Recently, I went for a walk with Australian philosopher Peter Singer along Merri Creek, a stream that winds its way through some of Melbourne’s most liveable suburbs. I wanted to discuss investment with him upstream, when I realised I couldn’t—I was just reading The Guardian.

That clickbait title drew me in—thanks, Guardian! I found myself reading one of Sophie Black’s “Walk With” series, a deliberately casual interview format in which prominent Australians wander to places they love, talking about their lives and work. The interview appears to have caught an unguarded Singer who is wandering outside his usual academic comfort zone.

I have been a reader of Singer for decades, and I heard him speak in person at the University of Melbourne over a decade ago. Each decade I have found reading him less productive than the last, and I have progressively knocked him further down in the famous living philosopher pedestal in my head.

Still, I have some lingering respect for his contribution to animal liberation. His seminal work, Animal Liberation (1975), helped generations of educated readers see animal suffering and develop a steely compassion for one of the corners full of ugliness that our cultural system and social arrangements had long trained us not to see.2 Singer’s approach was to follow the consequences of moral commitments in a disarming, direct manner. As a philosopher, there was something of the spirit of a punk about him: moral separation was declared simply irrelevant.

When I read the Guardian piece, however, I was perplexed but not surprised by how little of 1975 Singer was left. That was most apparent when he discussed capitalism, in a style of casual reasoning that has characterised his engagement with politics ever since I've paid close attention.

Capitalism is—he said in an aside delivered with faint hand-wringing—“the most productive economic system that ever existed.” If I didn’t know better, Singer offers an apology for pragmatism. Instead, it seems more from the mould of capitalist realism, when he is aiming at a resigned utilitarianism. We are not getting rid of capitalism anytime soon, fait accompli, so we should “improve it, patch it up, fill the gaps”.3

Singer’s Giving What We Can project, which he takes every opportunity to advertise, is asking businesses to pledge at least ten per cent of their profits to charities it regards as measurably effective—a gesture that Singer shares, incidentally, with religious traditions such as Sadaqah in Islam.

What Singer asks us to accept is that Capitalism is “the most productive economic system that ever existed”, and this fact is somehow meant to sit in a neutral, factual, background space where utilitarian inserts itself and nestles in the social relations of capital today, if with a little resignation.

But Singer was never asked: productive of what?

Also, importantly, he was not asked: productive according to whose capacities, and for whose lives? Singer's controversial writings on disability, euthanasia and animals should make it difficult to walk past those questions.4

1980 Singer

As I read about Singer’s walk along Merri Creek, I remembered a curious fact: Singer encountered much of what he is talking about before in another form. In 1980, five years after he published Animal Liberation, Singer was invited by Oxford University Press to contribute a short book called Marx, as part of their Past Masters series, and it was later republished as Marx: A Very Short Introduction (2018).

Singer had studied Marx as a graduate student, and had debated the influence of Hegel on Marx. He had argued that the fashionable separation of an early philosophical and more Hegelian Marx of alienation from a later structural analyst and “scientific” Marx—the idea of a break between early and later Marx popular in French theory with Althusser, among others—was mistaken. There was, Singer thought, a philosophical vision running through both, with Hegel’s influence maintained. Singer was in effect responding to the vogue for structuralism and its critique that had become common academic discourse in the 1980s

Marx was always a text I couldn’t quite place in Singer’s oeuvre, and I had felt it was more of a vague statement of what is called, today, leftism. A closer reading is rewarding, however, because Singer didn’t principally approach Marx as an economist, and instead appreciated him as a philosopher of human freedom and alienation. The problem that loomed large in Marx, in Singer’s own interpretation, was that the powers human beings collectively produce escape our control. Today, I strongly agree with Singer, although we couldn’t be further apart in what follows.

1980 Singer keenly understood the problem of inversion. His eloquent summary of Marx’s essential insight is exactly, for me, the problem of power that Marxism has not resolved:

“Marx saw that capitalism is a wasteful, irrational system, a system which controls us when we should be controlling it.”

Then there is the superbly pithy description of what communism looks like for Marx:

“We will control our economy, instead of being controlled by it.”5

What is striking is that Singer has never really abandoned this reading of Marx, and with each new Oxford edition of Marx, may be drawn back to it. Looking back on the book decades later, he described Marx’s materialist theory of history as “essentially a story of alienation”. He stated that Marx argued “collectively we do not control our own destiny”: individually we pursue our interests, but collectively produce outcomes that nobody else wants. “The fact that Marx’s solution to this problem is mistaken,” Singer concluded, “does not mean that the problem isn’t real.”6

There is a subtle movement that happens in Singer's formulation that perhaps explains his more recent politics. Marx's relational problem slides into Singer's utilitarian framework: socially produced individuals become individuals pursuing interests whose choices aggregate into unintended consequences. For Marx, however, the irrationality lies deeper. Social power arises through our relations and cooperation, then confronts us as something independent of us. We can therefore act perfectly rationally within relations that collectively reproduce our domination. That, to me, is the “story of alienation”, as Singer puts it, that we must confront. The problem is not merely that individual choices add up badly. It is that our own collective powers become organised as powers over us as individuals.

As I read it, Singer did not interpret Marx as having somehow failed to notice capitalism's unprecedented productivity—that would be a false charge. For Marx, capitalism's revolutionary development of productive power was not a resolution of alienation, but an expansion of social powers that were still subject to class struggle. Instead, I think for Singer productivity becomes an argument for preserving capitalism because he does not see that politically we can change it, and we should use mechanisms to “patch” its consequences.

Singer in Marx tests a series of predictions that he associates with Marx. These six predictions are: the worsening relative position of workers, proletarianisation, subsistence wages, the falling rate of profit, capitalist collapse, and the revolution beginning in the advanced capitalist countries. Their apparent failure suggests to Singer that Marx’s theories are not scientific discoveries and that his importance is located in philosophy.7

Some of these criticisms have force. Others are interpretations of Marx that can and should be contested. Let’s say that all six criticisms are valid. Would that exhaust the empirical content of Marx’s analysis? I don’t think so, because I don’t think they even scratch the most persistent claim of Marx’s most mature critique:

Does capitalist accumulation reproduce the capital relation itself?8

There is a valid test to falsify Marx, and that is if his analysis of Capitalism is internally coherent. To test it, we can ask: as capitalism develops, does it keep reproducing a society in which the productive powers we build together accumulate under someone else's control, while most of us still have to sell our labour to gain access to them?

That's a key empirical test, one that does not receive significant attention in Singer's assessment. It also seems minimised in his own analysis of alienation.

It is a test that I do not believe anyone has falsified. Over the past two centuries, capitalism has enormously increased human productive capacities. But has that development progressively given the people whose cooperation produces those powers greater collective command over investment, workplaces, infrastructure, accumulated knowledge and the conditions of production?

Well, has it?

2026 Singer

Capitalism in our times has changed almost unrecognisably since Marx lived and wrote his analysis in Capital. One thing has been stable: most people still need to sell their labour for wages so they can access productive powers over which they individually or collectively have little control. There is little evidence that this relation is disappearing—whatever else capitalism’s development has accomplished, this remains the case.

Singer's own account of Marx in 1980 contains this insight, and it should be an awkward read back for the Singer of 2026. It seems that he perfectly understands Marx’s claim that workers sell their labour-power to capitalists, who accumulate the products of that labour as capital, further increasing capital’s power over workers. He even understood that Marx recognised the development of productive forces under capitalism as a historical achievement that was transformable: “the development of these productive forces, and the liberation of human capacities that this development will bring, is the goal of history.”9

Clearly, capitalism’s productivity was already part of Marx’s problem. But the important connecting thread is that Capitalism is not responsible for all the capacities that are brought into its relation. By itself Capitalism does not labour, learn, invent, build or care. People do these things within social relations and they labour with capacities and accumulated knowledge that capitalism cannot wholly control and never completely created. Billions of human capacities are brought into relation and, through their cooperation, powers emerge that none of us possesses alone. People, in short, unite their own powers within historically specific social relations.

These are what we can call social powers.10

The Marxist investigation of these powers can be framed as a question: what happens when powers we produce together become objectified in forms—commodities, capital, corporations, technologies, infrastructures, states—that confront us as independent powers somebody else commands?

Following that relation upstream—from consumption and distribution towards production, ownership and investment—is one of Marxism's most characteristic moves. It seems to me that Singer no longer has this move in his apparatus, or never had in the first place, despite his philosophical understanding.

Perhaps, he has simply has accepted this problem as unresolvable, and he believes our situation requires a different approach. Writing in 1980 and again in the second edition in 2018, Singer in Marx wants us to accept a most debatable proposition: that any revolutionary solutions based on Marxism have failed. While Singer seems to accept that capitalism is not disappearing, he has not been able to identify any forms to resolve his own diagnosis.

Singer's path here was not direct. Between Singer the reader of Marx and Singer the effective altruist was Singer the political organiser. Disillusioned with Labor during the Hawke years, he became involved with the emerging Victorian Greens, stood for parliament and, with Bob Brown, published The Greens in 1996. Their program questioned accumulation and corporate power and even proposed directing a portion of superannuation capital towards environmental sustainability and social infrastructure. For a while, Singer's politics had wandered upstream towards investment itself.11

By 2015, he spoke about this political turn: alternatives to the capitalist global economic order, he said, seemed considerably less plausible to him than they had twenty or thirty years earlier, but his conclusion was pragmatic: concentrate on interventions that work within the world we’ve got.12 Alienation may have survived as Singer’s diagnosis, but it no longer organised his politics.

But if the social relations remain, so does the problem Singer identified in Marx. And if capitalism continues developing extraordinary productive powers through those relations, the stakes of alienation have grown rather than disappeared. Productive success may increase the stakes of alienation, because the more social powers we develop, the greater the consequences can be if those powers confront us as powers we do not collectively command.13

The more this happens, the more important it seems that we ought to pay attention to how our social powers are being developed. Decades earlier in 1980, Singer ended his little book Marx with the strange declaration:

“We are all Marxists now.”14

Perhaps the irony of his own inversion escaped him.

Forty-six years later, beside Merri Creek, 2026 Singer seems to have travelled a different path from where he started out, and can’t seem to see what happens upstream.

Upstream, I want to whisper urgently to Singer. Who decides?

Before the Philanthropy

Singer's Ethical Altruist project imagines that a system patch exists in which the ethical capitalist can donate ten per cent of their profits to give away, and do good. Now, it is entirely plausible that such a donation could do some short-term good. But, long term, the same social relations that caused the problems will still exist and philanthropy can become an act of apology.

Singer the Marxist might consider in more detail how for the 90 percent, a vast machinery of institutions will have already helped determine where capital will go.15 When private enterprises receive capital, they make decisions about labour, capacity, activities and infrastructure. Workers are brought together. Practical and technical knowledge is developed. Hospitals open or close according to whether resources are made available to sustain them. Infrastructure is built. Particular technologies receive years of human attention. Particular animals are bred by the billion and assembled in gigantic farms, and they aren’t the only lives that rely on the movements of capital: we all do. That’s because decisions about capital are decisions about our own cooperation and capacities—as well as the material conditions in which they can develop.

Some capacities never make it onto the spreadsheet. Capital involves allocations on an almost unfathomable scale. But Singer does not subject them to anything like the consequentialist scrutiny he brings to philanthropy—seeming to assume they are fait accompli. In an act of arbitrary hyperfocus, effective altruism shines an intense ethical spotlight on the fraction directed toward charity: which intervention, which charity, which consequence, how much good per dollar? In effective altruism, all this takes place in feverish conversations with ever more fits of reasoning over spreadsheets. The vastly larger allocation, however, that in the first place produced the profit is not scrutinised with any similar effort. The beam becomes awfully narrow when turned upstream.

Instead, we should be widening the beam at this point: What should we ask before we ask what good the profit can do? It is: What has producing that profit already made us do? What else has it prevented us from becoming capable of doing?

Peter Singer may have once walked surprisingly far upstream, but I want to understand why he turned around with Effective Altruism. What happened on the path to Merri Creek?

Excuse me, Peter. Can we walk upstream? I think you left something back there.

A Non-Sketchy Billionaire?

In Singer’s walk with Sophie Black, the topic of his disappointment with the jailed Sam Bankman-Fried was raised, and seems to have been swatted away. There was a time, in recent years, when the billionaire was widely accounted to be the wunderkind of crypto finance, that Bankman-Fried was celebrated in effective-altruist circles for his commitment to earning to give. Singer himself supported this interpretation of Bankman-Fried even after the financier was convicted of fraud.16 These days, as Sophie Black tells us, Singer has taken to putting him in PowerPoints under the command: “Be good but don't be sketchy!”

Singer in this casual exchange has made the problem look like one of character even if, elsewhere, he resists that reductive moralism. But would it have worked out for the best if Bankman-Fried hadn’t been so sketchy?

Let’s confront that question for a moment and give Singer a non-sketchy Bankman-Fried. This Bankman-Fried has all the personal virtues Singer’s disappointment seems to demand. He is scrupulously honest, committed to effective altruism and gives away enormous amounts of money while making more—bucketloads more, a whole Merri Creek more.

Remove the moral failure, however, and the thought experiment exposes a structural question: why did he get to decide where billions of dollars went in the first place?

When Bankman-Fried’s investment apparatus poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Anthropic, the money did not on its own create the capacity to build artificial intelligence. That capacity already existed among researchers, engineers and workers, and they also drew upon generations of publicly and privately supported knowledge accumulated across the world. What capital provided was command over some of the material and institutional conditions that bring capacities forward into relation: it organised the capacities that built the artificial intelligence.

When scaled up, condensed and mobilised as investment, capital acts as power over us and it does this by granting the material conditions that make forms of present and future cooperation possible. In this, Bankman-Fried was hardly unusual: he was just using the functions of investment and finance to create a company.

In the background of the billionaire who becomes a spectacle, there is the mundane machinery that combines to make capital what it is: banks, corporations, asset managers, pension funds, venture capital, private equity, lenders, boards and executives. The administration mechanisms are many: banks extend or withhold credit, shareholders exercise ownership rights, boards approve strategies and capital expenditure, and venture capital buys equity and sometimes influence over governance. Meanwhile, private equity buys and restructures firms. And asset managers hold a claim over the savings that circulate in this system.

The mechanisms are many, but they return us and there’s a recurring upstream question we face here:

Who gets to say yes?

Yes or no?

At some point, contemporary social decisions seem to take a completely mundane form: the spreadsheet.

In the spreadsheet, many of capital's abstractions are rendered as practical calculations. Capital’s categories appear in a calculable form: labour becomes cost, time becomes productivity, and the future is expressed as expected return. Risk is given a price, and potential forms of cooperation become investments to be accepted or rejected. The balance sheet includes projected revenue, debt, interest, expected return, net present value, internal rate of return, and the hurdle rate.17 Accountants, analysts, executives, investment committees and boards translate possible futures into numbers. The social relation begins to look like a calculation.

Whenever I volunteered for an effective altruist group, even in animal advocacy, I noticed how much of their social life became organised through spreadsheets and calculations that satisfied them as compelling evidence. These spreadsheets were different. The investment spreadsheet is a form that scrutinises which possibilities can satisfy the requirements of capital. The effective altruist spreadsheet scrutinises possible interventions and scrutinises which will create a measurable good. The spreadsheets are different, but they share a calculative form. In both, radically different forms of life must become legible as comparable quantities before they can enter the decision. What fascinates me is that effective altruism subjects the downstream spreadsheet to extraordinary ethical scrutiny while largely accepting the social relations governing the upstream one.

In capitalist investment, the spreadsheet doesn’t command anyone on its own, and calculation is not a capitalist activity in itself, but the spreadsheet does become a privileged form within capitalist relations. Through its investment function, capital can exercise command in the spreadsheet. An apparently innocuous and binary decision binds us to this form in contemporary capitalism:

Yes.

No.

What happens with a yes? It is a social green light. Scientists can get together to develop a medicine that saves millions of lives. Engineers, construction workers, energy and enormous quantities of accumulated knowledge can be move together to build a new generation of data centres. Thousands of workers, buildings, animals, feed systems, veterinary knowledge and logistics can move into an expansion of industrial agriculture. Capital appears as a neutral means because it can finance almost any end, only to disappear into the many separate activities it sets in motion. But the power to select which ends receive the means is not neutral at all.

Power under capitalism also appears neutral for another reason. Even as we fetishise the investment decision at every turn, we intuitively understand that the investment itself has not produced the power or created the productivity. Scientists discover, carers care, engineers build and workers cooperate. The investment has done something else that is consequential: it has helped decide which capacities receive the material conditions through which a particular social power can develop.

The paradox of this alien power—the inversion that fascinated Marx—is that capital appears simultaneously awesomely powerful and oddly passive. We attribute the achievement to the investment—capital “built” the factory, “created” the jobs, “developed” the technology—while at the same time understanding that the allocation of capital as merely enabling the everyday activity that happens elsewhere.

There is one final appearance of neutrality: capital's power can disappear most completely when it says no. A no can mean a hospital isn't built, carers aren't hired or a technology can never find capacities to develop. We rarely encounter these as decisions at all; instead, the are just futures that never became possible. Michał Kalecki, the Polish economist, recognised something similar eighty years ago, independently of Keynesian economics. He argued that when employment depends upon private investment, capitalist “confidence” gives business what he called “a powerful indirect control over Government policy”.18 The power not to invest is itself a form of command.

Investment has many powers, and they are powers over our own future.

Investment and our Powers

Investment can therefore develop social powers as well as reorganise existing ones. A hospital can organise thousands of capacities into a social power of care that none of us can exercise alone. But financial decisions can reorganise the conditions in which that power operates without changing the underlying capacities of the carers themselves.

These powers are collectively produced, but the forms in which they become organised and accumulated can place disproportionate command over them in particular hands. Capitalists do not individually create these powers. Their distinctive class power lies in control over capital, which is the power to disproportionately command the conditions in which our capacities are brought together. Investment is much more than allocating money. It can be a power to select which relations receive material support, which social powers develop and which forms those powers assume.

This is the reality obscured when we simply say that “capitalism” is productive, and leave it there. Capitalism's productivity is our capacities organised through capitalist relations, given such stable forms that its “human nature” can appear in the calculations of spreadsheets.

Consider care. A carer’s capacity to care can remain unchanged while an investment fund purchases their employer, debt rises, staffing falls and the time available with each patient contracts. Nobody needs to order the carer to care less, because the changed conditions they live and labour under can do it all. A financial decision has the consequences of reorganising the conditions and relations in which carers can care. Finance can change the social power of care without changing the carer’s capacity to care.19

Investment can develop social powers as well as reorganise existing ones. It can tie our capacities to fossil fuels, military equipment, war machines or mining, among other things. Consider animals, as Singer did during his long walk between Marx and effective altruism. Industrial animal agriculture organises vast accumulated social power. Generations of genetics, veterinary medicine, engineering, chemistry, logistics, refrigeration and human labour have all been organised into the capacity to breed and kill billions of animals. Many of those capacities could be organised differently: plant and aquatic agriculture, fermentation, ecological restoration, sanctuary and forms of food production that don’t require industrial slaughter. Capital has begun investing in some alternatives too, but they are subject to the decisions of investment.

The power to shape the conditions for our social powers concentrates in the hands of a few, even as our productivity increases and as the forms of other possibilities become apparent. One of the biggest barriers to transformation in these cases is alienation from our own powers.

The upstream question is still undissolved:

What capacities do we see receiving sustained investment, at what scale, under whose command and according to which criteria?

Who Commands the Capitalist?

Investment is a mechanism of power that often has little scrutiny from the public, but is a principal way in which capitalists gain command over the conditions in which our social powers develop. None of this makes the capitalist sovereign, because the capitalist is caught in the relation too.20

A business that turns a productivity gain into shorter working hours may be undercut by one that converts the same gain into lower costs, greater output or expansion. Debt must be serviced, while investors expect returns. Competitors invest, and market share can disappear. Capitalist relations give capitalists disproportionate command over social powers while simultaneously disciplining how that command can rationally be exercised.

That’s why replacing sketchy capitalists with non-sketchy ones doesn’t solve the problem. The virtuous billionaire remains a capitalist.

There is no cabal or secret committee of capitalists that decides exactly what society will become.

Something even more unsettling is happening. Thousands of apparently separate and rational decisions reproduce a patterned form of command without anybody having to design the whole. And it is perceived as entirely natural. But profitability is not even an individual capitalist preference. It is a social discipline that selects, constrains and trains what capitalists themselves become capable of doing.21

The supposedly private investment decision is also never entirely private. Inside the spreadsheet, the state is already present: property rights, corporate law, patents, labour law, taxation, subsidies, monetary policy, public education and research, roads, ports and energy infrastructure all constitute or alter the conditions under which the numbers are calculated.

The state invests directly, organising enormous social powers of its own. But the answer to the capitalist social order is not to replace private investment with state investment. Nicos Poulantzas, who I have cited before, describes the capitalist state as “a relationship of forces, or more precisely the material condensation of such a relationship among classes and class fractions” that can be expressed in different forms.22 The State is a form struggled over by capitalist command.

The politics we need to confront is thus much larger than how governments regulate private investment or redistribute its proceeds. It is how people gain a collective command over the conditions in which our capacities become social powers. Across many different fronts, capitalists command us and our possibilities, including in state-organised powers and in spreadsheets. They confront producers as alien powers, separated from them, when we should, together, be deciding how they are used.

Hey, Peter! Upstream, mate. Look how many drowning people we already walked past.

Storm n’ Smash the Spreadsheet

Why do we treat two bundles of money—and two forms of power—so differently? Money only becomes politics when the government spends it. If a corporation spends it—and they do, in much larger quantities—we call it business as usual.

Why?

Both decisions over money in a similar way bring people, resources, knowledge and infrastructure together, into relation. Both decisions create the conditions in which society becomes capable of doing things. Both decisions can prevent other alternatives. Both decisions can harm us through omission, just as much as action.

Investment is already political. But in capitalism, we have depoliticised who gets to make most of its most consequential decisions, and we’re asked to believe capitalism with democracy is the best flawed system.

That’s why I think we should storm the spreadsheet.

Storming the spreadsheet means refusing the political limitations we give—through our own disciplined common sense—to investment decisions. Workers, communities, pension holders, carers, users and public institutions should acquire effective powers to initiate, redirect and veto decisions that organise their lives. If the decisions are consequential, we should know, and we should debate, democratise in our own assemblies, and create new forms for decisions together.

Who gets to invest? Who gets to say no? Who decides that a productivity gain becomes shorter working hours rather than another round of expansion?

But storming is not enough.

History shows us that workers can learn to administer capital too, and end up depoliticising the most contestable decisions. Australia’s Accord years offer a warning. Under the leadership of Bob Hawke, the Prime Minister of the Country and the former leader of the ACTU, organised labour acquired a greater place within national economic management while unions were increasingly drawn into arguments organised around wage restraint, productivity, competitiveness and investment.23 Participation in institutions can expand, but the imperatives that govern the institutions—and condition our capacities and future possibilities—remain intact. Workers can acquire greater powers within the wage relation but not overcome it.24

Curiously, these were the years in which Singer became disillusioned with Labor and eventually became a member and candidate for the Victorian Greens. 1980 Singer had become disenchanted with Hawke’s Labor. The Accord had given organised labour an extraordinary place at the table. But that table was still organised around investment, profitability, productivity, competitiveness—all the calculations that could be seen then to maintain the surplus, wasted lives and wasted environments. Singer's own political response to Labor's limitations is telling: rather than simply seeking better outcomes within the existing organisation, he participated in building another political form.25

We can become collectively very good at administering our own alienation.

But eventually we encounter a question no spreadsheet can answer for us:

What do we want our powers to be for?

Our free development cannot be organised around better spreadsheets. Putting carbon, ecological destruction, and animal suffering back into the spreadsheet won’t solve the problem. Neither will putting carer’s time, free time, exploitation, or even community needs back into the spreadsheet—we need to push further. We can measure better, calculate consequences better, but the problem isn’t only what the spreadsheet counts: it is the relations we calculate in, the criteria the decision must satisfy. It is who decides and how the decision takes place.

That’s why we should not just storm, but also smash the spreadsheet.

Not to abandon calculation, or to stop measuring consequences. To smash the spreadsheet means: break the social relations that make profitability and accumulation compulsory criteria that must decide about our collective possibilities.

Storming changes who gets to decide. Smashing changes what deciding is for.

Taking command of our social powers is not enough if the relations in which we command them remain unchanged.

The Long Walk Upstream

In the struggle against the social relations of capital, there can never be just one single institutional answer. Taking command of our collective powers will involve them all: worker control, cooperatives, public banks, pension governance, social wealth funds, participatory budgeting, commons and forms we haven't built. But no practice or form exhausts the challenge.

Collective command, by itself, is not enough. Marx's communism does not replace the domination of individuals by capital with their domination by an abstraction called “the collective”. His formulation in the Communist Manifesto is an association in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”.26 Thus, taking back our social powers cannot mean subordinating individual development to collective power. It must be measured by how our powers together become conditions for the development of each other life.

Singer has travelled from animal liberation through Marx, Green politics and effective altruism without entirely losing sight of alienation. What has narrowed is the political horizon through which he confronts it. Downstream, we are left deciding how to alleviate consequences after many of the decisions organising our capacities have already been made.

Upstream, we can become more capable of living rather than subordinating our lives to an endless expansion of our capacity to produce. We can produce fewer things and still become capable of more. But becoming capable of more must itself be freed from the idea of becoming more conventionally able or economically productive. It can mean producing social relations in which more kinds of people, and more forms of life, can develop and exercise the capacities they already have. Each to all.

Capitalism has developed astonishing social powers that are transforming our world even now: Marx knew it, but he also saw the impaired lives in alienation, waste, inequality, and contradictions. Singer, for his part, still holds on to some faint vision of alienation he read in Marx. What he no longer seems able to see is how the relations producing that alienation might be transformed, if only we can stop sitting downstream.

Peter, at last. We’re upstream together. Can you hear me?

“the educator must … be educated.”
— Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, III (1845

In 2015, I was lucky enough to be paid to conduct a study of student life for a glorious month of travel.

It was a once-in-a-lifetime type of experience. But when I think back to that time, I remember most of all my extreme exhaustion. I was then restlessly poking the dead carcass of an overdue PhD while working at the University of Melbourne for a student union that had endured decades of assaults on student unionism in Australia and was now caught up in toxic, internal disarray.

I should have quit then and there, but I really believed in the ideals of student unionism. I was a union diehard who wanted to save an idea when the reality was not only falling short, but pulling me apart. I believed in students, among whom I was one. I believed in their fiercely won independence. But I was becoming disenchanted by the organisational challenges and failures, by the things we didn’t seem able to learn together and the possibilities that hardened around us as the union dream appeared to fade into dust.

At that time it was due to the intervention of a thoughtful general manager, who seemed to bring the strategic thinking out of everyone, that the union paid me to travel around Britain looking at student unions. It would be a study trip. I would write and present a report when I returned about what our union could learn from the unions other students had built. The task chosen for me matched my talents perfectly, and gave me a chance to recharge and recover after years of conflict and challenge in saving our union from collapse.

I remember planning out my travel, while suffering from a fog of exhaustion, and arranging meetings even as every part of me felt like it was fading away. Across Britain, I travelled to seven selected universities, meeting student representatives and staff. I created a series of questions, researching their histories, governance, funding and programs. But I also made the effort to sample life as a student among them, to try their services, attend their programs, and learn more about what made them tick. I kept meticulous notes. Other students’ funds had collectively paid for flights and leave. So I took my mission seriously: study what other students were doing and bring that knowledge home.

Among all the places I visited, the one that left the most unforgettable impression on me was SOAS Student Union at the University of London. Before I arrived there, I walked through the Bloomsbury area of the University, including University College London (UCL), and the South Cloisters of UCL’s Wilkins Building, where I found Jeremy Bentham’s famous, disturbing Auto-Icon, his skeleton in a glass cabinet with a wax head and clothed in the gentleman’s fashion of the time. I’d always wanted to see it. Studying it up close made me think of utilitarianism and social forms, and the odd estrangement of an inert body as an identity becoming an institution unto itself.

After that curious encounter, I found SOAS in a more lively part of the wider University of London complex. It was once called the School of Oriental and African Studies, a name now tainted with the colonialism that makes for many the word “research” a “dirty” word.1 SOAS was already famous for scholarship on Asia, Africa and the Middle East. The student union among it seemed to me the hub, the driver, the colour and the life of the University as a whole. Its clubs were involved in politics, culture and art in countless ways. The activity of the place was palpable immediately, as you feel the way activity was strewn everywhere in posters, flyers, and people from all walks of life, ages, ethnicities, and classes. Then you could overhear it in conversations, random meetings, and groups of students assembling in ways and forms that had to be seen to be believed.

The student union building when I found it seemed to me to descend into the bowels of the very earth, layering different levels of student life, until it reached a bar that was never really the feature of the building. Colour poured over all of the place, art and collages covered the walls, and I watched as more were being created. There was open-mic poetry, music, art-making, and discussions that drew me into the best parts of the best ideas. Political organisations advertised campaigns and meetings. Students from all over the world sat around talking, living together, and splinter groups seemed constantly to assemble themselves around tables and on the ground, on beanbags or rugs with cultural items they brought for themselves. Study and studying spilled into everything else that these students did or were able to do: it was all the happenings, the meetings, friendships, arguments, organisations, reading groups, campaigns, and encounters with each other. The empowerment and independence I witnessed at every turn overwhelmed me.

It was impossible not to be gripped by it. I left with a vision of a way of life lived at the edge of possibilities, and that I had glimpsed only at times in my own graduate student life. After visiting six other student unions, SOAS was the last one I encountered and it felt qualitatively different. There was an intensity about its density and fierce independence. Students weren’t just passing through a building between classes; they were living another way of life within the limits of the University form, that threatened to spill out. Over what must have been generations, they had constructed a space to live intellectually and politically at the limits of possibility—spaces they could take over to develop capacities together they otherwise could not independently possess.

Study life was everywhere, and it was for me utterly energising. I left Britain with a new spirit, and later that year I reported back to my student union. I presented two models of excellent union practice. Leeds University Union was an accomplished service union with across the decades then had one of the highest student satisfaction ratings in the country. I could explain how it worked, and serve it up as a package of programs. SOAS was much harder. I could describe its clubs and spaces, but the source of its vibrancy remained mysterious to me, embedded in student clubs and activities that seemed more tenuous. Something in its connection to intellectual life had escaped my report.

Things did begin to change in our union after that study trip. I noticed the student representatives lifting their heads, eyes bright, full of new ideas and visions. But as we became more intelligible, and listed our performance proudly to our students and university, we also became more conquerable by the technocrats and the corporate neoliberals who sought to invade and conquer, while an imperishable student spirit resisted their every step. I still look back wistfully at SOAS and wonder what I missed.

There was something else I didn’t know when I discovered SOAS. More than fifty years earlier, a twenty-one-year-old Guyanese historian named Walter Rodney studied there. Back during my union travel, I barely knew Walter Rodney. I only began to realise who he was after 2022, when his collection of essays, Decolonial Marxism: Essays from the Pan-African Revolution, was published by Verso more than twenty years after his death in 1980. I was blown away by Rodney’s writings, the patient and careful way he took Marx’s method and applied it to Africa and the Pan-African Revolution, analysing race, capital, place and histories in African societies such as Guyana and Guinea.

Rodney was born in Georgetown, British Guiana, in 1942, into a politically active working-class family. He topped his class at Queen’s College, won an Open Scholarship to the University College of the West Indies in Jamaica and graduated with first-class honours in history in 1963. Then he came to London.2 At SOAS, Rodney studied African history, but he made full use of everything London offered him. On Friday nights he joined a small group of young Caribbean students and intellectuals at the home of the Marxist historians and activists C. L. R. and Selma James. The group read Marx, shared papers and argued for hours about colonialism, workers’ struggles and revolution. Rodney worked through colonial records in European archives. He practised public speaking at Hyde Park. And in 1965, he married Patricia Henry, who was studying nursing and became a health advocate and professional.3

At twenty-four, Rodney completed his doctorate. He had spent these years in archives, even learning languages to study them, and reading widely into the history of Africa. His doctorate, was published by Oxford University Press as A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545–1800. He reported during this time being frustrated by the form of the thesis and professional demands of academic life. But he was also becoming more familiar with the Pan-African liberation movements that attracted him to writing a more expansive history of Africa. He left London for the University College in Dar es Salaam, in newly independent Tanzania. There he entered another vibrant intellectual world, among scholars, socialists and African liberation movements. He taught university students, mentored school students and taught at an adult education centre. Patricia, his wife, worked as a public-health nurse as they raised children. Their home became a meeting place where people gathered over food and music from around the world, and they discussed and shared theories, histories, and information on political transformations underway across Africa.4

A conventional biography might narrate this as an individual progression, a form of story in which Rodney studies and becomes a professional historian. But we have to look further than that form. Rodney was built up over time by a social world: family, school, scholarship, university, teachers, libraries, students, archives, Patricia, C. L. R. James, Selma James, Caribbean students, arguments, political organisations, African historians, and liberation movements. Rodney’s capacities were his own, even his study was his own. But it was also socially made, and lived socially.

In 1968 Rodney returned to Jamaica to teach African history at UWI Mona. He carried with him all the markers of a rising academic intellectual. But he also felt frustrated, in Jamaica more than anywhere noticing the problem of the distance between university life and the poor communities surrounding it, which always struck him as a contradiction he could not support.5

Soon, Rodney was taking steps to leave the university. Not to abandon it: he continued teaching and researching. But he travelled into poor Black communities around Kingston to talk with Rastafarians, workers, young activists and people Jamaican society called sufferers. He went wherever people would gather: schoolrooms, sports clubs, churches, yards and the places where the sufferers and poor Jamaicans lived known as “gullies”. Jamaicans knew him as the “African Doctor.” Soon he was also “Brother Wally.” Rodney called what happened there a “grounding”. Grounding was “a-sitting down together to reason.” He would go wherever Black people were prepared “to sit down to talk and listen.”6

The distinction between teacher and student was already beginning to break down. “You can learn from them what Black Power really means,” Rodney explained. “You do not have to teach them anything.”7 The African Doctor brought all the accumulated years of study and academic powers with him: archives, African history, Marxism, political economy, years of reading and historical research. But by grounding himself, he made sure that none of these powers were wielded against the people he met. Rodney listened, and by listening:

“I was also gaining.”8

He listened to Rastafarians discussing Africa and the Word, to their music and drumming, and to ways of understanding Jamaican life that he had not encountered sheltered in the university.

“Because I learnt,” he later said. “I got knowledge from them, real knowledge.”

They taught him humility too:

“they are teaching you.”⁷

These encounters transformed Rodney—others reported he carried himself and spoke differently after these groundings. A new way of study was loosening him from the relations through which he had learned to inhabit the world as student and then professional historian. The “African Doctor”, as the Jamaicans in the gullies called him, soon became known as “Brother Wally”.

Rodney’s groundings interest me not because they involve the spreading of radical ideas, but because they are revolutionary practice. So much about Rodney’s institutional life had become subordinated to purposes other than study. Grounding loosened Rodney from some of the institutional and cultural forms that he felt entrapped him. The milieu he opened himself to with the burgeoning Black Power Movement helped energise his engagement with the book he later became more widely renowned for, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972). By grounding, Rodney was disturbing the social relations that organised him into the form of an intellectual authority. He was shaking up the social relations of who teaches whom, whose experience produces knowledge, where study belongs, and what the university is for.

The educator was being educated, and the state noticed. In October 1968 Rodney left Jamaica to travel to Montreal for the Congress of Black Writers, and was barred entry on return. Hugh Shearer’s government personally intervened. The act caused a dramatic controversy. The students at UWI Mona walked out and marched towards Kingston in protest, and on the road the police confronted them. The confrontation became violent and widened into unrest among Jamaicans suffering poverty and inequality. The events became known as the Rodney Riots, or Rodney Rebellion.9

There is something momentous about this happening that occurred after Rodney’s groundings. We cannot say the grounding alone created the Rebellion. But it was 1968, and across the world rebellions among students were triggering mass protests. Paris, Mexico City, Prague, New York, West Germany, Italy, Japan, Australia and elsewhere saw eruptions of student and student-worker power. None of them were the same as the Rodney Rebellion, but they did involve students. Universities had gathered young people, books, teachers, time, organisations and common spaces together, but the dynamic seemed to be that the relations students made within them developed powers exceeding the purposes that the institutions anticipated.10

After the Rodney Rebellion, Rodney’s groundings kept moving, travelling with people. News of his exclusion travelled to London, where people from the political and intellectual networks around him during his stay in London organised in his defence. Jessica and Eric Huntley helped turn material from his Jamaican talks into The Groundings with My Brothers, published in London in 1969. The groundings took on new forms. But the Rodney Rebellion was part of an emerging Caribbean consciousness movement, and in 1970, the Black Power Revolution emerged in Trinidad and Tobago.

Rodney went on studying, writing and organising, but this time at home against an authoritarian Government in a country that had been carved up and underdeveloped by a violent and extractive legacy of Dutch, British and Portuguese colonialism. And in 1980, he was assassinated by a car bomb in Guyana at age thirty-eight.11 The Guyanese state has since formally recognised Rodney's death as an assassination, following a Commission of Inquiry that found evidence of state involvement.

Decades after Rodney’s life was taken, people are still studying with Walter Rodney, even if they don’t know about Brother Wally. Groundings have become something other people can study and practise. His books have reappeared, and the arguments he formed have taken on new struggles. We need to investigate whether we’re fully grounded ourselves in Rodney and the struggles that he fought and for which he was murdered.

There is much more to Rodney’s story, including his return to Guyana, let alone to SOAS and student life. We will return to that and more later in this new series. For now, I want to hold onto the practice Rodney called grounding: people struggling with the class forms of Capitalism bringing what they know into relation with what other people know, and discovering what they might understand, do and transform together.

That seems to me a good place to begin thinking about study.

Study is a social power. It develops what people are capable of knowing and doing, but also what they might become together. At its most powerful, study can exceed and struggle against the forms built to organise and contain it. It can reorganise relations, create new capacities, and reorganise our ways of acting and becoming together.

Somewhere there, where study begins again, is Study Communism.

What is Study Communism?

Gramsci observed that everyone is an intellectual, although not everyone has the social function of an intellectual. We might begin to describe Study Communism with a similar observation: everyone studies, but not everyone has the social function of a student.

Put aside the social function of the student, and the actions of study should be familiar. We watch, listen, remember and compare. We ask questions, copy, practise, measure, explain, follow instructions, experiment, imagine, make mistakes and try again. A mechanic listens differently to an engine after years of work. Children work out the rules of a game. Workers compare what a manager has told them with what actually happens on the job. Friends study one another. Parents and children do it constantly. Scientists study. And, as we know, Communists study.

Everyone studies in one form or another. Study is an ordinary feature of everyday life before it becomes a role in a hierarchy or institution. It is not something that universities invented. Humans have been studying with one another and the world—and other lives have been studying us—long before anyone was enrolled in the social function of student. Universities are historically particular forms for organising, concentrating and legitimising some kinds of study.

When I found myself at SOAS, I now realise that I was observing how students were using the institutional form of the university, while their study was exceeding it, in ways I could not fully articulate or understand. I didn’t yet understand the Marxist argument about how producers have their powers separated from them.

The young Walter Benjamin, who would later turn to Marxism, wrote political philosophy about what the student might be as a social role a year before SOAS was founded. I remember reading in my early graduate years his The Life of Students (1915). It was a strange little work of youthful idealism in his collected writings that shared something of the dream that attracted me to student unionism. I scrawled in fineliner all over that over a decades ago, recognised the student unionist in Benjamin, but found no particular use for it.

Benjamin was writing while involved in the radical student movement, having been elected as the President of the Freie Studentenschaft, the Berlin Free Student Society in 1914. He criticised universities because they were no longer organised around “the productivity of the students” (Produktivität der Studenten). Students had become too receptive, preparing themselves for office and profession, and all their labour was being appropriated by professors, leaving little time for free study. Against this, Benjamin remembered an ideal of students as “teachers and learners at the same time,” and elsewhere imagined the student body as a “community of learning” and in its creative function as “the great transformer” (der große Transformator).12

The coupling of transformer with productivity is an interesting conceptualisation. Benjamin was likely not writing about Marx’s Produktivkräfte, or productive forces, because he was not yet the Marxist he would become. A decade later, his encounter with Asja Lācis, Bolshevik theatre director, and his growing interest in Lukács, would help turn him towards Marxism.13 I wonder if he ever entirely left the young student behind, and he remained in lifeline study. Before Marx, Benjamin was already asking what people might become when intellectual life was organised around their own activity rather than preparation for an allotted place in society.

Reading Benjamin through Marx now, we can push productivity a little further. Students don’t simply produce knowledge. In studying, arguing, questioning, teaching and learning from one another, they develop capacities that can become social powers: powers to understand, remember, organise and transform. Benjamin’s productive student begins to look less like the recipient of education and more like one of its productive forces. Students weren't simply consuming intellectual products made by professional intellectuals. They were producing an intellectual life with one another. But those productive powers could also be separated from them, divided into professional roles and institutional forms, and eventually return as powers over the students themselves.

I think back to what overwhelmed and impressed me so much about SOAS. It was the way that students were together as a great transformer in the University, people producing social powers together. Academics seemed a distant shadow in this community and they only become powerful because they, in Benjamin’s words again, “appropriate a milieu entirely alien to themselves and make it their workplace.”14 The professional academic was not the norm in this environment. I went looking for academics stars, but it was the office that had become the alien in independent student life.

That takes me back to the student life that I couldn’t explain at SOAS.

Fred Moten, the African American cultural theorist, helps us identify the relational reality of study: “study is what you do with other people.” For Moten and Stefano Harney, in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013), study is already in the undercommons: it is already happening as people walk and talk, make music, work, rehearse, argue and sit around together. A grounding in intellectual life doesn’t begin when an institution recognises it.15

Student names a particular social function. But study is a much wider social activity. That activity can create social powers that are subordinated to the commodity forms that organise and value it, granting offices and professional roles to some of those who emerge from it.

That’s study life for you.

Study as a Social Power

Study is often experienced individually. I read a book. I practise a skill. I think about a problem. But none of these capacities came entirely from me, and something else happens when we put them into relation.

Study develops when capacities meet together. It’s when someone knows something I don’t, when we interact with people who remember something I have forgotten, when someone has done the thinking and studying for thirty years, when someone has read the book I haven’t, someone else speaks another language I have not learned, and someone has experienced something I have not.

Put these capacities into relation and we can become capable of things none of us could do alone.

This is when study becomes a social power.

They are powers that are essential to our lives: they are the powers to remember, investigate, interpret, explain, question, imagine, preserve knowledge, teach one another, plan and organise. We build forms in which these powers can accumulate. Conversations become notes, speeches become books, books accumulate in libraries, memories enter archives, discoveries become disciplines, and study groups become organisations. These forms allow the powers produced in study to endure, accumulate and travel beyond the people who first made them.

But they also create something that can be captured. Under capitalism, the accumulated powers of study can be enclosed, commodified and sold back to the people whose social activity produced them. Today this is happening on an unprecedented scale, digitally, under our watch, as we ourselves produce it through scaled forms of cooperation. AI makes this movement unusually visible: we study through platforms that are themselves built from the accumulated products of human study. Forms and new social powers return to us as accumulated capacities we pay for as services that then move through our work and study again.

The powers of study can return as powers over those who produced them.

This series is an investigation that will continually return to this key problem, the problem of power, its observation, and its resistance: What happens to the powers people produce when they study?

Studying study

Mao Zedong gave a radically simple formulation in On Practice (1937) that reminds me of grounding and what I have called the ladder of abstraction: “Practice, knowledge, more practice, more knowledge”. A circular formulation suggests knowledge doesn’t achieve any completeness by correctly interpreting reality. It returns to the world through activity, where it is tested, changed and developed again.16

Study is not understood in this way as a retreat from practice. It is one of the necessary activities that practice must undergo as a process, so that it becomes capable of reflecting and transforming itself.

In my writings at Life Against Capital, I have been developing another way of following that movement and process that seems indispensable to Marxism:

RELATIONS → SOCIAL POWERS → FORMS → RELATIONS′ → SOCIAL POWERS′ → FORMS′

This is not a causal formula, but rather an analytical schema. It keeps in sight a way of asking where people’s powers come from and what happens to them. People enter relations with one another, and those relations develop capacities and powers. In society, we give those powers forms, or they are given forms by others, that allow them to endure or to be absorbed by other forms. Those forms then organise or reorganise the relations in which people subsequently live and study.

The story of Rodney’s groundings gave us one possible movement, involving a student, university, the professional historian, grounding, Brother Wally, social powers, book, new readers, groundings and new social powers.

But I won’t decide the dialectic of study in advance, and we’ll see where our series on the practices and powers of study takes us. History has a way of teaching us what it is.

Wherever we go, however, whatever we study, whenever it is study, we will ask:

Who studies with whom? What are they actually doing? What capacities enter the relation, and which are developed through it? What new powers become possible? What forms do those powers take? Who controls them? Who is excluded? And when those forms return to organise social life, what relations—and what kinds of people—do they produce?

Above all, we should ask: What happens to people’s powers?

In this series, I’ll begin with Marx: the Marx who wrote about education, but also the Marx who was a student and studied across his life. We’ll consider his method of study and how the concepts he developed and studied—such as cooperation, social power, productive forces, alienation and self-change—might themselves help us understand study.

From there the inquiry can move through different problems and faces. Rosa Luxemburg and the school of strikes. Walter Benjamin, the life of students and their productive forces. Gramsci and the intellectual capacities of ordinary life. Mao and the movement between practice and knowledge. Rodney and grounding. Freire and education as transformation. E. P. Thompson and working-class intellectual life. Harney and Moten, who take us to a study that exceeds institutions.

Texts will only form part of the evidence.

We’ll also find ourselves in Workers' libraries, political schools, literacy campaigns, in reading groups, in publications, in feminist consciousness-raising, in the struggle for anti-colonial education, in union education, in universities and institutes, in community archives, in study circles and in cadre schools. And we’ll find ourselves in the maintenance, reproduction, and everyday life of study and the often underappreciated role of all the labourers, including women, who make study possible. And all of this in different periods and times, including in revolution and transition.

Towards a Study Communism

I think this is an important study for Life Against Capital because it helps me understand a concrete way in which capital doesn’t merely dominate social life from outside. It organises powers people themselves produce through cooperation and returns many of those powers to us in forms we don’t control.

Communist politics therefore requires more than knowing what we oppose. We have to become capable of organising our powers differently.

And it requires study.

We cannot struggle against social relations we cannot perceive. We cannot learn from struggles we cannot remember. We cannot reorganise powers whose workings we don’t understand.

No individual could possibly understand a social world produced through the activity of billions of people.

Fortunately, no individual has to, because we can study together.

Study can’t be reduced to preparation for changing social relations. Study is already a social relation. Every act of study organises questions: who speaks and who listens, whose experience counts, who possesses knowledge, who teaches, who learns, who has time to study, and who has access to the social powers of others. Change those relations and study changes, and at the same time people studying can change too.

When Marx wrote, “the educator must … be educated”, he was objecting to a crude materialism that divided society between the enlightened people who could change things with their social powers, and the people who must be changed. Marx sought instead the “coincidence of changing circumstances and self-change”, which he understood as revolutionary practice.17 Paulo Freire also described us as “beings in the process of becoming—as unfinished, uncompleted beings.”18 He wrote those words in Pedagogy of the Oppressed during 1968, the extraordinary year we have already encountered.

Study is one of the ways that we become.

My provisional definition of Study Communism for the purposes of this series is that Study Communism is the struggle to make the powers we produce in learning together into common powers for changing the way we live freely together.

In the language I've been developing at Life Against Capital, it means building relations and forms that hold together our capacities to investigate, remember, interpret, question, imagine and teach one another. These should be freely developed as powers held increasingly in common rather than return to confront us as alien powers, separated from us in forms of capital.

It is important to realise that studying Marx alone does not make you communist. Study becomes communist not because of its subject matter, but when the powers it produces become conditions for people's free development

Back in 2015, wandering through SOAS, I couldn’t explain what I was seeing. I had been sent by one collective of students to investigate other collectives of students. Around me, students were reading, arguing, organising, making art, forming groups and teaching one another.

Being a student means, whether we recognise it or not, something more interesting than enrolment. It can name a relation in which we are permitted—sometimes even expected—to admit: I am not finished.

But, remember, you don’t need to be a student to study.

Everyone studies.

Study Communism asks what might happen if we learned to organise our ordinary human powers more and more in ways we share together as our own.

I was then a young working-class student from a public school. Somehow I had survived the lottery to end up as a graduate student at the University of Melbourne, still slightly astonished to be there. I had grown up in a childhood full of unfathomable challenges. After some difficulties in early adulthood, I was now relishing life: reading, teaching, publishing student journals, going to conferences and spending long evenings with a circle of friends who breathed literature and the possibilities of culture.

Through this circle I met my then girlfriend. She was a ravishing, brilliant and anxious fellow literature graduate student and arts curator with an English accent. She had lived in England for most of her life. Her family were capitalists, the sort who were genuinely concerned about my socialist ideals. Her mother came from old industrial money in Melbourne and once, when told by my girlfriend that I had applied to Yale, remarked that she had never pictured me as an ivory-tower type. She was right. After a series of conversations over organic-store meals for which I had no easy answers, my girlfriend convinced me to become vegetarian and, a month later, vegan. We were beginning to change our way of life together.

Not long after this, we drove down to Phillip Island to spend a weekend with our poetry friends at a secluded family holiday home. My girlfriend was too nervous to learn to drive, so I drove us there. That evening our group had organised a “Black Dinner,” the sort of event that seemed perfectly natural to young literature obsessives and ridiculous to everyone else. We dressed in black and ate from black plates with black cutlery. There was squid-ink pasta and the black rice that we brought, poems about blackness and death read between courses, and an original funeral march performed on clarinet by a graduate music student.

It all felt like something out of the feverish Symbolist imagination of Huysmans or the aesthetic satire of Oscar Wilde. We played with these literary forms because they brought us together, and we were toying with other ways of living without ever giving them solid form. Our host, a former vegetarian with a habit of needing to be the most ethical person in the room, presided over it all.

Now that I think about it, I should probably have expected what followed.

At some point, the Black Dinner became an argument about veganism. Everyone seemed to be arguing with my girlfriend and me. Veganism was a first-world luxury. It was a class privilege. It was no more ethical than anything else. We were all part of the same production system. Vegans were extreme and annoying. Why were we doing this anyway? Why wouldn’t I eat a cow if it had lived a good life? I remember the peculiar feeling of being cornered by friends, our literary circle united against us.

There was an irony in being the working-class kid in the room and finding myself the target of this accusation about privilege. I didn’t yet have the politics to make much out of it, or the cynicism to understand how changing my own life—and changing it together with my new girlfriend—might unsettle other people. Mostly, I felt exposed, but I could give my reasons up in response until my girlfriend began to cry. I knew how she felt. We had only just begun changing how we lived and suddenly had to defend it. Our transformation, and especially mine that shocked them, had to be tested. Everyone wanted to protect their own way of life.

Much later, after my girlfriend had gone to bed, I wanted to escape the discomfort of the house. Nobody else would come with me. Our battle-weary friends were too tipsy, worn down by the fight at dinner, the wine and the poetry. I stepped outside alone, with People Are Strange... playing in my head. I carried a loneliness about me and my op-shop jacket. The tension of the argument, still bearing down on me, I moved beyond the house to the fields I had seen when we first arrived. They were dark now beneath a strangely light sky and a visible moon. Drunk to the hilt on poetry and wine, I decided I didn’t need shoes. When you’re a stranger...

In the dark, I was walking barefoot through the sodden fields. The wet grass was cold under my feet, and I was beginning to lose enthusiasm and wonder whether I should turn back when, suddenly, I heard a bell somewhere in the darkness. A small black shape began moving towards me and I paused and peered. As it came closer, I saw a small calf, with a big bell hanging around its neck.

I remember how incredible this seemed to me at the time. I had sobered up and was elated by the encounter, so I stood still, holding out a hand. The calf came snuffling towards me, close enough that I could see our breaths meeting in the cold air. It was just about to nuzzle my hand when I heard calls from somewhere behind it: first one low moo, then many others, even lower. The calf stopped, and suddenly its body seemed to shudder backwards, the the bell tinkling rapidly as it turned and disappeared into the shadows.

I watched the calf disappear and gradually became aware that the shadows it was moving into were also moving. I rubbed my eyes and waited for them to adjust. Then, gradually, one dark body after another separated itself, a transformation of the darkness that kept going for some time, until I realised there were cows all around me.

They were enormous up close. I had wandered into the middle of a herd without knowing it. Shifting around me, they formed a loose circle. I felt a thud of fear in my belly. A moment before I had been delighted by a calf, and now I thought that I could be charged. I heard their bodies moving through the wet grass and their calls coming from around the circle. Their breath rose visibly into the cold air. I wanted to get out of there, but I was afraid that running might be the worst thing I could do.

So I stood very still, listening. Their moos sounded like warnings to me. I had surprised them in their field. I realised then that I was an intruder.

In an act of curiosity and simple desperation, I began to moo back. At first I simply imitated them. When a cow called from somewhere in the circle, I answered, varying the length and pitch of my sounds and listening for what came back. They called again. I answered again. I had no idea whether we were communicating or whether I was just making cow noises, but doing something felt better than doing nothing, so I held out my hand and tried to make myself seem safe to them.

For a while, nothing happened. The calling continued around me, and I kept answering. Five minutes is a very long time when you are standing still in the middle of a herd of cows in the dark. I began reciting poetry in my head to keep myself calm.

Then, slowly, one of the cows moved towards me. She came out of the circle like a new form. I remember her as large and somehow maternal: an old, calm, steady presence, although I have no way of knowing what she actually was. I stood where I was and let her approach.

She reached me and began to lick my hand. Her tongue was enormous, thick and rough, sliding deliberately over my skin. I remember the strangeness of standing there and experiencing this one cow, who had frightened me only moments before, investigate me. I touched my tender interlocutor gently around her thick neck, feeling the movement beneath my hand as her breath clouded the air between us. Then slowly, subtly, something seemed to change in the herd. The calling quietened, bodies shifted, and the circle loosened.

After a while, there was a way out.

Once I was clear of the herd, I ran. Barefoot, I ran towards the lights of the house, feeling the cold, sodden ground under my feet. I remember looking back, half-expecting the dark shapes to follow me, but they stayed where they were. By the time I reached the house I was breathless, cold and relieved.

Back at the house, I found I couldn’t tell my friends about the encounter. Words seemed inadequate to an experience I could not fully speak. After spending the evening debating whether we should eat animals, I had wandered into a field and met the animals we had been arguing about.

If I shared the story, I imagined I would seem even more like the annoying vegan I had become. More than that, I didn’t trust my friends—or perhaps anyone—to hold what had happened and give gravity to my intuition that it was important to think about. That weekend, in a bout of inspiration, I read about an experience called agape and wrote an introduction to our poetry anthology on enthusiasm, but said nothing about what had happened in the field. I kept the circle of cows to myself and wrote about them in my notebook instead.

I have remembered them ever since.

⁂

Whenever I later wanted to eat meat or drink milk again, I returned in my head to that group of cows on Phillip Island. I dwelled on the contradictions of that night. At dinner we had argued about cows without a cow anywhere near us. Then I walked into a field to encounter a herd of cows living their lives without waiting for our debates.

There was a social world underway in that field before I stumbled into it. I don’t mean anything mystical. The cows could sense, move, call, investigate, respond to one another and act together. I had just seen these powers at work. However differently the cows and I experienced those minutes—and however little I understood what was passing between them—what they did together changed what became possible for me. I could leave.

At dinner we encountered the cow entirely through our relations to each other: as something humans might eat or refuse to eat, exploit or protect. In the field I encountered a life that exceeded it. The cow had a social world of her own.

Twenty years later, I have come to understand the encounter differently. Capitalism has a specific way of encountering living things through the powers it can put to use. The cow appears as milk and meat, the tree as timber, land as yield or real estate. The rest of their lives can disappear from view.

Human beings undergo their own reduction when they enter capitalist production. The human worker appears as what Marx called labour-power: the capacity to work, which can be bought and put to use by capital. The abstraction has its grip because the capacity is real. A worker really can work. Just as a cow really can produce milk. A tree really can become timber. Land really can produce a crop. The violence is not in inventing these capacities, but in organising a whole life around the part of the powers of life that can be put to use.

Capitalism, I sometimes wonder, is a machine that makes synecdoches, parts of a whole. My literary head loves the phrase. But the process really is a strange assembly of consciousness, social relations, and forms of material reality.

In everyday life, we stop thinking What can this being do or become? and the part begins to take over the whole as we start thinking and questioning others: What can this being do or become for us? Under Capitalism, this last question narrows down even further in a systematic way: What can be made productive? It’s so easy to think like the system.

This is where Marx’s worker and the cow begin to meet. Not because the cow is a worker, or because being milked and being compelled to sell your labour-power are equivalent forms of exploitation.1 They aren’t. But both can be encountered through a part of themselves that production requires, while their lives exceed the part.

What I had stumbled into that night, I later learned, was a small hobby farm. Those cows were owned and enclosed, but their lives were not fully exhausted by what could be extracted from them.

I encountered a different cow a few years later.

This time I went looking. I researched industrial animal agriculture with increasing obsession, visited slaughterhouses, spoke with workers, read investigations and watched hours of footage. The cow was joined by pigs, sheep and chickens in numbers I couldn’t comprehend: over 80 billion animals every year. I won’t catalogue all the horrors here.

Once I saw those horrors, I wanted it to end with a ferocity that began to organise my life. I became extraordinarily capable of seeing what was being done to animals. As my vision sharpened, something else also narrowed. I knew immensely more about what happened to cows than what cows did. This was the curious thing about how I had trained myself to see the world. Animal began to appear to me almost entirely as suffering, confinement, exploitation and death.

Their victimhood was not false. The suffering was real. Learning to see what our society works hard to hide was a power that I had developed with other animal activists. But it was a partial vision. I had become so capable of seeing that one dimension of an animal’s life, but other dimensions fell away.

I began to see only a victim, and I trafficked her image.

For a good cause, I told myself.

⁂

Twenty years went by until I encountered the same cow in a different way again.

She was waiting for me in a passage in Marx’s Capital. I found her in my old paperback filled with my fineliner notes, the copy I had been reading around the time of the Black Dinner. I had underlined the analogy and apparently noted down its cleverness. But like the encounter with the cows themselves, I had not yet understood what I had found.

Marx describes what manufacture does to the worker. Imagine a craftsperson who comes from a single-person workshop and builds entire objects to trade. If they are placed in a specialised division of labour, the activity of a single craftsperson is broken into parts and the worker is stationed on one of those parts. The worker is not being made less capable. In fact, they do more and become an extraordinarily capable fragment in a process of production that churns out vastly more objects than a single craftsperson. But something is also lost in this process. Manufacture cultivates specialised dexterity, Marx writes, “at the expense of a world of productive capabilities and instincts.”2

It is in this passage in Capital that Marx, startlingly, points to an animal to explain what has happened: “just as in the States of La Plata they butcher a whole beast for the sake of his hide or his tallow.”3

There they were again, the worker and the cow.

When I first underlined those lines, I had appreciated the analogy. But now I am pausing over the the concrete violence of the image. It’s a whole being sacrificed for a part. Unlike the “beast”, the worker is not literally butchered. Instead, it is their activity that is divided, and one capacity is selected, repeated and developed while other productive possibilities are pushed aside, into the background. The worker becomes what Marx calls a “detail labourer”4. They are stationed in the operations of manufacture. The process of losing other capacities is about losing a whole for a part in this analogy.

Those other productive powers wasted as it were in manufacture do not simply reappear inside the capitalist. The knowledge and control of the whole process are increasingly built into the organisation that confronts the worker: the division of labour, cooperation, management, machinery and technical knowledge that becomes a form. Individually, each worker commands less and less of the whole, and any capacities that do not get used on the production line are treated either as wasteful, or are value-adding in the process of the transfer of profit to capital. Together, the divided activities of workers produce a collective power that none of them controls alone, and that is claimed by the capitalist.

That is what Marx means here when he writes that what is lost by workers is “concentrated in the capital that employs them.”5 Capital grows powerful by organising social powers that workers collectively produce but cannot collectively command themselves.

Marx’s butchered beast looks like much more than a rhetorical inclusion. Capitalist production also does something similarly selective to animals. The dairy cow is organised around lactation, the broiler chicken around rapid growth, the laying hen around eggs. Through breeding, feeding, confinement, machinery and reproduction, particular capacities are developed to extraordinary degrees. A whole life is organised around the part and subordinated to the productive process.

That’s why the problem is not merely welfare or whether capitalism suppresses our powers. It also develops them. Worker and cow remain radically different lives under different forms of domination, but in each case capacities are selected and developed according to the requirements of production, while other possibilities for living and acting are narrowed and subordinated.

Capitalism becomes richer in powers, while the lives organised inside it become poorer in possibilities. I had lost sight of this process when my own politics was organised around suffering. I had become a kind of partial worker too, a proletarian of compassion. I had developed a real capacity: I could see animal suffering that I had once walked past. I had trained myself to investigate it, describe it, make it visible and persuade others to see it. But as this capacity became more specialised, and I entered professional forms of activism and the non-profit industrial complex, my political life increasingly organised itself around a wound.

A politics capable of seeing suffering was for me still indispensable. What I could adopt was the idea that ending suffering could exhaust liberation. While I had learned to see what was being done to the cow, I felt I needed to recover the question that the cows in the field had first put before me: what else might this life do and become?

For me this helps explain why I eventually found my way out of liberal animal advocacy and back towards communism. In parts of the vegan movement, such a move can look like a betrayal of animals: a retreat from the specificity of their suffering into some larger human politics. I wanted a politics expansive enough to contain that suffering without making suffering the horizon of liberation.6

We should not underestimate what the production process under capital can do our political powers. We can become extraordinarily capable of fighting one injury while allowing the injury to organise who we become, and narrow our capacities. Our struggles can reproduce their own detail workers. All our social powers for witnessing, organising, caring, resisting and fighting can be narrowed, attached to wounds, and we can lose the capacity to become more and build revolutionary change together.

Emancipation must mean more than developing the capacities that have been commanded from us. It is also much more than the capacities we have developed fighting for it. Liberation must also create forms and relations that develop and combine our capacities in directions we cannot know in advance.

We must open ourselves to the world.

All this explains why today it is the worker and the cow who have drawn me towards Life Against Capital. Capital has developed and combined extraordinary powers that no individual possesses alone. But those powers are organised in relations and their forms we do not collectively control.

Emancipation does not mean taking possession of the powers capitalism has already assembled. Communism cannot mean another authority deciding in advance what workers, animals or ecosystems should become. How do we change the relations that force one selected capacity to rule an entire life subordinated to accumulation?

I have begun thinking that one way of bringing us closer to answering this question is the commons of becoming. By that I mean bringing the powers we create under common and communal control while creating free space for lives to develop in directions that cannot be prescribed beforehand.

For workers, that means more than liberation as workers: having the time, resources and collective power to develop capacities beyond those demanded by a job. For animals, it means refusing to organise a whole life around milk, meat, eggs or any other use. Ecologically, it means encountering forests, rivers, soils and other living systems as more than inventories of productive capacities.

A commons of becoming, in this sense, is not a blueprint for what life should become. It is a way of fighting for the conditions that enable us, each and all, to cooperate together in finding out.

⁂

When I think about the commons of becoming now, I find myself back in that field twenty years ago.

I don’t want to romanticise what happened. Those cows were domesticated animals, behind fences, on somebody’s property. They were already caught in human relations of ownership and use. There is no Eden before industrial capitalism, no pure animal life waiting somewhere outside our social relations. But neither can the group of cows I met be reduced to those relations.

I encountered capacities and powers of life that I did not know how to use and, for once, did not try to. I stood vulnerable before lives I knew almost nothing about. A calf tinkled towards me. A herd organised itself around me. A cow came forward and investigated me. Something passed us and them that I did not understand.

I didn’t know what those cows were for, and my ignorance may have been useful.

What kind of politics could become capable of such ignorance? Not ignorance of suffering and of domination, which we have every reason to understand and fight, but ignorance of what a life must finally be. Capital is extraordinarily good at answering that question in advance. The worker will work. The cow will produce. The forest will yield. Even our struggles can become organised around the injuries we have learned to fight.

Communism, as I have come back to understand it, means bringing the powers we create under common control so that the free development of each can become the condition for the free development of all, refusing to let the capacities demanded by this world determine the limits of the next one. The worker is always more than their labour bought and sold. The cow is always more than her body bought and sold. What we can do is refuse to decide in advance what individual lives must become and transform the relations that make our shared possibilities impossible.

That night I walked into the field wanting to escape an argument about what we should do with animals. I came back with a different question, although it has taken me twenty years to find the words for it. What else might we become?

Our united emancipation begins by opening ourselves to a struggle for worlds where we can discover what else life might become.7

I first encountered Marxism for myself in a rogue reading group when I was a teenager in high school. Later, I found it fed to me through academic studies. Back then I thought that making it as a working-class kid in a rarefied environment meant that I knew the most of anyone about Marx.

I had read all the literature surrounding him and mused over New Left Review in my spare time. I had Hegel munched up, Kant spat out, Nietzsche on my right hand, and had amired one too many pat Foucauldian reconstructions of historical Kantianism aimed at Marx. As a literature student I felt I had become so intimate with him and that I could reconstruct all his author moves. I knew what Marx was doing, where Marx went wrong, and which later thinkers had done Marx better.

Or so I believed.

I had so much energy for this that I went around accusing my enemies, those Department Hobbit philosophers and their mentors, of idealism and covert bourgeois sympathies. I read Capital Volume I cover to cover, covering its margins in fineliner: commodity fetishism, dancing tables, vampires, dead labour, primitive accumulation.

Then I opened Volume II.

Page after page of tables, schemas and repetition. A bore and a chore. It defeated me. It all looked like dead forms. So I went back to Hegel and Bataille, whose Accursed Share had potlatch and orgies. Here was the Henry Milleresque state of rapture I craved, to such an excess that I remember literally vomiting while smoking a cigar and reading Bataille alone in a public park. Nausea was my thing, not Sartre’s. And when Socialist Alternative tried to hand me flyers with “Have you read Marx?” in big letters, I ignored them because, had I ever.

But I digress.

Eventually I stopped reading Marx altogether. Unionism absorbed my time. I drifted through social democracy and, worse, a liberalism that unhappily struck me, only to teach me how little it deserved my attention.

The odd thing is that, suddenly, after trying to be a socialist for so many years I found I could not stop being one. It emerged up inside me due to a deep change in how I experienced my social relations, and following the recent pandemic, reflecting on my experiences and the historical moment, I entered my forties more committed to communism than at any earlier point in my life.

There is that cliched old saying that if you aren’t a communist at twenty you have no heart, and if you aren’t a capitalist at forty you have no brain. It has been falsely attributed to Winston Churchill, and I’ve even seen it besmirching George Bernard Shaw’s good name. A bad idea seeks to gain authority by being attached to dead famous white men. And like all effective propaganda, it’s bad, false, and dangerous to know.

Because the reality is so different. There are so many wise elders of Marxism who have drawn on experience to discipline and deepen their thinking, and I am grateful for all of them, for their generosity, and sometimes even their crotchetiness. But if I’m ever going to be absorbed by a parallel phrase with heads and hearts, then I prefer the young Marx from his introduction to A Critique to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1844): “criticism is no passion of the head, it is the head of passion.”1

Perhaps that helps express what I mean by maturing as a Marxist: developing a head of passion. I’ve now become less interested in discovering the correct Marxism and more fascinated by the different things Marxism allows us to see—and they are many. Having absorbed Marxism across so many forums, in books, unions, organisations, conferences, arguments and different political systems, I now know that Marxism is not a doctrine: it is an open discipline of thought and practice.

Disciplines contain unresolved problems. Marxism gives us extraordinary ways of understanding the world, but it has so many problems left to solve. Some of its disagreements seem to exist because Marxism holds together things that are in tension.

Now that I am passionately reading and researching Marx and Marxism again, I am beginning to see those tensions that I previously missed. The younger me thought Marx had abandoned living relationships, and had expressed himself in the dead categories of old theoretical volumes. The older me has begun to understand Marx as increasingly circling a dialectical problem that never left him as he sought to understand the greatest Marxist challenge of all: how to at once diagnose and overthrow Capitalism, while developing the practices to create Communism in its place.

⁂

There is a question that has been circulating in my thinking for most of this year: How do our living relationships gain forms that come to rule over how we relate to each other?

I believe that Marxism is designed to explore all the complexities of this question. Marxism seems to experience two tendencies that warrant exploration. These tendencies are like constellations for our dialectics. For want of better names, I’ll call them Form Marxism and Relational Marxism. They aren’t schools; instead they describe an arrangement you could pick out in the horizon of Marxism: Where do you start looking?

Form Marxism begins with money, property, commodities, corporations, markets and the state—among other things. It asks critical questions about how these forms organise our lives, and it also asks us to consider what forms we need to change, and which ones we would need to build, for capitalism to end.

Relational Marxism begins with people in the total socal relation of capital: these are people who are working, cooperating, caring, ruling, resisting and organising together. It asks us to understand critically and even structurally what people are doing together, what they are becoming capable of doing, and what powers their relationships can create or that can be exploited.

The younger me could see both of these Marxisms in some shape or other, but what I couldn’t see was why Marx kept moving between them. Relations were alive to me, while forms seemed like deadends I could put away on the shelf. I hadn’t yet understood why Marx was making these movements from one to the other, so reading Capital left me with an analytical quagmire that slowed me down and made me think, but I was still not able to understand the way Marx was analysing the social totality of life under Capitalism.

The missing concept for me was social power.

Marx never settled social power as a key term in his vocabulary within a single, consolidated theory. But across his work he writes of powers, forces, capacities and productive powers, which are, in German, Macht, Kraft, Vermögen, Produktivkraft.2 The peculiar dynamic and dialectic of social power persists in Marx’s writing for nearly forty years, which is as long as it took me in my life to fully spot it. For this time, Marx kept returning to the problem of how human capacities become social powers and how those powers take on objective forms. The most curious thing that Marx analyses is how our relations under capitalism can confront producers with their own powers that reappear in the form of the powers of capital.

Marx appears to have first found this problem in the German philosopher and anthropologist Feuerbach, whose critique of religion appeared to first attract Marx to writing criticism. For Feuerbach, human beings take their own powers, project them into God, and then bow before their creation as a kind of alienated form, or as a fetish. This image of fetishism from the pages of anthropology seemed to haunt Marx, but the more he explored it, he saw the limits of holding onto an abstract human being as an original source of creative power. By 1845, in his famous Theses on Feuerbach, he argued that the human essence was not an abstraction contained in each individual but instead the individual was “the ensemble of the social relations.”3

So if our powers are not capacities that are inalienable in an eternal human essence, what powers do we generate in our relations with one another?4

Marx spent decades assembling his answer. He began to understand that no individual builds a railway. An individual never runs a hospital. They do not accumulate generations of scientific knowledge. Any individual innovation springs out of social powers. When workers cooperate, they become capable of doing things they otherwise could not do independently, and Marx became familiar with this in his studies of the productive forces of labourers under Capitalism. He called it the “social productive power of labour.”5

The power of indviduals in a productive process is a relational one, because it would not exist if it was completely independant. The inversion that Marx took from Feuerbach, moving from heaven to earth and deeper, emerged when the old mole continued to dig into radically material forms. In Capital Volume I, Marx analysed the dialectic of cooperation under capitalism. Because of the way it is organised by capital, Marx says this “social productive power of labour” appears instead as “the productive power of capital.”6

What we create together can confront us as the power of something else.

⁂

The younger me could not see what Marx was trying to say about living social powers. I remember the way I stopped reading Capital volume II, in the mistaken belief that the old grub mole was retreating from life into more and more dead forms I could safely put down.

But I was wrong.

The basic dialectic I am thinking of, the dialectic of Marxism, holds together the different types of Marxism I’ve named: Form Marxism and Relational Marxism. The difficulty of reading the dialectic that Marx uses to move between these types of forms and relations has resulted often in Marxisms that are necessarily incomplete, partial for one critique or the other—and this problem grows the more doctrinal they become.

Marx had his own moves here.

For him, relations produce social powers, and those powers can take on forms that structure our lives. The forms act and live on, shaping our lives and organising the relations that reproduce them.

RELATIONS → SOCIAL POWERS → FORMS
↑　　　　　　　　　　　　 ↓
← ← ← reshape relations ← ← ←

There is, behold, the dialectic.

In the Grundisse, that manuscript of rough drafts, Marx worked out this movement of the dialectic through social powers. As he puts it wonderfully: “The individual carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket.” Money is a thing, but it is as we know a social construct: its power comes from social relations. Elsewhere in the same discussion, the “social connection between persons” becomes “a social relation between things.”7

Even when we carry them in our pockets, our own powers return as powers over us, tying us to roles mediated by things. In Capitalism, what this does to us can have a variety of contradictory and harmful effects.

The social productive forces of our society, for example, ensures that life-saving treatments are available, but an insurer is capable of telling us no, condemning us to poor health or even death. We develop enormous productive capacities as individual workers, but encounter them in corporations compelled to accumulate and lay off anyone who doesn’t use these powers in ways that enrich the stakeholders at exactly the right time. We collectively produce the products and reproduce markets and money, and then organise our lives around what the market demands.

Here Marx’s reading of Feuerbach’s alienated powers is brought back down into the earth of Capitalism.

But, the curious thing is that none of this means that forms are somehow the enemy, that we could smash these forms and somehow an unalienated human would spring forth. This was Marx’s critique of Feuerbach, whose critique of.the fetish seemed to suggest that if humans learned to smash the icons they could learn how to worship their own creative powers.

In fact, Marx distinguished the necessary objectification of social powers from their alienation. Knowledge needs preservation. We also know that railways need building, and cooperation needs organisation. Objective forms don’t create the same subordination as when these accumulated powers confront living people as “alien and dominant” powers.8

⁂

Life needs forms. Organisers and unionists understand this. When workers are gathered together, they talk, grow their trust and learn how to develop a collective power together that they wouldn’t otherwise have without each other. But if they are going to live together as a union that they can leave to the group, they need the form or formal aspect of meetings, minutes, rules, membership, officers, money and so on.

One day soon somebody then says: the union won’t let us do that.

There is the dialectic appearing again, because without forms, our powers can disappear every time everybody goes home. Forms have that eerie tendency of reshaping the relationships that produced them.

The dialectic therefore gives Marxism two problems, problems that cannot be reduced or resolved into one another. If we want to apply our Marxism, we have to transform the forms that we make but that confront us with our own powers. Then we must develop relations and capacities. It is by this process that we can become capable of organising life differently. But there is a tension here, and it is never resolved in Marxism, because it is a living problem.

What this looks like is the movement within Marxism.

Form Marxism without Relational Marxism can often blunt socialism by turning it into an architectural problem: seize power, change ownership, build the institutions. New relations will follow, won’t they? We’ve seen this play out in real time in history.

Relational Marxism without Form Marxism lurches into the opposite: develop cooperation, autonomy, collective capacity. Now, we can sit back and expect capitalist forms somehow to go away—shoo. Again, we’ve seen this play out in real time in history.

Capital cannot be related away, because you cannot socialise your way out of Capitalism, as I wrote elsewhere. By the same token, Communism cannot be signed into existence.

This is the dialectic within Marxism. It’s the productive quagmire we can find ourselves stuck in if we’re not careful. It’s also a dialectic that only becomes more important in our times when technologies of social power seem to reign triumphant.

Let’s consider something that people today can carry around in their pockets. Not mobile phones, but fame. Relational Marxism helps us see that fame is not something a famous person merely possesses. Fame is a socially produced power, one that is built by millions of acts of attention, recognition, and communication.

Fame is a social power, but we can say that fame is at once a form and a social relation. Fame condenses into a form and become a power that is reproduced. If I have millions of likes, I’m going to compel more whenever I post, but we can’t forget that just one or a handful of readers can be an enormous labour of reading for individuals and can positively transform our capacities.

Form Marxism immediately asks: How do the forms organise the power?

Today attention increasingly moves through privately owned platforms. We have our follower counts, advertising markets and algorithms. Power is being digitalised in these forms that then bear down on us to reshape our relationships: people remake who they are for algorithms as even our political systems are reorganised around attention, and owners of infrastructure possess, sell and trade huge social powers that can organise our attention, the visibility we think of in society, and the recognition that we can receive. This has huge flow on effects in our society, as people remake who they are to ever greater degrees.

We need both Marxisms to see the problem.

The same is true of AI, which depends on the accumulated social powers of generations of living beings. AI is language, knowledge, art, science and cooperation produced by many generations that is then turned into a form, one that confronts us as a privately owned platform. It is a form backed by intellectual property and built into infrastructures that more and more structure our everyday lives.

Form Marxism makes us pause to understand who owns these forms, how they are organised by capital and accumulation, and how institutional forms are being transformed to accepted changing social relations. A Relational Marxism, on the other hand, will examine how our capacities are changing, what is happening to how we are knowing, creating, and cooperating together, or resisting. It will ask us to determine what new capacities we might develop as we struggle with these technologies or use them to build new forms.

To what degree is ownership important here? It is very important, but the socialist question for our age must go further: Who has the power to organise our social powers?

Form Marxism and Relational Marxism would have different answers. But neither Marxism is resolvable to the other, and their dialectic is the movement we have been tracing.

⁂

Today the old Marxist oppositions are not longer satisfying me as they once did. Socialism cannot be reduced to the form questions: reform or revolution, centralisation or decentralisation, institution or prefiguration, party or movement? These old distinctions freeze one moment of the dialectic of Marxism and turn it into a doctrine.

Marxism is more interesting when it shows us its moves.

That’s why I think naming Form and Relational Marxism helps. Form Marxism reminds us that capitalist social forms can come to dominate over us. They possess, as a Marxist might say, real objective power. Property as a form of course cannot be wished away. Capital cannot be related away. The dominant forms of our historical moment must be confronted and transformed, along with our relations: states, corporations, markets and infrastructures.

Relational Marxism reminds us that even if we do abolish forms and build new ones, forms cannot make Communism for us. People have to develop the capacities to cooperate or disagree in new ways, rule their own lives collectively, and build the forms that will hold together their collective social powers in ways that they don't return to dominate them.

Social power helps us understand why both relational and form Marxism are true, because relations generate powers; then powers assume forms; and, finally, forms can reorganise relations. Repeat.

This is why revolutionary practice is so critical. Marx in his confrontation with Feuerbach called revolutionary practice the coincidence of changing circumstances and human activity, or self-change.9 Here in brief is one way of expressing the dialectic I have been trying to describe—the human is an ensemble of social relations, as Marx wrote, which is another way of saying both a form and a relation. In praxis, we can transform the objective world and, through that struggle, transform ourselves. And transformed people, as we know, become capable of revolution.

When I was younger, I was not capable of seeing any of this, and so I stared miserably at those schemas in Volume II of Capital. I couldn’t see the social relations, let alone the social powers, in what seemed to me the dead forms of Capitalism.

Communism is not I think the discovery of the correct social form. And it is not the liberation of pure human relationships underneath the ruinous forms of Capitalism. That tension is why this dialectic of Marxism survives. It holds the space we need to learn to become capable of Communism.

Marx imagined “universally developed individuals”, the transformed people who were able to bring their own communal social relations under their “communal control.”10

It’s a beautiful image, but it has always seemed as far off to me as the sky.

Marx, however, could see the stars, and dance.

And these are the constellations, I think, that Marxism allows us to see in the horizon of our own united powers, universally developed, in Communism.

⁂

The episode featuring these two political economists is called “The Destruction of Modern Nations”. I’m not sure I agree with the framing because, as I have argued elsewhere, I don’t see a decline of modern nations, so much as a reorganisation of them under capitalism that is currently being commanded by class rule.

What interested me most was the conversation — with Wolff near the 41 minute mark and Hudson near the 51 minute mark — in which the two socialists hammered home what is now seen as an outdated distinction: productive and unproductive labour.

The clip from Hudson that first caught my eye was shared by Arkansas Worker. Hudson there brightly chips in from where Wolff left off to make an argument about the boundaries of economics. He argues that Western Marxists have largely followed mainstream economics in no longer talking about something that preoccupied Marx and the classical political economists before him: the distinction between productive and unproductive labour.

As a result, Hudson claims they've made Marxism amorphous, and he agrees with Wolff that without this distinction, we have lost something essential to Marxism as more than a word.

You can watch and listen to their arguments here:

I'm not sure I fully agree with everything single thing that follows, but let me try to recreate Hudson’s argument, supported by Wolff. Hudson places Marx within a longer tradition running through the Physiocrats, Adam Smith and Ricardo. These early economists disagreed about what constituted productive labour, but they were all motivated by a question that no longer recognisably appears in mainstream economics: which economic activities add to society’s wealth, and which drain wealth produced elsewhere?

For Hudson, this classical distinction between producer and parasite is something Western Marxists need to recover. Why? Because it not only gave political economy a boundary; it was inseparable from the classical attack on economic rent. Classical economics sought to expose how landlords could become richer by owning land and collecting rent without producing it; how creditors could receive interest by acquiring claims upon the social product; and how monopolists could charge for access to something they controlled. Political economy needed some way of distinguishing the production of wealth from claims of value. As Wolff points out, without distinctions of this kind we also lose something of the capacity to trace the historical transformation of class relations from feudalism into capitalism. I find that historical argument the most compelling point.

While I agree with many of their arguments about mainstream economics, I would point out that even GDP doesn't literally abandon a boundary around production. GDP and national accounting has elaborate rules for deciding what counts as economic output. It seems that Hudson more clearly contests where that boundary is drawn.

Modern accounting systems measure national income without maintaining the older classical distinction between productive activity and economic rent. Activities once treated as deductions from production therefore appear as measured contributions to output. Rent, financial services and even the imputed rental value of owner-occupied housing can appear within measured output. Hudson’s complaint is that economic measurements have stopped asking the questions of political economy that classical economists asked: what has been produced, who is the producer, and who is appropriating the value?

I think there is something important in the way that Hudson recovers the distinction. But I am less convinced that Marxism becomes amorphous without it and muddies the class struggle. I also don’t think these abstract concepts have anything near the theoretical weight that both Hudson and Wolff want to give them.

Hudson does not seem to keep a clear sight on how Marx transforms the problem of productive labour rather than merely inherits it. Productive does not simply mean useful, material or socially beneficial in Marx’s analysis. But what is less often commented on is that unproductive does not help us identify a parasitic class living from the labour of others. It would be a category mistake to read the distinction that way, because Marx is at pains to show the historical specificity of the category itself: under capitalism, productive labour is labour that produces surplus value for capital.

As Marx puts it, “Productive labour is only an abbreviated expression for the whole relation.”1 What is being abbreviated is a whole capitalist social relation in which labour-power is purchased and put to work so that capital can increase its value. Whether the labour is useful or harmful, wonderful or horrible, is beside the point of the category.

Hudson, whose writing on rentier economies point us to the issues Marxists should explore, would remind us that that the distinction still matters. Western economies, he argues, have “erased the whole distinction between productive and unproductive investment, productive and unproductive labor.”2

I agree that an erasure of sorts is important to note because, regardless of the mechanisms, the result is the strange possibility that an economy can become more expensive without becoming more capable. Housing makes the problem obvious. If every house doubled in price tomorrow, we clearly wouldn’t have twice as much housing for people. Nobody would be better sheltered. Nevertheless, rising rents, mortgage interest and associated financial activity can generate additional measured income.

The numbers may have grown. But what has been produced?

Hudson’s answer is that an increasing portion of what we call economic growth consists of economic rent and overhead: payments for access to land, housing, credit, monopolised infrastructure and other conditions of economic life. What appears in national accounts as income can simultaneously confront households and other parts of the economy as a cost.

There is something unsettling about Hudson’s argument that echoes Marx’s encounter with classical political economy. Our measurements can tell us that an economy is growing while people’s access to the conditions of life is becoming harder.

Returning to what Marx means by abbreviation makes the problem stranger still. If productive labour means labour productive for capital, it doesn’t follow that everything capital finds productive develops human capacities—our powers to actually get things done. A parent caring for a child produces no surplus value. Much publicly provided care and education doesn’t either. Meanwhile labour producing weapons or environmentally destructive commodities can be perfectly productive for capital.

Marx’s definition exposes the problem. And even mainstream economics acknowledges it. The OECD itself, for instance, cautions that measured labour productivity only “partially reflects” workers’ personal capacities because output also depends upon capital, technology, organisation and other inputs.3 The measure can be useful but still leave many important things out. The ideological move comes when the measure becomes our neutral definition of what wealth is.

We must look for wealth elsewhere. An activity can be productive for capital because it produces surplus value. It can contribute to measured economic output. Income can also be extracted through rent, interest or monopoly. None of these tells us, by itself, whether society has become more capable.

Consider a teacher helping a child learn to read. What has been produced? Something has changed in the child. A capacity has been developed. The child can now do something she couldn’t do before. The same is true when we care for somebody, grow food, restore an ecosystem, learn an instrument or organise a neighbourhood.

Political economy can tell us how these activities stand in relation to value, capital and accumulation. But that does not exhaust what has materially happened. A capacity may have been produced, sustained or destroyed. No refinement of the boundary between productive and unproductive labour will fully answer that question.

Another material question is therefore available: What powers do our activities produce, sustain or enlarge?

It's a question that takes us somewhere beyond both mainstream economics and Hudson. Hudson's recovery of classical political economy points to a distinction between production and extraction. But I don’t think we can therefore oppose a parasitic rentier economy to an otherwise healthy productive economy.

Industrial production itself can destroy the powers of life, even when by every capitalist measure it is productive. A factory can be extraordinarily productive while poisoning a river. Industrial agriculture can produce mountains of commodities while degrading soil, animals and workers. Capital can develop astonishing cooperative powers while exhausting workers and their capacities to be anything more than servants of that cooperation.

So the question can’t finally be whether we are producing enough rather than extracting too much. It has to be: Productive of what? The answer from capital is surplus value or accumulation for capital. GDP answers: measured production output. Hudson asks us to isolate the extraction.

I wonder if communist politics should be asking something else again. Here the question becomes normative but remains material: Does our activity—productive, unproductive, or revolutionary—develop the real powers of living beings? These powers are our capacities to feed one another, shelter one another, learn, care, create, cooperate, organise, and collectively determine the conditions of our own lives.

Marx and Engels themselves gave us one of the finest foundations for a measure of wealth, and Marxists have never stopped struggling for it: “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”4

My seven-year-old has brought these squishies to a particular forefront for me, although as a teacher I’m already familiar with them: the kind of toys that educational support staff hand out to students who are disengaged academically, who then use them with the most engagement they have all day to hit or hurl at each other, to great, temporary delight, before the experiment ends with what we call in education a correction and redirection.

My young son has an even more intense pleasure in squishies than the teenagers I see in secondary schools, where they are routinely offered as aids to attention or regulation. He has ADHD and finds it difficult to focus at school, especially in the afternoon. Earlier this year his teachers began giving him squishies to help him focus, an adjustment for which the evidence is pretty thin.1 The stress ball does not seem to reduce stress, although we should put the stress on whose stress matters here.

For a while they do seem to work for my child. He focuses, very hard, on that ball of squishy, slow moving fluid. He squeezes them relentlessly. Stretches them, twists them, savages them beyond recognition and holds up the strange shape he has made with an indomitable glee. He finds out how far you can take a smiling hamburger before it is no longer recognisable as a hamburger. He squeezes until the squishy is deformed almost into an atom, held together by his will, his hand, alone. Then he lets go and, absurdly, the hamburger reforms.

Inevitably, my son takes the experiment in forms further than his education was designed to support.

Pop.

Yes, squishies can explode.

The most appalling goo spills everywhere.

And although he is the culprit, he is often happy, giggling, gleeful.

He spends a good ten-minutes pouring out the goo from the squishy and if there are metallic stars from a star squishy, he is even more intrigued by the gooey mix. He is not upset unless the pop is unexpected and sprays him, covering him in the same toxic goo.

There may be something here that the Left can learn.

My son spends much of his life struggling against social forms that are never as yielding as a squishy.2 He is asked to sit still, attend now, start moving, put his hand up, stop speaking too much, listen, do this, do that, learn this thing for this long, but not for too long. His teacher this year is an experienced professional, and she has noticed his developmental predicament and changed some of those forms around him. But mostly he is learning what all children learn: how much of yourself must bend into the shapes that institutions require, and what happens when you don’t bend, or you bend other things.

I think I am beginning to understand why my son likes squishies so much. Most of the time he is pushed, pulled, and corrected into accommodating the institutions that are troubled by his behaviour. Every day, he has to accommodate the forms around him. The squishy accommodates him.

Speaking of the Left, my experience of some Marxists is that when you start talking about similarly squishy things—accommodations, learning, care, maintenance, relationships, and social reproduction—they’re so far outside the orbit of their theoretical and practical experience that they assume you’re squishy-brained for discussing them.

This is changing. Marxist feminists and social reproduction theorists have spent decades pressing against this hardness. They ask awkward materialist questions, such as: if workers produce the world, who produces the workers?3 They have changed Marxism in the process, squeezing some of its harder forms into different shapes. But the difficulty of that struggle tells us something about the developmental predicament that the Left needs to face up to.

There remains a hierarchy of revolutionary seriousness in many parts of the Left. Production is hard and care is soft, the factory is material, while relationships are cultural; even historical materialism is soft, and revolutionary action is hard; class is structural while learning is a nicety; the party is hard and everyday life is squishy. The seizure of power is revolutionary, while making somewhere decent to live is what happens around the rupture, in sameness.

This certainly wasn’t the way of Marx, who didn’t see production as the only serious topic and everything else as a nicety to be left to carers while the real work of revolution happened somewhere else, picked up afterwards by mothers. The old grub mole began with the niceties of our social relationships. He didn’t oppose production to reproduction, or treat the latter as a mere backdrop to history. He began with the practical organisation of life.

That doesn’t mean Marx had already solved the problems social reproduction theorists would later pose, far from it. But it does make the hardness some Marxism has historically taken on, under huge material and political pressures, look even stranger.

In The German Ideology (1845-1846), Marx and Engels insist that production isn’t just producing what we need for our physical existence. It is what they call a “definite mode of life.”4 A little later they speak expansively of the “production of life”: that is, the production of our own lives through labour and “fresh life” through our procreation. Cooperation, they argue, is a productive force.5

Our old grub mole was squishier than some Marxists who came afterwards.

Revolutionary history is squishy too. In February 1917, thousands of women textile workers and housewives walked out of their workplaces in Petrograd on International Women’s Day.6 They fit neatly enough into the hard story as factory workers. Except their lives did not. Living through war and bread shortages, they had to keep their children alive and their households functioning. They were corrected by factory schedules and clocks, and then queued for hours for bread. Production and reproduction were not separate columns they were waiting for theory to connect. They were just abstractions from the same life.

The women in the morning in February walked out and called other workers into the streets. By the next day more than 200,000 workers were on strike. Within days the strikes became general, and troops ordered to suppress the crowds began to mutiny.7

Then something went pop.

Within days, covered in toxic goo, the Tsar was forced to abdicate.

We call this the February Revolution today, but perhaps we see revolution backwards if we start with the pop that makes history. The general strike, the mutinies, and the collapse of the state look like ruptures. But if we look backwards, the revolutions such as the February and October Revolutions become spectacular final deformations rather than the long development of power that makes rupture possible.

The pop in 1917 were unexpected. But the powers that made the February Revolution possible were not created that morning.8 Women had organised around International Women’s Day before 1917. Workers carried with them histories of strikes, rebellions and revolution. Socialists had spent years organising under repression, and soldiers, socialists, and workers all argued, cooperated and remembered what they learned. When the Tsarist regime collapsed, people were not unprepared: they discovered that they had developed capacities in the school of strike and struggle that helped them act together.

This is difficult to see if we only notice the squishy after the pop. It is squeezed. It deforms, and springs back. We can never be sure if it will take quite the same shape again. People learn its form. They discover where it gives, and where it doesn’t, and they learn to squeeze the form in different ways. Most revolutionary struggles, when you squeeze the surface, appear to be like this.

It’s why I have always admired revolutionaries like Alexandra Kollontai, who organised around the squishy struggles after 1917: childcare, kitchens, laundries, motherhood, marriage, sex, and love. Kollontai lived through the terrible irony of the revolution: the social order could be overthrown, but then someone still had to wash the clothes, cook the food, look after children, and clean the messes. Usually that was women, who lived the dual existence of factory and home.9 Kollontai tried to respond by socialising much of this work. But even here the old hierarchy partly returned. She described the remaining labour of the individual household as “unproductive”: while exhausting and necessary, it did not produce commodities. Communal kitchens, laundries and childcare would free women from it for social production and a more complete public life.10

The squishy stuff is still a challenge for the Left, because it is hard to hold onto. Social reproduction theorists have kept squeezing this problem, forcing Marxism to recognise the labour that reproduces workers, households, and generations. But shouldn’t we squeeze the problem further? Because what if all those social powers of teaching, raising, nursing, learning, loving, maintaining, and caring cannot be reduced to activities that simply reproduce people so they can return to producing?

What if they are among the activities that actually make our powers what they are?

Marx never let these developmental questions entirely go. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, he includes “seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, observing, experiencing, wanting, acting, loving” among our sensuous relations to the world.11 And decades later, in Capital Volume III, freedom still appears as the “development of human powers as an end in itself”.12

Perhaps the squishy things that surround us are not peripheral to human emancipation at all. The Left needs to change how it sees these squishy struggles themselves. People push against the forms organising their lives. Most of the time the forms accommodate some pressure and hold it. Sometimes they deform and reform. Sometimes concessions are won. Sometimes they spring back into much the same shape. Sometimes the people doing the squeezing change too: they acquire knowledge of the form, discover new capacities, discover other hands squeezing, and new ways to squeeze together. And sometimes a struggle develops powers that did not exist before the struggle. The form encounters something it cannot accommodate without becoming something else.

Pop.

But not every squishy can be revolutionary, and most will never burst. Forms shouldn’t yield everything to us. Collective life requires its forms, limits and obligations. A child cannot run an entire school according to his will, although like my child he’ll give it a good try. This is why these squishy struggles for power are so important.

They are about who bends, who accommodates, who is corrected and redirected. Who gets to squeeze, and who gets squeezed. Which forms can change, and which are presented as immovable, inflexible, naturally solid, so that everyone else must conform to them. Capitalism is superbly good at this. It demands extreme flexibility from human beings while presenting its own requirements as immovable facts of life. Workers must adjust and pivot. Families must juggle and make do. Teachers must cope. Carers must fill the gaps. Children must learn to sit still and be quiet. Until, sometimes, they don’t.

When my son plays with a squishy, he never sets out to rupture them. He is very focused on squeezing, learning their form, and delighted by the way they can become something else in his hands. Most of the time, a squishy reforms. Sometimes it doesn’t. And every so often there is goo everywhere and my child needs someone else’s capacities to help clean it up: teachers, educational support staff, parents, relatives.

What I think is that the Left spends too much time imagining the pop, and not enough attending to the squishy struggles that people live every day as they learn about the world, where it can give, where it cannot, and what powers we develop by squeezing together.

If we surrender learning, care, housing, education, reproduction and everyday life as soft and secondary concerns we don’t have time and resources for, we don’t become better Marxists or the hardest Left there is. We end up accepting capitalism’s own hierarchy of what counts as serious.

I reassured the concerned student that I had taken the branch carefully from a young, robust tree in the schoolyard. As I collected the branch, I had noticed something I hadn’t expected. Many of the gum trees were covered in scale insects, suggesting that at least some of them were under stress. We should keep an eye on that, I told them, because today we're learning how to see trees differently.

I had them pause while I explained what I was holding and showed them its red flowers. Then I pointed the gum at each student in the classroom.

“Go on,” I told them. “Take a leaf. Crush it, like this.”

The students followed me in rubbing a leaf between their fingers. Slowly, the room filled with the sharp, unmistakable smell of eucalyptus.

Some students smiled. Others looked puzzled. One quietly kept smelling the same leaf.

“Pungent,” one thoughtful student said.

“What a beautiful word,” I exclaimed and wrote the word up. Then I asked them to write, offering three prompts. I sense, I think, I wonder.

Then I discussed what they wrote with them.

And I asked them: How did you read that smell?

What memories did it evoke? What did it make you notice? How does it help you read the poetry we have been studying?

If anyone had walked past our classroom at that moment, they would probably have wondered what on earth was going on.

To be honest, I suspect some of my students were wondering exactly the same thing.

Why on earth was a teacher carrying a branch to class and making them smell gumtree leaves?

Our Literature class has been reading Oodgeroo Noonuccal—the first Aboriginal Australian to publish a book of poetry—as part of a unit called Voices of Country.

When I planned my teaching, I expected to teach colonisation, belonging and Aboriginal history. What surprised me was that reading Oodgeroo slowly began to teach us a different way of seeing—a different way of attending to relationships among living beings.1

At our best, we have been relearning how to pay attention. Oodgeroo unsettles the habit of treating living things merely as symbols. Instead she asks us to notice their place within webs of life and to imagine the unrealised possibilities that still exist within those relationships.

In that moment, with the gum in the classroom, all I initially wanted them to know was that the tree had peeling bark and small red flowers that hung like lanterns. Its leaves released a sharp, unmistakable scent when crushed. It could shelter birds, insects and fungi. It could grow, become diseased and die.

We’re all vulnerable like trees. I wanted them to know this so that we didn't spend the week discussing “the gumtree” without ever really encountering one. I wanted them to think and write as though something living depended on their attention.

That attention is why I walked into the classroom carrying a handful of eucalyptus branches from the school garden, and copped strange looks from coordinators.

Connection to Country now occupies a strange place in Australian education. We increasingly teach it, acknowledge it and write about it. Yet many of the disciplines through which we teach students to understand the world continue to isolate things from the living relationships that sustain them.

Oodgeroo's poem, Municipal Gum, first written in 1960 and published in the landmark collection We Are Going (1964), invites us to renew our attention and to think more deeply:

Municipal Gum

Gumtree in the city street,
Hard bitumen around your feet,
Rather you should be
In the cool world of leafy forest halls
And wild bird calls.
Here you seem to me
Like that poor cart-horse
Castrated, broken, a thing wronged,
Strapped and buckled, its hell prolonged,
Whose hung head and listless mien express
Its hopelessness.
Municipal gum, it is dolorous
To see you thus
Set in your black grass of bitumen—
O fellow citizen,
What have they done to us?

Like most Literature classes, we read slowly. With this one, we were forced to. We paused over what were for them unfamiliar words. Municipal. Mien. Dolorous. Bitumen, even: my students had no name for the roads that surrounded them, the black surface.

I remember watching bitumen being laid when I was a child. Roads seemed to appear before my eyes. Today the road simply arrives complete. My students had never needed the word because the process had become invisible. Perhaps municipalities become like that too. We inherit their work so completely that we stop seeing the forms of organisation shaping everyday life.

We paused over a word that was to them only vaguely familiar:

Municipal.

“Why Municipal Gum?” students asked after looking up the dictionary. “Why not City Gum? Or Street Gum?”

It was an excellent question. “Municipal” sounded oddly bureaucratic, more suited to a planning document than a poem. The more my students stayed with the words, the more they realised why the poet had chosen it. A municipality is not simply a place. It is a way of governing a place. Roads are municipal. Parks are municipal. Footpaths, drainage systems and planning schemes are municipal. Before we know anything about the tree, Oodgeroo has already named the form of power organising its life.

And yet, when the poem itself begins, Oodgeroo rapidly turns away from that abstraction:

Gumtree in the city street,
Hard bitumen around your feet.

My hunch about municipal seemed right. We noticed together that the poem's rhythm is grounded in the body: its heavy stresses fall on words like "gum", "hard", "street" and "feet", so that the tree is encountered not as an abstract symbol but as a living being standing on the earth.

Another student noticed something I almost read straight past.

Not roots.

Feet.

It is such a small decision that it barely announces itself, but it changes the poem. The roots are gently personified. We don’t mistake the tree for a human being, but we begin to imagine what it might feel like to stand there. The bitumen is no longer simply part of the setting. It presses against living feet. It encloses them, much as colonisation enclosed Aboriginal lives within expanding settlements, roads, fences and cities.

Oodgeroo could easily have written a poem about urban planning, colonial development or the destruction of Country. Instead she begins with a living being. The municipality is there from the first word of the title, but it never becomes the object of our attention. The tree does.

Then, the comparisons. Oodgeroo’s description of the cart-horse gathers a simile into an image of prolonged suffering: broken, constrained, listless and hanging its head in hopelessness and buckling under ropes. The cart-horse is not simply another symbol. It is another living power broken and constrained for use. “Castrated, broken, a thing wronged”: Oodgeroo makes the violence of organisation visible in the body of the animal.

The poet is drawing the reader on to understand the parallels with the treatment of Aboriginal people. “O fellow citizen,” she writes, addressing the tree through a language usually reserved for political belonging among human beings. The cart-horse has already entered the poem as another living power broken and constrained for use. By the final question—“What have they done to us?”—the horizon of injury has expanded. The tree is planted, surrounded and managed; the horse is strapped, buckled and made to labour. The “us” directly joins the Aboriginal speaker and the displaced tree, while the suffering horse remains within the wider field of recognition the poem has created.2

I reminded my students that Oodgeroo was deeply involved in the campaign that culminated in the 1967 referendum, although the referendum did not itself grant Aboriginal people citizenship or voting rights. It removed constitutional exclusions and expanded the Commonwealth’s power to legislate concerning Aboriginal people. Even that victory reveals the limitation of citizenship as an abstraction: recognition by the state did not itself undo dispossession, transform living conditions or restore relationships with Country.

Municipal Gum has changed the way I notice trees.

That surprises me.

I have learned to foreground trees and their living powers, much as Oodgeroo does in the poem. I tried to teach my students to remember that before a gumtree is a symbol, before it is a metaphor, before it becomes a subject for literary analysis, it is a living thing.

It struck me that what we had been practising in class was a resistance to fetishism. Marx usually discusses fetishism in relation to commodities, but the same inversion seems to haunt our thinking more generally. Municipalities become more real than municipal gums. The abstraction begins to eclipse the life it was meant to describe. Colonialism can become more vivid as a concept than the particular lives, places and relationships through which colonisation occurred and continues. Even historical materialism risks becoming fetishised whenever its abstractions become more vivid than the living beings they were invented to illuminate.

Reading Oodgeroo made me realise that historical materialism is less a philosophy than a discipline of attention.

Oodgeroo’s poetry repeatedly interrupts that inversion in fetishism. She does not deny the municipality. She refuses to let it eclipse the tree. Throughout Municipal Gum, she returns us again and again from abstractions to living beings. Rather than speaking only of labour, she gives us the broken body of the cart-horse. Rather than treating citizenship solely as a legal status, she addresses the tree as a “fellow citizen”. Rather than explaining colonisation as an abstract system, she shows us hard bitumen pressing around living feet. The poem continually returns from systems to lives, from institutions to relationships, and from concepts to the powers of life itself.

The more I thought about it, the more this refusal seemed to characterise Oodgeroo’s life as well as her poetry. I had always known the broad outlines: her membership of the Communist Party, her departure when she said they tried to write her speeches for her, the return of her MBE, and the reclaiming of the name Oodgeroo Noonuccal.3 Reading Municipal Gum, I began to see in these moments a related political insistence. Institutions could be used, challenged or abandoned, but they could not be permitted to replace the living people and relationships in whose name they claimed authority.

By the end of our lesson—and after I had pointed a gum branch at each of them—my students knew what municipal, bitumen, mien, and dolorous meant.

I am hoping they learned something else.

A week later, we will walk through the schoolyard again. The branches will still be there. The scale insects will still be feeding. The leaves will still release that familiar smell when crushed.

The trees will not have changed because we read a poem. The bitumen will not have loosened around their roots or around our feet.

But perhaps these Literature students—and their teacher—will no longer pass the trees as though they were merely part of the background. Perhaps we will notice the scale insects, the peeling bark, the flowers and the birds sheltered among their branches.

The municipal gums will still be there.

Living, not waiting for us to learn to see.

Everyone seems to be reviewing and sharing their thoughts on Christopher Nolan's newest film The Odyssey at the moment, which has already been proclaimed a huge commercial and critical success. Most reviews are hugely positive, with dissenters only now emerging.

One reviewer even called it "this generation’s defining epic."

I wasn’t ultimately so impressed. It is a startling film—an assault on the senses—and it stays with you in its wake, like a tide after days on a raft. But as that feeling wore off, I found myself thinking that the film was decidedly “mid”, as my teenage students might say: lavish and entertaining enough, but ultimately one adaptation among many.

The film is certainly still worth seeing. It is technically astonishing, a visual marvel, and often beautiful. If it succeeds anywhere unequivocally, it is in its spectacle and in Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography. Shot entirely on purpose-built 70mm IMAX cameras, it has a scale that continually startles. Oceans, caves and monsters become immense. The Cyclops is genuinely terrifying and probably worth the price of admission alone. Circe’s transformation of Odysseus’ men into pigs is one of the most visually accomplished sequences I have seen in years. Much of it was achieved through relatively old-school filmmaking: physical sets, locations, puppetry and practical effects.

But beyond these moments, if Nolan’s The Odyssey really is the defining epic of our generation, I think it needs to do more for us than offer an entertaining adaptation of Homer. It needs to tell us about ourselves. It needs to reveal the journey we should take. Instead, I think it reveals the odyssey our generation still hasn't made.

Watching the film, I kept thinking I wasn't really watching Homer. I was watching Batman in black armour.

The film seems to linger over the Trojan Horse and the sacking of Troy, but most of all it lingers over this batman who is Agamemnon, the King who ruled the Greeks at Troy. He stalks across the screen like a Nolan protagonist: haunted, burdened and psychologically isolated. He doesn't seem to do much, and stands around looking menacing in black armour that hides his face. And he's only mentioned in the film’s present time for meeting a sticky end.

Before long, everyone else begins to resemble him. Odysseus. Menelaus. Athena. Even the gods seem drawn into the same emotional register. Everyone is solemn. Everything is interior. It is an odd thing to do to Homer, because Homer is one of the funniest, liveliest and most socially observant writers ever to have lived. Nolan doing Nolan things, I suppose. But why do them to The Odyssey?

I came into the film with an open mind. But I should admit that I’ve spent years reading Homer and other ancient Greek texts. Not feeling the Mycenaean—or even the Homeric—world in the film was a genuine disappointment. Most of it felt like Americans on beaches and sets with sandals looking downcast.

Interestingly, Emily Wilson—the scholar whose translations Nolan drew on—has also observed something similar. In an interview with Derek Thompson, she commented on it not being a “complicated” movie:

I don’t think it’s a complicated movie. And I don’t think it’s even about a complicated man. I think it’s a quite simple action-hero movie about an action hero who feels bad about being an action hero.

Wilson in the larger passage puts her finger on the way that Nolan seems to work best in shorter, more, intimate cinema, but on this scale and commercial pressure still seems to be selling the action-hero movie. An uncomplicated Nolan blockbuster is not inherently a problem, and they are films we can find entertaining. The difficulty is that Homer’s Odysseus lives and breathes as polytropos: the man of many turns, many-sided, witty, charming, a master of disguise and a schemer whose intelligence is inseparable from his capacity to improvise. We did not even get Matt Damon in The Talented Mr Ripley. We got action-hero Damon: Jason Bourne crossed with Batman, now having second thoughts about being an action hero.

Some say Nolan has captured the central themes of Homer’s epic and should therefore be given some licence. To an extent, I agree. Most readers identify three great themes running through the Odyssey: nostos (homecoming), xenia (hospitality), and hubris (the dangers of pride). Nolan clearly understands these themes. My problem is not that he abandons them, but that he psychologises them, and it feels like a butchering of Homer’s poetry.

For Homer, these are never simply moral ideas. They are woven into a living social world. Home is never simply a return to Penelope. It is Eumaeus the swineherd. Eurycleia the old nurse. Argos the ageing dog. Boastful kings, rambling old men, clever servants, strange customs, and dangerous strangers. And it's all lived in feasts, stories, arguments, flirtation and jokes. Penelope, Eumaeus, Eurycleia and Argos are all present, but they may as well have been cardboard cut-outs.

Nolan even gives Odysseus one of his own finest lines—one that stayed with me after the film:

"The clearest sight of a man is from below."

I thought this was a great line, although it appears to be a Nolanism. The trouble is that the film rarely follows its own advice. We almost never see Ithaca from below. The kingdom exists largely as the backdrop for Odysseus' moral journey. The suitors are certainly cruel, but we rarely understand the society they have consumed. Their feasting has consumed Ithaca’s wealth for years, yet we scarcely meet, let alone understand, those who grew the grain, tended the sheep, baked the bread or kept the kingdom alive.

When Argos dies from starvation on the dung heap, the moment should devastate us. It is not as if Nolan does not try to invest it with pathos, but I found myself feeling little, and I am someone who abhors violence against animals, including at the dinner table. There's the closeup and a flashback to the days of puppy Argos. Still for me it becomes another instrument for illustrating Odysseus’ psychology, and even then more symbol than the culmination of twenty years of shared life. The view from below is once again missing. Telemachus eventually inherits the throne wearing a golden band, but we never really see the people whose lives he is now expected to govern. Homecoming simply arrives. The social world never quite does.

The same reduction occurs with hubris. One of the greatest episodes in Homer is also one of the funniest. Odysseus tells the Cyclops that his name is "Nobody." When the blinded giant cries out that "Nobody has hurt me," the other Cyclopes dismiss him and leave. It is one of the great comic moments in Western literature. Then, unable to resist his own pride, Odysseus shouts his real name across the sea, transforming comedy into catastrophe as Poseidon hears the boast.

That is Homer, because it is about the complications of character. Hubris is inseparable from wit. Cleverness and vanity exist inside the same person. Triumph and disaster arrive together. Nolan largely strips away that contradiction. The Cyclops remains terrifying, but he never quite becomes a character. He has no social existence beyond somehow milking cows, sulking and munching on Greeks. Terror survives; irony disappears.

The pattern repeats throughout the film. The Lotus-Eaters are almost entirely absent, and with them Homer's extraordinary meditation on forgetting home itself. In Homer they are not villains to be defeated. They embody another possibility: a life organised around forgetting labour, memory, obligation and return. Homer doesn't condemn them so much as ask what makes home worth returning to in the first place. But this complicated question is barely scratched. The entire imaginative and sensual possibility opened by the Lotus-Eaters is reduced to Matt Damon chewing lotus leaves while Charlize Theron gazes at him.

The Sirens, too, lose much of their force. Their temptation is no longer knowledge, memory and the promise of knowing all things, but another stage in Odysseus' internal struggle. Circe is magnificent to watch, but we barely come to know her. Calypso becomes another woman orbiting Odysseus' emotional gravity. The Nausicaans—perhaps Homer's greatest vision of another form of civilisation, where youth, hospitality, play and generosity briefly eclipse war—are reduced to nothing because they don’t appear.

These are not random omissions. They are precisely the episodes where Homer pauses the journey long enough to imagine different ways of living.

Again and again Homer asks: What kind of society is this?

Nolan asks: What is Odysseus feeling?

Difference itself begins to disappear. Every encounter becomes another variation on the same psychological landscape. What were once competing forms of life become stages in a single man's moral development.

The same transformation occurs with the gods. In Homer, the world itself is alive. Athena is not merely Odysseus' conscience. Poseidon is not simply guilt. Gods intervene, quarrel, deceive, laugh and reshape human affairs. Every stranger may conceal a divinity. Every act of hospitality opens onto something larger than the individual. Nolan's gods survive only as haunted or haunting memories. The divine has migrated into psychology and the repeated heavy-handed symbols such as beheaded statues rolling down temple stairs. We get it.

Even another striking line—"We have broken the fragile bonds between men"—captures this shift. I found myself resisting it because it sounded beautiful but it didn’t quite fit. Homer's social bonds are not fragile because they are delicate. They are remarkably durable. They survive twenty years of absence because countless ordinary people continue reproducing them. Eurycleia remembers. Eumaeus remains loyal. Penelope continues weaving. Argos keeps waiting. Ithaca survives because life goes on. The real protagonist of Homer’s Odyssey is not Odysseus alone. It is also Ithaca: the living world whose memory has carried him home and whose people have survived his absence.

This, I think, is where Nolan unintentionally reveals something about our own historical imagination. Homer distributes intelligence, humour, memory, loyalty, hospitality and courage across an entire society. Nolan gathers those powers back into Odysseus. The hero becomes the bearer of capacities that Homer understood to belong to a living world. It's a subtle form of fetishism. The hero absorbs the capacities surrounding him, then moralises away their charm, contradiction and social life. We're left with an austere, haunted landscape subordinated to the hero. Apart from some attempts to give Penelope, Calypso and others an interior life, it is never enough to build either the intimacy or the lived sociology this epic needed.

The enormous IMAX cameras—machines notorious for sounding like lawnmowers—become something of a metaphor for the adaptation, even though new housings were designed to permit close, dialogue-heavy filming. Nolan’s technical achievement is extraordinary, but the resulting scale still seems to come at the expense of intimacy. Characters often appear separated from one another. Odysseus and Penelope rarely seem to inhabit the same emotional space, even when they’re not separated by screens, and almost all conversations feel staged rather than lived. The camera sees everything except the ordinary textures of social life.

The film ends with Odysseus and Penelope sailing away, rather like the Elves and Hobbits departing Middle-earth, to live in retirement. They leave Ithaca to Telemachus, played by Tom Holland, still most widely associated with Spider-Man. Nolan dresses him in a golden band and pristine kingly robes, as though a golden age has arrived with the costume. But what has Telemachus actually learned? What will be different? Once the suitors are gone, what justice awaits the people of Ithaca who fed and served them for all those years? Is it enough merely to fetishise Telemachus in splendid clothing? So much for the clearest sight of a man coming from below.

After the film finished, I thought less about Odysseus than about the city I had walked through to reach the cinema. Earlier that afternoon I had left from a teachers' strike in Melbourne's CBD. Thousands of teachers dressed in red had briefly brought the city to a halt. They chanted together, laughed together, argued together. Office workers watched from above. Drivers honked. Some raised fists in solidarity. Others hurried impatiently through the crowd. Half an hour later the city had returned to its ordinary rhythm. Trams rolled again. Tour groups gathered. Office workers drifted back onto the streets as though nothing had happened.

Later, in Hungry Jack’s, a teenager carrying a large canister marked “poison” argued loudly over speakerphone while repeatedly spitting from his nang onto the floor. He threatened someone, declared he was “just joking,” called someone a “fucking cunt,” then finished with, “I love youse.” An anxious security guard never took her eyes off him. Around them, dozens of strangers quietly negotiated the ordinary rituals of public life: waiting, watching, cleaning, eating, ignoring, intervening.

None of this was epic. But all of it was profoundly social. It struck me that Homer would have noticed these moments. He would have remembered the teenager's contradictory mixture of bravado and affection. He would have found room for the workers cleaning the floor afterwards, for the conversations at neighbouring tables, for the ordinary negotiations through which strangers continually reproduce a shared world. He might even have recognised, not the teenager himself, but the question raised by the Lotus-Eaters: what kinds of lives do people build, what kinds of worlds do they inhabit, and what makes a home worth returning to?

Homer rarely reduced people to moral examples. He made them into characters, and through them, he made society visible. That is what Nolan's Odyssey cannot quite see. Its IMAX cameras can capture oceans, storms and giants. They cannot quite capture the ordinary social powers that make a world live.

If this is indeed the epic of our generation, perhaps that is precisely why it deserves our attention. Not because it faithfully recreates Homer, but because it reveals the limits of our own imagination.

Hollywood has become extraordinarily good at telling stories about haunted individuals. Trauma is now filmed on an epic scale. It keeps returning to Batman in one form or another: the armoured, traumatised individual carrying history alone. What it struggles to imagine is society itself.

Homer by contrast never forgot that people become who they are through the worlds they inhabit together. His epic is populated by shepherds, servants, nurses, kings, beggars, strangers, tricksters, gods and dogs. Every encounter asks what kind of life is being lived, and what kind of world is being made.

Perhaps that is the odyssey our generation still has to make.

Each story is reported in its own language— trade, defence, diplomacy, technology, and so on—as though it belongs to a different problem. But perhaps they are not different problems. Perhaps they are fragments of the same historical movement.

The Reclamation's recent essay, “The West Can't Stop Its Collapse”, is well worth reading because it rejects the comforting fiction that today's tensions are simply democracy confronting authoritarianism. It insists that class, capital and imperial power remain central to understanding the present.

I agree with almost all of that. Where I differ is in how I understand the historical movement. I don't think we are witnessing the collapse of the West. I think we are watching the reorganisation of Western capitalism.

Seeing the present as a reorganisation rather than a collapse changes what we should look for in our historical situation. For much of the last forty years, the dominant sections of Western capital organised development through financial markets, global supply chains and private investment. Governments certainly never disappeared—they guaranteed property, opened markets, rescued banks and secured the conditions for accumulation—but increasingly the direction of development was entrusted to private capital. Manufacturing moved wherever labour was cheapest, infrastructure was privatised, and shareholder value became the measure of economic success.

That settlement between markets and states—and the neoliberal common sense that justified it—is beginning to unravel. Listen to the language of governments today. They no longer speak with the confidence of neoliberalism. Instead they speak of economic security, strategic autonomy, critical minerals, industrial policy, resilient supply chains, national capability and even “weaponised interdependence”.1 The market has not disappeared. But development has returned as an explicitly political problem, changing the language thar governments use to describe their place in the world.

China is a large part of the reason why. Over the past three decades, China has not simply become wealthier. Its governing institutions have pursued a long-term strategy of developing productive capacities.2

State-owned banks have continued directing investment. Five-Year Plans have coordinated industrial priorities. Within the parameters set by the Party-state, provincial and local governments have competed to build infrastructure, cultivate industries and assemble manufacturing clusters. More recently, Xi Jinping has argued that China's future depends upon developing what he calls "new quality productive forces"3—advanced manufacturing, semiconductors, artificial intelligence, robotics, biotechnology and green energy.

The results are hard to miss. China now accounts for roughly 30 per cent of global manufacturing value added. It has built more high-speed rail than the rest of the world combined. Chinese firms dominate battery manufacturing, solar panel production and the processing of rare earth elements that underpin everything from renewable energy to advanced weapons.4

These are not simply successful industries. They are concentrations of organised social power. A battery factory is never just a factory. It presupposes engineers, universities, research laboratories, electricity grids, ports, mineral processing, logistics, finance and public institutions capable of coordinating them over decades. Every productive force depends upon a web of social relations that structure how knowledge, labour, materials and infrastructure are brought together. What appears as the power of a factory or corporation is already the organised cooperation of a whole society.

Today's geopolitics increasingly revolves around the question of development. Development is not just about producing more wealth. It is about organising what a society becomes capable of doing.

Once you begin looking through that lens, the fragments of the news stories suddenly fit together better. Taiwan matters because TSMC manufactures the overwhelming majority of the world's leading-edge semiconductors.5 Those chips increasingly underpin artificial intelligence, industrial automation, telecommunications and military systems. The South China Sea matters because roughly one-third of global maritime trade passes through it. We readily understand the Strait of Hormuz as a strategic artery because of the oil moving through it. Coverage of the South China Sea, by contrast, often begins and ends with images of Chinese aggression. That framing obscures the wider struggle for influence over one of the principal routes through which the world’s productive system now circulates.

What ties these stories together is not simply competition between states, but the attempt by rival ruling classes to reorganise the conditions under which capital can continue to accumulate and project power. Rare earths matter because modern manufacturing, batteries, electric motors and precision-guided weapons depend upon them. Even electric vehicles are becoming a site of struggle because they integrate batteries, software, robotics, data and electricity into the next platform of industrial production.

These stories are connected, although not because every capitalist shares the same interests. Finance, manufacturing, technology and fossil capital frequently pull in different directions. What gives the response its class coherence is that these conflicts remain organised around preserving accumulation, property and political command. Competition mediated through the value form compels rival capitals—and the states that reproduce the conditions of accumulation—to secure the productive capacities that have become increasingly important in the battlegrounds of future profits, state power and class rule.

Seen this way, the return of industrial policy across the West makes perfect sense. The United States has committed tens of billions of dollars through the CHIPS and Science Act to rebuild semiconductor production. The Inflation Reduction Act channels hundreds of billions towards clean energy and advanced manufacturing. Europe now speaks openly of strategic autonomy. Even an Imperial outpost like Australia has embraced a Future Made in Australia agenda built around critical minerals, manufacturing and sovereign capability.6

Mariana Mazzucato correctly pointed out that "the State has not only fixed market failures, but has also actively shaped and created markets."7 The real change is not that states are intervening again. They never stopped. What has changed is the object of intervention. States are increasingly reorganising the conditions for future accumulation, and they need the labour, knowledge and consent of working people to do it. Workers are therefore asked to experience chips, ports, critical minerals and military supply chains not as the property and strategy of ruling classes, but as shared conditions of national survival. The powers created through our cooperation confront us as external necessities that force us to adapt.

Firms such as NVIDIA, TSMC, ASML, CATL and BYD have become geopolitical actors as much as commercial ones. They are important not simply because they generate enormous profits, but because they organise durable productive capacities which entire industries—and increasingly states themselves—rely on in their operations. Their strategic importance reveals how private command over particular technologies can become power over the direction of whole economies. Capacities created socially by workers, researchers and public institutions return as the private property of firms. States increasingly depend on these firms, even as they continue to finance, regulate and mobilise them.

At this point, the infamous critic of political economy who never quite goes away becomes difficult to avoid. Marx showed that capitalism is driven by the production and expansion of value. Competition compels capital continually to revolutionise production. But value does not act by itself. Its pressures are mediated through firms, banks, property relations, infrastructure, states and markets, each of which organises production in particular ways.

Marx explained why capitalism continually revolutionises production. What confronts us today is the way different institutional forms organise the development of those productive forces. Western capitalism has increasingly organised development through financial markets, shareholder value and globally mobile private investment. China has retained much greater public capacity to coordinate long-term industrial development while remaining deeply integrated into global capitalism. Both have remained disciplined by the value form and structured by class domination. They have nonetheless organised development differently, and those differences cannot be denied, because they are now reshaping world politics.

All of this is why I hesitate to speak of collapse. Capitalism has repeatedly reorganised itself throughout its history. The transitions from competitive to monopoly capitalism, from the age of formal empires to Fordism, and from Fordism to neoliberalism each emerged through crisis, conflict and institutional transformation.

The present moment belongs to that history. Whether this latest reorganisation succeeds remains an open political question. Every reorganisation also changes where and how class struggle is fought, even when its underlying antagonism remains.

As this reorganisation becomes visible, wider groups of people begin asking political questions at precisely these sites. If governments can consciously coordinate semiconductor industries, battery production and the data centres for artificial intelligence, why should housing remain subordinated to speculation? If states can mobilise extraordinary scientific and engineering capacities for geopolitical competition, why not for ecological restoration, public transport or care? If development increasingly depends upon collective organisation, why should its purposes remain governed by private accumulation rather than our shared needs?

These questions do not arise at the end of history, after capitalism has collapsed. They emerge within the violence and disorder of its reorganisation, as capitalism develops collective capacities that increasingly exceed the social forms that control them.

What we are confronting today is therefore not simply a contest in which China wins or the West declines. It is a struggle over whether the immense productive powers created by workers across the world remain organised by rival ruling classes for accumulation, geopolitical competition and war—or become common social powers that can collectively and consciously shape our conditions of life.

That does not mean choosing a better foreign policy or supporting the correct geopolitical camp. It means building a different politics altogether.

⁂

I think that's because they shift the value of the tree away from its exchange or extraction value, the paper, furniture or electricity generated from felling them. They are stories that don’t fixate on a tree’s usefulness but move us to something wider than that—its living powers. They give a tree a history instead of a price, and open up a more creative way of seeing life.

Tree stories always make me think of my own kinship with the tall and old bunya tree that sits on the home of my ancestors. The bunya pine tree species is a survivor from the prehistoric age, a tree found only in Australia. It once flourished across much of the continent, and today survives in scattered pockets of Queensland. The particular tree I’m thinking of has stood for over a century on the McCarthy homestead built in 1906 at Deadman, outside Gympie. It sits where the Gabi Gabi people once organised bunya festivals and other Aboriginal mobs travelled hundreds of miles to sing, dance, share stories and barter while they ate the peculiar starchy bunya nut, which tastes somewhere between a potato, a sweet potato and a pine nut.

Every second New Year the cones begin to fall. I’ve spent countless holidays watching the nuts fall in this biannual event and some of the most memorable ones collecting the nuts and turning them into a soup that inevitably knocks me to the ground. When the fruiting happens, the tree announces itself ripe through the heavy thud of a falling cone. I know when I hear it will attract rats and mice, then snakes, and earlier than this life—if present and paying attention—me.

The McCarthy homestead has been sold now, perhaps because no value was seen in the type of kinship with trees and land that I describe. Property exists in contradiction to our living powers. My ancestors had become selectors who lived in accommodation of the colonial machine and in tension with it. Now my connection to this home of my ancestors and the bunya tree already feels dimmer. Instead, it makes me think about what it means to experience the dispossession of a way of seeing trees.

So rather than feeling loss in a troubled piece of history, I think about what that tree made possible, and still may, and the forms of life Aboriginal people built together. Not just food, but gatherings, journeys, songs, trade, stories and relationships stretching across generations. Long before anyone imagined the bunya pine tree as timber, it was already organising human life in common. These ancient trees are part of the organisation of the commons built, shared, protected, and lived by the Gabi Gabi people.

What makes a tree remarkable isn’t simply that it’s alive. It’s what its life makes possible. It turns sunlight into prehistoric protein, sunlight into forests, carbon into wood, becomes home to countless other forms of life, and over centuries quietly reshapes the world around it.

Trees change what becomes possible.

Why don’t we learn to look at humans and other animals the way we sometimes look at trees?

Humans are no less astonishing. Human living powers are distinctive. By living powers, I don’t mean domination. I mean the capacities living beings develop through their relationships with one another and with the world. Our living powers are social because they become possible through one another. We build languages, care for one another, create music, restore ecosystems, discover medicines and organise entire societies.

The powers of other animals are also distinctive: they navigate by the stars, communicate across oceans, regenerate landscapes, pollinate forests, cooperate, teach, remember and sustain rich social worlds of their own. They cooperate in ways we can only marvel over.

Most of us already recognise these powers from time to time. We admire old trees. We celebrate remarkable teachers and elders. We marvel at migrations, reefs, forests and acts of extraordinary care. But we also inherit social relations that continually teach us to value these same living powers differently.

Capitalism is perhaps the most developed social relation for organising living powers around accumulation. This organisation teaches us to see these powers primarily as resources.

A tree becomes timber, extracted through collective labour. If I owned the land on which the bunya pine tree sits, I’d be encouraged by incentives to sell its nuts rather than experience it in its furtive state. I’d live in a useful property only if I harvested every New Year and shipped bunya nuts overseas. People are expected to respond to capital and class rule by learning to extract and uproot.

It's the same with animals. An animal becomes a product—for plates, clothes and countless other commodities—its living and sentient powers reduced to growing as quickly as possible before being slaughtered, all to suit an exchange system organised around class rule and accumulation. The extraordinary capacities of a living being become organised around the production of commodities and, ultimately, their own destruction.

A river becomes a resource, dammed and diverted, pumped to exhaustion, or engineered around one form of profit.

A human being becomes labour, bought and sold according to the requirements of class rule, reduced to human capital so that every possibility of becoming is subordinated to competition.

Instead of asking what this life makes possible, we ask what value can be extracted.

This isn’t simply a failure of imagination. It is one of the ways capitalism reproduces itself through markets, institutions and everyday life. Capitalism rarely abolishes living powers outright. More often, it encloses them, cultivates them where they are profitable, and redirects them towards the reproduction of capital itself.

It continually reorganises the living powers of humans, other animals and ecosystems. It narrows what they might otherwise make possible together and organises life according to the requirements of profit.

Colonialism—which brought my own ancestors to Australia as exiles and Irish socialists called Fenians—violently extended an extractive way of life across peoples and landscapes. The bunya gatherings themselves were among the relationships disrupted by dispossession. Wherever lands, peoples and ecosystems are reorganised around extraction rather than the relationships that sustained them, that history continues.

When an ancient tree is felled, many people instinctively mourn the loss of centuries of living possibility. We should recognise something similar whenever the living powers of humans, other animals or entire ecosystems are diminished.

The tragedy of our times isn’t simply that life is exploited. It’s that extraordinary powers, capable of creating so much together, are continually organised around accumulation instead.

Living powers change what becomes possible.

A better politics begins there.

We start by asking ask not how much wealth can be accumulated by life, but what becomes possible when the living powers of humans, other animals and ecosystems are organised in common.

That is the beginning of seeing what I think of as the commons of becoming.

After the attacks of 11 September 2001, the United States passed the USA PATRIOT Act and created the Department of Homeland Security, dramatically expanding intelligence, border security and financial surveillance.1 Similar counterterrorism powers soon spread across liberal democracies, becoming permanent features of political life rather than temporary emergency measures.

The War on Terror illustrates this tendency in one of its clearest forms, but similar institutional trajectories appear across very different crises. The 2008 financial crisis wiped out millions of jobs and homes, yet governments responded by rescuing the world’s largest banks while introducing a new generation of financial oversight bodies and regulatory institutions. The administrative capacities governing finance emerged stronger than ever. Global military expenditure exceeded US$2.7 trillion in 2024, while the UN continues to report substantial financing gaps for climate adaptation, biodiversity conservation and pandemic preparedness.2 During the COVID-19 pandemic that began in December 2019 governments rapidly introduced QR check-ins, digital contact tracing, vaccine certification systems and unprecedented forms of data sharing between public agencies and private technology companies. Many were justified by immediate necessity, but they demonstrated how rapidly entirely new systems of observation, coordination and administrative control could be assembled, and how few of them disappear once the emergency passes.

Across these examples, the pattern becomes clearer. Modern societies under Capitalism clearly possess immense capacities for collective organisation. But we should be asking which capacities are selected, and how they are organised. When a crisis hits our societies it appears that States become increasingly adept at managing insecurity but progressively less capable of overcoming its causes or preventing them. Each emergency leaves behind another layer of surveillance, bureaucracy, financial oversight or coercion, while the collective capacities needed to prevent future crises—democratic planning, ecological restoration, care, public health and community organisation—remain comparatively neglected. The institutions accumulate with each successive shock as more and more of our collective capacities return to us in alien form, organised to administer crises rather than abolish the conditions that produce them.

As a result, the dominant and rewarded social powers developed through successive crises increasingly become those of observation, administration, policing, incarceration: oercive powers.

Why has it become increasingly certain that our societies will repeatedly respond to the crises by developing these coercive social powers? Why is it that each emergency strengthens the powers to administer society while controlling and underdeveloping the collective powers that build society: care, democratic planning, ecological restoration, cooperation and collective self-government?

In this essay I want to contend that these are not separate developments. They are different expressions of a single historical tendency. Crises force societies to develop new collective capacities. Under class rule in the capital order, however, those capacities increasingly return to us not as our own united power, but as alien institutions organised around the reproduction of capital that prolong a way of living in crises rather than resolve the crises themselves.

The deepest crisis of our time is not simply ecological, economic or political. It is the crisis of our own united power.

Commie Corner

We're All Going to be Called Terrorists Eventually

The first time I began seriously questioning the usage of the term terrorism, it was amid a conversation being held between a small group of students in a “Terrorism and WMD Threat Assessment” and our professor. The class itself was fascinating, and one that was well out …

Read more

9 months ago · 2959 likes · 51 comments · James Ray

The Widening Net

Many people recognise this pattern long before they have a language to describe it. That is one reason James Ray’s recent essay, “We’re All Going to be Called Terrorists Eventually”, has resonated so widely. Although written through the history of the United States’ War on Terror, it captured something much broader than American counterterrorism. Readers recognised a political tendency that extends across liberal democracies: institutions built in response to one crisis rarely disappear once the emergency has passed. Instead, they accumulate, expanding the administrative capacities of states while steadily widening the range of people, activities and relationships that fall within their reach.

Ray ends with a warning worth quoting at length:

“The reality of the crisis that we face is decades in the making, constructed in myriad ways that have helped deepen the resources of state intelligence and security apparatuses and cast a wide enough net to justify state violence against those the state deems opposition. We face a future where we all may be deemed terrorists eventually, at least those doing work that challenges the state of things. As this reality draws nearer, we must reexamine our relationship to the term and push back on its usage against groups at home and abroad. We cannot hope to dull the sting of the term against ourselves if we allow it to be weaponized against those abroad.”

I think Ray is right. Over the past two decades the category of terrorism has become increasingly elastic as Counterterrorism has expanded far beyond the prevention of spectacular acts of violence.

After reading Ray’s conclusion, I found myself returning to one phrase in particular.

“...those doing work that challenges the state of things.”

Something important changes here, because Ray’s object is no longer primarily about terrorism or violence. It is about work. Not work in the narrow sense of employment, but the practical activity through which people cooperate to reorganise society. It is about the work of community organisers, Indigenous land defenders, trade unionists, journalists, mutual aid networks, environmental campaigns, cooperatives, and tenant unions. Anyone who challenges the state of things becomes a target for class rule to sure up the wage system and discipline combined labour. The concern is less what people believe or even what they do individually, and the target is the social powers they build together.

These are questions that emerge that Ray himself does not pursue. Why does the widening net increasingly concern itself with the collective work people do to organise different ways of living together? Why, when crises demand new forms of cooperation, do capitalist societies repeatedly respond by expanding only the institutions that observe, administer and police collective action?

Our Own United Power

To answer that question, I think we need to use a largely sidelined idea in Marx. In The German Ideology (1845–46), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels reflected on a curious feature of human society. Unlike other animals, Marx claims human beings transform the world cooperatively.3 Through the division of labour, language, science, technology and countless forms of shared activity, we produce powers that no individual could ever create alone. Reflecting on this, they wrote:

“Social power, i.e., the multiplied productive force, which arises through the cooperation of different individuals as determined by the division of labour, appears to these individuals... not as their own united power, but as an alien force existing outside them... which they thus cannot control.”4

This is one of Marx's most neglected insights. It is not frequently quoted and discussed unless it is collapsed into the theory of alienation. But Marx here is not simply describing alienated labour or the exploitation of workers. He is describing the tragedy of collective life: how the social powers that underpin it have been turned around to dominate it. Capitalism does not merely exploit labour or structure production. It governs society by organising the social powers produced through our cooperation.

Living beings cooperate, and through it they create immense social powers: systems of knowledge, infrastructures, institutions, technologies, cultures and forms of organisation that vastly exceed the capacities of any individual. Society itself is nothing other than this ongoing historical organisation of collective capacities.5 Under capitalism these capacities increasingly cease to function as our own united power. They return to us as powers organised independently of those who created them. Class rule and a handful of corporations increasingly determine how these systems are trained, what data they use, whose labour they replace and who benefits economically from humanity's accumulated knowledge. The intelligence of billions increasingly returns as the property of a few. And these powers become organised independently of us, confronting us as forms and institutions that seem to possess a life and logic of their own.

This insight casts Ray’s widening net in a very different light. Perhaps what has expanded is not simply the category of terrorism. Perhaps what has expanded are particular social powers: the collective capacities to observe, classify, predict, coordinate and intervene in social life. Intelligence agencies gather information on a scale no individual ever could. Financial surveillance follows transactions across continents. Police databases accumulate knowledge about entire populations. Artificial intelligence is not simply produced by engineers. It is produced from humanity's accumulated language, images, software, scientific knowledge and creative work. Large language models such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are trained on vast corpora of books, websites, software, scientific literature and everyday language created by millions of people across generations.6 Collective intelligence becomes the raw material from which privately governed artificial intelligence is built. Today satellites can measure deforestation in the Amazon, monitor methane leaks from oil and gas fields and track crop failures across continents.7 Humanity has never possessed greater capacities to observe the Earth. These are extraordinary collective achievements. No king, corporation or government could produce them alone. These capacities may appear to be concentrated within states and militaries, but they are not: the process is structural, shaped by the capital social relation that shapes and conditions states, militaries, institutions and social powers.

Almost all of our united powers return to us as alien powers.

The collective capacity to observe becomes surveillance. It is not created by governments alone. It is produced collectively, through billions of ordinary acts of everyday life. Every day we leave behind thousands of digital traces: phone locations, search histories, purchases, transport cards, workplace logins and online conversations. Individually these fragments reveal almost nothing. Together they produce one of the most detailed systems of social observation ever assembled.8 But the capacity to interpret and govern this immense social knowledge is converted into private control rather than to people whose lives generated it. The collective capacity to remember becomes vast proprietary databases. The collective capacity to communicate becomes privately owned digital platforms. And the capacity to learn becomes artificial intelligence trained on humanity’s accumulated knowledge but governed by corporations and states, while the capacity to coordinate becomes logistical systems whose primary purpose is the circulation of capital.9 Again and again, powers produced through collective life return to confront the very people who created them.

This, I think, is the deeper crisis beneath the crises. The problem is not that capitalist societies fail to develop collective capacities. On the contrary, they develop them at an astonishing pace. The problem is that these capacities are organised around the reproduction of capital. They become increasingly separated from the people whose cooperation brought them into existence. And they appear to menace anyone who challenges the running of the system, while the opportunity cost in capacity building shapes the crises that are then formed into our way of life to be defended and policed.

Seen from this perspective, Ray’s widening net begins to make more sense. The practical work of organising a different way of life together is not merely politically inconvenient. It represents the possibility that these social powers might be organised differently. What increasingly comes under surveillance is not simply dissent or violence, but the cooperative capacities through which ordinary people might begin freely using their own immense powers.

The Reorganisation of Social Powers

Every crisis genuinely requires society to develop new capacities. Pandemics require systems of care, scientific cooperation, medicine and public coordination. Financial crises demand new forms of economic organisation. Ecological collapse requires unprecedented capacities for planning, restoration and international cooperation. Terrorism requires ways of preventing violence without destroying the freedoms such prevention is supposed to protect.

No society can confront a crisis without reorganising the capacities it requires to act. Our lives are shaped by which social powers are developed, and in whose interests they are organised. This is where Naomi Klein’s work becomes indispensable. In The Shock Doctrine, Klein showed how crises reorganise markets and property relations, restructuring economies in ways that would otherwise prove politically impossible.10 My argument is that they also reorganise society’s social powers, a shift in analytical focus that illuminates what Klein and many others have also found.

Every major crisis of the last half century seems to leave behind new institutions capable of observing, classifying, predicting and administering populations. The attacks of September 11 did not simply produce new counterterrorism laws. They dramatically expanded intelligence agencies, financial surveillance, border security and the legal architecture of national security. Edward Snowden's disclosures in 2013 revealed that intelligence agencies had developed systems capable of collecting communications metadata on an unprecedented scale. Programmes justified in the name of counterterrorism had evolved into infrastructures capable of monitoring entire populations rather than narrowly defined suspects.

After September 11 the United States created an entire Department of Homeland Security employing over 250,000 people. Global spending on homeland security now measures in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually. The 2008 financial crisis did not democratise economic planning. It strengthened central banks, rescued financial institutions and accelerated the concentration of corporate power. The COVID-19 pandemic expanded systems of emergency administration, digital monitoring and logistical coordination on a scale previously unimaginable. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many of the most effective responses emerged through networks of nurses, community volunteers, neighbourhood mutual aid groups and local food distribution initiatives. But these capacities were not institutionalised with anything like the permanence afforded to emergency policing or surveillance.11 Today, climate breakdown increasingly arrives alongside anti-protest legislation, critical infrastructure laws and new forms of policing directed towards those attempting to disrupt fossil fuel extraction, the “ecoterrorists” in James Ray’s piece.12

Each crisis and response is different. But the institutional trajectories are strikingly similar. Again and again, societies develop extraordinary capacities to administer crises while investing comparatively little in the collective capacities required to resolve them. We become better at managing insecurity than overcoming its causes. The institutions accumulate, each emergency adding another layer to an already expanding apparatus of surveillance, administration and coercion.

This is not accidental. It is structural. Capitalism is often described as an economic system based on private property, wage labour and markets. All of this is true. But within these institutional forms there is another process. Capital continually appropriates and reorganises society’s collective capacities around one overriding imperative: accumulation. Technologies, infrastructure, education, finance, logistics, communications and scientific research become increasingly integrated into the reproduction of capital. They are not simply neutral developments in productive power. They are organised in ways that sustain a particular class and its social order. Crises threaten existing social relations and so the social order, although they are necessary features of the economic structure of Capitalism. Socially, however, they create moments in which ordinary people begin experimenting with different forms of cooperation, solidarity and other democratic types of organisation. They expose the limits of markets and the necessity of collective action. They raise the possibility that society’s productive capacities might be organised differently. That possibility is itself politically dangerous.

From the perspective of capital, the problem is not crisis but the reproduction of its powers. Capital does not simply survive crises. It increasingly governs through them. Production remains fundamental, but it is only one moment within the wider organisation of society's collective capacities. Production is one historically specific organisation of broader cooperative capacities.

The governance of capital, however, cannot accept the emergence of collective social powers capable of responding to crisis that may challenge the reproduction of class rule. Trade unions, tenants’ organisations, mutual aid networks, Black Radical movements, trans survival, liberation movements, Indigenous self-government, community health initiatives, ecological movements, socialist parties, migrant sanctuary citiesand other forms of planning all represent ways in which people begin organising their collective capacities for purposes other than accumulation. Seen from this perspective, class struggle increasingly concerns the means of the organisation of shared social powers in addition to the means of production.

The decisive question is no longer simply who owns factories or who occupies parliament. It is increasingly who develops and structures society’s capacities to know, communicate, care, coordinate, educate, predict and govern. Every crisis becomes a struggle over whether these capacities remain common powers organised by those who create them, or whether they return once again as alien institutions standing above us.

The Politicisation of Social Powers

Capital has spent centuries reorganising collective capacities around the reproduction of accumulation, but we have not fully reckoned with its impact on our lives or traced its histories to our present state of things. I believe that James Ray’s warning asks even more of us than he perhaps intended. The problem is not simply that the category of terrorism has expanded. It is that capitalism increasingly governs the social powers through which people might organise society differently. The widening net concerns not only violent acts, but the capacities through which people cooperate, communicate, remember, observe, care, educate, produce and govern together. What comes under administration are not simply individuals, but the collective powers from which another way of life might emerge.

This changes how we think about politics itself. For much of the twentieth century, the Left organised around questions of ownership, wages, representation and the state. Those struggles remain indispensable. But capitalism has not stood still. Increasingly, it reorganises something deeper than markets or governments. It reorganises the social powers. Capitalism did not simply enclose land. Increasingly it encloses the collective capacities and exploits how a society knows, remembers, communicates, cares and governs itself. The struggle of the twenty-first century therefore concerns more than ownership. It concerns whether humanity’s expanding social powers continue returning to us as alien institutions organised around accumulation, or whether they become our own united power. Every crisis forces societies to develop new capacities. The decisive political question is therefore not whether new powers will emerge, but who they will belong to. Will they return as surveillance, punishment and war? Or will they become common powers through which people learn to collectively govern their own lives together?

The future of this century will be decided not simply by who owns the world, but by who organises the social powers through we know, remember, communicate, care and govern. If capitalism increasingly governs society by reorganising our collective powers for class rule, then the struggle for another way of life begins by reclaiming these powers as our own united power. Communism, understood this way, is the historical movement through which the working class learns once again to govern the social powers it has created together.13

I first tried reading the libertarian socialist and communalist Murray Bookchin’s The Next Revolution more than a year ago, after encountering the familiar insistence that every serious leftist ought to read him.

When I first sat down to read Bookchin’s book, I was lured in and had high expectations because of the foreword written by one of my favourite authors, Ursala K. Le Guin. More than that, my enthusiasm for Rojava strikes me from time to time, and as Bookchin influenced the Kurdish liberation struggle theoretically, it was clearly an attraction. I've also long wanted to get to grips with municipalism, to understand it as part of a strategy for socialism.

So I thought I would read Bookchin in one sitting. I did not get far. The Next Revolution sat at the bottom of the bag for months and then eventually went back on the shelf, dirtier and unread.

This is not usually how I respond to political writing, even bad political writing, but I found the opening passages almost unbearable. Let me explain why. Bookchin’s writing seemed to combine a pompous petit-bourgeois self-importance, philosophical grandiosity and a dazzlingly incorrect account of Marxism. I stopped reading in a blaze of irrationality that's rare for me.

Recently, I told myself I should return and overcome my superficial and somewhat petulant judgement, not in the least because social ecology and organization are directions I am taking in my thinking. I returned to the book and persisted, partly because I wanted to know whether my initial response had been unfair, and partly because Bookchin is asking some questions that matter enormously: how revolutionary movements endure, how collective power takes institutional form, and how popular organisation might become more than an spotaneous protest against the world.

My first impression was not entirely wrong. But it was incomplete. The opening pages are where I stumbled in pain. Bookchin begins with an elaborate contradiction between capitalism and its utopian promise. Capitalist development has created the material possibility of abundance, freedom and rational social life, while preserving domination, hierarchy and ecological destruction. So far, this is hardly unfamiliar. It comes directly from Marx and Engels, and is familiar in the inferior, hackneyed varieties that have abounded since the Second International.

But Bookchin quickly takes the argument somewhere even more extreme. Humanity, he suggests, is now stepping beyond the old world of “mystification” and “irrationality” toward the possibility of a “free and rational society” organised through “reflection” and “discourse”.

Whatever can this mean? Societies do not become free or rational because a philosopher has discerned their latent potential. They are organised through conflicting social powers, inherited institutions, material dependencies, divisions of labour and relations of domination that continually exceed anyone’s conscious design. To describe the emancipated society as “free and rational” may express an aspiration, but it does not yet tell us how freedom is produced, whose reason governs, or by what historical criteria the rational is distinguished from the merely desirable.

Bookchin’s language sometimes resembles the most confident writing of the most dogmatic Marxism, as though history were climbing laboriously toward an idea that the theorist has already reached — when he is not Marxist at all. He identifies genuine capacities emerging within social development, then detaches them from the social relations through which they have been produced. “Reason” becomes a kind of philosophical advance party, arriving before the organised forces capable of realising it.

Such schoolyard politics and stale positivism would be a little less irritating if Bookchin did not use an abstraction to dismiss Marx and Engels as prisoners of their century. Marxism, in his account, remained fixated upon the industrial proletariat, the factory and an increasingly obsolete conflict between labour and capital. Modern workers have supposedly become largely “petit bourgeois”, absorbed into consumerism and dispersed across new social identities and concerns.

There is something wonderfully petit bourgeois about discovering the petit bourgeoisie in everyone who no longer looks like a nineteenth-century factory worker. A teacher does not become petit bourgeois because they work in a classroom rather than a mill. A nurse does not cease to be proletarian because their labour produces care rather than steel. Warehousing, logistics, education, health, administration, domestic labour and platform work are not evidence that class has disappeared. They are forms through which dependence upon wages and dispossession from the means of life are reproduced.

Bookchin mistakes one historical composition of the working class for the social relation that produces it. More importantly, he criticises Marx for precisely the simplicity that Marx’s method allows us to overcome. Marx did not provide a sociological checklist in which factory workers were revolutionary and everyone else historically decorative. He analysed capitalism as a total social relation: a mode of organising production, reproduction, property, time, dependence and collective capacity. That method can be extended to “the ecological, civic and subjective forces” Bookchin wants to place beyond it.

Nonetheless, a more generous reading of Bookchin is possible. Bookchin is right that people do not encounter capitalism only at work. They encounter it as residents, parents, carers, citizens, racialised subjects, women, ecological beings and members of communities whose capacities are constantly enclosed or degraded. He is right that workplace exploitation does not automatically explain or abolish patriarchy, racism, bureaucracy or ecological domination. He is right that a revolutionary politics cannot simply wait for the factory to disclose the universal subject of history.

But none of this requires us to leave class behind. It requires a richer account of class as the organisation of life. Bookchin’s “ecological, civic and subjective forces” can be understood as social powers: collective capacities to care, deliberate, produce, remember, resist, maintain places and govern common life. These powers are neither exterior to capitalism nor reducible to wage labour. They are produced within capitalist society, divided by it, appropriated by it and often turned against those who collectively create them.

Bookchin notices these powers. What he lacks is an adequate theory of how they are formed. Instead, he reaches quickly for “the history of ideas” as a “theoretical springboard” that makes a radical movement as a “catapult” beyond existing conditions. I'm not quite sure how a springboard met a catapult in this vigorous mixed metaphor. But Bookchin's siege equipment, I call it, is similarly mixed, assembled from a theory of organisation, an urban location from which to deploy it, a disorganised civic power, and a new name: Communalism.

One should give Bookchin credit for constructing his own machinery. But naming the machinery does not make it move. His choice of “Communalism” is meant to “encompass the philosophical, historical, political and organisational components of a socialism for the twenty-first century”. But why should a word encompass anything like this? At most, it seems to name a proposed arrangement of constitutions and institutions: popular assemblies, confederated municipalities, recallable delegates and municipal control of economic life.

These are serious proposals. They are not inventions pulled from nowhere, and they should not be dismissed merely because Marx also wrote about the Paris Commune. But a constitutional “form” is not yet a society, and a municipal assembly is not yet driven by the social power required to make it move.

Bookchin’s siege equipment is not designed to capture the state, only presumably destroy it or withstand it long enough for it to surrender. Communalism is supposed to construct a rival democratic power in municipalities, confederate it, and eventually deprive the state of its authority. The problem is not that he has mistaken the target. It is that the machinery appears too nearly assembled in advance. Assemblies, confederations, civic identity and revolutionary organisation arrive as the components of a new society without an adequate account of the social powers that must build, operate, maintain and defend them.

But siege equipment does not self-assemble. It does not fire itself. It does not feed its operators, maintain its components, educate new members, care for children, repair infrastructure or defend itself against an enemy. And a lifeboat in the “history of ideas” marked “Communalism” may contain an impressive inventory of components, but someone still has to build the vessel, keep it afloat and learn how to navigate. Those capacities cannot be conjured from civic identity. They must be found and developed among working people themselves.

This is why the strongest passages in The Next Revolution are those in which Bookchin turns from philosophy to organisation—because “the history of ideas” is not his forte. “A revolutionary left”, he argues, “must move beyond ad hoc protest groups and create organisations that are enduring, structured, programmatic and capable of translating their aims into everyday practice. Such organisations must retain their identity, maintain formal institutions and develop members who understand and can act upon their principles.”

Much of this is correct. Protest does not become power merely by recurring. Movements require memory, coordination, discipline, education and durable institutions. Bookchin is also right to reject the fantasy that structurelessness eliminates domination. Informal power does not cease to be power because nobody has written down the rules.

But here again his answer raises the question it is supposed to solve. Why “the” organisation? It is true that Bookchin does not advocate for a single organisation swallowing the whole movement. His wider political model is plural and confederal. However, the revolutionary organisation itself often appears as a definable, programmatically coherent body that educates the movement and protects its direction. It begins to resemble the industrial machinery Bookchin elsewhere claims to have surpassed.

His careful distinction taken from Leninism is important: this organisation should not seize the state and govern in the name of the people. It should help construct institutions through which people govern themselves. But the problem of leadership is not solved simply by making leaders recallable or administration subordinate to policy. The deeper question is whether the capacities concentrated in leadership are being reproduced throughout the organisation.

Who understands the programme? Who knows how the institution works? Who maintains its records, resolves disputes, speaks publicly, coordinates resources and trains new members? Does organisation distribute these capacities, or does it create a stratum that becomes indispensable because everyone else has been organised around their indispensability?

Bookchin is interested in the democratic control of leadership. A communist theory of organisation must also be interested in the generalisation of leadership capacities. Everyday practice matters at precisely this point. Bookchin treats the organisation as something that translates its programme into daily life, but organisation is already daily life. It is the distribution of time, knowledge, confidence, responsibility and care. It is who speaks, who listens, who cleans the room, who has childcare, who can attend a three-hour meeting, who understands the documents and who decides what counts as a reasonable proposal.

The organisation is not a container into which social change is placed. It is one of the places where new social relations are either developed or defeated. It must involve class struggle or it will just struggle.

The same problem appears in Bookchin’s treatment of the city. His distinction between the city and capitalist urbanisation is valuable. He does not simply romanticise the modern metropolis. He sees the municipality as a potential space in which strangers can become citizens through shared institutions, deliberate upon common needs and exercise power beyond both private property and centralised state administration. There is real insight here. Democracy needs places. It needs repeated encounters, common memory, accessible institutions and forms of collective decision that are more substantial than periodic voting.

Bookchin, however, has a—dare I say it—petit bourgeois tendency to fetishise the civic form. The municipality becomes the authentic terrain of freedom, as though civic identity could dissolve the divisions produced by property, labour, race, gender and unequal access to time.

It simply does not work out like this, because the common interest does not sit patiently inside the town hall waiting to be expressed. A city is itself a concentration of social powers and institutions: transport, care, waste disposal, construction, education, communication, food distribution, public health and cultural memory. These powers are organised through workers, institutions, infrastructures and forms of knowledge that exceed the assembly. The assembly may govern them democratically, but it cannot substitute for them.

Bookchin sees the political shell of the city more clearly than the labour that continuously reproduces it. This is also why the Aristotlein language of social “potentialities” remains unsatisfying. Social change does not possess capacities. People do. Organisations do. Communities, movements and institutions do. Contradictions create openings, pressures and crises, but they do not act. Potentialities become historical forces only when people acquire the capacity to recognise, organise and exercise them.

Bookchin occasionally describes political, cultural and ethical movements as the “efficient causes” of transformation (again, from the ideas of Aristotle). The phrase is more intelligible than it initially appears. He is asking what converts structural contradiction into historical action. It is exactly the right question. But consciousness, ethics and civic commitment do not descend from the history of ideas carrying a catapult. They are developed through struggle, education, cooperation, maintenance and collective organisation. The efficient cause of change is not the movement in the abstract. It is organised social power that makes the institutions move.

That may also be the best way to learn from the limits of projects influenced by Bookchin, including the Kurdish movement’s experiments in democratic confederalism. Their difficulties are not proof that assemblies, communes or confederations are worthless. They show that no democratic form can reproduce itself through constitutional ingenuity alone. It must secure the material, military, ecological and reproductive powers upon which its survival depends. No lifeboat survives because its components have been correctly named.

What, then, can Life Against Capital take from Bookchin in The Next Revolution?

1. Power cannot simply be abolished. It must be reorganised, located, shared and institutionally constrained.

2. Protest is not enough. Movements need durable forms through which knowledge, memory and collective capacities can accumulate.

3. Organisation must extend beyond the workplace without pretending that class has disappeared.

4. Ecology is not an optional concern added to socialism. It concerns the organisation of the social powers through which human and non-human life are reproduced. Liberation movements here must be engaged with in the deepest ways.

5. Reforms should be judged not only by the benefits they deliver but by whether they expand collective capacities and reduce dependence upon capital.

6. Freedom is not merely release from domination or participation in a meeting or choices. It is the developed collective capacity to make, govern and sustain a shared world.

Number 5 and 6 is perhaps not learnings that emerge from Bookchin himself. But Bookchin’s great contribution was to insist that revolution requires organisation, institutions and an ecological politics of everyday life. His mistake was to think these insights required leaving Marx’s methods and insights behind. They do not.

It is true that Bookchin discovered an organisational problem that too much Marxism has neglected. But he lacked the theory needed to solve it. The city, the assembly and the revolutionary organisation may all become siege fields for liberation. But none of them are its single source. Nor can their formal components be assembled in advance and rolled toward the state as though history had finally delivered the correct machine.

The question is not only what siege equipment we bring to the gates of the state. It is who builds it, who learns to operate it, who keeps it supplied, who repairs it when it breaks, and who can reproduce life while the siege continues and after the walls come down. Siege equipment does not fire itself. The walls will not fall before an idea. They will fall, if they fall at all, because working people have organised the social powers capable not only of bringing them down, but of building and sustaining another way of life beyond them.

The answer cannot be “the citizen” in the abstract or “civicism” as an ideology. It lies among working people—not merely the industrial proletariat of Bookchin’s caricature, but all those whose labour, knowledge and care reproduce society while capital fragments and appropriates their powers. Teachers, nurses, carers, builders, drivers, technicians, farmers, cleaners, administrators and communities already operate the machinery of social lif. The problem is that they do it under relations they cannot collectively control under Capitalism.

Revolutionary organisation must therefore do more than recruit these people to a programme or invite them into an assembly. It must help them recognise, connect, develop and govern the powers they already possess. Its measure is not merely whether leaders can be recalled or decisions democratically ratified, but whether more people become capable of leading, deliberating, maintaining, defending and remaking their common life.

Bookchin gives us some useful designs for the siege. But the plans are not the machinery, and the machinery is not the revolution. Only the organised working class can animate it—not as a chosen sociological identity marching out of the factory, but as the living association of those whose collective capacities already make and care for the world and might yet learn to make it otherwise.

LIFE AGAINST CAPITAL REVIEWS

How does living under capital become living against it? Books, essays, and interventions that help us think through that question. Not recommendations, but immanent critiques: attempts to understand what we can do with a text, what questions remain unresolved, and how we can build life against capital.

No. 2: Who Builds the Siege Equipment? Bookchin, Communalism and the Social Powers of Revolution

The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy (London, New York: Verso, 2015).

By Murray Bookchin.

Forward by Ursula K. Le Guin

Some of the most beautiful political lines I’ve read all year don’t appear to be about politics at all. They’re about birdsong, bicycles, friendship, time, and the simple comfort of knowing that your own life doesn’t depend on exploiting other lives:

I cannot picture a 'post-neoliberal society rooted in fairness.' But tell me that I could wake up each day and hear birds outside my window again, and that I can cycle safely to work on clearly-marked bike lanes. Tell me about a world where the rise of job-shares and redistributed wealth means that I only have to work 20 hours a week and finally have the time to make doctor's appointments, check up on my friends and neighbours, read books and get involved in local issues. Tell me that I won't worry about who made my clothes or prepared my food, because supply chains are more local now, and regulations on environmental and human rights standards have been implemented to make sure nobody is being exploited behind the scenes.

This passage comes from an essay by Cass Hebron, published in Grace Blakeley's Substack. Blakeley is one of Britain's most popular socialist writers, whose commentary on economics has helped popularise critiques of neoliberalism and inequality. Hebron is Media and Narratives officer for Oxfam International and a climate justice organiser.

Hebron's essay argues that the contemporary Left has become trapped in abstract language—phrases like "post-neoliberalism" or "reshaping power structures"—and that if we want to build majorities, we need to replace jargon with language ordinary people can live inside.

Hebron’s words don’t persuade because they win an argument. They persuade because they describe a life that almost anyone could imagine wanting to live. Reading them, you don’t picture an economic system. You picture hearing birdsong. Riding safely to work. Having time for friends. Knowing that the things you buy are no longer built on someone else’s suffering. They remind us that politics, at its best, is about the kinds of lives we can live together.

I think Hebron has identified something important. But I also think her own most powerful passage points towards a different conclusion.

Notice what actually happens. Hebron doesn’t persuade by finding simpler words for post-neoliberalism. She persuades by leaving abstraction behind and describing a way of life. The opposite of abstraction isn't plain language. It's lived experience. Ideas become common sense not because they are explained more clearly, but because they become woven into the ordinary organisation of everyday life.

Every organised way of life develops the language needed to reproduce itself. It also develops the collective social powers—the capacities to care, produce, govern, educate, defend, heal and create—through which that way of life is continually sustained and renewed. Hospitals have their own vocabulary. So do schools, engineering firms, trade unions, religions, militaries, businesses and corporations. We rarely experience these as "jargon" because they're embedded in practices we encounter every day.

Organised social power is what gives language this quality. Not simply power as domination, but power as the organised capacity to shape how people live, work and relate to one another. Institutions that organise everyday life also organise everyday language. Their concepts become ordinary because they describe capacities people exercise every day.

Every organised way of life develops its own language and teaches people how to speak about itself. Militaries talk about force projection and combined arms. Corporations speak in KPIs, stakeholder value, synergies and human capital. Medicine, law and engineering all have technical vocabularies. Few people complain because we're compelled to live inside those institutions, so their language becomes ordinary.

The issue isn't words but the social practices that give them meaning. Concepts become lived when they're rooted in widely shared everyday experience. Making that happen isn't simply an exercise in changing words. It's a challenge of social practice, organisation and the development of our collective social powers.

That's the Left's real problem. We often have concepts that are at odds with institutions, organisations and ways of life that cannot make them real. Solidarity, intersectionality and even socialism remain abstractions if people never experience them in practice.

This is why the Right often appears to speak more plainly. It isn't because it has discovered some magical language. It speaks from within institutions that already organise everyday life—workplaces, markets, media, churches, political parties and states. Where those institutions no longer command consent, it is busy building new ones organised around grievance, identity and belonging. Its language feels natural because its social power is lived.

The Left, by contrast, has spent decades losing the organisations through which people once learned cooperation as an ordinary part of life. Trade unions have weakened. Community organisations have declined. Cooperatives remain marginal. Public institutions have been hollowed out. We have become better at describing alternatives than organising them.

The answer, then, isn't simply to replace “intersectionality” with simpler words, or “socialism” with friendlier branding. If we cannot organise people's everyday capacities differently, no vocabulary will save us. No amount of marketing can substitute for social power.

If we build stronger unions, neighbourhood organisations, cooperatives and institutions of mutual care, our language will become familiar in exactly the same way corporate or military language does. People don't learn political language because someone explains it well. They learn it because they live it.

The real challenge isn't to simplify our vocabulary. It is to build the institutions and ways of life through which our collective social powers can develop freely. Once that happens, our language won't sound like jargon at all. It will simply describe the lives people already know, or are struggling to create.

Language follows life. If we want people to speak differently, we first have to organise life differently. Cass Hebron’s essay shows us why: people don’t fight for concepts. They fight for ways of life. They defend the social powers that make them possible. The life comes first. The language follows.


This essay was inspired by Cass Hebron's thoughtful article on Grace Blakeley's Substack. Whether or not you agree with my conclusions, I recommend reading Hebron's piece first—it raises important questions about how the Left communicates.

Marx spent much of his life filling notebooks. Long before an argument appeared in print, it existed as observations, excerpts, questions and fragments. Like many nineteenth-century naturalists—including Darwin—he accumulated notes long before he reached conclusions.1 These field notes are my own working notebook, written up from the already wayward observations of a field I suspect I’ll never leave. Some of these notes will become essays. Others will simply remain observations worth keeping.

In this series I’ll collect observations made while travelling, teaching and living: books rescued from opportunity shops, local museums, forgotten histories, conversations, landscapes, moments of contradiction and the small details of everyday life that reveal something about how people organise their lives.

I hope you'll read them less as a record of my holidays than as an invitation to look more carefully at the ordinary world. They are unfinished, exploratory and occasionally personal. If something strikes you, if a question occurs to you, or if you think I’ve missed something important, I’d love to hear from you. Some of the best ideas in this project have emerged through conversations with readers.

School starts again on Monday. My notebook is fuller than when I left for the holidays. So is my attention.

Until the next field notes.

In solidarity,
Beornn McCarthy
Author of Life Against Capital

Field Note. 1: Winter Holidays
Teacher holidays, industrial action, family, and the door to Queensland

This photograph was taken on a first morning back in Queensland. I look happy enough. Underneath, though, I am more burnt out than at any other point in my teaching career.

This has been the hardest year of my teaching career. I stepped into a leadership position in a brand-new school alongside forty-five new teachers. At the same time, our union entered one of the most significant industrial disputes in recent Victorian education and recently teachers voted no to a new in-principle agreement, a result that apparently shocked everyone, except teachers like me who can read workplaces and wider social conditions better than tea leaves.2

Far from this maddening period of what politicians call “industrial relations” when they’re minimising class struggle, I’ve tried to unwind and recover. By the end of term I'd developed an infected molar and a tiredness that simply refused to leave. What has helped is time with my mother in rural Queensland. I've begun to recover in an isolated pocket of my ancestors' country near the Blacksnake Ranges outside Gympie, on Gabi Gabi Country. I know more of the secrets of this land than most who live there but not much at all.

I traveled with my seven year-old son. He enjoyed swimming in the creeks between ferns, hunting for insects to observe, and playing with my mother’s cat. And despite the weather being a little too cold for tropical adventurousness, he loved it and was very upset to leave.

While sitting besides the creeks I tried to train him (but, just as much myself) to sit and be still. You can see below a video of the silence, birds and flowing water I managed to film before he filled it all up again with the constant talk, endless questions, and the jokes he memorised from his big book of jokes. “When does the door become something else? … When it’s a jar.” That was a ripper, I had to admit.

Our time near the creeks was great chance to reconnect with my mother. A retired school teacher who lived in Melbourne when I was growing up, my mother moved over a decade ago to the isolated hamlet of her childhood to look after my grandmother.

Travel also allowed me to finally finish the third piece in the Marxism and Transition series—”Society is What it Does: Notes Toward an Historical Materialism of Organised Life”. While I was writing it, I could not help observing how small towns such as Gympie and its surrounds are microcosms for our wider society and contain all the tensions and accomodations of life under capital.

Gympie is often described as Australia's gun capital. Hunting, mining, conservation, tourism, farming and regional boom and burst all meet here. The more I looked, the more it seemed like a small version of the contradictions I'd been writing about all year.

Field Note. 2: Gympie Cemetery
Gravestones, the Ghosts of Social Power, and Regional Australian Cemeteries

The first stop from the Sunshine Coast airport was Gympie Cemetery, my mother wanting to show me the new graves the family had installed for my grandmother and the McCarthys, black marble and pristine. This had taken some doing, some outlay.

My mother was happy with the graves, and we wandered through the cemetery, my son having a happy time trying to trample over graves while I taught him how to show them respect, to small avail.

My mother showed us the family graves, Irish graves, the celtic crosses, the grave of my great great grandfather and the family all buried with him. My son was impressed by the graves. He paused over his great great great grandfather while I admired the grave of John Flood, the radical newspaper man who was a blacklisted Fenian, a socialist who held together the Catholics in the region and left behind a great regional newspaper legacy in The Gympie Times.

Victorian era cemeteries always make me slow down. They were built with extraordinary confidence that future generations would continue the work of remembrance. Families erected elaborate monuments, fenced plots with cast iron, planted trees and expected children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren to return. Victorian cemeteries were built with the expectation that they would remain part of everyday social life.

Walking through Gympie Cemetery, I was struck by how many family plots appeared no longer to be maintained. Iron railings had collapsed, headstones had tilted or broken, and grass had begun to reclaim spaces that were once carefully tended. I wondered about the social arrangements that had once made this remembrance possible. A grave is not maintained by feeling alone. It requires time, proximity, knowledge, responsibility and some institution or family network capable of carrying that responsibility across generations. When people move for work, families disperse, churches weaken and everyday life becomes more hurried, the capacity to sustain such practices can also weaken.

Whether this is a broader pattern across regional Australia is something I still need to investigate. But the neglected graves at Gympie raised larger questions. What happens when a society retains the desire to remember, but loses the social organisation that made remembrance possible? What forms of social organisation enable care to continue across generations?

Continuing to walk through Gympie Cemetery, I thought about one of Marx’s most famous lines. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), reflecting on the failed revolutions of 1848, Marx argues that genuinely new social movements cannot simply dress themselves in the language and symbols of the past. Earlier revolutions, he suggests, borrowed “names, battle slogans and costumes” from previous ages because they lacked confidence in their own historical task. “The revolution of the nineteenth century”, he writes, “must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content.”

The words "its own content" echoed in my head. Marx’s target here was political nostalgia. He wanted revolutionaries to stop seeking legitimacy in Rome, in 1789, or in heroic ancestors, and instead create forms of life adequate to their own time. It is, among other things, a warning against confusing history with nostalgia. But as I stood among the weathered graves at Gympie, all the trappings of a past that was itself nostalgic for a past, I formulated a different historical materialist question: Who buries the dead?

Who tends the graves after the funeral has passed? Who remembers names after children move away? Who keeps the paths clear, repairs broken headstones, records family histories, preserves cemeteries and teaches the next generation why these places matter?

I've long wanted to write a book about Australia's regional cemeteries. There are so many beautiful and distressed cemeteries in Australia, even colonial residues such as children’s cemeteries in gold mining towns in Victoria that fill one with the eerie and the awful. Perhaps, instead, I should write a book of historical materialism in which the dead step forward and ask us who cares for them, and how, as the dead cannot bury themselves.

Field Note. 3: Entering the Cave
The Social Powers of Opportunity shops

One of my favourite holiday rituals is wandering through opportunity shops, an Australian term for the thrift or charity stores run by nonprofits. The town of Gympie in Queensland has over ten op shops, enough to have The Gympie Times asking what this says about the socio-economic status of the town.

On this holiday, we wandered into the Fancy That Op Shop run by the Anglican Church. I joked with my mother that perhaps we should not frequent this one as Catholics. And as we entered, there was a great gaggle (to use the proper noun) of grey-headed beadle ladies who were laughing together so loudly that their laughs shook racks of old jackets and dresses. There seemed to be a meeting of volunteers, plump middle aged ladies in Anglican life—something so familiar it felt like the deja vu of a Blake poem in Song of Innocence and Experience.

As we browsed Fancy That, one of the volunteers was flitting around while asking everyone who entered, us customers (but is that the right word?):

“Do you want to visit the cave?”

“The cave?”

“That’s where there’s more things to browse below. It’s not always open. Now is your chance.”

“Okay,” I jested with this one grey-headed beadle, “as long as I can take my son down there and we’ll survive.”

She laughed. “Well, I haven’t been down there in years, to tell you the truth, but you should enjoy it. Make sure you go.”

I gave her a jolly, solid Anglican nod.

My son skipped down the stairs ahead of me to the parking lot, and screeched as behind the store, sure enough, there was a cave-like entrance out of which trash and treasure spilled. It was the basement where, underneath, lay more of the taint of “used”. But we imagined it, and my son loved it, as the lair of a dragon or Ali Baba’s cave. I found nothing there I wanted, and even my son found only curiosities to leave behind, but before we left a 50c book caught my eye, and my mother the spy thriller addict found a John Le Carre tape. We passed more grey-haired beadle volunteers who sat on chairs in the dust and waved us on to pay for our treasures upstairs.

As we left, I began my reflections. My mind, overwhelmed, felt like a crowded cave. The cave was full of the trash and treasure of ordinary life. It was a zone of noncapital life operating in a defunded ruin, a creature made in the sorting of the overproduction and consumption waste of our societies. These shops always strike me as little pirate republics that time has forgot, except that they’re nonprofit hubs and are at their best full of volunteers who lure us into caves.

Who is responsible for the remnants of Capitalism? What contradictions do the ongoing demands of maintenance and conservation under capitalism present?3

All I know is that the op shop has long been a vital organ of the non-profit world in Australia, particularly since the Depression era, disciplined by capital yet never completely governed by it. It is a world of subterranean organisation, surplus objects and forgotten things, where the labour of sorting, scavenging, relocating, repairing and caring never quite ends.

Everywhere, even in regional towns, I find similar people in this labour: volunteers, young people between worlds, and grey-headed exiles from other worlds or marriages, rummaging through the past and laughing together as they patiently organise what our society has discarded. They work in the caves, basements and shop fronts that time and capital forgot, steadily reproducing forms of care that the market neither fully values nor knows quite how to organise.

Field Note. 4: The 50c Book
The Natural History of Tambourine Mountain, remembering Colonialism, and remembering Birds

While in the cave of the Fancy That op shop, I had spied a slim green book with the price of 50c. It was lying among old books such as encyclopedias and dusty biographies next to boxes of chipped crockery. My eye settled on the Australian 1988 Bicentenary label, a symbol of Australia that screamed the 80s. I’ve long been fascinated by this period in history from my childhood, but the book also fascinated me as a local natural history.

Why that attracted me to this find is that in my graduate years I studied among other things the craze for natural history in Romanticism and the eighteenth century (what scholars in the know call “The Long Eighteenth Century”).4 And I knew that sometimes the most revealing historical documents are not scholarly tomes or rare first editions. They are fifty-cent paperbacks waiting in rural opportunity shops.

My 50c book was A Natural History of Tamborine Mountain. It was produced in 1988 by the Tamborine Mountain Natural History Association with funding from the Australian Bicentennial Authority. The booklet is itself an historical object. It belongs to that strange moment when Australia was beginning to rethink the stories it told about itself while simultaneously commemorating two hundred years of European settlement. The language of settlement still dominates, yet throughout the book another history is sketched: Yugambeh occupation stretching back thousands of years, ecological destruction following European arrival, disappearing forests, the beginnings of conservation, and memories of a society in transition to life under capital.

On the flight home I found myself unable to stop reading the section on lyrebirds. I learned about the differences between the Superb Lyrebird and the Albert Lyrebird, and the comparison between Sherbrooke Forest in the Dandenongs, near my home in Victoria, and the forests of Tamborine Mountain. Lyrebirds are among the world’s most remarkable animals. I’m lucky enough to have heard their extraordinary mimicry with my son in Sherbrooke when he was five, although he probably won’t remember it. I’d heard them imitate chainsaws, sirens and mobile phones rings, but I hadn’t realised how different the two species were. One story about an Albert Lyrebird learning to mimic a flute player completely captivated me. Reading it, I found myself wanting to visit Tamborine Mountain.

The rainforests of that region have drawn me before. Lamington and Springbrook National Parks are among those places where birds seem to fill every layer of the forest. Tamborine Mountain has now joined my list, even though I know tourism can be one way of loving a place to death.

One of the most moving sections of the booklet is a reminiscence by a naturalist who grew up on Tamborine Mountain during the 1920s. Rather than remembering politicians or buildings, the author remembers birds: the annual arrival of dollar birds, owls calling through the night, fruit bats crossing the evening sky, and then, gradually, the wrens disappearing, replaced by noisy miners and currawongs as roads opened the forests to settlement. Long before ecological collapse became a political slogan, ordinary people were already noticing the gradual impoverishment of the living world around them. Environmental history often survives first in memory before it becomes science.

What struck me most was the author’s extraordinary attentiveness and compassion for the animals of Tamborine Mountain. Yet the story also seemed to stop at the arrival of settlers carrying guns into the forest, as though ecological destruction were simply the result of individual choices. The settlers themselves rarely appear as people caught within a way of organising life that encouraged clearing forests, surveying land, fencing property and treating living landscapes as resources. The memoir sees ecological loss with remarkable clarity, but it struggles to see the social relations that organised it.

For thousands of years, Yugambeh peoples organised life through seasonal movement, fire, language, ceremony and ecological knowledge. European settlement reorganised the same landscape through timber extraction, survey lines, private property, dairying, roads, orchards, tourism and suburban subdivision. Neither history is simply a history of ideas. Each is a different way of organising collective life.

By the time I closed A Natural History of Tamborine Mountain, I realised it wasn’t really a history of a mountain, or even of birds. It was a history of organised life. The history of Tamborine Mountain can be read as the history of changing social powers: different ways of organising relationships between people, land and other living beings. That increasingly feels like the question I want Life Against Capital to pursue.

Field Note. 5: Builder of Nation
Gympie Library, Andrew Fisher and the emergence of the social powers of labour

Late in the trip, my mother slipped a slim folio in front of me. It was called Heritage Wonders of the Gympie Region. She didn't say a word. She simply looked at me knowingly. I looked up, and asked, “what is this?”

”Well, it has so much about Gympie you should read,” she said, with a wise look.

I hesitated.

“Look here”, she said, opening the folio to an article on Andrew Fisher. She told me about how Fisher had an uncomfortable legacy in Gympie, someone who was today celebrated but who had also been ignored for decades. Under Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the labour movement was hardly celebrated as a force in nation building.

“Gympie Times is owned by Murdoch, mind you, so maybe things have changed”, my mother said, an eyebrow raised at the page she’d stretched before me.

”Thank you, mum”, I said.

Before I could read it, she was already off again, this time pointing out the features of Fisher’s life that interested her, including his wife. “While pregnant,” my mother galloped, “Margaret Jane Fisher participated in the Women’s Coronation March in London. It was one of the largest suffragette marches. You know, the suffragettes.”

The previous term I'd been teaching my Year 12 English class about protest movements. We'd read Emmeline Pankhurst's speeches, so yes, I knew about the suffragettes. What caught my attention wasn't the history itself but my mother's excitement. The Pankhurst energy. Even now, she was teaching.

Once my mother's light on the hill had finally exhausted itself, and she left for an appointment, I settled down to skim through the publication she had knowingly handed me in the Gympie Library, but my mind kept wondering to the space itself. It was bustling with retirees, families and teenagers on school holidays. It is one of those remarkable regional institutions without which our lives would be much smaller.

The library sits lightly in the centre of town, with its ramps, public spaces and quiet generosity, and it seems designed for everyone. Inside, I pause when I saw the local history collection. Behind glass cabinets and dark mahogany shelves sat shelves of family histories, local memoirs and regional studies, with a research room quietly waiting for the next person determined to write one more book about Gympie. It made me want to become one of them.

Eventually I turned back to the folio book itself Heritage Wonders of the Gympie Region. It was published in 2017 for the G150, commemorating the 150th anniversary of Gympie’s settlement. Builder of a Nation: Andrew Fisher (1862–1928) was a spread that presented Fisher’s legacy as settled. Fisher was Australia’s fifth Prime Minister and led the Australian Labor Party (ALP) to its national breakthrough. When I read the words “builder of a nation”, I found myself thinking less about the nation Fisher built than about the society that built Fisher.

It dawned on me that Fisher was himself built by working-class life and the struggle for emancipation. He left school at ten after his father was blacklisted for union organising and went underground to work in the mines. Before he entered parliament, trade unions, cooperatives, working-class education and political organisation had already shaped him. He emerged from his father’s world of blacklisted unionism just as Australia was nationalising itself through Federation.

Reading this, I understood a little better why my mother, and so many of her generation, remain deeply attached to the institution of the ALP. Fisher and the Labor Party left an immense legacy in Australia that today seems, at times, to be fading—or even falling out of favour. But his was a generation that focused less on electoral politics than on enduring the hostility of an entire social order. In doing so, they built a new political order from below. The rise of the Labor Party makes far more sense when we remember the social world that produced it. Chifley’s famous “light on the hill” speech, delivered to the ALP Conference at Sydney Trades Hall in 1949, was never simply an electoral slogan. It emerged from institutions, organisations and movements that had already transformed ordinary life.

Reading Fisher’s life also reminded me that political leaders do not appear from nowhere. They are formed by institutions, struggles, friendships, defeats and traditions. Before Fisher helped build a nation, working-class life had already helped build him. What struck me most was that Fisher—a Scottish migrant who would have headbutted Pauline Hanson’s monocultural vision of Australia—was shaped by the same social world my mother’s enthusiasm had just recalled: suffragettes, international protest networks, unions, cooperatives and socialists who together created a social infrastructure that still has much to teach us.

I closed the booklet and looked again at the shelves around me. Hundreds of local histories sat waiting to be read. They were not simply stories about remarkable individuals. They were records of the ordinary people, institutions and struggles that make remarkable people possible. I left wondering how many more Andrew Fishers were waiting quietly on the shelves of regional libraries. Not simply to be remembered, but to be understood.

Field Note. 6: The Dictionary and its Relations

Last year my ninety-nine year old grandmother died, leaving behind a large McCarthy family and a lasting impression as a teacher and community lynchpin. She had lived through a dramatic transformation of technology, leaving behind horses and carts to live through the organisation of a world of cars, highways, fast food, television, satellites, computing, mobile phones, the internet, streaming and more. She tried, not always smoothly, to embrace each period of change.

My grandmother maintained a wide social circle and had something of a reputation as a Gympie intellectual in a town where such luminaries are rare. She was a reader, who knew how to teach others to read, and she really appreciated words. Up until the last decade when her memory in dementia began to fail her, she would always try to sharpen her mind with a crossword and would thoughtfully puzzle over the word she held up for us.

My mother has been winding her way through her mother’s possessions, taking her time with the grief and the memories. Among the books she set aside was Que’s Computer User’s Dictionary from 1992, a once popular illustrated technical reference book that defined computing terms for PC users. It caught my eye because it seemed like such a curiosity from its times.

It was first published by Que Corporation and authored by the fantastically named Bryan Pfaffenberger, whose entries were written with a remarkable energy. When I opened it the first thing that hit me was the sheer number of terms that we have learned since the 1990s. Each one I knew and realised I had inhabited as a new digital frontier, a space of digital organisation I had to let reorganise my life when I was a child. The second thing I noticed was that it was not the outdated museum piece I expected, full of forgotten jargon from the age of floppy disks, dial-up modems and DOS prompts. Well I did read these obsolete terms, but I also found something stranger. So many of the words still belong to our world.

Whether it is network, information, memory, interface, communication, digital, interactive, data, download or database: these are terms we still inhabit. An entry on artificial intelligence was there already, and it seemed to perfectly define AI for today. The vocabulary was recognisable. What had changed was everything those words now organised in our lives, and the discourse that contested that.

When my grandmother bought this dictionary, these were specialist terms. They belonged to a new technological frontier that most people were only beginning to enter. People rose to the organisation challenge, and today they describe the ordinary texture of daily life. We don't simply use computers. We live and work through networks, communicate through platforms, store memories in clouds, navigate interfaces before breakfast and spend much of our social lives online. Many of the words survived. The society around them was transformed in ways that eventually left my grandmother behind.

The dictionary reminded me that historical change happens as old words acquire new lives. Dictionaries tell their own story of the social relations that define us. They preserve the moment before a new way of organising life becomes so ordinary that we cease to notice it. They capture a society learning to inhabit new social relations without yet understanding where those relations might lead. And they capture the struggle of the ordinary “user” to adjust to new ways of life and compete in the market for their labour.

Holding my grandmother's dictionary, it felt like looking at the threshold of a changing world, only parts of which are today obsolete because they promised to be “universal” and fell short. Our own words are changing beneath our feet in exactly the same way, while the social relations that dominate our lives continue to push us onto new frontiers that enclose our capacities. Perhaps someone thirty years from now new artefacts will show the first outlines of forms of life that are only just beginning to emerge.

Field Note. 7: Everyone will Own a Mercedes

On one of our drives between Widgee and Gympie, my mother put Radio National on and asked me to listen to some guy who interviews people.

“I don't like him,” she said, “because he makes it all about himself and doesn't listen to anyone.”

“Do you mean the Rafael guy?”

“Yes.”

“He is a narcissist. I find him difficult to listen to as well.”

As soon as she put the radio on, I expected to hear the whiny voice I’ve never been able to stand but instead I heard another one, the practiced voice of the ever so cultured David Marr. He was interviewing Australian journalist Jonathan Swan, whose new book on Donald Trump is currently selling out across the United States.

My mother simultaneously loved the interview and what Jonathan Swan had to say, and hated Marr, the interviewer whose name she didn't know. She hated him with the hatred and scorn of a voice of a devoted listener of Phillip Adams. As Swan detailed the next ridiculous unprecedented narcissistic and tragic behaviour of Commander-in-Chief of the United States, my mother went from laughter to groans and frustration as Marr interjected with a dropped in line that always somehow showed he wasn’t listening as he searched for wit.

“See, he’s terrible”, she said, also interrupting Swan. “He’s no Phillip Adams.”

“Well, Adams was an old commie”, I said, smiling.

“Not old, a young commie at university”, my mother said with the experience of a former boomer student radical.

“Yes, that’s what I meant”, I said, and then told my mother and anecdote one of my good friends who had her own experience here had told me.

“There’s a story that when Phillip Adams was older and had made it in his career he used to drive to work in a Mercedes. A former comrade asked him why he was driving such an expensive car. Do you know what Adams said in his usual thoughtful way? After the revolution, everyone will own a Mercedes.”

My mother laughed and as we drove on, the laughter continued with the next astounding behaviour from Donald, the greatest leader since Hitler, Stalin and Mao.

Field Note. 8: The Dentist
Care and repair in everyday life

By the end of the trip, my first molar—the largest in my mouth—had decided it wasn’t finished with me yet. I could feel an infection building. I tossed up a visit to a dentist in Queensland, and instead I booked an appointment with a new dentist in my local, well-established dental clinic. Before the trip, the dentist I saw in the CBD had seemed inexperienced, and didn’t know what to do with my first molar: they quoted $600 if I asked them to grudgingly do it and recommended I go to the hospital instead for thousands. I thought I’d get a second opinion.

The new dentist had a warm, professional and calm manner. She asked me my problems and within minutes was X-raying my mouth. I explained what had happened and asked her for her opinion. She looked at the X-ray, smiled, and said she could have that out right away. I was so grateful as I just wanted the tooth out. A few days later, I would be back at work teaching. And once school starts, there never seems to be a good time to have your mouth rearranged. If the end of the day with teenagers seems at time pulling teeth, I didn’t want to be literally pulling teeth during the term.

Over the course of 15 minutes, however, the dentist made it easy. She said it would come out in two parts, and seemed to know how it would go before we started. She numbed and rearranged my mouth. And when I was numb in half of my mouth, she was ready for me. She pulled my tooth, and did it in what appeared to be almost gigantic gyrations, firm but gentle, for a good ten minutes.

When it seemed nothing was going to happen in the end, she moved on to cutting my roots with a saw. Those pesky roots, she said, just didn’t want to let go. She never seemed in doubt, however, that the tooth would come out.

The snap and release was the satisfying thing about it all, and I saw her pull the tooth out, but I felt nothing.

“That is my shoulder workout done for the day”, she joked as it was almost over.

It all cost me $290, and I left carrying my wisdom tooth home in a little sterile bag.

The dentist and my local clinic surprised me. It was a well-established practice built during the Whitlam era in the 1970s. It felt calmer than most clinics. But still they asked, more than once, whether I had private health insurance. I don’t. I rely on the public system. Wherever careful repair is required, it seems questions of insurance and access must appear.

“That’s the biggest tooth I’ve ever seen.”

His eyes widened as he leaned in for a closer look.

“It looks so gross.”

Then, almost immediately:

“Can I hold it?”

He turned it over in his hands, inspecting every root with a mixture of horror and fascination, unable to look away. Perhaps he wondered why the tooth fairy only rewarded children.

When the anaesthetic wore off, I realised how much quiet labour had gone into fifteen minutes of repair. We celebrate invention, production and achievement. We hand out awards for breakthroughs and grand accomplishments. Yet much of what allows a society to flourish is quieter than that. It is the work of preventing infection, relieving pain, repairing damage and helping people return to their ordinary lives. Dentistry is only one example. Much of the work that sustains our lives remains almost invisible until something hurts.

The more I travel and write these field notes, the more I find myself noticing the people whose work consists not in making something new, but in patiently stopping things from falling apart.

Meanwhile, from time to time, I am still catching my son staring at the tooth, which he has now renamed “fungus.”

He’ll probably remember it for years.

So will I.

📓Back of the Notebook

What is still making me smile

• My son trying very hard to be disgusted by my tooth while refusing to stop looking at it.

• My mother’s running commentary on a Radio National presenter.

• The Anglican op shop volunteer inviting strangers into “the cave.”

• A dentist who considered extracting my molar part of her daily gym routine.
  

Questions that will return

• Cemeteries may tell us as much about the organisation of the living as the dead.

• Maintenance seems to disappear from history until it breaks down.

• Regional op shops function as accidental or wayward historical archives.

• Are op shops part of the hidden infrastructure that keeps Australian life going?

• Conservation might be better understood as the maintenance of collective capacities.

• Andrew Fisher wasn’t simply a nation builder. What kind of society built Andrew Fisher?

• Natural history often preserves social history without intending to.

• Local history often preserves ecological memory more honestly than national narratives.

• How many institutions exist to stop things from falling apart?

• Historical materialism should observe organised life rather than production alone?

• Need to find evidence on changing cemetery maintenance in regional Australia.

• Every regional town seems to preserve forgotten histories of labour, care and community that rarely appear in national political histories.

• The history of capitalism might be better written as a history of changing social powers than simply markets or industry.

• Return to Tamborine Mountain.
  

I have loved ships for as long as I can remember.

Around the time of Australia’s Bicentenary in 1988, I remember standing aboard one of the tall ships visiting Melbourne at Princes Pier. Whether it was the Young Endeavour itself1 or a different replica ship has become blurred with time. Memory is like that. The details fade while the feeling remains.

I remember feeling like a stowaway, and wanting to be one.

The smell of that ship lingers still: salt, tar and polished timber beneath my feet. Above me, a forest of ropes disappeared into the sky. Far above me a young woman balanced impossibly high in the rigging, whistling down to the crowd of tourists below with an ease that made the risk seem ordinary. I wished I could be up there.

The teenagers who crewed the ship were not much older than I was, but they seemed to inhabit another world. Calm and alert, they climbed, tied knots, stood watches and spoke a language of sails, spars and currents that I could not begin to understand. Everything on board seemed connected to everything else. A rope disappeared through a pulley only to emerge somewhere entirely different. A knot held together a sail. A beam supported a mast. Each part only made sense because of every other part.

For years afterwards I tried to enter that world in my own way. I learned about how to tie natutical knots from library books, collected old sailing books and manuals from bargain bins and filled the fake timber walls of my rented bedroom with maps of Bass Strait. Long after the childhood dream of joining the Young Endeavour had faded, ships continued to find me. As an undergraduate I discovered Michel Serres, whose philosophy repeatedly returned with the wisdom of an old sailor to navigation, geometry and the sea. Somehow, ships kept returning whenever I found myself trying to understand the world.2

With the benefit of hindsight, I realise the Bicentenary filled my childhood imagination with one society while leaving another largely in shadow. At school we reenacted the voyage of the convicts, lying beneath classroom tables in prison pyjamas while our teachers explained the hardships of the crossing. Aboriginal society appeared only at the edge of the story. Years later, I realised that the ships themselves had been teaching me something different entirely. It was never simply ships that fascinated me. It was organisation.

A ship is a thing. It is timber, rope, canvas and iron. Leave it long enough in dry dock and a thing is all it becomes. But a ship crossing an ocean becomes something else. It is an organised way of life. Like every organised way of life, it depends upon cooperation, authority, conflict and continual acts of maintenance that disappear from view precisely when they succeed.

Nobody and nothing aboard maintains itself. Nothing aboard exists in isolation. Meals exist because somebody cooks them. The hull survives because somebody notices the first signs of rot. Water is rationed. Sails are repaired before storms arrive. Every person’s labour becomes part of everyone else’s survival. Every failure becomes everyone else's problem. A ship remains afloat not because there is a captain giving orders, but because hundreds of ordinary acts of work continually reproduce the relationships that keep it alive. I had no language for this as a child. I simply knew that I wanted to belong to it.

Only much later did I realise that my childhood fascination was already living the political questions at stake. In January 1988 Margaret Thatcher, who had just become Britain’s longest-serving Prime Minister, presented the Young Endeavour to Bob Hawke as Britain's Bicentennial gift to Australia. Thousands of young Australians have since learnt teamwork, seamanship and leadership aboard her. There is something genuinely admirable about that program. Learning to depend upon other people, and becoming someone they can depend upon in return, is no small achievement.

History, however, has a habit of giving familiar symbols unfamiliar meanings. Two hundred years after Britain transported the First Fleet across the world, it commemorated that history by giving Australia another ship. Not a warship. A floating classroom. And at almost exactly the same moment another British inheritance was coming ashore. The language was different this time. Not empire, but markets. Not mercantilism, but privatisation, deregulation and competition. Under Hawke and Keating, Australia entered another period of transition. The country's political economy was reorganised in ways that still shape everyday life.3

It was during these same years that Thatcher made one of the defining statements of the neoliberal age: "There is no such thing as society."4 I have come to think she misunderstood her own achievement. The neoliberal project did not abolish society. It reorganised it. It reorganised the ordinary relations through which people worked, cared, competed, travelled, governed, learned and imagined their futures. Society did not disappear. One way of organising life was gradually displaced by another until the new order came to feel as natural as the old.

The significance of the Young Endeavour lay in the capacities it cultivated. While it was hardly causal in any direct sense5, it reminds me that societies are not reproduced primarily through speeches, constitutions or elections. They reproduce themselves by developing capacities that people learn to exercise together. Long before we encounter political theory, we learn how to cooperate and compete, how to obey and lead, how to repair, maintain and care. Politics first enters our lives not as an argument about society, but as participation in a particular way of organising life.

Society is what it does, not what it says about itself.6 These words began as an intuition, but gradually they have become a method. Every society inherits capacities. What differs historically is how those capacities become organised through social relations into the powers that reproduce a particular way of life. Once I started looking at societies this way, every institution became a question of organisation, every history a struggle over what kind of life was being reproduced.

During my undergraduate years I encountered similar words that changed the way I thought about ships—and, eventually, society. I read them in N. A. M. Rodger's The Wooden World (1986), a history of the eighteenth-century Royal Navy, which described the ordinary life of a ship in terms that seemed to capture exactly what I had been trying to understand all along:

A ship’s company, large or small, was a microcosm of society with a manifold division of ranks and ratings, of social class and status, of skills and professsion, and of age. The life of the ship can only be understood in relation to these overlapping patterns. In their dealings with one another, in tension and accomodation, in persuasion and command, men acted within the constrains imposed by the complex internal sturcture of shopboard society.7

I stopped reading, not because of a dramatic revelation, but because it was obviously true. This passage in Rodger’s book had described a ship as a society rather than a machine. Over the years I came to think Rodger’s insight into the “invisible and subtle divisions” of shipboard life reached even further than he intended.8

Rodger taught me to see ships differently. Australia taught me to see societies differently. Marx taught me to ask how one organised way of life comes to replace another.9 Together they suggested that historical materialism begins not with things but with relations; and not even with institutions, but with the organised and ordinary activities through which societies continually reproduce a way of life.

When I understand societies as organised ways of life, the First Fleet begins to look different. Those eleven ships that reached Botany Bay in 1788 transformed Australia not simply because they carried soldiers, convicts and supplies. They carried and coordinated the organised capacities through which British society could reproduce itself on Aboriginal Country. If that is true, the central problem of transition is not simply how one government replaces another. And it is not how one mode of production succeeds another. It is how one way of life displaces others and gradually makes itself ordinary.

In the years following the Bicentennial, I felt a growing realisation as I knew more of the violent struggle and domination associated with Colonialism. It slowly became clear to me that organisation is never politically innocent. The same capacities can be organised through radically different social relations, reproducing very different ways of life.

To understand a society in transition, then, is not simply to interpret its ideas or describe its institutions. It is to understand how it continually organises the conditions of its own existence. That is the problem that this essay sets out to explore. The argument that follows begins from a simple habit of paying attention to the organisation of life. Whenever I encounter a society, I find myself asking questions about this organisation: How is this way of life organised? What social relations organise this way of life? Who performs the ordinary labour that keeps it alive? What relationships must be continually maintained? What must be repaired, cared for, taught and remembered? What kinds of roles does this organisation continually reproduce? Who benefits from this organisation? Who bears its costs?

Australia is not simply my example. It is where I first learned to ask these questions. These questions do not replace Marx’s concern with production, ownership and class.10 They deepen it by asking how those relations are continually organised, defended, reproduced and transformed through the ordinary work of everyday life. Historical materialism, I want to suggest, becomes stronger when it begins here—not with society as an object, but with society as an organised activity.

Every society inherits the capacities of life. Every society organises them. What differs historically are the social relations through which those capacities become organised and therefore the social powers they produce. This essay develops that proposition as a historical materialist method. It also traces how communism has frequently confronted this problem, even if Marxists have not always described it in these terms.

The problem of transition is ultimately the problem of organising another way of life.

The Wooden World Comes Ashore

I am returning to the history of the First Fleet not because it offers a model for communist transition. Quite the opposite. It reveals, with unusual clarity, how one organised way of life dominated and oppressed another. Rather than treating transition as an abstract political problem, the Fleet allows us to watch an organised society crossing an ocean and attempting to reproduce itself somewhere entirely new. It is not a symbol for transition. It is one of history's clearest examples of it. By examining how the British ruling classes organised the First Fleet and the durable reproduction of British society on Aboriginal Country, I hope to confront the practical problem that communism must also answer: how does another way of life become capable of enduring?

When I look back at the Australian Bicentenary in 1988, I realise that this was already the question I was trying to ask without yet possessing the language for it. The commemorations celebrated the arrival of the First Fleet while tens of thousands of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians protested across the country. More than 40,000 people marched through Sydney, while the Tall Ships entering the harbour were met by demonstrations declaring 1988 not a celebration but a continuation of invasion. Those protests now strike me differently. They were not simply disputes over historical memory. They expressed the continued existence of another way of organising life of great endurance refusing to disappear.

Rodger had already taught me that a wooden ship was not simply timber but an organised society. Once I began looking at the First Fleet through that lens, I found it difficult to see it merely as a convoy transporting convicts to Australia. I began asking a different question: What kind of society crossed the ocean?

Australian history usually answers by listing the Fleet's passengers and cargo. My method asks a different question: what capacities had already been organised before Britain could reproduce itself on another continent? Once we ask that question, the inventory changes its meaning.

The First Fleet was larger and more socially complex than the familiar image suggests.11 When it departed Portsmouth in May 1787 it comprised eleven vessels: two Royal Navy escorts, six convict transports and three store ships. Around 1,420 people12 travelled aboard them, including convicts, marines, sailors, naval officers, surgeons, civil administrators, chaplains, women and children, together with pets, livestock, seeds, tools, medicines, surveying instruments, portable forges, official records, construction materials and weapons.13

Historians often describe these as people and cargo. But they were something more. Before Britain established a colony, it first organised the social powers necessary to reproduce one. The Fleet did not simply carry useful individuals. It carried capacities already organised through British social relations into durable social powers. Navigation had become a naval institution. Surveying had become property. Accounting had become administration. Military discipline had become organised coercion. Agriculture had become settlement. Medicine had become the organised preservation of labour and military capacity. Religion had become moral authority. What crossed the oceans was not simply a prison convoy but an organised ecology of social powers already capable of reproducing British society far from Britain itself.

Every society inherits capacities. Britain did not invent navigation, agriculture, repair, care or administration. What distinguished the First Fleet was the way these capacities of life had already been coordinated through British social relations into powers capable of reproducing empire. Organisation did not eliminate conflict. Ships remained deeply hierarchical and often brutally violent places. But hierarchy coordinated specialised capacities into an organised society capable of reproducing itself under extraordinary conditions. The political question was never whether navigation, maintenance or education existed, but whose society they reproduced.

Rodger's observation that a ship's company formed "a microcosm of society" that was lived in all its “tension and accomodation” therefore reaches further than the eighteenth-century Royal Navy.14 Each vessel functioned as a society in miniature, while the Fleet itself formed a larger ecology of organised social powers. Naval officers exercised military command. Surveyors prepared property relations. Clerks reproduced administration. Carpenters and blacksmiths maintained the material conditions of life. Surgeons preserved the health of crews and convicts. Sailors repaired sails, pumps and rigging. Chaplains cultivated moral discipline. Cooks transformed provisions into meals that sustained hundreds of people. None of these capacities existed in isolation. Each depended upon the others. The Fleet survived because they were continually reproduced and their capcities were coordinated.

To further understand these societies, we must understand some key details. Although the expedition was conceived and directed by the British government, only Sirius and Supply belonged to the Royal Navy. The remaining nine vessels were privately owned merchant ships chartered through commercial contractors, principally the London shipping firm Camden, Calvert & King.15 Long before anyone spoke of outsourcing or public-private partnerships, colonial expansion already depended upon the close coordination of state administration, military force and private capital.16 Capitalism did not arrive in Australia as a free market. It arrived as an organised social order in which state power and commercial accumulation combined. The First Fleet coordinated institutions already organised through particular social relations. The same capacities that allowed people to navigate, cultivate, repair, govern and educate were organised through relations of domination and capital. This is why a transition to a new society cannot inherit existing institutions: any genuine transformation must reorganise the social relations through which those capacities become social powers.

The voyage itself contains insights into how how Colonisation disciplined the capacities to reproduce its own organisation of life. Long before the Fleet reached Botany Bay it was already reproducing the ordinary conditions of British life at sea. For more than eight months people were born and died. Food was rationed. Disease spread and was treated. Punishments were administered. Clothing was repaired. Water was measured. Livestock survived only through continual care. Official records were protected because another society depended upon their arrival. When the ships finally entered Port Jackson in January 1788, colonisation did not begin as a proclamation. It began as care and work. Boats ferried stores ashore. Marines secured landing sites. Carpenters repaired damaged vessels. Surveyors measured Country through another geometry of ownership. Clerks unpacked ledgers. Blacksmiths assembled portable forges. Surgeons established hospitals. Seeds were sorted. Pets were carried to new temporary camps. Livestock unloaded. Everyone who came ashore had needs to be met and a life to continue. And every object unloaded carried with it another social relationship. An axe required skilled hands capable of maintaining it. Seeds required fences, labour, seasons and accumulated agricultural knowledge. Surveying instruments only made sense within a legal order transforming Country into property. Even punishment depended upon organised institutions capable of making authority durable.

One detail about this landing has stayed with me more than I expected. Many of the female convicts were not immediately brought ashore. They remained aboard the transports until accommodation had been prepared. At first this appears to be a logistical curiosity. Looked at through the method I am developing here, it becomes something else. Settlement did not begin simply by unloading soldiers or proclaiming sovereignty. It required the gradual organisation of households, care, washing, cooking, nursing, childbirth and the everyday labour through which society reproduces itself.17 The colony was already confronting the problem that every organised way of life eventually confronts: who will perform the ordinary labour through which tomorrow becomes possible?

Our understanding of the ship as a society is important because it changes what we think crossed the oceans. The First Fleet did not merely transport people, supplies and imperial ambition. It transported an organised way of life.

Genocide scholar Patrick Wolfe's observation that settler colonialism is "a structure, not an event" is in this light important.18 The invasion of Aboriginal Country was not completed when the ships entered Port Jackson. In many respects, it had only begun. Every survey line drawn across Country, every fence erected, every court convened, every school opened, every road constructed, every property title issued and every farm established extended the organised social powers carried across the oceans aboard those ships. Colonialism became durable not simply because Britain conquered, but because it continually reproduced the institutions, relationships and ordinary practices through which British society became increasingly ordinary on Aboriginal land while simultaneously attempting to dismantle the organised ways of life that already existed there.

The history of colonisation is often written—or forgotten about in “The Great Australian Silence”19—as a history of conquest. My concern is slightly different. Conquest created the conditions under which another society attempted to reproduce itself, but conquest alone could never make that society durable. Violence can destroy one society, but it cannot by itself reproduce another. Violence destroys. It does not cultivate fields, educate children, repair ships, organise transport, maintain households or reproduce institutions. Every enduring social order must continually organise the capacities through which ordinary life becomes possible. The class struggle is therefore never simply a struggle over who rules. It is a struggle over which social powers organise everyday life, whose capacities they develop, and toward what kind of future. Colonialism depended not simply upon coercion and violence but upon the structural organisation of everyday life. That distinction, I think, is central to understanding historical transition. This is why I think organisation deserves a more central place within historical materialism.

Still, to understand how colonisation as organised life did systematic violence, it is necessary to know Colonialism never unfolded without resistance. The First Fleet did not arrive in an empty landscape. It confronted societies that had already organised life on this continent for tens of thousands of years. Colonisation therefore confronted not nature but another organised way of life. Fire regimes, fisheries, pathways, seasonal harvesting, kinship systems and ecological knowledge continually reproduced Aboriginal societies in ways Europeans scarcely recognised. Bill Gammage in The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (2011) has shown that colonists repeatedly mistook maintained landscapes for untouched wilderness precisely because they could not see the labour through which Country was continually cared for. And, even when they did begin to see, they systematically denied, exploited, owned or destroyed them.

Aboriginal peoples did not simply sit still as their way of life was destroyed. The Eora and neighbouring nations monitored, negotiated and resisted the newcomers from the beginning. Governor Arthur Phillip was speared at Manly. Pemulwuy led sustained campaigns against farms, granaries and settlements for more than a decade.20 This helps us identify the significance of resistance. Roads, granaries and farms were not merely economic assets. They were the material conditions through which another society was attempting to reproduce itself. Attacking them therefore became more than military resistance. Seen this way, invasion and resistance become competing projects of social organisation rather than simply opposing military forces. Aboriginal resistance became—and is still to this day—a struggle over the organisation of life itself.

The colony, moreover, very nearly failed. This matters more than historians sometimes acknowledge. If British sovereignty alone were sufficient, failure would have been impossible, but sovereignty could not produce food. It could not repair damaged tools or overcome exhausted soils. The colony survived only because people continually reorganised the conditions under which life could continue.21 Settlement shifted to Parramatta, where supply networks were rebuilt while administrative routines changed. Agricultural practices adapted, often by appropriating Aboriginal knowledge while simultaneously destroying the societies that had produced it.22 The lesson is uncomfortable but important. A society survives not because it once succeeded, but because it continually reorganises itself in response to failure.

Nothing about this process deserves admiration. Every successful adaptation strengthened dispossession and deepened the structures of settler colonialism. Yet studying how colonial society became what Oodgeroo Noonuccal called “white command”23 reveals something historically important. Durable societies are not founded once and for all. They continually learn, repair, reorganise and reconstruct the ordinary conditions of their own existence. Colonial society did not endure because the First Fleet landed successfully. It endured because it continually organised the social powers through which one way of life reproduced itself while systematically dismantling another.

This is why communists should study this history with ruthless honesty. The object is not to admire empire but to understand the practical problem it solved. Every ruling class confronts the same practical question: how are the capacities of life organised through social relations into enduring social powers capable of reproducing a particular way of life? The communist problem is not whether organisation is necessary. Every society must organise itself. The question is whether those same social powers can become genuinely common without simultaneously reproducing domination.

This, I think, is what historical materialism begins to reveal when approached through the organisation of life. Rather than seeing only people, institutions or objects, we begin to see organised capacities, social relations and the social powers through which societies continually reproduce themselves. The inventory becomes a map of organised capacities, social powers and the practical work through which societies reproduce themselves. Politics appears differently too. The decisive question is no longer simply who owns society or who governs it, but how society continually organises itself, whose capacities it develops, whose it exhausts, and what kind of life it makes durable.

Once we learn to read history in this way, the communist problem of transition also changes. It is no longer simply how capitalism is abolished, nor even how state power is conquered. Those questions remain indispensable. But another immediately follows: how can another organised way of life develop the common social powers capable of reproducing itself while capitalism is still trying to reproduce its own?

Every voyage eventually reaches land. Every society organises life. The political question is not whether organisation exists, but what kind of life it continually reproduces.

The Organisation of Life

Understanding the First Fleet has not simply taught me something about colonialism. It has changed how I look at every society. Once I understood that a ship was not merely carrying a society but continually reproducing one, I found myself asking the similar questions wherever I looked: How does this way of life remain alive? What labour must continually be performed before it appears effortless? Which relationships are being reproduced? What capacities are being cultivated? What social roles are being organised? What kinds of ways of life are becoming ordinary?

These are recognisably Marxist questions. They begin with production. Marx taught us that capitalism is not fundamentally a collection of things but a social relation reproduced through production itself. Factories produce commodities, but capitalist production simultaneously reproduces the relation between capital and wage labour. As Marx writes at the end of the first volume of Capital, capitalist production “produces and reproduces the capital relation itself.”30 That insight remains indispensable. But in the last few years I have more and more come to think it does not exhaust the question.

Capital can be considered unfinished, as he never realised the six volumes that Marx originally planned in 1858.24 In the second volume of Capital, Marx turned from production to reproduction, asking how capitalism continually renews itself from one cycle to the next through the circulation of means of production and means of consumption. His schemes of reproduction reveal that production is always embedded within a wider process through which society recreates the conditions of its own existence. Looking back at the First Fleet suggests another extension. Before production could even begin, Britain had to reproduce navigation, repair, surveying, administration, medicine, domestic labour, law and countless other capacities that made production possible in the first place. Marx brilliantly theorised the reproduction of the capital relation. The First Fleet reminds us that every society must also reproduce the wider organisation of life.25

Marx himself pointed out that production never appears in isolation.Every act of production presupposes an already organised world. Workers must first be born before they can be employed. As Marx put it from the perspective of capital, “the muscles, nerves, bones, and brains of existing labourers”, the “necessities” of life under capital must be reproduced: they must be fed, educated, housed, transported, healed and cared for throughout their lives.26 Roads must already exist. Water must already flow. Knowledge must already have accumulated. Machines must already have been maintained. Forests, rivers, soils and oceans must continue to possess the capacities upon which production itself depends.27 Labour-power, indispensable though it is, presupposes a much wider field of the capacities of life.

This is why I have gradually come to distinguish between labour-power and what I call social powers. Labour-power names the worker’s capacity to labour under capitalism. Social powers refer more broadly to the capacities of life once they become organised through historically specific social relations into durable forms capable of reproducing a way of life. Every society inherits capacities. What differs historically is not whether people teach, repair, care, navigate, cultivate or remember, but how these capacities become organised. When coordinated through enduring social relations they become social powers capable of reproducing entire societies.

In widening our understanding of labour-power, social reproduction theory has made one of the most important contributions to Marxism over the past half century.28
Developed by thinkers and feminist Marxists such as Lise Vogel, Silvia Federici, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser, social reproduction theory demonstrated that capitalism depends upon forms of unpaid labour long rendered invisible by classical political economy.29 Cooking meals, raising children, caring for the elderly, maintaining households, emotional labour, education and the reproduction of labour-power are not external to capitalism. They are among its conditions of possibility.

I think this insight is profoundly important. But I also wonder whether the field can be widened still further. For what societies reproduce is not simply labour-power. They reproduce organised ways of life. When these capacities become coordinated through enduring social relations they become social powers. A school is not simply a building. It is an organised social power through which the capacities to teach, learn, administer and remember are coordinated. A hospital organises care, medicine, knowledge and infrastructure. A port organises navigation, logistics, engineering and communication. A corporation organises labour, finance, technology and management. Institutions are therefore not simply things. They are organised social powers through which societies continually reproduce particular ways of life. They are also sites of class struggle because they organise the capacities through which societies endure.

By seeing history in this way, we begin to see that the First Fleet carried far more than convicts, marines and supplies. It carried organised social powers. Navigation. Surveying. Property. Law. Agriculture. Domestic labour. Military discipline. Religion. Accounting. Timekeeping. Repair. Administration. Ecological knowledge. These capacities did not travel independently. They arrived already coordinated through the social relations of British colonialism and were gradually reorganised on Aboriginal Country into another durable way of life.

The British Marxist Raymond Williams famously described culture not as art or refinement but as “a whole way of life.”30 I have increasingly come to think that historical materialism points towards a similar conclusion. Society is not merely an economy, a state or a collection of institutions. It is an organised way of life continually reproduced through production, reproduction, maintenance, education, ecology, law, culture, memory and care. “Culture is ordinary”31: if Williams broadened culture beyond art, perhaps Marxism can broaden production beyond the factory by asking how entire ways of life are organised, reproduced and transformed.

This also changes how I understand class. Marxism has rightly analysed class primarily through relations of production. It must continue to do so. But ruling classes organise much more than production alone. They organise education, property, transport, law, media, finance, households, administration and culture into social powers through which their own world becomes ordinary. Gramsci recognised this in his analysis of hegemony.35 Cabral recognised it in his understanding of culture as a living practice of national reproduction.36 Fanon recognised it when he described colonialism as reorganising everyday existence itself until domination appeared natural.37 These are just some of the Marxist thinkers who recognised the need to extend Marxist inquiry. Read together with social reproduction theory, these traditions point towards a broader historical materialism concerned with the organisation of life itself.

Production, reproduction, maintenance, education, ecology, infrastructure, culture and care are not separate domains waiting to be connected by theory. They are already connected in practice. Every society continually coordinates them into a coherent, though always contested, way of life. That, I have come to believe, is what historical materialism studies at its most powerful. It studies how the capacities of life become organised into social powers through historically specific social relations, how those powers reproduce particular ways of life, whose interests they serve, and how they become objects of struggle and transformation. Capitalism, understood in this way, is not simply an economic system. It is a historically specific organisation of society’s social powers around the accumulation of capital.

Transition and the Communist Way of LIfe

Every communist generation inherits the same practical problem: how does one organised way of life become another?

The question is easily mistaken for one of political power alone. Revolutions lend themselves to dramatic images: the storming of a palace, the overthrow of a government, the seizure of state power or the abolition of private property. History remembers these moments because they are visible. They divide time neatly into a before and an after. Life is rarely so accommodating.

Even where a revolution succeeds, people wake the following morning needing food, water, shelter, medicine, warmth and companionship. Bridges still require repair. Children still need teaching. Harvests still have to be organised. Electricity must continue flowing. Hospitals must remain open. Every society must continue reproducing the conditions of life. This, I have come to think, is where the communist problem of transition truly begins.

Marx and Engels never imagined communism as a moral ideal imposed upon history. In The German Ideology they famously described communism as "the real movement which abolishes the present state of things."32 The emphasis falls on real. Communism is not first an ideal but an historical activity emerging through struggle, contradiction and collective practice. Marx also famously insisted that he was not writing "recipes for the cook-shops of the future."33 No blueprint could substitute for history itself. That distinction between the explanation of the "present state of things” and the practice of transformation runs throughout Marx’s work, not merely in the famous eleventh thesis in his Feurbach.

Marx was equally clear that capitalism creates the conditions for another society. The question is how those conditions become durable. Marx answered this primarily through the development of capitalism itself: the concentration of labour, the growth of productive forces, the contradictions of accumulation and the collective organisation of the working class. Those insights remain indispensable. But they leave another practical question increasingly pressing itself upon us: how do the capacities inherited from capitalism become reorganised into the common social powers of another society?

This question became concrete whenever Marx encountered living revolutionary experiments. The Paris Commune fascinated him not because it realised an ideal society, but because ordinary people immediately began reorganising everyday life. Public officials became elected and recallable. The standing army gave way to the armed people. Education was secularised. Night work in bakeries was abolished. Abandoned workshops became cooperatives. Women organised hospitals, canteens, neighbourhood relief and new forms of collective life that challenged the patriarchal household.

Read through the argument developed in this essay, the Commune appears as an experiment in reorganising social powers. Marx’s attention was repeatedly drawn towards the practical organisation of society itself. Revolutionary politics had arrived not only in parliament or on the barricades, but in schools, workshops, kitchens, laundries, neighbourhoods and associations. The decisive question was no longer simply who governed. It was how life would be organised. This is why the Commune occupies such an enduring place within the communist imagination. It briefly revealed that revolution is not exhausted by insurrection. It is also the collective reorganisation of the ordinary practices through which society reproduces itself.

Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) deepens this insight. Communist society, he argued, emerges “still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.”34 The metaphor is striking, not in the least in the way that mother in labour is rendered somewhat invisible. A new society does not begin from nothing. It inherits institutions, infrastructures, habits, knowledge and capacities already shaped by capitalism. Transition is therefore not the creation of a pure society, but the historical reorganisation of an inherited one.

Here I think historical materialism and Communism can be extended. Marx showed with extraordinary clarity how capitalism reproduces the capital relation through production. But every society reproduces far more than production alone. It reproduces education, care, administration, maintenance, ecology, memory, logistics, culture and countless other organised capacities without which production itself could never continue. The question is therefore not simply how capital accumulates, but how the capacities of life become organised through social relations into social powers capable of reproducing an entire way of life.

From this perspective, communist transition appears somewhat differently. The central strategic question is no longer only who owns production, indispensable though that remains. It is also how society develops the organised social powers through which people become increasingly capable of governing the conditions of life together. Britain did not establish itself on this continent because it possessed superior ideas. It organised navigation, surveying, law, administration, agriculture, military force, education and property into a colonial way of life capable of reproducing itself across generations. Capitalism has done the same on a global scale. Finance, logistics, media, schools, digital platforms, transport systems, households and states continually coordinate society’s social powers around the accumulation of capital until that organisation increasingly appears natural. Communist politics therefore cannot begin only after capitalism has been overthrown. History suggests something different. It begins wherever people develop the common social powers through which another society might eventually endure.

Every strike develops new capacities for cooperation. Every union cultivates collective decision-making. Every cooperative experiments with another organisation of work. Public libraries, childcare centres, neighbourhood assemblies, commons, community health services and mutual aid networks all enlarge people’s practical capacity to organise aspects of life together. None abolishes capitalism alone. But each contributes to the organised social powers upon which another way of life might eventually depend.

This also changes how communists judge reforms. The question is not only whether a reform redistributes wealth or alleviates suffering, important though both remain. It is whether it enlarges the common social powers through which people become capable of organising life differently. The eight-hour day, which was struggled for in Colonial Australia for over 70 years after the First Fleet landed, did not simply shorten working hours.35 It reorganised time itself, creating possibilities for education, association, political participation and care. Public education does more than teach literacy. Universal healthcare does more than treat illness, and organises forms of care markets cannot sustain.36 Libraries, public transport, childcare, housing and parks do more than provide services. They organise capacities that markets cannot reliably reproduce because their value lies not simply in exchange but in enlarging people’s ability to participate in common life. Reform is not merely a way of acting as “a hospital ordinary for capitalism”, as Lenin might have put it.37 The “ordinary” is the organisation we must address, and the deeper level of strategy is how reforms that Communists fight for can enlarge our collective capacity to organise life differently.

Maintenance has therefore come to occupy an increasingly central place in my own thinking. Capitalism celebrates innovation because innovation promises accumulation.38 Societies, however, survive far less through continual invention than through ordinary acts of repair. Every organised way of life continually decides what will be maintained, what will be restored, what will be taught and what will be allowed to decay.39 The significance of maintenance extends well beyond infrastructure. Democracies require participation. Rivers require restoration. Knowledge requires teaching. Relationships require care. Commons require stewardship.40 Human capacities themselves require continual renewal, as do ecological capacities. And all of these are sites of enduring class conflict that can help us reshape our world. Steven Jackson describes this as the “broken world” perspective: societies endure not because they avoid breakdown but because they are continually repaired.41

Seen in this light, the common twenty-first century condition of burnout in work and careers also appears differently. Burnout is not merely an individual psychological condition. It increasingly reflects the organisation of social powers against the very capacities they depend upon reproducing. Teachers lose the capacity to teach as they wish. Parents lose the capacity to parent as they hoped. Communities lose the time required for association. Capital continually develops those social powers that facilitate accumulation while exhausting, enclosing or commodifying those primarily concerned with reproducing life itself.

Few revolutionaries confronted these organisational questions more directly than Lenin. The seizure of power in October 1917 lasted only days. The organisation of another society lasted years. Grain had to reach cities. Railways had to function. Teachers had to teach. Hospitals had to operate. Literacy had to expand. Electricity had to flow. Lenin’s famous formulation—”Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country”—appears differently through the argument developed here.42 It was never merely a slogan about industrial development. It identified the organised social powers through which another society might become durable. Lenin’s later embrace of the New Economic Policy can also be understood in these terms. The question was never simply whether markets should exist. It was which social powers would become historically dominant. Could markets remain subordinate while cooperative institutions, planning, public ownership, literacy and democratic organisation steadily expanded? Or would capitalist social relations once again reorganise society around accumulation?

This problem of a transition to a Communist way of life has never disappeared. Communism confronts capitalism not simply as an economic system but as an organised way of life. The struggle is therefore not only over ownership, indispensable though that remains. It is over which social relations organise the capacities of life into social powers, what kind of life those powers continually reproduce, and whether they increasingly become common powers through which society consciously transforms itself. Communist transition is therefore neither a single event nor merely the conquest of state power. It is the historical process through which another organised way of life develops the social powers capable of reproducing itself while capitalism is still trying to reproduce its own.

Conclusion: Once More, The Commons of Becoming

Throughout this essay I have tried to practise historical materialism in a slightly different way. Marx taught us to examine the historically specific social relations through which capital produces and reproduces itself. The Paris Commune revealed his fascination with ordinary people reorganising those relations in practice rather than merely seizing state power. Lenin discovered that revolution immediately became a problem of bread, railways, literacy, electrification and administration. Gramsci showed how ruling classes patiently organise consent until their way of life appears natural, while recent work on maintenance reminds us that societies endure not because they avoid breakdown but because they are continually repaired.43

Held together, such traditions suggest that historical materialism studies not simply production or ownership in isolation, but the organisation of life. It asks how the capacities of life become organised through historically specific social relations into social powers, how those powers reproduce particular ways of life, whose interests they serve, and how they become objects of struggle and transformation. Historical materialism teaches us to ask not simply whether a society works, but what its organisation continually reproduces.

While developing these ideas I was struck by a convergence between my approach and another intellectual tradition. Working from management cybernetics rather than historical materialism, Stafford Beer famously argued that “the purpose of a system is what it does.”44 Designing Project Cybersyn for Salvador Allende’s Chile, Beer became concerned with how complex societies might be organised democratically without sacrificing their capacity to adapt and survive. That insight remains profoundly important. And yet historical materialism asks political questions that cybernetics alone cannot answer. Systems are never politically innocent. Every organised society coordinates the capacities of life through particular social relations of property, authority, cooperation, care and domination. What matters is not simply whether a system survives, but what kind of life its organisation continually reproduces, whose capacities it develops, whose it exhausts, and whether people increasingly participate in transforming it.

Looking back at the First Fleet, what strikes me now is not only its violence, although that remains inescapable. It is the extraordinary organisational achievement it represented. Navigation, repair, surveying, education, planning, agriculture, logistics and care were coordinated across half the globe to reproduce British society on Aboriginal Country. These were remarkable human achievements, but they did not belong to colonialism. They were capacities of life developed through generations of ordinary people learning to navigate, build, cultivate, cooperate, remember and care. Colonialism inherited these capacities and reorganised them through relations of empire, violent dispossession and accumulation. It did not create them. It organised them into social powers capable of reproducing a colonial way of life while simultaneously dismantling and subordinating another.

Despite the violence of a Colonial society, those capacities always exceed the social relations through which they are organised. That is why they can become the material from which another society is built. This is where the communist problem finally becomes clear. If every enduring society organises life, what prevents communism from becoming simply another organised system of domination? The answer cannot be that communism dispenses with organisation. Every society organises life. Nor can it simply be that communism abolishes private property or replaces one state with another. Those transformations matter profoundly, but history has repeatedly shown that domination can survive dramatic political change. What distinguishes a communist transition, I want to suggest, is not simply what it abolishes but the direction in which it develops society’s social powers.

Every ruling class seeks to organise the capacities of life so that its own social relations become increasingly durable while alternatives become more difficult to imagine, practise and sustain. Colonialism organised those capacities around conquest. Capitalism organises them around accumulation. A communist society should be judged by the opposite movement: whether the capacities to organise, maintain, repair, deliberate, educate, care and govern become increasingly common, enabling society continually to reproduce and transform the conditions of life together rather than confronting people as an external power beyond their control.

This is why in previous pieces I have described this horizon as “the commons of becoming.”45 By this I do not simply mean common ownership or shared resources, important though both remain. I mean the expanding common social powers through which people—and the wider community of life—become increasingly capable of reproducing, repairing and transforming the conditions of life together.

The First Fleet reproduced colonial society by concentrating the capacities to organise, command and govern within the institutions of empire. A communist transition should be judged by the opposite movement. Does it continually distribute those capacities more widely? Does it enlarge the common powers through which people can organise, deliberate, maintain, repair and transform society together? Or does it merely construct another apparatus that confronts them as an external force? The commons of becoming names this movement. It is not merely a commons of resources but a commons of organised social powers through which society increasingly becomes capable of reproducing and transforming itself.

The purpose of communist organisation is therefore not to make itself permanent. It is to make society increasingly capable of transforming itself.

When I come full circle to Australia’s 1988 Bicentenary, I realise that the Young Endeavour and the First Fleet taught opposite lessons from the same object. As a child, I thought I admired the life I could lead with timber, the ropes and the open sea. Later I realised I admired something much more ordinary: people who had learned to depend upon one another through cooperation, maintenance, memory and care. What I could not yet see was that these same capacities could be organised for empire as readily as for freedom.

That, perhaps, is the enduring communist problem.

Communism is the organisation of the capacities of life into common social powers through which the conditions of life are continually reproduced, repaired and developed. Its purpose is not to perfect another system of rule, but continually to enlarge society’s capacity to reorganise itself.

Communism is not merely the abolition of capital. It is the organisation of life beyond capital.46

Other Voyages at Life Against Capital:

The Marxism and Transition Series:
Capital is Not a Thing: Marxism and the Problem of Transition no. I
The Commons of Becoming: Marxism and the Problem of Transition no. II

When I studied and worked in the orbit of the University of Melbourne, there was one building, the withered, melancholic Old Quad, which still to this day looms larger in my imagination than any other.

Walking beneath its sandstone cloisters each morning felt strangely cinematic, as though I had wandered into an Indiana Jones film. The feeling only increased when I briefly had an office in the building and spent a semester in the musty attic chamber overlooking the gnarled trees and busy passings of academics and students below.

Regularly throughout the day I crossed the Quad on my way to Old Arts or the John Medley Building, where English and Theatre Studies helped organise my intellectual life for over a decade. It was an exciting time in my life. A research scholarship allowed me to travel overseas for the first time, and I lived an adventure that as a working-class kid once seemed unimaginable.

Over time, I became fascinated less by the building itself than by the people constantly repairing it. For years sections of the Old Quad disappeared behind scaffolding. Stonemasons chipped away weathered sandstone, carefully removed damaged blocks, carved new ones by hand and fitted them into place.

Offices and student spaces closed for months at a time while another corner of the building underwent restoration. It struck me that the Old Quad was never really finished. The building endured only because generation after generation quietly rebuilt it.

The casual visitor would never notice the way the building was being constantly rebuilt. To most people it appears timeless. Students drifted beneath its cloisters much as they would have for more than a century and a half. The sandstone seemed permanent, as though it has simply survived unchanged since the 1850s.

But permanence is an illusion. Sandstone decays. Rain enters microscopic fractures. Salt crystallises beneath the surface. Wind slowly erodes carved details. Conservation architects and stonemasons inspect every block, deciding which stones can be repaired and which must eventually be removed altogether. New sandstone is quarried, carved to match the original masonry, and carefully inserted so that the building continues to appear exactly as it always has.

Stone by stone, generation after generation, the Old Quad is continually rebuilt.¹ That is perhaps what conservators do with such skill that we rarely notice it: their labour disappears behind the appearance of permanence. Societies often work in much the same way. They appear solid, timeless and natural. Yet they too survive only because millions of people quietly rebuild them every day and because they provide the backdrop and theatre for our lives.

Long before I encountered the problem of reproduction in Marx, I suspect the Old Quad had already taught me this lesson. Completed in stages from the 1850s, the Old Quad has become one of Australia’s most recognisable heritage buildings. It was one of the first buildings constructed for one of Australia’s earliest universities, a confident declaration that the young colony intended to reproduce not merely wealth, but British civilisation itself.2 However, the building, and the ground on which it stands, both tell a story of contradictions, difference and dissent.

Before sandstone walls enclosed its quadrangle, this was Wurundjeri Country. The University today acknowledges that an Aboriginal camp stood nearby. The Scottish merchant William Westgarth who settled on the land recalled being guided across the area by Wurundjeri people even as disease, dispossession and the violence of colonisation were already dismantling the social world that had sustained them for ancient generations.3

The university was not built upon empty land. It emerged through the violent reorganisation of another society, and the ongoing process sometimes called The Great Australian Silence. But the irony deepens further. The men who quarried and laid the sandstone were themselves recent arrivals. Many had travelled almost sixteen thousand miles from Britain, Scotland and Ireland, escaping famine, enclosure, poverty or political repression in search of something the colonies promised but rarely delivered: a better life.

On 21 April 1856, while constructing the university itself, eight stonemasons laid down their tools and marched from the building site. Their demand was astonishingly simple.

Eight hours for work.

Eight hours for rest.

Eight hours for what we will.

Addressing a public meeting during the campaign, labour activist James Galloway captured the spirit of the strike in a single unforgettable sentence:

“We have come 16,000 miles to better our condition, and not to act the mere part of machinery.”4

Read carefully, Galloway’s words were about far more than the length of the working day. And even with the context of the political economy of labour, they were a rejection of an entire way of life. The colony had promised freedom. If that promise meant anything, it could not mean crossing half the world simply to become another cog in someone else’s machine. To refuse the endless working day was to insist that life ought to be organised around more than the demands of capital.

The strike succeeded. Every student who now crosses the Old Quad walks through that history, whether they know it or not. Yet the deeper lesson lies not only in the plaque commemorating the eight-hour movement, but in the sandstone itself.

The building survives because someone is always replacing the stones. Perhaps societies are much the same. Every morning millions of people wake, care for children, prepare food, travel to work, repair buildings, teach classes, answer emails, maintain roads, clean hospitals and return home to begin the cycle again the next day.

Society, like the Old Quad, appears permanent only because it is continually reproduced. The question is who rebuilds it, and on whose terms.

Why Do Communists Fight for Reforms?

If society is continually rebuilt through everyday life, then the question for communists has never simply been how to seize power. It has also been how to transform the conditions through which society is reproduced.

The history of communism has never been a history of opposing reforms. One of the most durable misconceptions about Marxism is the belief that communists dismiss every reform because it falls short of revolution. The criticism has a superficial plausibility. Marxists have long criticised reformism, and many revolutionaries have warned that capitalism is remarkably capable of absorbing reforms while leaving its basic relations of power intact. Leftists tend to make caricatures of Marxist positions to exaggerate a point.

But reformism and reforms are not the same thing. Historically, communists have fought for universal suffrage, shorter working hours, public education, housing, healthcare, trade union rights, anti-colonial reforms and social security. Marx celebrated the Ten Hours Act as a historic victory because it marked the first time political economy had been compelled to yield to the organised demands of labour. These were not embarrassing compromises. They were victories won through collective struggle.

The question, then, is why communists fight for reforms. Rosa Luxemburg first popularised the distinction between reform and revolution in Reform or Revolution? (1899), arguing that although reforms were indispensable to the workers’ movement, they became politically disastrous when they were mistaken for socialism itself. Lenin developed the same point more than a decade later. Writing in Marxism and Reformism (1913), he observed:

“The workers fight for better conditions and use them to intensify the fight against wage-slavery... The more independent the working-class movement, the deeper and broader its aims, and the freer it is from reformist narrowness, the easier it is for the workers to retain and utilise improvements.”5

It is a passage that deserves to be read carefully. Lenin is not saying that reforms weaken revolutionary politics. He is saying that the ability to win reforms is itself evidence of an organised and independent working class. Practically, Lenin had enormous respect for the fight for reforms among the working class as it was how they deepened their fight. But the reforms were built into the struggle to transform the society, rather than an end in itself.

A movement capable of forcing concessions from capital has already demonstrated confidence, solidarity and collective power. Every successful campaign develops new organisations, new leaders, new habits of cooperation and new expectations about what ordinary people can achieve together.

The measure of a revolutionary movement, then, is not its refusal to fight for reforms. It is its capacity to win them. Yet Lenin was equally clear that reforms were never enough. Capitalism continually reorganises itself around every victory won against it. Wages are eroded by inflation. Public services are privatised. Housing becomes unaffordable. Working hours creep upwards again. Victories remain fragile because the wider organisation of society remains largely unchanged.

This is the mistake reformism makes. Reformism is not the struggle for reforms. It is the belief that reforms themselves gradually become socialism or contain lasting and necessary, better outcomes. Communists have never confused the road with the destination. But this still leaves a deeper question unanswered. If reforms neither abolish capitalism nor automatically accumulate into socialism, what distinguishes those reforms that merely stabilise capitalism from those that begin to transform it?

To answer that question, we need to look beyond production itself and ask how capitalism reproduces the organisation of everyday life itself.

Reproducing a Way of Life

Marx himself points us toward an answer to the problem of reform. In the second volume of Capital, he began to turn his attention to reproduction schema, table after table showing how Capitalism circulated itself, making its profits in the circulation of production and consumption commodities. He was fascinated by the technical problem of the reproduction of the profits of Capitalism through commodities of production (Department I) and consumption (Department II):

Even more broadly, one of Marx’s most profound insights was that labour is not simply the production of commodities but a “metabolism’ between human beings and nature. Through labour we continually exchange matter and energy with the natural world. Yet capitalism ruptures this metabolism in a phenomenon Marx called “metabolic rift”. As food and raw materials are drawn into rapidly expanding cities, the nutrients consumed by people are no longer returned to the soil. Capitalist production, Marx argued, therefore “disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth,” becoming “a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil.”6

Marx was describing agriculture here, but the topic he raised reaches much further. If production is a metabolism between humanity and nature, then society is also sustained through a metabolism among people themselves. Every morning millions of people prepare breakfast, get children ready for school, care for ageing parents, clean hospitals, repair roads, drive buses, teach classes, answer emails, maintain friendships, pay mortgages, commute to work, and return home to begin the process again tomorrow.

None of this sits outside capitalism. It is how capitalism is continually reproduced. The Old Quad survives because stonemasons quietly replace weathered sandstone before anyone notices. Capitalism survives for much the same reason. Not because capitalists wake each morning and decide to reproduce capitalism, but because millions of ordinary people reproduce its institutions, expectations, infrastructures and habits simply by trying to live.

This, I think, changes how communists should think about reforms. There has always been a tendency on the left to reduce socialist strategy to production alone. Who owns the factory? Who controls investment? Who plans the economy? While these remain indispensable questions, they are not sufficient.

Capital does not simply organise production. It organises a way of life. Long working hours leave little time for politics. Housing becomes a source of debt rather than security. Care is privatised within families or commodified through markets. Neighbourhoods are designed around isolation rather than collective life. Digital platforms colonise leisure. And education prepares workers for employment while leaving little space for democratic participation. Meanwhile, the Capitalist economy compels people to sustain these conditions. Because none of these institutions exist in isolation. Together they organise the conditions under which society reproduces itself from one day to the next.

This is why the communist must ask about whether a reform can change the institutions through which everyday life is reproduced. The eight-hour day did precisely this, because its significance was never confined to reducing exploitation. Instead, it transformed time itself. Hours that had previously belonged almost entirely to employers became available for something else. Trade unions expanded. Reading groups flourished. Political parties grew. Sporting clubs, friendly societies, choirs, cooperative associations and educational institutions multiplied. Parents spent more time with children. Neighbours spent more time with neighbours.

The famous slogan was therefore about much more than leisure.

Eight hours for work.

Eight hours for rest.

Eight hours for what we will.

“What we will” was always the most radical part. It expressed the possibility that ordinary people might collectively determine how life itself should be organised.

This is, I want to suggest, the criterion by which communists should judge reforms. The reforms that matter most are those that begin to democratise the reproduction of everyday life. They do not simply redistribute wealth. They redistribute time. Care. Knowledge. Organisation. Confidence. These are the collective capacities through which people become capable of governing society themselves. And for the most part they are violently resisted by the capital class.

Non-Reformist Reforms and the Politics of Transition

In the 1960s, the socialist thinker André Gorz proposed a useful distinction. Some reforms, he argued, simply make capitalism function more smoothly. Others begin to transform the balance of social power itself. He called these “non-reformist reforms.” Their purpose was not to make capitalism more tolerable, but to “bring the future into the present” by demonstrating that ordinary people could collectively organise society differently:

“[i]nstead of dichotomizing the future and the present—future power and present impotence, like Good and Evil—what must be done is to bring the future into the present, to make power tangible now by means of actions which demonstrate to the workers their positive strength, their ability to measure themselves against the power of capital and to impose their will on it.”7

The point was not simply the reform itself, but the break from idealism and moralism in the dynamic process of building power for working class people: reform required new capacities, confidence and democratic institutions that were created through the struggle to win the future. The point was never that such reforms abolished capitalism overnight. Rather, they changed the ground on which future struggles would take place: the eight-hour day was precisely this ground-breaking reform without which pre-conditions for socialism could not exist.

Such reforms reduce exploitation, certainly. But more importantly, they expand the capacity of working people to organise collectively, make unions sites of strong participation, and they make political education possible. They give workers the time to participate in public life rather than merely endure it.

It has never been a question of whether communists should fight for reforms at all, but which reforms expand the democratic capacities of ordinary people. I think Gorz’s idea of non-reformist reforms could be be developed further. What distinguishes these reforms is not simply that they prefigure socialism. It is that they begin to democratise the reproduction of everyday life itself. They change who controls the institutions through which we care, learn, travel, dwell, organise, and reproduce society from one day to the next.

Communists should judge reforms in much the same way today: not by asking whether they are revolutionary in themselves, and not by seeking ways of making capitalism slightly kinder. They should ask a different question of these reforms:

This immediately changes how we evaluate reforms. Take housing. Subsidising private rents may reduce immediate suffering, but it largely leaves housing as a commodity governed by landlords and financial markets. Universal public housing, community land trusts and democratic housing cooperatives begin from a different principle. They remove increasing parts of everyday life from speculation while giving communities greater control over one of the basic conditions of human existence.

Or consider working time. A four-day week without loss of pay matters for reasons that extend beyond leisure. If accompanied by stronger unions, democratic workplaces and public institutions through which people can participate in civic life, shorter working hours expand the time available for care, education, organisation and democratic participation.

The same is true of care as unpaid or underpaid labour. Capitalism increasingly treats childcare, aged care, disability support and even friendship as private responsibilities or profitable markets. Communists should seek the opposite. Universal childcare, publicly organised aged care, neighbourhood health centres, community kitchens, repair workshops, libraries, public transport, and shared civic institutions. But they must do so by not reproducing capital and seeking more contractual opportunities for big capital to expend the dependence of workers on private services; as public reforms, each of these reforms must reduce dependence upon private markets while increasing people’s capacity to organise life collectively, winding back the controls over public space that capitalism has exerted over us to extract its circulation of consumption and production.

Even digital technology raises questions that get us to to essential problem of power and the capacity to refuse it. Will artificial intelligence, digital platforms and automation simply deepen surveillance, unemployment and corporate control? Or can they reduce necessary labour while placing the time and knowledge they generate under democratic control? The issue is never technology alone. It is who governs the social relations that are embedded in the way technology is used and woven into everyday life.

Notice what unites all these examples of reforms that Communists would support. They are not merely redistributive. They alter the conditions under which society reproduces itself. If they are redistributive, they redistribute essential capacities that are preconditions for the transformation of our society, something that capital knows is dangerous because it does not give these freely but will take and sell them back to us: time, care, knowledge, organisation, and democratic power.

This is why some reforms threaten capital more than others. Capital does not simply depend upon profits, but also depends upon reproducing a particular way of life. A society organised around long working hours, private debt, commodified housing, privatised care, isolated consumption and political exhaustion is not accidental. It is extraordinarily effective at reproducing capitalism because it leaves people with little time, confidence or opportunity to govern society differently. Capitalism operates through the threat of poverty and violence and the enclosure of labourers in conditions that force them to struggle to free themselves.

Reforms that begin to democratise those conditions are therefore more destabilising than they first may appear. They cultivate habits of cooperation instead of competition, collective provision instead of commodification, and democratic participation instead of passive consumption. They expand not only what people have but what people become capable of doing together and in relation to much more than just capital, but also in the wider world of life, nature, animals, spirituality, ecology, and metabolism.

Seen in this light, the strategic purpose of reforms becomes clearer. The most important reforms do more than redistribute wealth or improve living standards. They begin to democratise the social metabolism itself. They return to ordinary people greater collective control over the conditions under which society is reproduced from one day to the next. They win space to the struggle for life against capital.8

All this is ultimately why communists fight for reforms. Not because reforms are socialism and not because every reform points towards socialism or wil inevitably get us there. But because the struggle for socialism begins long before political power is won. It begins wherever ordinary people enlarge their collective capacity to reproduce society on different terms.

The purpose of communist reforms is not to administer capitalism more humanely, but to enlarge the capacities through which ordinary people become capable of governing society themselves.

The Struggle for What We Will

Each year, thousands of students pass beneath the sandstone arches of Melbourne University’s Old Quad. Most never notice the plaque commemorating the eight stonemasons. Fewer still notice that the building itself is quietly changing. Another stone replaced. Another section restored. Another generation of stonemasons preserving the appearance of permanence through the patient labour of reconstruction.

The building survives because someone is always rebuilding it. Societies are no different. Every morning millions of people reproduce the conditions under which social life continues. They teach children, prepare meals, care for ageing parents, drive buses, clean hospitals, maintain parks, repair buildings, answer phones, organise workplaces and sustain communities. None of this is politically neutral. It is the labour that continually assembles tomorrow’s society.

Capitalism has always depended upon making this process appear natural. Long working hours. Private debt. Commodified housing. Privatised care. Political exhaustion. These come to appear as unfortunate facts of life, forced by the conditions capital sets, rather than social arrangements that could be organised differently.

Communists fight for reforms because some reforms interrupt this appearance of inevitability. They do not simply improve life under capitalism. They enlarge the democratic capacities through which ordinary people can consciously organise society themselves. They begin to answer a question that capitalism constantly suppresses:

That is why the distinction between reform and reformism matters. Reformism mistakes reforms for the destination, while revolutionary purism mistakes them for the wrong road. Communism has historically understood something more difficult: the path beyond capitalism. This path is built through the struggles that enlarge the capacities of ordinary people to govern society together. The eight-hour day remains one of the clearest examples. It did not abolish capitalism. It created time. Time to organise, learn, care, and imagine. Time to discover that ordinary people might govern their own lives better than capital governs them.

That was always the hidden meaning of the old slogan. Not simply fewer hours, not simply more leisure, but the possibility of another way of life:

Eight hours for work.

Eight hours for rest.

Eight hours for what we will.

Over the coming days I’ve gone over the formerly live feed, all three hours worth. I can’t say I didn’t skip parts, but I watched most of it:

What I also did was pay attention to the reactions of people in the community and on social media. Among the negative reactions, those pointing to the circle of war criminals in which Obama happily socialized, were opinions I shared even as I had disconcertedly experienced moments of warm reaction to the spectacle. The point of all of this grand pageantry, perhaps, was to draw a kind of moral line in the sand for establishment Presidents, although not many were buying it.

Among the positive reactions, I noticed Democrats—the vote blue no matter who crew—shedding their tears and sharing their love for the former President. Among these supporters, I even saw a quote shared from one of my favourite authors, Kurt Vonnegut:

“There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.”— Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan (1957)

These words are intriguing one. Sundered form context like a prized possession, they were shared unironically (as it usually is) to mean something like: Obama is organizing the good guys in ways that we should appreciate as necessary, a kind of necessary evil: a spectacle of billions of dollars “unconstrained by habit and convention” in the thick of a gentrified South Side in Chicago squeezing out the ordinary renter who at least has a tall building with the grass on top and the digital research library inside to see “You are America”.

Among the many posts, I noticed Vonnegut being quoted and shared with the words:

“Amen. Get organized, angels.”

Who are the angels, here? The sense I had from the spectacle of this weekend and its many ripples around me was of a world being reconstructed in a message of hope. And indeed hope was the message widely shared in response to the opening of the Obama Presidential Center. The sentiment was understandable. Across the political centre, the ceremony reminded its viewers that another America still existed. Former presidents gathered on stage. Michelle Obama spoke movingly about her husband. Bruce Springsteen performed. Stevie Wonder performed. Oprah Winfrey, Angela Merkel, Justin Trudeau, Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks and a parade of political, cultural and philanthropic elites celebrated a project dedicated to democracy, hope and civic participation.

For many viewers, the message was clear. Trumpism and the right is organised. The forces of democracy must become organised too, and the Obama Presidential Centre is a tower in the sky for democracy, an American in which we can also see ourselves. Watching the ceremony, I found myself understanding that impulse more than I expected. The mood was warm, nostalgic and occasionally moving. That one point in the speeches got me, when Barack Obama cried as Michelle Obama described his character and public life. The emotion appeared genuine because it probably was.

What struck me was not hypocrisy, but the expensive sincerity of it all. The ceremony presented Barack Obama not primarily as a president, strategist or statesman but as a husband, father, organiser and human being. For a moment, the technocratic image that has followed him throughout much of his political life gave way to something more personal. The emotional centre of the event was his character, stoic and relentless.

Yet sincerity is not the same thing as democracy, or even organizing. The longer I watched, the more I found myself thinking not about Obama but about the quote shared to celebrate it. I found myself returning to Kurt Vonnegut’s novel after the ceremony: The Sirens of Titan.

Rereading the novel after many years, what struck me immediately in was that the famous quotation about organised angels comes not from an angel at all, but from the character Winston Niles Rumfoord. The Democrats sharing Vonnegut’s quotation seem to imagine that the angels are the answer. Yet the strange joke of The Sirens of Titan is that the quotation is spoken by one of the novel’s warnings. Rumfoord is not an angel. He is what happens when organisation becomes detached from life itself.

Rumfoord belongs to what Vonnegut calls "the one true American class." He emerges from a social world that reproduces presidents, governors, financiers, philanthropists and institutional leaders across generations. He is wealthy, intelligent, cultured and often sincere. He is not a tyrant. He is not even particularly malicious. He is, however, one of the eeariest members of the American establishment in modern literature.

The usual interpretation of Vonnegut’s quote is that good people need better organisation. Yet this is not quite what The Sirens of Titan is about. Rumfoord is not a heroic organiser. He is a man who has glimpsed the totality and become detached from it. He sees history more clearly than anyone else and yet becomes increasingly incapable of participating in it as an ordinary human being. The tragedy of Rumfoord is not that he is wrong, but it is that he is right. He sees the patterns and contradictions, and he can explain the system, but he remains trapped within it and its power over us.

This is what makes the quotation so strangely appropriate to the contradictions of the Obama Presidential Center. The ceremony itself was organised by people who genuinely understand many of the crises facing contemporary America. They understand inequality, racism, climate change, authoritarianism, and democratic decline. And if pressed they would likely understand Capitalism, although they think that they can (in theory) use the market as a tool to manipulate us to our better angels. All of the understanding of the problems of our social order is never the same thing as transformation.

The Obama Presidential Center has responded to a social crisis by assembling more expertise, more philanthropy, more institutions, more foundations and more elite networks than anyone else. It is responding to the failures of one establishment by building another. The result of all this feverish activity and mobilisation by liberalism is a politics that knows more and more about society while becoming increasingly detached from the people who actually reproduce it. Like Rumfoord in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel The King’s of Titan, this politics mistakes seeing the whole for changing the whole and is, increasingly, captured by its own understanding of the world that resists its organisation.

In Vonnegut’s novel, Rumfoord acquires a peculiar perspective after passing through what Vonnegut calls the Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum. The name is absurd but the idea is profound. To explain it, Vonnegut asks us to imagine two Daddies. One Daddy explains the universe to his child one way. Another Daddy explains it another way. Both are intelligent. Both are sincere. Both are right. Yet they disagree completely. The lesson is not relativism, but that reality is larger than any single perspective. There is room enough in the universe, Vonnegut suggests, for many apparently contradictory truths to coexist. And that is what the Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum allows, all the contradictory truths in the universe coming together in a single place in space, in such a way that authority and ultimate meaning is rendered completely absurd.

The image is more political than it first appears, because modern politics increasingly resembles a world populated by Daddies. Presidents explain democracy. Economists explain inflation. Philanthropists explain inequality. Consultants explain institutions. Experts explain society. The voters are their children. All these authories grasp something real and possess a fragment of truth. Yet the social relations producing those truths increasingly disappear from view. As the social relations connecting these experiences disappear from view, politics increasingly appears as a contest between rival groups of experts, managers, philanthropists and strongmen. Society begins to resemble an argument between Daddies whose authority no longer rests on anything visible beneath them.

Under the unimpeded crisis capitalism of our age, different Daddies can remain right indefinitely. And this pattern repeats itself. Even in the everyday sense, the worker is right about exploitation. The landlord is right about debt. The teacher is right about workload. The administrator is right about budgets. The Indigenous activist is right about dispossession. The settler is right about the world they inherited. But it doesn’t really matter, because no can hold them to any sort of social relation that can stabilise the truth for more than their particular fleeting state of rightness. The contradiction is not that these experiences are false. The contradiction is that the relationships producing them become increasingly invisible.

What does all of this mean? This is where revolutionary theorists such as Karl Marx becomes indispensable. Writing in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx observed that estrangement appears not only because workers are separated from the products of their labour but because "an inhuman power rules over everything”:

“Estrangement appears not only in the fact that the means of my life belong to another and that my desire is the inaccessible possession of another, but also in the fact that all things are other than themselves, that my activity is other than itself, and that finally - and this goes for the capitalists too - an inhuman power rules over everything.” Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

This is perhaps one of the most misunderstood sentences Marx wrote. He did not mean that some kind of higher elites, or individuals, become monsters over us, and in fact he was writing to warn us about analysing the world in this way. He meant that social relations acquire a power independent of the people who create them. They become emergent systems of power in which we all fall as role players, unable to response except to the structural lure of capital and its social and economic laws. This is what he meant by the powerful psychological effect of estrangement, a state of being that, like alienation, can remove us from meaning in the universe and in daily life over which an inhuman power rules.

Human beings reproduce society every day through work, care, education, friendship, cooperation and struggle. Yet the institutions governing those activities increasingly appear as external forces standing above them. Markets, states, corporations, bureaucracies and foundations confront people as though they possessed lives of their own. The result is a peculiar form of politics. The right seeks salvation through strongmen. The centre seeks salvation through enlightened managers. One seeks kings. Badder the better. The other seeks philosopher kings. Do good men. Both leave ordinary people as spectators. Angels become mafia, and the mafia angels.

The phenomenon of etsrangement that is pointed to in the Vonnegut and the Marx quotes is what makes the Obama Presidential Center so interesting. To be clear, the Centre embodies a genuine historical achievement. The son of a Kenyan father and a white American mother became the first Black president of the United States. The struggles that made such a moment possible were real. They were fought for by generations of ordinary Black people confronting segregation, disenfranchisement and racial domination. That history deserves recognition. Yet the Center also embodies one of the central contradictions of racial capitalism. It commemorates the struggles of ordinary Black people while presenting elite incorporation as their highest achievement.

The South Side even appears throughout the ceremony as a source of resilience, struggle and inspiration. Community organising is celebrated. The Civil Rights Movement is honoured. Black excellence is affirmed.

Yet the organisational form of the event tells a different story, a story of The Sirens of Titan. Presidents, donors, philanthropists, foundation leaders, celebrities and global dignitaries gather together to celebrate democracy. The people whose struggles made the moment possible appear primarily as memory, symbolism and inspiration, while the established institutions who come to take pictures, shake hands, and make deals with the former President appear as power.

None of this is a criticism unique to Obama. It is a feature of liberal politics more generally. Faced with the rise of Trumpism, liberalism increasingly searches for better Daddies. Better experts. Better institutions. Better philanthropists. Better presidents. Better angels. The opening of the Obama Presidential Center offered precisely this reassurance: trust the adults. Trust the institutions. Trust the managers. Trust the people who can see the larger picture.

Yet this is precisely where the Democrats sharing Vonnegut's quotation seem to miss the joke. Rumfoord is not the angel. Rumfoord is the warning. Because the person who told us that it is best if the angel are oganized like the mafia is dangerous not because he sees too little but because he sees too much. Having glimpsed the totality, he increasingly relates to humanity from above rather than among it. His tragedy is not evil. It is estrangement.

What makes the image of Obama crying so compelling is that it reveals the opposite impulse. For a moment, the organised angel becomes recognisably human again. The contradiction is that the emotional sincerity is real while the institutional form remains unchanged. Obama is not Rumfoord. He is not a villain, nor is he an aristocrat floating above society. The emotion displayed during the ceremony was meaningful precisely because it reminded viewers of the human being beneath the institution. Yet this only makes the problem more contradictory.

This is where a small detail from Vonnegut’s novel becomes unexpectedly important. Rumfoord remarks that angels cannot “reproduce”. While its a line that initially sounds like a joke, or one that marks out the way that Rumfoord is caught in inhumanity as a result of his knowledge of contraditions, it points toward the deepest problem raised by the Obama Presidential Center. The Center is devoted to democracy, citizenship, leadership and participation. Yet none of these things reproduce themselves. Democracy must be reproduced. Citizenship must be reproduced. Communities must be reproduced. Hope itself must be reproduced. And these things, the social relations that make the liberals go around, are not reproduced by those who are breaking “habits and conventions”. They are reproduced every day through ordinary activities: raising children, educating students, caring for elders, maintaining friendships, organising workplaces, preparing meals, resolving conflicts, sustaining neighbourhoods and keeping one another alive.

This labour is rarely spectacular. It does not attract celebrities, presidents or billion-dollar fundraising campaigns. Yet without it, no democracy exists to celebrate. The organised angels do not reproduce these relations. They depend upon them. Every speech, foundation, presidential centre and philanthropic project rests upon forms of essential labour largely absent from the stage itself. Teachers, carers, parents, neighbours, organisers, maintenance workers, cleaners, nurses and countless others reproduce the social world celebrated by the ceremony. The angels appear because somebody else keeps life going.

This is what makes the image of Obama crying so poignant. The emotion is real. The humanity is real. Yet the institution surrounding it remains separated from the everyday activities through which democratic life is actually sustained. The problem is not that the angels are insincere, but the problem is that the angels cannot reproduce the system they organize.

This is why Marx's observation remains powerful if we let them speak to our times. The problem is not bad people, the problem is that social life increasingly appears as something organised above society rather than by society itself. The daily labour of social reproduction remains elsewhere, the social relations are hidden in a cloud, onscured by a King of Titan.

Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist, captured the condition nearly a century ago when he wrote that "the old is dying and the new cannot be born." In such moments, he warned, "a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." Gramsci’s interregnum is a gap or discontinuity experienced between an established order and a new one, struggling to be born.

Trumpism is one such symptom. But perhaps the growing tendency to seek salvation through foundations, celebrity politics, billionaire philanthropy and gatherings of former presidents is another. Both emerge from societies struggling to imagine ordinary people as the authors of collective life.

The answer cannot simply be a better organised elite, and the answer to capitalism is not a more enlightened ruling class. The question facing us today is not whether the angels are organised. The question is whether ordinary people are developing the capacity to organise themselves.

Not simply to choose between competing kings in the cloud, but to become the authors of their own collective life.

That, ultimately, is the search for life beyond capital.

No, it wasn’t Billie Eilish, whose name has recently circulated through vegan discourse after the now-familiar viral footage of a slaughterhouse, but a different kind of figure altogether.

It was a published author. She had read my piece The Vegan Moment. She even called it “brilliant.” I recognised her name immediately, and I’ll admit—there was a kind of infatuation there, the sort one might reserve for a cultural figure. She was someone whose work had, for years, shaped how I thought about veganism when I was working in an animal advocacy organisation I co-founded, Open for Animals.

Her writing had always struck me as working at a different level: more attentive to social relations, less satisfied with the usual circuits of moral persuasion, and grounded in practical attempts to organise and reproduce social life differently.

And in the years when I fell out with the usual run of advocacy in the nonprofit industrial complex, and became more Marxist in orientation, I noticed she too was moving—on social media, unmistakably—beyond the narrow limits of what is typically permitted within veganism and what is often called “animal advocacy.”

So it was with some delight that I found myself exchanging emails with this “celebrity” of mine. What I learned was that over the past decade, my correspondent has co-founded and built a vegan organisation in a small Midwestern town, growing it to thousands. Not simply through advocacy, but through events, discussion groups, and a sustained attention to what she described as “social relations” as a major barrier. The focus was not on how people think, but on how they live with others: family, friends, shared spaces. The difficulty they found, as she put it, was not persuading people, but sustaining the practice within relations that remain structured against it.

And yet, despite this, her question returned to a familiar place: whether the problem lies with the Left itself, didn't I agree? And whether what we are encountering is, ultimately, a failure of recognition? (Rather than, I supposed, something embedded in the social relations she had already begun to describe?) She asked, too: had I written about this?

These questions are difficult to answer because they mark a limit my project has been trying to resolve. They hold a tension. On the one hand, they begin from a recognition that the difficulty lies in social relations—in how practices are sustained, resisted, or made difficult in everyday life. On the other, they return to a familiar diagnosis: that what we are encountering is a failure of recognition, something that could be corrected if the Left were more consistent, more attentive, more willing.

Again and again, I find a tendency in thinking through this issue to slip away from social relations—the structures that shape and select behaviour—and to return instead to will and recognition. This is the familiar problematic I have argued is insufficient, especially when addressing what is often called “the Left”: not a fixed group, but a formation defined by its language of systems, solidarity, and structural critique.

In a piece on animal advocacy, I argued that recognition is compulsively produced by what I called “the proletarians of compassion”—free-floating advocates who circulate images of animal suffering to generate moral awareness that, paradoxically, reproduce the very social relations they seek to challenge. If the problem is located in the social relations that organise production, it cannot be resolved simply by convincing those who already recognise it—by offering more and more competing spectacles of oppression.

There is still a tension here I will need to return to. I will return to it more than once at Life Against Capital, because there is something extremely important to clarify about the way the problem of the Left is consistently misdiagnozed as hampered by recognition. This tension—between social relations and moral recognition—is the point around which my thinking keeps circling, and the point at which many accounts of veganism dissolve into a battle of individual wills.

To see how this slippage away from social relations operates, it is worth turning to two essays that have recently circulated widely in the vegan community: Evan Shamoon’s “The Limits of Solidarity” published in Glass Walls and Ed Winters’ essay on Veganism, Billie Eilish and the Left’s so-called moral blind spot. These pieces of writing attempt to explain the same phenomenon my correspondent described, but in doing so, they reproduce the very limit they are trying to explain.

Shamoon’s essay is compelling in its diagnosis. It captures a moment of dissonance: the Left speaks fluently about systems of oppression and solidarity, only to retreat when animal exploitation is raised, “frantically searching for reasons why this particular form of mass cruelty is simply too complicated to meaningfully resist.” The repertoire is familiar—“there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism,” “veganism is a privilege,” “plant agriculture causes harm too.” These function less as explanations than as deferrals. The point is not disagreement, but retreat.

Glass Walls

The Limits of Solidarity

In a rare moment of veganism becoming part of mainstream internet discourse, Billie Eilish recently said something that caused a minor earthquake online: “Eating meat is inherently wrong. Two things cannot coincide: ‘I love animals … and I eat meat.’ You can’t do both…

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4 months ago · 24 likes · 10 comments · Evan Shamoon

Shamoon sharpens the point by comparison. The Left asks people to boycott, to strike, to refuse, and to align their actions with their politics even when it is costly. Why does that expectation collapse here? Why such a sharp limit of solidary?

So far, the critique is persuasive. But the explanation that follows is where the argument begins to slip away from the structures that shape us. Shamoon ultimately resolves the problem at the level of individual alignment:

Society is people. Markets are people. Culture is people.

At this point, the argument replaces explanation with description. It treats social practices as freely portable at the level of individual choice, and in doing so evacuates the problem of social reproduction—the way life is organised, stabilised, and made repeatable.

This reduction is attractive, especially to vegans who believe in the power of individual transformation within a broadly liberal paradigm, but its limits are rarely recognised. Ed Winters arrives at the same limit from the opposite direction. Where Shamoon diagnoses retreat, Winters diagnoses deflection. He is right to insist that appeals to “the system” can become excuses—that one cannot simply blame billionaires like the singer Billie Eilish while continuing to participate in the practices one opposes.

Ed Winters

Billie Eilish, Veganism, and the Left’s Moral Blind Spot

In July last year, I uploaded a podcast episode titled Are celebrities hurting the vegan movement?. One of the things I discussed was how promoting veganism using celebrity anecdotes about their health doesn’t make a strong case for veganism. It also opens the door for celebrity anecdotes about why they stopped being vegan to be used against veganism to…

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4 months ago · 637 likes · 97 comments · Ed Winters

But here too, the argument resolves at the level of individual choice: the decisive moment is the supermarket decision, and the individual in the market as the embodiment of a solutio. Taken together, these arguments oscillate but converge. One reduces systems to individuals; the other reasserts individual responsibility against system-talk. Both locate transformation in the moment of choice embedded in social relations that are defined by capital.

And this is where the problem becomes clearer. Because the phenomenon they describe is too consistent to be explained this way. If it were simply a failure of will, we would see variation. Instead, we see repetition across left and right—patterns that point not only to individual inconsistency, but to structured reproduction.

There’s a way in which this individualised theory of change obscures more than it describes. To say that “society is people”—the shared assumption underlying both Shamoon and Winters’s views—is like saying a forest is trees, a strike is workers, language is words, or veganism is vegans. All true, but also all insufficient when the question is how these systems persist and change. What disappears at this point is the problem of social reproduction: the way everyday life is stabilised through time constraints, infrastructure, norms, and expectations—through the deeper layers of what is available, affordable, normal, and repeatable.

A Darwinian analogy might clarify this further: species do not change because organisms decide to evolve, but because the conditions of selection shift. Certain behaviours become viable, repeatable, and capable of reproduction. The same holds here. The question is not whether individuals can choose differently, but how different practices become livable. And this is where both accounts—and the Left they identify—fail. They mistake the site of decision for the mechanism of reproduction. They lack a theory of how practices are collectively reproduced, and therefore how they might be transformed.

But to say this to people who are seeking moral transformation will seem only a lack of clarity, even though, as I believe, moral transformation and social transformation are interconnected. People who see moral change as more important than social transformation often hammer home individual responsibility. And on a direct, everyday level, individual responsibility is often the only way we think we can organise against moral wrong and injustice. There are moments when saying plainly what is happening and why it is wrong matters enormously. And social movements should not simply abandon moral clarity. Otherwise we relativise what meat eaters do as vegans, or as leftists we excuse the actions of the bosses, landlords, and politicians. What I would push against here is a different tendency: treating individual responsibility as a sufficient explanation for the social relations of power in which we are all caught up in and must organise against — and together, if we hope to change them.

To use an everyday analogy, if we’re sitting in a traffic jam, every driver is making choices. Nobody is being physically forced to be there. Yet the traffic jam itself cannot be explained by looking at one driver, or even a hundred drivers. It emerges from the way the whole system is organised. If someone suggested that the solution was simply to find the bad drivers and replace them with good drivers, we’d immediately recognise the limitation. The problem isn’t that drivers have no responsibility. It’s that responsibility alone doesn’t explain why the traffic jam exists or persists.

For me, the power structures of capitalism (including speciesism, racism, patriarchy, and even many of the frustrating behaviours we encounter on the left) operate similarly to emergent social phenomenon like traffic jams. Of course they have far greater consequences and cause far greater and sustained harm than traffic jams. But they operate similarly. Individuals participate in them, but they are social relations that organise our lives and continually reproduce particular behaviours and outcomes. This is what gives them their durability in our societies. We can’t address them simply by removing the “bad drivers”, because the same patterns can quickly reappear. Traffic jams exist through drivers, but are not reducible to any particular driver.

In this traffic analogy, we can imagine three responses. One is to yell at individual drivers. Another is to persuade a few drivers to behave differently. Sometimes that’s worthwhile. But a third response is to ask why the road is producing congestion in the first place and whether different roads, forms of coordination, habits and ways of travelling are possible. To me, organising is largely about that third task: creating and coordinating the conditions under which different ways of travelling become practical, desirable and sustainable.

This becomes clearer when we return to other left-wing practices. Strikes are not just moral commitments. They are organised, supported, and bounded. The cost is distributed. Boycotts are coordinated. Transformations endure where the burden of sustaining them is not left to individuals. Now consider where the Left struggles. In climate politics, housing, and food systems, the pattern repeats: clarity at the level of critique, difficulty at the level of life. All mobilisation, sound, and fury, and then the equivalent of social traffic jams. When these struggles move into everyday practice—fewer flights, less driving, different consumption—the same pattern appears: complexity, deferral, the insistence that “the system must change first.” The issue is not awareness. It is that the forms of life that would make those changes livable are absent.

This is the limit that vegan activists as well as leftists more generally identify, but do not fully theorise. Because once we follow the argument this far, the question of solidarity itself shifts. Solidarity is not agreement. It is not unanimity. It is not even the declaration of shared values. It is participation in a shared struggle—one that distributes cost, organises support, and makes collective action livable. Where such forms exist, solidarity holds. Where they do not, and the burden falls on the individual, it fractures.

And this is precisely where veganism presses hardest. Because the demand is continuous in veganism. It runs through food, family, relationships, and daily coordination. It sits at the level of social reproduction, where it creates pressure and fictions with the wider world of “relations”. What cannot be organised socially is absorbed privately. We see this in the adaptations that emerge: vegan dating, household negotiations, the redistribution of care labour. In mixed households, the work of maintaining that practice—shopping, cooking, coordinating—becomes a form of care labour, often unevenly distributed. What is at stake is not belief, but who bears the burden of making a practice livable.

And if a revolution cannot be made by writing recipes for the cook shops of the future, it may well be made by cooks organising the production of food with non-cooks. And this returns us, finally, to my correspondent. Her question was: don’t we need to convince the Left?

My correspondent’s practice already suggests a different answer. She did not begin from argument. She built something. Those dinner sessions, those shared spaces, those collective experiments in living differently—these are not supplementary to the struggle. They are the struggle, at the level where it must be sustained. At those tables, something shifts: the practice is shared, the cost reduced, the norm inverted. What appears as moral demand elsewhere is at the table ordinary. These are not just conversations, however, but they are moments in which a different form of life is made, however briefly, stable. They do not produce recognition. They produce conditions. And it is here that solidarity becomes something that can be lived. Because the problem is not will alone; it is that the Left has not yet organised the forms of life required to sustain acting on what it already knows.

Historically, movements have always depended on such forms of condition making. Women’s labour—feeding, caring, sustaining—has been central to revolutionary processes, even where it remained informal or unrecognised. In moments like the Russian and Spanish revolutions, or in contemporary experiments such as the Zapatistas or Rojava, or in the Black Panthers who were Marxist-Leninists and gendered labourers in the kitchen — we can see attempts—uneven and incomplete—to reorganise everyday life alongside production. What these moments reveal is not that reproduction is secondary, but that it is foundational. And that no transition can succeed by simply transforming production without reorganising the life that sustains it.

This is the deeper limit veganism exposes. Not a failure of will. Not a moral blind spot. But a mismatch: a politics oriented toward transforming production encountering a demand rooted in social reproduction. When the Left encounters this limit, its solidarity does not simply disappear. It reaches a point it cannot yet sustain itself. Animal liberation does not simply expose hypocrisy, but exposes a limit. And until that limit is addressed—at the level of organisation, not argument—the pattern will remain: clarity in principle, hesitation in practice.

What follows from this is not a withdrawal from the Left, nor a renewed attempt to persuade it more forcefully, but a shift in how the relation itself is organised. If the problem is not primarily one of recognition, then it cannot be resolved at the level of argument alone. To relate to the Left as something to be convinced is already to accept the terms of the problem as it presents itself: as a failure of awareness, a gap in moral clarity, a decision the market in recognition resolves. But what my correspondent’s own practice suggests is something different. Not that people must first agree, but that they must be able to live differently together, and organise together to do just that.

The task, then, is not primarily to produce recognition. Recognition is important, becuase without it, we cannot even name what is wrong. But recognition alone cannot reproduce a different world.

Organisation is something else. Organisation creates the conditions under which acting on what we know becomes possible. It distributes burdens, coordinates activity, sustains commitments, and makes new practices livable. Where recognition exists without organisation, people experience contradiction as guilt, hypocrisy, or failure. Where organisation exists, solidarity becomes something that can be lived.

Because the problem is not that the Left does not care. It is that it has not yet organised the forms of life through which what it knows about power can be sustained and reproduced.


Postscript:
I’ll add here as the last words on Veganism’s relations with the left, a self-styled “rant of a leftist vegan” from an outstanding voice on Instagram and Facebook, Brown Feminist Vegan, that superbly recognises the problems we face:

The renewed debates around Iran, Israel, the United States, and also Gabriel Rockhill's new book, have produced exactly the kind of polarisation one might expect.

Many of these discussions have become contests over quotations sundered from their context, Lenin, Mao, even Luxemburg being marshalled responds to another. Before long, the discussion resembles a theological dispute more than a materialist investigation.

What I find disheartening is not disagreement itself, but the failure to return to method and first principles. Too often we search for quotations rather than asking what it is we are actually trying to understand.

What should Marxists and communists care about? That sounds like an obvious question, but the answers are less obvious than they first appear. Should we care primarily about states? Nations? Classes? Anti-imperialist blocs? Social movements? The easy answer for many of us is the working class, but this class is difficult to locate geopolitically, even locally, and there seems to be a strong desire for politics to be less bound to the factories and workplaces of old.

In fact, the object of communist politics is not a group of people or a thing. It is the transformation of social relations under capitalism, the abolition of life under capital, and the transition to life against capital.

The recent debates have emboldened so-called campists, those who want communists to pick a side against US Imperialism - Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and so on are to be supported to destabilise the US. A geopolitical camp is to be cheered on, as it were, as the enemy of my enemy is a friend.Anti-campists, for their part, respond to point out the errors in thinking that result, and have historically resulted, from such a position, as enemies have posed as friends.

Both these positions, however, sometimes seem trapped within a shared framework that risks losing sight of communist politics altogether. One side begins with geopolitics. The principal contradiction is Western imperialism and hegemony. Therefore, states that weaken that hegemony deserve support, even if critically and temporarily. The other side begins with class. The principal contradiction is between capital and labour. Therefore, subordinating workers and social movements to capitalist states is a betrayal of Marxism.

These positions contain important insights. Yet both seem to search for a general answer before adequately understanding the specific situation before them. Class analysis has never been opposed to digging deeper into how social relations govern us in a particular time and place, region or conflict. And we cannot forget that our method for analysis does not stop short with economic conditions, but also must consider how Capitalism is reproduced.

We need to ask, what are the social relations we need to overcome? What are the conditions under which the people who make and reproduce the world are able to collectively sustain and govern their lives?

In answering questions like these, we can come at very different answers in different cases. This is expected: Capitalism is full of contradictions, and historical materialism is never intended to be a catalogue of ready-made positions. It is a method of investigating concrete social relations.

This seems especially important to acknowledge when discussing conflicts between states in an unequal world system. Imperialism is not an illusion. Military occupations, sanctions, coups, blockades, settler colonialism and unequal exchange have profoundly shaped the modern world. Marxists should resist imperial aggression wherever it appears, because there is nothing abstract about the destruction it produces. But acknowledging that reality does not relieve us of the responsibility to investigate the particular situation we face.

If the United States attacks Iran, what exactly are we defending when we oppose that attack? The Iranian state? The Iranian people? Iranian workers? Regional self-determination? Some combination of all of these?

If Iran weakens American influence in the region, what follows from that? Does every setback for US power strengthen emancipatory forces? Or can new forms of domination emerge alongside the weakening of old ones?

Likewise, if we reject support for states entirely, where does that leave us? How should Marxists respond to occupations, sanctions, colonial domination and asymmetrical wars? Can every conflict simply be reduced to the same formula?

What strikes me is that Marxists are often too eager to identify the correct doctrine. Campism. Anti-campism. Revolutionary defeatism. Yet history rarely presents itself in doctrinal form.

The temptation is always to find the correct position before adequately understanding the situation itself. But the answer for Europe in 1914 was not the same answer for Vietnam in 1968. The answer for Algeria in 1956 was not the same answer for Chile in 1973. The answer for Palestine today may not be the answer for Iran tomorrow. The answer for anti-colonial liberation struggles was not the same as the answer for inter-imperialist wars. Historical materialism demands something more difficult than the mechanical application of doctrine. It demands investigation of concrete situations, concrete histories and concrete social relations. For example, what is war? War is never simply a conflict between governments. It reorganises the conditions for the reproduction of life. It reshapes food systems, migration patterns, energy networks, public services, ecological relations, families and institutions of care. It changes how future struggles will be fought.

We have to look past which side possesses the correct quotation or the correct doctrine. The more materialist questions are:

What social forces are actually being strengthened in this situation? Which classes gain power? Which institutions of care survive or disappear? Which movements become stronger or weaker? Which capacities for collective self-government are expanded or diminished? Who gains greater capacity to organise, and who loses it?

Both campism and anti-campism often become arguments primarily about states. But through class and historical materialist analysis we can begin asking how social forces, institutions of care, forms of reproduction, unions, communities and movements are actually being strengthened or weakened by a given conflict. At the very least, that seems a more materialist place to begin than searching for another quotation to win an argument.

For a more concrete illustration, consider the current confrontation between Iran, Israel and the United States and its allies. A Marxist analysis cannot begin and end with states. Iran is not simply "anti-imperialist," nor is it simply another capitalist state equivalent to the United States. The Iranian state emerged through a specific historical trajectory, sits in a subordinate position within a US-dominated world order, and faces real pressures from sanctions, military encirclement and regional intervention.

These are realities. The expansion of imperial domination should be resisted. Not because the Iranian state represents an emancipatory alternative, but because military aggression, sanctions, occupation and regional destabilisation deepen domination and narrow the possibilities for collective self-determination. Opposition to imperial aggression is therefore not a secondary question. It is a practical necessity.

At the same time, opposing imperial aggression does not require us to champion one state against another. We must also remember that Iran is not outside capitalism. It contains class divisions, labour struggles, political repression and forms of accumulation that shape the lives of ordinary people. The interests of the Iranian state are not identical to the interests of Iranian workers, women, minorities or social movements. This means that opposing US or Israeli aggression does not require us to romanticise the Iranian state. Nor does recognising the reactionary features of the Iranian state require us to become indifferent to imperial aggression. A Marxist politics should be capable of holding both ideas simultaneously.

Opposition to aggression is not an endorsement of the state being attacked. We can oppose invasion, sanctions, military escalation and colonial violence because of the devastation they inflict upon ordinary people and the ways they undermine the capacity of communities to reproduce and govern their lives. We should not be asking whether Iran is "good" or "bad", nor whether the United States is worse. An object of communist politics is not deciding which state deserve our loyalty. The focus must be on what political orientation Marxists should adopt within the conflict.

And it must be based on historical investigation, which is not political neutrality. It is the means by which we determine how best to resist domination in the particular circumstances we face. In this situation, that means opposing imperial aggression and resisting the expansion of imperial domination. But it also means looking for contradictions in Capitalism and refusing to identify the interests of ordinary people with the interests of any capitalist state. It means analysing the concrete social relations at work, remaining attentive to class divisions and the forms of domination at play, while asking what social forces are actually being strengthened through the conflict.

Above all, it means supporting the capacity of ordinary people to organise, care for one another and collectively govern the conditions of their lives. Perhaps that is the real lesson. Marxists should resist imperial aggression wherever it appears. But resisting imperialism does not require abandoning analysis. Nor does class analysis require indifference to the unequal and violent structure of the world system.

The challenge is to oppose imperial domination without collapsing into campism, while also refusing a dogmatic anti-campism that treats every conflict as though history has already supplied the answer.

Historical materialism is never a catalogue of ready-made positions. It is a method for understanding the world in order to change it.

When I reflect on this, I realise that these are the ordinary, routine contradictions of life under capitalism. Most people already love animals. They feed dogs before themselves. They spend sleepless nights caring for sick cats. They rescue injured wildlife. They cry when animals die. Vast numbers of people organise parts of their daily lives around caring for non-human beings. But these people also need to leave for work, or work in ways that take them away from the care that is unsustainable and placed as a burden on individuals, when it is shaped through and through by how society operates and structures our lives. Again, it is just one of those ordinary facts of contemporary life. Set and forget.

What we also tend to set and forget is another ordinary fact that’s very much extraordinary: we live in a society organised around the industrial exploitation and killing of animals. In fact, I feed Lily the waste products of that industry, the bodies of animals I do not eat which go into her feed using more energy than could power an SUV. More than ninety billion terrestrial animals are killed every year to feed us, and trillions of aquatic animals pass through systems of extraction and slaughter, making products that feed us unecessary quantities of protein, or end up in our trinkets, toys, cars, buildings, clothes, and medicines.

Entire ecosystems are reorganised around production. So many chickens are bred, confined, killed and discarded that some scientists have suggested their elongated, fragile bones marked by capitalism may become one of the defining geological markers of the Anthropocene itself (perhaps it will be known as the age of chickens).

How can both these things be true? How can a society be so full of care for animals? And how can it be organised around such extraordinary violence toward them?

The usual explanations are not very satisfying. Some say people are hypocrites. Others say people simply have not been persuaded. But the problem is not the absence of care; instead, it is the organisation of care. Care is a condition of social life upon which capital depends but which it cannot fully reduce to commodity production. It cannot manufacture love, attachment, trust or care. It can only organise them, commodify them and extract from them.

Lily's dependence on me reveals a contradiction. I care for her deeply, yet the society I inhabit continuously limits my capacity to care. The same society that teaches us to love animals also teaches us to leave them alone all day while we work. The same society that celebrates companion animals organises the industrial slaughter of billions of others destroys the ecosystem on which it depends for its profits, and harms millions of people every year, exploiting precarious workers, destroying rainforests for feed crops, and killing millions with the particulate matter of intensive animal farms.

It is also just one of those contradiction that care exists outside capitalist social relations. We know that whenever we stare into the eyes of our child or our animals or our family or even our charges. We know and feel that our duty to them is unconditional. But the contradiction is that this motivation to do unconditional things remains subordinated to accumulation. It is a contradiction that is not unique to animals. We see it in our relationships with children, parents, partners, neighbours and communities. We know what care looks like. We practice it every day, but we live in social relations and the material conditions that they create which both facilitates and makes caring increasingly harder for us to sustain.

Capitalism does not merely exploit labour. Instead it appropriates care and extracts from the relationships that sustain life while continuously undermining the conditions under which those relationships flourish. This is the fundamental reality of capitalist social relations and the conditions they create that discipline, structure and control our lives. In this context, as Capitalism’s control over life becomes more and more important, there is a huge potential for animal liberation to be on frontlines in the battle to empower us.

Purity, Pragmatism, and Power

Knowing that we need to make our problems much more transparent and address the social relations in our lives, I often find the typical narrow debates within animal advocacy deeply unsatisfying.

Philosophically, the debate between the welfarists and rights vegans or abolitionists—especially the the consequentialists and deontologists—have been leading us down the path of asking the wrong questions. While these debates have clarified moral principles, they have hidden social relations and distracted us from the contradictions in our lives. One side argues for purity, and considers compromise a betrayal, or a logical error. The other argues for pragmatism, and considers compromise as progress. One side asks whether a compromise is morally acceptable. The other asks whether there are “wins for animals”. Everyone on one side just wants to win. The other wants to be right. The audience wants to reduce everything to veganism as consumption. And the transparency of social relations is lost every time.

Abolitionists are right that moral principles matter. Pragmatists are right that strategy matters. But neither is sufficient. That is because these views begin in the wrong place; they begin with moral principles when they should begin with social relations and principles for organising society. Then these debates might have enormous value to work out a strategy. Currently, however, these debates are confused with whether or not we care about animals, and how we can make others care too. The reality is that millions of people already do care about animals. They simply lack the ability to organise their lives, the capacity to do anything about it in a way that overcomes the barriers that snap them back into a world of normal routines or that overcome the barriers that limit us. Right here we should be aiming at something much broader than even the industrialisation I referred to earlier: it is empowering people to organise their relationships with animals differently without the threats to their survival and the scarcity incentives this creates.

Recently, David Ramms in “It’s Time Vegans Stopped Arguing with History” intervened in a controversy involving Gaz Oakley, a formerly vegan avant-garde chef and influencer who has been coping flack for joining the carnists and eating animals. Ramms argued that vegans should learn from history, particularly from abolitionist movements that relied on compromise, coalition-building and incremental gains. He praised the Vegan Strategiest, Tobias Leenaert, whose work encourages rank and file vegans to become less militant, not so purist, and more pragmatic in their everyday communication and behaviour.

The David Ramms Substack

It's Time Vegans Stopped Arguing With History

“Gaz Oakley is no longer anti-racist. That doesn’t mean he’s no longer an ally…

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3 months ago · 33 likes · 19 comments · David Ramms

The Vegan Strategist

The team is bigger than the label

I’m always interested to see the vegan community’s response when a vegan celebrity jumps ship…

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3 months ago · 74 likes · 24 comments · Tobias Leenaert

There is truth in what both Ramms and Leenaert write. No successful movement has ever been pure. Every struggle contains compromises, alliances and contradictions. But by arguing we should slide good thoughts into the DM of Gaza Oakley, to use and exploit him as a “tool for good” before he is exploited by industrial agriculture, Ramms turns this insight into a liberal theory of history. His potted account of abolition becomes a story about moderation, persuasion and strategic compromise. I’ve seen such reductions of history before. While Ramms’ argument is useful because it identifies a real problem, his solution mistakes one aspect of history for the whole.

Because the implication Ramms makes is that only abolition succeeded because activists were pragmatic; like Leenaert, abolitionists in the past were willing to get “messy” with “reality”. What this framing does is reduce both the causes and consequences of abolition itself, and obscure the lessons that follow from it by indulging in comparisons that are too transhistorical to begin with and then, what is more, narrow them down to one set of abolitionists in one particular geographical location in Europe and one moment in history. In Ramms’ account, the Haitian Revolution largely disappears, among all the other slave rebellions. Anti-colonial resistance disappears, the threat of revolutionary upheaval and the changing economic relations of capitalism disappear. While legal abolition in England is presented as a necessary compromise, the truth is that enslaved people did not patiently wait for freedom: they fought for it. Haiti transformed the political landscape of the Atlantic world and confronted slave-owning societies with the possibility that enslaved people might liberate themselves.

Equally relevant to discuss here is what happened after abolition. Ramms celebrates the uncomfortable compromise of this act to give Veganism a wide scope to compromise, but it’s an unfortunate story he is framing. Britain did not simply abolish slavery and move beyond it. In 1833, the British government allocated £20 million—around forty percent of annual government expenditure—to compensate slave owners for the loss of their human property. The formerly enslaved received nothing, as Ramms points out. And the debt incurred to fund this compensation remained embedded in Britain’s public finances until 2015.

This was on paper at least a “win” for slaves, a “messy”, “dirty” one, but it took compromise to ensure this legislation as passed. But what Ramms ignores here is how the wealth accumulated through slavery by former slave owners did not simply vanish. Instead, through the ongoing compensation it was built into the unbroken power of these former slave owners that flowed into industry, finance, landed estates, agriculture and the development of British capitalism itself. Abolition in this case did not simply destroy a system of domination. It reorganised it. The wealth extracted through plantation slavery became part of the foundations of modern capitalist development, including agricultural systems that would themselves become increasingly industrialised and subordinated to accumulation.

The lesson of abolition is therefore not that compromise works. Nor that compromise fails. It’s that if we take our eyes of the systems of domination, we can record wins for one group of people, and reform one plank in the system, only to build the domination elsewhere, and to export the social relations further across society. The lesson is that systems of domination must be transformed, and we do that through acting through contradictions, struggles and shifts in power.

The same is true of labour movements, anti-colonial struggles, Black liberation movements and feminist movements. None of them succeeded because oppressed people became more polite. None of them succeeded because they discovered the perfect messaging strategy. They succeeded because they altered the balance of power. Moderates often negotiate because radicals transform what is possible. Compromise is rarely the cause of change. More often, it is one outcome of changing social relations. This matters because animal liberation faces a similar problem.

When Ramms asks us to pursue the “best outcomes for animals”, I find myself wondering how we know what those outcomes are. I think about Lily. What would the best outcome for her be? More companionship. More time together. More opportunities for play, exploration and social connection. Less isolation. More care. But immediately I run into a problem. Those outcomes are not simply matters of personal choice. They depend on working hours, housing, income, public space, transport systems and the organisation of daily life itself.

In other words, they depend on social relations. If we struggle to create the conditions for flourishing in our relationships with the animals who already live in our homes, how can we assume that we already know how to create the best outcomes for the billions of animals hidden within industrial production systems?

This is not about merely what animals need. It’s about the power we possess to meet those needs. It’s the preconditions of any moral or ethical behaviour. And this is not what I hear about in countless debates in animal advocacy; there’s no discussion of the kind of pragmatic strategies we need to build and strengthen the ability of everyone to make the choices by taking on the social relations that could sustain the end of the domination and suffering of our loved ones.

What is to be done?

If the problem is ultimately one of power rather than morality, then the question becomes what kinds of reforms build power. Reform and abolition can quickly become a debate that will tie a movement up into an impractical knots, and there is a growing awareness that veganism and the animal liberation movement must move on from this dead-end.

Socialist André Gorz’s idea of “non-reformist reforms“ becomes useful here. A reformist reform reduces suffering while leaving existing social relations largely intact. A non-reformist reform expands our capacity to organise life differently. It shifts power. It creates new possibilities. It opens space for further transformation. The distinction between reform and reformism is crucial.

Non-reformist reforms are not an argument against immediate reductions in suffering. They are an argument for selecting and designing reforms that also increase the capacity for future transformation. Rights on paper are also important, but if we ignore these questions about power and transition, we lose the opportunity to consider how those rights become durable realities rather than aspirations continually undermined by existing social relations.

Abolitionists might ask if a reform is morally acceptable. A pragmatist might ask whether a reform will win, or shift outcomes, no matter how small. But a politics of life against capital asks whether the reform merely stabilises existing relations or also increases our collective capacity to transform them. It asks:

• What capacities does this reform create?

• Does it expand our collective ability to organise human-animal relations differently?

• Does it increase the power of those who produce and reproduce life, democratic power over how they make things, sustain and care?

• How does the reform help us “win”? Who wins and loses? What might be the unintended consequences of our compartmentalised reform in a power system?

These questions point toward a different strategic horizon for animal liberation. Not a blueprint. Not a checklist. But a set of five principles for reorganising society which help animal liberation become the mature social movement it should be, the one capable of genuinely strategic compromise for building power. Animal liberation should be judged by whether it builds five forms of power:

1. Production

2. Reproduction

3. Transition

4. Alliances

5. Institutions

1. The first principle is that animal liberation must increase democratic control over production (production).

The industrial systems that dominate human-animal relations today are organised by corporations, investors and large landholders. The people who work within them often possess little power to determine what is produced, how it is produced, or how animals are treated. Non-reformist reforms therefore include measures that increase worker power, public oversight and democratic control throughout food systems. Transparency laws, worker organisation, agricultural unionism, producer cooperatives, public ownership and forms of democratic planning all expand society’s capacity to transform production itself. In addition, they flow back into principle 2 (below) and give back the time outside workplaces everyone needs to care and sustain ourselves and our loved ones while building the capacity to realise our ethical and compassionate principles in the practice of life. Such reforms allow us the time to overcome the contradictions and build the class consciousness and resources we need to overturn the structural disadvantage, neglect, and discrimination that capital has built into our lives.

Other reforms target production specifically. Building democratic control over production, through parties and committees. Slaughterhouse workers electing health and welfare committees with real power, or the targeted conversion of feed-crop production into plant-based food production based on cooperative principes. Introducing some of these reforms are incredibly uncomfortable for vegans and people who support abolition. But, they are critical. They have impacts on everyone’s ability to challenge deeply exploitative systems. And they’re addressing the systems that actually do and enforce the killing and exploitation, that force the precarious workers into systems that destroy respect for life in almost every way conceivable. We should be creating a society in which everyone has a clear choice, cannot be dominated by others, employers or markets, and has no incentive to kill or exploit to survive.

2. The second principle is that animal liberation must in connection with producers increase reproducer power (reproduction).

This principle is so important, I am tempted to call it Lily’s principle. Every additional hour reclaimed from work is potentially an hour of care returned to children, communities and animals like Lily. We are not just producers. We are also reproducers, which is as essential as work. Many workers are also reproducers, are the essential workers who clean, feed, clothe and serve us. These workers sustain the lives of others, stabilise and make capital livable. The more subordinated they are to accumulation, the more society struggles to transform. The care of animals is part of the broader work of social reproduction. It depends upon time, attention, housing, public space and social support.

People cannot care for animals if they have no time to care. A shorter working week, stronger leave provisions, public health services that break down the segregation of animal and human health care, inclusive housing, community care programs, public investment in sanctuaries and the decommodification of basic services all increase society’s capacity to organise care differently.

These reforms would do more for countless animals than another debate over vegan purity. They create conditions in which relationships like the one I have with Lily can flourish rather than being squeezed into the margins of economic life. And they give people the space and time to transform their lives and become vegan and organise others to support a collective project.

3. The third principle is that animal liberation must reduce dependence on systems organised around animal exploitation (transition).

Farmers should not be abandoned to market forces. Workers should not be abandoned to unemployment. Communities dependent on animal industries should not be left behind. A non-reformist approach would fight for publicly funded transitions into plant-based agriculture, worker-owned food production, ecosystem restoration projects, rewilding programs, rural public investment and new forms of employment capable of sustaining communities beyond animal exploitation. No farmer should have to choose between economic survival and animal liberation.

The objective is not merely to reform animal agriculture, but to reduce society's dependence upon systems organised around animal exploitation. And the goal is not simply to close industries but to create alternatives capable of sustaining life. Some of the most remarkable advocacy is already working in these areas.

If this is compromise, let’s see more of it. Let’s also see it extended everywhere in food systems, in all animal industries: let’s decommodify the lives and conditions for the lives of the humans and animals around us. Let’s transform animal agriculture and its destruction of communities, ecosystems, and wildlife. There’s so much to do here, and it’s neither about compromise or about purity: it’s the transparency of power and the reduction of dependence we need in our lives.

4. The fourth principle is that animal liberation must build alliances around shared forms of domination (alliances).

Liberation movements reveal forms of domination that animal advocates often miss because they have already confronted questions of power, institutions and social reproduction. That is why they are so valuable for animal liberation. We should be listening to members with experience in liberation, such as Queer Brown Vegan, or Isaias Hernandez, further defines “white veganism [as] a form of veganism that focuses solely on animal liberation while actively ignoring the effects of colonization and how it is interconnected to the oppression of humans and animals.” Or the words and insights of Brown Feminist Vegan, whose instagram page should be on the feed of every animal advocate.

The same social relations that subordinate animals to accumulation often subordinate workers, carers, Indigenous peoples and ecosystems. This does not mean collapsing every struggle into one. It means recognising that many struggles confront the same structures of power. Campaigns for shorter working hours, housing, public goods, food sovereignty, ecological restoration, workplace democracy and Indigenous land justice can all expand society’s capacity to reorganise human-animal relations.

Vegans should not to ignore comments pointing out racism, and fall into the trap of white veganism, being a useful tool for white supremacy ( “an extension of white supremacy or at least a tool of it”, as Demi Colleen puts it, that ignores the “socio-economic impact” of the movement). We need to ally ourselves to everyone who struggles for liberation, and to learn from them, rather than play the game of professionalisation and corporate “wins for animals”. This path is increasingly reproducing social relations that do real harm and that will only become greater with increasing popularity.

Why is compromise with the other liberation movements that surround us never what is sought strategically, and why is it that animal advocates are always seeking some mass appeal? Ramm refers to the “psychological manipulation” that is organised by animal agriculture industries—are we somehow to pour our energy into adopting that? The capacity building of one, not the other, is much greater, if only we understand that we don’t need to make people see suffering in order for them to care: instead, we need to give them the tools to change the social relations that lead them down the path of manipulation. We should be less concerned with persuasion than with expanding people's capacity to act on values they already have: this is the way.

5. The fifth principle is that animal liberation must build institutions capable of sustaining a different world (institutions).

Movements cannot survive on outrage or even on what Ramm calls “real money and real attention” alone. They require organisations, cooperatives, unions, sanctuaries, educational projects, democratic associations and community networks. These organistions should be putting the attention on the principles and strategies we need to transform how we operate in the world. The challenge is not merely to resist existing institutions. It is to connect and build new ones that do not reproduce the same social relations or seek to make transparent and transform them.

Power that cannot be institutionalised eventually dissipates. Animal liberation has a wide scope here to organise and combine. The capacity and funding is already there. We don’t need sugar hits from poker players, celebrities, and billionaires and other uncontrollable “tools for good”, as Ramms puts it. We do need to empower the people that are producing and reproducing in our societies, and that we depend on. We should never be afraid of centering their needs to build the transformation the difficult work of disrupting social relations requires.

Politeness won’t get us far here. Politeness has a dark history in enforcing colonial and capitalist rule. What will get us far together is genuine listening and collaboration that respects the connectedness of the liberation of us all. Vegans do not need to learn to subordinate themselves to “real money and real attention to the animals”. Instead, they need to learn how to build real power over the people that manipulate us into thinking we need capitalist realism to survive.

Beyond purity and pragmatism

Taken together, these principles suggest a very different understanding of progress than is usually presented by animal advocates and in debates between people who, ultimately, support animal liberation. We should not be debating whether reform is incremental or abolitionist.

What we should be seeking is reforms that build power. Power for the people organising change, not for the already powerful who are seeking the reparations and compensations. Whenever we seek a reform, wellbeing or other, we should be asking at least these 5 questions for non-reformist reforms for the animals in our lives:

1. Does it strengthen the social forces capable of transforming human-animal relations?

2. Does it expand democratic control over production?

3. Does it increase society’s capacity to care?

4. Does it reduce dependence on systems organised around accumulation?

5. Does it help people live more of their lives according to values other than profit?

These are the standards by which reforms should be judged, and not because they guarantee victory, but because they expand our ability to create a society in which care rather than accumulation becomes the organising principle of human-animal relations.

This is where both purity and pragmatism become insufficient. Purity without power becomes moral grandstanding and futility, and pragmatism without power becomes adaptation and conformity. Both risk becoming trapped within the social relations they claim to oppose. What matters is whether our actions increase our capacity to transform those relations. This means starting with social relations rather than identities. It means analysing contradictions rather than policing personal consistency, building power rather than simply building awareness, and expanding democratic control over production and reproduction.

It means creating institutions capable of sustaining different forms of life, and judging reforms not by whether they make us feel virtuous, nor by whether they produce immediate wins, but by whether they increase our collective capacity to care. Animal liberation will not emerge because people suddenly learn to love animals. Millions already do. What we should be working on is turning everyday capacities for care into become social forces capable of transforming the conditions under which humans and animals live together.

Purity without power cannot transform social relations. Pragmatism without power adapts to them.

All Power to the Lilys

Every morning I leave Lily behind and go to work with a knot in my stomach not because I’m feeling bad for no reason, but because I am correctly feeling a contradiction in the social relations that govern both our lives. I do not want merely a slightly kinder version of those relations: I don’t think that is what Lily needs, because it is an adaptation that suits me more than her.

I want a society organised around care rather than accumulation. The challenge of animal liberation is not simply to reduce suffering, a laudable moral principle, but one we cannot mistake for an organising principle for society. Because our goal should be to build the power necessary to organise production and reproduction around life itself. It should be to end what we sustain in our everyday lives, forced into the exploitation of our social relations and the material conditions they have created.

This is the challenge I’ve begun to think of as transforming life under capital into life against capital. And in this transformation, I can think of no better revolutionary traveller than my dog Lily, a brown labrador who has been abandoned and who deserves better.

The central problem of animal liberation is not persuading people to care, but building the social power necessary to organise care differently.