The UK’s ‘Emergency Brake’ on Sudanese Students is a Cynical Act of Collective Punishment

By Husam Osman Mahjoub

March 21, 2026

Source: African Arguments

The Sudan University of Science and Technology. The current war in Sudan has destroyed educational institutions across the country.

The UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood recently announced an “emergency brake” on sponsored study visas for nationals from Sudan, Afghanistan, Cameroon and Myanmar. Presented as a crackdown on “visa abuse”, the policy is framed as a technical adjustment within a broader effort to tighten immigration controls. In reality, it reveals something far more troubling. Sudanese students have become convenient collateral in Britain’s domestic immigration politics.

The justification offered, a sharp rise in asylum claims following the completion of studies, rests on a presentation of data that is framed to mislead. When the actual numbers are scrutinized, it becomes clear that the vast majority of Sudanese students have remained fully compliant with immigration rules, yet they are now being subjected to a form of collective punishment that targets one of the most vulnerable and high achieving segments of the global student population. The Home Office cites a 470 percent increase in student asylum claims since 2021; however, this percentage masks a negligible absolute number during a period when Sudan itself has been plunged into war, meaning that an increase in asylum requests is to be expected.

In the year ending September 2025, only 120 Sudanese students applied for asylum, a tiny fraction of the 110,000 total asylum applications recorded in the UK. Furthermore, between 2021 and 2025, the UK issued a total of 1,480 study visas to Sudanese citizens, and during the same period, 380 Sudanese students claimed asylum, around 26 percent.

In addition, while the government targets these students for ‘visa abuse,’ it ignores its own data showing a 94% grant rate for Sudanese asylum seekers. This high approval rate proves that these claims are not abuses of the system but rather recognized cases of people fleeing one of the world’s most violent conflicts. By closing this route, the UK leaves thousands of Sudanese in need with more dangerous options, such as small boats. In 2025, a total of 5,896 Sudanese claimed asylum, of whom 596 held visas such as study visas, and 4,537 entered the UK on small boats.

What makes the policy particularly worrying is the context in which it arrives. Sudan is currently experiencing the largest displacement crisis in the world. Universities across the country have been destroyed and academic life paralysed by war. For thousands of Sudanese students, studying abroad is no longer simply an opportunity for advancement; it has become the only pathway through which a generation of doctors, engineers, researchers and public administrators can continue their education.

Cutting off access to international study does not merely regulate migration. It suppresses the intellectual capital that Sudan will desperately need when the war eventually ends.

Victims of domestic politics

There is also an unmistakable element of political opportunism in the measure. Immigration restrictions are rarely applied where they might trigger serious resistance from governments, universities or influential diaspora networks. Instead, they tend to fall on countries whose students lack the lobbying power or diplomatic leverage to challenge them. In this way, the policy allows the government to perform ‘toughness’ on immigration while avoiding confrontation with states and constituencies capable of pushing back.

The result is a selective application of strictness, producing a migration policy that falls hardest on those least able to influence political debate in London.

Blanket restrictions based on nationality mark a departure from the principle that immigration systems should assess individuals on their own merits. Portraying the act of seeking asylum from a war zone as evidence of “visa abuse” risks undermining the integrity of the international protection system itself. The right to request asylum exists precisely because people fleeing catastrophic violence may have no other viable path to safety.

Reframing that right as wrongdoing erodes the very legal frameworks designed to protect those escaping war.

Closing doors across the region

Britain is not the only place where Sudanese civilians are encountering closing doors. In Egypt, the neighbouring country that has long served as the primary refuge for Sudanese fleeing war and instability, the atmosphere has grown increasingly hostile. Security campaigns targeting migrants and refugees have intensified in recent months, with widespread arrests and deportations reported by human rights monitors.

In many cases, the distinction between those lacking documentation and those holding valid residency or refugee status appears to have collapsed, with both groups now facing detention and deportation.

Detentions, raids and administrative pressure have produced a climate of constant fear among families who believed they had found temporary refuge. Reports from detention centres describe harsh conditions and inadequate access to medical care, and several detainees have died in custody under circumstances that raise serious questions about the treatment of refugees and the responsibilities of host authorities.

Young students and elderly refugees alike have been caught in these enforcement campaigns. Families describe being pressured into paying fees in order to facilitate deportations back to a country still engulfed in war. In some cases, even Sudan’s embassy has been drawn into the process, with reports that officials have requested payments from families to process or expedite deportations.

For Sudanese civilians trapped between a devastating conflict at home and tightening restrictions abroad, the corridor of survival is rapidly narrowing.

The humanitarian contradiction

Seen together, these developments expose a profound contradiction in the international response to Sudan’s catastrophe. Western governments regularly position themselves as leaders of the humanitarian response, convening aid conferences and issuing statements of concern. Regional actors speak of solidarity and shared history, yet the policies shaping the everyday realities of Sudanese refugees and students tell a different story.

Legal pathways are shrinking. Safe havens are becoming uncertain. And those who have already lost homes, universities and livelihoods are increasingly treated not as partners in reconstruction but as risks to be managed.

For a country that once prided itself on being a global hub for higher education and a defender of human rights, Britain’s visa “emergency brake” represents more than a narrow administrative adjustment. It signals a retreat from the very principles that once made its universities magnets for talent from across the world.

Sudan’s war will eventually end. When it does, the country will depend heavily on the skills, knowledge and networks of those who managed to continue their education during the conflict. The question then will not only be how Sudan rebuilds its institutions, but also which countries chose to nurture its future leaders, and which chose instead to close the door.

Real leadership requires more than humanitarian rhetoric. It requires the political courage to keep legal pathways open for young people fleeing devastation, ensuring that when the guns finally fall silent, there remains a generation prepared to return home and rebuild what war has destroyed.

How Global Finance Drove Deindustrialization

Economist Ann Pettifor explains how America’s industrial decline has its roots in the dismantling of the international monetary system established at Bretton Woods and in the rise of a global financial system that prioritizes capital mobility over production.

By Ann Pettifor, Bartolomeo Sala 

March 23, 2026

Source: Jacobin

Activists from various climate groups in solidarity with the uprising of Letzten Generation (Last Generation) block the road to the Ministry of Transport. Invalidenpark, Berlin, November 18th, 2022 | Image by Stefan Müller via wikimediacommons

Economist Ann Pettifor is one of the world’s most authoritative and consequential voices on the themes of global finance, debt sovereignty, and sustainable economics. She is widely credited for having predicted the 2008 financial crisis in her book The Coming First World Debt Crisis (2006) as well as providing the main inspiration behind the Green New Deal. In 2000, she led the campaign Jubilee 2000, which resulted in the cancellation of $100 billion of debt for more than thirty of the world’s poorest countries.

In her latest book, The Global Casino: How Wall Street Gambles with People and the Planet, she takes on the global financial system, showing us how its currently deregulated, de-territorialized iteration is at the root of so many of our current crises — from the erosion of democracy and the appeal to strongmen to the cost of living essentials all the way to climate change. In an interview for Jacobin, Bartolomeo Sala asked her how this system originally came into being, how it currently works in practice, and, more importantly, what an alternative system which works for both people and the planet would look like.

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Bartolomeo Sala

In your latest book, The Global Casino, you build a powerful case for the dismantling of the global financial system as it currently exists.

You show how unregulated capital flows and murky financial speculation happening in the “stratosphere” of the shadow banking system not only cause ever-frequent financial crises but are also at the root of the extractivist, export-led, imperialist orientation of most economies and the appeal of strongmen, whose ultimate promise is shelter from its volatility.

Could you tell us briefly what the bare bones of this system are? What is shadow banking? And why can it be so dangerous if left unchecked?

Ann Pettifor

Shadow banking is the manifestation of [Friedrich] Hayek’s utopian ideal of denationalizing money, the idea that money can and should be detached from regulatory democracy. As I argue in the book, it is a system that began in Chile with the privatization of pensions. What happened was that the combination of the privatization of pensions and the deregulation of capital flows — those two changes in policy that happened in the 1970s and 1980s — led to the funneling of the world’s pension savings into institutions, first pension funds and then asset management funds like BlackRock, which, with time, soaked up more and more of the world’s savings.

The problem with that is that eventually they accumulated funds at a scale that cannot be deposited in a high street bank or in a main street bank. If you’re managing a billion dollars, you cannot put it into a normal bank. Out of the creation of such institutional funds, you then get the creation of a market called the shadow banking system — a market in money that operates beyond regulation. Asset management funds, hedge funds, and other kinds of institutional funds still have to maintain the value of their assets.

They can’t hold it as cash because cash doesn’t earn interest. You are holding Mrs Jones’s savings, and you need to invest these money into something that will generate returns and that will enable you to pay her pension in thirty years’ time. In other words, you need to invest your cash into an asset that is interest-bearing.

Now, the best way to do that is to lend money to someone else who needs cash. A hedge fund thinks — or rather, a guy owning a hedge fund might think he wants to buy a new AI company that’s been set up in California somewhere. He needs billions, you know, at least $100 billion. That’s “big potatoes,” as Damon Runyon would have had it, are you familiar with his writing?

Bartolomeo Sala

No, I am not actually.

Ann Pettifor

I suggest you look him up; he writes stories about New York gangsters. Anyway, the point is, they need $100 billion. They go to the asset management, and the asset management says, “Yes, we will lend you $100 billion, but you are going to have to pay a rate of interest on that.” In other words, we will lend you $100 billion, but you’ve got to pay us back, I don’t know, $110, $120 billion. That’s how they create new money for themselves, essentially. The hedge fund promises to pay, and the asset management fund uses this promise to pay to leverage additional finance. It is a system based on very big-scale money and great risks, especially for individual pensioners.

What really bugs me, though, is that while this is the culmination of the Hayekian fantasy of a deregulated economy, it is at the same time tethered to the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, and the Bank of Japan. So in the event of a crisis — as we saw back in 2007, but again in 2020 and again in the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and the failure of Credit Suisse — when the shadow banking system is in trouble, the Federal Reserve bails them out effectively. These guys are trying to have it both ways: they want to be beyond the reach of public authority but nevertheless be sycophantic in the case of losses.

It’s that injustice for me that is crucial, and it seems to me outrageous that the public doesn’t understand this. Now, having said that, I am also clear that the public do understand. They do know that the 1 percent get bailed out periodically and do very, very well, and that they, the 99 percent, have been doing very badly. The reason I wrote this book is I would like them to understand the mechanics a little better.

Bartolomeo Sala

In the second chapter of your book, you identify President [Richard] Nixon’s decision to break away from the financial architecture of the postwar years, Bretton Woods, as the ground zero of the current deregulated global financial system you just described.

This history is very striking, first because it shows how the financial system in its current form is not “natural” but that it is a relatively recent invention; and second, because it draws a direct line between Nixon’s decision and the election of Donald Trump fifty or so years later. It feels almost like a foregone conclusion.

Can you tell us why Nixon’s decision was so momentous? And how it did in effect give us Trump fifty-odd years later?

Ann Pettifor

You need to know that I am very influenced by Karl Polanyi and his book The Great Transformation, which explains that what happened in the 1920s and 1930s was effectively a response to government by markets.

When I first began understanding and talking about the Nixon shock in the 1980s and 1990s, economists tended to speak about it as a minor affair. They still do. They thought it had some impact on the American economy, but they didn’t regard it as a breakdown of the architecture of Bretton Woods as such. I am convinced that’s how we should understand it, because Nixon was incredibly reckless. But to understand why he was reckless, we have to go back to 1945.Rather than being governed by politicians, you are being governed by markets.

The year 1945 is when they built a managed, regulated financial architecture — I like to use the term “architecture” because it is something that was built — and they did so in reaction to what happened in the 1920s and the 1930s. The men and women at Bretton Woods sat down and said we must never ever allow that to happen again, to have financial imbalances and trade imbalances explode in the way that they did in the 1930s. To do that, we have to manage exchange rates and trade balances, and so they began building this architecture. [John Maynard] Keynes, in particular, was very clear about this because he understood what J. A. Hobson, the famous economist and author of Imperialism, had explained in the early 1900s.

Bartolomeo Sala

Oh yes, this is the argument that export-led economies have a tendency to get into trade wars, which often turn into actual wars. . .

Ann Pettifor

Hobson had explained that Britain had industrialized and built up financial surplus in the City of London. However, when that surplus had grown to a certain amount, rather than investing it back into Britain, the City of London chose people like Cecil John Rhodes to invest it in a country like South Africa, where I was born, because there the capital gains you could make were simply much higher than what you could make at home by investing in Manchester.

Meanwhile, in Manchester, people’s wages were low, falling in real terms, or are stagnant, so they’re not able to consume all that is produced by the export sector. Because they don’t have enough income to do that, then that’s partly why Britain moves from exploiting South Africa to exploiting India and other markets. The consequence is that you get both overproduction and underconsumption at home. But above all you get imbalances, you get countries in surplus and countries in deficit.

That leads to the sort of tensions that Keynes and his colleagues were opposed to in 1945. Your standard economics, your traditional neoliberal economics, teaches that really all economies should be export-oriented, and should be earning hard currency. Now the problem with all of that is you also get inequality at home, which breeds political tensions and hatred. As Polanyi explained so clearly, the public realizes that the market is saying to ordinary people, “Sorry, but we can’t supply you with life’s essentials. We cannot afford a roof over your head. We cannot afford decent health care. We cannot afford for you to go to university,” and so on. Rather than being governed by politicians, you are being governed by markets.

I mean, we see this very clearly in Britain. When I was young, to be a politician was to exercise political power, because in those days the British government owned the water companies, the electricity energy companies, the broadcasting services. The politicians decided on the allocation of resources into those sectors. Today they don’t do any of that. That is all being done by markets, private markets. We’ve hollowed out our political institutions; they are powerless and we can see how weak and powerless they are.

All the public is doing is saying, “Give me a strongman to protect me from markets that strip me of the right to a decent roof over my head, food, education, health,” etc. This is a very natural response. However, as Polanyi also explains, by looking for a strongman, what the public does is make things worse. Meanwhile, centrist politicians don’t have an answer to what to do about the government by markets. They say, well, we’ve just got to put up with them. And that impotence of our political class is what makes us turn to strongmen, even if they ultimately make things much worse.

Bartolomeo Sala

In the book, you explain how Nixon’s decision of decoupling the dollar from gold initially caused a devaluation of the currency. With time, though, the dollar turned into a global reserve currency that directly impacted the US’s manufacturing and export capabilities. How does a strong dollar concretely lead to the destruction of the US’s industrial base? And how does this lead to Donald Trump?

Ann Pettifor

What Nixon does is to remove global regulation. Soon after the shock, they decided to lift exchange controls as well as controls over the cross-border mobility of capital, and that made it much easier for capitalists to move their money across the world effortlessly.

However, the key point about it is that for many years gold wasn’t used in the same way as it had been used under the gold standard. It was simply used as a kind of comparator for your currency. Your currency had to have a basic relationship to the price of gold, and you had to keep it within bands relative to the value of an ounce of gold. And that was simply a way of saying, you have to manage your economy so that your currency does not rise too high or too low. And that means you’ve got to be exporting, but you’ve also got to be importing. And you can’t overdo one and not the other.

One of the things that happened after Nixon is economists said, “No, no, we don’t have to manage trade, the market can manage the trade. Global markets, they will be able to sort out the trading system. We can trust the market, right?” And so now the situation is: China becomes an expert at building iPhones. It sells iPhones to the US economy and makes huge capital gains from that. Rather than taking that money and investing it in China and raising incomes in China, he invests it in US Treasury bills. Now, Treasury bills have become effectively the world’s gold standard.

And that led to, as I say, these massive imbalances. The United States becomes the world’s consumer of last resort and China becomes the world’s producer of last resort.

Bartolomeo Sala

And how does this concretely lead to the election of Trump?

Ann Pettifor

Trump’s advisor Stephen Moran — who’s on the board of the Federal Reserve now — has written a paper saying they want to limit the flow of capital into the United States. And there’s a think tank, American Compass, led by Oren Cass, which also argues for capital controls, inward controls effectively.Americans are right to want to demand protection from global markets — but that would require that we restructure the international financial and trading systems.

What they don’t say is that they have come up against Wall Street. Because while Trump might want to have to weaken the US dollar and increase and manage inward capital flows, Wall Street isn’t going to have it because Wall Street makes its money from the capital inflows that Trump and co. claim they want to restrict. Wall Street will not tolerate limits on capital inflows unless it has a government like that of President Roosevelt. And I don’t think Trump has the strength or the power or the intelligence that Roosevelt’s administration had.

Americans are right to want to demand protection from global markets — but that would require that we restructure the international financial and trading systems. However, in the world of free markets, the ideology of free trading markets is even more powerful than the ideology of free capital mobility. If you read the Financial Times, people who talk about managing trade are treated as mad Trotskyists. I dare not say it because I don’t want to be branded as a mad Trotskyist, I’m just a very moderate Keynesian, for God’s sake. But even my moderate views are considered extreme in the world of free markets. And how we overcome that ideology is the issue that we face.

Bartolomeo Sala

Far from a rarefied activity happening in some distant realm, global finance is ultimately tethered to the real economy.

Indeed, as you discuss very well in the body of the book, it has a parasitic tendency to find ways to commodify everything into assets on which it can bet and charge rents. I have in mind prediction markets apps such as Kalshi and Polymarket, whose unique selling proposition is that they can turn everything, even opinions, into tradable assets.

Can you tell us more about this relationship? Is this situation sustainable long term?

Ann Pettifor

The problem they face is there’s a finite amount of real assets. I have a chapter in which I talk about the importance of assets and, above all, the valuation of assets. The issue we face now is there’s so much debt leveraged against them. I never quite remember the numbers on this, but it’s $300 or $400 trillion out there in financial assets, while there’s $100 or $110 trillion real income from the real economy. Those financial assets have to find somewhere where they are being used to leverage additional debt, because quite a lot of those assets are also liabilities. They’re also debts, really.

Here is this finite economy called the world economy. It can shrink. It can get blown up by war. It can be wiped out by climate change. What then happens to this enormous amount of debt that’s out there? That’s the kind of cancer at the heart of today’s global financial system.

If you think about Elon Musk, he does not live on income. Musk simply takes out a loan against the value of Tesla. He says, “Look, I’ve got shares in Tesla and they’re worth, say, $30 billion. Give me $1 billion to spend on going on holiday or whatever.” He uses an existing asset to obtain income and then of course he doesn’t pay tax on it because it’s all debt. This is what’s so evil about the rich, it’s this debt-based economy that is unstable relative to the world’s income, but it’s also unstable relative to the real finance, the real assets of the real economy.

We have a very moving story in Suffolk at the moment where people who live near the sea are literally having their houses demolished because they’re being rushed away by the sea. These people are finding that the value of their homes is collapsing. They have borrowed huge sums of money to buy that house, they’ve got the debt, and now they’re losing the value of the asset. And that’s been eroded by climate breakdown, essentially. In a microform, this is what’s happening to the global economy as well.

Bartolomeo Sala

A central preoccupation of the book is how global finance acts as a powerful fetter to any chance of tackling climate change. You end the introduction, I think very provocatively, by saying that the idea of cutting greenhouse gas emissions and restoring climate stability is simply futile and delusional until we, the people, take back control, taming and subordinating the financial system to serve the interests of both the biosphere and humanity, not just, as at present, the interests of wealth.

This will sound heretical, not only to many economists but also to many well-meaning environmentalists who have bought into the neoliberal playbook and think that effective markets could act as a panacea for every crisis, including the climate. How does financial gambling exacerbate the climate crisis?

Ann Pettifor

I wanted to provoke the environmentalists and to challenge them on the fact that they live in a silo, which is called the ecosystem, the biosphere. I am perhaps being unfair because they do care about what’s happening in the economy. But this failure to see the financial system means that we can never really get around to doing what we need to do to curtail fossil emissions.

What I’m trying to argue in the book is that the financial system provides rocket fuel to the fossil fuel sector. They do so because fossil extraction is much more profitable than clean energy, but also for another reason, which is rate of interest. Now, the rate of interest, people think of it as something obscure, a percentage, which indeed it is. But the rate of interest is effectively the rate of return on an investment. Rather than simply a profit, it’s a capital gain, and it is something that rises mathematically. If you apply interest to a loan, that interest can rise exponentially over time.The financial system provides rocket fuel to the fossil fuel sector — they do so because fossil extraction is much more profitable than clean energy and the rate of interest.

What the rate of interest then requires is an exponential rate of extraction of the Earth’s finite assets to satisfy the interests of creditors. As I always explain, Brazil has to strip its forests, has to fish its seas, and has to degrade its land in order to raise the money it needs to repay its foreign debts. The same applies to ordinary people. In America, many of them are heavily indebted. They have to work very long hours and take up more than one job in order to repay mortgages or health bills or whatever. That rate of extraction concerns not just human labor but also green resources of the Earth.

What you have to do to stop the rate of extraction is to switch off the spigot. You have to turn off the tap and lower the rate of interest at which money is lent. If you’re going to invest in a green economy, you’ve got to transform your economy. You’ve got to retrofit housing. You’ve got to build flood defenses. That’s an awful lot of money and you shouldn’t expect to make massive capital gains from that. But you need to be able to do it all the same, and therefore you need to have low rates of interest. So, for me, there’s a line that goes between the economy, the financial system, and the ecosystem, which is called the rate of interest.

Bartolomeo Sala

In the last chapter of the book, you set out to provide a series of recipes for a world in which finance is not allowed to run wild on the biosphere and society. Some of these recipes, such as capital controls and a Tobin tax, are straightforward enough, if easier said than done.

What caught my attention, though, is the overall framework you are proposing. Basically, you are calling for a rolling back of globalization and a reshoring of economic activity within national boundaries as well as a general call to “living within your means,” which I take to mean a balance between imports and exports and a focus on domestic demand, as well as on ecology and climate.

Can you tell us why this is not some sort of nostalgic return to an era before globalization? And why do you see this return to sovereignty as the only guarantee for lasting democracy and peace?

Ann Pettifor

I think for me it’s mainly environmental. I begin with the view that, and I put it very crudely, in Britain we have to learn to grow our own green beans. In Britain, we expect to have fresh green beans on our tables every day of the year, and we expect to draw down Kenya’s water table and exploit its cheap labor so that we can have green beans every day of the year. That has to end. We’ve got to learn to grow our own green beans. We can’t prey upon the assets of others for our own economic well-being.We want to cooperate with our friends and partners across the world; we don’t want to exploit and extract assets from them — it’s as simple as that.

At the same time, I want to be very clear, I am not a nationalist. I believe it must be possible for a government to respond to its electorate and act in their interests. For me, that’s democracy. At the same time, I don’t believe we can achieve that degree of autonomy without internationalism. We can only do it by actually cooperating. I’m arguing that there must be a much greater emphasis on environmental self-sufficiency. However, that is not nationalism, that is internationalism in my view. That is saying that we want to cooperate with our friends and partners across the world. We don’t want to exploit and extract assets from them. It’s as simple as that.

What always strikes me about the great financial crisis of 2007–9 was that the Left didn’t know it was coming. I am very proud of having written The Coming First World Debt Crisis (2006), but the rest of the Left didn’t see it coming. People talked about globalization as if it was a given. And then when it blew up, there was no plan B. We didn’t even know it could happen. We were as stupid as the chair of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. The Left was as stupid as Greenspan, who said he didn’t believe it could happen.

Meanwhile, Wall Street couldn’t believe its luck because it then consolidated itself and became stronger than it had ever been. Before the financial crisis, it could go bust. Since the financial crisis, no Wall Street bank can go bust anymore. They are now guaranteed; they’re too big to fail. I think it was the failure of the Left not to have a plan B. So I’m offering a plan B. It might sound utopian to some, but let’s debate and let’s discuss. And has anybody else got any better ideas? If they do, I’d be really pleased to hear them.

Industrial Policy and a Socialist Reform Agenda

By Tom Wetzel

March 22, 2026

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

China’s vast development and export of renewable energy gear and electric vehicles is helping to drive the green transition globally — the transition away from reliance on the burning of fossil fuels. As green tech becomes the cheapest energy source, an economy that sticks with a reliance on burning gas, coal and petroleum derivatives will be a higher cost economy. The price of energy affects costs throughout the economy. Meanwhile, the Trump administration attacks renewable energy and doubles-down on support for fossil fuels. This poses the risk of committing the American economy to a high-cost energy system. 

A post-Trump USA could avoid this danger if it uses industrial policy to push through a green transition — moving to eliminate fossil fuels from electricity production, land transport and other sectors of the American economy.

An industrial policy is a set of practices that are designed to change the character of industries for social purposes or to build up industries that are regarded as socially beneficial or “advantageous” in various ways or to phase out industries that are regarded as damaging (such as the fossil fuel industry). Industrial policy could be used as a reform program in the capitalist framework, or it could be implemented as part of a revolutionary re-organization of industry — as part of a process of socialization of the economy.

Because global warming is an emergency that needs to be dealt with now, I’m going to look at how a green industrial policy can be developed as a labor-based reform agenda, pushed from below — but as a reform within the present capitalist framework.

Although the Biden administration touted fossil fuels, they took small steps in the direction of pushing the green transition. The CHIPS Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and the Inflation Reduction Act were all elements of Biden’s industrial policy. The IRA provided subsidies for purchase of electric vehicles, energy efficient appliances, home batteries and solar and wind facilities. To build up American manufacturing, electric vehicle subsidies required final assembly of the vehicle in the USA as well as other “local content” requirements. Fifty percent of the battery system value had to be made in the USA and 40 percent of the minerals used in battery manufacture had to be extracted, processed or recycled in the USA. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Act also required American manufacture for components used in infrastructure projects (such as bridges). Requiring local manufactured content is a typical industrial policy, to protect American manufacturing.

In elaborating their industrial policy initiatives, the Biden administration said it was necessary to have an “industrial strategy” to promote a number of goals. This included:

• Promote innovation
• Enhance the competitiveness of American products in the world market
• Protect national security
• Meet the science and engineering needs of key industries
• Protect American manufacturing against aggressive Chinese mercantilism.

Officials of the Biden administration pointed out that training engineers and “skilled trades” and doing research and development are “positive externalities.” An externality is a cost or benefit to people other than a company and its customers. For example, if a power company generates electricity by burning coal, that damages respiratory systems downwind of the plant and contributes to global warming. The company pays nothing for those damages. It has externalized its costs onto others. That’s a negative externality. A positive externality is a benefit the company provides but can’t always get re-imbursed for. Thus if a company does R&D and trains engineers, those engineers could go to another company — and other companies may adopt the results of their R&D. But it’s not in the interests of a company to train the engineers of its competitors. This explains why American companies at present fail to do enough R&D. Thus innovation and training of scientists, engineers and “skilled trades” needs to be publicly financed and taken on by public organizations of some kind such as universities and technical colleges. Worker organizations can also play a role here, as with apprenticeship programs.

Counter-planning 

Industrial policy pushed by workers and their unions from below would be an example of counter-planning. Counter-planning is where workers develop their own ideas about products to make or methods of production. This can take the form of proposals for products that are less environmentally destructive. An early — and influential — example of counter-planning comes from the of the shop stewards committee at Lucas Aerospace in Britain. In the 1970s various British metal-working and aerospace firms were proposing layoffs and factory shutdowns. The company-wide shop stewards “combine committee” at Lucas Aerospace produced a counter-proposal for “socially useful production” in 1978. This was a plan that included about 150 medical, transport and environmental products the workers felt they could design and manufacture. This was a kind of “peace conversion” plan because these were alternatives to the military products they had been building. Management was intransigent in its “prerogatives” and ultimately fired two of the key shop stewards.

Another example of worker counter-planning is the long-running factory occupation at the GKN auto parts factory in Florence, Italy, which began in 2021. The factory was owned by British firm Melrose Industries. The workers occupied the plant to fight the shut down. They have proposed conversion of the factory to manufacture other products — such as “cargo bikes” used in product delivery — as part of an orientation they call “re-industrialization from below.” In the course of the occupation they have sought ways they could use both their skills and the plant’s equipment that would be socially beneficial, such as production of renewable energy technology.

Industrial policy is another area where unions have the potential to intervene with their “counter-planning.” Unions can potentially act as a mass force from below to push through a government industrial policy that favors working class interests. An example of industrial policy through union counter-planning is a report ( “Organize, Industrialize, Decarbonize! A Pro-Worker, Green Industrial Policy for California”) in 2025 from the United Auto Workers California region (Region 6).

The union’s report defines industrial policy as “coordinated government action to proactively shape what goods and services an economy produces,” as well as “how they are produced and how they are distributed.” The union wants the state government in California to use industrial policy to push through the green transition. But they also want an industrial policy that doesn’t just beef up the profits of the green capitalist sector but also addresses the working-class affordability crisis in the USA. The union report describes global warming, inequality and the crisis of affordability as “mutually reinforcing crises.”

The union backed a bill (SB 787) in the state legislature to develop supply chains and set labor conditions in three priority sectors: electric vehicles and their battery systems, offshore wind, and heat pumps. But billionaire-friendly governor Gavin Newsom vetoed this legislation.

A program to address both global warming and the serious working-class affordability crisis in the USA could be coupled with an industrial policy that could be used to re-build manufacturing employment. For example, consider the housing affordability crisis in the USA. With hedge-funds jacking rents to increase the market value of their buildings and capitalist builders mainly providing housing for the top 20 to 25 percent of household incomes, we can see how the capitalist real estate industry is the cause of the housing affordability crisis. This problem could be addressed by creating a massive fund available to non-profit developers and city housing departments to enable them to enter into contracts with builders to construct buildings as a form of Social Housing. By “social housing” I mean housing that is self-managed by the residents but locked down under restrictions that guarantee permanent affordability (as with limited equity housing coops).

If a major fund were provided by the federal government, the program could require all-electric construction to meet the goals of the fight against global warming. And subsidies and local content requirements could be used to ensure the gear (such as solar panels and heat pumps) is made in the USA.

Self-management and Socialist Reform

But what about a specifically socialist industrial policy? A central goal (but not the only goal) of socialism is to do away with the class subordination of the working class — the subordination of workers to the owning and managing boss classes in the system of social production of goods and services. As R.H. Tawney once wrote, the capitalist firm is “autocracy checked by insurgency.” When workers build unions or go on strike, that’s “insurgency.” This means workers are not accorded any democratic (collective) right to make decisions about the labor process even though they are directly affected by — governed by — these decisions. Back in the 1860s-70s, the first principle of the International Workers Association said: “The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the workers themselves.” The “working class” are the wage-earners who do the work of production of goods and services. And their emancipation would require that they take over collective self-management of the industries they work in. If workers don’t control production, some boss class will.

This is why nationalization is not actually a socialist reform. In the extensive nationalizations in Britain after World War 2, for example, the top-down state managerial bureaucracy was in control, not workers. We need to distinguish nationalization from socialization. Socialization requires two conditions: (1) democratic self-management of workplaces and whole industries by the workers in that industry, and (2) democratic social planning and accountability to the general population.

Could these two conditions actually be achieved as a reform within the existing capitalist and constitutional framework of a capitalist regime such as the USA? Maybe, to some extent. If so, this degree of attack on the power of the owning and managing classes would require a very high level of working class struggle. But even if not, we still need a socialist agenda for change. Here I want to suggest the negotiation model, as we can call it. I can explain this best by contrasting it with the suggested program of  Max B. Sawicky in “Socialists Need a Distinctive Economic Policy  Agenda.” 

To begin with, Sawicky misstates the goal of industrial policy: “The idea is to restructure the economy — to shift the composition of what is produced — in the direction of higher-value-added industries.” An example of an industrial policy for the USA would be to provide extensive public funding for bio-medical research, pharmaceutical development, and a comprehensive program of free to user health care. There is no requirement here that this industry generate profits.

Rather, the idea of industrial policy is to maintain and develop industries that are advantageous for various social reasons — such as health care provision or the fight against global warming or national security.

Sawicky mentions two industries he proposes for nationalization: “Some public services are properly national in scope and require federal design, funding, and management. Examples already mentioned are intercity rail and a national power grid.”

This is where I will illustrate the negotiation model as an alternative to Sawicky’s statist nationalization. In recent years the Public Rail Now campaign has been discussing a proposal for nationalizing ownership of the tracks and right of way of the main Class 1 railroads. This campaign was initiated by Railroad Workers United. Some members of RWU want the railways to be treated the same as the interstate highways. This means the federal government would only have responsibility for infrastructure investment such as grade separations and electrification. The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) would allow various non-governmental entities — even capitalist firms — to operate the actual freight and passenger services. This would allow competing firms to share the same routes.

Now, let’s suppose that grants — and possibly loans from Ro Khanna’s proposed coop bank — are provided to create regional railway worker cooperatives to operate large regional segments of the American railway network. A coop firm might operate the northern transcon (the former Burlington Northern) from Chicago to Puget Sound and maybe another regional coop to take over the northeastern region from CSX. The regional cooperatives might form a coordinated national railway federation to coordinate services. There could be periodic negotiations between the railway worker cooperatives and the FRA over issues such as infrastructure investment, subsidies for passenger ticket prices and policies affecting the general public.

Another industry where the negotiation model could apply would be the industry comprised of biomedical research, pharmaceutical development and health care provision. We could imagine the creation of a non-governmental, non-profit, staff-controlled, democratically-structured National Health Service to run this industry. The federal government would provide funding for research, free medical school, and free to user health care. We can suppose there is periodic negotiation between the NHS and the public governance bodies and this might involve some type of citizen health councils. The negotiation would cover the issues of government funding and policies affecting patients and the general public.

Sawicky also proposes statist takeovers in the area of housing and the green transition away from reliance on fossil fuels. We could imagine a program for the electric power industry similar to my proposal for railways. The federal government might acquire electric utilities but contract with the workforce in large regional segments of the national grid — with periodic negotiation with the Energy Department over grid investment, funding to phase out coal- and gas-fired plants and other issues.

In my discussion of housing, I’ve already proposed an alternative to the government as landlord: Limited equity housing coops. This implements resident self-management of buildings. We could also propose the setting up of large design and build construction worker cooperatives to bid on housing and infrastructure projects. In this case city housing departments or non-profit community organizations would negotiate over issues like costs, finishes, appliances and so on. The community organizations could even organize prospective residents to negotiate over the character of individual dwellings (as described by Christopher Alexander in The Production of Houses). 

But if we’re not talking about small, and possibly marginal cooperatives, but democratically-structured, staff-run non-profit organizations controlling large, strategic industries, is this compatible with the constitutional and capitalist framework of USA or another capitalist country? I think this is doubtful.

We do have an example of large-scale re-organization of industries into worker-controlled industry federations — the Spanish revolution of the 1930s. In that case the militants of the syndicalist CNT union (and often with the support of the members of the social-democratic UGT union) expropriated many industries. In most cases when the workers expropriated a private firm they would not operate it as a stand-alone cooperative. Rather, they’d merge the assets from all the firms in that industry into a single industry federation. They were working to the industrial union principle of “taking wages and conditions out of competition.” They built industrial federations like this in many industries: health care, railways, wood products, telecom, public utilities, fishing, and the entertainment industry. 

But this took place in the course of a massive revolutionary struggle. After the Spanish army’s attempted takeover was defeated in the streets of Barcelona in July, 1936, the syndicalist CNT union used the army’s weapons to build a large “proletarian army” under the direct control of the union. The principles of the syndicalist international stated that in a revolutionary situation the goal was for the worker mass democratic organizations to gain control of the dominant armed power in society. Thus the union used its army to defend its expropriation of industry. 

Once the Republican state authority was rebuilt with its own army and police by 1937, there began a process of state seizures of industries — reasserting worker subordination to a managerial boss class. We can see here there’s a structural problem. As long as owning and managing classes have power in society — and the ability to control the state — they will try to use that power to keep the working class as a subordinate, exploited class.

Even so I think it may be helpful to have a socialist reform agenda of the sort I described. It helps to clarify what the goals are of the movement. And this is where I think the negotiation model is useful as it allows us to clarify the distinction between socialization and nationalization. In the past various forms of the negotiation model have been used for a socialist program — from guild socialism to participatory economics. Various forms of this model are possible.Email

Tom Wetzel

In Deer Hunting With Jesus Joe Bageant says "those who grow up in the lower class in America often end up class conscious for life" and so it has been with me.After leaving high school I worked as a gas station attendant for quite a few years and got let go from that job in one of the first job actions I was involved in. I gradually worked my way through college and in the early '70s was part of an initial group who organized the first teaching assistants' union at UCLA in which I was a shop steward. I had been involved in the anti-war movement in the late '60s and first became involved in socialist politics at that time.After obtaining a PhD at UCLA I was an assistant professor for several years at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee where I taught logic and philosophy and in my spare time helped to produce a quarterly anarcho-syndicalist community newspaper. After I returned to California in the early '80s, I worked for a number of years as a typesetter and was involved in an attempt to unionize a weekly newspaper in San Francisco. For about nine years I was the volunteer editorial coordinator for the anarcho-syndicalist magazine ideas & action and wrote numerous essays for that publication. Since the '80s I've made my living mainly as a hardware and software technical writer in the computer industry. I've occasionally taught logic classes as a part-time adjunct.During the past decade my political activity has mainly been focused on housing, land-use and public transit politics. I did community organizing at the time of the big eviction epidemic in my neighborhood in 1999-2000, working with the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition. Some of us involved in that effort then decided on a strategy of gaining control of land and buildings by helping existing tenants convert their buildings to limited equity housing cooperatives. To do this we built the San Francisco Community Land Trust of which I was president for two years.