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A long time ago, around the time when social media was a new and exciting part of the internet, I heard someone say of these sites, “if the product is free, you are the product”. Many implicitly understood that bargain: I give you my data and attention, you give me the ability to connect with my friends. If we knew then what we know now, I wonder if we would’ve thought this to be a fair deal. Each person created a profile on their favorite social media app, but in doing so, the owners created a profile of you as a consumer. Instead of a living breathing person, you became - to them - a collection of signals, preferences, likes and dislikes, behaviors, that they could package up and sell to ad companies or data brokers. Tracking consumer behavior, of course, seems quaint in comparison to a technology that tracks people for deportation or extermination, but the logic implanted in the former is what has given birth to the latter. A Palantir-type product was always the inevitable end result of technology under capitalism.

As a software engineer with a career spanning a decade plus, I have taken great pains to work at what I like to call “morally neutral” companies. With a full recognition that there is no true moral neutrality under this system, nevertheless I have intentionally avoided or turned down interviews for NewsMax, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and various other corporations that are an overt evil upon society and where I would not want my labor to help them achieve their ends. Despite that, much of what Palantir is and does is quite familiar to me based on systems I have built myself. When reduced to its parts, what is Palantir but yet another collection of metrics and dashboards, insights and analytics, events and signals, but directed at entire populations instead of customers? While consumer or b2b products track what you click, what you buy, where you drop off, what predicts churn, to determine how a company should act on a consumer base, the logic embedded in that is the same as the logic embedded in technofascism. People are transformed into signals that are used to determine how to coerce or control them. To either get them to perform a desired behavior (like complete a purchase), or to predict whether they are a danger to the state. In both cases the human being is mere commodity. It is only logical to see the former “neutral” implementation of technology as merely the nascent expression of one that exists to dominate and repress the masses. Industrial capitalism at its base level is a means by which human labor is extracted and commoditized in order to produce profit, but within platform capitalism it is not just labor, it is human behavior and life itself that becomes the raw material used in order to track, classify, analyze, and surveill the populace, not for direct profit, but as a metafunction of protecting capital via keeping the war machine humming or making mass deportation seamless.

But what is Palantir? Perhaps you’ve heard the name but are unfamiliar with what their product actually is and does. First and foremost they are a technology company and military contractor. What they do is often something even their own engineers can not succinctly describe, however one of their flagship products is described as “operationaliz[ing] data”. Essentially, it sits atop the many existing systems and databases used by agencies like ICE or the LAPD and delivers a single dashboard that aggregates that data and provides “insights”, making connections and inferences that allow analysts to better profile immigrants or citizens. Data collection, aggregation, and analysis is utterly mundane — until it isn’t. According to Buzzfeed News, Palantir’s Gotham program used by the LAPD will make even an uneventful interaction with law enforcement turn you into a point of data, “Maybe a police officer was told a person knew a suspected gang member. Maybe an officer spoke to a person who lived near a crime “hot spot,” or was in the area when a crime happened. Maybe a police officer simply had a hunch. The context is immaterial. Once the LAPD adds a name to Palantir’s database, that person becomes a data point in a massive police surveillance system.” They say the program “[constructs] a vast database that indiscriminately lists the names, addresses, phone numbers, license plates, friendships, romances, jobs of Angelenos — the guilty, innocent, and those in between”

Once you are inside the dashboard, your intrinsic humanity is stripped. The dashboard is not neutral - not in consumer software and not in Gotham; it is instead an attempt at organizing reality that invariably comes with its own biases. Once you have been transformed into a point of data, you are no longer human, but rather a category to be sorted, sifted, filtered, and targeted. Just like a man becomes a unit of labor power, a man is then a row in a database used against all the others to try to paint a picture of what to manage or control. Whether the subject is a consumer or a prisoner, the worldview is the same: people are not people they are objects to be acted upon.

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This may not surprise people who have been outspoken about government surveillance since the Patriot Act, but we are now sitting on decades worth of data not only from various governmental agencies but also widely available from consumer products that have spent years collecting metrics from primary and secondary sources. Capitalism in the modern era has made it virtually impossible to “opt out”. Sure, you can never create a social media profile, you can never use a loyalty card or sync your contacts or turn “find my iPhone” on, you can refuse to “check in” or post your vacation on Instagram, but there is a social cost to refusing to participate at all. So while one could contend we give this information away “voluntarily” we only do so in the most limited sense of the word. The disclosure of all these pieces of our lives is under conditions in which we have no say. The tech oligarchs own the phones and the apps and the websites we use every day. And while we pay the toll of online life by these disclosures, we are also unwittingly helping to architect a panopticon used to repress us. The surveillance state instead of being constructed from scratch, is assembled from the many pieces of consumer data being collected from us at every turn.

The inevitability of this may not be immediately clear, but as capital accelerates ever-worsening material conditions on the working class, governments feel it necessary to tighten control of populations and prevent mass unrest. Data that was once used to sell us a product, is now ripe to profile us as a suspect, a protestor, a migrant, a dissident, a military target. We believed that the data collected would only be used to sell us things, but inherent in that understanding is that we are the commodity. Palantir is this rationale brought to its logical extreme: a population who can be immediately legible to state power based on millions of signals produced in our everyday life as workers, consumers, and citizens. Technology itself is indeed neutral in a vacuum, but under a system that has coercion baked into the very fabric of its being, technology will always be a loaded gun. Instead of using the vast amounts of data we collect all around us to keep populations safe, to better lives, or to cooperate, the existing social relations ensure that it will be used for extraction, repression, and control. What is disturbing about Palantir isn’t that they’ve created something new, it’s the fact that what they do is positively unextraordinary. Technological capital mediated the abstraction from human to signal long ago, but seeing that mediation in the hands of a repressive state reveals the latent tendency of a system where human relations are abstracted for profit. The house was already built, Palantir simply turned the key.

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“I have so much gratitude to people who wrote extremely complex software character-by-character. It already feels difficult to remember how much effort it really took. Thank you for getting us to this point.” With this one tweet from Sam Altman, the game is revealed. What may sound like a note of genuine appreciation for people who spent their lives learning to do the impossible - to “teach a rock to think” - is really a shot across the bow, not only to the entire software development industry, but to nearly all of the places that humans derive the means to make a living. We are hurtling into an era of AI-driven mass deskilling that will take all of the human contributions gobbled up by this machine and replace them with a poor replica that allows bosses to “run lean” and lay off skilled workers across sectors while seeing no reduction in productivity. At least that’s the sales pitch. And it’s working.

You can hardly log onto any tech subreddit these days without seeing posts like “Execs thirsting over AI is killing my passion for software engineering”, “Has AI ruined software development?”, “Hot take: AI ruined the way we see coding - and I hate it”, and “AI timeline expectations are driving me crazy”. I know that it’s difficult to have sympathy for software engineers, as Silicon Valley has been responsible for some of the worst developments in our lifetimes, but it’s not the code monkeys that are the ones making these decisions. In fact, we largely despise them. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, is not a software engineer. He has never written a line of code. Neither is Peter Thiel. Nor Reid Hoffman. Nor even Steve Jobs. The people who have had a stranglehold on our lives aren’t the ones producing the code, making the products work. They are the vulture capitalists who are addicted to the Next Big Idea, who foisted on us the NFTs and the crypto and now the AI revolution with nary an ounce of our consent.

Just Learn To Code

I was one of the people who took this advice. Way back in 2013, after a divorce and a failed attempt at starting a sole proprietorship I found myself stuck. I couldn’t afford to go back to school. I had a 4 year old daughter and I needed to find an industry that was undersaturated and recession proof. While scrolling Facebook I saw an ad about learning to code and a lightbulb went off. After looking at the career outlook for engineers I was convinced that if I really committed myself to learning this craft, I would be able to provide for myself and my daughter and never have to worry about being homeless again. I threw everything I could into it. For a couple long, lean years I studied software engineering from my home for 10 hours a day, 7 days a week. I nearly ended up on the street just trying to make ends meet during that time, but I finally got there. I got my first Junior Engineer position, then another, and eventually worked my way up and pulled myself and my daughter out of poverty. For the first time in my life I was solidly middle class and didn’t have to freak out whenever I bought groceries. As someone who was on food stamps as a child, this was unimaginable success in my eyes. The peace of mind I felt knowing that if I lost a job there were 10 more for every 1 developer out there was immeasurable. I had a good run of it.

But in the last couple years, something shifted. I noticed that my bosses were getting infected with the mind virus sold to them by the AI hype men. They started to believe we weren’t needed anymore, or, if we were, we were now capable of producing 10x the amount of code in the same amount of time. We started to be required to use AI to write our code, and were given virtually no time to understand and solve the problems ourselves. We became more code reviewers than code authors. And no matter how much we produced, we were expected to do more. If AI can make one dev do the work of 10, maybe it can make one dev do the work of 20. Why not? We just have to spend more on tokens! Naturally, none of these increases in productivity have been passed down to the devs who are now somehow more overworked but paid the same. On my team, there isn’t a single engineer who doesn’t feel burned out, underappreciated, and virtually forced at gunpoint to be overreliant on a technology that has killed everything we enjoyed about our career. Beyond that, the outlook couldn’t be worse. The market is saturated with thousands of engineers that were laid off from the big MAANG companies, and just the process of getting your resume in front of human eyes feels impossible when AI resumes flood the zone and AI Human Resources apps read and reject candidates without a single living person involved. I can tell you from the inside, things have never felt so bleak. And just like everyone outside the software industry, we feel we are being dragged along unwillingly for the ride while this hype train destroys everything about a career we once loved, with nothing there to replace it.

This is not to say you must feel sorry for the poor suffering software engineers, but to emphasize what it represents in a larger pattern of how capitalists are approaching labor in the modern era. Having to hire human workers who might have pesky demands for more pay, better hours, or better working conditions is but a nuisance to them. They want to streamline their businesses by - ideally - not needing to hire humans at all. They are being sold a dream of a 100% agent operated business where they purchase tokens instead of labor hours, and at a fraction of the cost. After all, agents won’t ever try to unionize. They don’t need weekends off. They don’t get sick or fall pregnant. They can’t strike. They won’t fight back. When the one of the last vestiges of upward mobility (“just learn to code”) is being increasingly proletarianized and made redundant, it signals that the owner class has completely abandoned the notion that a minimum quality of life must be made possible for workers, even aspirationally. The oligarchs of old used to talk about a “riot tax”: some minimal concessions by capitalism to prevent the working class from an uprising; a base level standard of comfort that would quell a revolution. Our modern day oligarchs no longer feel such impulses. They (either rightly or wrongly) predict that no such uprising will occur, even if their wildest dreams come true and 25% of the workforce becomes unemployed and unemployable.

Of course, capitalists wanting to invest in labor saving technologies is nothing new. Since the dawn of capitalism, owners have always wanted to spend less on labor to produce more. This, however, feels different precisely because of the scale, the speed, and the fundamental discrepancy between AI itself and the developments that in some ways moved humanity forward. The industrial revolution may have displaced workers, but the fruits borne from it were important. The steam engine, the cotton gin, the telegraph, and the lightbulb were all crucial for human advancement. And while jobs were made redundant, other ones took their place. The same cannot be said for AI. What do we, as workers, gain from AI generated video games or music or art? What do we get as a society from a company hiring one engineer instead of ten and keeping the surplus profits? What happens to the 25% who now have nothing else they can do with their lives under a system that does not share the surpluses of this replacement with them, or universalize gains, and has no mechanism to care for those who can not justify their existence through laboring for a wage?

While people like Sam Altman have vaguely gestured at the concept of some sort of universalization of profits “I think just like a fixed cash payment, although useful and maybe a good idea in some ways, does not get at what we’re really going to need for this next phase and the kind of collective alignment of shared upside as the balance between labor and capital shifts”, it would be a mistake to trust them. As one memo from 2019 said about Altman: “Sam exhibits a consistent pattern of […] lying”. Silicon Valley bros do not truly want to move towards an egalitarian society where no one has to work, but they do want to make sure the transition to their vision of “utopia” involves less people trying to firebomb their homes. Even Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist, once said “any person working to build this civilization-altering technology bears a heavy burden and is taking on unprecedented responsibility. [but] the people who end up in these kinds of positions are often a certain kind of person, someone who is interested in power, a politician, someone who likes it.”

Even while these tech oligarchs wax poetic about a new technofuturist societal formation where robots do all our work while we play in the sun, the money tells a different story. The AI industry has been active behind the scenes trying to lobby politicians in both parties with hundreds of millions in bribes to legislate against AI regulation and expansion of data centers nationwide. Likewise, AI is being used by Palantir for ICE surveillance, and loaned out to precision strike little girls in Iran. Hardly the technoutopia we are told is just around the corner.

As the paths to moving beyond poverty begin to close completely, so comes the backlash. Whether it’s the council member whose home was shot at for supporting the construction of a data center the community was against, or the attacks on Sam Altman, people are beginning to understand AI as the existential threat that it is, and responding in kind. Estimates say around 16,000 jobs a month are being cut due to AI, and the outlooks are only getting worse. Public opinion is not on the side of the oligarchs, however they are completely unconcerned with our consent. Even while the data shows that the productivity gains are not being realized quite in the way they were expected to, this sort of job loss will have catastrophic downstream effects for society at large.

Speaking personally, the shift this so-called “AI revolution” has caused in a career I fought for with my blood, sweat, and tears; witnessing it become a shell of what it once was, with the looming threat of a return to poverty with no way out, has been a radicalizing moment for me. I can feel the pendulum swing above me, holding my breath and waiting, knowing that if it drops I will have nothing left to lose. This is the prevailing situation for so many of us. I can’t make any solid predictions, but I know that when you give tens of millions of people nothing to hang onto, the threadbare fabric holding society together will turn to dust. Ask Claude what happens next.

If you’re able, please become a paid subscriber today. I can’t do it without you. -Scarlet

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If you’re able, please become a paid subscriber today. I can’t do it without you. -Scarlet

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If you’re able, please become a paid subscriber today. I can’t do it without you. -Scarlet

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ICE murdered a man this morning in broad daylight. Alex Pretti, 37, a registered nurse, was filming ICE actions in Minneapolis just a day after a historic protest and general strike, and was accosted by agents for filming, thrown to the ground, held down, and then executed by an agent unloading his full clip into this observer. Alex had committed no cri…

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If you’re able, please become a paid subscriber today. I can’t do it without you. -Scarlet

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If you’re able please become a paid subscriber today. I can’t do it without you. -Scarlet

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Since Kamala Harris lost the election to Donald Trump in 2024, a deluge of articles have been written about the factional battle inside the Democratic Party between the centrists / moderates and the progressives. Some of the people most responsible for the direction of the party writ large but more specifically the direction of Harris’ failed campaign have done everything they can to distance themselves from her, to claim that “real centrism hasn’t been tried” and to convince everyone that actually it wasn’t her platform of war with Iran, “the world’s most lethal military”, campaigning with Liz Cheney and inviting Leon Panetta to speak at the Democratic National Convention, doubling down on support for a broadly unpopular genocide, that harmed her. It was the answers she gave to an ACLU survey in 2019 about transgender care for incarcerated individuals that sealed her fate. Matt Yglesias and Jonathan Chait are among the worst offenders. Tweet after tweet, article after article, they’ve tripled down on their notions that “wokeness” was to blame for the broad loss of some seven million voters between 2020 and 2024. They insist that what the party has to do is to moderate even harder. To give up on more marginalized groups. To abandon even the few popular policies the party is known for and, hopefully, pick up enough racists and bible thumpers to make up the difference.

To anyone who has been following the trajectory of this party over the last four or five decades, “move to the center” is hardly new. From the dawn of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) in the eighties, the prescription for what ails you has always been “move right, move right, move right”. This year, after the hard launch of the airport book that wants to be a political ideology “Abundance” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, the liberal intelligentsia has flooded the media with thinkpiece after thinkpiece about how there’s really no need to pivot to economic populism, the party just needs to give up on a few key marginalized groups, deregulate housing development, and ??? profit! Klein in particular posited that it might be a good idea to run anti-abortion Democrats in red states (states that have overwhelmingly supported ballot measures to keep abortion legal, mind you) in order to somehow pick up mythical evangelical voters who like everything about Democrats except their views on abortion.

There have been countless iterations of “how to remake the Democratic Party” published this year from the same old mouthpieces with the same old politics that has landed us here, in a desperate bid to shift the blame from themselves and onto “the groups” or trans people or immigrants or the elusive concept of “woke”, but whether it’s Welcome PAC’s missive in Deciding to Win that insists Democrats just need to move away from “unpopular ideas” like Medicare For All (entirely based on shoddy push polling), or Klein and Thompson’s insistence that the silver bullet to fix the housing crisis - and society at large - is deregulation, every single one of these arguments boils down to trying to technocratically determine who is worth saving and who is worth throwing away, in service of the nebulous goal of “winning” (what we win and for whom is an open question).

This is because the very concept of centrism is a lie.

The foundation of centrism is built on the delusion that there can be a middle ground between exterminationism and an ideological commitment to the sanctity of human life. The fundamental premise of centrism requires you to classify violence as the things independent, rogue, non-state actors do to one another, and to ignore the monopolized violence of the state; whether at the hands of police, the military, or the guy at Aetna with a spreadsheet of claims rejections. Centrism believes that politicians who are bribed by capital to deprive workers of fair wages, of healthcare, of housing, of food, can continue to do so and still represent the workers that they are (in spirit if not in practice) tasked to represent. Centrism thinks that trillionaires and wealth inequality are unrelated phenomena. Centrism believes that you can reconcile blatant election meddling and corruption with abundance for everyone (although I doubt they really care about that last part). Centrism believes as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

While great minds on the left spin their wheels debunking specious argument after specious argument from the centrist hive mind, the centrism intelligentsia laughs all the way to the bank to cash another handsome check from another billionaire funded think tank. I could spend this entire article going through why Medicare for All is actually popular, how people turned to Trump because of economic pain that Democrats refuse to address, how corruption is so total in American politics that any kind of course correction that doesn’t include taking money out of the equation is useless. I could do that but the Centrist Hive would just vomit out another ten or twenty articles or PACs or think tanks next week. In truth, debunking arguments that are made not because someone believes them, but because someone is being paid really well to make them, is futile. So what I will argue instead is that centrism is a fiction.

To put it bluntly you either think all people deserve the right to life or you don’t. It may sound outlandish to claim that the centrists, the “moderates”, think there are people who simply don’t deserve to live, but when you put aside the five dollar words in the thinkpieces from the thought leaders, when you reduce the arguments to their truest form, what else are they saying when they tell you that housing should not be a human right? Are they not saying that if you don’t have dollars in your pocket - if you are not useful to the GDP - you should endure freezing to death? When centrism tells you that Medicare for All is a pipe dream are they not telling you that you shouldn’t be able to get cancer treatment if you get laid off or if your claim is denied? Are they not telling you that the 68,000 people who die every year for lack of healthcare (saying nothing of those whose claims are routinely denied) are an acceptable price to pay for the given system?

A thought experiment: During the government shutdown, imagine Trump gets on stage at one of his rallies and says this “Healthcare is too expensive and diabetics are 11% of the population. They account for $1 of every $4 spent on healthcare in the United States. My administration is signing an executive order that ends the production of insulin. If you are diabetic, I’m sorry but you are costing us too much folks, too much money, and we will no longer help you”. Can you predict the outrage from the centrist media class? The pearls that would be clutched? Yet how is that so different from saying that if you don’t have a full time job and $500-$1000 a month, you shouldn’t have the ability to get insulin? How is saying “kill the poors” fundamentally different than saying “it’s ok if a million people sleep outside and have no access to food and shelter in the winter. Them’s the breaks”?

What is called centrism is really just a decency filter on the abominable. Dressing up anti-human policy in a human suit. It requires you to completely overlook all of the ways the organization of society deprives the average person of the necessities of life and considers this - at best - a necessary evil. Whether it’s deciding that data centers need to be built at the cost of a livable planet or even drinkable water in low income communities or it’s deciding that children should not be entitled to food as a basic guarantee, it’s an ideology built on the demand that every human life justify its own existence. You are not entitled to anything just by the virtue of being born a human on this planet that should belong to us all, you have to consistently demonstrate your utility in society to qualify to drink the water or breathe the air or have a shelter or get that mole looked at.

As our society tumbles endlessly towards the darker and more horrifying vision of the future that some of the most nefarious in our ruling class have planned for us, the compromises the centrists are willing to make become more and more heinous. Because the “center” to them is the center of the prevailing forces, whatever those forces may be, it must constantly shift towards the cruel as our politics continues down a path that fails to meet basic needs and the masses find a consolation prize in savagery. Finding the middle ground between deploying a secret police force that is kidnapping documented, undocumented, and native born alike and simply not doing that, is where you make the masked thugs unmask, but you do not stop the thuggery.

As we careen off a cliff, the wretchedness of “centrism” demands that you overlook more and more overt violence against your fellow citizens and try to find a compromise where we collectively decide exactly how many lives are worth nothing to us and can be thrown away to achieve our goals. Worst of all, this sort of Faustian bargaining is nearly invisible to us because it’s something that has been a part of the fabric of capitalist society since before we were born. Indeed, we are trained from a very young age to overlook the innate violence that is ever-present under capitalism. We are not trained to see the man begging for change on the street corner as a victim of an inscrutable universalized system of violence. We are taught that if you need food stamps or welfare, you didn’t play by the rules, you are a victim of no one but the consequences of your own bad decisions. At its most indelicate you are told “someone has to scrub the toilets” which is a polite way of saying that we need an underclass that lives lives of quiet desperation in order to make it so that others can take lavish vacations, have big houses in the hills, and keep the whole thing running.

When you’re little you might even question this. You might wonder why we can’t just feed and house everyone. You might wonder why humans can’t just share. Why are there children starving in Africa, you might ask. If you do, you’re told that a collectivist society is “a great idea on paper but goes against human nature” but that we humans are just too selfish and self-interested to ever share the earthly spoils of our labor with each other so that everyone has enough. Maybe you’re told there actually isn’t enough for us all and not to believe your lying eyes. Be realistic, they say. But in the greatest sense of irony, the more the veil is lifted, the more you begin to see that the childlike impulse to - simply - care for us all, was the right one.

The more the veil is lifted the more you begin to see that our “normal” would be considered insanity if we weren’t so close to it. Our normal is one where we keep armed guards by dumpsters full of food while letting the man down the street starve. Our normal is one where we are so inextricably obsessed with a human invention, currency, that we are willing to kill ourselves, our home, and each other over it. Our normal is one where the people that are lauded as the “adults in the room” are willing to make detached proclamations about who should live and who can go ahead and die for all they care.

Of course, the rational conclusion is that none of this is normal at all. And in realizing this you start to see that you are living in a world gone mad, not guided by calculated logic or reason, but by a forgetting. A forgetting that we all belong to one another and that we owe something to each other. That we were all thrust into this world and that it could be anything, it never had to be this. That this society came about because of decisions made long ago but that it requires our consent to keep running. That there are only two possible outcomes in our future: socialism or barbarism. Moving towards a future of socialism is a process of remembering everything you forgot. And in that cold light, with new eyes, you can see that what is called “centrism” is a deception. It’s an attempt to cover over the obscene with academic words and self-serious declarations. It is nothing more than a thin coat of paint on a system that will eventually destroy us. There will never be a middle ground between extermination and liberation. Centrism does nothing but sell a comforting lie in the hopes that you get too confused to start remembering that we all inherited this earth and we all deserve to be here. The true danger to the centrist is not in losing an election, or having an untruth debunked. It is in exposing centrism itself as an illusion, a mirage. The promise of the a future worth living in will never be found in trying to seek a reconciliation of human life with its antagonist, it will be found in walking a path towards liberation, with each other, remembering that it was always ours to take.

If you’re able please become a paid subscriber today. I can’t do it without you. -Scarlet

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Joy has become almost a dirty word on the left lately. Sullied by people like Kamala Harris and her centrist counterparts talking about embracing joy while fervently supporting a genocide and promising the working class absolutely no relief from the crushing status quo, the concept of being joyous has started to become associated with being totally disconnected with the suffering all around us. The Zohran campaign and subsequent victory has something to say about that. The campaign’s embrace of boundless optimism has been critical to its success. The difference between this type of joy and the the kind embraced by Harris et al is in its authenticity. It isn’t a positivity that is predicated on intentional ignorance of our material conditions, but one that sees those conditions and feels relentlessly optimistic about a vision to resolve them. It is a joy that is fueled by a vision for the future that is so much better than our current reality. It is a joy that is grounded in a recognition that we can be more and in a faith in the average person to break their own chains. I think the left can learn a lot from this.

For too long the revolutionary left, (especially in online spaces, but also in real life) has adopted a posture of dour realism that seems to embrace the idea that authenticity is found in being the sober truth teller that can’t possibly express happiness or hope when things are so bad and suffering is so total. While it’s legitimate to reject the superficiality of a joy rooted in just “hoping for the best and ignoring the worst”, too many seem to believe that this also means rejecting optimism or joy of any kind. While anger can be a powerful motivator to spur one into action, it can also be paralyzing without its dialectical counterpart. With no joy, no hope, no optimism, there can be no future. With no feelings of great love centering your movement, there can be no victory. If we want to grow a movement that can truly break our chains we must become the type of movement that others want to join. If we instead revel in raining on every parade, on scolding people who feel hope or excitement (even if misguided), we become repellent to normal people who are desperate to find something to cling to as it all falls apart. While social democrats are partying we stand in the corner with a surly expression on our faces, arms crossed, chastising people for daring to smile, and then turn around and wonder why no one is asking us to dance.

“At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.” ― Ernesto “Che” Guevara

Yes, And.

There is a way to thread this needle that doesn’t require you to be a pollyanna who cannot speak to the truth of our material realities and still to be a welcoming force that is infectious in its ability to move and inspire. Abandon the binary that says you must either be blissfully ignorant or aware but miserable. The key is to focus not just on what is wrong, but also on how wonderful it will be to live in a society that fixes it. Learning to not say “no” to misguided workers, but to say “yes, and”. Successful movements do not scold people into thinking their way, they speak to the pain of the working class but also to their sense of optimism. They say “yes, the election of Mamdani is a victory for working people because it shows we can take on capital and win, and there is still more work to do, here’s how to start”. No one has ever been won over by smug condescension and superiority complexes.

What was so extraordinary about Mamdani’s campaign was his ability to talk to anyone and acknowledge their point of view, and tell them what he could do for them without judgement. Even to non voters, to triple Trump voters, to Cuomo voters, to anyone at all. If the revolutionary left wants to even be on the same playing field, it cannot adopt a posture of being too good for the the rubes. There is value in critique and criticism of course, yet it holds an almost mythic quality among the left. It has in itself taken the place of actual praxis in the minds of so many. Being a critic who stands on the sidelines and spends more time throwing tomatoes than it does changing minds is not the work. Extreme hypervigilance has replaced action in near totality. Scanning every word spoken by social democrats for the faintest trace of betrayal cannot replace the duty of going into communities where people still like Bernie Sanders and AOC and their counterparts and talking to them - not to tell them that they’re wrongheaded, but to show them an even broader vision of the possible. It would be nearly impossible to build the numbers we need to truly change the structure of society by acting like a bunch of miserable assholes all the time.

While we know the shortcomings of reforms and social democracy, our knowledge isn’t the same as power. Power comes from having the people on our side. Getting the people on our side requires us to create the type of movement that is so infectious, so exciting, that people can’t help but be drawn in. Centering our movements in optimism and love isn’t just some feel-good pablum, it gets to the heart of the matter: if we do not believe in our class, if we do not believe that workers can rise above their oppression, then why do we even call ourselves communists in the first place? If - on the other hand - we believe in the working class, we will approach them with a sense of revolutionary patience, knowing that consciousness is a continuum, and that they have the capacity to evolve as we ourselves have. Having a head full of theory but a heart that has hardened itself totally to the possibility that others can be changed is worse than useless, it’s a betrayal of the people who inspired you and who actually believed that they could act on their conditions and inspire and move their class to victory.

If there’s anything worth taking away from the campaign that went from 1% to triumph in the heart of global capital it is this: stop underestimating people’s capacity to move towards a future that is worth fighting for. Stop thinking each individual you meet is frozen in amber and cannot expand. Look for the future revolutionaries in the taxi driver, the cashier, the dock worker, the everyday people all around you. You were once a liberal and you are not that special and that is wonderful news! That means millions more can see the world as you do one day. Instead of an emphasis on “I told you so’s” and “this will never work” focus on the infinite potential contained in the working class just waiting to be unleashed. Believe in them and they’ll believe in you back. Set aside your egos and your pessimism and start looking to what the future could be if there were millions more of us. Show people what's worth fighting for by struggling alongside them with an open heart and mind and build the future together. That is how we win.

If you’re able please become a paid subscriber today. I can’t do it without you. -Scarlet

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The United States in 2025 is the image of a society that is coming apart at the seams. That which was set in motion long ago finally seems to be reaching its nadir. Climate crisis, extreme unaffordability, social unrest, coming to a crescendo with a right wing authoritarian takeover of government that has deployed military and gestapo to our city streets and made every citizen a target. A sweeping agenda of rooting out dissent making its way through our institutions. A corrupt and moribund political party as seemingly the only available opposition against a further descent into fascism. If things seem really bad lately, it’s because in virtually every way that matters, they are.

Out of this, what seems like a new left populist momentum has emerged. The meteoric rise of outsider Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral race has inspired many across the country and made people feel that a new kind of politics is possible and even inevitable. While Zohran’s success has made him both a target of the Zionist media and our entire political body, it has also in other ways made him a darling. Hundreds of think pieces about whether this or that candidate is the “next Zohran” have been churned out week after week. Even moderates running for office have sought to rebrand as millennial outsiders who are nothing like their ideological peers in Congress. Just as the rise of Bernie Sanders and later AOC was in many ways earth shattering to the status quo, the resurgence of left populist momentum in electoral politics is the same. The largest single-day protests in US history are taking place in the midst of this - the liberal-oriented No Kings protests which has turned out anywhere from 3-6 million people nationwide. Something is happening amongst the people - that is undeniable. The masses are not happy and are not afraid to say so. This is undoubtedly a welcome change from the neoliberal coma most have been in for their entire lives, but the question then becomes how do we make sure that the hope-turned-disappointment of the Sanders run doesn’t get recreated in this new groundswell? I think the answer lies in not relying on the systems and institutions that brought us here to bring us out.

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In that vein, while Zohran’s candidacy will be good for the people of New York and perhaps even good for the cause of socialism in a roundabout way, he is not the type of leader we should be looking for. He is heavily constrained by his participation in bourgeois institutions. He cannot say the police should be abolished, he cannot say that it is right to resist occupation by force, he cannot say that capitalism must be overthrown, he cannot say the means of production should be seized and the wealth redistributed. We cannot defeat fascism when we are being boxed in by the rules of the capitalist imperialist system that brought us here. The leaders we need in this moment are visionaries who work outside the system to spread a revolutionary message to the masses. Who do not have to hedge and mince words. Who never capitulate to the bounds of acceptable discourse within the captured arena of bourgeois politics.

As much as the resurgence of electoral populism is a welcome change, it is not the way. What it is useful for is to gauge the sentiment of the people we need to win to socialism. In that way the prognosis is somewhat rosy. Liberal and apolitical people are far more open to leftwing messaging than they have ever been in my lifetime. They are angry. They are activated. They are looking for a better way and are sick and tired of the status quo and the Democrats it rode in on. The missing piece is the revolutionaries. While there are thousands of rank and file revolutionary cadre in the streets every week, natural leaders have yet to emerge. With this dearth of grassroots leadership it’s predictable that people would seek that leadership within the left wing of electoral politics, and in that way may become easily mislead back towards the same structures that have failed them time and time again. Until we find our revolutionaries I fear we will be stuck creating and recreating the same outcomes with reformists in a system that is incapable of being reformed.

To be clear, this is far from a confession that I subscribe to Great Man Theory. I don’t believe any one person can own a revolution. But it is undeniable that in every successful revolution there were leaders who emerged who knew precisely how to inspire the masses by articulating the failures of the current society and supplanting that with a vision for a society that was more just, more fair, more humane. In Jack Goldstone’s book Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction1, he says leaders have been historically necessary for the success of a revolution because they “create a portrait of the injustices of the old regime and of the absolute necessity and inevitability of change that is capable of motivating and uniting diverse groups to support the revolution. During the revolution, visionary leaders continue to inspire and guide the revolutionary forces.”

Why revolutionaries have not emerged from our many attempts at organized dissent over the 21st century is a complex inquiry that calls into question the strategies, tactics, and character of these movements. In successful revolutions of the 20th century, the typical pattern was a crisis of the old regime giving rise to a revolutionary movement with a vanguard party at the head, and from this one or a handful of leaders emerging who guide the masses to capture power and become the heads of the new state. In the new century, this pattern is less visible as mass protests are often spread via social media without clear leadership or a solidified party formation. What these movements gain in virality - their ability to spread across nations almost instantly - they lose in the necessitation of figureheads, or even clear cut goals or demands.

In If We Burn2 by Vincent Bevins, Bevins discusses movements across the globe in the last decade or so and how their horizontal structure made a vanguard capable of leading impossible to form. “The particular repertoire of contention that became very common, almost appearing to be natural, from 2010 to 2020—apparently spontaneous, digitally coordinated, horizontally organized, leaderless mass protests—did a very good job of blowing holes in social structures and creating political vacuums”. Unfortunately without leadership, without a vanguard, the worst political actors can step in easily and fill the void (as with the Democratic Party during the Black Lives Matter protests).

From my own experiences as an organizer, I’ve seen first hand how the diffuse organizing structures that have become the new paradigm for protest have weakened the possibility of a united front that even understands exactly what it wants. In the months where students across the nation were setting up encampments for Palestine, while their demands of the university administrations were clear, the leadership structures within these campus insurgencies was not. There were power struggles on an ongoing basis, constant disagreements about strategy, and even internecine factional battles with one side demanding less visibility and less hierarchy, while another wanted clear chains of command and designated figureheads to speak to the university and press.

In the successful revolutions we often admire such as the Russian, Cuban, or Chinese Revolution, a party with leaders and a very well articulated vision of the future of the country were critical to organizing and educating the masses, building trust amongst the workers of their respective countries, and speaking with one voice. In this way their goals and their demands were always clear and agreed upon across the party strata. This left no room for ambiguity when communicating to the masses, and more importantly when communicating to the state about what the movement wanted to achieve. In the protest movements globally across the 21st century, it is often clear what the masses are unhappy about, but inarguably less clear what the people want to do about it. Eventually, without a disciplined message and clearly delineated goal, the protests fizzle out and the energy dissipates into the ether.

In From Rebellion to Revolution3 Mehran Kamrava argues “planned revolutions will not appear unless several highly dedicated individuals commit themselves to planning, organizing, and leading a takeover of power […] The party sees itself as the revolution’s vanguard. Among the planners involved in this vanguard, usually an individual with greater ambitions, or better organizational skills and opportunities, or through sheer chance, emerges as its leader. While planned revolutions cannot succeed without the work of an organized revolutionary party, the party’s leader becomes the face of the revolution, and, if the revolution succeeds, he then becomes the leader of the country.” With neither leader nor party our attempts are doomed to failure as they constantly recreate the same power vacuums that have allowed the worst actors to co-opt the message of liberation for their own ends.

While there is valid frustration among the left of the way liberals often seize control of the narrative when our movements reach critical mass, the blame ultimately rests squarely on our shoulders. Expecting liberals not to funnel people back to their own narrow vision of the possible is like expecting a billionaire not to suck you dry. That’s just what they’re built to do. It is up to us to intervene in every single place where there is discontent and wrest the narrative away from reforms and away from the dead end bourgeois politics that have brought us to this unfortunate interregnum. We cannot shy away from meeting the MSNBC libs, the wine moms, the disaffected reactionaries, the apolitical wherever they are, and giving them a taste of what could be. But moreover we must understand that a movement is only as good as its leaders. If we merely turn up to a protest here and there, moving independently of a party, without tangible and explicit demands, the only outcome will be more of the same.

We are in the fight of our lives right now and while we are seeing welcome signs of a sea change in the thinking of the average American it is absolutely crucial that we do not repeat the mistakes of the last half century, and that we build our movements brick by brick with an intentional and deliberate focus on the lessons of the past. With attention to structured formations and an elevation of those who emerge as natural leaders, we can protect our movements from exhaustion, from cooptation, from becoming merely a pressure valve for our aimless outrage. We can instead distinguish this mass movement as one with that knows exactly what it wants to achieve, rather than a formless blob that cannot articulate a point of view. If we create our movements with intention I believe we will once again find our revolutionaries, and they will be people who represent the least of us, who do not funnel us back into the same dead ends, who do not settle for modest reforms, but instead inspire us and lead us to a new society that is truly free.

If you’re able please become a paid subscriber today. I can’t do it without you. -Scarlet

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If you’re able please become a paid subscriber today. I can’t do it without you. -Scarlet

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The assassination of Charlie Kirk has unleashed something unholy on the right. In the wake of this event, the empowered right wing has finally let out their barely contained desire to do anything and everything possible to crush the liberals and the left once and for all. A heap of the contradictions of a capitalism that has been inching towards collapse for decades have finally sharpened and the pointy end is aimed at us all. The last 8 months of this presidency have accelerated a collapse timeline that was all but written during the second Red Scare. Late night hosts are getting removed from television for mild jokes about Kirk, people are losing their jobs, the administration is even threatening to deny visas to potential immigrants based on their public social media posts about the man. The utter absurdity of course being that the people that constitute the most violent faction of the American society are the ones clutching pearls and crying foul over anyone who does less than lionize a man who made a career of spreading hate. A man who called the civil rights amendment a mistake and believed that we should bring back public executions. A man who felt that flying with a black pilot would be less safe and that it was preposterous that a black woman could be qualified to sit on the Supreme Court. It is not even enough to say nothing, mourning will be compulsory. Just make sure you never quote his actual words. Wouldn’t want to do that.

While this extreme lurch forward to true authoritarian fascism seems to be happening all around us, one might ask “where are the liberals? Where is the opposition?”. The leaders of the Democratic party, true to form, have been all but silent on these direct attacks on our constitutional rights. In fact, Hakeem Jeffries whipped votes in the House for a resolution that honored the “life and legacy” of Charlie Kirk and 95 Democrats voted along. The liberal “thought leaders” are just as bad. Ezra Klein wrote a gushing essay for the New York Times that declared that Kirk practiced politics “the right way” and whitewashed his history as if he was merely a man who sought to debate his beliefs in the marketplace of ideas and not the man who helped bus people to the Jan 6 insurrection. Schumer and Jeffries could barely muster a strongly worded letter when Jimmy Kimmel was suspended from his late night spot for a joke the Trump admin didn’t like at the behest of the Trump-appointed FCC chair. If you haven’t noticed, there is no resistance to be found. There is no constituted body with the will and the numbers to stop this. It’s full steam ahead for fascism and nothing will stand it its way.

Just yesterday Neera Tanden of the Center For American Progress (who was given a makework job in the Biden administration and once famously wrote about extorting Libya for money because of their vast oil reserves) commented on yet another Ezra Klein coal post essay that suggested that the Democrats could win a coalition to defeat fascism by recruiting anti-abortion candidates. That’s right, we have to defeat fascism by supporting fascist policies. First it was the immigrants, then the transgender people, now it’s women writ large. Shocking to no one, the party that stands for nothing has no sacred cows. Anyone’s rights could be on the chopping block next if it means the insulated political actors who have gotten very wealthy trading on our futures get to keep doing so. The only thing, it seems, that is off the table for Democrats is doing literally anything that materially helps the people of this country. Even as we watch immigrants get disappeared into black sites, even as we watch random boats of fisherman get illegally bombed in the Caribbean, even as we watch a full scale takeover of the airwaves by the fascists, even as our own people are threatened and jailed and coerced, the Democratic Party is still too addicted to their corporatism and backroom dealing to even contend with the present reality and offer a compelling alternative.

If you are a Marxist, none of this should surprise you. There are troves of books of Marxist theory that explains exactly how capitalism leads to fascism and how liberals serve as its handmaiden. Still, whether you predicted it or not, living through it is another thing entirely. The sheer lack of so much as a survival instinct by bourgeois liberal institutions is alarming. The ease at which these people throw out all of their professed values and tend towards appeasement is unsettling. “It was always going to end up here” is truly an insufficient balm for the horror of watching it unfold.

In 2016 and 2020, the main pitch from the Democratic Party was along the lines of “we won’t address your material conditions, your economic stress, your financial ruin, but hey we promise to protect the girls and the gays. We promise to protect multicultural democracy. You can count on that”. In 2024 Harris ran a campaign that threw at least some of this out, promising to out-Trump Trump on the border and promising the “most lethal military" in the world while holding steadfastly to their commitment to genocide. In 2025 its women’s rights on the chopping block too, as they also capitulate to anti-trans hysteria. The pitch went from “we’ll at least protect you on social issues” to “ok no we won’t but we will manage your obliteration more responsibly”. Needless to say this message won’t win. And that is in the very unlikely scenario that elections remain free and fair (as imperfect as that was in a managed democracy).

The unfortunate truth is that the Marxists were right and the liberals won’t save us. While so many seem to be sleepwalking their way through the fourth reich, the worst of the calamity has not even happened yet - but it has been written. The actions being taken right now cast a long and horrifying shadow and the darkness is coming for us all. The worst thing we could do right now is continue to entrust the people that got us here to get us out. They have neither the tools nor the will nor the mere inclination to do so. They would sell their grandma for a bump in their stock value and they are not going to save you. The Marxists were right and that also means the Marxists are right about the way out. The only thing capable of successfully pulling us back from the brink is the organization of the working class. We are the ones who grease the wheels of capital, we are the ones who can shut shit down. They can’t have or do or be any of this without our willing submission, without our consent by silence, without our contribution to the machine. It can’t run on billionaires and CEOs alone. It takes us to keep it lurching forward and we are the ones who can make it stop running at all, but only if we are willing and ready.

The painful reality is that there is no “one weird trick” that undoes this. It’s the long and boring and tedious slog of turning a fully zero-class-conscious society into one where people know what their class interests are and who the enemy is. A president AOC can’t fix this, a slow takeover of our rotted institutions via elections can’t fix it. It’s still a person by person step by step process that should’ve started 50 years ago but at the very least must start now. There’s not even a guarantee that it’s not already too late, but we must try. After all, it’s this or oblivion. Step one is to stop getting distracted by the political efforts that are doomed to fail. The electoralism when elections are likely ending as we know them. The legal challenges when the law is meaningless. This is war. We’ve always been at war but only the capitalist class knew it. It’s up to us to realize that the war has already started and it’s time to take up our arms and fight or die on our knees.

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Much has been written over the last half decade about the “male loneliness epidemic”, a social crisis where men are less likely to find partners, have social networks, are increasingly isolated from each other and their communities. This framing has always rubbed me the wrong way because I think its focus on a single gender misses the true crisis: lonel…

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With so few people willing to tell the truth about our politics, independent perspectives are more vital than ever, but I can only keep this work paywall free with your help.

If you’re able please become a paid subscriber today. I can’t do it without you. -Scarlet

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With so few people willing to tell the truth about our politics, independent perspectives are more vital than ever, but I can only keep this work paywall free with your help.

If you’re able please become a paid subscriber today. I can’t do it without you. -Scarlet

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This week I wanted to highlight some of my favorite but less loved pieces of the last 7 months. Sometimes the algorithm doesn’t work to our favor, but these pieces are some of the ones that have meant the most to me. I hope you enjoy!

This was my first ever post on Substack and it was a reaction to seeing a left that often likes to brag about their lack of empathy.

This one is about the future that was promised and never delivered

I wrote this about letting your broken heart light your way in a broken world

I wrote this one because I think the path to a better world is in our commitment to one another

Here are a few more that I hope you’ll give a chance:

Thank you for being here and I’ll see you next week!

-Scarlet

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With so few people willing to tell the truth about our politics, independent perspectives are more vital than ever, but I can only keep this work paywall free with your help.

If you’re able please become a paid subscriber today. I can’t do it without you. -Scarlet

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