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Podcast Episode: The Yahoo Boys: A Portrait of Global Loneliness and the Criminality of Capitalis

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Pip: When capitalism hollows out a country's economy and leaves millions with nothing, it turns out some of those millions get very good at the internet — and freerein61 has been paying close attention.

Mara: This episode follows a single, sprawling piece of analysis built around Carlos Barragán's book The Yahoo Boys — covering Nigerian cybercrime, structural adjustment, Western loneliness, and what the pseudo-left gets wrong about all of it. Let's start with the portrait itself: who the Yahoo Boys are and what actually produced them.

The Yahoo Boys: Capitalism's Surplus Population Goes Online

Pip: The central argument here is that Nigerian romance scammers are not a moral failure or a cultural quirk — they are a predictable output of a global economic system that deliberately destroyed the formal economy they were supposed to enter.

Mara: The book opens with something personal: Barragán's own mother, alone in Madrid, was deceived by a fake American soldier named "Brian." That starting point frames what follows, and the post draws the structural conclusion directly — "The Yahoo Boys are not anomalies but expected outcomes of IMF, World Bank, and multinational oil policies that have exploited Nigeria's resources and left millions unemployed and in poverty."

Pip: So the scam targeting his mother becomes the lens for understanding a generation. The upshot is that the infrastructure of exploitation runs in both directions — resources extracted from Nigeria, loneliness manufactured in the West, and a generation of young men positioned exactly at the intersection.

Mara: The numbers make that concrete. Nigeria's oil sector employs fewer than 65,000 direct workers in a country with a 70-million-strong workforce. Textile employment collapsed from 350,000 jobs to 25,000. Official youth unemployment sits at 27 percent, and over 100 million people live in poverty. The formal economy did not fail on its own — it was systematically dismantled.

Pip: And into that vacuum steps Tinder.

Mara: Exactly — the post names the platforms explicitly. Tinder, Instagram, Apple IDs, gift cards: these become, as the analysis puts it, "the only viable labour market." Barragán profiles four scammers — Biggy, Chibuike, Azeez, and Richie — with enough specificity that they register as people shaped by intolerable conditions rather than cartoon villains.

Pip: The most cited line in the book is apparently a market observation, not a punchline. "White men pay fast, but white women pay long" — that is a worker analyzing the emotional economies of the global North with genuine precision.

Mara: And the victims are not wealthy elites. They are pensioners, widows, and insecure workers — people whose own communities were dismantled by the same neoliberal policies that destroyed Nigeria's industrial base. The post is careful on this point: the scams do not redistribute wealth, they transfer suffering from one section of the global working class to another.

Pip: Which is why the pseudo-left's response to all of this turns out to matter quite a bit.

Mara: The post spends considerable time on that. Identity politics framing — "Black resistance," "hustle culture," "postcolonial survival" — obscures the class dynamics entirely. It allows critics to condemn "whiteness" while leaving IMF conditionalities, currency devaluations, and multinational oil extraction completely untouched. The scammers get cast as symbols rather than analyzed as products of structural adjustment.

Pip: And the victims get dismissed as privileged rather than recognized as people whose unions, communities, and social supports were also systematically stripped away.

Mara: The post's conclusion is that moral condemnation and police crackdowns address none of this. The Yahoo Boys are not the system's anomaly — they are its signal.

Mara: That signal points outward from Lagos to a worldwide pattern of surplus populations and broken social bonds — which is where the broader argument lands.

Pip: What stays with me is the gift card that travels from a victim in the U.S. through Nigerian middlemen to Chinese vendors — cybercrime as a fully integrated node in the global economy.

Mara: Barragán calls it a warning: when a system provides no future for its youth and commodifies human connection, the consequences are destabilizing everywhere. That framing doesn't go away when you close the book.

The Yahoo Boys: A Portrait of Global Loneliness and the Criminality of Capitalism

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Carlos Barragán’s The Yahoo Boys offers a disturbing yet insightful look into the world of investigative journalism. It explores one of the most grotesque consequences of the global capitalist crisis: Nigerian online romance scammers who prey on the loneliness and desperation of individuals in wealthy countries. The book avoids sensationalism and moral judgment, instead providing a sober, humane, and often harrowing account of young men in Lagos who turn to cyber-fraud because legitimate avenues for social mobility have collapsed.

Amid the deepening contradictions of global capitalism, this book explores the increasingly grotesque and tragic behaviours these contradictions produce. Based on six months of reporting in Lagos, it delves into the lives of the “Yahoo Boys”: young Nigerians who make a living by executing online romance scams targeting lonely individuals in Europe and the U.S. However, Barragán’s observations—often despite his own framing—reveal more than a typical crime story; they depict the social ruin caused by imperialist influence, structural adjustment, and capitalism’s fragmentation of daily life.

The book starts with a personal injury: Barragán’s mother, alone in Madrid, is tricked by a fake American soldier named “Brian.” The con artist is never caught. Instead, Barragán discovers a generation of Nigerian youth drawn into an underground digital economy after the formal economy has been systematically broken down. The “Yahoo Boys” are not anomalies but expected outcomes of IMF, World Bank, and multinational oil policies that have exploited Nigeria’s resources and left millions unemployed and in poverty.

Barragán portrays four scammers — Biggy, Chibuike, Azeez, and Richie — with striking specificity. Rather than caricatures of criminality, they appear as young men forced into a form of labour after other options have been shut off. Azeez, a tailor’s apprentice, faces the brutal arithmetic of survival in a country where inflation has made honest work untenable. Richie bears the psychological weight of a scam that ended in a victim’s death. In their world, the platforms of global capital — Tinder, Instagram, Apple IDs, and gift cards — become the only viable labour market.

The “Yahoo Boys”: A Product of Imperialist Plunder and Capitalist Decay

This reality affects a generation whose future has been damaged by imperialist reforms. Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, has experienced decades of structural adjustment policies that have dismantled public services, privatised state assets, and put international financial interests above development. Consequently, many young people are seen as surplus to capital’s needs—often turning to digital fraud as a risky occupation. The “Yahoo Boys’—young Nigerians engaged in online scams like advance-fee fraud, romance fraud, and business email compromise—are often seen by bourgeois commentators as a moral crisis, a cultural failing, or issues stemming from weak law enforcement. However, a Marxist perspective reveals that they are not an anomaly. Instead, they are a predictable result of Nigeria’s systemic exploitation by imperialism and its local comprador bourgeoisie.

The economic reality that produces them

Nigeria, Africa’s biggest oil producer and most populous nation, has earned hundreds of billions of dollars from oil since gaining independence. However, as documented by the WSWS, Nigeria captures only about 10–15 per cent of the crude’s value at the wellhead. The remaining 80–90 per cent—generated through refining, petrochemicals, logistics, and finance—is siphoned off offshore by transnational corporations. Nigeria exports raw crude oil, and then imports refined gasoline at higher prices. According to Jean Shaoul’s detailed June 2026 analysis of Africa’s political economy, Nigeria exemplifies a system in which every profitable part of the oil value chain is systematically externalised.

The concrete consequences have been devastating. Nigeria’s oil sector employs less than 1 per cent of its 70-million-strong workforce — about 20,000 to 65,000 direct workers. In the 1970s and 1980s, the influx of petrodollars inflated the currency, made domestic goods uncompetitive, and gutted agriculture and manufacturing. Textile employment collapsed from 350,000 jobs to just 25,000, with nothing to replace what was lost. The result is mass unemployment — officially 27 per cent, and far higher among young people — while 102 million people, more than half the population, live in poverty.

The Yahoo Boys phenomenon originates from the economic marginalisation faced by many young Nigerians, many of whom are university graduates with skills, ambition, internet access, and fluency in English. Despite these assets, they encounter limited legitimate job opportunities. As a result, they are forced to choose between honest employment and criminal activity, or develop alternative survival strategies within an economy intentionally designed to exclude them.

The comprador state and the real criminals

Nigeria’s ruling class—a comprador bourgeoisie acting as an intermediary layer that benefits from foreign capital—continues to oversee this social disaster while accumulating vast personal wealth. Aliko Dangote is Africa’s richest individual, and Nigeria’s four billionaires have experienced a significant increase in their fortunes. Meanwhile, the government depends on police units like the infamous SARS (Special Anti-Robbery Squad), which has been linked to extortion, kidnapping, torture, and extrajudicial killings. These abuses overwhelmingly target young people aged 18 to 35, as documented by WSWS during the 2020 EndSARS protests.

The extent of theft by Nigeria’s ruling class—whether through embezzling state funds, corruptly granting oil concessions to transnational corporations, or systematically siphoning public revenue into private accounts—far exceeds what Yahoo Boys could achieve. The key difference is that this form of theft is legal and often celebrated, while internet fraud is criminalised and penalised. Ironically, the very state condemning internet fraud is actually the largest criminal enterprise in Nigeria.

Not a revolutionary force, but a symptom

None of this is to romanticise the Yahoo Boys. Their activity is not a form of anti-imperialist resistance. It is an individualistic, lumpen response to social conditions that preys indiscriminately on working people abroad while enriching a layer of young men who often flaunt their wealth in ways that reproduce the values of the very bourgeoisie that has destroyed their country. The Yahoo Boys do not challenge the system — they aspire to join its beneficiaries.

The moral condemnation of Nigerian cybercriminals by the Nigerian government and Western media is deeply hypocritical. The same imperialist nations criticising these hackers have corporations that drain Nigeria’s resources, making honest work impossible. Similarly, Nigerian officials who vow to crack down are often the ones who have looted the treasury. The Yahoo Boys’ actions reflect a broken social system, not its root problem. Tackling this issue requires more than increased police, surveillance, or moral lectures. True change involves societal transformation through socialism—taking control of oil from multinational and local partners, organising Nigeria’s productive sectors to create decent jobs for everyone, and building global worker solidarity to oppose capitalism, which causes poverty and crime. Nigerian youth don’t need sermons; they need a revolution.

Barragán’s access to these young men — their routines, chat logs, and self-justifications — enables an account that is both intimate and socially devastating. Rather than cartoon villains, they emerge as people shaped by intolerable conditions: mass unemployment, decaying infrastructure, and the extreme inequality that marks Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy and one of its most fractured societies.

Loneliness as a global commodity

Barragán’s notable insight is that the Yahoo Boys have harnessed a new resource for global capitalism: loneliness. In Europe and the U.S., years of social fragmentation, declining living standards, and weakened community ties have left millions feeling isolated. Scammers exploit this vulnerability with precision, weaving complex tales of love, military duties, grief, and financial hardship. Their targets are mainly working-class individuals — pensioners, widows, insecure workers, and others pushed aside by social structures — who seek connection. These scams succeed because capitalism has fostered significant social dislocation in the West.

Barragán does not excuse the scammers, but he refuses to reduce them to moral aberrations. Their actions grow out of the catastrophic failure of Nigerian capitalism: staggering youth unemployment, unreliable electricity, underfunded education, entrenched corruption, and a ruling elite enriched by oil revenues and foreign investment while abandoning an entire generation. In this context, cyber-fraud becomes a rational, if destructive, means of survival. The Yahoo Boys often justify themselves by invoking colonialism and global inequality — “We are taking back what the West stole” — but this pseudo-radical rhetoric collapses under scrutiny. Their victims are not imperialist governments or multinational corporations, but ordinary working people. The scams do not redistribute wealth; they transfer suffering from one section of the global working class to another.

Barragán’s book unintentionally highlights the limited capacity of individual actions during social collapse. The Yahoo Boys see themselves as rebelling against the global system, yet they rely entirely on its infrastructure: Western social media, international payment platforms, Chinese gift-card resellers, and the interconnected digital networks that sustain the global economy. Their form of “resistance” is more parasitic than revolutionary, leaving Nigeria’s ruling elite unaffected, failing to challenge imperialism, and ultimately worsening the social fragmentation and cynicism that capitalism fosters. The scammers are not opponents of the system but rather its desperate, informal offshoots.

The Yahoo Boys and the World Capitalist Swindle

One of the most revealing parts of the book details a gift card taken from a victim in the U.S. It travels through Nigerian middlemen, is laundered on online marketplaces, and finally ends up with Chinese vendors. This chain reveals how modern capitalism encompasses even fraudulent romance as part of a global system of value extraction. Barragán’s investigation demonstrates that cybercrime isn’t separate from capitalism but a sign of its decline: the same issues—unemployment, inequality, and social collapse—that give rise to the Yahoo Boys are present worldwide in various forms.

Barragán’s reporting clearly illustrates this labor process. The Yahoo Boys establish their own division of tasks, terminology, and social structures. They are skilled in algorithms, adaptable, and entrepreneurial within the limited scope allowed by their environment. Their main offering is manufactured intimacy — a commodity derived from Western victims’ loneliness. The book’s most referenced line, “white men pay fast, but white women pay long,” is not a joke but an insightful market analysis by workers who have become experts in the emotional economies of the global North.

The Yahoo Boys are more than just Nigerian romance scammers; they represent a part of the worldwide cybercrime scene, which has emerged from neoliberalism’s fallout and is driven by the despair of millions left behind by capitalism. These individuals are not exotic criminals, but the marginalized children of a global system that provides them with no prospects. The young men Barragán encounters in Lagos are products of a society eroded by years of IMF austerity measures, oil industry exploitation, and a parasitic Nigerian bourgeoisie. Youth unemployment is dire; education systems are failing; infrastructure is minimal. In such circumstances, cyber-fraud shifts from being a moral issue to a necessary survival tactic. However, Lagos is just one part of a worldwide network. West Africa is known for romance scams and “419” fraud; Southeast Asia hosts large-scale scam operations dependent on trafficked labour; Eastern Europe produces ransomware and other cybercrimes; China engages in money laundering through extensive grey markets; and the West provides both victims and digital infrastructure. This situation isn’t traditional crime but rather the informal labour market characteristic of modern capitalism.

Barragán’s key insight is that the Yahoo Boys exploit loneliness, which is the West’s often overlooked epidemic. Years of social fragmentation, declining living standards, and weakening community bonds have driven millions into isolation. These scammers do more than take money; they demand emotional effort, offering digital intimacy to those left behind by society. Their victims are not affluent elites but pensioners, widows, and insecure workers — all victims of the same system that created the scammers.

The Yahoo Boys and the Pseudo‑Lefts

Carlos Barragán’s The Yahoo Boys highlights the social crisis in Nigeria, but its true meaning becomes clear when viewed in the context of the politics of developed capitalist nations, especially the pseudo-left’s role. The Yahoo Boys—young Nigerians resorting to digital scams to survive—are not just a social anomaly but a sign of capitalism’s worldwide crisis, a reality that the pseudo-left has often hidden with identity politics, moralism, and middle-class focus.

Barragán’s book highlights two interconnected tragedies: the decline of youth in Lagos and the profound loneliness of millions in the West. Both stem from the same global system. However, the pseudo-left—comprising NGOs, academic radicals, lifestyle progressives, and those aligned with the US Democratic Party or Labour’s Blairite and soft-left factions in Britain—refuses to see this link. It attributes Nigerian suffering to “corruption,” “bad governance,” or “postcolonial trauma,” while dismissing Western workers’ pain as “toxic masculinity,” “misinformation,” or “individual vulnerability.” In each case, the underlying class dynamics of the crisis are often hidden.

The pseudo‑lefts’ moralism: a substitute for analysis

The pseudo-left often reacts to phenomena like the Yahoo Boys with either moral condemnation or nostalgic pity. They label the scammers as misogynists, exploiters, or “digital predators,” while also romanticizing them as victims of “global inequality.” In both perspectives, the scammers’ class background is overlooked. Instead of viewing them as products of systemic issues like IMF-driven structural adjustments, resource exploitation, and the decline of Nigeria’s industrial sector, they are cast as characters in a moral story.

This moral stance is deliberate, representing the beliefs of a privileged middle class whose material gains rely on maintaining capitalism. The pseudo-lefts refuse to recognize the structural causes of the Yahoo Boys’ rise, because admitting this would reveal the influence of Western imperialism — encompassing the institutions they back, the governments they choose, and the NGOs they fund — in fostering the environment that pushes Nigerian youth into digital fraud.

Pseudo-left groups often analyze global inequality primarily through identity politics. They describe Nigeria’s crisis as “Black suffering,” “postcolonial wounds,” or “racial capitalism,” instead of pointing to specific causes like IMF conditionalities, currency devaluations, privatization, and the exploitation of oil wealth by multinational corporations. This racialized framing serves a clear purpose: it enables them to criticize “whiteness” while ignoring the broader global mechanisms of capital.

In this perspective, the Yahoo Boys are seen not as products of structural adjustment but as symbols of “Black resistance,” “hustle culture,” or “diasporic survival.” Their victims, typically older Western women, are often dismissed as manifestations of “white fragility” or “privilege,” instead of being recognized as victims of neoliberal atomization that has dismantled unions, communities, and social supports. Consequently, identity politics serves its main ideological role: dividing the working class into racial, gendered, and cultural segments and hindering a unified understanding of the global crisis.

Barragán highlights the deep loneliness experienced by Western victims, many of whom send money to scammers over years due to their near-total isolation. The pseudo-lefts interpret this loneliness as a psychological issue — labeling it as “emotional labour,” “gendered vulnerability,” or “digital manipulation” — but fail to see it as a class issue caused by capitalism’s dismantling of collective institutions.

The pseudo-lefts often deny this truth because they have historically supported policies like privatization, austerity, union-busting, and promoting ‘flexibility,’ which have contributed to social atomization. Their politics tend to originate from the professional-managerial class, which has gained materially from neoliberal reforms while claiming to champion ‘social justice.” The Yahoo Boys are not rare exceptions but are emblematic of a global system that creates excess populations in the Global South and marginalizes groups in the Global North. They are workers pushed into digital black markets due to the collapse of formal economies; their victims are those whose social structures have been broken down. The pseudo-lefts avoid confronting this reality because it reveals their own complicity. Having abandoned meaningful critiques of capitalism, they resort to moral performances, academic jargon, and outrage that lacks deep analysis. As a result, class struggle is replaced by identity politics, internationalism by NGO-driven humanitarianism, and socialism by lifestyle choices.

The Yahoo Boys are more than just criminals; they are victims of imperialism, and their victims are not simply naïve but also victims of social fragmentation. These scams reflect a worldwide crisis that the ruling class fails to address effectively. The same forces behind widespread unemployment in Nigeria also foster loneliness in Europe and the U.S. Similarly, digital platforms that facilitate gig economy exploitation also support romance scam schemes. The capitalist system that erodes livelihoods in Lagos is equally responsible for breaking social ties in Los Angeles.

Barragán’s book is important because it provides essential insight into this crisis. It offers a detailed account of what occurs when a generation excluded from formal jobs resorts to the only available labor market. However, this description must be linked to the broader history of imperialist control, structural adjustments, and the breakdown of capitalist society. Only through this context can the true significance of the Yahoo Boys be understood.

Moral condemnation, police crackdowns, and digital literacy campaigns are insufficient solutions to the worldwide crisis that yields both scammers and victims. This crisis can only be addressed by dismantling the economic system that has resulted in surplus populations, broken communities, and the commodification of intimacy. The Yahoo Boys are not exceptions but signals of a future where millions more could be forced into similar survival strategies unless a united international working class acts to overthrow the system behind this disaster.

Barragán’s achievement

The strength of The Yahoo Boys lies in its refusal to dehumanize its subjects. Barragán shows their contradictions, cruelty, humor, aspirations, and failures. He avoids romanticizing or demonizing them, instead placing them within the context of a broader crisis affecting a world system incapable of providing stable, meaningful lives for billions. In this way, the book aligns with the tradition of honest, socially conscious reporting praised by the WSWS for films like Eyimofe. It dismisses exoticism and moral panic, focusing instead on a straightforward analysis of the conditions that shape human behavior.

The Yahoo Boys is more than just a book about Nigerian scammers; it explores the worldwide crisis of capitalism—a system that fosters loneliness in the West and desperation in the Global South, linking both through exploitation and deception. Barragán’s work should be seen not as a crime story but as a warning: when society neglects its youth, leaves millions hopeless, and commodifies human relationships, the consequences will be destructive, unpredictable, and deeply destabilizing.

Sources and Bibliography

Books and Monographs

Ake, Claude. Democracy and Development in Africa. Brookings Institution Press, 1996. A foundational critique of how structural adjustment destroyed African developmental capacity.

Amin, Samir. Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism. Monthly Review Press, 1976. Classic analysis of dependency and the global division of labour.

Barragán, Carlos. The Yahoo Boys: Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria’s Romance Scammers. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026. Primary text under review.

Bello, Walden. The Food Wars. Verso, 2009. Useful for understanding how IMF/World Bank policies create surplus populations.

Berman, Bruce. Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya. James Currey, 1990. A model for analysing colonial labour structures that applies to Nigeria’s postcolonial trajectory.

Brenner, Robert. The Economics of Global Turbulence. Verso, 2006. Key text on the long downturn and global capitalist restructuring.

Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff. Theft of History. Cambridge University Press, 2006. Important for understanding the commodification of identity and pseudo‑left cultural politics.

Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. Verso, 2006. Essential for situating Lagos within global patterns of urban immiseration.

Ferguson, James. Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Duke University Press, 2006. A central text for understanding how neoliberalism produces informal economies.

Gore, Charles. The Rise and Fall of Structural Adjustment. Oxford University Press, 2021. Directly relevant to Nigeria’s economic collapse.

Guyer, Jane. Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa. University of Chicago Press, 2004. Important for understanding informal monetary economies.

Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, 2005. Key text on the global restructuring that produced both Nigerian immiseration and Western loneliness.

Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Managed Heart: Commercialisation of Human Feeling. University of California Press, 1983. Useful for theorising the “manufacture of intimacy” as labour.

Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine. Metropolitan Books, 2007. On the political logic of IMF/World Bank interventions.

Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume I. Penguin Classics, 1990. Foundational for understanding surplus populations, labour markets, and exploitation.

Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. University of California Press, 2001. Useful for understanding the political economy of African states under neoliberalism.

Meagher, Kate. Identity Economics: Social Networks and the Informal Economy in Nigeria. James Currey, 2010. Directly relevant to Yahoo Boys’ informal labour networks.

Sassen, Saskia. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Harvard University Press, 2014. On how global capitalism produces surplus populations.

Standing, Guy. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. Useful for situating Yahoo Boys within global precarity.

Tilly, Charles. Coercion, Capital, and European States. Wiley‑Blackwell, 1992. For understanding state formation and disintegration under capitalism.

Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Routledge, 2001. Useful for contrasting moral framings of labour with materialist analysis.

Articles and Reports

Adesina, Jimi O. “Rethinking African Development: Beyond Impoverishing Adjustment.” Journal of International Development 16, no. 6 (2004): 825–846. On the destructive impact of structural adjustment.

Akinyoade, Akinyinka, and Chibuike Uche. “Oil and the Rentier State in Nigeria.” African Affairs 115, no. 459 (2016): 1–23. On oil extraction and elite capture.

Burgis, Tom. “The Looting Machine.” Financial Times, 2015. Investigative reporting on multinational extraction in Nigeria.

Guyer, Jane. “Marginal Gains and Monetary Transactions in Africa.” Africa 74, no. 3 (2004): 389–405. On informal economies.

International Monetary Fund. Nigeria: Structural Adjustment Program Review. IMF Country Report, various years. Primary documentation of IMF policies.

Meagher, Kate. “Informal Economies and the State in Africa.” African Studies Review 47, no. 1 (2004): 1–15, on informal labour networks.

Nwankwo, Chima. “Youth Unemployment and Informal Economies in Lagos.” Journal of Modern African Studies 57, no. 2 (2019): 245–268. Directly relevant to Yahoo Boys.

World Bank. Nigeria Economic Update. Various years. On inflation, unemployment, and currency crises.

Digital Labour, Scamming Economies, and Platform Capitalism

Abidin, Crystal. “Digital Intimacy and Platform Labour.” Social Media + Society 4, no. 3 (2018). Useful for theorising intimacy as labour.

Brunton, Finn, and Helen Nissenbaum. Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest. MIT Press, 2015. On digital deception as a rational response to surveillance capitalism.

Gershon, Ilana. “The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media.” Cornell University Press, 2010. On digital intimacy and loneliness.

Marwick, Alice. “The Public Domain: Social Media and the Commodification of Attention.” New Media & Society 15, no. 3 (2013). On attention economies.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs, 2019. On platform capitalism’s extraction of human behaviour.

Pseudo‑Lefts, Identity Politics, and the Professional‑Managerial Class

Brenner, Johanna. “Identity Politics and the Left.” Monthly Review 48, no. 2 (1996). Classic critique of identity politics.

Fraser, Nancy. “From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump.” American Affairs 1, no. 4 (2017): 46–64. On the alliance between the pseudo‑left and neoliberalism.

Lind, Michael. The New Class War. Atlantic Books, 2020. On the professional‑managerial class.

Reed, Adolph. “The Limits of Anti‑Racism.” Left Business Observer, 2000. Foundational critique of pseudo‑left racial politics.

Reed, Adolph, and Walter Benn Michaels. “The Trouble with Disparity.” Jacobin, 2015. On how identity politics obscures class.

WSWS Editorial Board. Various analyses on identity politics, pseudo‑left tendencies, and global capitalism. Essential for the political framing.

Historical and Theoretical Foundations

Lenin, V. I. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. For understanding global extraction and surplus populations.

Luxemburg, Rosa. The Accumulation of Capital. On capitalism’s need for external markets and the creation of surplus populations.

Trotsky, Leon. The Permanent Revolution. On uneven and combined development — crucial for understanding Nigeria’s position.

Trotsky, Leon. History of the Russian Revolution. Methodologically relevant for analysing class forces.

Alabama Shakes and the Crisis of the American Dream

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Alabama Shakes’ return after nearly a decade has prompted the mainstream press to respond with its usual blend of breathless anticipation and superficial speculation. Much of the coverage falls back on familiar clichés about “nostalgia,” “reunion energy,” and the band “returning to what they do best.” Repeated across the music press, these phrases say less about Alabama Shakes than about the intellectual limits of contemporary cultural criticism.

A serious assessment must begin with the conditions surrounding this reunion. In 2026, the United States is marked by deep inequality, political instability, and cultural confusion. The “American Dream,” invoked in the band’s lead single, is not simply a poetic image but a historically specific ideology whose failure is now widely recognised. The gap between the promise of upward mobility and the reality of widespread insecurity forms the backdrop to nearly all serious art today, and Alabama Shakes’ return is no exception.

Alabama Shakes, the “American Dream,” and the Cultural Opposition to Authoritarianism

The lack of any direct clash between Alabama Shakes and the current fascists in the White House — no stage denunciation, no Truth Social outburst, no headline-making confrontation — is telling. It does not suggest political neutrality, but points to a deeper feature of the present: artists are being pulled into political conflict less through personal disputes than through the objective pressures of social life. The band’s 2025–26 return comes at a moment when cultural expression can no longer be separated from the political regime. That is the context in which their new work must be understood.

Alabama Shakes fell silent in 2018, during the second year of Trump’s first term. Their 2025–26 return comes under markedly different conditions. The administration’s authoritarian course — attacks on democratic rights, incitement against political opponents, and the concentration of executive power — has created a climate in which artists, writers, and performers increasingly feel compelled to respond.

As cultural critic David Walsh noted earlier this year, this growing resistance “is beginning to find many important expressions, including among classical and popular musicians, actors, writers and even professional athletes.” Bruce Springsteen, Philip Glass, Renée Fleming, and Lucinda Williams have already taken public stands, while Trump’s rhetoric toward dissenting artists has become increasingly hostile. Alabama Shakes has not been directly involved in these confrontations, but its silence should not be confused with political absence.

The Political Weight of the Band’s Existence

The band’s significance does not depend on overt political statements. Brittany Howard — a Black, queer woman from Alabama — leads a group grounded in Black Southern musical traditions: soul, blues, gospel, and R&B. These forms grew out of histories of oppression and resistance and remain inseparable from the struggles of working-class and oppressed people in the Deep South. As a critically acclaimed, Black-led rock band from Alabama, Alabama Shakes carries political weight in a period of reactionary nationalism and racial incitement. This is not identity politics, but historical fact: American popular music, at its most authentic, has long expressed the experience of those subjected to exploitation and injustice. To work seriously within that tradition is itself a challenge to the ideological foundations of authoritarianism. The single “American Dream” sharpens this point. Its title rejects the myth of national health and upward mobility, making it anything but a neutral artistic gesture in 2026.

The Limits and Contradictions of Artistic Opposition

The limits of artistic resistance must also be acknowledged. The WSWS has repeatedly observed that, although more artists are prepared to speak out, political confusion remains the dominant tendency. Many recognise that something is deeply wrong, but lack a coherent framework for understanding its causes or how it might be overcome.

This contradiction is evident in the emotional structure of I Must Be Dreaming. Its movement between exhaustion and wonder — between despair and the search for beauty — is more than an aesthetic choice. It expresses the condition of artists who oppose authoritarianism but remain confined by the ideology of the existing social order. They reject the symptoms without yet grasping the underlying disease. This is not a criticism of Alabama Shakes, but a description of the artistic milieu’s broader political limitations.

The Real Question

The central issue is not whether Alabama Shakes will directly “take on Trump.” The more important question is whether their music can contribute, even indirectly, to a broader cultural shift in which the working class becomes conscious of its own power. Will I Must Be Dreaming remain a beautifully realised portrait of distress, capturing individuals trying to make sense of a collapsing social order? Or will it achieve something rarer: a clarity that cuts through the ideological fog and points, however tentatively, beyond the limits of the present?

The band’s history shows a capacity for seriousness, honesty, and artistic courage, though whether this will develop into more than emotional testimony remains uncertain. Their re-emergence is not simply an effort to recapture earlier success. Brittany Howard’s solo albums — Jaime (2019) and What Now (2024) — revealed a restless search for new forms, rhythms, and emotional registers. Far from side projects, they were necessary explorations that sharpened her artistic vocabulary and broadened the expressive range of her voice. The band’s decision to reunite after this development suggests not a retreat into the familiar, but a renewed effort to confront the contradictions of the present.

Producer Shawn Everett’s return underscores this development. Sound & Colour (2015) stood out among major-label releases of its era for resisting the flattened sound of commercial rock production. Everett preserved the band’s volatility — its sudden turns from quiet reflection to explosive force — without smoothing it into algorithmic uniformity. His involvement suggests a continued effort to push against the sonic limits of the streaming economy.

The Political Dimension: Mood as Symptom of Social Crisis

Reviewers have described “American Dream” as “political,” but usually in the loosest sense. Much contemporary music criticism treats politics as mood — a haze of “chaos,” “division,” or “uncertainty” — rather than as the outcome of concrete social forces. This is more than a methodological flaw; it reveals the ideological disorientation of a cultural layer that senses crisis but lacks the tools to explain it.

The album’s apparent movement between exhaustion and wonder, despair and longing, is more than an emotional palette. It reflects a society in which millions sense that something is deeply wrong but cannot yet articulate a coherent alternative. Artists, like workers, confront a system that promises opportunity while producing insecurity. In this context, the “American Dream” becomes both an object of desire and a symbol of betrayal.

Alabama Shakes are not presenting a political programme, nor should they be expected to. Their work instead captures, with unusual clarity, the emotional and ideological tensions of a society in crisis. The band’s return also reflects a music industry transformed over the past decade. Island Records, a subsidiary of Universal Music Group, operates in a system where streaming has devalued recorded music as a commodity, leaving albums to function chiefly as vehicles for touring, sync licensing, and catalogue valuation. With its critical reputation and cross-generational appeal, Alabama Shakes represents a substantial financial asset.

This does not diminish the artistic impulse behind the reunion. It does, however, place the band’s work within an industry increasingly organised around risk reduction and the monetisation of nostalgia. The tension between genuine artistic intent and commercial pressure is not unique to Alabama Shakes; it is a structural feature of cultural production under contemporary capitalism.

The Central Question: Clarity or Consolation

The question no preview can answer is whether the forthcoming album will simply combine the band’s earlier strengths — raw soul urgency and genre-crossing ambition — or reach for something harder: a clarity equal to the present moment. Can Alabama Shakes cut through the cultural fog of contemporary American life? Can they express, even indirectly, the contradictions of a society where hope endures after the collapse of the ideology that once sustained it? The early signs are encouraging, but the answer will only become clear when the full work is released.

Sources and Bibliography

Primary Sources: Music, Statements, and Industry Materials

  • Alabama Shakes. Sound & Colour. ATO Records, 2015.
  • Alabama Shakes. I Must Be Dreaming (forthcoming). Island Records / Universal Music Group, 2026.
  • Howard, Brittany. Jaime. ATO Records, 2019.
  • Howard, Brittany. What Now. Island Records, 2024.
  • Island Records / Universal Music Group. Corporate filings, annual reports, and investor communications (2015–2025).
  • RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). “2024 Year‑End Music Industry Revenue Report.”
  • IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry). Global Music Report (2020–2025).
  • Spotify Technology S.A. “Loud & Clear: Streaming Revenue Transparency Reports” (2021–2025).

WSWS Cultural and Political Analysis

  • Walsh, David. “Artists Speak Out Against Authoritarianism and Attacks on Democratic Rights.” World Socialist Web Site, January 2026.
  • Walsh, David. “The Crisis of American Democracy and the Role of Culture.” WSWS, 2025.
  • Walsh, David. “The Political and Cultural Significance of Bruce Springsteen’s Opposition.” WSWS, 2024.
  • D’Angelo, Tom. “The Music Industry in the Age of Streaming: Profit, Precarity, and the Working Artist.” WSWS, 2023.
  • Greene, Joanne Laurier. “The Social Crisis and Contemporary American Art.” WSWS, 2022.
  • North, David. The Crisis of American Democracy: Essays on Politics, Culture, and Class. Mehring Books, 2021.

Historical and Theoretical Works on Culture, Class, and Music

  • Adorno, Theodor W. Essays on Music. University of California Press, 2002.
  • Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Schocken Books, 1968.
  • Lipsitz, George. Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture. University of Minnesota Press, 1990.
  • Guralnick, Peter. Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom. Back Bay Books, 1999.
  • Ward, Brian. Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations. University of California Press, 1998.
  • Filene, Benjamin. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music. University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
  • Hobsbawm, Eric. Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion, and Jazz. Verso, 1998.
  • Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka). Blues People: Negro Music in White America. William Morrow, 1963.

Studies of the American South, Race, and Cultural Production

  • Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution. Harper & Row, 1988.
  • Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Oxford University Press, 1955.
  • Sugrue, Thomas J. Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. Random House, 2008.
  • Romine, Scott. The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction. LSU Press, 2008.

Music Industry Economics and Cultural Labour

  • Hesmondhalgh, David. The Cultural Industries. Sage, 2019.
  • Negus, Keith. Music Genres and Corporate Cultures. Routledge, 1999.
  • Meier, Leslie M. Popular Music as Promotion: Music and Branding in the Digital Age. Polity, 2016.
  • Marshall, Lee. “The Rise of Catalogue Valuation in the Streaming Era.” Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2023.
  • Baym, Nancy. Playing to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and the Intimate Work of Connection. NYU Press, 2018.

Political Context and Authoritarianism

  • Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. Crown, 2018.
  • Ziblatt, Daniel, et al. “Democratic Backsliding in the 21st Century.” Journal of Democracy, 2024.
  • American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Reports on civil liberties and executive power (2020–2025).
  • Human Rights Watch. World Report (2024–2026).

Press Coverage and Interviews

  • Rolling Stone. Coverage of Alabama Shakes (2012–2024).
  • Pitchfork. Reviews of Sound & Colour, Jaime, and What Now.
  • New York Times. Interviews with Brittany Howard (2019, 2024).
  • NPR Music. “Brittany Howard on Artistic Growth and Political Climate.” (2024).
  • Billboard. “UMG Strategy in the Streaming Economy.” (2023–2025).

Archival and Reference Sources

  • Library of Congress. American Folklife Centre archives on Southern musical traditions.
  • Smithsonian Folkways. Collections on blues, gospel, and R&B.
  • Oxford Music Online. Entries on soul, Southern rock, and contemporary American music.

A review of Colin Kidd’s Twilight of the Dons: British Intellectuals from World War II to Thatcherism

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The Last Dons: The Collapse of Britain’s Bourgeois Intellectual Establishment

At its core, Colin Kidd’s Twilight of the Dons examines the terminal decline of a ruling-class intelligentsia. The “golden age” of Oxbridge dons was less a period of democratic intellectual flourishing than the final moment when a small academic elite exercised ideological authority on behalf of the British bourgeoisie. Although Kidd writes with affection for his subjects, his book inadvertently exposes the exhaustion of an entire social order and the inability of its intellectual representatives to understand the forces that displaced them.

A wartime bureaucracy becomes an ideological caste

Kidd’s central historical claim—that Oxbridge intellectuals rose to postwar prominence because of the Second World War—is wholly persuasive. Returning from Bletchley Park, Whitehall, and the intelligence services, these dons did not simply resume academic life; they were drawn into the machinery of the state. Their authority depended less on public engagement or democratic legitimacy than on Britain’s distinctive culture of elite deference.

This intelligentsia functioned as a manager of ideology. Figures such as Isaiah Berlin, Hugh Trevor‑Roper, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Edmund Leach were not detached from power; they helped justify it. The debates, rivalries, and feuds Kidd recounts with relish were the internal dramas of a caste whose role was to stabilise bourgeois rule after war and empire.

The tremors of crisis

Kidd’s narrative of the 1960s and 1970s is revealing. The student protests, curricular battles, and increasingly parochial academic disputes were not merely cultural episodes. They were symptoms of a deeper crisis: the erosion of the ideological authority of the bourgeois academy.

For the first time, the dons had to justify their role. The old assumptions—that Oxbridge defined national culture and that its professors naturally guided public life—began to collapse. Kidd presents these disturbances as early signs of Thatcherism, but they were better understood as expressions of the global capitalist crisis of the late 1960s, which shook the institutions built on postwar stability.

Kidd’s most striking insight—and the one closest to a Marxist reading—is that the dons were not overthrown by radical students or left-wing agitation, but by the right.

Thatcher’s government, serving finance capital and an assertive new managerial class, saw Oxbridge’s intellectual aristocracy as an obstacle to market discipline. Long accustomed to acting as an unelected arm of the state, the dons suddenly appeared as inefficient remnants of a paternalistic order the ruling class no longer required. The irony is central: the bourgeois intelligentsia was dismantled by the very class it had served. Thatcherism did not simply reform the universities; it destroyed the social foundations that had sustained Oxbridge’s ideological authority for decades.

Elegy from inside the citadel

Kidd’s account is intimate and nostalgic, as might be expected from a former Fellow of All Souls. It is richly detailed, but also limited by a key blindness: he laments the disappearance of an elite without fully examining the class relations that sustained it. The dons’ authority was never democratic; it rested on Britain’s rigid social hierarchy. Their decline was therefore not a cultural tragedy, but a sign of the wider decay of bourgeois intellectual life.

Why the book matters now

The significance of Twilight of the Dons lies not in its nostalgia, but in its unintended warning. The forces that dismantled the Oxbridge establishment—marketisation, managerialism, and austerity—now weigh on the entire university system. Today’s academic, deprived of autonomy and governed by bureaucratic metrics, is less the heir to Berlin or Trevor‑Roper than another casualty of the forces that displaced them.

Hugh Trevor‑Roper: The Bourgeois Historian as Court Intellectual

Hugh Trevor‑Roper is central to Colin Kidd’s Twilight of the Dons because he so clearly embodies the contradictions of the postwar Oxbridge intellectual caste. His career shows how the British ruling class depended on a narrow elite of academics to give its authority ideological coherence—and how that elite ultimately failed to grasp, much less resist, the forces that would displace it.

Trevor‑Roper was more than a historian. He was a court intellectual whose authority derived from proximity to power, social status, and Britain’s reverence for Oxbridge as guardian of national culture. His work advanced a view of British history that legitimised the existing order: rational, moderate, anti‑revolutionary, and deeply wary of mass politics.

The Don as Defender of the Establishment

Trevor‑Roper’s postwar prominence grew directly from the wartime experience that shaped Kidd’s generation of dons. His intelligence work gave him access to the state, a reputation for administrative competence, and the conviction that intellectual authority belonged within government. He emerged not as a radical critic, but as a trusted interpreter of Britain’s past for the ruling class. Whether writing on the Puritans, the Civil War, or historical method, he reinforced a conservative narrative in which national stability depended on elite stewardship and resistance to ideological extremes. In this sense, Trevor‑Roper acted as an ideological stabiliser, helping sustain bourgeois hegemony during the fragile postwar settlement.

Kidd emphasises Trevor‑Roper’s legendary feuds — with A.J.P. Taylor, with Lawrence Stone, with anyone who threatened his intellectual territory. These were not merely personal eccentricities. They were the internal politics of a caste whose authority depended on maintaining hierarchical control over the production of historical knowledge.

Trevor‑Roper’s battles were, in effect, defensive actions against the encroachment of new methods, new disciplines, and new social forces. His hostility to social history, his contempt for sociology, and his suspicion of Marxist analysis were expressions of a deeper fear: that the bourgeois narrative of British history was losing its grip.His feuds were the last gasps of a declining intellectual aristocracy.

The Hitler Diaries Debacle: A Crisis of Bourgeois Authority

The 1983 Hitler Diaries scandal, in which Trevor‑Roper authenticated forged documents, is often seen as a personal humiliation. Yet it also exposed a wider crisis. His error was more than a lapse in expertise: it revealed the fading authority once automatically granted to Oxbridge dons, the susceptibility of elite intellectuals to media spectacle and commercial pressure, and the old establishment’s inability to adapt to a market‑driven cultural environment. The scandal became symbolic: the bourgeois historian, once treated as an arbiter of national truth, was shown to be fallible, compromised, and out of step with Thatcherism’s emerging order.

Thatcherism and the End of Trevor‑Roper’s World

Trevor‑Roper’s career spanned the “twilight” of the dons that Kidd describes. He lived to see the world that had sustained him dismantled by Thatcher’s reforms, as market logic displaced elite cultural authority, managerial bureaucracy replaced the Oxbridge intellectual, and the social foundations that had allowed dons to act as an unelected arm of the state were destroyed. His marginalisation in the 1980s was therefore not merely personal misfortune, but the political liquidation of the caste he represented.

From a Marxist perspective, Trevor‑Roper’s importance lies less in his scholarship, however stylish, than in his social function. He defended bourgeois historical interpretation, managed elite ideology, and ultimately became a casualty of the ruling class’s shift from paternalistic conservatism to neoliberal aggression. His career traces the arc of the British bourgeois intelligentsia: wartime integration into the state, authority sustained by cultural deference and institutional prestige, crisis under the pressures of mass politics and intellectual diversification, and collapse under Thatcherism’s assault on elite autonomy. Trevor‑Roper was therefore more than a don: he embodied a social order no longer able to reproduce its own ideological guardians.

Conclusion

The rise of artificial intelligence, the commodification of research, and the corporate transformation of universities mark a new phase in the crisis of bourgeois intellectual production. Kidd’s dons belonged to the last generation whose authority was socially assumed rather than bureaucratically measured. Their disappearance was not an isolated event, but part of the bourgeoisie’s wider failure to sustain a coherent ideological worldview.

Twilight of the Dons is not simply a history of Oxbridge. It is a chronicle of the collapse of a ruling‑class intellectual apparatus. Kidd’s affection for his subjects cannot obscure the truth: the dons were the final representatives of a decaying social order, undone not by revolution but by the internal contradictions of capitalism itself.

An Opportunity Squandered: Why Your Party Failed

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History seldom provides the left with clear moments. Usually, it appears as a haze filled with contradictions, crises, and uncertain possibilities. However, occasionally, these contradictions become clearer, the fog clears, and a political opportunity emerges—short-lived, obvious, and highly promising. The launch of Your Party was one such occasion.

It appeared after the Corbyn movement was dismantled, during a period when millions of workers, young people, and politically aware individuals were looking for a way to oppose the worsening brutality of British capitalism. The Starmer leadership had turned Labour into a party aligned with the state, security forces, and corporate interests. As a result, the working class found itself without a political home.

Your Party emerged into this vacuum, earning an enthusiastic response: within days, hundreds of thousands expressed interest. This strong reaction was not media exaggeration but a real sign of political radicalisation, indicating that the working class was ready to move away from Labourism and explore new avenues. However, Your Party’s leadership was unprepared for the moment; in fact, they feared it. They were afraid of the working class, of mass participation, and of the consequences of their rhetoric. As a result, they missed the opportunity.

The Labourist Reflex: Bureaucracy as Instinct

Your Party’s tragedy lies in being undermined not by outside foes, but by internally reproduced Labourist habits. The leadership group—self-selected, unaccountable, and cautious—acted from the beginning more like minor officials of a parliamentary system than rebels striving to create a new movement. Their natural inclinations were bureaucratic rather than revolutionary.

They built a party structure aimed at shielding the leadership from the members rather than empowering them. Decisions were taken in private WhatsApp groups, and policies were developed through secret discussions with advisers and consultants. The membership was viewed not as the party’s ultimate authority but as a possible challenge to the leadership’s dominance.

This bureaucratic instinct resulted in several harmful actions: decision-making that was opaque and secretive, factional tactics such as leaking information to adversarial media, pre-emptive expulsions of socialists before democratic structures were in place, legal threats targeting internal critics as a distorted form of “new politics,” and a refusal to develop democratic processes, which left members feeling powerless and confused.

These actions were deliberate, revealing a leadership with a limited political outlook centred on Westminster. They feared popular involvement because they feared the working class. Your Party was effectively doomed at birth because its leaders feared the very force that could have invigorated it.

The Sabotage of the Rank and File

The strongest criticism of Your Party’s leadership is that they never focused on building a party. Instead, they aimed to create a brand. Local branches emerged spontaneously across the country. Volunteers arranged meetings, designed leaflets, and tried to establish local structures on their own—without guidance, resources, or support from the leadership. Rather than assistance, they faced silence, obstruction, and disdain.

The leadership declined to supply funds, materials, organisational guidance, political education, or democratic mechanisms. Branches disintegrated, activists lost interest, and initial enthusiasm vanished. What once could have mobilised tens of thousands turned into a hollow entity, unable to contest elections or influence political discourse. This was not mere incompetence but deliberate political sabotage.

The leadership was concerned that a strong grassroots organisation could threaten their authority. They worried that an informed membership might seek clarity, accountability, and a departure from Labourism. They feared the party could evolve into something beyond their control. Consequently, they deprived it of resources.

The Ideological Vacuum: A Party Without a Programme

Your Party never clearly defined its main purpose: What is the party meant to achieve? Two opposing visions coexist uneasily. One, the Grassroots Socialist Current—anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, rooted in working-class struggles—sought to build a large movement capable of challenging the state and breaking definitively from Labourism. It saw capitalism’s crises as requiring a revolutionary response. The other, the Parliamentary Moralist faction—centred around the Peace and Justice group—favoured a modest, respectable NGO-style organisation, more of a pressure group than a political party, emphasising morality over strategy. They believed politics was mainly about tone, civility, and moral influence, not class struggle. The leadership’s inability to choose between these visions left the organisation paralysed. Instead of defining a clear program, Your Party drifted into empty slogans, identity-politics moralism, and electoral fantasies. A party without a clear program is not truly a party; it is merely a logo.

The Collapse: A Predictable Catastrophe

The results were immediate and catastrophic: polling showed 0% support. Membership remained stagnant at a small fraction of the original sign-ups. The party’s public credibility was shattered. Internal conflicts became its only visible activity. Leaders attributed this to “media hostility” and “growing pains,” but in truth, they engineered the movement’s suppression, fearing its potential for genuine change. The party’s collapse stemmed from leaders’ inability to envision politics beyond limited parliamentary reform.

Your Party’s failure is part of a long, tragic pattern: after 1932, the ILP; post-1956, the CPGB; the Bennite movement; Respect; Left Unity; Momentum; and now Your Party. Every effort to establish a left alternative within the limits of parliamentary reformism collapses due to internal contradictions. The Labour left does not serve as a vessel for socialist politics; it acts as a graveyard for such aspirations. The clear lesson is that the working class cannot be truly emancipated through organisations that fear its power.

The Verdict: A Failure of Nerve, Vision, and Class Politics

Your Party’s failure stemmed from its leadership’s refusal to depart from Labourism. They perpetuated the bureaucratic culture, factionalism, timidity, and disdain for the rank and file that have long characterised the Labour left. The opportunity was genuine, and the moment was historic, but the failure was self-inflicted. Your Party could have been a powerful tool for the working class; instead, it became a symbol of political cowardice. Its decline is not only organisational but also ideological, showing that the Labour left cannot and will not forge a socialist alternative. The challenge remains: to build a party rooted in the working class, unwavering in its principles, ready to confront the capitalist state fearlessly. Your Party was not that; the next must be.

Minority Rule, the American Founding, and the Marxist Theory of the State

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Introduction

Recent studies on the decline of American democracy focus on institutional failures, partisan division, and the solidification of minority rule. Ari Berman’s book, *Minority Rule*, fits within this discourse, and the Guardian’s review highlights its key assumption: that the U.S. is an “undemocratic democracy,” a republic whose founding principles have been undermined over time. This article challenges that view as historically inaccurate. Using Marxist state theory and the history of the American Revolution, it argues that the U.S. constitutional system was intentionally designed to limit popular sovereignty and maintain the political power of property owners.

The US Constitution was never intended as a democratic blueprint, but rather as a counter-revolutionary tool to control and undo the democratic changes sparked by the 1776 revolution. This chapter explores how this assertion fits into the wider academic discussions.

The Social Dynamics of the American Revolution

The American Revolution was not solely an elite political rupture but a period of intense popular mobilisation. Alfred Young’s microhistorical study of George Hewes demonstrates the political agency of artisans and labourers in revolutionary Boston.¹ Gary Nash’s synthetic account likewise emphasises the “lower-sort republicanism” that animated popular committees, militia organisations, and town meetings.² Archival petitions from Massachusetts and Pennsylvania reveal widespread demands for price regulation, debt relief, and expanded suffrage during the 1770s and early 1780s.³

These developments generated what Nash describes as a “radical democratizing impulse,” which challenged the established elites and called for significant political reform.

The Revolution’s democratic energies generated significant elite anxiety. Gordon Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic remains the foundational account of this ideological shift. Wood demonstrates that leading figures — Madison, Hamilton, Morris — increasingly viewed popular politics as destabilising.⁴ Their correspondence reveals deep concern over “the turbulence and follies of democracy.”⁵

Woody Holton’s Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution extends this analysis by emphasising the economic dimension: debtor-relief legislation, paper money issuance, and tax resistance threatened the interests of bondholders and merchants.⁶ Holton’s use of state legislative records shows that the Constitutional Convention was convened in response to these pressures, not merely to address interstate commerce or diplomatic weakness.

Anti-Federalist writings provide crucial evidence for understanding how contemporaries perceived the Constitution. Melancton Smith’s speeches at the New York ratifying convention warned that the proposed system represented a “transfer of power from the many to the few.”⁷ Archival notes from the debates show that Smith and others objected specifically to the Senate’s malapportionment, the indirect election of the president, and the lifetime tenure of federal judges.⁸

These critiques align with Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, which argued that the Constitution reflected the interests of property owners seeking to stabilise social relations after a decade of popular unrest.⁹ Although Beard’s thesis has been debated extensively, recent scholarship — notably Michael Klarman’s The Framers’ Coup — has revived aspects of his argument by demonstrating the extent to which the Convention operated outside popular control.¹⁰

The institutional architecture of the Constitution — the Senate, the Electoral College, the separation of powers, and the independent judiciary — must be understood as mechanisms designed to restrain democratic participation. Archival records from the Convention show explicit discussions of the need to “check the impetuous vortex” of popular politics.¹¹ The Senate was conceived as a body representing “the wealth of the nation.” At the same time, the judiciary was insulated from electoral accountability to ensure “firmness” in protecting property rights.¹²These features were not accidental. They were deliberate responses to the democratic mobilisation of the preceding decade.

Marxist theory provides a conceptual framework for understanding why the Constitution took this form. Marx and Engels argued that the state is “a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie.”¹³ Lenin, in State and Revolution, emphasised that the bourgeois state is structurally incapable of serving as an instrument of genuine popular rule.¹⁴ Trotsky, in The Revolution Betrayed, stressed that the form and function of the state are determined by underlying class relations, not by constitutional ideals.¹⁵

From this perspective, the American state’s institutional architecture reflects the class interests of those who shaped it. The Senate’s malapportionment, the Electoral College’s indirect mechanism, and the judiciary’s insulation from democratic oversight are structural features designed to limit the political power of non‑propertied classes.

The Supreme Court’s historical trajectory illustrates this continuity. Early Court decisions — Calder v. Bull (1798), Fletcher v. Peck (1810), Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819) — reveal a consistent pattern of protecting contract rights and property interests.¹⁶ While the Court has occasionally upheld measures favourable to labour or civil rights, such decisions have typically occurred under conditions of intense social pressure. When those pressures recede, the Court reverts to its structural role as a defender of property. The Federalist Society’s contemporary influence intensifies this tendency but does not fundamentally alter it.

Liberal Reformism and Its Limits

The Guardian review concludes with examples of successful ballot initiatives in Michigan and Wisconsin, suggesting that such reforms demonstrate the resilience of democratic participation. Yet these cases illustrate the limits of liberal reformism rather than its promise. Archival data from the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission show that while the initiative altered district boundaries, it did not change the underlying distribution of political power or the state’s socioeconomic structure.¹⁷ Similarly, Senate debates over filibuster reform reveal that institutional veto points persist because both major parties benefit from them under different circumstances.¹⁸

To conclude, the answer to the crisis of American democracy is… the building of an independent political movement of the working class.” Whether one accepts this political prescription or not, the underlying historical insight is clear: the institutions of American governance were constructed to limit popular sovereignty, and their contemporary functioning reflects that foundational purpose. Any analysis that treats these institutions as neutral mechanisms capable of straightforward democratisation fails to grasp the historical depth of the problem.

This article contends that current forms of minority rule in the U.S. are not distortions but rooted in its original democratic framework. The U.S. Constitution was deliberately structured to limit democratic participation and uphold property-based political dominance. When viewed through Marxist state theory and the history of the American Revolution, this shows a consistent thread in American political evolution. Recognizing this continuity is crucial for evaluating the scope of reforms and the potential for deeper political change.

Notes

  1. Alfred F. Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999).
  2. Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (New York: Viking, 2005).
  3. Massachusetts Archives, vol. 210; Pennsylvania State Papers, Revolutionary Series.
  4. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969).
  5. James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, 24 October 1787, in The Papers of James Madison, vol. 10.
  6. Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007).
  7. Melancton Smith, New York Ratification Debates, 20 June 1788.
  8. New York Public Library, Melancton Smith Papers.
  9. Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1913).
  10. Michael J. Klarman, The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
  11. James Madison, Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention, 14 June 1787.
  12. Ibid.
  13. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848).
  14. Vladimir I. Lenin, State and Revolution (1917).
  15. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (1937).
  16. Calder v. Bull, 3 U.S. 386 (1798); Fletcher v. Peck, 10 U.S. 87 (1810); Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819).
  17. Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission Records, 2021–22.
  18. Congressional Record, 117th Congress (2021–22).

The Social History of Eviction and the Political Bankruptcy of Reformism

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Eviction as a Window into the Class Nature of Society

The eviction of seventy households—including pensioners, disabled residents, and low-income families—from a working-class estate, as detailed in Jessica Fields’ book Eviction: A Social History of Rent, exemplifies a broader pattern in British capitalism. It highlights that heritage rights do not take precedence over property rights, and community bonds do not outweigh financial interests. These two statements clearly summarise the core rationale behind eviction policies and their role in the political economy.

This article doesn’t merely recount families’ suffering. Instead, it places that suffering within the broader context of capitalist urban growth, the decline of Labourism, and Engels’ ideas in The Housing Question. Evictions serve as a lens through which the working class can examine the system they oppose and identify the political steps necessary to dismantle it.

The Social History of Rent: From Industrial Slums to Financialised Landlordism

In 1872, Engels challenged the Proudhonists, who believed that rent-to-buy schemes could resolve the housing crisis. He emphasised that the housing shortage is not merely due to poor policies but is an inherent aspect of capitalism. Capitalism requires concentrating labour in cities, which inflates land prices, results in overcrowding, and causes periodic population displacement. The bourgeoisie “resolves” these issues by demolishing working-class housing and relocating workers outward. The destruction of council estates exemplifies this ongoing process.

Following the Second World War, municipal housing initiatives somewhat diluted Engels’ idea. However, these were not socialist endeavours; rather, they were concessions obtained by a militant working class during the expansion of capitalism. Housing remained a commodity, as councils built homes without challenging private land ownership. The core contradiction remained, only shifting to different aspects.

After 2008, the conflict intensified dramatically. Housing became a global financial asset, attracting heavy investments from private equity firms, REITs, offshore entities, and pension funds. Landlords shifted from individual owners to financial institutions, turning rent into a securitised income. Evictions began to serve as a means of capital growth.

Councils like the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) are subject to this trend. While the extent of malice within councils like RBKC is uncertain, they are now integrated into a global system of financialised landlordism. The council’s plans to demolish estates and replace them with developments for the private rental market are not merely local issues but reflect a broader, historic global pattern.

Financialised Landlordism: The Globalisation of Rent and the New Mechanisms of Capital Accumulation

Evictions from council estates reflect more than just the actions of a social landlord. They signify a new phase in capitalism’s evolution: financialised landlordism, where housing shifts from being mainly a home to serving as a financial asset, facilitating the flow and increase of capital.

Tracking the evolution of financialised landlordism from the 1970s crisis through the neoliberal counter-revolution, the decline of social democracy, and the post-2008 transformation of global capitalism reveals that eviction, demolition, and displacement are not anomalies but essential tools for capital accumulation in this era. The post-war economic boom depended on industrial production, rising wages, and regulated finance. However, by the late 1960s, this model faced a crisis: profit margins dropped, inflation surged, and labor unrest increased, prompting capital to seek new ways to accumulate wealth. The neoliberal shift dismantled the post-war regulatory system—liberalising finance, increasing capital mobility, weakening the welfare state, and opening housing, once protected by municipal regulation, to market forces.

The Thatcher government’s “Right to Buy” was more than just a policy; it represented a fundamental shift. It shifted millions of homes from public to private ownership, established a new petty-bourgeois class of homeowners, reduced municipal housing stock, and set the stage for land commodification. Labour governments continued this trend, with councils demolishing estates and transferring properties to housing associations increasingly connected to financial markets.

The collapse of Lehman Brothers sparked a worldwide crisis of excess capital. Trillions of dollars were sought for secure, profitable investments, with housing emerging as a preferred asset due to its stable returns, physical collateral, rising land values, and state-backed rent enforcement. Private equity firms, REITs, sovereign wealth funds, and pension funds all invested heavily in residential real estate. As a result, landlords shifted from individual property owners to financial institutions. Companies such as Pemberstone participated in this global trend.

Financialised landlordism goes beyond just “big landlords.” It involves specific accumulation mechanisms: rent is no longer just payment for land use but is securitised, bundled, sold to investors, and used as collateral, integrating housing into global financial markets. The tenant becomes a revenue source, and the home becomes a bond.

Eviction is not a flaw in the system; rather, it serves as a tool for capital accumulation. It enables landlords to clear “underperforming” tenants, redevelop land for greater profits, turn low-yield housing into high-yield assets, and discipline tenants through precarity. Evictions from social housing are part of this process and not exceptions; they reflect the system functioning as intended.

Demolition of estates is not about destruction; it’s about creating value. It allows for densification, luxury redevelopment, conversion of social housing into private properties, extraction of planning gains, and increases in land values. However, this process often displaces the working class, allowing capital to intensify the exploitation of urban space.

Financialised landlordism relies heavily on debt, with tenants accumulating rent arrears, landlords handling leveraged buyouts, councils participating in PFI schemes, and housing associations issuing bonds. Debt interconnects all parties within the financial market system, which depends on state support such as enforcement of eviction laws, policing authority, planning policies, tax incentives, deregulation, and eviction powers related to immigration. Labour’s role includes expanding Section 8 eviction powers, implementing the digital possession process, and applying Ground 7B regulations.

This is not a deviation; it represents the state performing its typical function. The state is inherently not neutral but acts as the guarantor of rent extraction. Financialised landlordism is supported by an ideological framework that masks its class interests.

Regeneration frequently conceals demolition and displacement, portraying capital growth as progress, modernisation, and renewal. The term ‘affordable housing’ is misleading, as it refers to market-rate rents rather than a social right, thereby embedding working-class housing in financial markets. Consultation often seems superficial, merely legitimising predetermined decisions and turning democratic language into bureaucratic procedures. The idea of mixed communities is a euphemism for social cleansing, replacing working-class residents with wealthier populations to boost land values.

The Emotional Power and Political Weakness of Local Campaigns

The main contradiction in localist housing campaigns is that, despite stirring strong emotions, they lack a clear strategy. While community, heritage, and shared suffering foster solidarity, these feelings do not translate into political power. They remain in the moral sphere, appealing to a system that lacks consciousness. Local campaigns are easily bypassed as councils “consult,” “engage,’ and “listen,” only to proceed with demolition or evictions. The moral appeal becomes part of bureaucratic formalities, reducing the campaign to a mere mention in planning documents. This underscores the ideological link between localism and Labourism.

Localism is inherently ideological and not politically neutral. It aligns with Labourism, which claims to protect community and heritage but ultimately serves financial interests. As mentioned, Labour councillors “deploy police to bar residents from town hall meetings.” Local campaigns often appeal to the same institutions that are evicting residents—the Dialectical Critique: Localism as Economism. Localist housing initiatives resemble trade-union economism by tackling symptoms rather than addressing the root social relations. They stay at a pre-class-conscious stage of struggle and cannot move beyond reformism without breaking away from Labourism’s political framework.

Labour isn’t genuinely a workers’ party but rather a bourgeois party supporting capitalism. Its aim is to manage capitalism’s contradictions, not eliminate them. This isn’t a flaw; it’s central to who it is. Labour’s Post-2024 Housing Strategy reveals increased Section 8 eviction powers and easier digital procedures for possessions. Ground 7B evictions over immigration led Labour MPs to be booed at the 2026 housing rally. This isn’t a failure to forget history but a reaffirmation of property rights.

The New Left Review, Verso Books, and the Ideology of Housing Reformism

The New Left Review (NLR) and Verso Books position themselves as prominent voices of radical thought in Britain. Over time, they have regularly published books, essays, and monographs on issues such as housing, urbanism, gentrification, and “neoliberalism.” Their contributors—such as Stuart Hodkinson, Anne Power, John Boughton, Loretta Lees, and Danny Dorling—are committed to portraying tenant struggles with sincerity and in detail.

However, documentation does not equate to politics. The stance of the NLR/Verso environment is more of a refined, scholarly Labourism than a genuinely radical position. It emphasises capitalism’s violence but suggests solutions like “better policy,” “more democratic planning,” and “politicians listening to historical narratives.” This part of the article contends that the NLR/Verso housing discourse is not only inadequate but also an ideological barrier hindering the development of revolutionary consciousness.  

Founded in 1960, the New Left Review emerged from the merger of The New Reasoner and Universities and Left Review. It faced a fundamental contradiction: while it opposed Stalinist bureaucratic authoritarianism and Labourism’s parliamentary gradualism, it did not endorse a Marxist revolutionary platform. Instead, it presented itself as a “radical” intellectual journal that critiques capitalism from within the bourgeois democratic framework.

This inherent contradiction has influenced its political perspective since then. Starting from the 1970s, scholars linked to NLR became key analysts of Britain’s housing issues, producing detailed ethnographies of council estates, examining “regeneration” projects, critiquing gentrification, documenting the history of social housing, and proposing policies for “democratic planning.” Although these works are often rich in empirical detail, they generally remain politically passive, describing capitalism’s violence without explicitly pointing to its fundamental cause: private ownership of land and housing.

Verso Books: The Publishing House of Academic Reformism

Verso Books describes itself as a “radical publishing” house. Nonetheless, it operates more like the literary wing of the academic left, a community that has long documented social crises without directly challenging Labourism.

Their housing titles, such as Safe as Houses, Estate Regeneration and Its Discontents, Municipal Dreams, The New Urban Crisis, and Eviction: The Social History of Rent, exhibit three key ideological traits: 1. They view housing mainly as a policy issue rather than a class struggle, describing it as a “crisis,” “failure,” or “challenge,” but not as an intrinsic aspect of capitalism. 2. They focus on politicians instead of the working class, assuming policymakers can be convinced to counter capitalist interests. 3. They minimise Labour’s role, criticising Conservative governments while often depicting Labour as a potential reformer—even though Labour-led councils have historically been responsible for mass evictions, estate demolitions, and social cleansing.

The NLR/Verso milieu is not politically neutral; it is structurally linked to universities, research grants, policy institutes, Labour councils, think tanks, and NGOs. Its authors rely on these institutions, which also oversee eviction processes. Consequently, they cannot promote revolutionary politics without risking their careers. Their reformism is grounded in material realities, not just ideology.

Verso housing books frequently promote ideas like “stronger regulation,” “community involvement,” “democratic planning,” “ethical regeneration,” and “fairer development models.” These notions are illusions, presuming that the capitalist state can be reformed to oppose capitalism.

Verso authors romanticise community campaigns, highlighting successes such as Focus E15, Newham mothers, West Hendon, and local fights. However, they never address the political reality: these campaigns failed because they relied solely on moral appeals. “Community does not defeat the rate of return.” Regarding “Heritage,” Verso books often reference estate histories, community dignity, and working-class culture, but heritage lacks legal weight against property rights. It remains sentiment, not a strategic tool.

Engels dispelled reformist illusions in 1872, highlighting that housing shortages stem from systemic issues. He stated that eviction serves as a means of capital accumulation and emphasised that reform alone cannot eliminate the commodity nature of housing. The only solution, according to him, is the abolition of private land ownership to resolve the housing problem.

The NLR/Verso milieu has overlooked this analysis for fifty years. They reference Engels but ignore his insights, considering his revolutionary conclusions as mere historical curiosities rather than urgent political calls. The book’s call is for politicians to heed the stories of history… But which politicians?”

The NLR/Verso environment provides no route to victory as its political approach is a dead end. The working class cannot secure housing through heritage, community efforts, moral appeals, Labour councils, academic research, or policy changes. The fight for housing is a fight against the capitalist class… transforming housing from a commodity into a social right.”

On The Financial Times Editorial on the 2026 World Cup

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A recent Financial Times editorial, “Football will eclipse politics at this World Cup,” exemplifies the complacent, upper-middle-class liberalism that has long provided ideological cover for the abuses of global capitalism. Its main argument—that the 2026 World Cup’s “goals, talent and diversity are set to drown out controversy off the pitch”—is not just naïve; it’s a reactionary move to suppress public awareness amid the growing tensions of world capitalism, which are now affecting every aspect of social life, including sports.

The editorial board’s stance is based on a flawed and strongly ideological divide between “politics” and “the beautiful game.” The authors briefly admit that the tournament has been “tainted by events off the pitch,” mentioning the troubling scene of FIFA giving a “peace prize” to Donald Trump, the exorbitant ticket prices that make supporters pay nearly $7,000 just to watch their team, and the blatantly discriminatory visa policies excluding fans from non-European countries and even “a match referee from Somalia.” Despite these issues, they are dismissed as minor problems—mere background distractions that do not detract from the overall spectacle of goals and celebration.

This is a common ideological tactic of the bourgeois media. While the FT notes the symptoms, it avoids examining the underlying issue. The World Cup is not corrupted by politics; rather, it exposes itself as a large commercial and geopolitical venture, where football acts as a front for the interests of governments, corporations, and oligarchic elites.

The FT’s depoliticisation of sport is itself a political act.

The editorial’s claim that “World Cups are ultimately about what happens on the pitch” exemplifies ideological mystification. Because the World Cup is a worldwide media spectacle watched by billions, ruling classes aim to manipulate it. The FT’s suggestion to concentrate on “goals” and “serendipity” is not harmless; it urges the public to ignore the harsh realities of the global system.

The editorial downplays the extraordinary fact that “this is the first World Cup where a host nation is at war with one of the participating countries,” viewing Trump’s decision to deny the Iranian team overnight stay in the US as a minor curiosity instead of a stark example of how militarism and xenophobia are now openly influencing international sports.

The FT’s lack of coverage on the wider issues—the escalating US–Iran conflict, the growing trade war between the host countries, the global surge of authoritarian regimes, and the worsening crisis of global capitalism—is deliberate. It mirrors the class interests of the publication, which represents the financial oligarchy that benefits from commodifying sport and militarizing geopolitics.

The editorial celebrates the very inequalities it pretends to lament.

The FT criticizes the “extortionate pricing” of tickets but celebrates the expansion to 48 teams as a sign of “worldwide representation.” This presents a cynical contradiction. What does “representation’ truly mean when the working-class populations cannot afford to attend? When the editorial mentions that Curaçaoans, Cape Verdeans, Uzbeks, and Jordanians will “watch from home with pride,” it unintentionally exposes the class divide: the global poor may provide the players, but the stadiums are owned by the wealthy.

Likewise, the editorial highlights the “vibrancy of international cultures” that will be showcased as fans move between 16 North American cities—yet it concedes that only those “who can afford it” will be able to participate. This is not true diversity; it amounts to luxury multiculturalism catered to the wealthy.

The fetishisation of individual stars masks the structural rot.

The FT devotes significant space to Ronaldo, Messi, Mbappé, and Lamine Yamal, suggesting that the star power of individual players can compensate for corruption in the sport’s governance. This focus on personal charisma illustrates bourgeois ideology by transforming systemic issues into a spectacle of individual achievement. Additionally, the editorial characterises Roberto Lopes’ recruitment to Cape Verde via a ‘LinkedIn message’ as charming, disregarding its indication of the chaotic, unregulated, and exploitative global labour market that shapes modern football.

The World Cup cannot “eclipse politics” because it is a product of politics.

The FT’s conclusion that the tournament’s “enduring power” is rooted in its ability to “entertain” regardless of politics essentially accepts the logic of spectacle. It suggests that the audience should be kept distracted, pacified, and depoliticized by sport’s spectacle while the ruling elite pursues its predatory interests unnoticed. In reality, the opposite is true. The 2026 World Cup is not an escape from the global capitalist crisis but a vivid reflection of it. The militarized borders, corporate profiteering, sky-high ticket prices, geopolitical tensions, exploitation of migrant workers, and authoritarian displays by host governments are not external to the event—they are integral to its nature.

Claiming that football will “eclipse politics” demands the public accept a world that’s unequal, violent, and ruled by oligarchic interests. Socialists must reveal this falsehood, expose the material forces behind global sport, and insist that the working class—whose labor, passion, and creativity make football possible—should not be passive spectators in a spectacle that hides their exploitation.

Obituary for the Beautiful Game:

Once, football was a pastime of the working class, not just a game but a shared expression of solidarity and human creativity. Played in factory yards, slag heaps, crowded streets, and muddy fields, it only needed a ball, a small space, and the imagination of its players. That era has passed.

Today, what remains of “football” is a distorted imitation: a worldwide commodity, a tool for marketing, a pawn in geopolitics, a means to clean oligarchic wealth, and an entertainment designed to pacify a population losing political influence. The “beautiful game” has been embalmed, packaged, and sold to the public at a cost they can no longer bear. This isn’t an obituary for a sport that has merely evolved; it’s for a sport that has been completely extinguished.

The Expropriation of a Working‑Class Inheritance

Football originated among the industrial working class, whose labour established the very time and social environment for collective leisure. Clubs were established by railway workers, dockers, miners, and textile workers. The terraces served as the one space where the working class could emerge as a unified social force, expressing their collective voice and purpose. However, late capitalism has undermined this foundational aspect.

Stadiums have transformed into luxury zones, with even the cheapest tickets exceeding the financial reach of the original community that built the sport. As the FT editorial notes, tickets for the 2026 World Cup will start at nearly $7,000 before travel costs—an extraordinary figure a generation ago. This change has pushed the working class out of the stands, making room for corporate sponsors, tourists, and wealthier elites. The vibrant, spontaneous atmosphere has been replaced by curated fan experiences, and the organic culture of the game has been replaced by branded content. Overall, football has become privatized, financialized, and disconnected from its social roots.

The Oligarchic Capture of the Global Game

The modern football economy highlights the stark inequalities of today. Clubs serve as investment tools for petro-monarchies, hedge funds, and billionaire investors. FIFA and UEFA act as transnational corporations mainly focused on generating profit.

The World Cup, originally a showcase of international sporting spirit, has now transformed into a spectacle marred by corruption, authoritarianism, and geopolitical drama. The editorial highlights FIFA’s decision to give a “peace prize” to a sitting US president, a move so ridiculous it might be funny, if not for revealing the organisation’s complete submission to state influence.

Visa bans, militarised borders, and political vendettas now determine who can attend, participate, or even enter host countries. For example, a Somali referee was refused entry; entire national fan groups are excluded; and a nation participating in an event is prevented from staying overnight in the host country. These are no longer exceptions but reflect a broader world order where sport is manipulated to serve the interests of powerful nations. Football has evolved into a diplomatic tool, a means of propaganda, and a way to legitimize political agendas.

The Commodification of the Player

Players—originally local heroes developed through community clubs and youth initiatives—have transformed into commodities in the international market. Their bodies are traded like financial derivatives, and they are pushed to perform at higher levels to accommodate a growing number of matches designed to increase revenue.

The editorial emphasizes Ronaldo, Messi, Mbappé, and Yamal, yet this concentration on star players signals a decline in the sport. The fixation on superstars masks harder truths: the exhaustion, injuries, and exploitation faced by young players from Africa, South America, and Eastern Europe, who are trafficked through academies and often discarded if they fail to meet commercial expectations. The so-called “beautiful game” now functions as a labor market where human beings are reduced to mere brand assets.

The Spectacle as Social Pacification

The ruling class recognizes the political role of football. In a time marked by increasing inequality, declining living standards, and rising geopolitical tensions, sports serve as a pressure release. The editorial’s claim that “World Cups are ultimately about what happens on the pitch” is not just a statement but a demand: urging the masses to divert their attention from global crises and become absorbed in entertainment.

The World Cup is promoted as a celebration of “diversity,” “vibrancy,” and “international culture”—but only accessible to those who can afford it. The working class is left watching from home, passively absorbing the spectacle and cheering for a world they are becoming more excluded from. Football has shifted from a shared act of solidarity to a tool for distraction.

The Death of the Beautiful Game

What made football beautiful was not its commercial spectacle but its simplicity, accessibility, and universality. It was a game that belonged to everyone because it required almost nothing and reflected the creativity, spontaneity, and collective spirit of ordinary people. Under late capitalism, that world has been dismantled.

The “beautiful game” is not dead because people no longer love it, but because capitalism has consumed it. It was destroyed through privatisation, financialisation, militarised borders, oligarchic ownership, and the transformation of sport into a commodity, turning fans into consumers. What is left is a shell driven by marketing, broadcast rights, and geopolitical agendas.

However, the obituary concludes with a contradiction: while the game is considered dead, the desire that birthed it remains alive. The working class that originally invented football continues to exist, along with its ability to reshape the world—and the sport—on a new basis. The revival of the beautiful game will not originate from FIFA, billionaires, or corporate media, but from the same force that created it initially: the collective strength of the working class.

Identity Politics and the Manufactured Spectacle of the 2026 World Cup

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The BBC’s focus on a VAR official’s hand gesture during the 2026 World Cup isn’t a rare mistake or journalistic error. Instead, it reflects a corrupt political culture where those in power, facing growing social issues and increasing imperialist violence, depend increasingly on divisive identity politics. This strategy aims to split the working class and steer collective dissent into meaningless, symbolic conflicts. The so-called “OK sign” controversy is just the most recent example of this reactionary approach.

While the media was breathlessly speculating about “a VAR official’s fingers,” the United States, as the host of the tournament, was engaged in violent actions: prosecuting a war of aggression against Iran, preparing military operations against Cuba, sustaining the Gaza genocide, and conducting mass deportations unseen in modern American history. The World Cup itself has become a militarized spectacle: ICE agents patrolling stadiums, entire national teams denied entry, African nations subjected to degrading “quarantine” procedures, and ticket prices soaring to $32,970 for the final—turning a sport originally created by the working class into an event reserved for the global elite.

However, the BBC and the broader media industry focus their attention not on these crimes but on the supposed racial significance of a referee’s hand gesture. This is intentional. It is a political move.

The Function of Identity Politics Under Capitalism

Identity politics is not an uprising from the grassroots nor an opposition to oppression. Instead, it functions as a tool of dominance, engineered and exploited by the bourgeoisie to divert social rage from the capitalist system toward ongoing, unresolved symbolic disputes. The ruling class has realized that nothing better suppresses class awareness than fostering the idea that workers see each other as racial enemies, potential racists, or carriers of concealed “dog whistles.”

The VAR controversy serves as a clear example. Whether the gesture was meant to be innocent doesn’t matter. What matters is that the media focused on it because it is harmless, symbolic, and divisive. This encourages the public to engage in a moral policing ritual instead of challenging the underlying structures of exploitation.

The “OK sign” controversy started as a hoax on 4chan—deliberately designed to trick the liberal media into believing a harmless gesture was a white supremacist symbol. The media bought into it, and the Anti-Defamation League added it to their database. Consequently, a gesture used by millions worldwide was transformed into a racialized symbol, fueling suspicion, accusations, and performative outrage. This exemplifies identity politics at its most superficial: a focus on symbols without real substance, morality divorced from materialism, and vigilance disconnected from actual struggle.

The Real Conditions of the 2026 World Cup

While the media focuses on racist hand gestures, the real aspects of the tournament expose the harsh realities of modern capitalism. A host country engaged in several imperialist wars, with police-state security present throughout stadiums, mass deportations disrupting immigrant communities, and entire national teams barred from entry. African nations face racist humiliation disguised as “public health,” and FIFA’s president awards Donald Trump an “inaugural FIFA Peace Prize”—a disturbing mockery of diplomacy.

This is the truth the BBC avoids addressing. The World Cup now serves as a worldwide showcase for authoritarianism, militarism, and the commercialisation of human life. It is a celebration of oligarchic wealth, built on excluding the working class—whose labour created the sport and whose enthusiasm keeps it alive. The media’s responsibility is to prevent any of this from becoming a source of public anger.

Why the Ruling Class Needs Identity Politics

The capitalist class faces a world in chaos: economic stagnation, geopolitical conflicts, declining living standards, and increasing working-class resistance. In such times, the ruling elite cannot allow the rise of a unified, class-aware movement of workers—whether American, Iranian, Congolese, Mexican, European, African, or Asian—who identify their shared adversary in the capitalist system.

Identity politics counters unity by prompting workers to view each other not as allies in a common struggle but as racialized suspects, potential bigots, or members of hostile identity groups. It shifts focus from the universalism of class to the particularism of identity, turning the battle against oppression into a rivalry for symbolic acknowledgment.

The VAR controversy exemplifies a situation where a trivial gesture becomes a national scandal, serving as a distraction that deepens racial divisions among workers while the state continues its war effort, deports millions, and benefits the oligarchy.

The Task of the Working Class

The remedy to this spectacle isn’t increased vigilant policing of symbols, but rather cultivating revolutionary class consciousness. Workers need to reject the entire framework of identity politics, which mainly hides the material roots of oppression and causes division among the exploited majority. The core issue isn’t what a referee did with his fingers; it’s why workers should accept a system that sends them to fight and die in imperialist wars, deport their neighbours, humiliates entire nations, makes them unable to afford the sport they helped create, and then demands they focus on media-fuelled symbolic disputes. The working class must respond to this not with outrage over small gestures, but through a united fight against capitalism itself.

Mexico’s Azteca Stadium Protests Expose the Social Fault Lines Beneath the 2026 World Cup

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 “Inside the stadium: a carefully curated spectacle of nationalism and corporate branding… Outside the stadium: the real Mexico.”

12 June 2026

The intense scenes outside Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca on the opening day of the 2026 World Cup exposed the fragile illusion of ‘unity” and “celebration” promoted by FIFA, the Mexican government, and corporate sponsors, who dominate every aspect of the event. The incident at Gate Eight—where striking CNTE teachers and the families of Mexico’s disappeared forced past heavily armed security—was not an isolated event but a reflection of deep social tensions that have long been overlooked. “The scenes outside the Azteca Stadium are the eruption of social contradictions that the 2026 World Cup’s corporate and governmental organizers have tried desperately to suppress.” The ruling class has failed.

A confrontation long in the making

For weeks, the CNTE teachers’ union warned they would confront the World Cup with their fight for wages, pensions, and democratic rights. Their slogan—sin solución, no rodará el balón (“without a solution, the ball will not roll”)—was a clear political statement, not just a rhetorical flourish. As some of the most militant members of the Mexican working class, the teachers have declined to accept the austerity measures imposed by the Sheinbaum government.

Their arrival at the Azteca was accompanied by another persistent force: the mothers of Mexico’s disappeared. For over a decade, these women have taken on the work the government refuses to do—searching for their children, uncovering mass graves, and challenging the military and political powers behind the disappearances. “These mothers have become their own investigators… because the same state that took their children is now deploying riot police with shields to defend FIFA’s branding.”

The symbolism is unmistakable. The Mexican government, which has long blocked justice for the 43 Ayotzinapa students missing since 2014, now deploys its repressive forces to protect FIFA’s commercial interests.

Inside and outside the stadium: two irreconcilable realities

The Azteca Stadium became a physical and political border separating two incompatible worlds.

Inside:

  • $2,500 tickets sold through “dynamic pricing”
  • corporate hospitality suites
  • FIFA executives projecting $11 billion in revenue
  • a nationalist spectacle choreographed for global television

Outside:

  • teachers fighting for pensions
  • mothers searching for their disappeared children
  • riot police with shields and batons
  • the working class confronting the violence of the state

The World Cup, far from uniting the nation, has exposed the depth of social inequality and the brutality required to maintain it.

The international dimension: a tournament under the shadow of repression

The 2026 World Cup marks the first time the United States, Mexico, and Canada co-host it. Rather than displaying “North American unity,” the event has exposed the common authoritarian direction of all three governments. In the U.S., ICE agents are present at every venue, transforming stadiums into militarised zones. Migrant workers—who often work in kitchens, cleaning, and security—face risks of detention and deportation, despite their essential roles in making the tournament happen.

In Mexico, the Sheinbaum administration has responded to the CNTE strike with the same disdain as previous governments. The report states that the government “refuses even to meet with striking teachers while dispatching security forces against them.” Canada, on the other hand, has increased intelligence sharing and border enforcement in collaboration with US agencies, ensuring the tournament is protected within a continental security framework. This repression is deliberate; it is the necessary response to a tournament whose profits rely on silencing working-class opposition.

Historical parallels: Argentina 1978 and the politics of spectacle

The comparison to the 1978 World Cup under the Argentine military regime is accurate. Back then, as now, the ruling class aimed to use football to conceal a legitimacy crisis. The stadium served as a venue where the government showcased unity while secretly repressing dissent beyond public view. “The 1978 comparison Uco made in his article is fitting.” Although Mexico is not a military dictatorship, it shares the same fundamental pattern: employing sport as a political tool to hide societal issues.

The World Cup as a battlefield of class interests

The events at Azteca Stadium highlight a key reality of the 2026 World Cup: it’s not about worldwide unity, but a contest between class forces. The workers outside—teachers, precarious labourers, mothers of the disappeared—align their interests with those inside, including stadium cooks threatened by ICE, cleaners working long shifts, and migrant workers who built the infrastructure under risky conditions.

The nationalist spectacle aims to divide them, but the class struggle brings them together. As the document states, “The game will continue, but the social contradictions erupting at Gate Eight will not be settled on a football field.”

The political task ahead

The protests at the Azteca serve as a warning: the ruling class will deploy every tool—police repression, nationalist propaganda, and corporate media—to protect their profits and silence dissent. However, the working class, both in Mexico and globally, is beginning to resist. The goal is to turn these spontaneous outbursts of anger into a deliberate political movement, grounded in a socialist program and focused on international worker solidarity. The World Cup has exposed a vital truth: the fight for justice for the disappeared, fair wages, democratic rights, and an end to state violence is intrinsically linked to the broader struggle against capitalism that creates these injustices. The protest at Gate Eight marks only the start.