Why Do Left-Wing Governments in Central and Latin America Remain Trapped in Cycles of Rise and Retreat?

An Analysis of Incomplete Rupture, State Crisis, and the Continuity of Domination

By Majid Maleki

March 2, 2026

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

Introduction: The Problem Goes Beyond Electoral Defeat

The recurrent rise and fall of left-wing governments across Latin America and Central America—from Venezuela and Bolivia to Brazil, Chile, Honduras, and Nicaragua—is often portrayed in dominant political and media narratives as a mere electoral pendulum or as evidence of “popular fatigue with the left.” Such interpretations, whether consciously or not, reduce the matter to partisan competition while evading the deeper foundations of power in these societies.

What is unfolding in these countries is neither accidental nor simply the product of tactical miscalculations. These oscillations express an unresolved historical crisis: the crisis of the state in societies that have never achieved a structural rupture from an imperialist-dependent order. In many cases, left governments have succeeded in capturing executive office, yet they have not attained real sovereignty. The decisive structures of power—ranging from the military and financial systems to foreign trade, land ownership, corporate media, and the nexus between domestic elites and global capital—have largely remained intact. This gap between government and power is the source of chronic instability.

Imperialism as Structure, Not Merely Intervention

The role of the United States in Latin America cannot be reduced to coups or overt military interventions, real as those historical episodes have been. Contemporary imperialism operates less through tanks than through the construction and consolidation of structural dependency. Across the region, it has reproduced networks of subordination: dollar-centered financial systems tied to international institutions, export-oriented mono-economies, armed forces trained under U.S. security doctrines, and economic elites functioning as local intermediaries of global capital.

Within this framework, left governments—even when democratically elected on platforms of social justice—operate on terrain whose rules are already structured against any emancipatory project.

The Military and the Question of Real Power

Few left governments in the region have fundamentally resolved the question of the armed forces. Militaries remain institutionally and doctrinally linked to the imperial order and frequently conceive of themselves as guardians of “order” rather than instruments of popular sovereignty. Even where overt coups do not occur, the shadow of military intervention hangs persistently over political life.

This condition compels left governments into a posture of permanent caution: avoiding red lines, reassuring capital, and retreating at critical junctures. Transformative projects gradually devolve into the careful management of the status quo.

Shallow Reforms and the Crisis of Incompletion

A significant number of left administrations have substituted structural rupture with limited redistributive reforms: subsidies, anti-poverty programs, wage increases, or partial nationalizations. In the short term, such policies may generate improvements in living standards and foster social hope. Yet without transforming property relations, financial systems, trade structures, and national production patterns, these measures quickly encounter structural limits.

Dependence on volatile revenues—oil, gas, raw materials, or external borrowing—renders governments vulnerable to global market fluctuations. With the onset of economic downturns, declining revenues, inflation, and social strain emerge. The same popular sectors that once benefited from reforms confront disappointment and frustration. Policies that initially generated legitimacy begin to erode it.

Left Governments as Managers of Dependent Capitalism

One of the central contradictions of the regional left has been its tendency, often unintentionally, to become a more efficient manager of dependent capitalism rather than its gravedigger. Instead of challenging the capitalist order, many governments have sought to humanize its administration. Yet dependent capitalism is structurally incapable of meeting the needs of the majority.

As long as concentrated ownership, banking systems, and foreign trade remain in the hands of dependent capitalist classes, left governments must coexist with forces that will ultimately mobilize against them in moments of crisis. Capital flight, investment strikes, economic warfare, and coordinated media pressure create the conditions for the resurgence of right-wing forces.

Media, Ideology, and the Reproduction of Domination

Imperialist domination is not only economic and military; it is ideological. In much of the region, major media outlets remain under the control of private, globally integrated capital and systematically frame crises in ways that discredit left governments. Economic difficulties are generalized as the “failure of socialism,” even when the underlying economic structure remains fundamentally capitalist.

Under such conditions, legitimate grievances among workers and marginalized populations are frequently channeled to the benefit of right-wing movements. Disillusionment does not lead toward emancipation but toward harsher and more authoritarian forms of neoliberalism.

The Absence of Independent Mass Organization

Another structural weakness has been excessive reliance on state institutions at the expense of building independent class-based organization. When trade unions and social movements become subordinated to governmental structures and lose their autonomy, the weakening or fall of a left administration can unravel the broader project. The right not only reclaims political power but also dismantles social gains, perpetuating the cycle.

Venezuela: A Paradigmatic Crisis

The contemporary crisis in Venezuela represents one of the most striking manifestations of this pattern. The trajectory of the government led by Nicolás Maduro has unfolded under the combined pressures of oil dependency, sweeping U.S. sanctions, internal mismanagement, corruption, and intense social strain accompanied by large-scale migration.

The Venezuelan case demonstrates how reliance on a single extractive sector, compounded by external economic warfare and internal structural weaknesses, can generate profound political and legitimacy crises. It underscores the vulnerability of left governments that fail to construct diversified and socially rooted economic foundations and to advance structural transformation beyond redistributive measures.

Conclusion: The Question Is Not Electoral Rotation

The cyclical rise and retreat of left governments in Latin America and Central America does not signify the bankruptcy of emancipatory aspirations. Rather, it reveals the incompletion of the anti-imperialist project. Without a genuine rupture from dependent capitalism, democratization of coercive institutions, reinforcement of independent class organization, and transformation of the state from a manager of capital into an instrument of structural change, the left remains confined to temporary returns followed by periodic defeats.

The issue is not simply the alternation of governments. The issue is that power itself has yet to change hands.Email

Majid Maleki

Majid Maleki is a political analyst and political activist, born in 1971 and based in Iran. He is the translator of books such as Inevitable Revolutions and other works. His writings focus on the left, the labor movement, and ethnic and gender issues. Numerous articles by him have been published on websites including Akhbar-e Rooz, Zamaneh Tribune, and other platforms.

A Successful General Strike Requires Trauma-Informed Mutual Aid

To strike at scale and over the long-term, we need to build real trust so that we can lean on each other when the paychecks stop.

By Sahaja Serpent

March 6, 2026

Source: Waging Nonviolence


Protesters march through downtown Minneapolis during the Jan. 23 general strike. (Instagram/becomingalexisj)


The dream of a national general strike to paralyze multiple major industries or corporations is gaining traction.

Across the nation, voices are rising with a righteous call for collective action at scale, especially in the wake of ongoing local economic strikes and protests against the ICE occupation of Minneapolis. The Day of Truth and Freedom on Jan. 23 gave a glimpse of the power of everyday people to make the system tremble. Over 50,000 people poured into downtown Minneapolis in the middle of the workday, braving temperatures of 20 below zero. Roughly a thousand businesses were shuttered, and organizers estimate that a million Minnesotans supported the action. The level of participation demonstrated the power of strikes to energize activists even as we have been grieving the murders, blatant cruelty and torture perpetrated by ICE agents.

What has happened in Minnesota will only add momentum to other efforts to build toward general strikes: There is a national call to strike when 3.5 percent of the current U.S. population commits to it, an ongoing push for regional strikes by Blackout The System and a plan by the United Auto Workers for a general strike on May Day 2028. These calls for general strikes reflect a yearning to reclaim agency from systems that profit from exhaustion, division and despair. They also emphasize that to halt the slide into fascism and climate collapse, we must disrupt business as usual, awaken a shared sense of moral and civic sovereignty, and wield our collective economic power.

Recently, Aru Shiney-Ajay, a Minneapolis-based organizer with the Sunrise Movement, said in an interview that Jan. 23 “was a fantastic start.” But to get to a real general strike, she added that “it’s going to take a lot more work.”

Indeed, pulling off a successful long-term general strike in this large and diverse country will require unprecedented organizing. It will place great demands on each of us — on both a personal and collective level.

This need for deeper organizing could be seen when the call for a “general strike” on Jan. 30 did not materialize nationwide despite the increasing momentum after Alex Pretti’s murder.

As we lay the groundwork for future strikes, we should not overlook another essential ingredient to their success: Strong movements require deep mutual support. We must ensure that strikers and their families have their fundamental needs met when conventional economic systems are being challenged. We need to support one another despite the messages we receive from our culture that it is unsafe to rely on one another. In other words, we will not be able to strike at scale and over the long-term unless we learn how to collaborate through distrust, fear and trauma.
Practicing interdependence amidst trauma

We must learn to depend on one another for our very lives: for food, shelter and safety from violence. This sort of dependence is called, in movement speak, mutual aid. Mutual aid — the practice of voluntary, reciprocal exchange within a community — is not a peripheral support activity; it is the essential infrastructure that will make a prolonged strike possible. The promise of mutual aid is that we learn to depend on one another rather than rely on the broken institutions we’re striking against.

In the past, notable mutual aid networks have been organized in response to the COVID pandemic, natural disasters and to support teacher strikes, among many other causes. And under tremendous risk, inspiring and self-organized mutual aid efforts have sprung up — neighborhood by neighborhood — in Los Angeles, Minneapolis and other cities targeted by ICE over the last year.

However, the scale of mutual aid needed for a long-term general strike will be much larger than anything we have seen to date. It wouldn’t be just the marginalized or immigrant families that will need “aid.” People who are currently employed and supporting others will also need to survive without relying on mainstream structures. The mutual aid networks that emerged over the past two months in Minneapolis are a solid step in the right direction. Beyond the rent assistance and food delivery systems for immigrants sheltering at home, restaurants, places of worship and coffee shops have opened their doors to feed neighbors for free and supply ICE patrollers with gas masks, hand-warmers and whistles. We need to continue building on this momentum.

The hyperindividualistic capitalist script tells us to rely only on ourselves, that we must work hard and make enough money to secure our own food, health and shelter. But that system is designed to fail, and too many of us and our neighbors are vulnerable, exploited and denied access to our basic human needs. A poorly planned strike risks making those injustices even worse if people step away from their sources of income. This is the trap: We wouldn’t need to strike if we had a safety net, but without a safety net, striking is far more difficult.

Mutual aid is how we break this circular logic. But here’s the big problem: Collective traumas have robbed our society of the willingness to depend on one another — to give and receive support as if our lives depend on it. Mutual aid is a trust fall, but many of us still need to learn to trust one another. Past or ongoing money and class trauma make some of us believe that our economic privilege was justly earned — that we have the right to hoard our resources and to not share what we have with others. For others, financial stress keeps us stuck in the systems that are killing our biosphere and degrading our souls. Racism causes a similar spiritual degradation, teaching us that some people are more deserving of our support than others.

Our bodies are so traumatized that interdependence feels unsafe for most of us. We believe the narrative that living alone with a six-figure salary is safer than living in deep interdependence with our community. Or that working four part-time jobs to pay our rent is our destiny, and no one can help us change this fate. Our inability to trust one another is capitalism’s great victory. The unspoken truth is that we are lonely, traumatized, dysregulated and grieving. We are trying to build a movement with bodies and hearts locked in states of fight, flight or freeze. We can make brilliant intellectual arguments for mutual aid, but without an embodied sense of safety, healing and belonging, these networks remain abstract — impossible to lean on when the paychecks stop.
But I am not traumatized!

“But I’m not traumatized!” I have heard this so often in my work of bringing trauma healing practices and frameworks to activist communities. Especially from men and white people. Any conversation about emotions can seem like a waste of time in a culture obsessed with productivity and rationality. But in a world in which we are bombarded with news of genocides perpetrated with our tax dollars, unhoused people dying on our streets, a mental health crisis among children, an opioid epidemic, police brutality, mass extinctions and unfolding climate chaos, none of us are shielded from the violence of this world. Our collective stubborn insistence that we are “just fine” can actually be a symptom of disassociation and trauma, not a sign of true well-being.

Crucially, the most insidious and primal traumas are personal. Too many of us did not receive the unconditional love from our families and society that is so essential for human flourishing. We were treated as less than the sacred beings that we are. Even worse, many of us have experienced acute familial violence. I also never fail to be struck by the fact that 60 percent of kids in the U.S. have faced at least one of the following: sexual abuse, physical beatings, domestic violence or alcoholism in their family. And personal trauma can be rooted in many realities of life beyond childhood abuse: intergenerational racial pain, dysfunctional societal power dynamics, and income and wealth disparities.

How do we enable more people to participate in the mutual aid that will be essential to carrying out a general strike? We can share information about how neighborhoods can meet fundamental human needs. We can advocate for healthy, grassroots decision-making. We can educate one another about conflict resolution processes and transformative justice. But does information and political education alone inspire people to act? No.

It is important to recognize that an intellectual understanding of mutual aid is fundamentally different than actually practicing mutual aid. Many of us understand that our daily actions harm the water, soil or other species, yet we continue engaging in them. We understand that there is no truly ethical consumption under capitalism, and yet we continue to consume. Our habitual consumption despite knowledge of its harms can intensify pain and trauma.

Consider the legacy of scarcity: A person might intellectually champion a political movement, but when the moment comes to contribute, they are flooded with a paralyzing anxiety they don’t understand. Later, they remember a story: “My mother lived in her car before I was born.” This isn’t just a memory; it’s an inherited, somatic warning that shouts, “Your safety is your money alone! Sharing is risking destitution!” The body’s survival impulse overrides the mind’s political commitment.

Or consider the shame of dependency: Another organizer, eager to dedicate themselves fully to the movement, feels a knot in their stomach at the idea of quitting their corporate job. The obstacle isn’t a lack of conviction, but shame at the thought of becoming dependent on others. In a society that equates self-sufficiency with virtue, the vulnerability of needing support can feel like a profound moral failure. Trauma whispers in our bodies that we should stay in a compromising job rather than face the perceived humiliation of mutual reliance.

Moving from the theory to practice of mutual aid means confronting the emotional and traumatic barriers that block us from exercising true interdependence. To build a resilient movement, we must bridge this gap between knowing and feeling. We must embody the beauty and joy of radical interdependence with other humans, and with the Earth itself.

Unless we can access the subterranean emotions preventing us from living this radical practice, it will remain little more than an intellectual exercise for most of us. Political education, when not coupled with emotional sensitivity, doesn’t land in our hearts. In fact, political education without trauma awareness can bind us deeper into our siloed opinions where we don’t see each other’s genuine needs and grief under the surface of our opinions. Many of us debate meaningless political differences rather than actually practicing mutual aid.

A trauma-informed practice of mutual aid in our daily life would look like us acknowledging our past traumas, fears or hesitations and yet offering our time, money and even bodies to our community members. This ability to “see” our traumas and act in spite of them is possible when we can tap into a strong sense of groundedness — and even joy — in our sense of belonging to our community, and hopefully our spiritual practice.
The power of multiracial coalitions

A general strike — and the mutual aid effort necessary to sustain it — requires a multiracial coalition. A multiracial coalition is crucial not just as a moral necessity, but also as a strategic necessity rooted in demography, economics, history and the current reality of who serves as essential workers. Historically, some of the most militant and class-conscious segments of the U.S. working class have been workers of color, precisely because they face the compounded exploitation of low wages, unsafe conditions and systemic racism.

A multiracial coalition will make the movement less vulnerable to attempts by the ruling class to break strikes by exploiting racial differences through the age-old tactic of “divide and conquer.” Workers of color are disproportionately concentrated in the most exploited and strategically vital sectors (e.g. warehousing and logistics, hospitality, domestic care and agriculture) where a strike would have maximum impact. Therefore, a multiracial coalition would be able to mobilize workers at the economy’s critical chokepoints and build on the most effective traditions of labor struggle. A strike without this foundation is a ship with a hull breach; it may set sail in calm weather, but it will not survive the storm.

Building a multiracial coalition depends on confronting racial trauma. This trauma isn’t an abstract concept. It lives in the daily, embodied experiences of our potential comrades. It shows up in our meetings, in our resource sharing and in our silences. We witness it arise when a low-income femme of color calculates how to ask for rent help from her community while listening to others casually plan their summer vacations. She may wonder, “Can they truly understand what ‘mutual aid’ means when my survival is only an abstraction to them?”

Or imagine a gentle, well-intentioned white man who can recite the statistics on racial wealth disparity but cannot feel in his body the pain of the mother in his group who works overtime to make ends meet. He overlooks her deep fatigue, the fear of a single missed shift, or the weight of an entire lineage of forced resilience. His intellectual declarations for justice become a wall, not a bridge. He has an inability to fully embody the empathy he feels. Such a man needs to move beyond intellectual understanding to feel the pain of his friends as if it were his own. He can only do this by opening up to his own layers of grief and trauma.

These moments are not mere interpersonal friction; they are the manifestations of unhealed racial and class trauma. They are why, despite our best intentions, our coalitions fracture. Why, for example, the #MeToo movement fractured under accusations of racial bias.

Unaddressed trauma — the wild inner impulses of wrath and grief — does not vanish by suppression or avoidance. This pain can only begin to transform when it is wisely witnessed with love by our own selves and fellow human beings. By shining a light on emotions and experiences that feel neglected and shameful, we can begin to heal and move towards deeper solidarity with one another.
How can we face this trauma?

Modern psychotherapy could be a good starting point for different kinds of activist groups. But we do not have enough well-trained and affordable therapists to confront the scale of trauma we are facing.

Many ancient healing lineages, including Indigenous and Eastern spiritualities, have also been offering us pathways for healing. In contrast to the individualist approaches common in Western healing, these approaches emphasize the creation of belonging with one’s community and the Earth itself. Modern spiritual leaders like Joanna Macy have curated pathways for healing collective ecological trauma, drawing on some of these ancient lineages. Some younger and people of color leaders are creating new integrated practices that address other kinds of trauma from both modern psychological and ancient spiritual community-based frameworks (search for facilitators here).

Healing is, of course, not easy — it’s full of pitfalls, but it cannot be bypassed. Our mass movement must admit that a general strike can only succeed if we face our traumas head-on.

As we prepare to engage in nonviolent struggle, we must also learn to care for each other. This is the quiet, unglamorous work of our time. We must slow down to build the relational fabric for true mutual aid that will make any future strike not merely possible, but unshakable.




Sahaja Serpent

Sahaja Serpent is a contemplative practitioner and ecological science educator based in Tibet. She works at the intersection of contemplative practice and social change, mentoring activists in trauma-informed movement building. She facilitates retreats and workshops that integrate embodied trauma healing practices, community dialogue, and discussion of ethics. She can be reached at sahajaserpent@proton.me

North Carolina’s New Era

“This is what real community power looks like”

By Aaron BLACKUNBOUND, Christina Cole 

March 6, 2026

Source: BlackUnbound

Image courtesy of BlackUnbound

People aren’t talking enough about what happened in NC this week, so let’s talk about it. Contrary to what you might have seen or heard, the most important story from North Carolina’s primaries on March 3rd is not Republican leader Phil Berger losing by two votes or Valerie Foushee defeating progressive challenger Nida Allam. The most important and inspiring story was this: an unprecedented coalition of Southern unions and working peoples’ organizations running audacious campaigns and winning a series of upset victories over establishment Democrats in major races at the state and local level.

Over the last few years, organizations like DAE, Unite Here, Durham for All, Carolina Federation, Siembra, and Down Home NC have been organizing non-stop — building up their bases of working class member leaders, training them in how to run and win campaigns, and sharpening their political strategy. Tuesday night’s election results showed what a winning combination that can be — from the coast to the piedmont and from urban centers to the rural Black Belt.

Even more importantly though, these election results show how profoundly these organizations have already shifted the balance of power in our state and they signal what could become a New Era for North Carolina politics— one where leaders actually stand up for what is right and where working people can finally win the schools, rights, and freedoms our people have been denied for too long.

What Happened?

First, in Durham: a union-backed slate of Board of Education candidates swept into office on massive margins. The four New Era for DPS candidates— Natalie Bent Kitaif, Xavier Cason, Gabby Rivero, and Nadeen Bir— were all supported by DAE and Durham for All, a public school workers union and a political organization of public school parents, and they each won by an average of 30 points. Nadeen Bir, a long time community activist, won by 34 points over the 8 year incumbent and Board Chair Bettina Umstead (who won her last election by nearly 48 points). These were unambiguous mandates that working families in Durham are ready for new, pro-union, pro-democracy leadership for our public schools.

Similarly, in the NC House: across four different races, establishment Democrats were trounced by peoples’ candidates backed by aligned working peoples’ organizations like Unite Here, Carolina Federation, Down Home, NCAE, and Siembra. Veleria Levy in NC House District 99, Rodney Sadler in NC House District 106, and Patricia Smith in NC House District 23 each defeated one of the most conservative and unreliable Democrat incumbents in the NCGA. Nasif Majeed, Shelly Willingham, and Carla Cunningham have been in the legislature for 30 years collectively, and all have voted with Republicans multiple times in recent years. Their resounding defeats on Tuesday sends a clear warning to any other conservative Dems in the NCGA. Finally, Rodney Pierce was also victorious on Tuesday against a challenge from Michael Wray (Pierce defeated Wray, the 20-year incumbent, by just 34 votes in 2024 and this time won by almost 4,000 votes).

Now, we know that winning School Board elections in Durham and NC House seats in Mecklenburg, Edgecombe, Martin, Bertie, Warren, Halifax, Northampton counties might seem like smaller, down-ballot victories in this moment of fascism, war, and genocide. However, when you understand how all these candidates won, you begin to see how these wins could chart a path towards a new era in NC politics.

So, how were these upsets possible?

What fueled these victories, in short, was those multi-racial working peoples’ organizations— which have each been building their own muscle— teaming up like never before to 1) identify key races where there was a real opportunity to challenge and then recruit candidates from their own bases who were ready to fight for what working families in those districts care about most deeply (paying workers living wages, full union rights for workers, protecting our communities from ICE, fighting the privatization of our schools, and more) and 2) mobilize their own highly-skilled member leaders to help knock over 150 thousand doors and have tens of thousands of real face-to-face conversations with voters.

In the Durham School Board campaign for example: DAE and Durham for All (Carolina Federation) combined the strength of the robust member-led organizing committees they’ve built over the past few years to create a genuinely incredible political movement/machine. A machine capable of filling 630 volunteer canvass shifts, knocking almost 10,000 doors, and greeting voters at nearly every precinct on Election Day. In the last month they were able to have real conversations with thousands of public school workers at their worksites and thousands of public school parents and community supporters at their homes about what was at stake in these Board elections and what change they want to see for our schools.

And it worked. The polling numbers show game-changing turnout of working class voters who likely would have just stayed home were it not for these organizations, these campaigns and these candidates.

Turnout in Durham was nearly 10,000 votes (+20%) higher than the 2022 midterm primaries and even exceeded 2024’s presidential-gubernatorial primaries. Over 35,000 total Durhamites cast their vote for the four New Era slate candidates. For perspective, that is almost exactly double the number of votes Alexandria Ocasio Cortez got in her now legendary, grassroots-powered primary victory over establishment incumbent Joe Crowley in 2018. Just sayin’.

In Mecklenburg (where Sadler and Levy won) turnout for this primary was 17,000 voters higher than the 2022 midterm primaries (+15%). In just Sadler’s district (NCHD 106) within Mecklenburg County, they saw a 47% increase in voter turnout over the 2024 presidential-gubernatorial primaries.

One more piece of perspective: Trump won NC by less than 200,000 votes in 2024. And these unions and working peoples’ organizations just got +27,000 people to vote in these down-ballot primaries compared to the 2022, and that’s just counting Durham and Mecklenburg. How many more counties can we run these kinds of campaigns in? How much bigger can these grassroots campaigns get the more they keep winning?

The final takeaways

These state and local level wins were nationally-significant victories for grassroots, multiracial, working class democracy.

Tuesday’s results showed that working families in our state are hungry for something fundamentally different from the status quo state politics we are used to. Working people are fed up with party elites who are not ready to meet this moment, who are not accountable to their constituents, who are not brave enough to stand up for what’s right, and who aren’t willing or able to lead the fight against fascism.

MAGA facism will be on the ballot in 2028. And one thing is certain: the status quo of elitist Democratic leadership in NC cannot and will not be the Democratic leadership that defeats Trump’s fascism.

But the deep hope here is that these powerhouse, fighting working people’s organizations have just demonstrated that there is a real path to victory here in NC. A path forged by audacious, multi-racial working class leadership towards a new era of hope, democracy, and freedom for our people.

“This is what real community power looks like!” exclaimed newly elected Durham School Board member Nadeen Bir to nearly 100 supporters Tuesday night at Motorco. The hope and empowerment flowing through the crowd was truly electrifying. The crowd represented the working people of Durham through and through: students, educators, union members, parents, community members, elders, faith leaders, Black, white, Latino, Palestinians, longtime activists, and first time campaigners. And after weeks and months of exhausting organizing, no one was finished — they were determined to keep winning for our people. They were rejuvenated to begin a New Era, for DPS and for NC politics. No one was ready to sit back down and check out for four years— they were ready to show up to next week’s BOE meeting and keep fighting for classified public school workers. No one was hopeless in the face of the horrors being carried out by Trump and his party — they were making calls to actions at the victory party to demand our Senator stop the war in Iran. They were fortified by the profound belief that we can fight for a better future and win. We have to. And this is how.

Email

Aaron BLACKUNBOUND

BLACKUNBOUND is a labor of love for Black people and those who love us. I envision this online space as a project toward deep freedom. Join a community of people committed to the project of deep freedom by reading, sharing and supporting.

 Four Union Strategies to Fight  A.I.

By Keith Brower Brown

March 7, 2026

Source: Labor Notes

    

National Nurses United released “A.I. justice” principles last year that highlight specific threats, like an automated algorithm deciding how many nurses to schedule on shift or which tests should be ordered for a patient. Photo: NNU

A corporate artificial intelligence frenzy is sowing fear for workers on a massive scale. Seventy-one percent of people in the U.S., according to a Reuters poll on A.I., are concerned “too many people will lose jobs.”

Wall Street and Big Tech are running a huge hype machine to back up their massive, risky investment in A.I., pledging it will drive a “productivity surge,” meaning fewer workers and more profits.

But workers can take heart that, so far, it’s mostly hot air. To date, A.I. is making little profits. It can be helpful at a few tasks—rough drafts of computer code, summaries of reams of data—but is rarely the equal of human talent otherwise.

Nonetheless, investors are on track to pour more than $5 trillion worldwide into A.I. over the next five years. To make good on that cash outlay, expect CEOs to sell A.I. as the salve for everything from logistics to loneliness.

A.I is a management power grab, disguised as an inevitable technical upgrade. To fight it, workers can use four strategies proven in the past: name the real problem; unionize it; ransom it; and block it.

NAME THE REAL PROBLEM

The first step for workers is to cut through the hype. At your job, what are the specific uses of automation or A.I. that management aims to roll out?

Which uses are likely to be a dud, and which are a real threat to union power, job security, and the quality of what you do? Are there uses that your co-workers want, on their own terms?

These tough questions are best answered collectively, with knowledge from different departments and job types, whether that discussion takes place in union meetings or on lunch breaks.

At the United Caucuses of Rank-and-File Educators conference last summer, teacher activists from across the country held a discussion like this. Many hated A.I. being pushed into the classroom. Others felt it could make onerous parts of their job easier.

The teachers opposed to A.I. shared examples of how it had been used against workers and how it was promoting plagiarism and misinformation. Participants keyed in on a few uses they might want as options, like class planning or reviewing students’ past work, but agreed it should never be mandated by management.

National Nurses United released “A.I. justice” principles last year that highlight specific threats, like an automated algorithm deciding how many nurses to schedule on shift or which tests should be ordered for a patient. The union argues that computer systems can’t replace human expertise.

Executives often tell on themselves. To stay ahead of management’s game, unions can recruit member volunteers to read what CEOs in your sector are bragging about in the business press and scour the web for what they’re promising their higher-ups.

In fact, the heaviest A.I. users are in the C-suite. A recent survey of the U.S. and five other countries found 87 percent of executives and 57 percent of managers were using A.I. tools, versus 27 percent of employees. These tools can’t nurse a patient, but they can hack a passable version of management’s tasks: surveilling workers, summarizing information, and telling investors what they want to hear.

Job cuts from A.I. may be a real threat in your sector, but not because automation can actually do your work well. Executives may not care whether students are nurtured, real facts are reported, or patients are healed. They just want to make a buck. A.I. gives them cover to allow the quality of work to degrade.

Software executive and critic Anil Dash recently observed that half a million tech workers have been laid off since the release of ChatGPT mainly because execs “now have A.I. to use as an excuse for going after workers they’ve wanted to cut all along.”

Junior programming jobs have been heavily cut, while senior engineers are kept on to fix the buggy code dreamed up by A.I. But where will the next generation of senior engineers come from, if they’re not learning on the job as junior coders? These short-sighted cuts are creating new leverage for experienced programmers, who could push worker-run solutions for training the next generation.

UNIONIZE IT

New tech could become an excuse to outsource your work to non-union hands. To keep it union, you can bargain contract language, make direct demands on management, and take a proactive union approach to learning technology.

In the 1970s and ’80s, Mike Parker, an Auto Workers electrician and Labor Notes co-founder, kept track of auto company plans for robotics and computers, and developed union training programs on the new gear.

When managers proposed to bring in the robots, they said non-union specialists would have to take on installation and maintenance. Parker and his co-workers asserted they were ready to handle the work on union terms, and often won.

It’s too bad the union as a whole didn’t follow his lead. Every decade since the late 1940s, auto company CEOs have made grand promises of automation by robotics, and Auto Workers top officers generally gave up the fight. Still, most job cuts were caused by work speed-up, mandatory overtime, and outsourcing to third-party parts suppliers and non-union Southern factories.

As the San Francisco-to-Oakland Bay Bridge got rebuilt two decades ago, private contractors planned to outsource the work on massive new welding machines to non-union workers. “The company came to the union and said, ‘We’ve got a contract with you, but you don’t have welders certified on those machines locally,’” said Mike Munoz, then a leader with the Pile Drivers in Oakland.

“Our union bought one of the machines and started teaching the members to weld on it,” said Munoz. “We can train our members to do anything. We certified all the welders who went out on the Bay Bridge. It became our work because we threw ourselves into it.”

When it comes to new A.I. and automation schemes from management, workers can refuse to let non-union contractors take charge. An army of consultants has sprung up to advise bosses on A.I. implementation for hospitals and schools, grifting millions from actual education and care.

Your union contract may already have language requiring management to bargain over major changes in unit work. Where it doesn’t, you can push for specific new language. If you accept some A.I. tools, like to summarize a thousand pages of patient records, which union job classifications will run the robots and double-check their work? Keeping the work in union hands is a first step to steer what A.I. is and isn’t used to do.

RANSOM IT

Another union strategy worth considering: force management to pay workers extra, as a condition of rolling out new technology.

The most famous deal like this, for longshore workers, shows short-term gains and big long-term limits for the approach.

In a landmark 1960 agreement, the militant West Coast Longshore union (ILWU) agreed to allow mechanization and shipping containers at the ports, in exchange for expanded pay, pensions, and a guarantee of a certain number of union jobs at each port. If the port owners dropped hiring below that number, they still had to pay that number of union members indefinitely.

The agreement came with big tradeoffs, as members were split into three tiers with radically different job security. Only the A-tier got the guaranteed jobs or payouts. When port owners slashed hiring, A-tier longshore workers and union officers didn’t feel the urgency to organize the jobs in new hubs of the supply chain.

“The containers go inland,” said Peter Olney, who came into the union as a lead organizer decades later. “Do you follow the work inland, unloading and warehousing them? That fell by the wayside.”

Another kind of ransom can be won by those building out the new technology and its infrastructure. Construction workers have a particularly direct kind of leverage over the A.I. boom: it can’t be built without them.

Much of the massive data center construction behind A.I. is getting unionized, even in far-flung boomtowns. That’s because building trade unions have national networks of trained, traveling members to call up through their hiring halls, and can meet the labor demand fast.

In the next wave, many “hyperscale” data centers are planned to be 10 times the size of those already built. The largest will guzzle as much electricity as the entire city of Philadelphia.

The vast labor demand of those projects gives building trade unions leverage, if they seize it: to bring new members in, to turn down work on the projects facing the most local opposition, and to demand concessions for public services and the environment.

An upsurge of local grassroots campaigns blocked 25 data centers last year. When unions partner with community groups, they both can squeeze more from developers and governments, like dropping the billion-dollar data center tax giveaways that can bankrupt local schools and roads. In California, such alliances unionized gas and solar power plants and won a few community demands.

At best, these kinds of “ransom” deals can raise the costs for management to force in a new technology, and buy time for workers to go on offense with organizing.

BLOCK IT

With enough strength, workers may manage to draw the line against certain uses of A.I. altogether.

In their 2023 Hollywood strikes, the Writers Guild and Screen Actors won restrictions on the use of A.I. writing or replicas of actors’ faces and voices. But in a media industry that’s getting more consolidated and corporate every year, bosses are finding workarounds, and unions are fighting to keep up.

The NewsGuild launched a national campaign in December for “News, Not Slop,” using contract negotiations and public pressure to demand limits on A.I.-generated news content.

In their recent strike, 15,000 New York City nurses won language against some kinds of A.I. misuse.

Oil refinery Steelworkers, in national pattern bargaining this year, aim to block management from using A.I. tools to monitor workers’ movements, assess their productivity, and dish out automatic discipline.

Existing contract language on working conditions could be used against degrading uses of A.I. Use your discipline process to limit the use of automated demerits. Use worker oversight of safety to push back against allowing A.I. tools to make risky decisions. Use staffing limits to draw a line against bigger workloads disguised as high-tech efficiency.

The most degrading effect of A.I., after all, isn’t just to our work, but to our skills and imaginations. When music and movies are made by a robot cobbling together past works, it cheats audiences and artists alike of newer, wilder dreams.

Even in more rote work, we learn by doing. A.I. is no unstoppable force of progress. In fact, if it’s done how CEOs want, it would dry up the well of progress: worker know-how.

Standing up to management’s technological power grab is one big step to take responsibility for the world we make on the job—and to keep open the path to a better one.

Is Human Well-Being Comparable With an AI Frenzy Driven by Speculative Pursuit of Profit?

By C. P. Chandrasekhar, C.J. Polychroniou 

March 3, 2026

Source: Global Policy Journal

Image by Bovee and Thill/Wikimediacommons, licensed via CC BY 2.0

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the hottest topics out there. And for a good reason. AI is transforming industries and everyday life. But how much do we understand about AI? How powerful is it? Is it comparable with capitalism? How will it affect the workforce? Is it becoming “too important to fail?” Is there a progressive alternative to AI? 

C. P. Chandrasekhar, a world-renowned scholar of finance, financial policy and development and Senior Research Scholar at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, addresses these questions in the interview that follows. He is emeritus professor at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi where he taught for more than 30 years. In addition to many articles in academic journals and serving as a regular economic columnist for Frontline (Economic Perspectives), Business Line (Macroscan),  and Economic and Political Weekly, he is the author of scores of books, including Karl Marx’s Capital and the Present. In 2009, Chandrasekhar received the Malcolm Adiseshaiah Award for contributions to economics and development studies. 

C. J. Polychroniou: Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been integrated into business and our daily lives. Among other sectors of the economy, AI is said to be transforming the finance and banking industries.  I’d like to start by asking you about capitalism and AI. Is capitalism compatible with AI?

C. P. Chandrasekhar: Innovation and technological change under capitalism are shaped by the needs of Capital in pursuit of profits. But that does not make technological change under that capitalism all bad. Both under capitalism and beyond, these technologies can be shaped and deployed to serve the needs of a more people-centric sustainable development agenda.

A matter of concern is how the observed evolution of Artificial Intelligence is being influenced by the needs of Capital. One obvious way is through the displacement of labor with attendant implications for employment and the conditions of labor. But, in the hype over AI, the transformation of activity induced by AI in the rest of the economy is expected to give rise to new opportunities for employment that would neutralize AI’s expected substitution of humans. Whether labor substitution would only reduce the probability of human error, or go awry, driven by sycophantic or hallucinating bots or software robots is a moot question. According to the hype, however, Artificial Intelligence (AI), a generic, general-purpose technology would ensure revolutionary transformation of almost every area of human activity, with a combination of productivity increase, employment expansion and improved human well-being through effects on delivery of health and educational services, for example. None of that is as yet validated by experience.

The other impact of concern seems to be an intensification of the atomization of society where relations with bots increasingly substitute for a wide variety of human relations resulting in new forms alienation. The effects of this are already being widely observed and reported.

An overarching problem is that since the evolution of AI and its deployment in multiple activities is being largely controlled and driven by private capital, there is little effort to assess and counter what could be socially and economically disruptive consequences of that development. Oligopolistic competition in AI development only makes its evolution more “autonomous” and “spontaneous.” Moreover, the speed of evolution and (as some have correctly argued) the ambiguity as to why, given the way large language models are developed and trained, they tend to deliver the “capabilities” they do makes regulation difficult and slow to respond.

So, the question is not whether capitalism is compatible with AI, but whether social cohesion and human well-being are compatible with the AI evolution delivered by Capital in unbridled pursuit of profit.

C. J. Polychroniou: How exactly is AI transforming finance and what should we expect its impact to be on financial markets?

C. P. Chandrasekhar: There are two issues to be discussed here. The first is how AI is transforming finance. The other is how yield-hungry finance is subordinating and driving AI development.

The transformation of finance and financial markets by AI follows the ongoing automation of code writing tasks in the finance space and the introduction of algorithms. Algorithmic trading speeds-up investment responses to market movements and even determines the size and sequencing of components of a large transaction based on stored instructions, to ensure better returns without the need for continuous human intervention prone to error. There is considerable evidence suggesting that this leads to increased market volatility and even “flash crashes.” With AI agents that are trained to do such tasks more “independently” and faster, these tendencies have only intensified, with fears that a range of human-run interventions would now be performed by digital proxies.

But the more concerning trend is the subordination of AI by finance in search of high returns based on exploding valuations driven by speculation. The surge in the Nasdaq and S&P 500 indices is reflective of this speculation-driven boom. A few firms have driven the rising trend in these indices, exaggerating their weights in determining market performance. Leading them have been the “Magnificent Seven” (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Tesla) that have been the best performing stocks. Six of those seven firms are not merely so-called “tech firms,” but have a presence of one kind or another in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) space. They account for close to 30 per cent of the weight by market capitalisation in the S&P 500, driving the movement in that index. Ten leading firms accounted for almost 80 per cent of the S&P 500’s net income growth in the year to November 2025.

The spike in the share prices of these firms has meant that the price earnings ratio of many of them are well above the average of around 19-20 for S&P 500 firms. NVIDIA, which crossed the $5 trillion market capitalization mark, recorded a price to earnings (P/E) ratio (calculated by dividing the company’s stock price by its earnings per share over the previous 12 months) of 58 in August of 2025.  Oracle, which is diversifying into the AI space from being a provider of database software, also recorded high figures. And there are other smaller companies breaking records. Palantir, which is an AI-powered data mining company, notorious in some circles for allegedly facilitating state surveillance, is being contracted by a range of commercial firms seeking to deploy artificial intelligence. It has seen its stock price more than double three years running.

A high P/E ratio indicates that investors are betting on the revenues of these firms rising significantly in the future, relative to their performance in the recent past, warranting higher stock price and capitalization values today. More diversified firms may be able to protect and raise their revenues irrespective of the future of AI. But AI-specific firms would soar, survive or crash depending on how successful AI is.

That explains why AI firms have been hyping up the potential of a future AI-powered world. And wherever those activities are commercial, it is seen as promising rapid and large increases in profits following deployment of the technology.

There is, however, much cause for scepticism. According to an MIT study,  just 5 per cent of AI projects are extracting value, while the majority do not record any measurable profit impact. In that assessment: “Most GenAI systems do not retain feedback, adapt to context, or improve over time.”

That would mean that unless there is a dramatic transformation of AI performance in use, deployment and willingness to pay would taper off (or even decline) till an uncertain turnaround actually materializes. There is evidence that business uptake of AI tools is stalling. The problem is that heavily AI dependent firms may not be able to wait for long for revenues and returns, given the huge investments being made in AI development

C. J. Polychroniou: Financial instability is inherent to capitalism. Doesn’t AI bring extra risks to the financial system? Indeed, is there a conceptual framework for assessing the systemic implications of AI for the financial system?

C. P. Chandrasekhar: The biggest threat arises because the speculative spike in share values has fueled huge expenditure outlays on acquisition of chips, investments in data centers, employee remuneration amplified by competitive poaching of talent, and investments in the power needed to support the development boom. Firms like OpenAI have been outlaying huge sums on their own operations as well as on contracts with chip makers like NVIDIA, investments in subsidiaries (like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform), and purchases of the services of independent data centers and cloud computing firms like Oracle. Those hardware and service providers in turn are investing large sums to expand operations and production to meet this rapid growth in demand. S&P Global estimates that as a result of the persistence of the “global construction frenzy that shows no signs of slowing,” investments in the land, buildings, hardware and energy to establish data centers totaled $60.8 billion in 2024 and $61 billion by November in 2025. But that is just what is happening in one corner of the AI space. According to Goldman Sachs, “AI hyperscalers” spent $106 billion in capital expenditure in just the third quarter of 2025, with that figure reflecting a 75 per cent year-on-year growth rate. It estimates that spending in 2026 as a whole would exceed $525 billion.

These firms and those investing in and lending to them are predicting rapid growth based on projected demand hinging on an AI boom. But, it appears that if and when AI models find their feet, they may not be able to extract as much revenues as expected because of competition. Competition between OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and surprise entrants like DeepSeek from China (promising to offer comparative features with much lower investment) could belie expectations of firms outlaying huge sums of capital in pursuit of promise high yields.

That prospect is particularly daunting for two reasons. First the role of debt in financing the investments in the AI space. AI-related companies in the US alone have issued bonds valued in excess of $200 billion in 2025, with sale of bonds to the tune of $180 billion by a few firms like Meta, Alphabet and Oracle accounting for a quarter of corporate borrowing in 2025. The unbridled spending by these firms has been encouraged not just by hugely optimistic estimates of the future of AI, but by the large volumes of still cheap liquidity available in the system because of the easy money policies of central banks and the liberalized financial system which has seen non-bank financial players, such as private equity/credit firms, mobilizing that liquidity and deploying it for profit. It is now becoming clear that a disproportionate share of such funds is being directed to AI and AI-related firms. 

Those are liabilities that need to be serviced independent of the revenues earned. But the risk involved is being discounted because of the large volume of cheap and yield-hungry liquidity in circulation.

The fragility that derives from such trends is substantially more than visible, because of the practice of “circular financing”. NVIDIA, for example, intended to invest $100 billion in OpenAI, which in turn has promised to buy $100 billion of NVIDIA chips for its ChatGPT development. That kind of entangled and concentrated exposure of firms riding on the promise of a huge AI profit boom increases fragility and the adverse impact that a collapse of that boom may entail.

Thus, the euphoric rise in substantially leveraged investments rides on the expected performance of a few entangled firms in a single tech space. This concentrated exposure of financial firms and investors based on mere expectations of dazzling future earnings has raised concerns that once again the US is the centre of a bubble that could unravel, as occurred in 2008. Yet the government and regulators are not stepping in to temper if not end the euphoria, because the investments that the boom is giving rise to and the luxury consumption that the beneficiaries of the financial boom are indulging in are partly responsible for much of the growth the US economy records.

C. J. Polychroniou: There are concerns about an AI bubble and that it may burst because of vast AI investments, but David Sacks, who is President Trump’s artificial intelligence and crypto czar, has gone on record stating that there will be no government bailout of the AI industry. Yet Sarah Myers West and Amba Kak argued in a recent Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal that the government is already bailing out AI. What are your own thoughts on this matter? 

C. P. Chandrasekhar: The massive AI spend financed with debt and fueled by and fueling share price valuation spikes has exposed many sectors of the US economy to the AI bubble. This implies that if and when the AI bubble bursts the fall-out would be wide and severe. This makes the AI sector “too important to fail.” So, the state would have no option but attempt a bailout. The uncertainty relates to the ability of the government to implement a bailout and therefore to the success of that effort. The Federal Reserve’s balance sheet is so bloated that it would be hard pressed to inject as much cheap liquidity into the system to save financial and non-financial firms as it did last time. And the elasticity of the spending power of the US Treasury is also likely to be limited by the political standoff over deficits and spending that have led to repeated prolonged shutdowns of the US government. With the capacity to bail out firms and the economy thus restricted, stalling the downturn would be difficult. But then, those governing capitalism never learn enough from history to prevent periodic collapses—even when that error could precipitate a crisis that is as bad as it was in the 1930s.

C. J. Polychroniou: One last question regarding AI and capitalism. There are many experts, including Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called “Godfather of AI,” who predict that AI will produce mass unemployment because that’s how capitalism works. Is there a leftist alternative to AI?

C. P. Chandrasekhar: Since so little is really known about where this technology is going, framing an “alternative” is not easy as of now. The progressive perspective on intervention today must focus on the evolution of the technology. It is imperative that the development of the technology is released from domination and subordination by finance and the big “tech” firms that have grown in size and control by riding on the boom. It also requires regulating both the evolution of the technology and its deployment, given the possibility that it can significantly change the way humans interact with each other and the world they inhabit. Leaving the development and deployment of a technology that can have far-reaching consequences to a spontaneous and uncontrolled “learning” process necessitated by the desire to extract huge profits in the short run is a recipe for disaster.Email

C. P. Chandrasekhar

CP Chandrasekhar is a world-renowned scholar of finance, financial policy and development and Senior Research Scholar at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is emeritus professor at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi where he taught for more than 30 years.