Boomerangs of Empire: Latin America as Colonial Laboratory

By Romina Green Rioja, Sergio Beltrán-García 

March 21, 2026

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

Isolation by byronv2 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 /Flickr

Masked federal agents kidnap a father as he waits to pick up his child from school. An ice cream cart is abandoned on the sidewalk, its vendor disappeared. A young man is arrested at his job and secretly transported to a terrorism confinement prison in another country. These stories are not from Cold War Latin America, but shared by immigrants—undocumented, asylum seekers, green card holders—living in the United States since President Donald J. Trump assumed office in January 2025.

The kidnapped father was Juan José Martínez Cortes, taken while waiting in his car outside of Linda Vista Elementary School in San Diego. The paletero, Ambrocio Lozano, known to his beloved community as Enrique, became the subject of protests demanding his release. Andry Hernández Romero, a Venezuelan gay makeup artist, was arrested in South Carolina and sent to the infamous Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador, where he was held for 125 days until his release as part of a prisoner swap between the United States and Venezuelan governments.

Mirroring the many accounts of state violence throughout 20th-century Latin America, similar events are now surfacing in the United States. As we witness these horrors in person and online, Aimé Césaire’s words in Discourse on Colonialism(1950) reverberate: “[O]ne fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.” What Césaire once diagnosed as a colonial return now shapes the everyday, the imperial boomerang of our lived histories, our identities, of the stories and histories we wish to tell. It is this returning and disseminating violence, including its architectures, justifications, and resistances, that guides this issue’s analytical and historical content.

“Boomerangs of Empire and the Technofascist Turn” takes Césaire’s insight not as a metaphor but as a method. The imperial boomerang functions as a historical circuit in which tactics of imperial domination tested abroad return home, reshaping the very societies that invented them. By emphasizing process over parallel examples, we push contributors and readers to consider why these systems of state repression have become models for replication. Our concern is not simply that U.S. policies echo past empires, but that repression itself has become a transferable technology: an experiment refined in the colonial laboratories of the Americas and now redeployed within the borders of the United States.

We asked contributors to probe what makes this moment distinct. Their collective responses converged on two themes. First, the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) and Military Industrial Complex (MIC)—braided through racialized logistics, infrastructures, industries, and algorithmic computing—now operate as a single apparatus that manages dissent, migration, and everyday life. Second, popular resistance, the response to methods of repression, emerges to protect those being targeted and reaffirm social rights. The essays that follow trace this machinery across borders and centuries, from border militarization and migrant criminalization to algorithmic surveillance and ecological extraction.

Césaire foresaw “the American hour” as an age of “violence, excess, waste, mercantilism, bluff, conformism, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder.” Our time demands that we meet it analytically and through activism. Naming this machine is a condition for interrupting it. In keeping with NACLA’s tradition, our editorial stance is double: to expose the architectures of technofascism and to foreground the counter‑methods that boomerang back as resistance.

Thingification
Césaire’s stark equation that “colonization = ‘thingification’” clarifies how colonization reduces life—person, culture, and ecology—into a nonentity to be sorted, priced, moved, and extracted. The colonial apparatus operates through administrative bureaucracies that strip singularity from the beings they process. What feels particular to this moment is not the process of thingification itself but its interoperability, where sonic thresholds, hydraulic schedules, and colonial urban geometries now plug into one another through infrastructures and logistics that bind extraction—human and nonhuman alike—to markets and security workflows.

In the Gulf of Mexico, Jerónimo Reyes-Retana shows how a small fishing border town is reframed by space-industry routines—launch corridors, shock-wave tolerances, and debris-recovery pathways—that rearticulate the lives of its fishermen and marine species in service of space colonialism. Further up the Río Grande, Federico Pérez Villoro tracks how dam-release timetables recalibrate the river’s dangers, reducing migrant lives to actuarial risk variables. And in Tovaangar/Los Angeles, Daniel P. Gámez reads the Castilian imposition of the urban grid as a mechanism that both exposes and contains dissidence, a mechanism still activated today through police kettling. As Mike Davis warned, the dystopian future is not ahead of us but built into the infrastructural present and its architectures, where life is parsed into parameters—decibels, flow rates, lines of sight—so it can be priced, routed, or neutralized.

Read together, the border pieces do more than illustrate thingification; they render its architectures visible. Reyes-Retana maps how aerospace regulation reconfigures a coastal commons into a mere service corridor; Pérez Villoro details how engineered water surges reprogram a river into a weapon; and Gámez reminds us how the colonial grid persists as a sorting machine for contemporary policing and repression. Together, these texts insist that architecture is not a backdrop but an instrument—spaceports, dams, and grids— that makes the routines of thingification interoperable.

The Law of Progressive Dehumanization
The rise of the U.S. empire turned the Americas into a continuous field of experimentation. From the Cold War’s “development” projects to the 21st century’s migration and surveillance regimes, the United States perfected a technocratic colonialism that organizes difference rather than erases it. In this landscape, deportation files, visa categories, and media representations perform the work once carried out by armies. Césaire’s warning that “there is a law of progressive dehumanization” names precisely this transformation: the conversion of life into data, labor into numbers, and citizenship into a conditional privilege measured by productivity and obedience. Dehumanization no longer requires ideology; it requires logistics.

In Jennifer Martínez-Medina’s “The Hidden Agrarian Transformation Behind Mass Deportation,” the Cold War’s counterinsurgency wars return as immigration policy. Martínez-Medina reveals how the racial hierarchies that once justified hemispheric “development” now govern U.S. agricultural fields, where the H-2A visa program updates mid-century tactics of control for a 21st century economy. The deported worker replaces the disappeared guerrillero, both rendered expendable in the name of national security and agricultural “efficiency.” In her reading, the farm becomes the new frontier of dehumanization—the plantation reborn through data and deportation.

Turning to Brazil, Omawu Diane Enobabor and Karina Quintanilha’s “Contesting Border Violence from São Paulo to New York” traces the afterlives of U.S. border enforcement in the detention camps and refugee airports of the Global South, where Black and African migrants navigate a transnational regime of racial profiling wrapped in humanitarian language. They show that the border, once a territorial line, has become a network—an algorithmic infrastructure stretching from Brooklyn’s migrant shelters to São Paulo’s immigration terminals—where mutual aid and community organizing fill the voids left by deliberate state neglect.

Marycarmen Lara-Villanueva turns Césaire’s phrase back onto its most contemporary surface: visibility itself. In “Anti-Racism as Spectacle: Visuality, Social Media, and the Afterlives of Mestizaje,” she argues that Mexico’s digital campaigns against racism reproduce the very “violence, corruption, and barbarism” Césaire identified, this time through the market of representation. What began as mestizaje—the 20th century Mexican state project to whiten and unify—returns in the 21st as a politics of inclusion that leaves racial capitalism intact. The colonial wound becomes a marketing category; dehumanization becomes an aesthetic.

Lastly, Chris Durán’s “Imprisoning Nations: Incarceration and Imperialism in Chile and the United States” traces how struggles against dehumanization—from the 1960s to today—provoke its renewal yet also generate the possibility of liberation. Focusing on the experience of political prisoners, Durán links the U.S. Black freedom movement and the Mapuche struggle for land against the Chilean state, showing how imprisonment becomes both a tool of repression and a crucible of resistance. In his reading, captivity does not extinguish resistance but refines it, transforming the site of containment into a school of revolution where the fight to reclaim life continues.

The Age of Tyrants
Césaire’s “circuit of mutual service and complicity” in the age of tyrants captures the long life of domination in the Americas, where empire’s administrators and neoliberal strongmen have continually borrowed from one another’s repertoires of control. From the 1930s onward, tyranny evolved through alliance: colonial paternalism merged with the spectacle of mass politics, and the vocabulary of development disguised dispossession as progress. Across the hemisphere, authoritarian projects drew legitimacy from the same sources as democracy—modernization, order, and the promise of national rebirth.Sam Markwell’s moving essay, “Submerged Pluralist Possibilities in the Pueblo Indian Homelands,”opens in this historical moment. Writing through the history of the Pueblo Indian homelands in the 1930s and 1940s, Markwell shows how Indigenous communities sought to build a genuinely plural society that took up the mantle against fascism while defending their sovereignty. Pueblo leaders and their allies envisioned a model of governance rooted in reciprocity and coexistence, a proto-plurinational order that countered both the racial hierarchies of settler democracy and the authoritarian unity of fascism abroad. Yet the U.S. state’s developmental agenda—its dams, bureaucracies, and modernization schemes—proceeded without them. Markwell’s conclusion lingers as both an indictment and a warning: the infrastructures that promised progress drowned the alternatives to tyranny that once flourished along the Rio Grande.

Cristina Awadalla’s “Authoritarian Aesthetics: Ortega, Bukele, and the Bodies that Sustain Power” brings Césaire’s circuit into the present. Across Central America, she traces how Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele inherit and reinvent the visual and affective technologies of Cold War rule. Ortega’s revolutionary nostalgia and Bukele’s social-media populism converge in a politics of spectacle where incarceration, obedience, and digital charisma become indistinguishable. The old tyrant’s charisma and the new influencer’s algorithm meet in mutual service: each governs by staging the body as proof of order and legitimacy. Awadalla exposes this alliance, both regional and global, as an aesthetic of domination that travels easily across regimes.

In this same register, Simón Rodríguez shows how the Dominican Republic’s regime, once cast as a regional pariah, has become a proving ground whose techniques of retroactive denationalization, racialized raids, and mass deportation quotas are now openly courted by the U.S. far right. The traffic is bidirectional: Trumpism’s legal fictions and carceral spectacle find in Santo Domingo not merely a model but a partner that furnishes ready-made instruments and a veneer of legitimacy. Césaire’s “circuit of mutual service and complicity” is thus made contemporary: old and new tyrannies exchange methods, narratives, and even markets, until apartheid governance becomes common sense across the hemisphere. By closing the loop between Caribbean laboratories and North Atlantic power, Rodríguez reveals that the age of tyrants is less a genealogy of leaders than a shared infrastructure of rule—one that can only be interrupted by circuits of solidarity as agile as those of domination.

Mechanization
In his final reflections, Césaire evokes the “prodigious mechanization, the mechanization of man; the gigantic rape of everything intimate, undamaged, undefiled that, despoiled as we are, our human spirit has still managed to preserve” in modern life. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, the Mexican anthropologist Rossana Reguillo names this the necromáquina, “a death device that advances by swallowing territories, bodies and futures.” The danger, as Césaire warned, is immense. In the same passages he cautions that “American domination [is] the only domination from which one never recovers… unscarred.”

In this light, Trumpism appears less as an aberration than as an intensification of “conformism, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder.” It recodes punitive governance and infrastructural chauvinism as common sense, aestheticizes humiliation as order, and licenses off—to federal agents or private tech—a managerial contempt for the inconvenient particularities of life. The boomerang is visible not only in policy but in style: the swaggering promise of this new American hour is to accelerate extraction, to police and militarize all space—physical, digital, discursive, and extraterrestrial—and to collapse all possibilities of political imagination into a repertoire of violent heuristics where cruelty is misrecognized as efficiency. Mechanization thrives on this confusion, turning collective resentments and cultural grudges into manipulable user interfaces at the disposal of colonial power.

Lost in this confusion is original thinking. The current rush toward large language models (LLMs)—misnamed “artificial intelligence”—invites the mass renunciation of judgment in favor of predictive mimicry, outsourcing observation, embodied knowledge, and even ethical reasoning to systems trained on past colonial normalities. Troublingly, we editors received multiple proposals—and even drafts—that leaned heavily on AI-generated content. The irony was not lost on us that the very technologies of imperial governance this issue critiques are being uncritically employed in the production of writing itself.

This raises uncomfortable questions about Audre Lorde’s famous assertion that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Can these algorithms and LLMs, trained on imperial archives and corporate datasets, confront the imperial boomerang? Césaire’s many warnings resonate that we are at risk of transforming radical thought into mere throughput—another task to be checked off, another data point to be processed, predicted, neutralized.  As our contributing poet, césar montero, writes from Los Angeles, California, reflecting on the imperial return:

Oh Great Smoking Mirror

Tezcatlipoca

Give me guidance

Allow me to see

Through the smoke and mirrors

The other side of your obsidian dreams

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.

UK

Emily Thornberry Keir Hardie Lecture in full

Emily Thornberry MP  22nd March, 2026

Emily Thornberry delivers the Keir Hardie Lecture.

I am so honoured to have been invited to speak here today and to have the opportunity to reflect on the values of our first leader, Keir Hardie, and to ask what his vision demands of the Labour Party today. 

It was a hundred and twenty years ago that our movement chose its first leader: a man called Keir. And in the 1906 General Election, under our Labour name, that young party won 29 seats in Parliament. 

Today, another Keir leads our family, and at the last General Election the British people placed their trust in us on a scale that our founder could never have imagined.  

We now have over 400 MPs. We have come a long, long way. 

People call it a “historic” victory. And they are absolutely right. We stood on a Labour platform, and the British public gifted us a majority on an extraordinary scale. But they expect something in return. And they expect what we said we would give, which was change. That’s what we promised. And that’s what we have to deliver.

So far so good. But it’s not is it? 

Here we are today, with that thumping great majority, with that clear mandate to do big things, really shake things up. And yet, we seem to be wrestling with something really quite troubling. 

We seem to be wrestling with a crisis of identity, a crisis of confidence.  

It’s as if we started to question what it means to be a Labour Party, to be a Labour Government. 

And the public are furious with us about that.

Insecurity in government isn’t just poor politics, it’s dangerous. Because when a government doesn’t know what it stands for, it risks squandering the hope and goodwill of the great many people who trusted us to do better. To be better. 

We cannot afford to be insecure, to be unsure of ourselves. 

We cannot waste this opportunity, this opportunity to enact generational change, to show Britain what a Labour government driven by Labour values really means. 

So, we must ask ourselves: Who are we? What are we fighting for? 

I think in moments like this, it helps to remember where we’ve come from. In order to know who we are, and where we’re going next.

Because when we understand where we’ve come from, when we understand the principles upon which we’ve built this movement, we can see more clearly what we need to do. 

Today, I want to talk in particular about Labour’s place in the world. About our Internationalism. 

Everyone always says “oh we’re Labour. We’re such great internationalists” 

But what does that mean? What does it really mean? 

Well, I think it means believing in something both very simple and yet very radical. 

It comes from believing that whoever you are, wherever you come from, you have a place in our socialist movement. And that we are all equal brothers and sisters.

That when you join Labour, you become part of something bigger than yourself. 

But it goes much further. We believe that spirit of solidarity goes beyond borders. Keir Hardie saw that working people were working people wherever in the world they came from across the world.

It means recognising that we all have far more in common than we have that divides us. 

We might have different eye colour.

We might have different skin colour.

We might call our God a different name.

We might speak a different language.

We might wear strange exotic hats.

But fundamentally, fundamentally at the level that really matters, we are all the same.

That’s our internationalism. That’s what it means. And it comes from our socialist origins to the progressive politics we practise today. There has always been something fundamentally internationalist about the Labour Party. 

And history bears that out. 

It was a Labour Prime Minister – Clem Attlee – who helped establish the United Nations and declared that the world should never again descend into the horrors of war. And that’s what it means to be Labour.

It was a Labour Foreign Secretary – Ernest Bevin – who helped create NATO, ensuring that Britain and its allies could defend peace in an uncertain world. And do it together. All for one and one for all. And that’s what it means to be Labour.

And it was a Labour minister – Barbara Castle – who, working with the Fabians, helped establish the Office for Overseas Development, because she understood that helping people thousands of miles away isn’t charity. It’s solidarity. And that’s what it means to be Labour. 

So alright. We are a party of internationalists. 

But how does that history, those values, help guide us through the crossroads we face today? 

Well, it reminds us that there are certain things that Labour has always rejected. 

We reject the idea that our prosperity should ever be built on the exploitation of others. 

We reject what Keir Hardie called the “plunder and butchery” of imperialism. 

And we reject the notion that the suffering of a stranger somehow means less than the suffering of a neighbour. 

Hardie understood this. 

Or more truthfully, he learnt this on his world tour. Where he travelled India and South Africa as the first leader of the Labour Party. And he learnt along the way that Labour was not just about the miner in the Rhondda Valley, or the dock worker in East London, or the millworker in Lanarkshire.

It was a movement for all those fighting for dignity, security and a better life. 

He learnt that Labour is a family borne of class but driven by values. Values of solidarity, and empathy. 

And I suspect no one in this room would disagree with those instincts. Those Labour instincts remain good ones. And they remain true.

They are beliefs to be proud of and they should remain the moral compass which guides us today. Our light in darkness.

But let’s be honest. It is easy to say these things. It is easy to celebrate these values. But values are meaningless if we do not deliver on them. 

So, we believe all these things. What are we prepared to do about it? 

Well, in the last two weeks, I think we may have seen those values in action. 

Our leader – the younger Keir that is – was confronted with precisely the kind of moment that tests a government. That reveals what exactly a government is prepared to stand up for. It was a true test of the mettle of a leader.

When the pressure came, our Prime Minister made clear that this Labour government should stand up for what is right. 

He made clear that Britain should not be drawn into war for war’s sake. 

A war with no clear purpose.

A war that is contrary to law. 

If people are going to die, either bravely and willingly as combatants, or just because they were in the way, like a little girl’s school, they deserve to know why they have to die.

And Keir has held that line. 

And let’s be honest, it’s not easy for Prime Minister to do that. It’s not easy for a Prime Minister when you’ve got the Americans breathing down your neck. They are close friends and allies and we rely on the US for defence and security, although that reliance is mutual.

But just as Harold Wilson refused to send British troops to fight in Vietnam, this Labour government knows that we have principles that we are not prepared to violate. Unlike the Tories, we stuck to our guns and said we have values that define who we are. It is the first time that a British Prime Minister has said no to an American President since the 1960s.

So no Mr President. We say no.

And with every passing day, I think we see just how important that decision actually was. How hard it was, and how pivotal it has been for this second Keir. 

Because the pressure did not come only from the United States. 

It came from the press. 

It came from the Opposition Benches. 

It came from the armchair generals beating their chests and roaring us on into war.

We forget it now but just two weeks ago, the drumbeat was relentless: The claim that Britain had to fall in line, that refusing to do so would somehow place us on the “wrong side” of the Americans. And how difficult and dangerous that would be for our country. 

I think it took real courage for the Government to resist that kind of pressure. 

But once you stand firm and say so, something remarkable happens – the fog clears. And suddenly the path becomes obvious. 

Of course we had to stand up for what was right. Of course we can’t be involved in attacking another country, no matter how hateful their regime is. And no one is apologising for Iran, but where is it going to end? What is the plan? And who is going to decide when that plan has been fulfilled, that we have done everything we wanted to do in that war, if we don’t have a clear idea what we’re going to do before we get involved?

The answer had to be no.

Unlike many of our founding fathers and mothers, not many of us in the Labour Party are pacifists these days. But we cannot agree to violence and the loss of life without either the agreement of the international community, or the real need for self-defence. That’s the law. And that’s what’s right. 

Of course we had to put principles before pressure. 

And looking back you can see this is exactly the kind of courage Keir Hardie displayed when he stood so firmly against the First World War. 

When he was ridiculed. 

When he was called unpatriotic. 

When he was spat at in the street. 

But history proved him right. 

Hardie was such a relentless advocate for peace that the outbreak of war very much killed him. But I think what he said in the weeks before the First World War tells us a lot about what it means to be an internationalist Labour Party. 

He told Parliament: “Our honour is said to be involved in entering into the war. That is always the excuse.” 

He went on: “I suppose our honour was involved in the Crimean war, and who today justifies it? Our honour was involved in the Boer War, how many today will justify it?”

Let’s update that. Let’s change Crimea to Iraq. Let’s change Boer War to Libya. 

He concluded: “If we are led into this war, we shall look back in wonder and amazement at the flimsy reasons which induced the Government to take part in it.” 

More than a century later, those words still ring true. 

So, the lesson for us today is simple. 

Standing by Labour values may not always be easy in the moment. But when we do it – when we hold our nerve – we discover that is exactly what we should do. This is where Labour belongs. This is who we are. This is what it means to govern according to our principles. 

And look how Labour’s internationalism, our belief in treating others with respect, as brothers and sisters, has helped our standing in the world.

Just think back a couple of years. Back to the depths of Brexit.  

When Britain was a laughing stock.  

When people openly mocked us. They mocked the politicians that were supposed to represent us.

We had David Davis turning up for Brexit negotiations without any notes. I mean really. The arrogance. The entitlement. 

We had Boris Johnson making everything into some silly little game, some chance for him to just show off, when real working people paid the price for his incompetence. 

We had Dominic Raab deciding he’d sit on a beach in Greece while Kabul fell to the Taliban, rather than get up and do something about it. 

The politicians who represented Britain on the world stage let us down, and our credibility vanished. People didn’t know what Britain stood for anymore. And neither did we as a country.

These people said they were patriots, but I think real patriotism doesn’t need to brag. It needs to be comfortable with itself, it needs to believe in itself, it needs to be strong.  

And we were so far away from that.

But look at the difference we have made in the last 18 months. 

Under Labour, Britain is once again a serious player on the world stage. And we are doing it on our terms. On Labour terms.

We are a force for good.

We back international law because we know it is right.  

We back strong partnerships because we know we are better together.  

We back fighting for peace because we know it’s a hell of a lot easier to get into a war than it is to get out of one. 

I have to say, I found it deeply disturbing to see Kemi Badenoch and her Shadow Attorney General arguing that we should simply ignore international law if we didn’t like it and commit our troops to unlawful action. 

That when the Americans asked us to jump our response, they thought, should be: “how high, Mr President?” 

She said that our troops were “just hanging around,” when they were bravely defending our partners and bases from incoming fire. 

It’s disgraceful. 

Sending our young men and women to war is one of the most solemn decisions any government can ever make. And the eagerness of the Tories and Reform to trample over the UN Charter, to ignore the legal protections Britain helped write and to embrace what is essentially the law of the jungle – that should trouble every one of us. They are the alternative.

Under Labour, we will not let our country be seduced by self-serving populists who are prepared to put our country’s security on the line. 

Under Labour, we will not be afraid to do what is right, no matter how loud the warmongers shout. 

Under Labour, we will never again forget who we are and what we are fighting for. 

Getting ourselves into the right place internationally at a time of war, is no small thing. 

But we need to show that same strength, the same vision, the same clarity of principle when it comes to our domestic policy.  

If we do that, if we stay true to our values and our principles then I know we are going to be alright. 

And more than that, we will take the country along with us. 

It’s about understanding the nervousness people feel when they believe there is no control of our borders without falling into the trap of being unfair and cruel to vulnerable people who come here seeking safety and a better life. 

It’s about being brave when it comes to tackling the crisis in social care. Because we know in our hearts we are never going to fix the NHS without being bold and ambitious and finally, finally ensuring the elderly, disabled, and vulnerable have the care they need to live in dignity and to keep them healthy.

Yes, some of these things look really difficult, but we need to take a deep breath, listen to our hearts, listen to who we are, and take action. 

How many people here think we should be standing up for our children and protecting them from the addictive nature of social media? Or protecting people from the vile abuse they suffer online?

How many people here think we should be doing something about the manipulative algorithms feeding us all of this hate, and division, or disinformation? Or the blatant use of bots to promote hatred by hijacking the algorithms and supporting the Right?

Exactly.

We just have to go for it.

We have to be brave, and bold, and go for it.

We know it’s about time we updated our laws to give equal rights to couples who are not married. By not updating the law, we are not protecting marriage, we’re just disadvantaging children, the majority of whose parents are not married in Britain these days. And we’re disadvantaging women who believe being a “common-law wife” gives you some sort of rights. It doesn’t. It doesn’t give you anything. 

We know it’s about time we had a proper green revolution so people can actually afford their heating bills.  

But we can’t do that unless our homes are insulated properly and unless we build the pylons to get the clean energy to where it is needed. We can’t secure a warm future for people while most of us, 73% of us across the country, and 84% here in Merthyr, still rely on gas. We have to change that. It’s going to take a lot. We have to do it. We are Labour

We cannot continue to be unsure about ourselves. We have to say: people have got to have heating they can afford and we just have to get it done. We are in power. We have a big majority. We are Labour.

I’m not saying Britain is broken. I don’t believe it is. But I am saying we have to sort this out, and we can sort this out.

We can only do it though, with a Labour government that believes in itself, that knows where it comes from, and that is willing to be a bit braver, a bit louder, a bit prouder. 

If we are not sufficiently clear and confident, if all we have to offer the country is something which seems a bit timid, a bit boring, a bit managerial, if Labour is no longer a moral crusade, then what are we? Not much.

And we make the populists even more attractive.  

Because if we can’t be clear about what we stand for, we are in trouble.

But if we can be clear and if we can be positive and we can be passionate: then we win.  

Because we have the truth on our side. We have the arguments that stack up. We have a vision that makes sense. And we have a plan.

The problem with populists, whether it’s Reform or the Greens or Plaid, is that they just say what they think people want to hear. 

It’s never about knowing the cost of delivering it. Or how they’re going to do it. Or what the consequences will be. They never think that through.

Of course, we do. Trouble is, sometimes it seems like that’s all we do. And we forget the reason why we’re doing it, what the essence of the plan is and where we want to go.

We’ve spent so much time talking about the cost, about next steps. And yes, of course we must do that because we are a responsible party of power.

But we also need to be able to look people in the eye and say: we know where we’re going, that things are going to be alright. Stick with us, and we can sort things out together. 

Because if we don’t, people will just turn to the Farage’s, the Polanski’s, the ap Iorwerth’s. The snake-oil salesmen. Whatever their names are, we see them. They are prepared in their vanity and glibness, to make us all poorer, to make us all more divided. 

I think that lately, we could be forgiven for thinking that all our passion, and beliefs, and confidence in our Labour values, had been beaten out of us. But our Labour values are still here. They’re still here in our hearts. They haven’t gone anywhere. We just have to rediscover it.   

 We have a duty to take advantage of this massive chance the public has given us to transform our country. 

 To be as brave as Keir Hardie was.  

 To be as bold as Keir Hardie dreamed.  

 To be Labour, as Keir Hardie envisaged. 

 And to show Britain what a strong Labour government, grounded in proud, Labour values, can truly achieve. 

 Thank you.

Emily Thornberry MP

Emily Thornberry Labour MP for Islington South and Finsbury.

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