The renewed debates around Iran, Israel, the United States, and also Gabriel Rockhill's new book, have produced exactly the kind of polarisation one might expect.

Many of these discussions have become contests over quotations sundered from their context, Lenin, Mao, even Luxemburg being marshalled responds to another. Before long, the discussion resembles a theological dispute more than a materialist investigation.

What I find disheartening is not disagreement itself, but the failure to return to method and first principles. Too often we search for quotations rather than asking what it is we are actually trying to understand.

What should Marxists and communists care about? That sounds like an obvious question, but the answers are less obvious than they first appear. Should we care primarily about states? Nations? Classes? Anti-imperialist blocs? Social movements? The easy answer for many of us is the working class, but this class is difficult to locate geopolitically, even locally, and there seems to be a strong desire for politics to be less bound to the factories and workplaces of old.

In fact, the object of communist politics is not a group of people or a thing. It is the transformation of social relations under capitalism, the abolition of life under capital, and the transition to life against capital.

The recent debates have emboldened so-called campists, those who want communists to pick a side against US Imperialism - Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and so on are to be supported to destabilise the US. A geopolitical camp is to be cheered on, as it were, as the enemy of my enemy is a friend.Anti-campists, for their part, respond to point out the errors in thinking that result, and have historically resulted, from such a position, as enemies have posed as friends.

Both these positions, however, sometimes seem trapped within a shared framework that risks losing sight of communist politics altogether. One side begins with geopolitics. The principal contradiction is Western imperialism and hegemony. Therefore, states that weaken that hegemony deserve support, even if critically and temporarily. The other side begins with class. The principal contradiction is between capital and labour. Therefore, subordinating workers and social movements to capitalist states is a betrayal of Marxism.

These positions contain important insights. Yet both seem to search for a general answer before adequately understanding the specific situation before them. Class analysis has never been opposed to digging deeper into how social relations govern us in a particular time and place, region or conflict. And we cannot forget that our method for analysis does not stop short with economic conditions, but also must consider how Capitalism is reproduced.

We need to ask, what are the social relations we need to overcome? What are the conditions under which the people who make and reproduce the world are able to collectively sustain and govern their lives?

In answering questions like these, we can come at very different answers in different cases. This is expected: Capitalism is full of contradictions, and historical materialism is never intended to be a catalogue of ready-made positions. It is a method of investigating concrete social relations.

This seems especially important to acknowledge when discussing conflicts between states in an unequal world system. Imperialism is not an illusion. Military occupations, sanctions, coups, blockades, settler colonialism and unequal exchange have profoundly shaped the modern world. Marxists should resist imperial aggression wherever it appears, because there is nothing abstract about the destruction it produces. But acknowledging that reality does not relieve us of the responsibility to investigate the particular situation we face.

If the United States attacks Iran, what exactly are we defending when we oppose that attack? The Iranian state? The Iranian people? Iranian workers? Regional self-determination? Some combination of all of these?

If Iran weakens American influence in the region, what follows from that? Does every setback for US power strengthen emancipatory forces? Or can new forms of domination emerge alongside the weakening of old ones?

Likewise, if we reject support for states entirely, where does that leave us? How should Marxists respond to occupations, sanctions, colonial domination and asymmetrical wars? Can every conflict simply be reduced to the same formula?

What strikes me is that Marxists are often too eager to identify the correct doctrine. Campism. Anti-campism. Revolutionary defeatism. Yet history rarely presents itself in doctrinal form.

The temptation is always to find the correct position before adequately understanding the situation itself. But the answer for Europe in 1914 was not the same answer for Vietnam in 1968. The answer for Algeria in 1956 was not the same answer for Chile in 1973. The answer for Palestine today may not be the answer for Iran tomorrow. The answer for anti-colonial liberation struggles was not the same as the answer for inter-imperialist wars. Historical materialism demands something more difficult than the mechanical application of doctrine. It demands investigation of concrete situations, concrete histories and concrete social relations. For example, what is war? War is never simply a conflict between governments. It reorganises the conditions for the reproduction of life. It reshapes food systems, migration patterns, energy networks, public services, ecological relations, families and institutions of care. It changes how future struggles will be fought.

We have to look past which side possesses the correct quotation or the correct doctrine. The more materialist questions are:

What social forces are actually being strengthened in this situation? Which classes gain power? Which institutions of care survive or disappear? Which movements become stronger or weaker? Which capacities for collective self-government are expanded or diminished? Who gains greater capacity to organise, and who loses it?

Both campism and anti-campism often become arguments primarily about states. But through class and historical materialist analysis we can begin asking how social forces, institutions of care, forms of reproduction, unions, communities and movements are actually being strengthened or weakened by a given conflict. At the very least, that seems a more materialist place to begin than searching for another quotation to win an argument.

For a more concrete illustration, consider the current confrontation between Iran, Israel and the United States and its allies. A Marxist analysis cannot begin and end with states. Iran is not simply "anti-imperialist," nor is it simply another capitalist state equivalent to the United States. The Iranian state emerged through a specific historical trajectory, sits in a subordinate position within a US-dominated world order, and faces real pressures from sanctions, military encirclement and regional intervention.

These are realities. The expansion of imperial domination should be resisted. Not because the Iranian state represents an emancipatory alternative, but because military aggression, sanctions, occupation and regional destabilisation deepen domination and narrow the possibilities for collective self-determination. Opposition to imperial aggression is therefore not a secondary question. It is a practical necessity.

At the same time, opposing imperial aggression does not require us to champion one state against another. We must also remember that Iran is not outside capitalism. It contains class divisions, labour struggles, political repression and forms of accumulation that shape the lives of ordinary people. The interests of the Iranian state are not identical to the interests of Iranian workers, women, minorities or social movements. This means that opposing US or Israeli aggression does not require us to romanticise the Iranian state. Nor does recognising the reactionary features of the Iranian state require us to become indifferent to imperial aggression. A Marxist politics should be capable of holding both ideas simultaneously.

Opposition to aggression is not an endorsement of the state being attacked. We can oppose invasion, sanctions, military escalation and colonial violence because of the devastation they inflict upon ordinary people and the ways they undermine the capacity of communities to reproduce and govern their lives. We should not be asking whether Iran is "good" or "bad", nor whether the United States is worse. An object of communist politics is not deciding which state deserve our loyalty. The focus must be on what political orientation Marxists should adopt within the conflict.

And it must be based on historical investigation, which is not political neutrality. It is the means by which we determine how best to resist domination in the particular circumstances we face. In this situation, that means opposing imperial aggression and resisting the expansion of imperial domination. But it also means looking for contradictions in Capitalism and refusing to identify the interests of ordinary people with the interests of any capitalist state. It means analysing the concrete social relations at work, remaining attentive to class divisions and the forms of domination at play, while asking what social forces are actually being strengthened through the conflict.

Above all, it means supporting the capacity of ordinary people to organise, care for one another and collectively govern the conditions of their lives. Perhaps that is the real lesson. Marxists should resist imperial aggression wherever it appears. But resisting imperialism does not require abandoning analysis. Nor does class analysis require indifference to the unequal and violent structure of the world system.

The challenge is to oppose imperial domination without collapsing into campism, while also refusing a dogmatic anti-campism that treats every conflict as though history has already supplied the answer.

Historical materialism is never a catalogue of ready-made positions. It is a method for understanding the world in order to change it.

When I reflect on this, I realise that these are the ordinary, routine contradictions of life under capitalism. Most people already love animals. They feed dogs before themselves. They spend sleepless nights caring for sick cats. They rescue injured wildlife. They cry when animals die. Vast numbers of people organise parts of their daily lives around caring for non-human beings. But these people also need to leave for work, or work in ways that take them away from the care that is unsustainable and placed as a burden on individuals, when it is shaped through and through by how society operates and structures our lives. Again, it is just one of those ordinary facts of contemporary life. Set and forget.

What we also tend to set and forget is another ordinary fact that’s very much extraordinary: we live in a society organised around the industrial exploitation and killing of animals. In fact, I feed Lily the waste products of that industry, the bodies of animals I do not eat which go into her feed using more energy than could power an SUV. More than ninety billion terrestrial animals are killed every year to feed us, and trillions of aquatic animals pass through systems of extraction and slaughter, making products that feed us unecessary quantities of protein, or end up in our trinkets, toys, cars, buildings, clothes, and medicines.

Entire ecosystems are reorganised around production. So many chickens are bred, confined, killed and discarded that some scientists have suggested their elongated, fragile bones marked by capitalism may become one of the defining geological markers of the Anthropocene itself (perhaps it will be known as the age of chickens).

How can both these things be true? How can a society be so full of care for animals? And how can it be organised around such extraordinary violence toward them?

The usual explanations are not very satisfying. Some say people are hypocrites. Others say people simply have not been persuaded. But the problem is not the absence of care; instead, it is the organisation of care. Care is a condition of social life upon which capital depends but which it cannot fully reduce to commodity production. It cannot manufacture love, attachment, trust or care. It can only organise them, commodify them and extract from them.

Lily's dependence on me reveals a contradiction. I care for her deeply, yet the society I inhabit continuously limits my capacity to care. The same society that teaches us to love animals also teaches us to leave them alone all day while we work. The same society that celebrates companion animals organises the industrial slaughter of billions of others destroys the ecosystem on which it depends for its profits, and harms millions of people every year, exploiting precarious workers, destroying rainforests for feed crops, and killing millions with the particulate matter of intensive animal farms.

It is also just one of those contradiction that care exists outside capitalist social relations. We know that whenever we stare into the eyes of our child or our animals or our family or even our charges. We know and feel that our duty to them is unconditional. But the contradiction is that this motivation to do unconditional things remains subordinated to accumulation. It is a contradiction that is not unique to animals. We see it in our relationships with children, parents, partners, neighbours and communities. We know what care looks like. We practice it every day, but we live in social relations and the material conditions that they create which both facilitates and makes caring increasingly harder for us to sustain.

Capitalism does not merely exploit labour. Instead it appropriates care and extracts from the relationships that sustain life while continuously undermining the conditions under which those relationships flourish. This is the fundamental reality of capitalist social relations and the conditions they create that discipline, structure and control our lives. In this context, as Capitalism’s control over life becomes more and more important, there is a huge potential for animal liberation to be on frontlines in the battle to empower us.

Purity, Pragmatism, and Power

Knowing that we need to make our problems much more transparent and address the social relations in our lives, I often find the typical narrow debates within animal advocacy deeply unsatisfying.

Philosophically, the debate between the welfarists and rights vegans or abolitionists—especially the the consequentialists and deontologists—have been leading us down the path of asking the wrong questions. While these debates have clarified moral principles, they have hidden social relations and distracted us from the contradictions in our lives. One side argues for purity, and considers compromise a betrayal, or a logical error. The other argues for pragmatism, and considers compromise as progress. One side asks whether a compromise is morally acceptable. The other asks whether there are “wins for animals”. Everyone on one side just wants to win. The other wants to be right. The audience wants to reduce everything to veganism as consumption. And the transparency of social relations is lost every time.

Abolitionists are right that moral principles matter. Pragmatists are right that strategy matters. But neither is sufficient. That is because these views begin in the wrong place; they begin with moral principles when they should begin with social relations and principles for organising society. Then these debates might have enormous value to work out a strategy. Currently, however, these debates are confused with whether or not we care about animals, and how we can make others care too. The reality is that millions of people already do care about animals. They simply lack the ability to organise their lives, the capacity to do anything about it in a way that overcomes the barriers that snap them back into a world of normal routines or that overcome the barriers that limit us. Right here we should be aiming at something much broader than even the industrialisation I referred to earlier: it is empowering people to organise their relationships with animals differently without the threats to their survival and the scarcity incentives this creates.

Recently, David Ramms in “It’s Time Vegans Stopped Arguing with History” intervened in a controversy involving Gaz Oakley, a formerly vegan avant-garde chef and influencer who has been coping flack for joining the carnists and eating animals. Ramms argued that vegans should learn from history, particularly from abolitionist movements that relied on compromise, coalition-building and incremental gains. He praised the Vegan Strategiest, Tobias Leenaert, whose work encourages rank and file vegans to become less militant, not so purist, and more pragmatic in their everyday communication and behaviour.

The David Ramms Substack

It's Time Vegans Stopped Arguing With History

“Gaz Oakley is no longer anti-racist. That doesn’t mean he’s no longer an ally…

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7 days ago · 33 likes · 19 comments · David Ramms

The Vegan Strategist

The team is bigger than the label

I’m always interested to see the vegan community’s response when a vegan celebrity jumps ship…

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11 days ago · 74 likes · 24 comments · Tobias Leenaert

There is truth in what both Ramms and Leenaert write. No successful movement has ever been pure. Every struggle contains compromises, alliances and contradictions. But by arguing we should slide good thoughts into the DM of Gaza Oakley, to use and exploit him as a “tool for good” before he is exploited by industrial agriculture, Ramms turns this insight into a liberal theory of history. His potted account of abolition becomes a story about moderation, persuasion and strategic compromise. I’ve seen such reductions of history before. While Ramms’ argument is useful because it identifies a real problem, his solution mistakes one aspect of history for the whole.

Because the implication Ramms makes is that only abolition succeeded because activists were pragmatic; like Leenaert, abolitionists in the past were willing to get “messy” with “reality”. What this framing does is reduce both the causes and consequences of abolition itself, and obscure the lessons that follow from it by indulging in comparisons that are too transhistorical to begin with and then, what is more, narrow them down to one set of abolitionists in one particular geographical location in Europe and one moment in history. In Ramms’ account, the Haitian Revolution largely disappears, among all the other slave rebellions. Anti-colonial resistance disappears, the threat of revolutionary upheaval and the changing economic relations of capitalism disappear. While legal abolition in England is presented as a necessary compromise, the truth is that enslaved people did not patiently wait for freedom: they fought for it. Haiti transformed the political landscape of the Atlantic world and confronted slave-owning societies with the possibility that enslaved people might liberate themselves.

Equally relevant to discuss here is what happened after abolition. Ramms celebrates the uncomfortable compromise of this act to give Veganism a wide scope to compromise, but it’s an unfortunate story he is framing. Britain did not simply abolish slavery and move beyond it. In 1833, the British government allocated £20 million—around forty percent of annual government expenditure—to compensate slave owners for the loss of their human property. The formerly enslaved received nothing, as Ramms points out. And the debt incurred to fund this compensation remained embedded in Britain’s public finances until 2015.

This was on paper at least a “win” for slaves, a “messy”, “dirty” one, but it took compromise to ensure this legislation as passed. But what Ramms ignores here is how the wealth accumulated through slavery by former slave owners did not simply vanish. Instead, through the ongoing compensation it was built into the unbroken power of these former slave owners that flowed into industry, finance, landed estates, agriculture and the development of British capitalism itself. Abolition in this case did not simply destroy a system of domination. It reorganised it. The wealth extracted through plantation slavery became part of the foundations of modern capitalist development, including agricultural systems that would themselves become increasingly industrialised and subordinated to accumulation.

The lesson of abolition is therefore not that compromise works. Nor that compromise fails. It’s that if we take our eyes of the systems of domination, we can record wins for one group of people, and reform one plank in the system, only to build the domination elsewhere, and to export the social relations further across society. The lesson is that systems of domination must be transformed, and we do that through acting through contradictions, struggles and shifts in power.

The same is true of labour movements, anti-colonial struggles, Black liberation movements and feminist movements. None of them succeeded because oppressed people became more polite. None of them succeeded because they discovered the perfect messaging strategy. They succeeded because they altered the balance of power. Moderates often negotiate because radicals transform what is possible. Compromise is rarely the cause of change. More often, it is one outcome of changing social relations. This matters because animal liberation faces a similar problem.

When Ramms asks us to pursue the “best outcomes for animals”, I find myself wondering how we know what those outcomes are. I think about Lily. What would the best outcome for her be? More companionship. More time together. More opportunities for play, exploration and social connection. Less isolation. More care. But immediately I run into a problem. Those outcomes are not simply matters of personal choice. They depend on working hours, housing, income, public space, transport systems and the organisation of daily life itself.

In other words, they depend on social relations. If we struggle to create the conditions for flourishing in our relationships with the animals who already live in our homes, how can we assume that we already know how to create the best outcomes for the billions of animals hidden within industrial production systems?

This is not about merely what animals need. It’s about the power we possess to meet those needs. It’s the preconditions of any moral or ethical behaviour. And this is not what I hear about in countless debates in animal advocacy; there’s no discussion of the kind of pragmatic strategies we need to build and strengthen the ability of everyone to make the choices by taking on the social relations that could sustain the end of the domination and suffering of our loved ones.

What is to be done?

If the problem is ultimately one of power rather than morality, then the question becomes what kinds of reforms build power. Reform and abolition can quickly become a debate that will tie a movement up into an impractical knots, and there is a growing awareness that veganism and the animal liberation movement must move on from this dead-end.

Socialist André Gorz’s idea of “non-reformist reforms“ becomes useful here. A reformist reform reduces suffering while leaving existing social relations largely intact. A non-reformist reform expands our capacity to organise life differently. It shifts power. It creates new possibilities. It opens space for further transformation. The distinction between reform and reformism is crucial.

Non-reformist reforms are not an argument against immediate reductions in suffering. They are an argument for selecting and designing reforms that also increase the capacity for future transformation. Rights on paper are also important, but if we ignore these questions about power and transition, we lose the opportunity to consider how those rights become durable realities rather than aspirations continually undermined by existing social relations.

Abolitionists might ask if a reform is morally acceptable. A pragmatist might ask whether a reform will win, or shift outcomes, no matter how small. But a politics of life against capital asks whether the reform merely stabilises existing relations or also increases our collective capacity to transform them. It asks:

• What capacities does this reform create?

• Does it expand our collective ability to organise human-animal relations differently?

• Does it increase the power of those who produce and reproduce life, democratic power over how they make things, sustain and care?

• How does the reform help us “win”? Who wins and loses? What might be the unintended consequences of our compartmentalised reform in a power system?

These questions point toward a different strategic horizon for animal liberation. Not a blueprint. Not a checklist. But a set of five principles for reorganising society which help animal liberation become the mature social movement it should be, the one capable of genuinely strategic compromise for building power. Animal liberation should be judged by whether it builds five forms of power:

1. Production

2. Reproduction

3. Transition

4. Alliances

5. Institutions

1. The first principle is that animal liberation must increase democratic control over production (production).

The industrial systems that dominate human-animal relations today are organised by corporations, investors and large landholders. The people who work within them often possess little power to determine what is produced, how it is produced, or how animals are treated. Non-reformist reforms therefore include measures that increase worker power, public oversight and democratic control throughout food systems. Transparency laws, worker organisation, agricultural unionism, producer cooperatives, public ownership and forms of democratic planning all expand society’s capacity to transform production itself. In addition, they flow back into principle 2 (below) and give back the time outside workplaces everyone needs to care and sustain ourselves and our loved ones while building the capacity to realise our ethical and compassionate principles in the practice of life. Such reforms allow us the time to overcome the contradictions and build the class consciousness and resources we need to overturn the structural disadvantage, neglect, and discrimination that capital has built into our lives.

Other reforms target production specifically. Building democratic control over production, through parties and committees. Slaughterhouse workers electing health and welfare committees with real power, or the targeted conversion of feed-crop production into plant-based food production based on cooperative principes. Introducing some of these reforms are incredibly uncomfortable for vegans and people who support abolition. But, they are critical. They have impacts on everyone’s ability to challenge deeply exploitative systems. And they’re addressing the systems that actually do and enforce the killing and exploitation, that force the precarious workers into systems that destroy respect for life in almost every way conceivable. We should be creating a society in which everyone has a clear choice, cannot be dominated by others, employers or markets, and has no incentive to kill or exploit to survive.

2. The second principle is that animal liberation must in connection with producers increase reproducer power (reproduction).

This principle is so important, I am tempted to call it Lily’s principle. Every additional hour reclaimed from work is potentially an hour of care returned to children, communities and animals like Lily. We are not just producers. We are also reproducers, which is as essential as work. Many workers are also reproducers, are the essential workers who clean, feed, clothe and serve us. These workers sustain the lives of others, stabilise and make capital livable. The more subordinated they are to accumulation, the more society struggles to transform. The care of animals is part of the broader work of social reproduction. It depends upon time, attention, housing, public space and social support.

People cannot care for animals if they have no time to care. A shorter working week, stronger leave provisions, public health services that break down the segregation of animal and human health care, inclusive housing, community care programs, public investment in sanctuaries and the decommodification of basic services all increase society’s capacity to organise care differently.

These reforms would do more for countless animals than another debate over vegan purity. They create conditions in which relationships like the one I have with Lily can flourish rather than being squeezed into the margins of economic life. And they give people the space and time to transform their lives and become vegan and organise others to support a collective project.

3. The third principle is that animal liberation must reduce dependence on systems organised around animal exploitation (transition).

Farmers should not be abandoned to market forces. Workers should not be abandoned to unemployment. Communities dependent on animal industries should not be left behind. A non-reformist approach would fight for publicly funded transitions into plant-based agriculture, worker-owned food production, ecosystem restoration projects, rewilding programs, rural public investment and new forms of employment capable of sustaining communities beyond animal exploitation. No farmer should have to choose between economic survival and animal liberation.

The objective is not merely to reform animal agriculture, but to reduce society's dependence upon systems organised around animal exploitation. And the goal is not simply to close industries but to create alternatives capable of sustaining life. Some of the most remarkable advocacy is already working in these areas.

If this is compromise, let’s see more of it. Let’s also see it extended everywhere in food systems, in all animal industries: let’s decommodify the lives and conditions for the lives of the humans and animals around us. Let’s transform animal agriculture and its destruction of communities, ecosystems, and wildlife. There’s so much to do here, and it’s neither about compromise or about purity: it’s the transparency of power and the reduction of dependence we need in our lives.

4. The fourth principle is that animal liberation must build alliances around shared forms of domination (alliances).

Liberation movements reveal forms of domination that animal advocates often miss because they have already confronted questions of power, institutions and social reproduction. That is why they are so valuable for animal liberation. We should be listening to members with experience in liberation, such as Queer Brown Vegan, or Isaias Hernandez, further defines “white veganism [as] a form of veganism that focuses solely on animal liberation while actively ignoring the effects of colonization and how it is interconnected to the oppression of humans and animals.” Or the words and insights of Brown Feminist Vegan, whose instagram page should be on the feed of every animal advocate.

The same social relations that subordinate animals to accumulation often subordinate workers, carers, Indigenous peoples and ecosystems. This does not mean collapsing every struggle into one. It means recognising that many struggles confront the same structures of power. Campaigns for shorter working hours, housing, public goods, food sovereignty, ecological restoration, workplace democracy and Indigenous land justice can all expand society’s capacity to reorganise human-animal relations.

Vegans should not to ignore comments pointing out racism, and fall into the trap of white veganism, being a useful tool for white supremacy ( “an extension of white supremacy or at least a tool of it”, as Demi Colleen puts it, that ignores the “socio-economic impact” of the movement). We need to ally ourselves to everyone who struggles for liberation, and to learn from them, rather than play the game of professionalisation and corporate “wins for animals”. This path is increasingly reproducing social relations that do real harm and that will only become greater with increasing popularity.

Why is compromise with the other liberation movements that surround us never what is sought strategically, and why is it that animal advocates are always seeking some mass appeal? Ramm refers to the “psychological manipulation” that is organised by animal agriculture industries—are we somehow to pour our energy into adopting that? The capacity building of one, not the other, is much greater, if only we understand that we don’t need to make people see suffering in order for them to care: instead, we need to give them the tools to change the social relations that lead them down the path of manipulation. We should be less concerned with persuasion than with expanding people's capacity to act on values they already have: this is the way.

5. The fifth principle is that animal liberation must build institutions capable of sustaining a different world (institutions).

Movements cannot survive on outrage or even on what Ramm calls “real money and real attention” alone. They require organisations, cooperatives, unions, sanctuaries, educational projects, democratic associations and community networks. These organistions should be putting the attention on the principles and strategies we need to transform how we operate in the world. The challenge is not merely to resist existing institutions. It is to connect and build new ones that do not reproduce the same social relations or seek to make transparent and transform them.

Power that cannot be institutionalised eventually dissipates. Animal liberation has a wide scope here to organise and combine. The capacity and funding is already there. We don’t need sugar hits from poker players, celebrities, and billionaires and other uncontrollable “tools for good”, as Ramms puts it. We do need to empower the people that are producing and reproducing in our societies, and that we depend on. We should never be afraid of centering their needs to build the transformation the difficult work of disrupting social relations requires.

Politeness won’t get us far here. Politeness has a dark history in enforcing colonial and capitalist rule. What will get us far together is genuine listening and collaboration that respects the connectedness of the liberation of us all. Vegans do not need to learn to subordinate themselves to “real money and real attention to the animals”. Instead, they need to learn how to build real power over the people that manipulate us into thinking we need capitalist realism to survive.

Beyond purity and pragmatism

Taken together, these principles suggest a very different understanding of progress than is usually presented by animal advocates and in debates between people who, ultimately, support animal liberation. We should not be debating whether reform is incremental or abolitionist.

What we should be seeking is reforms that build power. Power for the people organising change, not for the already powerful who are seeking the reparations and compensations. Whenever we seek a reform, wellbeing or other, we should be asking at least these 5 questions for non-reformist reforms for the animals in our lives:

1. Does it strengthen the social forces capable of transforming human-animal relations?

2. Does it expand democratic control over production?

3. Does it increase society’s capacity to care?

4. Does it reduce dependence on systems organised around accumulation?

5. Does it help people live more of their lives according to values other than profit?

These are the standards by which reforms should be judged, and not because they guarantee victory, but because they expand our ability to create a society in which care rather than accumulation becomes the organising principle of human-animal relations.

This is where both purity and pragmatism become insufficient. Purity without power becomes moral grandstanding and futility, and pragmatism without power becomes adaptation and conformity. Both risk becoming trapped within the social relations they claim to oppose. What matters is whether our actions increase our capacity to transform those relations. This means starting with social relations rather than identities. It means analysing contradictions rather than policing personal consistency, building power rather than simply building awareness, and expanding democratic control over production and reproduction.

It means creating institutions capable of sustaining different forms of life, and judging reforms not by whether they make us feel virtuous, nor by whether they produce immediate wins, but by whether they increase our collective capacity to care. Animal liberation will not emerge because people suddenly learn to love animals. Millions already do. What we should be working on is turning everyday capacities for care into become social forces capable of transforming the conditions under which humans and animals live together.

Purity without power cannot transform social relations. Pragmatism without power adapts to them.

All Power to the Lilys

Every morning I leave Lily behind and go to work with a knot in my stomach not because I’m feeling bad for no reason, but because I am correctly feeling a contradiction in the social relations that govern both our lives. I do not want merely a slightly kinder version of those relations: I don’t think that is what Lily needs, because it is an adaptation that suits me more than her.

I want a society organised around care rather than accumulation. The challenge of animal liberation is not simply to reduce suffering, a laudable moral principle, but one we cannot mistake for an organising principle for society. Because our goal should be to build the power necessary to organise production and reproduction around life itself. It should be to end what we sustain in our everyday lives, forced into the exploitation of our social relations and the material conditions they have created.

This is the challenge I’ve begun to think of as transforming life under capital into life against capital. And in this transformation, I can think of no better revolutionary traveller than my dog Lily, a brown labrador who has been abandoned and who deserves better.

The central problem of animal liberation is not persuading people to care, but building the social power necessary to organise care differently.

My seven-year-old loved it in a sip, although it was causing me some consternation. Sweet, spiced, old-fashioned: the kind of cola that tastes like it was invented before high-fructose corn syrup flattened sweetness into one note. For him it was just a good drink, bright colours, a small pleasure on a quiet, warm afternoon.

For me it was immediately unsettling, and it lingered. The Palestinian colours and the name Gaza Cola burned themselves into my mind: what it means to drink during a genocide and be reassured you are “Apartheid-free,” “funding a Palestinian hospital,” drinking something “Palestinian-owned” — all for $5.

Absurd and grim.

It didn’t behave like a normal commodity, though I knew it was one. I pulled out my tablet and sketched it, to slow my brain as it raced, unable to disentangle everything that the can could mean. It carried too much. Apartheid-free. Palestine-owned. Funds hospitals. Those were not flavour notes; they were political claims.

The object on the table seemed to contain a city and a world — a genocide, a movement, a moral position — compressed into colourful aluminium. What were the social relations of this object, which spoke only through its properties and flavours?

I drew Gaza Cola, which refused to sit still, to slow my thinking as it tumbled through its images: a logo, national colours, held in a child’s hand in a café, the logistical effort of a café owner expressing solidarity with a city butchered and in ruins, now commodified in a can.

The discomfort did not go away. It deepened.

So, after drawing, I followed the trail. Gaza Cola, I learned, was conceived by Osama Qashoo, a Palestinian activist long involved in the International Solidarity Movement and the Free Gaza Movement. He launched it in London in 2024 through Palestine House, a UK-based cultural organisation.

The brand itself is registered in the UK as COLAGAZA LTD. The drink, however, is not produced in Gaza. It is contract-manufactured in Poland and exported through European logistics networks. Officially, the project says its profits go toward rebuilding Al-Karama Hospital in Gaza.

None of this is a criticism of Palestinian solidarity. Gaza Cola may well raise money. It may spread awareness. It may even be preferable to Coca-Cola. Yet none of that resolved the question sitting in front of me at the café table.

Nothing here is fake. But neither is the can what it initially implies. This is not Palestinian production. It is Palestinian signification. The labour, factories, supply chains and distribution networks are European. Palestine supplies the story, not the means of production.

That distinction matters because it tells us exactly what kind of political object this really is.

What circulates globally is not Palestinian industrial power but Palestinian moral meaning. Gaza Cola exists because Israel has lost the narrative war. “Apartheid” has become mainstream enough that even soft drinks now have to declare themselves. It would be miserly, even Scrooge-like, not to acknowledge that this represents a victory for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.

But BDS, at its strongest, was never simply about consumer choice. Its force lay in collective organisation: institutions divesting, artists refusing participation, unions taking action, contracts being cancelled, legitimacy withdrawn. The supermarket boycott was only one expression of a much broader strategy.

Capital, however, does not oppose this shift. It adapts to it. When resistance becomes morally dominant, capitalism does what it always does: it absorbs it, packages it, and sells it back. We forget how wily it is, how many niceties can be packed into a single can. It sneaks up on us every damn time.

The result is a form of solidarity that feels like action but does not behave like one. Buying a can does not interrupt Israeli trade. It does not block weapons shipments. It does not cancel contracts or pressure banks. It does not create losses. It creates identification — a feeling, a moral posture.

I am reminded of another boycott movement: veganism, or “white veganism” as it is sometimes called — veganism in its marketised form. Not veganism as a radical ethic, but veganism as a supermarket shelf. You do not dismantle industrial animal agriculture by buying different products. You might dismantle it by confronting land use, subsidies, agribusiness consolidation, labour regimes and supply chains. But when boycotts become consumer identities, the system adjusts. It produces new options and keeps going. My own disenchantment with veganism after fifteen years has been precisely this: the ease with which ethical desires can be absorbed into market trends.

Gaza Cola reveals something similar in the political sphere. It turns solidarity into a brand, ethics into a purchase, and boycott into a commodity. Opposition is no longer something you organise; it becomes something you sip. Meanwhile, real pressure always looks remarkably similar. Dockworkers refusing to unload ships. Universities divesting. States cancelling arms contracts. Trade being blocked. Labour organising against capital. Money being lost. Power being forced to respond.

All the way in Australia we were sipping cola on Wurundjeri land, in a settler-colonial society built on the dispossession of First Nations peoples. You do not fight empire abroad while letting it remain invisible at home. When solidarity becomes a consumer aesthetic, it detaches from the material relations that structure the world you are standing in.

My son just wanted to be taste my sweet drink. I wanted to believe there was a glimmer of something good in the aluminium can between us. When I knew full well that the aluminium could have come from labour peripheries such as Timor-Leste, where it is well documented that Australia supported genocide to secure oil and gas and still in background does.

Capitalism is exceptionally good at playing on this tension between care and commodification, hope and fetish, politics and purchase. Gaza Cola contains this struggle, canned. Not Palestine itself, but the contradiction of a culture that knows something is terribly wrong and keeps trying to solve it through the market.

The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that the can was carrying an impossible burden. It was being asked to do what only collective action can do. It was being asked to turn solidarity into a purchase and politics into a flavour.

For my son, Gaza Cola tasted faintly sweet. I wanted him to have a future of real transformation, but we both sat with our contradictions as the afternoon wound down. And all I could do was to draw the red, the green, the white, and the black of Gaza Cola.

Author’s Note: This writing on Gaza Cola began as a Facebook post written in late 2025 after I encountered a can of the drink in a café in Belgrave, Australia. My writing caused some controversy then. I have lightly revised it for publication at Life Against Capital. The argument remains substantially the same, though I have clarified some references to BDS and ethical consumption. I am publishing it because the questions it raised for me remain unresolved: what happens when solidarity is commodified, and what forms of collective action challenge power?

Few are feeling well informed by that particular debate.

Perhaps, rather than trying to analyse Parliament tax graphs, Australians should be talking about a different kind of bracket creep: the Great Australian Creep.

Australia is one of the richest countries on earth. It possesses vast mineral wealth, abundant land, enormous energy reserves and one of the highest standards of living in the world. Yet by one of the OECD’s most important measures of living standards — real household disposable income per person — Australia has been among the weakest-performing advanced economies since the pandemic. The Reserve Bank similarly notes that real household disposable income per capita remains below its pre-pandemic level even as the economy continues to grow.

This is the paradox of contemporary Australia. The country grows richer while many Australians feel poorer. Productivity rises, asset values rise, and national wealth continues to expand. And yet security recedes. And Australian people are feeling it.

Something is creeping through Australian life.

Australian comedian Dave Hughes has been attracting both interest and criticism for recently attacked the Federal Budget and Prime Minister Anthony “Albo” Albanese in increasingly unhinged social media posts. Hughes criticised the new proposed changes to the taxation of investment income and assets.

Hughes’ rants are familiar and part of the attention-grabbing male celebrity and cultural war warrior sphere. But among the disinformation, it's not as if much of what he says is not true. Australians often feel overtaxed, particularly on wages and consumption. Politicians waste money, while Government have lost touch with ordinary people.

Critics for their part respond by pointing out that Hughes owns a substantial property portfolio and therefore has a direct interest in debates over taxation and investment. Perhaps he does. But Dave Hughes is not the story. The interesting story is why so many Australians recognise themselves in his frustration. The answer is not simply taxes. Nor is it government waste. It is insecurity.

Insecurity is the lived exposure to market instability that so many Australians now face. In response, the Government proposes tax relief. The Opposition proposes different forms of tax relief. For many households, that relief matters. Real wages have struggled to keep pace with rising costs and household budgets are under pressure. Yet even substantial tax cuts would not resolve the deeper problem.

A family may pay less tax while facing higher housing costs, rising insurance premiums, growing childcare expenses and increasing dependence upon private assets for retirement. Disposable income may improve while security remains fragile. Appreciation for those entering the housing market for the first time can be slowing, interest rates hover over their purchase, and mortgages are at risk or defaulting at significantly high rates. Meanwhile, renters and wage earners struggle, facing the intense of the job market with no safety or relief in sight. This is why debates about tax often feel strangely disconnected from people’s lived experience. The numbers change. The feeling of insecurity remains.

Politicians constantly speak of the “cost of living crisis”. The phrase sounds sensible enough, but it already frames the problem in a particular way. Life appears as a collection of costs: housing costseducation, costs, healthcare costs, energy costs and childcare costs. The question becomes how to make these costs more affordable. But it promotes constant insecurity.

Affordability is not the same thing as security. A society can reduce prices while leaving people deeply dependent upon markets. It can provide subsidies while leaving the organisation of life unchanged. The problem is not merely that life has become expensive. The problem is that life has become increasingly dependent upon purchasing power.

The most important question for Australians is not how much life costs. It is why so many of the conditions of life must be purchased at all.

The Australian Dream once promised security. Work hard. Buy a home, raise a family, and retire with dignity. The dream was never universal. As Stan Grant has argued, its foundations lie in the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the transformation of land into property. The Australian Dream begins as a settler dream. Its promise is not simply prosperity but possession. Land becomes property and property becomes security. Security becomes citizenship and access to a decent life is organised through an ownership reliant on dispossession from the very beginning. The security of this national dream is organised through possession underpinned by a lurking moral and existential insecurity.

Yet over the twentieth century something else emerged. Through unions, public institutions, public education, healthcare, pensions and public housing, security became partially socialised. Access to a decent life no longer depended solely upon ownership. The post-war settlement associated with Menzies and expanded under Whitlam did not abolish capitalism. Most Australians still secured their lives through wages, family and property. But it expanded the sphere of collective provision.

Public universities under Whitlam became free. Healthcare moved toward universality. Public housing expanded. Essential infrastructure remained publicly owned. Industrial institutions helped convert economic growth into rising living standards.

The achievement was not equality. It was security backed by a welfare state. Australians could increasingly expect that illness, education, retirement or periods of unemployment would not immediately threaten their ability to live a decent life.For a time, two traditions coexisted: the dream of ownership and the dream of collective security. From the 1980s onward that balance began to shift. This transformation was not imposed solely by conservative governments.

Neoliberalism entered a society already shaped by a much older logic. The Australian Dream had long connected security to possession. Settler society promised land, property and independence as the pathway to a decent life. What changed after the 1980s was not the importance of ownership itself, but the extent to which ownership once again became the primary means through which security was organised.

One of the distinctive features of Australian neoliberalism was that many of its institutions were built through compromise rather than open confrontation. The Prices and Incomes Accord delivered important gains, including elements of the social wage and the expansion of superannuation. Yet it also encouraged organised labour to increasingly pursue security through negotiation, investment and economic management rather than industrial power.

The shift was rarely presented as a loss. It was presented as pragmatism. It was presented as responsibility. It was presented as modernisation. Australians were told they were becoming owners. Shareholders. Investors. Self-funded retirees. Security was not removed. It was redefined.

Over time, public assets were privatised. Universities moved toward user-pays funding. Housing became increasingly financialised. Retirement security became tied to investment returns. More and more of the conditions of life became organised through markets.

None of this happened overnight. That is precisely why it has been difficult to see.

The Australian Dream did not collapse. It crept. Security was not suddenly removed. It was gradually reorganised. Housing provides perhaps the clearest example. For much of the post-war period, governments expanded home ownership through public investment, housing finance, land release and direct construction. Housing was understood primarily as shelter and social infrastructure.

Over time this changed. Financial deregulation expanded access to credit. Tax settings such as negative gearing and capital gains concessions encouraged housing to function increasingly as an asset. Governments retreated from large-scale public housing construction while private developers became central to housing provision.

Homes increasingly became investment products. As housing prices rose, Australians were told they were becoming wealthier. In one sense they were. In another sense the cost of entering the system rose with them. Housing became both the source of security and the source of insecurity.

Because beneath contemporary political debates lies a transformation in how Australians secure their lives. The Australian Dream once promised security through work. Increasingly it promises security through ownership. Not ownership of factories or even companies or corporations. Ownership of houses. Investment properties, superannuation balances, and appreciating assets.

Teachers become investors. Tradespeople become landlords. Public servants become property owners. Workers remain workers. They still depend upon wages and still sell their labour in order to live.

Yet increasingly they are encouraged to seek security through assets as well. The result is not the disappearance of class divisions. It is their complication. Workers remain workers, but many become invested in the appreciation of assets because their own futures increasingly depend upon them.

This is why debates over housing become so politically explosive. People are not simply defending investments. They are defending security.

The tragedy is that the solution creates the problem. The same housing market that secures one household excludes another. The same asset inflation that protects retirement undermines affordability. The same mechanism that promises security simultaneously generates insecurity.

This is not merely a housing contradiction. It is a class contradiction. Australia remains divided between those who own capital and those who must sell their labour. Mining capital, banking capital, property capital, media capital and investment funds continue to shape the economy and the state.

At the same time, growing sections of the working and middle classes become enrolled in defending asset values because the institutions that once provided security have been weakened, privatised or marketised.

The result is a population increasingly pulled between two impulses: the desire for affordable housing and the desire to protect the value of the assets upon which their own security depends.

The same system that produces insecurity presents itself as the solution to insecurity. That is why the problem appears so difficult to solve. It's the legacy of neoliberalism in Australia. Not simply privatisation or deregulation, but the gradual reorganisation of security itself.

The Australian Creep is not simply a decline in living standards. It is a change in how living standards are produced and secured. What previous generations increasingly secured through wages, public institutions and collective provision, later generations are increasingly expected to secure through ownership, investment and private accumulation.

Risks once shared collectively are increasingly pushed onto households, families and individuals. Problems once treated as public questions become matters of personal responsibility. The market becomes responsible for solving problems that earlier generations increasingly expected society to solve together.

This is the Australian Creep. Not merely bracket creep. Not merely the cost of living. It is the slow replacement of social citizenship with market dependence. The gradual transformation of security from something collectively guaranteed into something individually purchased. The creeping expansion of market relations into more and more of the conditions of life.

The right blames taxes. The centre promises better management. Both largely accept the same premise: that security should ultimately be organised through ownership.

There are questions we need to keep asking. Why can’t people have enough? Why is being wealthy such an endless quest? Why should a society as wealthy as Australia require people to become investors simply to feel safe?

Until more incisive questions are asked, the arguments will continue. There will be more debates about tax. More debates about housing. More debates about immigration. More debates about culture. But beneath them all lies the same contradiction. Australians are told that the answer to insecurity is ownership. Yet the more security becomes organised through ownership, the more insecurity spreads through society.

The Australian Dream once promised that prosperity would make life more secure. For much of the twentieth century, despite its exclusions and contradictions, Australians experienced rising living standards through a combination of wages, public institutions and collective provision. Security was never universal, but it became more widely shared.

Today, prosperity and security increasingly drift apart. National wealth grows. Asset values rise. The economy expands. Yet more Australians find themselves working harder to secure the same future their parents once expected as ordinary.

The Great Australian Creep is a slow creeping away of security in one of the richest societies on earth. The creeping replacement of life with investment. The creeping transformation of citizens into anxious investors and impoverished consumers. The creeping feeling that despite living in an age of unprecedented abundance, the future is becoming harder to secure. Because no side of politics in power has the vision to overcome it, it will only be addressed with widespread struggle and transformation rather than compromise—or, rather, if there is compromise, it will need to come from employers and the asset owning classes.

And that is the contradiction at the heart of the Australian Dream today.

I grew up before many of today’s conveniences existed.

As a kid, I remember the time we had to ourselves in our gardens, when children occupied the streets and adults occupied front porches. I remember saving for an entire year to buy a remote-control car, something that can now be purchased online for a few dollars and delivered to your door before the week is out.

I remember going to the Victorian Market for clothes, or walking half an hour to the milk bar to buy sweets that seemed far better than anything available today. I remember injuries that would now send a child to emergency departments but which were treated on a lounge with homemade lemonade, a wet cloth, and the confidence of adults who believed we would recover.

I remember having devices but not having games for them. I remember waiting days for the next episode of a television show, knowing that if I missed it there was a good chance I would never see it again.

More than anything, I remember knowing people.

I knew who lived on my street. I knew their stories. I knew how they were connected to one another. I interviewed my neighbour Ruth about surviving the Holocaust. I became best friends with the boy next door. I remember the games we invented, the odd jobs we did for neighbours, the hiding places, the shortcuts, and the endless escapes that seemed to occupy entire summers.

I remember the recession we had to have, and the wars we didn’t. I remember meeting Bob Hawke at the Melbourne Show and having absolutely no idea who he was. I remember when showbags were luxuries rather than weekly deliveries. I remember the panic about aerosol sprays and then the solution that emerged. I remember the millennium bug arriving with apocalyptic certainty and departing with almost no consequence at all. I remember work experience for an independent journalist firm that now no longer exists and attending court and writing an article which the head editor had time to read, and work experience for a government science agency which is now defunded.

I remember abundance arriving.

New foods. New technologies. New supermarket aisles. New gadgets. New forms of convenience. I remember my brother bringing home drinking glasses from the factory where he worked. These ones bounced when they hit the floor because they were made of hard plastic. We’d never seen anything like them.

What I don’t remember is noticing how hostile capitalism seemed to be to the lives of the adults around me.

Perhaps that is because I was a child. Or perhaps because many of the contradictions only become visible with age.

The older I get, the stranger modern life appears.

Not because we lack abundance. But because abundance seems to appear in all the wrong places.

I can replace my phone and switch providers in an afternoon. I can order a novelty gadget from the other side of the planet and have it arrive within days. I can choose between hundreds of breakfast cereals, dozens of streaming services, and more consumer products than any previous generation could have imagined.

I can summon almost anything to my doorstep.

Yet a friend waits months for treatment.

Another nearly misses out on housing for their children.

I cannot afford to buy a home despite earning more than the average Australian wage. Teachers burn out. Parents scramble for childcare. Nurses leave professions they once considered vocations. Communities become thinner, more fragile, more difficult to sustain. Everyone appears exhausted, as though life itself has become something squeezed between obligations rather than the thing those obligations are supposed to serve.

Children are transported from one organised activity to another while adults move from one deadline to the next. There is little time left for the aimless wandering, the goofing off, the unproductive sociality that defined so much of my childhood.

The goofs grow up. Many lose their mental health.

Services struggle. Every service is told it costs too much. Essential workers become essential only during global emergencies, before being returned to the category of expenses that governments and businesses are expected to minimise.

We are told these are separate problems. Healthcare is one thing. Housing another. Mental health another. Aged care another. Poverty another. Loneliness another. Ecological collapse another still.

And yet they seem to share a family resemblance. They all return us, eventually, to the same conversation.

What stays with me are not the statements but how ordinary it has become to tell people they must wait.

“I feel sorry for you teachers. There just isn’t enough money.”

”Shame there’s no money.”

”It’s the best we’ll get.”

Nobody says these words with malice.

Nobody says them while defending yachts, private jets, speculative finance, advertising budgets, military industrial expenditure, the waste on consultants, the expenditure on winning and mates, or the endless stream of products that somehow continue to appear without difficulty.

They say it sincerely. That is what makes it so powerful. And so strange. Because we are living in one of the wealthiest societies in human history. We can coordinate the labour of millions of people across continents. We can build data centres, logistics networks, artificial intelligence systems, and global communications infrastructure of staggering complexity.

Yet whenever the conversation turns to housing, healthcare, education, care, or the conditions of a decent life, we are suddenly returned to the language of limits. There isn’t enough money. There isn’t enough capacity. There isn’t enough room. There isn’t enough.

The treasury limits and the budget are somehow, in these situations, sovereign. The household budget traps as much as our Governments and a painful election cycle. There isn’t enough capacity or productivity, in a room full of more degrees and hardworking souls than ever before. There isn’t enough room for that.

The older I get, the more increasingly suspicious of these explanations. It’s disorientating how radical I become the more I age under conditions that are forcing livability to become a question.

The strangest thing about capitalism, I find, is not that it produces scarcity. We all know it produces marvels. The strange thing is where its scarcity and marvels appear. The things most necessary to a flourishing life remain perpetually rationed, while the things least necessary to it arrive in overwhelming abundance.

We are encouraged to see this as natural. As inevitable. As the ordinary consequence of economic reality. I no longer believe that either.

Every social order contains an answer to a simple question, whether it acknowledges it or not. What is society for? The answer is rarely found in constitutions, speeches, or mission statements. It is revealed instead through priorities. Through what receives urgency, investment, attention, and care. Through what gets built quickly and what remains unfinished. Through who waits and who does not.

Under capitalism, life itself is regularly told to wait. Wait for housing, treatment, disability support, aged care, climate action, public transport, better wages, an improving economy, for prices to go down, for conditions to be right, until the market delivers, and money can be found.

We wait for everything we need most of all. We have choices for everything, except for the most significant things, the things that matter for our future lives. And, somehow, we must be a realist for capital, not a realist for what we need now.

The explanation changes its vocabulary but rarely its substance. There are limits. There are constraints. There are realities we must accept. Yet these limits appear strangely selective, and the charm of waiting wears off, when we realise we don’t wait at all for things to stream, wear, buy, eat, but must wait for anything that gives us the energy for our futures.

That contradiction we must return to is that we live within one of the most productive social systems in human history. Vast global supply chains coordinate the labour of millions of people. Commodities travel across oceans with astonishing speed and reliability. Human beings have developed extraordinary capacities to produce, transport, communicate, and organise.

We can only turn to theorists like Marx in these times. He captured both the great wonders and marvels of our times, but also something of capitalism’s underlying imperative when he described its creed in a single line:

“Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!”

Accumulation is not merely something capitalism does. It is what capitalism is organised to do. It is its creed and sacred duty. It is the structure that shapes all our choices, all our lives. We must feed those who accumulate. We must spend, spend our savings. Even when we spend it on something to help us accumulate — it’s really to help capital accumulate.

But it’s not that capitalism is a blind machine here, simply unable to recognise life. The issue is not that capitalism ignores life. It cannot. Capital depends upon life in every conceivable way. Workers must arrive alive. Children must be raised. Knowledge must be transmitted. Communities must reproduce themselves across generations. Ecosystems must continue to provide the conditions under which production remains possible. Behind every commodity stands an enormous infrastructure of care, maintenance, cooperation, and ecological renewal without which accumulation would simply cease. And that generations of workers fought for as a concession.

Capital depends upon life. The contradiction is that it does not organise society around the reproduction of life. It organises society around the reproduction of capital. So that every year everything fought for by those who outgrew capital, by those who wanted to organise capital around non-capital imperatives, is borne back ceaselessly, until we beat forward seemingly getting nowhere but further and further into bullshit jobs and the creed of capital.

The distinction sounds abstract until one begins to notice its consequences. Life reproduces itself through activities that are often too ordinary to attract attention: raising children, caring for ageing parents, maintaining friendships, educating the young, healing the sick, sustaining communities, preserving ecosystems, and performing the countless acts of repair through which people make tomorrow possible.

Capital reproduces itself differently. Through accumulation. Through expansion. Through competition. Through the continual conversion of more and more of the world into opportunities for profit. And through the domination of capital over us, the dependencies, and the supremacies that justify it all.

The logics of capital and life overlap. But they are not identical. And increasingly they collide. We possess the knowledge to prevent millions of deaths that still occur every year from preventable causes. We know how to build housing. We know how to educate children. We know how to reduce working hours. We know how to care for ageing populations. We know how to feed entire populations.

The barriers are increasingly social rather than technical. It is not whether these things can be done, but rather why they remain so difficult to do. Life increasingly encounters itself through waiting lists, forms, queues, eligibility requirements, budget constraints, and administrative hurdles. Meanwhile, commodities move around the globe with extraordinary efficiency, responding almost instantly to the demands of accumulation.

Life waits. Capital does not unless there is a struggle. This shows you who - and what - has the power. And who and what does not.

Perhaps this helps explain why so many of the defining crises of our century seem concentrated not in production but in reproduction. It’s housing, care, mental health, loneliness, ecology, time. All of this is suffering over living, not our capacity to produce.

The points of greatest strain in our society now appear wherever life is reproduced. The problem is rarely that we do not know what to do. We know how to house people, care for children and ageing parents in our homes, prevent many diseases, and reduce suffering. What seems to be missing is not knowledge but priority and social imagination.

Social reproduction theories such as Nancy have argued that capitalism repeatedly destabilises the very conditions upon which it depends. Ecological thinkers, Aboriginal and Indigenous theorists, and many Marxists have made similar observations about nature. Different traditions arrive at remarkably similar conclusions. And the balance sheets do not lie: the activities that make life possible are treated as costs, even though society depends upon them, and profits would halt without them.

Care in capitalism appears as a cost. Ecology appears as a free lunch and a constraint. Communities appear as inefficiencies even as they are surveilled and enclosed. Enclosures maximize profits based on serving up what we once had or already have if we were to reorganize society. And time appears as something we can only optimize in endless self-help speeches. And yet these are precisely the conditions that make life possible.

When I was a child, I thought scarcity meant not having enough things. Not enough money, toys, and gadgets. Judged by that measure, I was poor compared to many children around me and unimaginably poor compared to many children today. Yet looking back, what strikes me is not the absence of conveniences. It is the presence of things that now seem increasingly scarce. And it is the confidence that tomorrow would arrive and that there would be a place for you in it.

Humanity has never possessed more productive power than it does today. We have never been more capable of feeding, housing, educating, healing, and caring for one another. And yet the most significant things in our lives remain the things we are told to wait for.

Perhaps that is the deepest contradiction and one of the most soul-destroying features of capitalism. Not that it produces too little, but that it continually asks life to stand patiently at the back of the queue while accumulation moves to the front.

We can no longer answer what all this production is for. If it cannot secure the conditions of a flourishing life—time, care, housing, health, community, a future worth planning for—then what exactly are we accumulating for?

We know that today we can produce enough. Yet we seem as far away as ever from imagining a future in which life can occupy the centre of society rather than falter alone in its margins.

The catastrophe of our social order is that, amidst so many marvels, conveniences, and productive achievements, life itself is still being told to wait.

In the days after writing the first essay in this series, “Capital is Not a Thing”, I find myself unable to stop thinking about ships.

My head is swimming with them. Merchant ships. Slave ships. Pirate ships. Colonial fleets. Container vessels. Super yachts. Oil tankers in the Strait of Hurmuz. Imperial fleets. Trade ships. Contested Seas.

I thought that the Ship of Theseus merely provided a way into the problem of transition. A useful philosophical puzzle through which to think about what Capital actually is: not a thing, but a social relation. Yet with the essay finished, the ship remains.

The more I think about it, the stranger it seems.

Why ships? Why does one of philosophy’s oldest puzzles concern a vessel at sea? Why do ships appear so frequently in political thought? And why does capitalism itself seem so thoroughly bound up with maritime imagery?

While I puzzled over these questions, I came across a passage by the Austrian socialist Otto Neurath that I will include below.

Writing at one of the great crises of Marxist history, Neurath was conscious of the context. The First World War had shattered Europe. The Soviet experiment was struggling into existence. Luxemburg had been murdered. The Second International, led by Karl Kautsky, had fostered an optimistic but also deterministic Marxism, and collapsed after it presided over a world at war. The Bavarian Soviet Republic, in which Neurath himself participated, had been crushed. Fascism was beginning its ascent.

At precisely the moment many socialists had expected history to move forward, it seemed to be moving backwards. For decades, much of the socialist movement had increasingly come to imagine socialism as the likely outcome of capitalist development. Capital accumulated. Industry expanded. The working class grew. Contradictions deepened. History appeared to possess a direction.

At the same moment, another developmental vision was becoming influential beyond socialism. In The Decline of the West (1918-1923), Oswald Spengler argued that civilisations were like living organisms. They were born, matured, declined, and died according to an inner destiny.

The two positions appear different. One predicts progress. The other predicts decline. Yet both share ths surprising assumption pointed to in the first essay: a history that already knows where it is going.

Neurath in his moment rejected both. History was neither destiny nor design. Cultures were not organisms. Nor were they machines awaiting engineers.

To explain what he meant in “Anti-Spengler” (1921), Neurath reached for a ship:

We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood, the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction. [1]

The passage floors me every time I read it. Not because it solves the problem of transition. But because it seems to reveal the limits of the Ship of Theseus itself. The Ship of Theseus asks what makes a ship a ship, because it is concerned with identity. But Neurath asks completely different questions, which are about process: What keeps a ship afloat? Which planks can be replaced before something becomes something else?

The difference might appear small. It is enormous.

Neurath is concerned not with the ships as things in the usual sense, but with reproduction. How does a vessel continue to carry life while every part of it is subject to repair, replacement, decay, and reconstruction? His sailors do not stand outside the ship examining it. They live within it. Eat, sleep and depend on it. They rebuild it while remaining afloat upon an ocean capable of swallowing them whole.

Suddenly the problem of transition appears in a different light. The question is no longer how much of society must change before it becomes something else. The question is how a society becomes something else while remaining capable of carrying life.

Capitalism, a Maritime Civilization

The more I think about the question that energized Neurath's writing in the 1920s, the more curious I become about the ships themselves. Neurath’s image seems to contain something more than a metaphor; something more like an entire theory of social life [2].

A ship is a strange thing. It is not merely an object. Nor is it merely a collection of people that can be reduced to people. It is a collective process, temporary world, a floating society, and a fragile arrangement of people and things in relation to each other. Nothing about its continued existence is automatic. And before a ship can travel anywhere, it must remain afloat through an effort if ongoing, living labour.

Thinking with Neurath's sailors, I wonder: Why do ships appear so frequently in philosophy? And why is capitalism so thoroughly haunted by maritime imagery?

At first glance the answer appears obvious. Ships move things. Yet capitalism has always been more than a system of production. It is a system of circulation. Goods circulate. Money circulates. Information circulates. Labour circulates. Capital itself circulates.

Without circulation, accumulation grinds to a halt. This is one reason ships occupy such a peculiar place in capitalist history. Capitalism spread across oceans before it conquered continents. It travelled in hulls. It measured risk through voyages. It transformed winds, currents, navigation and logistics into instruments of accumulation.

The age of enclosure was also the age of sail.

Former agricultural workers expelled from the commons found themselves bundled into colonies, plantations, and imperial projects. The slave ship, the merchant vessel, the colonial fleet, the insurance contract, and the joint-stock company emerged together as parts of a single historical process through which the world was reorganised around accumulation.

Marx understood this intimately before he confirmed it in decades of study in London, the heart of the seafaring civilisation:

“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe.”

In the Communist Manifesto (1848), he observed that the bourgeoisie must: “Nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.” The bourgeoisie appears as a fundamentally maritime class. Restless. Expansive. Driven outward by forces it does not control.

Neurath, for his part, echoed Marx in his simile and extended metaphor of the ship. He used and reconstructed the ship image throughout his life, and phrased it in its most influential way in 1932 in his Protokollsätze (Protocol Sentences):

“We are like sailors who have to rebuild their ship on the open sea, without ever being able to dismantle it in dry-dock and reconstruct it from its best components.” [3]

When I pause over this sentence, the similarities to Marx of having no choice (“without ever being able”) strikes my eye. But I also begin to think began to think more about how critical ships are to Capitalism. They are structures of circulation without which Capitalism could not function. But their fragility and ever need to be reproduced must be emphasises: there is no “dry-dock” or way to get back to Capitalism as it was: its agreements and supply lines must be reconstructed, as it were, continually, in a work that must be performed in the open seas.

The maritime character of capitalism has hardly disappeared. The world's wealthiest still circulate through offshore island tax havens. Each year hundreds of super-yachts gather around places such as Monaco and Saint Barthélemy, floating concentrations of wealth assembled at the very sites through which capital secures its mobility. The bourgeoisie remains, in a profound sense, a maritime class.

Because there is no “dry-dock” for Capitalism, it is relentlessly forward moving, at best making minor changes in the form of life that will guarantee the stability of its relentless drive to accumulate. As it does so, it will continue to transform people into commodities for its profit while parasiting their becoming.

There are living embodiments of this way of life who flock together in yachts. They are more and more invading levers of power, and making a spectacle of it.

But opposed to this way of embodying capital is life against capital. It is the Socialism and the Communist project as a whole, which seeks new forms of living that sit within Capitalism and what Rebecca Carson calls, its “immanent externalities” [4}.

These immanent externalities are not merely resources. They are social relations through which people learn to cooperate, care, organise, and live according to values that exceed accumulation. It is here that the problem of transition reappears.

The Reproduction Mystery

The more I think about it, the more ships appear not as incidental technologies but as the original social form of capitalism itself, the “form of life” par excellence of capital. Yet the more I think about ships, the less interested I become in circulation and movement alone.

The strangest fact about ships is that they are not supposed to survive. Constant exposure on the seas should ensure they are obsolete in a short space of years, or even months. Salt corrodes them. Barnacles slow them. Timber rots. Rigging frays. Sails tear. Hulls leak.

Every voyage is simultaneously a process of deterioration, and a ship survives only because somebody is constantly repairing it. Scraping. Caulking. Cleaning. Replacing. Maintaining.

A ship is never simply built. It is continually rebuilt in the process of existing. This is the reproduction mystery of the ship.

This reproduction fascinated Neurath, who called it “reconstruction”, a term loaded with different meanings in the German he was writing in: in fact, he used “umbauen” to capture less an effort to reconstruct Germany after WWI (“Weideraufbau”), and more an ongoing, routine labour performed by the sailors on the ship.

So if the Ship of Theseus asks what makes a ship a ship, Neurath is much more focused on the physical task of allowing a ship to remain afloat. To answer that question requires us to look beneath the visible structure of the vessel itself. Because a ship is not merely wood, canvas, rope and metal. It is an arrangement of labour. Knowledge. Discipline. Care. Maintenance. Navigation. Orientation. A floating social relation.

The vessel survives only because countless activities continuously reproduce the conditions of its existence. Someone repairs the hull. Someone cooks. Someone navigates. Someone teaches new sailors. Someone remembers where the charts are stored. Someone decides where the ship is heading. Before a ship can become something different, it must first remain afloat.

ISOTYPES and Ships

Every ship faces at least four problems: It must remain afloat. It must know where it is. It must know where it is going. It must continually reconstruct itself.

These four processes of ships are:

• Reproduction.

• Orientation.

• Navigation.

• Reconstruction.

Neurath's genius was recognising that the transition to socialism required all four. What fascinates me most is that Neurath’s philosophy and life does not stop at reconstruction. Throughout his life, he was preoccupied with orientation, the process of seeing from a ship. A ship can be perfectly maintained and still be lost. The hull can be sound. The sails repaired. The crew fed. The stores replenished. Yet without orientation the vessel drifts. Recognition, directed outward, rather than merely inward in the discipline of the ship, is a collective task to be reproduced.

Concern for these features of ship life runs throughout Neurath’s life. After the defeat of the Bavarian Soviet Republic, he carried many of these questions into the experiments of Red Vienna, which led to some of the most durable and effective socialist initiatives in housing, public health, adult education and municipal planning, workers’ institutions and Museums.

At first glance these projects appear unrelated, but Neurath connected them together in a theory of knowledge. Each attempted to answer the same practical question: How do people collectively understand the society they inhabit?

This concern eventually found expression in what became known as ISOTYPE, the International System Of Typographic Picture Education. No subject was off limits for Neurath, and with his wife Marie, he began the Isotype Institute.

The Institute would end up spreading an international language of visual design and establishing the benchmarks that communicated to the public essential features of the world:

Production.
Housing.
Trade.
Population.
Industry.
Shipping.
Economic life itself.

Otto Neurath wrote that by creating his picture language, he sought to prevent the divisions of words and to surface the shared grammar of the world. What is more, he sought to make the realities of social organisation visible which he hoped would lead to a “new community of living”. He wanted, as he put it, to bring ordinary people into a “living connection with the social transformation.”

In other writings, he pointed to the practical problem of how “to organize human life socially”, and explained how his “social museum” had a “twofold task: to show social processes, and to bring all the facts of life into some recognisable relation with social processes” (Empiricism and Sociology, 220). In this he sharply distinguished such praxis from “technical changes” for an “immediate future”, and asked architects and town planners to anticipate “changes in the form of life” (257).

Neurath understood something that many revolutionaries and reformers alike often overlook. People cannot collectively shape a society they cannot collectively comprehend. Economic knowledge cannot remain the private property of experts. This is why Neurath devoted so much of his life to visualising the social world. The point of ISOTYPE was not simply to communicate information. It was to cultivate orientation. To help people locate themselves within a larger social process.

The same thinker who imagined societies as ships rebuilt at sea devoted much of his life to making the movements of trade, transport, production, and social life visible to ordinary people. It is perhaps fitting that ships themselves frequently appeared in ISOTYPE charts. The ship was not merely a metaphor. It was one of the great technologies through which capitalism organised the world, and one of the means through which Neurath sought to make that world intelligible to itself.

Describing the Museum of Society and Economy in Vienna, Neurath wrote that the visitor should encounter “their problems, their past, their future — themselves.” The museum was not merely displaying information, but was helping people understand where they stood within a changing society. Their history, circumstances, and possible futures. The entire ship.

It was through this encounter with Neurath’s vision for social transformation, for transition in Socialism, that I began to understand a concept I have been developing since the start of Life Against Capital: the commons of becoming.

The commons is not simply a commons of resources. It is a commons of orientation. A commons of practical knowledge. A commons of memory. A commons of interpretation. A commons through which people become capable of understanding the social relations they inhabit and acting upon them together.

Commons, Practices, Capacities

Again and again, the most interesting figures in the Marxist tradition seem to return to the same question when encountering the problem of transition. Not simply who owns society. But who becomes capable of governing it. Not simply who controls production. But who develops the capacities required to reproduce life differently, to create a new social relation.

A brief line from Marx has become increasingly important to me, from Theses on Feuerbach:

”All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.”

The sentence appears almost in passing. Yet it may contain one of the deepest insights in the Marxist tradition. Marx is not solving the mystery of transition through teleology. Nor through engineering. Nor through inevitability.

He is solving it through practice.

The mystery of transition becomes a practical mystery. How do people become capable of another society? How do they learn to govern? To cooperate? To coordinate? To deliberate? To organise production? To organise care? To sustain institutions? To reproduce life according to another logic? Marx’s own work increasingly moved in this direction.

This is what increasingly strikes me as the significance of Neurath’s ship. The mystery of transition is not merely a mystery of institutions. It is a mystery of education in capacities.

The more I thought about transition, the less interested I became in resources and the more interested I became in how capacities are reconstructed in change.

When people hear the word commons they often imagine shared resources. A pasture. A forest. A fishery. A co-operative. These commons are important, yet every commons depends upon something deeper: people capable of maintaining it, communicating it, defending it, living it.

The real mystery is not the resource. It is the capacity and the relation, the new social relation that emerges and is shared with the resource.

A forest can be held in common. How do people learn to manage it?

A co-operative can be established. How do people learn to govern it?

A union can be formed. How do people learn solidarity?

A council can be created. How do people learn collective decision-making?

The commons of becoming names the social relations through which such capacities are developed, and social relations that are lived against what Marx called the “instrumentality of things”.

Not a commons of things.

A commons of capacities.

A commons of practical knowledge.

A commons of collective memory.

A commons of cooperation.

A commons of becoming.

This is why Marx’s vision of associated producers, which he articulated in Capital, Volume I and III, remains so important. Associated producers are not simply workers who own factories. They are people who have become capable of collectively regulating the conditions of their existence.

The famous Communist principle — from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs — is usually read as a distributive formula. It is also a developmental one. Abilities matter. Capacities matter. The capacities of each become resources for all, and the capacities of a collective, or even a general intellect, a concept of commons that Marx explored in his manuscript Grundrisse. The development of each becomes a condition for the development of all.

Seen from this perspective, many of the most important institutions of working-class history appear in a different light. A tenant union matters not merely because it confronts landlords. It matters because people learn how to govern collectively.

A strike committee matters not merely because it wins concessions. It matters because workers acquire practical experience in communication, coordination, logistics, solidarity, and collective decision-making.

A mutual aid network matters not merely because it distributes resources. It matters because people discover that the reproduction of life can be organised according to principles other than competition and accumulation.

Yet understanding alone does not reconstruct ships.

Charts matter.

Orientation matters.

But a crew must still learn how to navigate.

The question therefore becomes not simply how people understand society, but how they acquire the capacities required to transform it.

Schools of Navigation

What we can learn from Neurath is that the institution itself is not the decisive thing, the capacity is, and in particular the social relation that can free us from “the instrumentality of things”.

This practical knowledge is something that Marxists return to as they seek to theorise and act on ways of navigating transition.

Luxemburg described the mass strike as more than a tactic: a school of collective action through which workers developed new capacities for organisation, solidarity, and political judgment.

Lenin, often remembered primarily as a theorist of state power, repeatedly returned to the problem of capacity. The seizure of power solved one problem. It immediately revealed another. How were workers, peasants, and ordinary people to acquire the practical knowledge required to administer a society? Accounting. Coordination. Planning. Education. Distribution. The problem was not merely political. It was pedagogical.

Gramsci’s theory of hegemony was more than a theory of ideas. It was a theory of how a class becomes capable of exercising intellectual and moral leadership before it governs society politically.

Cabral’s struggle against Portuguese colonialism was not simply a military campaign. It was also a vast project of political education through which ordinary people learned to administer schools, organise agriculture, resolve disputes, and govern liberated territories before independence had been achieved. Cabral understood that liberation could not be reduced to the transfer of power from one set of hands to another. The decisive question was whether people had developed the capacities required to sustain a liberated society. Throughout the liberated zones of Guinea-Bissau, schools, clinics, agricultural projects, local councils, and systems of political education emerged alongside armed struggle. Liberation was not merely the destination. It was a practical process of becoming.

Mao's Mass Line can be similarly read as a theory of collective navigation. A ship's crew does not discover its course by consulting a captain alone, nor by mechanically aggregating individual opinions. Orientation emerges through a continual process of observation, discussion, synthesis, testing, and revision. The Mass Line sought to institutionalise this process. It was not simply a method of leadership. It was a method through which a people became capable of understanding and steering their own historical development.

Seen from this perspective, these thinkers are not simply offering strategies. They are describing different schools of navigation.

Different answers to the same question: How do people learn to sail another ship?

Navigation requires charts, and orientation to assist. To create socialism, which requires a social transformation, humans must develop capacities in struggle against the instrumentality of things, at the coalface of things.

The commons of becoming names the social relations through which these capacities are developed. Not merely a commons of resources, but a commons of orientation, practical knowledge, memory, cooperation, and collective intelligence. The question is not simply who owns the ship. It is how its crew learns to navigate it, and challenge the reproduction of capital.

The same concern runs through Neurath’s work. A ship can only be reconstructed if its crew can understand the vessel they inhabit. This is what makes his fascination with charts, museums, visual statistics, and ISOTYPE so important. Before people can govern a society differently, they must first become capable of seeing it.

Power and Change

At this point an objection immediately presents itself, one that is familiar in Marxist-Leninism, which offers us the most developed theory of transition. A Marxist-Leninist might reasonably argue that capacities alone explain very little.

Capitalism itself develops extraordinary capacities. Fascist movements have repeatedly demonstrated formidable capacities for mobilisation.

Capacities are never neutral. They are organised around particular forms of power, property, and social reproduction.

The question is therefore not simply whether capacities emerge. The question is what social relations they reproduce.

There is no way of escaping class struggle. History is littered with co-operatives absorbed into markets, mutual aid networks exhausted by scarcity, and experiments in common life overwhelmed by larger structures of accumulation.

The Marxist-Leninist critique therefore identifies something important. Another society will not emerge simply because people desire one.

Power matters.

Organisation matters.

Class struggle matters.

The seizure and exercise of political power matters.

Yet this raises a further question.

How do people become capable of exercising that power?

The Soviets, on the peripheries of the world economy, emerged during the Russian Revolution, but they did not merely contest the authority of the old state. They became practical schools of administration, coordination, and collective decision-making. Workers who had previously been excluded from governance suddenly found themselves organising food distribution, transport, production, and public life.

Dual power was not only a struggle over sovereignty. It was also a process of becoming.

The same can be said of Luxemburg’s mass strike, Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, Mao’s mass line, Cabral’s political education, and countless experiments in revolutionary organisation throughout the twentieth century.

How do people acquire the capacities required to govern society differently? How do they become capable of reproducing life according to another logic?

The Commons of Becoming

When I write about the commons of becoming at Life Against Capital, it should not be understood as an alternative to revolutionary transition. It is better understood as one of its conditions, as an opening to its conditions.

The commons of becoming is not simply another ship waiting beyond the horizon. It is not a collection of shared resources.

It is the practical development of people capable of navigating toward another, non-capitalist world. It is a process through which people become capable of inhabiting different forms of life.

The commons of becoming is not the future latent within the present. It is the social process through which people acquire the capacities to orient themselves, reconstruct their world, and keep another form of life afloat, even if partially, as they face historic defeat and domination.

In the face of this, we must reject the old alternatives. Teleology imagines history already knows where it is going. Engineering imagines we do. One waits for the future to arrive. The other attempts to construct it from a blueprint. Yet neither adequately explains how people become capable of creating another world. The problem is treated as implementation. The destination is known. The remaining challenge is simply getting there. History rarely behaves so generously.

The twentieth century is littered with futures that never arrived. Revolutions were defeated. Movements fractured. Commons were enclosed. Liberation became bureaucracy and reaction. Knowledge was lost. Institutions decayed. Solidarities dissolved.

Nothing guarantees the future. Nothing guarantees socialism. Nothing guarantees emancipation. Nothing guarantees the commons.

The commons of becoming does not grow like a tree. I was wrong to picture it as a tree, the first time I imagined it at Life Against Capital. But perhaps I could picture it surviving like a ship at sea.

Conclusion: Marxism and the Problem of Transition II

The transition problem is not primarily a problem of institutions. It is a problem of reproduction, orientation, navigation and reconstruction.

How does the ship remain afloat? Neurath’s own life increasingly followed this logic.

And so has this essay. The answer lies neither in the planks nor in the structure alone. It lies in the practices through which people learn how to rebuild the vessel while remaining aboard it.

Every capacity developed for collective self-government confronts institutions organised around accumulation. The commons of becoming is always contested.

Every commons encounters enclosure.

Every experiment in democratic coordination confronts forms of hierarchy, extraction, and domination that seek to redirect its energies elsewhere.

The commons therefore does not unfold.

It must be defended.

Expanded.

Reproduced.

Fought for.

It is the process through which people develop the capacities required to build change.

Tenant unions.

Strike committees.

Mutual aid networks.

Worker co-operatives.

Community food programmes.

Liberation movements.

These examples matter less for what they are than for what they teach. People learn to deliberate. To coordinate. To govern. To care. To remember. To reproduce life together. The capacities cultivated in one struggle become the conditions for another.

The development of each becomes a condition for the development of all.

Perhaps this is what Marx was reaching toward when he wrote that all social life is essentially practical.

The mystery of transition is not solved by a blueprint.

Nor by waiting for history to unfold.

It is solved in practice.

The commons of becoming names that practice.

Yet another mystery remains.

The commons of becoming helps explain how another world emerges.

It does not yet explain how it survives.

Capacities must themselves be reproduced.

Knowledge must be transmitted.

Children must be educated.

Care must be organised.

Memory must endure.

Defeats must be survived.

The ship must remain afloat.

How does the future learn how to reproduce itself?

That is the next voyage we will take.

References

[1] Otto Neurath, Empiricism and Sociology, Edited by Marie Neurath and Robert S. Cohen, D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland, Boston, USA, 1973, p. 199. https://cominsitu.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/vienna-circle-collection-1-otto-neurath-auth.-marie-neurath-robert-s.-cohen-eds.-empiricism-and-sociology-springer-netherlands-1973.pdf
[2] As Neurath wrote in the sentence prior to the same sentence in Empiricism and Sociology, “every statement about any happening is saturated with hypotheses of all sorts and that these in the end are derived from our whole world-view”, p. 199.
[3] Otto Neurath, Philosophy between Science and Politics, Cambridge University Press, 1999, https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/otto-neurath/on-neuraths-boat/CF54E807924BAC36252FDC8D2EF57FBA
[4] Rebecca Carson, Immanent Externalities: The Reproduction of Life in Capital, Brill, 2023.

I've spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to find it again, trawling through histories and searches.

Perhaps you know it and can tell me.

The short video was intended as a critique of reformism. A young woman was performing one of those pov split-screen arguments that populate political TikTok, switching between a reformist and an anti-capitalist. What intrigued me was how capitalism and politics were understood through a famous thought experiment, the Ship of Theseus.

The reformer argued that societies change the same way ships do. Replace enough planks, enough institutions, enough laws, enough distributions of power, and eventually the old ship becomes a new one.

The anti-capitalist disagreed.

"So you replace that plank?"

"Yes."

"And then that one?"

"Yes."

"And another?"

"Yes."

Eventually, the anti-capitalist asked:

"What does that make the ship?"

“A better ship?"

"A better ship... of capitalism?"

The argument was clever because it seemed to identify the problem the reformist faces.

Capitalism has survived reforms before. It has survived regulations, welfare states, labour movements, nationalisations, and crises.

Changing parts of a system does not necessarily change the logic that organises the whole.

Yet the video stayed with me because it made me think about the unanswered problems.

If replacing planks is not enough, how does the ship become something else? How does abolition work in a social in system? Is abandoning the ship really the answer? What is the transition we should pursue?

The problem of transition is one I have found myself returning to almost compulsively at Life Against Capital. It is one of the oldest and most difficult problems in the Marxist tradition. But it is also much older than Marxism.

How does one thing become another thing while remaining itself?

How does one social order become another?

How did feudalism become capitalism?

And if capitalism emerged from another world, how might another world emerge from capitalism?

One of the strangest facts about capitalism is that nobody can tell us precisely when or exactly where it began, and this is important to how we locate the problem of transition.

Historians have argued about the question of when capitalism began for generations. Some locate its origins in Renaissance Italy. Others point to the Dutch Republic. Others emphasise enclosure, colonial conquest, Atlantic slavery, the emergence of wage labour, or industrialisation.

The debate remains unresolved.

This is peculiar, because if capitalism is the dominant social system on earth, why can nobody identify its birthday?

The difficulty is hardly unique to capitalism, however, because every field that attempts to understand change eventually encounters the same problem. Geologists cannot identify the precise moment one epoch becomes another. Biologists debate when one species becomes another. Linguists struggle to determine when Latin became French. Literary scholars still argue about when modernism began.

Virginia Woolf famously declared in 1924 that "on or about December 1910 human character changed." The remark is memorable because it is both absurd and profound. No one believes human character changed on a particular Tuesday in December with the emergence of modernism, yet everyone understands what Woolf meant.

A transition had occurred. What remained uncertain was when.

Philosophers know this difficulty through thought experiments like the Sorites paradox and the Ship of Theseus. If removing a single grain does not stop a heap from being a heap, and adding a single grain does not create one, then when exactly does a heap emerge? If replacing one plank does not create a new ship, and replacing another does not create a new ship, when does the transformation occur?

This puzzle about transition appears wherever continuity and change coexist.

The Greek philosophers posed the problem early. Heraclitus looked at a river and saw a world in motion. The waters changed continuously, yet the river somehow remained. Reality appeared less like a collection of fixed things than a process of becoming.

Aristotle approached the mystery differently. Looking at an acorn, he saw development. The acorn became an oak because the oak already existed within it as a possibility. Change was directional. The future was latent within the present.

Over the centuries, thinkers would repeatedly return to mysteries of transition.

Two key answers to the problem of transition proved especially influential. The first followed Aristotle and imagined the future already present within the present. Development became the unfolding of a latent end. The second followed the early industrialization and the Enlightenment and imagined the future as something to be consciously designed. Society became a machine, a structure, a vessel whose components could be rearranged according to a plan.

At first glance these approaches appear opposed. One organic. The other mechanical. One trusts development. The other design. One suggests determinism. The other human agency.

Yet both share a surprising assumption: the destination is known before the journey begins. Whether the future unfolds from a latent end or is imposed through a blueprint, the mystery of transition is reduced to implementation.

History, however, rarely behaves in either fashion. The future emerges through processes whose outcomes remain uncertain.

New forms develop within old ones, but they do not arrive fully formed.

The ship is rebuilt while remaining afloat at sea.

In the wake of the Enlightenment's mechanical vision of the world, this insight found its most influential philosophical expression in Hegel. Hegel rejected the idea that development could be understood as the simple unfolding of an inner essence. Instead, identity emerged through contradiction. Things became what they were through conflict, negation, and transformation.

Marx inherited this insight and relocated it from philosophy to history. The question was no longer how an acorn becomes an oak, or a blueprint. Marx was fascinated with the social questions of politics:

How does one social order become another?

How did feudalism become capitalism?

And if capitalism emerged from another world, how might another world emerge from capitalism?

This is one reason why Marx found Darwin so compelling. Darwin offered a theory of emergence without design. Species did not require an architect. Complex forms emerged historically through cumulative processes operating over time.

Marx sought something similar for society. Capitalism did not emerge because someone designed capitalism. No architect unveiled it. No committee implemented it. It emerged because millions of people gradually came to reproduce their lives through new forms of labour, property, dependence, exchange, and power. Only later would historians gather these transformations together and call them capitalism.

This returns us to the mystery that began this piece.

The anti-capitalist in the lost reel I began with seemed to identify something real. Capitalism has survived reforms before. It has survived regulations, welfare states, labour movements, nationalisations, and crises. Replacing planks does not necessarily change the ship.

Yet the longer I sat with the argument, the more another possibility emerged.

Perhaps the reason historians struggle to identify the precise birth of capitalism is that capitalism was never fundamentally a thing at all.

Is this why capitalism has no birthday?

The factories changed.

The technologies changed.

The ships changed.

The laws changed.

The ways people lived changed.

But what was decisive was the gradual emergence of a new way of organising social life. When this change was lived, no necessarily knew that it was a transition to Capitalism. They lived it under pressure.

One of Marx's most remarkable formulations appears in Capital:

“Capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons established by the instrumentality of things.”

The idea is peculiar. It is perhaps one of the more stranger sentences in nineteenth-century political thought.

Marx is often presented as a thinker of material things: factories, machines, commodities, production. He spent decades explaining his version of materialism.

Yet one of his most important claims is that capital itself is not fundamentally an object.

It is a social relation.

A way people organise their lives.

A way labour, property, production, and power become connected.

A way society reproduces itself.

Suddenly the historical puzzle begins to look different. Historians struggle to identify capitalism's birthday because social relations do not emerge in the same way that buildings, constitutions, or inventions do. They emerge through countless acts of reproduction, coordination, conflict, adaptation, and struggle that only later become visible as a new social order.

Everything changes once this point is taken seriously.

If capital is a thing, politics appears relatively straightforward. We seize it. Destroy it. Replace it. Or, being realistic, as they say, incrementally replace it.

If capital is a social relation, the problem becomes much more difficult.

Social relations cannot simply be abolished. They must cease to be reproduced.

This is where the Ship of Theseus begins to look different.

The reformer focused on the planks.

The anti-capitalist focused on the identity of the ship.

But both were still thinking primarily in terms of things.

Marx's questions are stranger:

What makes the ship capitalist in the first place?

What are the social relations that make it capitalist?

The problem of transition is therefore neither simply reform nor transcendence. Neither replacing planks nor abandoning the vessel.

The real problem is how the social relations that reproduce capitalism emerge, persist, and eventually become something else.

And that is a different mystery altogether.

Not the mystery of how capitalism emerged. But the mystery of how life under capital becomes life against capital.

The name I want to give to that mystery is the commons of becoming.

Capitalism did not arrive fully formed.

Neither will what comes after it.

To explain why is another voyage.

Next Voyage at Life Against Capital:

The Commons of Becoming: Marxism and the Problem of Transition II

The first essay explored a mystery.

Why does capitalism have no birthday?

Why can we not identify the moment one world becomes another?

Why did Marx insist that capital is not a thing but a social relation?

The next essay begins where these questions end.

If capitalism is reproduced through social relations, then another society can only emerge through different social relations.

Once we know what makes the ship capitalist, we must begin to understand how life aboard it becomes capable of another voyage.

How does life under capital become life against capital?

An answer to this question emerges with the commons of becoming.

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

No. 1: Reproduction and the Capital-Life Conflict

The Feminist Subversion of the Economy: Contributions for Life Against Capital (Common Notions, 2022)

By Amaia Pérez Orozco

Translated by Liz Mason-Deese

Today, across most of the world, the work of sustaining life is becoming harder. Housing is becoming less secure. Care becomes more expensive. Teachers, nurses, carers, and parents are exhausted. Young people delay having children because they cannot afford them. Public services deteriorate while asset prices soar. The economy keeps growing, and yet life becomes harder.

Why does an economy that has never been more productive seem increasingly incapable of sustaining life?

Amaia Pérez Orozco’s The Feminist Subversion of the Economy: Contributions for a Life Against Capital begins from this contradiction.

Originally published in Spanish in 2014 in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and translated into English by Liz Mason-Deese for Common Notions in 2022, the book emerged from feminist debates around austerity, social reproduction, debt, and care. More than a decade later, its central question has only become more urgent.

Orozco’s intervention was both simple and radical. What if these were not merely economic crises? What if they were simultaneously crises of social reproduction? What if the central question was not whether economies could continue growing, but whether lives could continue being sustained?

A feminist economist associated with the traditions of feminist political economy and social reproduction theory, Orozco belongs to a lineage that includes thinkers such as Silvia Federici, Nancy Fraser, Maria Mies, Selma James, Antonella Picchio, and others who have challenged the assumption that the economy can be understood through markets, wages, and production alone. Like these thinkers, she directs our attention toward the hidden infrastructures that make economic life possible in the first place.

Her central claim is both deceptively simple and enormously consequential. The economy is not primarily about markets, and it is not primarily about growth or productivity. The economy is about the organisation of life. More specifically, it is about the processes through which life is sustained, reproduced, and made livable.

This shift in perspective changes how we orient ourselves in the economy. Workers do not simply arrive at workplaces. They arrive fed, clothed, educated, cared for, socialised, emotionally supported, and physically maintained. Entire worlds of labour precede the labour contract. Cooking, cleaning, child-rearing, emotional labour, household maintenance, community support, care for the sick, the elderly, and the vulnerable—all of these activities make production possible. Yet conventional economics routinely treats reproductive activities as peripheral or invisible.

Orozco instead places them at the centre of economics. The result is one of the most powerful reorientations of political economy produced in recent decades. What capitalism calls production, she argues, depends upon vast processes of reproduction that it neither fully recognises nor adequately supports. Indeed, capital continuously:

“expropriates the reproductive resources of common and public life and turns them into private means of capital production.”

This insight forms the foundation of what has become the book’s most influential concept: the capital-life conflict.

As Orozco writes:

“We are talking about a structural and irresolvable conflict between capital and life.”

The phrase captures a contradiction that runs throughout contemporary capitalism. Capital accumulation requires life. Without living people there is no labour, no consumption, no production, and no accumulation. Yet the very processes through which capital accumulates frequently undermine the conditions necessary for sustaining life.

Housing becomes an asset rather than a home. Care becomes commodified, while public services become targets of austerity. Time becomes colonised by work, while debt penetrates everyday existence. Our relationships are reorganised through market imperatives.

The institutions responsible for sustaining life are increasingly strained even as accumulation continues. This is one of the book’s greatest achievements. Orozco gives us a framework capable of linking phenomena that are often analysed separately. Housing crises, care crises, ecological crises, crises of mental health, precarious employment, debt, social fragmentation, and declining public services begin to appear not as isolated failures but as different expressions of the same contradiction.

The conflict does not occur solely within workplaces. It unfolds across households, neighbourhoods, migration systems, welfare institutions, communities, schools, hospitals, and intimate relationships. Political economy expands beyond production and workplaces and encompasses reproduction.

When people say that under capitalism democracy stops at the door of the workplace, they point to only one site of domination. The question is how democracy reaches the places where life itself is made and sustained. The historical novelty is not that democracy has disappeared from the sphere of reproduction. It is that the reproduction of life itself is being reorganised around the requirements of accumulation.

What makes Orozco’s intervention distinctly feminist is that it refuses to treat care, dependency, vulnerability, and everyday survival as secondary concerns. For Orozco, feminism is not primarily a demand for equal participation within existing institutions. It is not simply a matter of ensuring that women gain access to positions of power or achieve parity within labour markets. Rather, feminism becomes a challenge to the assumptions upon which those institutions are built.

The ideal subject of capitalist modernity appears as autonomous, self-sufficient, productive, competitive, independent, and detached from relations of care and dependency. Orozco rejects this figure. Such a subject is less a description of human beings than an ideological fiction upon which capitalist modernity depends. Human beings are vulnerable, dependent, embodied, and, what is more, interdependent.

We enter the world requiring care and leave it requiring care. The fantasy of autonomy is sustained by labour performed elsewhere, and the reality of reproduction and relation allows feminism to become something larger than a politics of representation. It becomes a critique of the social organisation of life itself.

One of the most illuminating aspects of the book is the way it transforms apparently private questions into political-economic ones. Childcare, eldercare, domestic labour, emotional support, friendship networks, housing, illness, dependency, and vulnerability cease to be private matters and emerge as central questions of political economy.

Orozco is circling questions that became particularly salient during Covid-19, but apply in any emergency, in everyday life, and in any transition or revolution. Who absorbs crisis? Who carries the burden when public services are cut? Who sustains life when wages are insufficient? Who is exploited for austerity?

Again and again, the answer is households and care networks. Economic crisis becomes family crisis, and welfare retrenchment becomes unpaid labour. Public disinvestment becomes private sacrifice, and the household functions as a shock absorber for accumulation.

This emphasis on households, care, and reproduction represents one of the book’s most important contributions. Much Marxist analysis has focused on production. Orozco insists that reproduction must be treated with equal seriousness. Housing is not simply property. It is infrastructure for sustaining life. Relationships are not merely private choices. They are conditions of social reproduction. Care is not simply affection. It is labour.

The implications extend beyond gender. Throughout the book, Orozco repeatedly returns to those whose lives become devalued under contemporary capitalism: migrants, unpaid carers, precarious workers, the unemployed, and those whose labour sustains society without appearing economically valuable.

Here the book intersects with themes explored by Zygmunt Bauman under the heading of “wasted lives.” The logic of accumulation increasingly produces populations that are simultaneously necessary and disposable. Earlier forms of capitalism displaced contradiction geographically through colonies, frontiers, extraction zones, and peripheral labour markets.

Today, however:

“There are no more empty places to throw out this human waste.”

This is one of the most striking lines in the book and it captures something essential about contemporary capitalism. Entire populations become economically superfluous while remaining politically governed. Surplus populations accumulate within the system itself: refugees, prisoners, debtors, precarious workers, the chronically unemployed, and those rendered permanently insecure by the dynamics of accumulation. Capital increasingly depends upon life while simultaneously rendering growing numbers of lives structurally unnecessary to profitability.

The book’s analysis becomes particularly sharp when discussing financialization. Earlier forms of capitalism, however exploitative, maintained a relatively visible connection between accumulation and the reproduction of labour power. Under financialized capitalism, this connection becomes increasingly attenuated.

As Orozco writes:

“The thread that ties these necessities to valorization is getting thinner every day.”

Debt markets, speculative accumulation, and shareholder value impose temporal horizons radically different from those required for sustaining life. Care, education, ecological regeneration, aging, infrastructure, and social reproduction operate according to long durations. Finance demands immediate returns and austerity and cycles of crisis discipline entire populations who are organized and reorganized around its demands.

The result is not merely economic instability but a growing contradiction between the temporalities of accumulation and the temporalities of life itself.

Likewise, Orozco’s discussion of the feminisation of labour is among the strongest sections of the book. Importantly, this concept does not simply refer to women entering paid employment. Rather, it describes the generalisation of labour conditions historically associated with feminised work: precarity, flexibility, emotional labour, communicative labour, self-management, multitasking, and permanent availability.

As she observes:

“Control is less imposed on us externally ... they attempt to make us identify with the company’s objectives.”

What emerges is not simply exploitation but the colonisation of subjectivity itself. The worker increasingly becomes responsible for managing their own insecurity.

The book also deserves credit for attempting to imagine alternative ways of organising economic life. Orozco is not content merely to diagnose the crisis. Throughout the text she gestures toward different configurations of social relations grounded in reciprocity, interdependence, collective responsibility, commons, care rights, public services, and shared infrastructures.

Concepts such as buen vivir and buen convivir appear repeatedly as attempts to name forms of social organisation and politics oriented toward sustaining life rather than accumulating value. The diagrams included throughout the book are especially revealing. They point toward neighbourhood networks, care communities, collective infrastructures, households, commons, chosen families, and public institutions as sites where alternative social relations already exist in partial and contradictory forms.

Running throughout these discussions is a question that is ultimately ethical as much as economic: what constitutes a dignified life? This concern helps explain why the book repeatedly moves from political economy toward questions of care, vulnerability, reciprocity, and collective flourishing. Orozco's concern is not simply survival, nor the reproduction of labour power, but the conditions under which lives become genuinely livable. The problem is not merely how to survive capitalism, but how to organise collectively for lives worth living.

This emphasis becomes even clearer in the English edition, translated and updated by Liz Mason-Deese and published by Common Notions in 2022. The timing matters. Appearing in the wake of the global financial crisis, the resurgence of feminist strike movements, and the Covid-19 pandemic's dramatic exposure of the labour required to sustain everyday life, the translation arrived at a moment when questions of care, dependency, and social reproduction had moved from the margins toward the centre of political debate.

Mason-Deese is more than a translator. Her work has been important to the circulation of contemporary feminist and social reproduction theory in the English-speaking world, and her collaboration with Orozco helps situate the book within a broader international conversation about care, crisis, and collective survival. Likewise, Common Notions has become one of the most important radical publishers of contemporary work on abolition, social reproduction, mutual aid, Black radicalism, feminist theory, and anti-capitalist politics. The publication of Orozco's work through Common Notions places it firmly within these ongoing debates.

The publisher's description captures the book's ambition well. It argues for the need to "radically and democratically discuss what we mean by a dignified life and how we can organize to sustain life collectively." This formulation captures both the strength and the challenge of Orozco's project. She is not simply offering a critique of political economy. She is attempting to reorient political imagination around the collective sustenance of life itself.

There is also something striking about the subtitle. Published years before this Life Against Capital project, Orozco's phrase "contributions for a life against capital" names a problem that increasingly preoccupies contemporary anti-capitalist thought: not simply how capitalism exploits life, but how life becomes capable of organising itself otherwise.

Orozco includes several practically suggestive sections in the book. They point toward forms of social organisation that might sustain life differently. Yet they also reveal the book's most important unresolved question.

The title promises a subversion of the economy. But where exactly is subversion located?

One of Orozco’s clearest insights is her insistence that:

“There is no longer an outside to capital.”

This claim is enormously important. It prevents the romantic fantasy that there exists some pure sphere of life untouched by capitalist relations. Life itself is already entangled within capital. The conflict is internal to capitalism rather than external to it.

Yet this insight generates a problem that the book never fully resolves. If there is no outside to capital, then there is no outside source of subversion either.

Subversion cannot emerge from a pure conception of life standing beyond capitalism. It must emerge from contradictions within actually existing social relations.

At its strongest moments, the book analyses households, care networks, welfare institutions, migration systems, communities, and reproductive labour. Life appears as a set of social practices through which people sustain one another under difficult conditions.

At other moments, however, the analysis begins to drift toward a different register. Increasingly, the argument appeals to vulnerability, interdependence, ecodependence, care, and the notion of a life worth living. These are powerful ethical and ontological concepts. They tell us something important about what human beings are and what conditions flourishing requires.

But they do not yet explain political transformation. The result is a subtle shift from analysing social relations to appealing to an ontology of life. The danger is not simply conceptual confusion. Once life becomes an ontological principle rather than a field of social relations, politics risks being displaced by ethics. The question shifts from how social relations are transformed to how life is valued. Yet domination, hierarchy, patriarchy, nationalism, and exclusion can all reproduce life. Life itself does not tell us which politics to pursue.

To Orozco’s credit, she partially recognises this danger herself. One of the most sophisticated moments in the book arrives when she acknowledges that:

“The logic of sustaining life is corrupted into a reactionary ethics of care.”

This observation is crucial. Not every practice of sustaining life is emancipatory. Families and communities can reproduce domination. Care can become patriarchal, nationalist, exclusionary, or reactionary. The sustaining of life does not automatically generate liberation.

This insight deepens rather than weakens the problem of subversion. There are many questions to address: How do households become political formations? How do care networks become institutions? How do relations of dependency become forms of collective power? How do reproductive practices become transformative practices? How does sustaining life become a force capable of reorganising society?

The book provides many of the materials required to answer these questions. Indeed, one could argue that its greatest achievement lies precisely in identifying the sites where such transformations might emerge. It shows us where life is sustained. It shows us where capital attacks it. It reveals the institutions, relations, and practices through which human beings continue to reproduce themselves despite the pressures of accumulation.

What it leaves largely unexplained is how those practices become organised capacities capable of acting against capital. This is not a reason to dismiss the book. It is one of the reasons the book is important.

The significance of Orozco’s work lies precisely in how it situates the problem of how life can be reorganised against capital. The book compels us to ask how living under capital becomes living against it.

It directs our attention toward households, housing, care, welfare, communities, and social reproduction. It demonstrates that these are not peripheral concerns but central terrains of political struggle. It reminds us that the economy cannot be understood apart from the conditions that sustain life.

As Orozco writes:

“The process of accumulation needs life.”

Without life there are no workers, consumers, or accumulation. Yet the reproduction of life increasingly appears not as a collective responsibility but as a cost to be offloaded, privatised, or transformed into a new frontier for accumulation.

Orozco’s achievement is to force political economy back toward this forgotten fact. Yet the unresolved question concerns subversion itself. If there is no outside to capital, then there is no outside source of transformation either. While Orozco convincingly demonstrates that reproduction is a central terrain of struggle, the question of political mediation remains underdeveloped.

One of the strengths of the book is that it identifies many of the institutions through which life might be organised differently: commons, care networks, public infrastructures, collective forms of provision, and relations grounded in reciprocity rather than accumulation. The diagrams scattered throughout the book are not merely illustrations. They are attempts to map alternative forms of economic organisation and to imagine how the work of sustaining life might be reorganised.

The book compels us to ask how living under capital becomes living against it. It directs our attention toward households, housing, care, welfare, communities, and social reproduction. It demonstrates that these are not peripheral concerns but central terrains of political struggle. It reminds us that the economy cannot be understood apart from the conditions that sustain life.

Yet the question remains: how do the capacities required to establish, defend, and expand these institutions emerge within a society organised by capital?

Traditional Marxist politics emerged from conflicts over the control of production: wages, labour processes, ownership, and the organisation of work. Orozco expands our understanding of the sites where domination operates, but she spends less time explaining how struggles over housing, care, households, welfare, and social reproduction become organised political capacities capable of transforming society as a whole.

Put differently: how do care networks become durable institutions? How do commons defend themselves against enclosure? How do communities acquire the power to reorganise the conditions of life? Through what forms of organisation, leverage, and collective action do alternative social relations become capable of confronting capital?

These questions remain largely outside the scope of the book. They are also where the inquiry pursued by Life Against Capital begins.

If the unresolved question concerns subversion, it is because the book leaves us with a deeper problem: not simply how life is sustained under capital, but how the practices through which life is sustained become organised capacities capable of transforming the society that constrains them.

Few books succeed in changing the landscape in which political questions are asked. The Feminist Subversion of the Economy is one of them. Its achievement is not that it answers the question of life against capital, but that it helps us ask it more clearly.

If communism is judged through executions, famine, repression, labour camps, preventable death, and political violence, then capitalism should be judged through the same categories too.

The reaction was interesting. Not withstanding the outrage of anticommunists, and the minor criticism of people who missed the overall point, it was the moment in the week to come when the thread reached colonial famine, and the platform intervened, that captured my attention.

I posted evidence from Bengal in 1943: starving bodies, emaciated children, victims of famine inside an empire that continued exporting food while millions died. Grain moved. Markets functioned. Empire remained orderly. The starving simply became excess to the priorities of capital.

In the days to come the images were removed for violating community standards on “nudity and sexual activity.”

The starvation itself was acceptable. The visibility of starvation was not. Capitalism can tolerate endless abstractions about economics, growth, development, efficiency, and markets. But the moment capitalism appears as an actual body — skeletal, starving, dying — something activates to push the image back down beneath the surface.

The dead disappear twice under Capitalism. First through famine. Then through invisibility.

And this is where we must confront the true nature of anticommunism: what it actually is. Not simply hostility to Marxism, nor merely criticism of socialist states. Anticommunism is a structure of perception that trains people to experience capitalist violence as normal life.

It's a structural violence that's largely invisible, the preventable death toll of capitalism. And it's a Trojan horse of the twentieth century, the way that authoritarianism and fascism have hid its forces in the acceptable violence of regime change and anticommunist purges.

“The dirty truth is that many anti-communists are not opposed to autocracy and repression; they are only opposed to autocracy and repression when practiced by communists.”— Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds (1997)

Anticommunism has never opposed authoritarianism consistently. It opposes authoritarianism when it threatens capital. When it protects capital, it becomes order, stability, development, or necessity.

Anticommunism is colonialism destroying communal life and making genocide a way of life, fascism murdering communists and minorities, coups drowning land reform in blood, markets letting millions starve so that property remains sacred, and wars waged to stop socialism before it can begin. But it's also welcomed by capitalists, conservatives, and liberals alike.

From the Blackshirts to Jakarta, from Gladio to Chile, anticommunism has not merely interpreted violence. It has organised it. If communism is judged by its body count, then anticommunism must be judged by the mass graves created in its defence. It remembers every victim of communism while forgetting those killed to prevent communism.

Anticommunism is the willingness to sacrifice entire populations and life itself to secure the social relations of capital. It is the doctrine that no famine, coup, prison, massacre, dictatorship, war or abuse of life is too costly if property remains safe. It is the willingness to spare no human or nonhuman hecatomb in the defence of capital, and the trained act of perception that makes such sacrifices appear natural, normal, inevitable and necessary.

The double standards imposed by anticommunism are its core feature. A famine under socialism immediately becomes proof of the system itself. A famine under capitalism becomes weather, corruption, scarcity, or human nature. Anything except capitalism. Starvation under socialism reveals the system. Starvation under capitalism conceals it, because it is its normal business.

Anticommunism functions less like an argument than a kind of ideological membrane surrounding capitalism itself. It protects capitalism from appearing historical. Only communism is violent, authoritarian, contingent, and bloody. And yet anticommunism is itself one of the most violent, authoritarian, and bloody forces in history.

Parenti once wrote that anticommunism is socialism’s “shadow.” But it is more than shadow. It is better described as capitalism’s great laundering machine. It washes empire into development, conquest into civilisation, thieving into value, markets into freedom, and, finally, mass death into economics.

The twentieth century, and perhaps even further back, is incomprehensible without understanding this. Fascism was anticommunist, The Jakarta Method was anticommunist, and Operation Gladio was anticommunist. They all shared the same assumptions about socialism, the same defense against the abolition of the relations and property of capital.

Colonial massacres, anti-labour purges, death squads, military dictatorships, sanctions regimes, proxy wars, coups against socialist movements, extermination campaigns against peasants, unions, Indigenous resistance, Black radicals, and land reform movements — all repeatedly justified through the language of anticommunism.

Anticommunism cannot be reduced to “disagreeing with communism.” It has functioned historically as a Trojan horse through which capitalism justifies extraordinary violence while presenting itself as civilisation defending freedom.

And the scale of this violence becomes difficult to morally process once the categories are universalised consistently.

Because we are constantly told by anticommunists: “Communism killed 100 million people.” The number functions almost ritually now. Every famine, prison, purge, execution, labour camp, and political catastrophe associated with socialist states becomes compressed into a single civilisational indictment.

But if this methodology of the infamous Black Book of Communism — a book disavowed due to its false scholarship and propaganda by two of its own authors — is to mean anything at all, then it cannot apply selectively. If executions count under socialism, they count under capitalism. If famine counts under socialism, it counts under capitalism. If labour camps, imperial wars, sanctions, political repression, structural starvation, and preventable death count under socialism, then they count under capitalism too.

And once the categories remain consistent, the moral landscape begins shifting violently beneath your feet. Not because socialist societies become innocent. But because capitalism suddenly loses the privilege of invisibility. The numbers begin surfacing. Not thousands, millions, or hundreds of millions. Billions.

Four broad categories emerge repeatedly across the literature surrounding state and systemic violence:

1. Direct state violence.

2. Policy-linked famine.

3. Imperial and geopolitical violence.

4. Structural violence.

And across each category the same pattern appears: violence attributed to socialism becomes unforgettable spectacle, while violence reproduced through capitalism dissolves into the background conditions of ordinary life.

Let's begin with direct state violence. Executions. Purges. Forced labour. Massacres. Political repression. Counterrevolutionary terror.

Estimated deaths associated with socialist states and transitions: approximately 35 million.

Estimated deaths associated with capitalist modernity through colonial conquest, slavery, imperial repression, anti-labour violence, settler genocide, and colonial extermination: approximately 160 million.

The asymmetry already begins rupturing the story. Capitalism did not emerge peacefully. It emerged through enclosure, conquest, enslavement, plantation economies, colonial extraction, genocide, and imperial domination on a planetary scale. This process is ongoing.

“In actual history,” Marx wrote in Capital, “conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force, play the greatest part.”

And then comes famine. This is where the ideological inversion becomes almost unbearable. Under socialism, famine becomes evidence of systemic failure. Under capitalism, famine becomes unfortunate reality.

But historians like Mike Davis and Amartya Sen demonstrated repeatedly that famine is rarely “natural.” Human beings rarely starve because food simply vanishes. They starve because access to food is organised socially through markets, property, export systems, empire, prices, and political power.

Estimated deaths associated with socialist famines: approximately 55 million.

Estimated deaths associated with capitalist and colonial famines: approximately 200 million.

The Bengal famine. The Irish famine. Late Victorian famines across India, China, Brazil, and Africa. Millions died while food exports continued moving through imperial trade systems. Markets remained disciplined while property remained sacred and profit at the expense of lived continued functioning perfectly.

And because this violence appeared through markets, liberalism learned not to see it as violence at all.

It’s the same with a century of imperial war. Mostly unseen, or treated as necessary. World wars, colonial occupations, counterinsurgencies, proxy wars and coups. Then there are the anti-communist extermination campaigns, military dictatorships sanctions, death squads.

Jakarta.
Chile.
Indonesia.
Korea.
Vietnam.
Guatemala.
Congo.

Estimated deaths associated with socialist conflicts and revolutionary violence: approximately 35 million.

Estimated deaths associated with capitalist empires, colonial wars, fascism, imperial conquest, anti-communist intervention, and geopolitical domination: approximately 320 million.

Capitalism is not simply a domestic market arrangement. It is a world system sustained through accumulation and military power. And world systems preserve themselves violently.

Capitalism’s global order has repeatedly depended upon anticommunist violence: the destruction of unions, peasant movements, land reform campaigns, socialist governments, and revolutionary experiments wherever they threatened existing property relations.

But even this is not capitalism’s greatest death toll. Its deadliest violence is also its quietest: structural violence. Slow death mistaken for ordinary life, rather than ongoing policy decisions. Hunger, malnutrition, preventable disease, unsafe labour, pollution, household and personal debt, homelessness, ecological collapse: this is how lives are gradually shortened because survival itself is subordinated to profitability.

Estimated deaths associated with socialist systems and transitional failures in this category: approximately 15 million.

Estimated deaths associated with capitalism: well over 800 million and still accumulating.

Roughly 9 million people continue dying annually from hunger and hunger-related causes despite humanity already producing enough food to feed everyone alive. Millions more die from preventable disease despite existing medical capacity. Millions die because medicine is commodified, because housing is subordinated to property, and because food follows profit. Survival itself remains market-mediated, but under capitalism these deaths barely register politically: they dissolve into the atmosphere of normal life.

Capitalism’s greatest achievement is that the same death changes meaning depending on the system producing it. A prison under socialism becomes proof of communism. Colonial labour camps become development. Political executions under socialism become ideological murder. Millions worked to death through imperial extraction become economic history. Again: starvation under socialism reveals the system. Starvation under capitalism conceals it.

And once the totals begin accumulating across consistent categories, the asymmetry becomes difficult to morally contain.

Approximate deaths associated with socialist states and transitions across all four categories: roughly 140 million.

Approximate deaths associated with capitalism, colonialism, imperial systems, fascism, anti-communist violence, and structural deprivation: approximately 1.4 billion.

These figures do not include the global, systematic exploitation of nonhuman life and wholesale destruction of ecologies and communities for extraction.

The precise figures can be debated. But what becomes much harder to debate is the structure of perception surrounding them. Anticommunism counts deaths only when they interrupt capital. The rest disappear into economics. And economics speaks the language of growth, development, and markets. It tells us this is “how the world works.” Not that it can be other.

And yet a child starving under socialism becomes evidence. A child starving under capitalism becomes a statistic. A famine under socialism becomes ideology. A famine under capitalism becomes weather, the market, a lack of development. A political prison under socialism becomes proof of the system. A mass grave created to destroy socialism becomes history.

This is the laundering machine. This is how capital acquires its innocence. Marx in Capital was trying to expose when he described capital as “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”

Not exceptional violence, ordinary violence. The uprooting violence of enclosure. The systemic terrorism of empire. The existential horror of slavery. The slow, shattering destruction of famine. The systematic, mechanized destruction of entire ecologies and the wholesale abuse of life for industries. The whip of labour disciplined by hunger. The accepted austerity of lives shortened so that profits might lengthen. And above all, the violence that it is required to forget and that drips from the pores of capital.

Anticommunism remembers every catastrophe attributed to socialism while forgetting the continuous global violence required to sustain capitalism. It remembers those killed under communism. It forgets those killed to stop communism. It remembers the enemies of capital. It forgets the victims of capital.

Anticommunism is not merely an argument about the past: it's a practice. It is one of the ways capital protects itself in the present. One of the ways exploitation becomes common sense. One of the ways domination becomes freedom. One of the ways blood and dirt become invisible.

The image of a starving child from Bengal disappeared from the platform. Perhaps it was merely a technical mistake. Or perhaps it reveals something deeper: structural violence is always easiest to ignore when it remains abstract. The child disappeared once into famine, then once more into invisibility.

The work that anticommunism performs at the level of memory itself is similar. It remembers the dead of communism. It forgets the dead of anticommunism. It remembers the prisons if they have a communist label, but not the gulags of capital. It forgets the mass graves. It forgets the colonies. It remembers the revolutions as failure, not the extermination campaigns organised to prevent them.

And so the victims of capital continue to disappear into economics, development, growth, and “how the world works.”

But once they become visible again, the story begins to unravel. The starving child returns, and with them the terror squads, the colonies, the mass graves, the enclosures, the violent extractions, the blood and dirt that capital has spent centuries teaching us to forget.

And with it returns the question anticommunism was built to suppress: What if the greatest violence of the modern world was not committed in the name of communism, but in the defence of capital?

That question is unsettling because it forces capitalism to appear not as reality itself, but as a historical system that has been and will always be built through violence and forgetting.

And this is why life under capital must become life against capital.

Next Entry: Ideology

Coming soon in A Life Against Capital Vocabulary.

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”— Marx & Engels

Ideology is not simply false belief, but how social relations appear natural. It is the process by which history becomes common sense, domination becomes necessity, and capitalism becomes reality itself.

Sources and Further Reading for Entry 1: Anticommunism

Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds. Anticommunism, fascism, and the selective memory of liberal capitalism.

Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method. Anti-communist extermination campaigns and Cold War violence.

Noam Chomsky & Edward Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism: Anti-communist state violence and Western support for authoritarian regimes.

Paul Thomas Chamberlin, The Cold War’s Killing Fields: Global Cold War violence and intervention.

Famine

Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: Colonial famines and the political economy of starvation.

Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: Entitlements, distribution, and famine.

Cormac Ó Gráda, Famine: A Short History: Comparative famine history.

Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War: The Bengal Famine of 1943.

Alex de Waal, Mass Starvation: Political causes of famine.

Empire, Colonialism, and War

Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I: Primitive accumulation, colonialism, and the origins of capitalism.

Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa: Colonial extraction and underdevelopment.

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: War, empire, and revolution in the twentieth century.

Domenico Losurdo, War and Revolution: Liberalism, colonial violence, and anti-communism.

Structural Violence

Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace and Peace Research”: Foundational statement of structural violence.

Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Structural violence and preventable suffering.

Jason Hickel, The Divide: Global poverty and unequal development.

Jason Hickel, Less Is More: Capitalism, ecology, and social reproduction.

World Health Organization Reports: Preventable mortality and health inequality.

Food and Agriculture Organization Reports: Hunger and food insecurity.

Critiques of the Black Book of Communism

Stéphane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism.

Nicolas Werth: Critiques of the book’s aggregation methods.

Jean-Louis Margolin: Critiques of the book’s methodology and conclusions.

Domenico Losurdo, War and Revolution: Critique of anti-communist historiography.

Methodological Note

The figures used in this essay are approximate synthetic estimates derived from multiple historical studies. They are intended to illustrate a methodological argument rather than establish a definitive demographic total.

The central claim of this essay is not that capitalism has killed a specific number of people. Rather, it is that the categories routinely used to indict communism—state violence, famine, war, repression, and preventable death—should be applied consistently across social systems.

Once these categories are universalised, a striking asymmetry emerges. Deaths attributed to socialism are typically remembered politically, while deaths produced through colonialism, empire, markets, structural deprivation, and anti-communist violence are often rendered invisible or treated as natural features of economic life.

The figures presented here should therefore be read not as a final accounting, but as an invitation to reconsider how violence is counted, remembered, and forgotten.

Most of us are taught to treat definitions as stable, neutral, and authoritative. But words do not stand outside the world they describe. They carry the histories of their use, the relations that produced them, and the assumptions that organise how we understand reality. This piece begins a long-term project: not a dictionary, or a lexicon, but a working vocabulary for Life Against Capital. It will become a series of posts that treat definitions as tools, not truths, and asks what analysis of society we are making each time we use them.

Introduction to A Life Against Capital Vocabulary

Before I knew what a definition was, I knew how they were lived.

Some of my earliest and fondest memories as a child were spent with my single mother and her dictionary, a stained and tattered relic from her days as a student, one of the few possessions that seemed to hold together an otherwise precarious life. It seemed to me then like an endless archive contained within a single book, part of a wider collection that marked out words and histories I would some day master as well as my mother.

I remember thinking then that the dictionary was a kind of fugitive bible, standing in place of one, for another way of living. Positioned in my mother’s bedroom among the rituals she devised, it felt like an organ in a church: its pipes built in paper tabs; its music endless words I did not yet know how to use; and as I thumbed through it in those quiet hours, the weight and scale of the old book filled me with a sense of immense, magical possibility.

We did not have much then. We collected the dole, and my mother worked odd jobs. Eventually returning to something like the life she had fled, my mother became a teacher on a stable salary that changed our lives. But my mother has always lived as an exile, and so have I too. And in this life I always knew that even if we had nothing else, we had words. Life felt then at once simpler and more exposed, more open to the social relations that could shape, harm, and transform you, and perhaps that is what a child recognises first in language: not its correctness, but its power.

Today, the way we define and share words has changed. Dictionaries, encyclopedias, glossaries, and now AI systems blur into one another, their functions increasingly indistinguishable. The dictionary belongs to another age, before words were endlessly hyperlinked, algorithmically matched, and recursively generated across vast systems of patterned text. And yet the social relations that gave rise to dictionaries—the need to stabilise, organise, and authorize meaning—have not disappeared. They persist, now less visible, but no less powerful.

When I teach English and Literature, I tell my students that if they find a dictionary, they should read it, and then throw it away. Then open another, and throw that one away too or close the tab and do the same. Only then should they begin to write their own definitions, building them from a stack of uses, quotations, and encounters, because that is how dictionaries are made in the first place: one usage at a time, until a constellation begins to form. This kind of stargazing and thread-gathering is not an abandonment of meaning, but the labour of tracing that makes up the most important work of a literature student.

I have never been a teacher or reader who insists on the correctness or finality of definitions. In linguistics, this position is often described as prescriptivism: the belief that words have proper meanings that must be fixed and maintained for clear communication. But rejecting this does not mean that all definitions are equal, or that anything can mean anything. What remains, once we refuse easy certainty, is something harder: the clarity and precision of history and analysis, a realism that must be built and struggled over, not assumed.

I try to be as clear as possible in Life Against Capital, because Marxism demands an analytical realism that is often underestimated. And yet much of what I write can appear vague, abstract, or detached from the concrete and everyday. It can seem to evade the local details of life, even as it attempts to explain them. This is not simply a failure of expression. It reflects the difficulty of naming relations that are real, but systematically obscured.

The concepts I use have been built across generations. They emerge from attempts to provide a functional explanation of the systems of power that shape our lives, and when I use them, I do so in recognition of that history. But even so, they can appear lifeless at first encounter, as if they belong to a language removed from experience.

And this is not accidental. Our culture does not simply neglect these words; it renders them rare, abstract, and distant, so that the relations they describe remain unexamined. You are not meant to find yourself worrying about the structures that organise your life, or asking who holds power over what is produced, and dominates the conditions that you are required to live. Language does not make this easy. We must contest the way it is structured and used to obscure it.

An Encyclopedia of Capital

I have long thought about creating a glossary for Life Against Capital, or even a series of conceptual essays in the form of a synopticon: a way of gathering and organising the central ideas that shape how we understand the world.

The Great Ideas: A Synopticon, edited by Mortimer J. Adler and published in 1952 as part of the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World, was one of the most ambitious attempts to do precisely this. It presented itself as a universal archive of thought, organising human knowledge into a coherent system of “great ideas,” from “Angel-Love” (Vol. I) to “Man-World” (Vol. II).

But this was never a neutral project. It was, in many ways, the quintessential encyclopedia of capital: a material expression of a particular historical moment, deep in the Cold War, that sought to stabilise Western thought as inheritance, to reconcile liberalism and conservatism within a shared intellectual tradition, and to present that tradition as universal. What appears as a collection of ideas is, in fact, a condensation of power, a way of organising knowledge so that certain histories, relations, and struggles appear central, and others disappear.

An original set of these volumes sits in my own library, passed down as unwanted refuse. I recognise in them all the traces of their ambition and their limits. And I read them as an ideological monument caught up in a moment of feverish Cold War intellectual production.

And this is where I hesitate. Life Against Capital is not The Great Books of the Marxist World. Fragments of such a project already exist, on Substack (such as the excellent Marx in Moments) and elsewhere, and I have no interest in reproducing them. What I am building here is something different: not a settled archive of ideas, but a way of working with concepts as they are used, contested, and transformed.

It has taken me time to recognise that something like a synopticon has a place. Not because the concepts are fully formed, but because they are not. My voice is still developing alongside the relations it attempts to describe.

Why I am writing this

If this is not an attempt to fix meaning or assemble a canon, then the question becomes unavoidable: what is this vocabulary for?

Part of the answer emerged recently in response to a question from a comrade on a Leftist Threads post, Angryrobotarmy, who is also LezLee Firestone on Substack, asking about definitions:

It is a fair question, and one that cuts to the centre of the project. But I was tempted to answer with another question: What does it mean to define something at all?

Definitions are often treated as neutral descriptions, ways of clarifying what a word already means. But this is not how they function. Definitions are historically grounded abstractions of social relations. They do not simply describe the world; they condense particular ways of understanding it, stabilising certain meanings while obscuring others.

To define something is not to step outside history, but to take a position within it. Every definition carries with it the traces of the struggles, institutions, and material conditions that produced it. This is why definitions can feel so stable: not because they are neutral, but because the relations they condense have been stabilised, at least for a time. This is also why they can feel abstract or distant. When we encounter concepts like “class,” “state,” or “capital,” they often appear removed from everyday experience, as if they belong to a language that floats above life. But this distance is itself an effect of how these relations are organised and represented. The abstraction is real, because the relations are real, even if they are not immediately visible.

What this vocabulary attempts to do is not to resolve that abstraction, but to work through it. Not by fixing meanings in place, but by tracing the relations they condense, and by asking what analysis of society is being made each time a word is used.

Because of the way I practice definitions, I find myself agreeing with translators and writers who understand the way language works. A translator does not simply carry meaning from one language to another; they reconstruct it, negotiating between contexts, histories, and uses that never fully align. What appears as a single word is revealed, in the act of translation, as a field of possible meanings shaped by different relations.

A translator I am reading at the moment is Jeremy Price: I encourage you to take these opportunities to see how meanings can completely shift. Price describes his publication, The Archive of the Ebyonim an attempt to create and recover “survival manuals for the dispossessed” from scripture. Focused on Yahwist and Apostolic scriptures, Price provides re-readings based on refusing to spiritualize Indigenous socioeconomic details of life in the ancient Hebrew Republic.

In The Syntax of Solidarity (from the Shuva Brit series) Price implores us to “recognize that the standard dictionary is already rigged… and that you… cannot use the tools of the colonizer to translate the manifestos of the colonized.” By translating scripture in their most descriptive and contested socio-economic detail, he offers us a powerful, immanent critique of scriptural scholarship since the Enlightenment, making us confront how the production of words “manages the population precisely by severing their vocabulary from the material reality of their exploitation”.

When I was a child, I believe that I used my mother's dictionary as a survival manual for the dispossessed, for the ones like us. My mother from her earliest age was exiled from the rural land she has since returned to. Then she was as a young adult exiled from university in the waning of student radicalism. And when I was a child she was exiled from my father’s cult. But far from the exile harming me, I want my mother to know how much our shared survival has meant for me. It is from her that I learned to resist what Price calls “the jaws of lexical subversion”, because she taught me what a dictionary and a definition was, and could be. But bigger than that, she maintained for me the survival of the memories and methods of ancestral dispossession, a heritage—so opposite the reigning supremacism of our age—that has given me a lifetime in a slow, unsinkable lifeboat full of the richest thinking and fugitive materials of the past.

Definitions are in fact condensed analyses of a system in a given moment. And because of this, people who believe there is a correct definition for every word also often become locked into a correct understanding of the system that, once embedded in a word, struggles to get free and become social relations again to turn back at what the system is.

When definitions are used as thought-terminating authorities, the analysis of what is real can become worse off. The “correct” definition is never free of social relations, changing historical conditions, and the tension of reality. As I understand them, definitions help clarify analysis. Disagreement over them is theoretical.

On dictionaries and lexicons (and why this isn’t something like these)

Dictionaries are often treated as the sacred vestibules of meaning, when they are historical documents that provide nothing like a fixed meaning or a correspondence to reality. Nonetheless, they often provide a kind of social authority. In 1946, in a ruling Judge Learned Hand wrote: “It is one of the surest indexes of a mature and developed jurisprudence not to make a fortress out of the dictionary”. I think it’s one of the surest indexes of a mature and developed thinking to also avoid turning definitions into the language of power and domination.

However, the dictionary as a fortress is the common way the dictionary is used as capital, a sort of liberal dictionary that conforms to all the hidden assumptions liberals have not learned to contest. In this form, meaning appears as something that can be clarified through reference alone, detached from struggle, context, and use. Words are treated as self-contained units, whose definitions can be stabilised and agreed upon, rather than as expressions of relations that are themselves contested and changing. This does not make the dictionary false. It makes it partial. By presenting meaning as neutral and settled, it obscures the conditions under which meanings emerge, and the interests they serve. What appears as clarity is, in part, a stabilisation: a way of fixing language so that the relations it condenses do not have to be examined.

Lexicons are collections of definitions of vocabulary in a particular topic that are often portrayed as complete and authoritative. But they expire in usefulness as soon as someone creates a new usage. If definitions do not hold themselves in place, but are continually reworked across changing relations, then the task is not to fix them, but to work through them. Lexicons and dictionaries aims at closure. They presents meaning as something that can be settled, clarified, and maintained.

But the concepts that matter most for understanding society—class, state, capital, power—do not behave in this way. They shift as the relations they describe shift, and they resist any attempt to stabilise them once and for all. What follows, then, is not a dictionary, but a set of working definitions shaped by this understanding. This is not an attempt to produce a dictionary in the conventional sense, nor to assemble a stable set of meanings that can be referred to as final. It is an attempt to treat concepts as tools: as ways of tracing the relations that shape social life, and of making those relations available for analysis.

What is required is not a fixed vocabulary, but a working one: a set of concepts that can be used, tested, and revised in the course of engaging with the world they attempt to describe. This is not quite a dictionary, not a lexicon. But it is also not quite just a glossary, either, terms meant for this text. These are words that are at use in Life Against Capital, but they are also much more.

So this vocabulary does something similar but also something else. It treats terms as tools for analysing social relations. It starts by accepting no fixed definitions. Not final meanings. A working vocabulary.

Where Marxists find their vocabulary

There is no single authority for a Marxist vocabulary, but there are many archives and traditions for the concepts of Marxism that we can also work with here:

• Marxists Internet Archive (MIA)

  https://www.marxists.org

• MIA Glossary / Encyclopedia
  https://www.marxists.org/glossary/

• MEGA (Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe)
  https://mega.bbaw.de

• Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Bottomore, ed.)

• Critical Dictionary of Marxism (Labica & Bensussan, eds.)

These works don’t fix meaning. They let you track how concepts are formed, revised, and fought over.

While they can promise forms of closure we’re seeking to avoid here, they do all act as survival manuals carrying historical materialism to the dispossessed.

And as my reading and study continues, we will track back to these entries. One of my favourite words that I will take my time to explore in the future, for example, is Bestimmt, a key Marxist term which different meanings that have shaped the way Marxists interpret in different ways. We’ll come back to this.

Three key political terms

With the method in place and in considering the question from LezLee, I want to begin with three key definitions where I show how I define the core political concepts that create so much confusion in leftist discussion:

Socialism

“What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but… just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect… still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society.”
— Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875)

Socialism for Marx is a historical form that emerges out of Capitalism, not a blueprint or perfect society. It is collective control of the means of production, but also a transitional form, shaped by what it emerges from.

That’s why Marxists can disagree about its form (state, councils, communes, etc.). The definition is relational and developmental, not static.

Imperialism

“Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established…”
— V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916)

“The accumulation of capital on a world scale… produces unequal development.”
— Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (1913)

The key features of imperialism are monopoly capitalism, finance capital dominance, export of capital and global division of labour and territory.

But even here, the definition is not frozen. Later Marxists extend it to neocolonial control, global supply chains and unequal exchange. This understanding of Imperialism emerged out of analysis.

Imperialism is not just “foreign policy”, as it may be reduced to. It is a stage and structure of global capitalist accumulation that is evolving.

Fascism

“Fascism is the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary… elements of finance capital.”
— Georgi Dimitrov, The Fascist Offensive (1935)

“The historical function of fascism is to smash the working class…”
— Leon Trotsky, Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It (1932)

Marxist definitions of Fascism converge around crisis, class rule, and mass mobilisation. Fascism arises in crisis of capitalism. It mobilises mass movements from below, destroys working-class organisation and preserves capitalist property relations.

So there’s no checklist for Fascism. It’s a relation between crisis, class power, and political form.

Fascism becomes dominant in crisis, mobilizing mass movements and destroying working-class organisation. It is a reaction that preserves capitalist relations and the capitalist mode of production, and can arrive heralded as a new way of saving Capitalism from itself.

A working vocabulary (Life Against Capital)

In what follows, I will introducing some of the many definitions I use at Life Against Capital. These will be updated, and I will also write synoptic entries from time to time to help us further understand why these concepts matter. These are not final definitions; they are tools for analysing the real movement of our society. Among them are more political concepts that are indispensable.

Anticommunism

“The dirty truth is that many anti-communists are not opposed to autocracy and repression; they are only opposed to autocracy and repression when practiced by communists.”— Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds (1997)

Anticommunism is not simply disagreement with communism. It is a structure of containment, repression, historical erasure, and ideological management. It disciplines political possibility itself. As such it is one of the ideological features of imperialism. It is not simply an opposition to Capitalism, but a way that Capitalism is practiced in some of its most violent and terroristic forms. The fruit of anticommunism is the Jakarta Method, the global slaughter of anyone nominally Communist, or with a capacity for different political possibilities.

Capacity

Capacity is the ability to act. It is not abstract freedom, but materially grounded possibility defined by practice. People may understand exploitation perfectly and still lack the capacity to resist it. Capacity depends on time, energy, coordination, infrastructure, social support, and organisation. Politics is not just consciousness. It is the development of collective capacities. The condensation of capacities can be a revolutionary event.

Capital

“Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour…”— Marx, Capital

Capital is not just money. It is value in motion, self-expanding accumulation. Capital is a social relation that reorganises life around its reproduction. But it is also a regime or order. It is “the Capital Regime” (Sweezy) or “the Capital Order” (Mattei). But it is also social reproduction geared toward accumulation and production for profit. This is why I can refer to both social relations and the power system when I refer to Capital.

Capitalism

“Value is self-expanding value.”
[…]

“The veiled slavery of the wage-workers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal.”

[…]

“In actual history, it is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force, play the greatest part. In the tender annals of political economy, the idyllic reigns from time immemorial.”

— Marx, Capital, Vol. I (1867)

“Capitalism is not an economic system; it is not a social system; it is a way of organizing nature.”

—Jason W Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (2015)

Capitalism is not an economic system, Moore reminds us. It is a way of organizing nature (which is also society) that has come to power. It is the power system we live under today, and it has has global dominance and control over how we live our lives.

Capitalism emerged from Feudalism in the “blood and fire” of colonialism and enclosure in the 1500s. It required three key historical pillars: violent dispossession such as slavery and enclosure, wage labour, and financial systems.

It is an ongoing process in social relations in which value is produced and expanded through the exploitation of labour, where production is organised for accumulation, and life is subordinated to value and markets for survival.

Capitalism is not simply a system of markets or exchange. Marx’s deepest insight in my view is that capitalism is not merely an economy distributing incomes, but a total social relation that reorganizes life around accumulation. It's surprising how few critiques of Marx or supporters of Capitalism even mention that.

Class

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”*
— Marx & Engels, Communist Manifesto (1848)

*“That is, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organization existing previous to recorded history, was all but unknown.”
— Friedrich Engels (note added to later editions, especially 1888 English edition)

Not an identity or category, but a relation, Class describes how people are positioned within systems of production, and how those positions shape their capacity to act, organise, and struggle. It is formed historically and understood through conflict, not classification.

One of my favourite readings of Marx and Engels comes from Walter Rodney’s Decolonial Marxism: the words “recorded history”, added by Engels, helps him explain why Marxism is not a doctrine but a universal method, one that can help us analyse different societies and different prehistories.

Class consciousness

“The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.”
— Marx

“The proletariat… becomes conscious of itself as a class.”
— Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (1923)

Not simply awareness, but a relation formed in struggle. Class consciousness develops as people recognise their position within systems of production and act collectively to transform it.

Colonialism

“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population… signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.”
— Capital, Vol. I (1867)

“Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it.”
— The Wretched of the Earth (1961)

“Colonialism is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.”
— Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)

“Invasion is a structure not an event.”
— Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” (2006)

Colonialism is not simply the occupation of territory, but a relation through which land, labour, and life are reorganised under external control, so that what is taken can be directed toward accumulation elsewhere. As Frantz Fanon writes, colonialism “is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content,” but seeks to remake the conditions of existence themselves. It operates by displacing existing relations and imposing new ones, transforming both the material organisation of life and the meanings through which that life is understood.

Colonialism does not end with formal independence. As Walter Rodney argued, colonialism reorganised entire societies so that their development would be “externalised,” directed toward the needs of others rather than their own. What appears as a past event persists as an ongoing structure, shaping how land is held, how labour is extracted, and how life is made to serve accumulation.

Commons of becoming

“The free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”
— Marx & Engels

The Commons of Becoming is not a place, but a relation. It names the processes through which life, under pressure, begins to reorganise itself collectively. It becomes the forms of collective life through which the powers that reproduce society begin to cease reproducing capital.

It appears wherever the conditions required to live can no longer be sustained individually, and are taken up in common: through shared practices, coordination, and the gradual development of new forms of life. It is always unfinished, formed in struggle, and held together only so long as it is life against capital. As a commons, it survives only by resisting enclosure and extraction.

Communism

“Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established… but the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”
— Marx & Engels, The German Ideology (1845)

“In a higher phase of communist society… after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour… has vanished… only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”

— Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875)

For Marx, Communism is not a future state or stage to be implemented through planning. It is the real movement that begins within the present, a collective activity through which people come to critique and abolish the existing organisation of life under capitalism, how life becomes life against capital.

This movement develops immanently, emerging from the contradictions of capitalist social relations themselves, as people struggle against exploitation, division, and domination.

Marx does refer to a “higher phase” of communism as the immanent horizon: but only within communist society itself. He is not laying out a rigid stage theory. He is describing how this movement, once underway, develops beyond the limits inherited from capitalism, gradually overcoming the forms of inequality and constraint that persist in its early development.

See also life against capital and the commons of becoming.

Counter-power

“Freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently.”
— Rosa Luxemburg

Counter-power builds the capacity to contest rule. Not simply opposition, but the development of capacity. Counter-power builds the conditions through which people can contest and transform existing relations, expanding the ability to act collectively against established forms of rule.

Dual power

“Alongside the Provisional Government… another government has arisen.”
— Lenin, The Dual Power (1917)

“Two powers cannot exist in one state.”
— V. I. Lenin

Not simply two institutions, but a relation of conflict between forms of rule. Dual power emerges when existing structures of authority are contested by new forms of organisation, each claiming the capacity to organise social life.

Enclosure

“Written in letters of blood and fire.”
— Marx, Capital

“The expropriation of the agricultural producer… is the basis of the whole process.”
— Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I (1867)

Not simply the fencing of land, but a relation of separation. Enclosure removes people from the means of life, forcing them into dependence on wage labour and reorganising land, labour, and survival around accumulation.

Extraction

“Capital is dead labour, that… lives only by sucking living labour.”
— Marx, Capital

“The expropriation of the masses of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production.”
— Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I (1867)

Not simply the taking of natural resources, but a social relation in which value, labour, and the conditions of life are drawn from people and environments without equivalent return, and redirected toward accumulation. Extraction operates not only in mines, fields, or supply chains, but across the organisation of everyday life, where time, care, attention, and energy are continuously appropriated and made productive. What appears as use or exchange is often, in this sense, extraction: a transfer structured by unequal power.

Forces

When I refer to forces, I mean pressures within and on social relations. Economic forces. Political forces. Ecological forces. Not external laws. Forces are structured tendencies emerging from relations themselves. They shape the conditions we experience.

Ideology

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”— Marx & Engels, The German Ideology

Ideology is not simply false belief. It is how social relations appear natural, become common sense, and reproduce themselves through everyday life. Ideology is a common sense, and the most ideological approach is the one that says living free of ideology is possible, that systematic ideas are more troublesome and more political than my pragmatic befuddlement through the web of social relations dominated by capital.

Liberation

“The free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

— Marx & Engels, Communist Manifesto (1848)

Liberation is not inclusion into existing domination, but the transformation of the social relations that produce domination. That means liberation movements are not reducible to “identity” or inclusion.

They emerge from histories, structures and how they operate, forms of extraction, systems of social reproduction and struggles over life itself. Different liberation movements confront different structures. But none exist outside social relations.

Black liberation

“Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No universal selfishness can bring social good to all.”— Angela Davis, Women, Race & Class (1981)

“There can be no capitalism without racism.”— Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism (1983)

Black liberation confronts racial capitalism, colonial histories policing, dispossession, extraction, and the organisation of life through racial hierarchy. It requires not simply representation, but transformation. Racism is hardwired into how Capitalism works.

Feminism / women’s liberation

“The nuclear family must be destroyed…”— Shulamith Firestone, Dialectic of Sex (1970)

“The reproduction of labour power requires… women’s unpaid labour.”— Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (2004)

Women’s liberation is not simply equality inside existing structures. It must confront the conditions that oppress women. It challenges existing reproductive labour, patriarchy, gendered violence, and the organisation of care under capitalism.

Queer liberation

“The revolt is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.”— Michel Foucault

We’re here, we’re queer…” emerged not as identity branding but confrontation. Queer liberation confronts normativity, regulation of bodies and desire, and family structures tied to property and reproduction. It calls not just for tolerance, transformation of social life.

Trans liberation / trans survival

“Trans people are engaged in practices of world-making.”— Susan Stryker

“Sometimes surviving is itself a collective project.”— paraphrasing Tourmaline and trans mutual aid traditions

Trans liberation emerges from struggle over bodily autonomy, medical control, violence, social reproduction and the right to exist beyond imposed categories At its base, it is a struggle for the capacity to live.

Animal liberation

“The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”

— Jeremy Bentham (frequently taken up in animal liberation thought)

Animal liberation confronts industrial extraction, the pervasive commodification of sentient life, ecological domination and the treatment of life as raw material. Veganism is not simply a consume movement, but a practice within animal liberation that is struggling against the conditions of animal life under Capitalism.

National liberation / anti-colonial liberation

“Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot…”— Frantz Fanon

“Decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.”— Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)

National liberation is not nationalism in the abstract. It emerges where land, labour, culture and political sovereignty are subordinated to imperial domination or neocolonialism and the work that former colonial and settler colonial states do for the forces of capital. Palestine is an example of such a flashpoint and liberation struggle.

Indigenous / Aboriginal liberation

“The settler state is a structure, not an event.”— Patrick Wolfe

“Our fight is for our lives, our lands, and our future generations.”— Aboriginal Tent Embassy tradition

“Decolonization is not a metaphor.”— Eve Tuck & K. Wayne Yang

Indigenous liberation is not simply inclusion within settler society. It confronts colonisation, dispossession, enclosure, extraction, cultural destruction and the ongoing occupation of land

A Life Against Capital approach understands colonisation not as past history, but as an ongoing social relation. Land is not simply property. It is relation, continuity, life, social reproduction, and collective memory.

This is why many Indigenous struggles emerge around land defence, water protection, sovereignty, community survival, and resistance to extraction; why it is so much more than recognition. In fact, it is the continuity of life against systems organised around accumulation.

Life

“The production of life, both of one’s own in labour and of fresh life in procreation… appears as a double relation: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social relation.”
— Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (1845)

Not simply biological existence, but a social relation. Life is the ongoing process through which people reproduce themselves and one another: through labour, care, time, and the conditions that make living possible.

Life is always organised. It takes shape within relations that determine how people live, what they require, and what becomes possible.

Life against capital

“Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established… but the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”
— Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (1845)

Not a position outside capitalism, but a relation that emerges within it. Life against capital names the point at which the conditions required to live come into tension with the conditions required for accumulation.

It appears wherever life can no longer be organised according to the demands of value, and begins, however partially, to reorganise itself. This tension is not always visible or collective, but it is the ground from which struggle, refusal, and new forms of relation emerge.

Life against capital is not declared. It is encountered, wherever living itself begins to break against the conditions that organise it.

Ontology

“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but their social being that determines their consciousness.”
— Karl Marx

“The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man.”
— Frantz Fanon

Not simply the study of being, but the organisation of what is taken to be real. Ontology names the assumptions that structure how the world appears: what exists, what matters, and what can be known.

These assumptions are not abstract. They are shaped by social relations, determining what becomes visible and what is denied, reduced, or rendered impossible. Ontology, in this sense, is historical: it changes as the relations that organise life change.

The term itself emerges from twentieth-century philosophy, but it becomes materially necessary in the analysis of capitalism and colonialism. As Frantz Fanon shows in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), ontology is not neutral: it names the conditions under which people are recognised, objectified, or denied as beings at all. What appears as reality is structured through these relations.

Power

“Power is everywhere… because it comes from everywhere.”
— Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality (1976)

“Between equal rights, force decides.”
— Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I (1867)

Not simply diffuse, but structured, material, and uneven. Power is the capacity to organise social relations: to determine what is produced, how life is lived, and what becomes possible, concentrating in ways that shape who can act and under what conditions.

Praxis

“The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity… can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.”
— Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845)

Not simply theory or action, but their unity. Praxis names the process through which understanding and transformation occur together, as people act within and against the conditions that shape them.

Racial Capitalism

“The development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions…”
— Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism (1983)

“Colonization = ‘thingification’.”
— Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1950)

Not simply capitalism plus race, but a relation in which accumulation is organised through differentiation. Racial capitalism names the ways in which capitalism produces, relies on, and reproduces racialised forms of life, structuring who is exploited, dispossessed, and made available for extraction.

These divisions are not secondary. They are constitutive: shaping how labour, land, and life are organised across different histories and conditions. What appears as race is inseparable from the relations through which capital develops and sustains itself.

Social reproduction

“Every social process of production is, at the same time, a process of reproduction.”

— Karl Marx, Capital Vol. I (1867)

“The capitalist process of production… produces and reproduces the capital relation itself.”

— Karl Marx, Capital Vol. I

“They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.”

— Silvia Federici

At Life Against Capital, I frequently discuss the importance of social reproduction. Any system, any revolution, any transition, must feed, clean, clothes and “live” itself. Social reproduction is the reproduction of life itself, and not just production but everything required for people to continue living: care, housing, food, relationships, education, community, and survival

Capitalism depends on social reproduction and often erases it as a labour, and also constantly destabilises it. A Life Against Capital approach starts here because people are not abstract political subjects. They are tired, indebted, and caring for others while trying to survive.

This is why awareness alone is not enough for people to act, to my take on change. Politics depends on the capacities that social reproduction makes possible.

Struggle

“Between equal rights, force decides.”
— Marx, Capital

Not simply conflict, but the lived tension between life and the relations that organise it. Struggle is not only declared or visible; it is present wherever the conditions of life come into contradiction with the conditions required for accumulation. It unfolds across work, time, care, and survival, shaping how those relations are endured, resisted, and transformed. Struggle is the ground from which collective action, consciousness, and new forms of life emerge.

The State

“The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms.”
— Lenin, State and Revolution (1917)

“The state is the condensation of a relationship of forces between classes and class fractions.”
— Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (1978)

The state is structured power based on class struggle, and currently expresses a resolution of this power struggle for the forces of capital. It is not a neutral authority, but a structured relation shaped by class struggle. The state organises and stabilises the conditions under which production and power are maintained, presenting these arrangements as universal even as they reflect specific balances of force.

Transition

“Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other.”
— Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875)

Not a fixed stage, but a process. Transition names the reorganisation of social relations as one form of life gives way to another, shaped by the conditions from which it emerges.

Wage labour

“The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces…”
— Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844)

“Labour-power… becomes a commodity.”
— Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I (1867)

Not simply work, but a relation in which labour power is sold as a commodity. Wage labour organises life around the production of value, separating people from the conditions of their own subsistence and binding survival to participation in accumulation.

To end where I begin

I’ve left the above deliberately unfinished, because I will be adding to it over the coming years. When we use these terms, we shouldn’t seek agreement on wording.

We should ask: What analysis of society are we making when we use them?

If that isn’t clear, the definition stops being analysis and becomes rigid ideology.

Most dictionaries aim for closure. This isn’t a dictionary. What it offers instead is a way of working with words as they are used: not as fixed meanings, but as tools for tracing the relations that organise social life. Not what words mean in isolation, but what they do and the histories in which they intervene.

When I was a child, my mother’s dictionary felt like it captured every word. But in the intervening years, I realised it was a survival manual and the words I spoke with my mother, the stories she shared, are never finished. They carry the histories of their use, the tensions of the relations they condense, and the possibility that those relations might be understood differently.

That’s why this is not simply a dictionary; it is a working vocabulary for life against capital.

“The problem with taking from others,” Donald Trump wearily postured while being interviewed about his trip to China, “is that they will ask for something in return.”

Trump’s statement sounds crude. And it is: a zero sum statement about international relations and life. Transactional and antisocial. But it is also resoundingly familiar, so much so that Trump even made a passing impression of packaging it as geopolitical “prudence”.

In its bluntest form, such “prudence” and homespun common sense names the way people are forced to live under capitalism: nothing without exchange, nothing without return.

Recently, I read an article published in Damage Magazine on Substack: Dustin “Dino” Guastella’s “Anti-Social Socialism Club: What happens to a Left that dislikes society?”. Guastella, a Teamster union leader, opens with a scene of environmental (and NIMBY) protest aimed against a redevelopment of Philadelphia’s “Meadows”, the park lands first created by FDR. What he sees here is a failure from the Left to embrace new social forms, a kind of general retreat into pointless, mobile isolation. A veritable antisocial mob of “infantile” Left disorders.

Guastella is incredibly articulate about the problem and even touches directly on the causes:

The roots of the antisocial attitude run deep. They find their origin in all the structural features of our society that are ambivalent or antagonistic toward our greater social impulses: the creep of market logic into even the most private parts of our lives, the drive to privatize everything that was once public, and, of course, the tendency for work-life to devour the rest of life.

There's so much here to unpack about “the creep of market logic” and “the tendency for work-life to devour the rest of life”: we could even start to see the structural way that these forces are connected, the way that Capitalism devours life through its mechanisms disciplining our social relations. The damage is clear: a thinning of social life, an “ever-shrinking public sphere,” a deepening “social misery.” So far, Guastella is remarkably accurate and incisive.

However, Guastella’s call for a new moral and cultural commitment to sociability is the major response of the piece, and I'm going to spend a short space here understanding how this approach may slip away from the problem itself. When Guastella is calling for a new political platform for “partisans of sociability” to restore “the commons” and rebuild trust, he is asking for the Left to provide a response to the loss of social life based on a new commitment to it that's beyond conservativism and progressivism, or perhaps absorbs the appeal of both.

This can be understood as a broadly left social democratic response to capitalism. Its diagnosis is accurate: capitalism destroys social bonds. And its response is to call on us, and the left in particular, to become “partisans of sociability” and restore “our collective faith in The Commons and in each other” through renewed state investment that reinvigorates the communities and organisations such as unions that stage collective life.

There's certainly an appealing aspect to this approach. However, it’s important to point out that Guastella never fully addresses the social relations that are producing that breakdown, and addresses them only at a moral and cultural level. Under capitalism, however, sociability isn’t just neglected, something waiting to be restored by its partisans. It is actively disciplined by the economic relations of capitalism, by necessity and manufactured scarcity.

People are forced to relate to each other through wage dependence, competition and the market mediation of basic needs. This is not incidental. It is how life under capital is organised. And if we're not clear about these structures of power, we can easily find ourselves committing to them in order to socialize relations within our system of power.

When Donald Trump tells us not to trust people—unless you can extract from them without meeting their expectations for mutual aid—his formulation is not an aberration. It is the everyday wisdom of capital: the expectation that nothing is given without exchange, nothing shared without return. It is the language that people use because they’re made to live inside a system that suits it.

What is accepted as simply a way of surviving produces a social world that is thin, fragile, corrosive, instrumental, and frequently openly abusive. Under these conditions, sociability itself becomes precarious, something squeezed into the margins of lives structured by necessity.

Calling for more sociability within this system—more chances to connect, more opportunities to trust—misses the point. It risks demanding that people extend themselves socially within relations that continually undermine that very possibility.

This risk is what Trump’s line expresses in crude, misrecognized form: exchange is an inevitable structure in capitalism as a system of power. But it reflects a more precise truth. You can’t socialise your way out of relations that are structurally antisocial. Not without an open struggle to change those relations. A struggle that will always risk being labeled as antisocial, naïve, unrealistic or, at worst, criminal.

Which reveals something important. The truly antisocial regime is capitalism itself. Beyond its familiar brutalities—and the hierarchies such as racism it reproduces—it is structured by who controls production, which determines how people access the means of life, and how labour and care are organised. And these structures are bundled up the condensation of social relations we call a State.

This is where the idea of “the commons” is difficult to locate with precision. As it appears in the piece, the commons is something to be restored through belief and investment. But without confronting the forces that continually enclose and reorganise life—markets, property, wage dependence—it risks becoming either a moral appeal or a state-managed patch. Or perhaps both, just like the perfect redevelopment pitch with which Guastella opens his piece in which Philadelphia’s Meadows are protected for social use and unions and business are appeased at the same time.

But such happy harmonies are problematic. The commons is not something permitted within the system, but it must be something that transforms it. Because the commons cannot exist without confronting enclosure and extraction.

The danger is that “partisans of sociability” end up building islands of connection—spaces of trust, care, and mutuality—that are constantly eroded by the conditions people must return to in order to survive.

The problem is not a lack of sociability. It is that sociability itself is made fragile by the way life is organised. Which is why the case for socialism cannot rest on the idea that capitalism makes us lonely. It must rest on something more accurate and more embedded in the struggle against Capital, the power system that forces us into antisocial relations in order to live at all.

From this perspective, the task is not, as Guastella suggests, to restore sociability on top of existing relations. It is to change those relations, to reduce dependence on markets for survival, to bring production and social reproduction under collective control and to reorganise how people are materially connected to one another. The political form that achieves this is unlikely to look like Guastella's appeal to restoration.

The commons is never restored, but it can be produced through the reorganisation of life itself. Only by rejecting any simple restoration over the top of existing social relations does “the commons” stop being an appeal to behave differently—an act of faith in each other—and become something real:

a set of shared conditions of life that no longer force us to relate through competition within enclosure in the first place.

It is sickening viewing. And I do not want to minimise what the documentary reveals. But I do want to offer a critique from a Marxist perspective.

First of all, a Marxist must resist separating technology from the social relations that produce it.

Several times in the documentary, it was suggested that platforms like Facebook directly cause social division and negative emotions such as rage. However, we should be clear that platforms did not create loneliness, alienation, insecurity, resentment, exhaustion, or diffuse social anger.

Ultimately, Capitalism did.

The platforms inside Capitalism and its structures discovered that these emotions could be organised, accelerated, measured, and monetised. There is a distinction here.

A great deal of discussion about social media treats the platform itself as the primary cause of social hostility, as though outrage emerged from the algorithm alone. But a Marxist perspective is not satisfied with a reductive explanation. The full explanation begins earlier, with the conditions of life producing the affect in the first place.

People are currently living through rising precarity, collapsing public trust, housing insecurity, stagnant wages, permanent competition, social fragmentation, declining community life, and growing feelings of powerlessness over the institutions shaping their existence. These conditions generate frustration long before anyone opens an app.

They are conditions exacerbated and produced by a political and economic system that requires people to have little meaningful say over how their lives are shaped by industrial and institutional processes outside their control. A system that repeatedly generates crises and disciplining shocks while demanding adaptation from ordinary people.

The algorithm enters afterward. And what it discovers is that anger is profitable. Outrage keeps people engaged. Engagement generates data. Data generates advertising revenue.

The platform will never fundamentally optimise for truth, democracy, or the flourishing of everyday life. It optimises for retention and behavioural capture at any externalised cost because it is structurally incentivised to do so.

That said, it is true that the platform does more than amplify emotion. It reshapes the political form that emotion takes.

Instead of collective anger directed upward toward systems of power, social suffering becomes fragmented into endless horizontal conflict between individuals. Structural problems become moralised personal disputes. Economic insecurity mutates into culture war. Isolation becomes performance. Public life collapses into permanent reaction.

This is one reason online discourse feels both emotionally intense and politically stagnant at the same time.

The system circulates outrage continuously while preventing sustained confrontation with the conditions generating it.

Marxists have long argued that Capitalism is a power system that obscures the structural causes of suffering. Social media intensifies that obscurity. It transforms diffuse social antagonism into monetisable emotional engagement.

The platform increasingly resembles a factory for affect, with labourers who will work for free, hustlers and grifters produced within the enclosure itself.

Users produce content, attention, emotional stimulation, behavioural data, and algorithmic training — mostly without pay. We are simultaneously consumers, producers, workers, and products. Even our anger becomes economically productive, and fuels waves of new consumption trends in the next newest normal of crisis.

This is why purely moral critiques of social media often feel inadequate. The issue is not simply that people are “too emotional” or “too online.” It is that human feeling itself has become raw material for accumulation, and profiting from it has been widely normalized by silent, structural decree.

Beneath all of this lies a deeper reality: many people increasingly feel they have little meaningful control over work, housing, institutions, or politics. Symbolic conflict online becomes one of the few remaining spaces where agency appears immediately available.

The result is a society trapped in a cycle of stimulation without transformation. The platforms did not create the crisis, but they did industrialise it, and scale a problem with a material solution: a transition away from Capitalism.

Being a teacher during sustained industrial action means inhabiting contradiction constantly. One week in March, 35,000 of us were marching through the streets in Melbourne. Bystanders applauded from footpaths and tram stops. Teachers saw their own collective power and many of us were briefly filled with solidarity and the political energy that everyday school life suppresses. Several weeks later, with the carnivalesque feelings still lingering faintly in the background, we are teaching as usual while still banning meetings, wearing red shirts, and debating whether further stop-work action is “necessary.” The largest actions capable of producing real political pressure are now suspended while the very real pressures of workload, exhaustion, and administrative collapse steadily return to settle back upon us.

Across Victoria, regional half-day work stoppages were planned and many of us were preparing for the return of that political energy and solidarity when the Government leaked to the press that a deal might be close. For the first time some saw a finishing line, although most knew that it could still wedge teachers and education support staff and there were no details on conditions. Gradually, the union leadership began speaking about strategic restraint. Suddenly, last week the union suspended the rolling half-day work stoppages. The disorientation is very real. Increasingly the question emerging among teachers and education support staff is not simply whether a deal is close, but what our strategy should be in the first place.

When you are living through industrial negotiations, even though you’re at your most visible publicly, it can still feel as though you are suddenly living underground, beneath the social relations normally taken for granted, where tensions and ambiguities usually hidden beneath institutional life begin surfacing into visibility. Your exhaustion becomes political. Your time becomes political. Even your inability to think clearly after another week of collapsing workloads and administrative absurdity becomes part of the terrain upon which bargaining, governance, and dissent are organised.

You begin looking differently at the political ecosystem surrounding you. Things that previously appeared natural begin seeming contingent. A different horizon briefly becomes imaginable even as the institutional limits surrounding it simultaneously narrow.

I have written elsewhere in Life Against Capital about Marxism as a practice: not simply a theory explaining society from outside, but a practice of learning to perceive the social relations already moving through one’s own life. The recent teacher dispute in Victoria has forced that question into unusually concrete form for me.

Earlier last week, after the Government began leaking to the press that they would be offering a higher pay deal, I sent a motion to my organiser reaffirming our key claims and calling for further 24-hour strikes. The motion itself was raised by teachers from several schools across regions like mine and I had first seen it shared by Socialists in Schools. My school sub-branch voted to support it, and as general secretary of the branch I eventually found myself emailing the organiser directly.

The response from my organiser was politely managerial, with a touch of tetchy. I was told these motions had already appeared elsewhere, were already being debated “centrally,” and had failed in another region. Then came the line that stayed with me most: he thought I should know all this because I was “usually very considered.”

By the time I arrived at our regional AEU meeting a few days later, I was exhausted enough after nonstop days at school that I almost did not speak at all. When I sent my motion, the union leadership had just announced the suspension of the rolling regional stop-work actions planned for the following week. I knew there would be anger in the room, but I also knew many members would accept the logic that negotiations were progressing and therefore escalation should pause, even though no final agreement had been tabled before members.

So I was unusually nervous. I had never floated a motion at this level inside the AEU before, although I am a long-term unionist. The organiser’s phrase kept returning to me: “usually very considered.” I became almost determined to prove precisely that. I spoke to teachers beforehand. I encouraged members from my branch to attend. I planned strategy with socialist teachers who were also coming to the meeting. They detailed their plans to table motions, and be loud in the room. I agreed that if they were vocal in the room early enough, it might create the conditions for the motions later.

When I arrived, my suspicions were immediately confirmed. The room was overflowing: tense classroom teachers, newly politicised members drawn in by the dispute, veteran union figures visibly irritated or disoriented by the sudden emergence of younger militants and procedural troublemakers. The socialist teachers I knew were there too, along with members from my own sub-branch, which steadied me somewhat, and we sat together talking about school matters as we waited for a meeting we thought would be a doozy. The atmosphere carried that peculiar mixture familiar to anyone who has spent time inside institutional politics: fatigue, suspicion, proceduralism, suppressed anger.

I handed over a stack of printed copies of the motion. My exchange with the organiser was awkward but cordial. He joked about how organised we were. Nearby, another motion circulated condemning the suspension of the rolling regional strikes which, I knew, had come from another school with a fellow socialist teacher. We ate the pizza that had been ordered, and gratefully they included the dietary requirements for everyone, and waited.

The major event of the evening was the arrival of the Deputy Secretary, sent by leadership to discuss negotiations and steady the room. Her speech, which went for forty minutes, dominated the meeting. It was a long justification for the suspension of strikes and the need to be strategic in negotiations with the Government. The response from the chair and organiser was a constant insistence upon proceduralism directed at the rank and file members themselves. Several fiery responses erupted from teachers, alongside quieter support for leadership. Some interventions — particularly from socialist teachers willing to openly confront leadership — butted directly against the assumption that anything other than support for the union leadership’s current approach was some version of “pie in the sky,” “unreasonable,” “reckless,” or “misinformation.” These interventions disrupted the room enough, because the leadership had became visibly defensive.

What interested me, though, was not simply the disagreement itself but the way the emotional equilibrium of the room was beginning to shift. What became increasingly clear throughout the meeting was that the disagreement was not merely over demands, timelines, or tactics, but over the meaning of strategy itself. The Deputy Secretary repeatedly attempted to define the boundaries of what strategy and responsibility could mean in relation to the kind of pressure exerted upon the Government. Again and again the discussion returned to the same managerial language: maintaining pressure without escalation, avoiding unnecessary stop-work action, securing what was “reasonable,” interpreting negotiations primarily through affordability, electoral realities, Treasury limits, and governance concerns. The implicit horizon was always the same: strategy understood as the careful administration of bargaining within already accepted political realities.

But beneath that official framework another understanding of strategy was surfacing among many teachers and education support staff in the room. Not strategy as the management of negotiations and managing expectations, but strategy as collective organising: the active production of political pressure capable of transforming what governments themselves experience as politically necessary, electorally survivable, or realistically negotiable. In that framework industrial action does not merely respond to negotiations; it reshapes the ground upon which negotiations occur.

The union leadership present did not seem to be fully grasping what had emerged through the strike itself: the growing awareness of conditions, the growth of solidarity, the collective awareness of power, and the recognition among many teachers that political pressure was not merely a limited tactic but a transformative social experience. They remained trapped within instrumental rationality, interpreting teachers speaking to it as “passion” and desire to strike as excessive emotionality and “pie in the sky” rather than an equally rational response to the conditions of the cost-of-living crisis, the school funding crisis, and the teacher retention and recruitment crisis.

The power to reshape political reality itself did not appear to leadership as something to be consciously cultivated, but as something volatile to be contained, managed, and ultimately returned to the common sense of school budgets, Treasury limits, and administrative realism.

This was partly why the suspension of rolling strikes produced such anger. For leadership, the strikes increasingly appeared as tactical instruments to be carefully calibrated within negotiations. For many classroom teachers, however, they had become one of the few remaining mechanisms through which members could collectively experience their own social power directly.

What has stayed with me most from the discussion surrounding the deputy secretary’s speech was not the official motions, nor even the procedural debate surrounding them, but a brief involuntary reaction that passed almost unnoticed across the room: the audible gasp at the projected financial cost of having reduced face-to-face teaching hours since 2012. This was presented by the organiser, and it was meant to be the salient point from the union leadership.

The moment itself was fleeting, almost mundane, yet it crystallised something much deeper than disagreement over bargaining priorities. What surfaced in that instant was the extent to which the logic of austerity had already been internalised inside an organisation historically formed to resist precisely that logic, until eventually the fiscal frameworks of governments and Treasury departments begin appearing not as political choices produced through contestable priorities and social struggle, but as reality itself — the unquestioned horizon within which all “serious” strategy must already remain confined.

But teachers speaking to an alternative horizon began to shift the room. Eventually, the meeting had to shift to motions. To do so, procedurally, they extended the meeting 40 minutes. It seemed unconsciously to be a strange way - but again presented as necessary, inevitable - of showing that the motions were a contamination, a space of procedure that had to be isolated, even though they were on the agenda. It was also a chance for people to leave. But the crowd remained.

When I finally spoke to introduce a motion reaffirming our key claims and supporting 24-hour strikes, what struck me was how little the impact of my intervention depended upon the rhetorical brilliance that had already been used up. Earlier speakers had already destabilised the room emotionally enough that leadership authority no longer felt entirely settled. My role became different. While I spoke with passion, I also spoke carefully, as a local member, someone who knew union procedures, used inclusive language, tactically agreed with leadership where it mattered before disagreeing where it mattered more, and even someone who was slightly academic.

I spoke to the need for leadership to hear the Western Suburbs as a region, a debate we needed to have even if it would ultimately be had centrally, even if similar motions had failed elsewhere. I spoke to the crisis we found ourselves living through and, agreeing that strategic clarity mattered enormously, I introduced the motion on precisely those grounds.

The moment that seemed to shift the room was when I attempted to name a contradiction increasingly organising the room itself: if we care about strategic clarity, I argued, we should be careful not to confuse negotiations strategy with wider union strategy. I stressed that the negotiations team was likely highly capable and should be allowed to do what it did best. But negotiations alone were not strategy. The strategic task of members was something else entirely: producing the political pressure capable of changing what governments themselves considered realistic in the first place. And we should be intensifying pressure now, even if negotiations were supposedly close to an offer, because that was precisely when pressure mattered most.

Strikes should remain on the calendar because the Government had repeatedly demonstrated it was not operating in good faith, even attempting to prevent industrial action in court. Members did not trust the Government, and we would only secure the best possible outcome through organised pressure. I called on the union to unleash its members politically against the Government because, increasingly, the pressure was simply being redirected back onto us.

What mattered was not merely the sentences themselves but the way the room suddenly recognised itself within that framing. Something about the procedural common sense that had governed the meeting until that point partially collapsed.

And I think many people in that room recognised that I was naming a deeper danger facing unions, particularly education unions: not weakness, bureaucracy, or conservatism in the narrow sense, but the gradual slippage of unions from organisations that mobilise collective antagonism into organisations that increasingly govern and manage that antagonism itself, disciplining demands before they fully emerge, translating anger into administratively acceptable language, and confusing negotiation — which should only ever be one tactical moment within a broader struggle over political necessity — with strategy itself.

Negotiation, detached from the active production of collective pressure, simply becomes administration. Teachers already live inside administration every day: endless directives, shifting expectations, procedural management, quietly accumulating forms of exhaustion. And increasingly unions risk reproducing internally the same managerial rationalities imposed externally upon their members.
Education unions are particularly susceptible to becoming neoliberal administrators because they occupy a contradictory position inside the state itself: they represent workers charged not only with selling their labour, but with reproducing the social order through schooling, administration, care, discipline, and the management of social crisis.

Historically, teacher unionism emerged through struggles over professional autonomy, public education, and working conditions, yet over time — especially through the managerial reforms and union incorporation of the Accord era in Australia — education unions became increasingly embedded within systems of governance, consultation, accountability, and policy implementation. As schools themselves were reorganised along neoliberal lines through audits, data regimes, performance metrics, managerial oversight, and austerity, unions were drawn structurally toward negotiating and administrating these pressures rather than mobilising against the political rationality producing them.

You can hear the shift in language everywhere now. “Budget”. “Responsible.” “Realistic.” “Affordable.” “Manageable.” What becomes striking is not merely the vocabulary itself, but the way these categories are experienced as neutral descriptions of reality rather than ideological interpretations of it. Treasury logic becomes common sense. Government priorities become moral priorities. Political questions become accounting questions. What begins as a historically specific managerial framework gradually transforms into a general social rationality through which people come to experience imposed limits as inevitable, natural, even virtuous.

This is what Antonio Gramsci called hegemony: not domination maintained primarily through force, but through the successful organisation of common sense itself. Neoliberalism’s deepest victory in our institutions has been just that, and when institutions originally formed to contest existing social relations slowly begin reproducing them internally, eventually even unions tasked with expanding political possibility come to experience themselves primarily as responsible for containing expectations within limits already authorised by the state.

And so the strategic question facing unions now becomes sharper than many leaderships are willing to admit: whether strategy means merely managing negotiations within existing political limits, or whether unions remain capable of cultivating the collective capacities through which those limits themselves become politically contestable.

What struck me most clearly about that night was how quickly the common sense of the leadership dissolved once a new framing emerged through shared frustration, listening, reflection upon lived experience, and the willingness of some teachers to openly rupture the emotional equilibrium of the room. A different kind of subjectivity began forming almost visibly, as teachers who represented the depth of what procedures could not contain emerged to transform the meeting. The meeting ceased relating to itself merely as an audience receiving managerial explanation and began instead functioning as a political body thinking collectively in real time.

As soon as the motions were tabled, as soon as speakers openly challenged the suspension of strikes and members began recognising their own frustrations reflected publicly in one another, the atmosphere shifted almost palpably. Teachers who had arrived uncertain, cautious, privately frustrated, suddenly began speaking differently. The room itself became more confident than the individuals who had entered it.

What changed was not simply opinion. It was the social organisation of perception itself: the way people understood their own experiences, one another, and the political horizon surrounding them. The speaker to the second motion cut through to everyone in the room and mentioned how for many ES staff, the strikes were their only way to take action. The room started changing its mind. At the end of the meeting, a veteran education support staff member spoke, crying, and she said that in over a decade, she had never felt so supported.

For a brief period the meeting stopped functioning primarily as a bureaucratic exercise in information management and became something closer to what Habermas once imagined communicative rationality might look like before its colonisation by administrative systems: a space where people collectively tested meanings, interpretations, possibilities, and strategic understandings against one another rather than simply receiving managerial rationality from above. The procedural surface of the meeting remained intact, but underneath it another process was occurring: the emergence of collective intelligibility — the process through which isolated experiences, frustrations, and contradictions become socially recognisable and politically meaningful.

And increasingly I think this is one of the central political questions of my writings at Life Against Capital: how does life under capitalism become capable of recognising itself as historical, collective, and transformable?

Because capitalism survives not merely through ownership or coercion but through the successful fragmentation of experience itself. Exhaustion is privatised. Stress is individualised. Failure becomes psychological rather than political. People encounter structural crises as personal inadequacies. The social totality disappears into isolated biography.

Strikes interrupt this process, not only because they withdraw labour, but because they reorganise perception.

What appeared private suddenly becomes collectively intelligible. The ordinary common sense of institutional life fractures slightly and another layer of reality becomes visible beneath it.

Perhaps this is why being inside sustained industrial action feels strangely subterranean. It feels as though one is suddenly living beneath the official social order, inside tensions and contradictions normally concealed beneath institutional routine. The strike becomes a kind of underground not because it is hidden, but because it reveals the hidden social relations already structuring everyday life.

And perhaps this is also why political consciousness develops unevenly, emotionally, socially, rather than according to the clean managerial models imagined by bureaucratic politics. Marx understood that the working class is not born fully conscious. It becomes conscious through struggle, contradiction, organisation, and recognition. A class exists “against capital” before it fully becomes “for itself.” Consciousness emerges socially.

Watching that room shift, I found myself thinking that industrial disputes are not simply negotiations over wages and conditions. They are open laboratories of political subjectivity. Strange spaces where people begin experimenting, often awkwardly and incompletely, with new ways of understanding themselves and one another. You can almost watch consciousness forming in real time: spreading unevenly across conversations, frustrations, side comments, procedural arguments, moments of laughter, moments of anger.

Marx once lifted lines from Hamlet and wrote of revolution as “the old mole” burrowing beneath history — unseen, subterranean, slowly tunnelling beneath the apparent solidity of the existing order before suddenly breaking through the surface. Sitting in that meeting, I began noticing how political consciousness develops in much the same way: not linearly, not cleanly, not through abstract persuasion alone, but through the gradual accumulation of contradictions within ordinary life itself, through buried recognitions, shared frustrations, suppressed aspirations, and moments where people suddenly encounter their own experiences reflected socially in others.

And when communication can name those contradictions, when it can transform isolated experience into collective intelligibility and give emerging frustrations political form, new forms of organisation and solidarity begin becoming possible. Beneath the surface of institutional life, another commons begins forming: a commons of becoming.

Perhaps this is the underground. Not conspiratorial politics. Not ideological purity. The slow subterranean movement through which life under capitalism begins recognising itself against it.

The ground is hegemony: the organised appearance of inevitability. The underground is where buried contradictions become collectively intelligible, where suppressed rationalities — often dismissed merely as “passion” — encounter one another, where private exhaustion becomes social recognition, where people begin discovering that what they had experienced as personal failure was political all along, and where these emerging forms of solidarity and recognition are not immediately absorbed back into the machinery that stabilises capitalism.

The underground is the space where political collectivities become intelligible, in the light we dig beneath the darkness of common sense, where the old mole keeps digging, grubbing out new truths beneath the surface that the world keeps insisting is necessary and inevitable.

Has the vegan moment really ended?

The vegan moment can be understood as a decade in the 2010s when it appeared as if a shift in ethical recognition might begin to reshape everyday life. It now looks more uncertain. Recent media, punditry, and sales data suggest that veganism has declined from the heights it reached less than a decade ago.

In 2018, The Economist declared that 2019 would be “the year of veganism,” predicting that a quarter of adults might soon adopt a vegan diet. The claim was expansive, widely amplified, and—for a moment—plausible. It also appeared globally, although the epicenter of it seemed to be the imperial core.

The explanations offered why this transformation was not realized are familiar: backlash, fatigue, the drift of “anti-woke” sentiment. But these accounts remain at the level of culture. They describe changes in visibility while leaving largely untouched the conditions in which those changes occur.

What has shifted more fundamentally is the organization of life itself. The post-COVID-19 landscape has altered the conditions for work, time, risk, and social reproduction. People have reshaped their routines under pressure—consolidating social ties, adjusting consumption, recalibrating what is reliable and sustainable in conditions of uncertainty. These shifts have had material consequences: media ecosystems have contracted, restaurants have struggled or closed, and everyday consumption have been impacted.

At the same time, capital has moved. Investment has retreated from speculative expansion into new or untested consumer niches and returned to sectors considered stable, necessary, and profitable under crisis conditions: industrial agriculture, logistics, health systems, and resource extraction. In this context, plant-based markets—once buoyed by optimism—have contracted, not simply because of changing tastes, but because they sit within a broader shift in economic priorities.

Veganism expanded in a moment when capital could afford to imagine alternatives. It contracted when capital returned to securing what already exists.

And yet, something else that is usually backgrounded must be brought to the foreground here. On a planet of eight billion people, the scale of animal exploitation—which Veganism sets out to morally address and resolve—has not diminished. Each year, over 80 billion land animals are slaughtered for food. Trillions of sentient fish are caught or farmed. Systems of production have become more centralised, more intensive, and more deeply embedded in global supply chains. At the same time, wild animal populations have declined dramatically as they are killed by the machinery or extraction or habitats are cleared, fragmented, and produced in the service of accumulation.

What we see, then, is that the system expands. And within it, refusal expands too. More people than ever attempt to live without exploiting animals—changing what they eat, what they wear, and what they buy. Despite having its bubble burst by media on a moment, Veganism has moved from the margins into everyday life. What was once unthinkable has become, for many, livable.

But in a seeming contradiction, these developments do not resolve one another. They advance together. More industrial exploitation and animal production than ever, and more industrial production of Veganism than ever. This phenomenon is not a contradiction of ideas, but of material and social relations—one that forces us to think and analyse differently.

If veganism is treated primarily as a matter of individual consumption—of better choices, clearer recognition, ethical alignment—its limits appear cultural: fatigue, backlash, inconsistency. But if it is understood as a practice embedded within a system of production, then a different question emerges:

What would it take not simply to refuse that system, but to transform it?

Properly understood, this is a question of transition. And it remains largely untheorized. In this piece, I will begin providing more of a theory in lieu of a response.

The Social Relations of Veganism

To start understanding how to address the question of transition, we need to understand that no one lives ethically in isolation.

What we eat, what we can access, what we can sustain over time—these are not simply matters of conviction, but are structured by work, time, cost, infrastructure, habit, and the dense, often invisible relations that organise everyday life under capitalism.

Veganism, in this sense, is not best understood as a choice. It is a practice lived within a set of social relations. To become vegan is not simply to substitute one set of products for another. It is to navigate a world in which food systems are organised around animal production, in which labour compresses time, in which affordability is structured by industrial scale, and in which social life is mediated through shared norms of eating. What appears, at the moment of decision, as clarity, unfolds over time as a process of rebuilding our life.

When I became vegan over fifteen years ago, it was one of the most significant decisions I have made, but also one of the most difficult. The first year did not feel like a seamless transition into a more ethical life, but like a series of dislocations. Relationships shifted. Familiar routines no longer held. Social spaces became strained, at times inaccessible. The difficulty was not simply dietary. It was relational.

Even with relatively supportive conditions—a partner making the transition alongside me, access to information and resources—the process was uneven. There were moments of isolation, moments in which the pull of what had previously been normal felt not only strong, but structurally reinforced. What I was encountering was not simply the difficulty of maintaining a commitment, but the difficulty of sustaining a different way of living within relations that had not changed.

Over time, this began to shift. What had initially felt like loss became something else: a gradual transformation of life I actively undertook but that sustained itself through ups and down. New forms of support emerged—communities, shared practices, infrastructures that made the practice not only possible, but livable. What sustained the transition was not will alone, but the partial reconstruction of the relations within which that will had to operate.

This is what is often underplayed. Transition is not a moment of recognition. It is a process of transitioning that requires material and social change. And it is uneven, contingent, and socially mediated at every point. Some experience it as relatively straightforward; others encounter it as prolonged difficulty and many “relapse”.

What appears, from the outside, as inconsistency or failure often reflects the limits of what can be sustained within the existing organisation of life. Relapse, however, is a common thing. There are, quite simply, far more former vegans than current ones.

That fact is rarely centred. Instead, vegan discourse tends to present transition as a matter of information and clarity: once the reality of animal exploitation is seen, the appropriate response follows. “Go vegan” becomes a call that presumes the conditions of life will adjust to support the practice.

But they do not. What appears as individual failure is, stepping back, the expression of collective conditions. And what is framed as inconsistency is frequently the limit of what can be lived within relations that continue to reproduce the very practices being refused.

This matters not only at the level of individual experience, but at the level of social transformation. Because the transition away from animal exploitation is not simply a substitution of consumption. It is the transformation of life.

At the level of the individual, this involves the reworking of habits, relationships, and forms of belonging. At the level of society, it would require the complete transformation of agriculture, labour, land use, and supply chains embedded within global systems of capital. It would mean overturning the material conditions through which both human and animal life are reproduced.

These are not marginal adjustments. They are systemic changes which only struggle resolves. And yet, within much of vegan discourse, they do remain largely untheorised. Instead, veganism is stabilised as a form of consumption—absorbed into markets even as it resists them, rendered purchasable, identifiable, and scalable. The system accommodates the practice without accepting its implications.

This is why the question of social relations cannot be treated as secondary: because domination persists most effectively when it appears as necessity.

When we think about veganism, the figure of the hunter often returns, quietly structuring the limits of what can be imagined. It appears as a grounding myth: that animal use is natural, inevitable, anchored in the conditions of human survival.

But what this figure reveals is not necessity. It reveals organisation. The image of the hunter-gatherer as precarious and dependent on constant animal killing is less an anthropological fact than a projection of modern assumptions backward into history. As Marshall Sahlins argued:

“the world’s most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor… poverty… is a relation between people.”

In fact, hunter-gatherers were regular plant-based eaters and only intermittently hunted. They formed “the original affluent society”, one which produced far less, a few hours a day of work for group that socially organized their needs. Hunter-gatherers, depending on local conditions, could have been layabout, well-fed mostly vegans who lived short but happy lives.

The reversal that Sahlins presents matters, because it shows that the conditions of life are organised socially before they are experienced individually. In any society, we need to understand the mode of production and the social relations that flow from it to consider what is possible and what we could change.

Animal Liberation and the Limits of Recognition

Animal liberation has not emerged in the absence of theory. It has been shaped by a series of increasingly sophisticated attempts to understand the moral, legal, and social status of animals within modern societies. These attempts do not simply accompany the rise of veganism; they inform it, give it coherence, and establish the terms through which it is most often understood.

And yet, when read in sequence, the texts of animal liberation tend to reveal a pattern. Each advances the critique, each deepens the problem, and each stops short of the conditions required for its transformation.

The work of Peter Singer marks a decisive starting point. In Animal Liberation (1975), Singer asks not whether animals can reason, but whether they can suffer. The shift is significant. It displaces moral consideration from rational capacity to sentience, opening the possibility that animals must be included within the sphere of ethical concern.

But the force of this move lies in recognition. Suffering must be seen, acknowledged, weighed. The problem is framed in terms of consistency: if we take suffering seriously, we must extend that concern beyond the human. The solution, correspondingly, appears as an adjustment of behaviour—an alignment of action with what has been recognised.

What remains largely unaddressed are the conditions in which that suffering is produced. The system that organises animal exploitation does not enter centrally into the analysis. It appears as the background against which moral reasoning takes place, rather than as a structure that must itself be transformed. The shift from recognition to transition does not occur.

With Tom Regan, the argument deepens. In The Case for Animal Rights (1983), animals are no longer simply beings whose suffering counts, but subjects-of-a-life, possessing inherent value. This move attempts to secure a firmer foundation for animal rights—one that cannot be overridden by calculations of utility.

Here, the language shifts from suffering to rights, from consideration to obligation. And yet, the form of the solution remains strikingly similar. If animals possess rights, then those rights must be respected. The ethical subject is again called upon to align their conduct with what has been recognised as morally binding. The framework intensifies the claim, but does not fundamentally alter the site at which it is to be realised. The system remains. The subject adjusts.

It is with Gary Francione that the problem of structure is most clearly named. In Animals, Property, and the Law (1995), Francione argues that the central issue is not simply how animals are treated, but their status as property. So long as animals are owned, their interests will always be subordinated to those who own them. Welfare reforms, in this view, do not challenge exploitation; they stabilise it, functioning as what he calls a “moral placebo.”

This is a decisive insight. For the first time, the analysis turns explicitly to a structural relation—property—and identifies it as the condition of possibility for exploitation. The implication is radical: if animals are to be liberated, the institution of their use must be abolished.

And yet, at the level of practice, the argument returns to a familiar form. The abolition of property becomes, in practice, the demand for veganism as a moral baseline. The structural diagnosis is displaced into ethical alignment. The transformation of social relations is reframed as the multiplication of properly aligned subjects. The structure is seen, but the transition is assumed.

With Corey Lee Wrenn, attention turns to the movement itself. In works such as A Rational Approach to Animal Rights (2016) and later writing on vegan neoliberalism, Wrenn traces how veganism operates within contemporary capitalism—how it is institutionalised, professionalised, and increasingly incorporated into market logics. Veganism becomes legible to the system precisely as it becomes consumable—reframed as lifestyle, identity, and purchasable choice.

Here, the question of conditions returns. The movement is not simply advocating within a system; it is being reshaped by it. Its expansion becomes compatible with the very relations it might otherwise challenge. This is an essential insight. But again, a limit appears.

The critique identifies capture, but offers less by way of transformation. The system is described, but the process through which it might be actually changed remains largely implicit.

With John Sanbonmatsu, the scope widens further. In Critical Theory and Animal Liberation (2011), animal exploitation is situated within a broader system of domination—linked to capitalism, to the instrumentalisation of nature, and to the violence underpinning modern production. What appears in earlier accounts as a moral or legal problem is now understood as part of a totality.

This is the most expansive formulation. The problem is no longer how individuals treat animals, but how a system organises life. And yet, with this expansion comes a new difficulty.

The analysis captures the breadth of domination, but the mechanisms of transformation remain less clearly specified. The problem deepens, but the pathway forward does not become proportionally clearer.

Across these approaches, a pattern emerges. Recognition expands. The critique sharpens. The scope widens. But the question of transition—of how the relations that sustain animal exploitation are to be transformed in practice—remains underdeveloped. The movement from seeing to transforming is assumed, rather than constructed.

Historical Limits of Ethical Refusal

This pattern is not new. Long before veganism emerged as a modern ethical practice, the problem of how humans should relate to other sentient beings was articulated with extraordinary clarity and seriousness. The principle of ahimsa—non-violence toward all living beings—developed in ancient India as one of the most rigorous ethical orientations in human history. It remains in practice today. It is not symbolic. It is lived.

In Jainism, particularly in the teachings of Mahavira, ahimsa was extended into a total discipline of life and has endured to this day. The refusal of harm is not partial or occasional, but systematic. Strict vegetarianism, the avoidance of root vegetables, careful movement to prevent harm to insects, and practices of restraint that govern speech, labour, and everyday conduct. The aim is not simply to reduce suffering, but to eliminate participation in it as far as possible.

In many respects, this exceeds contemporary veganism in its intensity. It is what a fully realised ethical refusal looks like. And yet, it exists within a world that does not transform accordingly.

Animal use persists. Agrarian systems continue to depend upon animal labour. Social hierarchies remain intact. When it first emerged, the refusal was real—but it has been contained.

Buddhist traditions have extended this ethical orientation further, embedding non-violence within a broader philosophy of suffering, interdependence, and compassion. Here, the problem of harm is situated not only in individual conduct, but in the conditions that produce suffering more generally.

And yet, even here, the transformation remains incomplete. Buddhist societies have not abolished animal use. They have mitigated, reinterpreted, moralised—but they do not change the material conditions of life at the level required to displace it.

Even when the ethical insight deepens, the system endures. The contradiction becomes clearest in the context of caste. As B. R. Ambedkar argued, practices of non-violence and vegetarianism became entangled with systems of purity and hierarchy. What appeared as ethical refinement could coexist with, and even reinforce, structures of domination. Non-violence did not abolish hierarchy. It was absorbed into it.

In modern contexts, similar dynamics persist. Traditions of ahimsa are invoked within projects of power, including forms of Hindu nationalism that selectively mobilise non-violence while maintaining systems of exclusion, exploitation, and control.

Ethics, without transformation, does not escape power. Power shifts and shapes it. This is the lesson that returns in veganism. The problem is not that ethical refusal is weak. It is that it operates within conditions it does not transform.

Ahimsa demonstrates that recognition can be profound, disciplined, and enduring—and still remain bounded by the relations in which it is practised. It shows that even the most developed forms of non-violence do not, on their own, alter the conditions that produce harm.

What appears as a new problem has, in fact, already been lived. And its limit has already been encountered.

From Recognition to Transition

Recognition is not nothing. It is often the beginning—the moment in which what was previously naturalised appears as violence; what was taken as necessity appears as organisation; what was invisible appears as structured relation. In the case of animal exploitation, this recognition can be profound. It unsettles habit, interrupts consumption, and reorders perception. It produces refusal.

But recognition, on its own, does not change the conditions that made it necessary. This is the limit that runs through the history of ethical practice. The belief that once something is seen clearly enough, it will dissolve—that alignment between knowledge and action will extend outward, gradually transforming the world that produced the misrecognition in the first place.

This belief persists because recognition feels transformative. It alters the subject who undergoes it. It produces coherence where there was contradiction, clarity where there was confusion. It can generate new forms of life at the level of the individual: different habits, different relations to consumption. In this sense, it is real.

But it is not sufficient. Because the conditions of life under capitalism are not simply misperceived—they are organised. Production, distribution, labour, land, infrastructure: these are not neutral backdrops to ethical choice, but the mechanisms through which life is reproduced. To recognise exploitation is not to exit these relations. It is to encounter them differently while remaining within them.

The result is a recurring tension. The subject who recognises the problem must continue to live within the system that produces it. They must eat, work, purchase, and reproduce their life through structures that remain oriented toward exploitation. Their refusal is real, but partial. Their transformation is genuine, but contained.

This containment is not accidental. It is how the system persists. Capitalism does not require ethical agreement. It requires reproduction. It can absorb refusal at the level of consumption, reorganise it into niche markets, differentiate products, and continue. Plant-based commodities proliferate alongside industrial slaughter. Ethical concern becomes segmentation. Refusal becomes demand.

In this way, recognition risks stabilising what it opposes. Not because it is false, but because it is incomplete. The problem, then, is not recognition itself, but the absence of a theory of transition—a theory of how the insight that something is wrong becomes a force capable of abolishing the conditions that produce it. A theory of how subjects who recognise exploitation become capable not only of refusing it in their own lives, but of acting upon the structures that sustain it.

This requires a shift in how transformation is understood. Not as the aggregation of ethical decisions, but as the transformation of social relations. Not as alignment, but as capacity. Not as the multiplication of individuals who see, but as the formation of collectives who can act.

Transition, in this sense, is not the extension of recognition. It is its transformation. The point at which refusal becomes coordination; at which alternative practices become shared infrastructures; at which new relations begin to displace old ones in the reproduction of life itself.

This is why the question of the subject cannot be deferred. If recognition produces a subject who can see, transition requires a subject who can act. Who can transform production, distribution, and care. Who can sustain forms of life that do not depend upon the exploitation they refuse. Who can act collectively—not only ethically, but materially.

The problem is not that such a subject does not exist. It is that it does not yet exist at the scale and coherence required to transform the conditions of life.

And so the question returns, in a different form:

How does living under capitalism become living against it—not only in thought, but in practice?

How do those who recognise the problem become capable of acting together to reorganise the world that produces it?

The Problem of the Subject

If transition names the problem, the subject names its condition. Not who suffers. Not who is recognised. But who acts.

Animal liberation presents a difficulty here that has often been taken as exceptional. The primary victims of exploitation cannot organise, cannot articulate demands, cannot form movements in the way that human subjects of struggle historically have. From this, it is sometimes concluded that animal liberation lacks a revolutionary subject altogether—that it must proceed, if at all, through the ethical commitments of others.

But this formulation mistakes absence for impossibility. The subject of animal liberation is not given in advance. It is not located in the animal alone, nor simply in the human who recognises their suffering.

It must be produced. This is where much contemporary theory, even at its most developed, reaches a limit. Recent work such as Emilia Leese and Eva Charalambides’ Think Like a Vegan (2022) also pushes further by reframing veganism as a process of becoming: “Vegan is something you become.” Not a diet, but an orientation—a way of seeing, reasoning, and inhabiting the world.

This is a real advance. The problem is no longer confined to consumption, but extends into subject formation. Veganism becomes not merely a refusal, but a mode of being. It recognises that the problem is not only what people do, but the kind of subjects they are within the relations that make such actions appear normal, necessary, or invisible. It begins to grasp that transformation must pass through the subject itself.

And yet, it is here that the limit emerges most clearly. For the subject that appears is still, ultimately, an ethical individual—one who recognises, reflects, and aligns their actions with their understanding. Even where systemic constraints are acknowledged—poverty, access, the structuring of choice—the resolution returns to awareness, to discussion, to the possibility of choosing otherwise.

The system is present, but as context. The subject is present, but as chooser. What is missing is the relation between them.

There is no account of how subjects capable of sustaining this orientation are formed within conditions that continuously undermine it. No account of how such subjects might act together—not only to refuse, but to alter conditions of life that make refusal necessary. No account of how the infrastructures of animal exploitation—industrial agriculture, supply chains, labour relations, land use—might be transformed through collective practice.

The result is a subject who can see the problem, but cannot yet transform it. This is not a failure of the theory, but an indication of its horizon. It has moved beyond consumption, beyond isolated ethical injunctions, toward a conception of subjectivity as formed through practice. But it has not yet crossed into a theory of collective formation.

The question, then, is not simply how individuals become vegan. It is how subjects become capable. Capable of acting together. Capable of sustaining alternative forms of life. Capable of intervening in the reproduction of the relations that organise production, distribution, and care. Capable, in other words, of transforming not only their own practices, but the conditions under which those practices take place.

This requires a different way of thinking about the subject. Not as a pre-existing agent who applies ethics to the world, but as something that emerges through shared practices, struggles, and forms of organisation. Not as the bearer of correct ideas, but as the product of relations that enable certain forms of action and foreclose others.

The subject of animal liberation, in this sense, is not the ethical vegan as such. It is the collective capable of sustaining a form of life in which animal exploitation is no longer reproduced as necessity.

Such a subject does not yet exist in a fully developed form. But it is not absent. It appears in fragments: in mutual aid networks, in alternative food systems, in struggles over land and production, in attempts to decommodify aspects of life. These are not yet sufficient. They do not yet displace the dominant mode of production. But they indicate something important.

That becoming is not only ethical, but material. That the subject is not only formed through recognition, but through practice. That the transition from living under capital to living against it is not a matter of individual alignment, but of collective capacity.

The problem of animal liberation is therefore not the absence of a subject. It is the incompleteness of its formation.

The Commons of Becoming

If the subject of animal liberation is not given, then it must be made. But not in thought alone. Not through recognition, however necessary that recognition may be.

It must be made in the space where life is organised—where food is produced, distributed, and shared; where care is given; where needs are met; where survival is secured. It must be made in common.

What is missing from most accounts of veganism is not ethics, but infrastructure. Not the ability to see differently, but the ability to live differently.

The ethical subject, on its own, remains suspended within the conditions it refuses. It must still buy, still work, still navigate systems organised around extraction and commodification. Its refusal is real, but partial. It interrupts, but does not yet change the relations around it.

This is why veganism, as it currently exists, stabilises. It becomes a lifestyle, a market segment, a set of consumable identities. Its insights are absorbed, translated into products, circulated as choice. The refusal remains, but the conditions that make refusal necessary persist.

To move beyond this requires a shift from recognition to relation. From the individual who becomes, to the collective that sustains. The commons of becoming names this shift.

It is not a utopian outside, nor a completed alternative. It is a set of practices through which people begin to transform the conditions of their own lives together—practices that reduce dependence on commodified systems and make different ways of living not only imaginable, but durable.

Community food networks. Cooperative production. Shared infrastructures of care. Land struggles. Mutual aid. Collective kitchens. Online networks. Distribution systems organised not for profit, but for need.

These are not, in themselves, animal liberation. But they are the conditions under which animal liberation becomes possible as more than refusal.

For what is required is not only that individuals abstain from exploitation, but that societies no longer depend upon it. That food systems no longer require it. That livelihoods are no longer organised through it. That the reproduction of life itself no longer passes through the commodification of sentient beings.

This cannot be achieved through consumption alone. It requires the slow, uneven construction of alternative forms of life within and against the dominant mode of production.

This is why the question of transition cannot be deferred. Without practices that build collective capacity, veganism remains suspended between insight and impossibility. It knows what must change, but cannot yet enact that change at the level required.

The commons of becoming does not resolve this immediately. It does not offer a blueprint. But it reframes the task.

We stop asking: How do individuals become vegan?

We begin to ask: How do we build the conditions under which vegan life can be collectively sustained?

How do we organise production differently? Distribution differently? Care differently?

How do we reduce the compulsion to participate in systems we know to be unjust?

How do we begin to live, even partially, in ways that prefigure the world we are trying to bring into being?

These questions do not replace ethical commitment. They give it form. They transform veganism from a position into a practice. From a refusal into a process of construction. From an insight into a force.

From Commons to Transition

The commons of becoming names the space in which new forms of life begin to take shape. But it is not, on its own, a transition.

It remains partial, uneven, and fragile—formed within the very conditions it seeks to exceed. It can sustain different practices, reduce dependence, and create openings. But it does not yet displace the system that continues to organise life at scale.

The question, then, is how these fragments move. Not how they expand as alternatives within the system, but how they begin to transform the relations that define it.

This is where the problem of transition sharpens. Because transition is not the smooth extension of ethical life. It is not the gradual replacement of one set of practices with another through accumulation alone. It involves tension, contradiction, and conflict. It passes through moments in which existing relations are disrupted, reorganised, and, at times, broken.

This is not an argument for rupture as event. It is an argument for rupture as process. The reorganiszation of agriculture, labour, land use, and the infrastructures through which life is reproduced cannot occur without displacing existing interests—without confronting forms of power materially invested in the continuation of exploitation. Capital does not withdraw because it is recognised as unjust. It withdraws, if at all, under pressure.

The commons, in this sense, is not only a site of alternative practice. It is a site of preparation. A space in which capacities are developed: to organise, to sustain, to coordinate, to resist, to build. Capacities that do not yet amount to transformation, but without which transformation cannot occur.

What is at stake is not simply the existence of different ways of living, but their ability to connect, scale, and intervene in the reproduction of the dominant system.

To move from commons to transition is to move from coexistence to contestation. From isolated practices to coordinated forms of action. From spaces that make life more livable to processes that make the existing organisation of life less necessary, less stable, less inevitable.

This does not occur all at once. It unfolds unevenly, across different sites: struggles over land, the transformation of food systems, conflicts over labour, and attempts to decommodify aspects of life. These are not reducible to veganism. But they are not external to it either. They form part of the terrain on which the conditions of animal exploitation are reproduced—and can therefore be transformed.

What emerges here is not a single subject, but a convergence, or what I have called a condensation. Different struggles, practices, and forms of organisation—each addressing aspects of the same system of production—begin to align, not through identical aims, but through shared conditions.

This is how a subject forms. Not in advance, but through the coordination of practices that begin to act upon the same relations. The abolition of animal exploitation, in this sense, is inseparable from broader transformations in how life is organised. It cannot be achieved in isolation, because it is not reproduced in isolation.

To treat it as such is to misrecognise the problem. The transition required is therefore not from non-vegan to vegan. It is from one mode of production to another.

From a system in which life is organised through extraction, commodification, and accumulation, to one in which the conditions of life are collectively organised in ways that do not require the exploitation of animals as a structural necessity.

This is a historical process. It cannot be reduced to ethics, though ethics plays a role within it. It cannot be reduced to markets, though markets mediate aspects of it. It is, fundamentally, a question of how life is reproduced.

And this is why the earlier assumption—that recognition will lead to transformation—must be set aside.

Recognition can begin the process. It cannot complete it. What completes it is the formation of capacities, relations, and practices that can reorganise the material conditions of life at scale.

It’s this transformation in theory and practice that gives the commons its direction. Not as an endpoint, but as a movement.

Life against Capital

On a planet of eight billion humans, countless living beings, the scale of animal exploitation continues to expand—decimating, exploiting, and extracting at scale. Industrial systems intensify, supply chains deepen, habitats collapse. At the same time, more people than ever refuse these relations in their own lives—transforming what they eat, what they wear, and how they move through the world.

These developments do not resolve one another. They advance together. This is not a contradiction of ideas. It is a contradiction of social relations.

What has become clear is that the problem has been seen—repeatedly, and with increasing clarity. From the disciplined non-violence of ahimsa, to the ethical frameworks of modern animal liberation, to the contemporary formation of vegan subjectivity—and to the broader history of liberation movements since the emergence of capitalism—the refusal of harm has been articulated, lived, and sustained in different forms.

And yet, the conditions that reproduce that harm have remained largely intact inside societies organised by the mose of production they inhabit. This is the limit. Not of the insight, but of its form.

Veganism, in its current articulation, marks a real advance. It produces recognition, coherence, refusal. It reshapes the subject who adopts it. It makes visible what was once normalised. It interrupts, even if partially, the reproduction of exploitation in everyday life. But it does so within relations it does not transform.

Left at that level, it stabilises. It becomes a way of living within capitalism rather than against it—a practice that can be absorbed, commodified, differentiated, and, at times, marginalised or forgotten. Its force remains, but its effects are contained.

This is why the question of transition cannot be deferred. Because the transformation required is not from non-vegan to vegan. It is a transformation of how life itself is organised.

From a system in which the reproduction of life depends upon extraction, commodification, and the use of animals as resources, to one in which those conditions no longer hold.

This is not primarily a moral shift. It is a material one. It requires the formation of subjects capable not only of refusal, but of reorganisation—subjects who can act together to transform the relations of production, distribution, and care that structure everyday life. Subjects who can sustain alternative forms of life not as exceptions, but as foundations.

This is what the commons of becoming begins to make possible. Not as a completed alternative, but as a process through which new capacities are formed, new relations established, and existing dependencies loosened.

Here, veganism changes its meaning. It is no longer only a way of living. It becomes part of a form of life being constructed—unevenly, incompletely, but materially—against the conditions that contain it.

A form of life that does not yet exist at scale, but is no longer entirely absent. This is where earlier traditions of non-violence reach their limit—and where the present must move beyond them. Not by abandoning ethical clarity, but by giving it form at the level of social relations.

The problem has been recognised. What remains is to build the conditions through which it can be resolved. Veganism is necessary. But it is not sufficient. Because it operates within a system it does not transform. Without that transformation—without the formation of a subject capable of changing the conditions of life—animal liberation persists as a contradiction: clearly grasped, ethically lived, and yet systematically reproduced in the very conditions that call it forth.

Veganism is not a moment. It is a practice of becoming and transition embedded in capitalism. Left at that level, it stabilises—absorbed into markets, identities, and distinctions—before receding from view.

But it does not have to remain there. Veganism is a way of living. It could become something more. Not an identity. Not a consumption pattern.

A process of becoming in transition.

A collective reorganization of life.

A form still struggling to be born.

It speaks constantly of collapse, catastrophe, extinction. Death appears as outcome, as future, as risk. Life appears as what must be saved and protected from the perilous death drive of elites.

Much of its messaging is spent specifying future death in ever more vivid detail, while gesturing toward the defence of life. But it is often less willing to name the social relations that produce both.

As a result, climate politics frequently becomes trapped in recognition and mobilisation. If only more people knew—really knew—then everything would change.

But this assumes something that must be questioned: that the system organising collapse is sustained by ignorance, rather than necessity.

Roger Hallam is one of the clearest and most forceful figures in this tradition. As a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, he has done more than most to force climate change out of abstraction. His framing—sometimes condensed into the provocation of “4 billion dead”—is not a precise prediction but a political device: a way of collapsing the distance between climate models and human consequence.

In his recent writing on the “death drive,” Hallam sharpens the question that haunts climate politics: If the science is known, why does the trajectory continue?

His answer is direct. Elites know—and yet proceed to make decisions that lead is to our end. What we are witnessing, he argues, is not ignorance but a rupture between knowledge and action. A “death project,” even a “death wish,” operating at a civilisational scale.

At moments, Hallam even comes very close to a structural account. He writes:

“The elites are not failing to act. They are refusing to act — because the system rewards refusal.”

Here, the system is visible. Action is conditioned, not freely chosen. But this clarity does not hold. Because the argument slips.

The slippage appears when Hallam moves from structure to explanation.

He writes:

“This is not rational self-interest. It is civilisation-wide self-destruction.”

“the death wish operating at a civilisational scale”

And more starkly:

“Capitalism will not survive because it is choosing not to.”

This is the turning point to misidentifying cause. Because here, even though he names Capitalism for the first time, the explanation shifts—from a system that must reproduce itself, to a civilisation that is choosing destruction. From compulsion to will, and fom social relations to psychology.

This shift matters, because it reorganises the politics that follows.

Once the crisis is framed as a failure of will—as a death drive—attention moves toward those who appear to enact it: elites, decision-makers, billionaires, governments.

This framing is not unique to Hallam. It runs across large parts of climate and left discourse, including a familiar “attack the rich” politics that centres the 1% as the decisive obstacle.

But here something crucial is lost. The truth is, elites are not the same as the system. Repeat: elites are not the system. They are positions within it. To psychologize elites is to analyse the occupants of those positions, rather than the relations that structure what those positions must do by the necessity of the system.

The capitalist is not simply a powerful individual. They are a role compelled by relations:

• invest or lose ground

• expand or be outcompeted

• generate returns or face exit

From within that position, acting adequately on climate—halting expansion, decommodifying essentials, shutting down fossil capital—appears as self-negation: loss of value, loss of control, loss of position. They simply wouldn't be elites if they participated in opposing the system: that's class suicide, a social death that they could experience only as a loss of life.

The problem is not that elites want destruction. It is that they must enact a system that cannot limit itself without ceasing to be. Hallam’s own language registers this tension, but cannot quite express it. He asks:

“Do we want to stand for life? Do we want to live rather than die?”

But this is precisely where the argument breaks.

Because life, as it is currently organised, is what is killing us. The issue is not a failure to value life strongly enough.

It is that life under capitalism is organised through relations—wage labour, profit, competition, finance, and state power—that require continuous expansion, even when that expansion destroys the conditions of life itself.

What appears as a “death drive” is better understood as something else: a system compelled to live without limit.

There is a another issue in Hallam’s framing. The “4 billion dead” projection pushes death into the future. But capitalism is already organised through mass death in the present.

Each year:

• millions of people die from preventable disease under commodified healthcare

• millions of people die from hunger in a system of food surplus

• millions of people die from pollution, unsafe labour, and environmental degradation

And these figures count only humans. We could go much further, and count nonhuman animals and wild animals and the destruction of entire ecosystems.

The figures and scale of the violence would truly mount up each year because the numbers of animals Capitalism farms or destroys for profit is truly unprecedented. The suffering and scale of this is limitless as long as it can be profited from, and wage labourers can be produced to sustain it.

Across the last centuries, deaths linked to:

• colonial extraction

• industrial exploitation

• enclosures and expansion

• resource wars

• structural poverty

• poor and uneven well-being

• famines

already reach into the hundreds of millions for humans, plausibly billions over time since the origin of Capitalism, and must be hitting trillions for life.

Climate collapse is not an anomaly. It is an intensification, and even an opportunity for a system that flourishes in disaster.

Hallam’s own strategy follows from his narrow diagnosis here. Escalate disruption. Force recognition. Trigger crisis. Compel response. But recognition, however intense, does not alter the relations that organise life.

Under capitalism, you can know—and still reproduce the system. Because survival itself is mediated through its mechanisms. This is why recognition politics repeatedly stalls, and not because it is wrong, but because it is incomplete.

At this point, another problem with this politics emerges: stages. This kind of politics often operates as if transformation unfolds in sequence: awareness → mobilisation → change. But the system does not wait for stages.

And when these processes are isolated, each stabilises what it opposes. Awareness becomes discourse that is circulating, absorbed, commodified. Mobilisation becomes spectacle that is intense, but transient. And organisation becomes management, administering and powerfully justifying what already exists.

Even regime change, when framed at the level of decision, provides no clear theory of transition. It is so unthought out and unplanned that it would seem only to reproduce the same constraints under new personnel.

Meanwhile, the crisis deepens—not abstractly, but materially:

• food systems destabilising

• water stress intensifying

• infrastructure failing

• migration increasing

These pressures are not direct. They are mediated—through class, geography, state capacity, and global inequality. Not all life is equally exposed. Not all death is inevitable. And not all outcomes are fixed.

This should shift our attention away from how we make elites act. We should ask: how do we prevent the system from metabolising crisis?

Capitalism does not simply collapse. It reorganises—through disaster markets, privatised adaptation, securitised borders, and uneven survival.

This is where Life Against Capital enters as a different orientation. The system reproduces itself through life:

• how we work

• how we eat

• how we care

• how we organise survival

And that is where it can be transformed. Not by withdrawal, but by building counter-relations:

• production not organised around profit

• care not mediated by markets

• coordination beyond competition

• collective control over resources

These already exist—fragmented, partial, under pressure. The problem is not invention. It is coordination, persistence, and resistance to capture.

Hallam is right about the stakes. He is right that something deeper than ignorance is at work. But it is not a death drive. It is a system that must live in ways that produce death.

Which returns us to the central inversion of this critique: Capitalism’s life is our death.

It's not a problem with the elites inherently. Nobody wills it. It's because a system organised to expand without limit cannot encounter limits—ecological or social—without pushing through them. Elites are not outside this. They are the most concentrated expression of the system. So they cannot simply choose otherwise.

But the system cannot reproduce itself without us either. And that is the opening. Because the capacities required to survive under these conditions—cooperation, coordination, collective organisation—are the same capacities required to move beyond them.

So the task is not to “stand for life.”

It is to organise life against capital.

Not in stages, but in simultaneity and condensation: where understanding, action, and organisation develop together in praxis and organization. Politics must organize where pressure takes material form and where life becomes less dependent on the system that is destroying it.

Because the question is no longer whether we recognise the crisis. It is whether life can take a form that no longer requires capital to exist.

And that is where the answer will be found. The system must be transformed or it will drive us to our death.

We live amid strange performances of strength broadcast around the world from the imperial core. Billionaires pose as insurgents. Authoritarians market cruelty as authenticity. A reactionary culture treats dependence as humiliation and vulnerability as defeat, while staging domination as freedom in the image of the self-sufficient man, finding their foils in liberal “sheeples.”

What passes as power here is often a theatre of hardness: command performed as autonomy, contempt performed as sovereignty, cruelty performed as seriousness, with “only joking,” sneering, and the insistence everyone must get down and dirty. Any wrestling fan recognises that politics has become entertainment of a certain aesthetic quality, a kayfabe consumed restlessly night and day.

Yet much of it is theatrical in a deeper sense too, because the loudest performances of independence often conceal the deepest dependencies — on states, subsidies, infrastructures, labour, care, the very social relations they disavow.

What this is circling is not simply that contemporary power performs hardness rather than vulnerability.

It is that we have come to mistake the performance of power for power itself.

The spectacle changes.

But the social relations of patriarchy endure.

Not simply as prejudice, nor merely as identity hierarchy, but as one way dependence has been organized, disavowed and unevenly imposed — care feminized, vulnerability shamed, autonomy masculinized, reproductive labour naturalized precisely so it can be obscured, dominated, and exploited.

The spectacle of hardness is one form of power today, but we should be careful, because there are other masculinities in power, and trauma, dependency and vulnerability can also, when reduced to spectacle, become the praxis of domination — power over rather than power with and against.

There is an old archive I’ve used for seeing this practical truth.

Arcadia and the Praxis of Rule

Years ago, I visited Penshurst Place, the Philip Sidney family estate, waving my National Trust pass to enter. Penshurst first appeared as inherited beauty, pastoral order, and the Arcadian ideal of Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia realised.

But reading into its history, another picture emerged.

Penshurst was inherited through dissolution, through destroyed convents, erased village life, enclosed farmlands and gardens. It is a story of the origin of capitalism itself: enclosure, dispossession, cheap labour, colonial projection, the practical making of a class world rendered harmonious in appearance.

And it is also where the myth of Arcadia was reborn for an early modern age, a place of blank simplicity and innocence that could seemingly be found in every colony Sidney’s friends set their eye upon.

Beneath the beauty of the scene stood domination, not only economic but gendered — household rule, inherited authority, feminized dependency folded into the order through which power appeared natural.

Penshurst taught me something I have not forgotten: the ruling classes have long had a praxis of their own.

They do not merely possess ideas. They build capacities. They organize domination materially.

And then they aestheticize it.

Power did not need to appear only as hardness. It could appear graceful, civil, courtly. The spectacle and appearances could vary. But the relations — and the “blood and fire” that brought them into being — could not.

Sidney, the poet and courtier, who wrote that “it is not gnosis but praxis that must be the fruit” (in An Apology for Poetry), knew aesthetics helped build capacities for power.

And that rule belonged with the West Country Men who not only enclosed millions of acres of land, but organized plantation systems and scorched-earth policies that made colonialism so successful in brutality and extraction.

There to witness it in Ireland was another poet, Edmund Spenser, who approved famine as policy to subdue the Irish. His thoughts circulated in manuscript, though they were not published in his lifetime.

If Spenser imagined starvation organized as power, the question here is whether care can be organized as counter-power.

There is another poet in that same broad world of enclosure and extraction who preserves something capitalism would later damage more fully.

John Donne.

Blessed Dependency

In 1631, Donne, suffering from stomach cancer and looking like a walking corpse in clothes, gave his last sermon at St. Paul’s Cathedral.

It was a sermon about the struggle with death, responding to Psalm 68, verse 20: “And unto God the Lord belong the issues of death.” As we should expect from a writer posthumously celebrated for his poetry, Donne’s words are rich in symbolism, and his moral message is uncomfortably layered with meaning.

Donne transformed the biblical quote into strikingly visceral language. The “issues” of death became “tissues of flesh” into which a baby is born, already imprisoned in a grave from the moment of birth.

He ended his sermon by referring to Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross as a “blessed dependency.”

To a modern reader, the phrase is hard to grasp.

Today, “dependency” carries no positive connotation. Centuries of imperialism, colonialism and capitalism have bred an ugly ableism, where weakness is seen not only as an invitation to death but as a social death as well.

In Donne’s time, organised religion and cultural traditions sheltered alternative understandings of dependency, seeing it as a natural state fostering care and mutual aid.

These ideas have not survived.

Instead, we are conditioned from birth to fight against death, aging, and the need to rely on others.

Dependency is framed as failure. Even our dependents grow up striving to become — or expected to become — independents.

There is no blessedness in being a child, an elder, or anyone outside the ideal of the perfect, productive body. But we have also lost ways of imagining what dependency could mean: the solidarity, care and understanding it might foster.

We remain at the scene of our own dependency, unable to see the bonds that connect us, but unable to escape their reminders.

And it is here that Donne’s words matter.

Not because dependency is blessed. Such blessings arrive broken for us, transformed.

But because what survives in Donne is an intuition modern forms of power have damaged without abolishing: that dependence is not the opposite of freedom, but one of its concealed conditions.

“No one is an Island,” Donne wrote poetically elsewhere.

Sidney and Donne, taken together, illuminate a transition as Capitalism was born in the 1500s.

Sidney shows a ruling class learning to organize power practically by building dependent labourers through enclosure.

Donne preserves, however damaged, a way of speaking dependence before capital would reduce it more fully to stigma and hide the sources of power.

Capitalism develops and relies on the power of dependence. But degrades the spectacle of dependence.

That has been one of its enduring conditions since its modern dawn in blood and fire.

Care as Conflict

The Left, for its part, has too often struggled to answer either Sidney or Donne, caught in a world in which dependence is an enemy.

It often has critique. It often has messaging. It often has moral force. But it too rarely does shared vulnerability, shared ways to overcome, praxis and capacity-building in solidarity and class consciousness.

It too rarely asks how practical capacities are built from below, or how transformation becomes livable. The old split between production and reproduction is continually reproduced by those who seek to transform the system.

But it is in truth a false split. As Karl Marx wrote, “The capitalist process of production… is, at the same time, a process of reproduction.” Capital never truly separates them. It depends on both.

It is we who have been taught to keep them apart. That separation explains the conditions of the theatre that men find themselves reduced to under power. What appears as a so-called crisis of masculinity is part of the cycle of the organization of social reproduction embedded in the economic functions of Capitalism.

Forms of masculine sovereignty have long depended on dependencies disavowed. Where those conditions fray, hardness often returns as spectacle.

But the task is not to restore patriarchal guarantees. Nor merely to aestheticize a gentler masculinity. Both support the violence that separate the system into care and conflict.

Ihe task is to move beneath spectacle altogether. To organize the relations through which power is actually made.

Care is conflict. To feed, house, tend, defend, repair, teach, keep one another in the fight — this is not politics after the revolution.

It is what makes transformative politics possible.

Dependence is not a tool against domination. It is a relation to be shared that supports us in reorganizing.

A relation domination has damaged, through which struggle may have to recompose in the commons of becoming, where solidarity may become counter-power.

That is the wager we make together.

No Movements Are Islands

I believe that given the conditions of our world today, we should not be inquiring into how the Left can better perform strength, or devise ever more messaging strategies.

We should be focused on how we can build the practical consciousness through which another life becomes inhabitable.

Every cook must learn how to govern. And the carers must learn to fight.

Not metaphorically: actually, politically.

Resistance never endures if it does not know how to feed, tend, house, teach and protect the people who carry it.

This is not a secondary fight.

Feminist struggle has long taught that.

Class and labour struggle connects to feminist struggle connects to disability struggle connects to environmentalism connects to animal liberation.

Not islands. Potentially, circuits — and a revolutionary condensation that, at the right time, can transform the system partially or completely. It has become clearer that today there is no chance for reform to make the system more liveable without it.

Some movements speak as if no one is an island, yet organize as islands.

Others act as if everyone is an island and must fend for themselves.

If we act as if the left is not an island, and organize to bring together movements in the commons of becoming, we may yet become life against capital — a livable revolution grounded in transforming the material conditions that bind us in the dependencies of social relations.

But today the left remains isolated and has disinherited the revolutionary counter-power of solidarity shared between liberation movements.

Alone, movements remain vulnerable to the domination they oppose.

The problem is never insufficient messaging but rather insufficient relational power.

Not a failure to persuade.

A failure to build what makes transformation livable.

The conditions capital teaches us to misrecognize as weakness may contain, reorganized in common, a ground of collective strength.

Because solidarity is a shared recognition of dependency and vulnerability that becomes a counter-power.

The left is not an island.

Is it prepared to organize as if this were true?

Thank you, A. J. Horn, for the seriousness with which you are pursuing your ethical theory and for the development in your thinking you have identified in your last reply. It has helped me revise my own thinking.

First, it seems that, based on a reaction to your piece, including your provocative title “Some People Deserve to Die”, I may have overstated the extent to which the newly branded CDT (Conditional Dignity Theory) directly authorizes killing. While I acknowledge you are ruling that out, and my framing was itself somewhat provocative, the normative implications struck me as hovering at the edge, so it was important for us both to mark some thresholds out.

Your clarification that your CDT operates at the level of moral status, not as a simple permission structure for action, sharpens an important distinction, and I take that seriously.

My focus is now less on whether CDT licenses exclusion directly, and more whether CDT is necessary, or whether it introduces problems a critique of social relations does not require.

Put simply: what does CDT add?

I take more seriously now your claim that CDT is not primarily action-guiding. You point out it is designed to register breakdown conditions internal to moral life itself. That clarifies something important. But my question remains similar to my reflections on dignity in my earlier piece: must breakdown conditions be theorized through conditional dignity at all?

I do not deny that the conditions making moral life possible can be attacked, undermined, or even deformed by action. That is a serious philosophical problem, and I take it to be real.

My hesitation is whether what you call breakdown in dignity is best understood as altered moral status, rather than as contradiction within social relations.

In other words: I do not deny breakdown conditions, but I do question whether they require conditional status to be intelligible. I think that dignity registers its breakdown through social contradiction, not through conditional moral standing.

My additional hesitation is that “status” may already frame the problem too juridically, whereas a Marxian approach may begin less from altered status than from transformed or contradictory relations that better capture the realities of social breakdown that we experience in everyday life and in the course of emancipation movements. I would add that what counts as a breakdown in the conditions of shared life may itself be historically specific, which is another reason I hesitate to treat it through a fixed status vocabulary.

A related question I still have is whether any theory of conditional status raises a problem of judgment that is not being discussed: who determines when conditions have failed, and how is that authority itself prevented from reproducing domination? This issue of sovereignty is, I think, one of the hardest problems CDT needs to address.

None of this is purely a speculative concern. Something like these problems has surfaced before in legal and political history:

• The old debates around M’Naghten Rules turned in part on whether culpability could be tied to thresholds of rational or reflective capacity, and what followed when responsibility was framed that way.

• The 19th-century disputes over “moral insanity” — itself a troubling category — raised, in another register, whether one could speak of moral breakdown in ways that quietly slid into altered status.

• And the jurisprudence around the Nuremberg Trials confronted culpability under conditions of systemic domination without, notably, requiring a theory of conditional dignity to do so.
  

I mention these only briefly because they suggest the terrain here may be older, and perhaps more fraught, than it first appears. They also sharpen my question: does CDT resolve problems that have historically accompanied threshold concepts of responsibility and status, or risk reproducing them in a new idiom?

I am also not persuaded that dignity becomes conceptually inert without CDT. Instead, I think its critical force may lie in how social contradiction registers breakdown, rather than in conditional status.

That may be where our disagreement now lies.

Relatedly, I understand the distinction you draw between a theory of who counts and a theory of what makes counting possible. I take that seriously. However, there seems to be some transcendental ambition in that claim. Does CDT risk smuggling in a transcendental ground (“what makes counting possible”) precisely where a materialist critique would ask how those conditions are historically produced?

I think this gets at a related question: whether the conditions that make counting possible are best grounded in reciprocal recognition among reflective agents, or whether they may be better grounded in material and social conditions of non-domination, shared vulnerability, and collective life?

That is where I would really push for you to reflect on what CDT commits to here. Why “reflective agents”? My concern is that reflective agency may function as a covert anthropology carrying a liberal model of personhood — an abstract subject imagined as morally constituted prior to the contradictory social relations that form and deform it. Marx, and I would say Hegel too in a dialectical sense, give us reasons to be suspicious of that starting point. For both, contradiction in social relations is not an afterthought added to moral subjects; it is a crucial starting point. It may also reintroduce, in philosophical form, some of the threshold problems visible in those earlier legal debates.

That is one reason I still find reflection a vulnerable grounding claim in CDT. Once dignity is grounded in reflective agency, one faces a dilemma: either the threshold excludes some beings, or it does no real grounding work at all. I remain unsure why reflective agency, rather than sentience, shared vulnerability, or social being, should bear this weight.

I also wonder whether “reflective agents” risks inheriting a history in which reason or reflection has often been differentially attributed — and sometimes withheld — through colonial, racial, or ableist forms of domination. Here I think Frantz Fanon, a thinker I mentioned in my last pieces, poses a serious challenge. If recognition is itself often structured by domination, rather than standing outside it as remedy, then reciprocal recognition may be too unstable a ground on which to rest dignity. And if reflection itself is socially mediated, overdetermined, and deformed under domination, as Fanon’s work suggests in his analysis of the social conditions of colonialism and racial capitalism, then reflection may be a much weaker and more historically compromised grounding category than CDT appears to assume.

Another thinker I’ve been engaging with recently, Amílcar Cabral, sharpens the concern differently; his theories emerge in the context of de-colonial liberation. If capacities are formed in struggle, if transforming conditions and self-transformation belong together, then reflective agency may be less a threshold presupposed for moral standing than something historically formed through practice. That is why I remain drawn to thinking in terms of social relations, contradiction, and transformation.

I also wonder whether my disagreement may now be better put this way: not that CDT is incoherent, but that it may be doing work closer to a neo-Hegelian perfectionist account of conditional moral standing than to a distinctively Marxian critique of social relations.

My worry is not simply that CDT invokes Hegelian recognition while missing mediation. It is that it may begin from the breakdown of recognition, whereas for Hegel contradiction is not only breakdown but the motor of transformation. That matters because Marx radicalizes precisely this point, relocating contradiction from moral standing into social relations that can be tested, revised, and transformed in practice. My question, then, is whether CDT risks moralizing contradiction at precisely the point where a dialectical approach would treat contradiction as generative.

I am curious about this because I want to ask whether grave harms are best theorized through altered dignity status at all, rather than through contradictions within social relations whose overcoming lies in transformation.

Still, I also want to concede something in return. I can see more clearly now where CDT may be trying to preserve something some forms of Marxism can understate: the moral gravity of harms caused by agents, betrayal, cruelty, and the ways persons may actively participate in damaging the conditions of shared life. I do think there can be a tendency in some forms of Marxism to over-socialize wrongdoing, to let structure absorb agency too completely, and thereby risk thinning our language for certain interpersonal or political injuries.

That is not a trivial point, and it has concerned me before. My aim here is not to deny the problem CDT identifies, but to ask whether a relational and materialist account may address it without the costs conditional status seems to introduce.

CDT may seek to foreground culpability in a way some Marxist currents have sometimes underemphasized, though there are also Marxist traditions that theorize culpability without conditional dignity. I take that possibility seriously. But this sharpens rather than resolves my question: does overcoming a thin account of culpability require translating blame into altered moral standing at all?

Does CDT risk adding a second layer — conditional status — where culpability itself may already do the work? That seems to me a real pressure point for the theory.

And I now suspect there may even be another possibility altogether — one perhaps closer to Marx, and in a different register to Spinoza — where the question is not whether dignity becomes conditional, but whether relations diminish or enhance the shared powers of life. I mention Spinoza only because he helps name a different starting point: not moral standing, but powers or capacities, affects, and relations.

That matters here because it raises a sharper question for CDT: is conditional dignity needed at all, if grave harms can be registered through damaged or diminished relations rather than altered status? My broader concern, perhaps, is whether CDT risks duplicating work already done by social contradiction and culpability, while adding a more problematic status layer.

So perhaps my key question back to you now is no longer whether CDT leads to disposability per se. It is narrower, but maybe deeper:

What does CDT add that a relational critique of social contradiction, breakdown conditions, responsibility, culpability, harms caused by agents, and transformative struggle cannot already do — and why is that addition necessary?

That, I think, is where I would now place the attention.

Thank you for your time in this discussion. If you would like to reply a second time, I would be happy to hear from you, but I suspect you may take up the question I’ve identified here as you continue developing CDT.

On March 24, in Melbourne, Australia, 35,000 teachers and education staff went on strike from their jobs in schools and marched to the city centre, closing schools across Victoria. I was one of the teachers who marched.

Among the crowd, I held a sign and wore a license plate that read, “Victoria - not the Education State”, a parody of the fact that the State considers itself the Education State in Australia. The crowd carried signs that ferreted out all the contradictions of being the education system with the best results in the country being the lowest paid and funded. In nice handwriting and literate gags.

From this position, I remember standing in the crowd, hearing ordinary conversations change. People who had spent months speaking in familiar language of compliance to a structure of workloads, reports, behaviour, staffing shortages, survival, were suddenly speaking another language: solidarity, leverage, collective strength, what we could do together.

Something shifted, not only politically but socially, as if beneath the routines of compliance another order of relation briefly surfaced, one in which cooperation appeared less as aspiration than as a latent fact of ordinary life. As a worker, union Sub-Branch organizer, teacher, colleague, and living being, it filled me with dignity and joy. Despite a loss of income, things felt lighter for a change.

And then the strike ended. People returned to schools, inboxes, deadlines, exhaustion. The old pressures closed back in.

What stayed with me was not the moment itself, but the harder questions it forced and would not let go:

How do you make that kind of transformation liveable?

How do you keep collective power from collapsing back into private coping?

How do you prevent conviction from becoming virtue signalling, or sacrifice from becoming burnout?

At these moments, we rarely turn to Marxism because it seems irrelevant. We are all now nearly universally told that Marxism is a relic, a Cold War prop, a dead inheritance.

While the relics of the past exist, I think the opposite is true, and more than that: I think Marxism has often been mistaken for a closed doctrine precisely when at its core is a method for tracing how domination of life is organized, how capacities emerge within it, and how those capacities might gather into forces capable of transforming the very conditions that formed them.

Marxism is a practice. Expecting it to explain why it is not a dead doctrine needlessly raises the stakes: either Marxism must transform everything at once at scale, or it is just a failure. The room for slow thinking, regathering, capacity building, creating organised counter-power (rather than destruction and spectacle) has been shattered by the forces that accrue to neoliberal and conservative triumphalism. But these conditions seem to be changing in the crises we face today and, what is more, Marxism has lost none of its relevance.

Wherever living human beings struggle over the conditions of life—work, land, dignity, survival, recognition, care, freedom—Marxism matters. Not because every struggle is secretly Marxist. But because Marxism offers a method for asking how domination is structured, how capacities form, how power can be organized, and how liberation can become durable. Marxism as a method cannot be denied. It contains lenses and tools that are still indispensable.

Marxism remains relevant across liberation movements too. Not as doctrine imposed from outside, as a liveable method remade in practice. For their part, Liberation movements—whether around labour, anti-colonial struggle, feminism, environmentalism, animal justice, trans survival, anti-racism, disability justice, or other struggles over the conditions of life—do more than register grievances. They can deepen understanding of power. They can develop capacities. They can help forms of struggle become durable.

In that sense, they may form a commons. Not because they are identical. But because they can preserve, share, and enlarge practical powers that no one struggle produces alone. They traverse, protect and operate in what I have called a commons of becoming that Capitalism never successfully encloses.

Marxism is not simply critique, nor simply organization, nor simply action, but a method through which critique, practical formation, and praxis can become mutually transformative. And they are not confined to one movement. They can be found, in different forms, wherever people struggle to understand domination, build capacities, organize and transform conditions together. They are movements that deepen each other.

I think that the search for transformation begins here. Because Marxism, at its deepest, is not a doctrine. It is a movement of thought and practice people can learn to live. In what follows I want to introduce a way of understanding Marxism that will help orient you to what Marxism is and what it does for us.

Marxism as a Practice: Three Functions and Their Condensation

Before naming the three functions separately, I want to suggest something stronger. Marxism can be understood not only through what these practical functions are, but through how they may condense.

By condensation I do not mean simple accumulation, as if more grievances or organizations mechanically become revolution. I mean a qualitative concentration in which critique, collective capacities, organizing and praxis begin reinforcing one another at a level they can no longer be contained within the ordinary reproduction of capitalist social relations.

This development may remain latent for long periods. It may intensify in struggle. In rare moments, it may become revolutionary force.

What follows can be read as the practical elements of that development.

The Three Practical Functions of Marxism

Marx identified functions through which capital reproduces domination. This essay asks whether Marxism, as a practical method, has functions through which people develop capacities against it.

I think it does. Its core movement can be stated simply enough for entry, though each term opens onto a much deeper tradition:

1. Learning to see clearly. Through immanent critique, Marxism helps people understand the social conditions shaping their lives.

2. Learning to develop capacities together. Through practical formation—discipline, organization, ethical practice, and the building of shared powers—Marxism helps people build capacities with others.

3. Learning to think in action. Through thought in action, praxis, Marxism helps people test, revise, and transform through struggle.

These are not stages one graduates through, but interlayered practical functions whose force lies precisely in how they strengthen or deepen one another.

The strengthening is to help these functions avoid the issues they face under pressure, so that critique without formation does not collapse nto spectatorship, formation without praxis does not harden into moralism, and praxis without critique does not dissolve into restless improvisation.

First Function: Critique, or Diagnosing Domination

Marx’s infamous eleventh thesis in his Feuerbach helps us understand how critique functions to immanently organise against the current state of things:

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”

It’s not a rejection of thought, and in fact it’s a request to take interpretation to its next level in change. It’s also a demand that thought become liveable.

To change things, we must understand what we are changing. Interpreting clearly begins from what Marx said perhaps most plainly:

“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but their social being that determines their consciousness.”

That is not fatalism. It is a starting point.

It means the pressures people feel in work, time, debt, care, housing, exhaustion, and mental life are not private accidents. They are shaped socially.

This is why Marx started with social relations, production and reproduction: our lives as they currently are, the way that we step into this world and survive in this world. This is why Marx studied capitalism as a historically specific mode of production, emerging through enclosure, colonialism, slavery, dispossession, and wage dependence.

By analysing Capitalism clearly, Marx found that people are separated from direct access to the means of life. So selling their own labour for a wage can come to appear as nature itself. His critique begins by showing it is a historical way of producing that creates a system of social relations.

Today, Marx’s critique resonates because so much suffering is still returned to people as personal failure. Burnout becomes failed resilience. Precarity becomes flexibility. Overwork becomes ambition. Distress becomes pathology. And the causes of all of this are hidden, obscured, in writers who use economic language to hide it.

Ideology confuses us about this, and is not only experienced as an abstract doctrine, but reinforced as a material force. Ideologies invite us into the practical reproduction of a world in which domination misrecognizes itself.

Marx called ideology a camera obscura, a social technology that makes reality appear inverted. That remains a powerful description. We experience this inversion constantly. We go to psychology and psychiatry for wounds that often have social conditions. We treat competition as necessity. We treat commodification as ordinary life. We mistake adaptation for freedom.

Critique begins by learning to see these inversions. An ordinary example matters here. When someone begins to realize their burnout is not simply personal weakness but tied to workload intensification, managerial control, and social pressures they did not create, they have already begun, however partially, to practice critique.

Liberation requires learning to perceive reality without illusions. But Marxism does not stop at critique. Because critique without capacities can become passive spectatorship.

Second Function: Capacity, or Developing Counter-Power

Learning to develop capacities together is why Marxism has always been, at its strongest, a practical education. This is where ethical practice belongs: not as a separate function beside praxis, but as part of capacity-building itself. Build virtue, don’t signal it. Build capacities, don’t merely announce them. Capacity names more than organization. It names the practical powers through which people become capable of acting otherwise.

Amílcar Cabral (1924–1973), agronomist and revolutionary organizer in the peripheries of the empire in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, was one of those Marxists who lived this problem. He treated political education as part of survival itself, arguing people had to learn reality together under conditions of struggle [1]. He lost his life in this cause. An everyday analogue in the imperial core is simpler, but also difficult for people embedded in social relations: a workplace delegate helping colleagues map how workloads are imposed, rather than treating stress as personal weakness. That too is practical consciousness in formation. But the unevenness of the experiences in the core and periphery in our global system is one of the most interesting histories that we can thank Marxism for in Global Systems Theory.

Another example of how a famous Marxist understood these issues is Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919), revolutionary and theorist, who argued the mass strike was not merely a tactic but a school through which people became capable [2]. I certainly found myself learning on the teacher’s strike. Other examples might be tenants who begin by contesting mould or repairs sometimes discover, through organizing, capacities for wider action they did not know they possessed.

These examples matter not because they offer saints. They do not. They show something else. That Marxism has often been lived as attempts—uneven, contradictory, sometimes extraordinary, sometimes disastrous—to develop practical consciousness and capacity. Not moral virtue. Developed powers, strike funds, mutual aid, political education, tenant organization, and shared infrastructures of survival. It doesn’t stop there; it has also built collective memory, democratic correction, and historical learning.

When workers build a strike committee, when tenants organize repairs collectively rather than each pleading alone, when people create mutual aid around food, childcare, or transport, capacities are developing. These are small forms, but they matter.

One danger is clear, however. Capacity without critique can harden into bureaucracy or moralism. The functions of Marxism are also disciplines that must be carried out through ruthless self-critique.

Third Function: Praxis, or Transforming Conditions

Praxis names the experimental movement through which critique and capacities are tested, revised, and transformed historically.

These are not supplements to Marxism. They are part of how Marxism becomes liveable. Walter Rodney (1942–1980), Guyanese historian and activist, treated theory as something sharpened socially, in contact, not held above people [3]. Rodney helps show “praxis” is not only exposing ruling-class practical consciousness, but developing another one through struggle.

I want to illustrate why praxis matters, a term often held obscure, and how it works with critique and capacity-building. Praxis is a way of taking knowledge into battle, learning to think in action. A comrade recently reminded me of Philip Sidney (1554–1586)’s reflections on praxis in An Apology for Poetry. Sidney, a writer, courtier and colonialist in Renaissance times matters here not as a Marxist, but because he helps reveal that ruling classes cultivate practical consciousness too.

Years ago, while doing research, I visited Penshurst Place, the Sidney family estate. What began as literary interest became, unexpectedly, a small exercise in historical materialism. When I entered via a National Trust pass, the estate first appeared as inherited beauty, pastoral order, Arcadian ideal. But reading into its history, another picture emerged: land transferred through the dissolution of monasteries, village life displaced through enclosure, common life broken under landed power. Beneath the harmony of the scene stood dispossession.

While I confess to a durable fascination with the baronial hall I first entered at Penshurst, by studying it's history I changed how I understood Arcadia itself, and this has remained with me, just as durable. Arcadia not simply as literary ideal, but as ideological form: a promise of order whose beauty can obscure the lives made unliveable beneath it. I began to decode the enclosure, displaced labour, colonial projection, class power.

Sidney’s wider colonial world sharpens the point. The West Country Men did not merely imagine order; they helped organize domination materially. Enclosure, expulsion, cheap labour, imperial projection. The ruling classes, in other words, have long had a praxis of their own.

Land Back shouldn’t be just a settler colonial fight. This remarkable quote from Michael Gleeson quote in Behind the Privet Hedge caught my eye:

In his 1987 book English Cottage Gardens, Edward Hymans, wrote that, ‘between 1760 and 1867 England’s small class of rich men, using as their instrument Acts of Parliament, which they controlled through a tiny and partly bought and paid for electorate, stole seven million acres of common land, the property and livelihood of the common people of England.’

That is what Penshurst Place place taught me. Praxis is not only something radicals require. It is also how ruling power reproduces itself. And without historical understanding, that practical consciousness slips from view, even as we continue living inside its walls. Understanding forces of history such as the enclosures, a pattern that has reproduced around the world, is part of what Marxism does. It teaches us to read appearances through the social relations that produce them.

And once seen that way, one can trace how such promises mutate. What Sidney cast as harmony through order reappears as other promises of adaptation. Not every ideology is Arcadia. But Arcadia can be read as a model of how historical materialism works: beginning from an ordinary object, tracing the relations beneath it, and revealing how domination can survive as aspiration.

I return to a Sidney line that surfaced for me through an exchange with a comrade:

‘Not gnosis but praxis should be the fruit.’

Read this one way, Sidney is saying something simple and demanding: do not stop at knowing the your interests. Build the capacities to live it. In that sense, Sidney appears here as a builder of a new society—though one tied to ruling-class order. Sidney belonged to colonial ruling networks, which makes the phrase double-edged. Even ideals can organize domination. In effect, the labourer is invited to imagine a path into harmony through service to an ordered world. That promise—however literary—became part of a larger colonial imaginary. We are still living among its descendants.

That is why I take Penshurst Place seriously as an everyday example. My own visit became a moment of class consciousness because it revealed how ruling-class praxis can survive as tradition, aspiration, even tourism. And this story is a small model of historical materialism in practice.

The point is not to imitate Sidney’s Arcadia, but to ask what it would mean to become builders otherwise, toward communism. I use it not romantically but practically. Knowledge alone is not the point; what matters is what thought becomes in social practice. That is almost a prefiguration of the Feuerbach thesis.

I come back to the point that Capitalists know the truth of revolutionary praxis. They practice it themselves, usually in quiet or in plain sight. And they do in order to secure their material interests, to enclose the labour that supports them. That matters because it proves the point: praxis is not owned by the left. It is a social capacity. The question is which class develops it, for what ends.

Milton Friedman, the economist and intellectual inspiration for the Heritage Foundation, provides one example. Capitalists have often been better at praxis than Marxists. Friedman did not merely interpret markets; he helped build institutions, train cadres, circulate doctrine, wait through crisis, and turn crisis into opportunity. That is praxis. It is ruling-class practical consciousness organized over time. And, as he wrote:

”That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.” (Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 1982, xii-xiv)

Marxism suggests a similarly long-term, practical consciousness, in which alternatives move from impossible to required for he social conditions of the time. Capitalists, of course, secure their interests in crisis and by developing cycles of crisis. Employers strategize collectively, investors coordinate politically, landlords defend rents, media owners reproduce narratives. This too is class consciousness in practice. Not activism for its own sake. But thought tested through practice. Practice revised through history. History read experimentally.

Marxism has long pointed out that workers need their own forms of praxis for their own interests, their own organisations and parties, and has always found a way to learn from defeat and crisis. When a group of workers loses a campaign, studies why, changes tactics, rebuilds trust, and returns better organized, that too is praxis. Not failure followed by resignation. Failure becoming learning. Or when a union rank and file tests one strategy, finds it cannot be sustained materially, revises toward another form workers can actually live, that too is praxis.

Praxis matters because in transforming conditions, people are themselves transformed. This is what makes Marxism empirical in a deeper sense. It learns. It corrects. It absorbs defeat. It begins again.

This too belongs to the tradition of Marxism. Different Marxists take fresh approaches, returning to the method. A variety of these approaches exist, from Marx’s ruthless criticism of all that exists, Rodney grounding theory socially, Cabral returning to the source, or Che Guevarra experimenting under conditions. But these are just some names. People do it all the time and there are no simple great men of history around; there are shared capacities and collective actions with which we can do great things.

Praxis is learning to study, contest, and undo the practical consciousness of domination itself. The dangers of praxis are that without critique dissolves into improvisation, while praxis without capacities burns out, and praxis without organisation and discipline has no focus on building power.

Condensation: How Practical Capacities Become Historical Force

Critique. Capacity. Praxis.

These three functions of Marxism matter because when they are interlayered and overcome their weaknesses, and by achieving material change, they may become genuine counter-power. And counter-power, if gathered, generalized, and sustained, may help generate conditions for class consciousness, dual power, and revolutionary transition.

Class consciousness is a shared understanding of structured conditions and collective interests. It should be understood in a broader setting, as subjectivity transforms itself. Not only is it a narrow industrial identity, or a single social group discovering a pre-given historical role. It is also a growing practical awareness, across linked struggles, that conditions of life are structured together, that capacities can be shared, and that liberation requires organized transformation across those relations.

Capitalism has shifted its focus of domination from the factory and workplace, where it has largely won due to the global victory of neoliberalism, to the conditions of life, and class consciousness is evolving to make these the focus of our struggles. Class consciousness can deepen through labour struggles, but also through anti-colonial struggle. This broadening does not abandon class relation, but asks how multiple struggles may become articulated through it.

In moments of heightened struggle, these practical functions may condense. Critique, practical formation, and praxis may gather into counter-power. Counter-power may deepen into class consciousness. Class consciousness may generate dual power. And revolutionary transition may be understood not as miracle, but as this condensation becoming historical force.

In that sense, the transition toward communism can be read as the uneven, contested development of these capacities across different settings. Class consciousness can deepen through labour struggles, but also through anti-colonial struggle, feminist struggle, ecological struggle, trans survival, disability justice, and movements against domination wherever they develop shared understanding, practical capacities, and durable counter-power.

When we come to understanding how revolution become livable, we must understand that a revolution is not only an event of rupture. It is not merely downing tools for a sustained period to win better workplace conditions. It may instead be understood as a condensation of capacities that can no longer be contained as labour-power for capital that rupture the general conditions of an entire society. These are rare events, and rarely happen and appear spontaneous while they are the result of a sustained history of struggles that has no single coordinator.

And if so, the transition toward communism does not begin after that moment. It begins, however partially, wherever such capacities are being formed. That does not mean every movement automatically tends there. It means Marxism can help ask how they might.

The three functions of Marxism matter not only separately, but in how they may condense. Condensation is not about quantity, but is the formation of quality and material counter-power, and its appearance at the right place and right time. There are different ways condensation shapes history: latency, activity, and revolutionary. Marxist analysis helps us identify the conditions under which these functions become revolutionary, not just active or latent.

Latent Condensation

Even under ordinary conditions, capacities form. A worker recognizing burnout as structured rather than personal. A tenant meeting becoming shared political understanding. A visit to Penshurst Place becoming a story of Marxist functions. These may appear small. Marxism suggests they are not.

They are latent condensations: practical powers forming beneath ordinary life. Life under capital may begin becoming life against it where such capacities begin to condense, however unevenly. And that unevenness is not accidental. It reflects the uneven development of capitalism itself, which generates different pressures, struggles, and practical possibilities across social life.

Active Condensation

In heightened struggle, these capacities may begin strengthening one another. Critique deepens into practical consciousness. Capacities thicken into counter-power. Praxis becomes shared experimentation.

What surfaced in the teachers’ strike, I now think, was one such moment. Not revolution. But active condensation. Active condensation does not yet rival the social order. It names struggles intensifying, linking, and reinforcing one another in ways that exceed isolated resistance, without yet generating durable alternative institutions.

Revolutionary Condensation

In rare moments, this composition can deepen. Counter-power stabilizes. Class consciousness generalizes. Dual power emerges.

And what appears as revolution may be understood not as miracle, but as the historical condensation of practical capacities into transformative force.

And where they begin to gather, something else can emerge. Class consciousness often names this, because it is not merely a private realization in the head, but capacities achieved in the reorganisation of life.

Clara Fraser (1923-1998), socialist feminist and trade unionist, posed the problem in strikingly practical terms. One reason she called herself a revolutionary, she said, was that revolution might involve a saving of human energies otherwise squandered in endlessly defensive struggle. Rather than endlessly expending “hundreds of billions of man hours and woman hours” fighting to defend one reform here, another there, with none of it stable (and in fact Capitalist cycles ensuring they are beaten back), the revolutionary problem is how the conditions reproducing the exhaustion of this fight might themselves be transformed.

Fraser matters here because she helps clarify something often missed. Revolutionary transition is not only a question of rupture or seizure. It is also a question of whether collective capacities can overcome the exhausting instability of merely defensive struggle. In that sense, her insight belongs to the problem of liveability itself.

And perhaps communism, at its most grounded, can be understood as the durable reproduction of those condensed capacities as new social relations. It is the difficult, experimental practice of making the Marxist functions durable, not as a model imposed in advance but as a historical process in which new relations are built, tested, corrected, and made liveable through struggle itself.

A revolution is not a miracle, but can be analysed as the historical condensation of practical capacities into transformative force. Revolutionary condensation begins where those capacities become durable enough to generate dual power: not simply intensified struggle, but competing forms of social coordination capable of pressing toward transition.

Communism as the Durable Reproduction of Condensed Capacities

Marx wrote that communism is “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” Read this way, communism is not a distant perfect society, but the difficult reproduction of condensed capacities as new social relations. As the Hungarian Marxist Pannekoek put it, again to paraphrase, it is not a question of a perfect social system, but a change in the methods of production.

Capitalism of course is not merely an economy. It is a total social system that colonizes the conditions under which choices are made. It shapes work, time, thought, care, even what appears realistic. Which is why Marxism matters. Not because capitalism is a metaphysical evil. But because clear sight into a power system can help organize life out of domination. It’s a movement from grievance toward shared cause, from isolated coping toward organized capacities, from adaptation toward cooperation and from life under capital toward life against it.

Marx and Engels wrote that “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”. That is not a narrow class slogan. It is a relational principle. It suggests liberation is deepened, not diminished, when struggles recognize themselves in one another. And perhaps this is also why Marxism remains a global, universal method across so many different movements and ideologies. Not because it erases differences among struggles. But because it offers ways to connect them without dissolving them. No liberation struggle is alien to Marxism, because Marxism begins from the social conditions through which living beings struggle to become free.

If social being is foregrounded seriously, it cannot finally be reduced to human beings treated in isolation from the web of life through which they live. The conditions of life are ecological conditions too. Labour is always entangled with land, energy, bodies, food, species, and worlds humans do not create alone. Capitalism creates a “metabolic rift” here that Marx identified through the exhaustion of soils and workers.

Environmental movements have often generated recognition of these pressures. What they sometimes lack is a method for connecting recognition to durable counter-power. Marxism can help there too. Not by absorbing ecological struggle into class reduction. But by helping connect ecological survival, social reproduction, and liberation as related terrains of struggle.

Ecological struggle often appears to stand outside Marxism, when in fact many of its deepest questions are Marxian questions:

Who controls the conditions of life?

How are living systems subordinated to accumulation?

What capacities are needed to defend and transform the conditions of shared survival?

Perhaps this is what people are looking for when they say Marxism feels obscure, dead, or redundant. Not another theory. But a way to discover that Marxism may already be latent inside questions they are asking:

Why does life feel so pressured?
Why does private success feel hollow?
Who has power in the world to change things?
Who owns the infrastructure we rely on for life, and why?

Marxism begins, perhaps, when those questions stop appearing private. And becomes liveable when people begin answering them together. Before closing, I would return to the kinds of questions Marxism teaches people to ask, because in some sense they gather the three practical functions again.

What conditions are shaping our lives? Who benefits from those conditions? That is critique, learning to see clearly and deepening toward power.

What capacities do we have to change the conditions around us? That is practical formation, learning to build powers with others.

How can the capacities we build become durable transformation? That is praxis, and the problem of transition.

These questions matter because they are not abstractions. They help people move from pressures that appear private toward conditions understood socially, from grievance toward shared cause, from isolated coping toward organized capacities.

And perhaps that is why Marxism matters still. Not because it gives ready-made answers. But because it helps people ask better questions about life, power, and what it might mean to transform the conditions they share.

I think back to that day in Melbourne, walking among teachers who had briefly ceased appearing as isolated employees and began appearing as a collective force. At the time, I understood it as a strike. I now think I was glimpsing something else as well: a fleeting concentration of critique, capacity, and praxis that made another way of living appear, however briefly, liveable.

Clara Fraser was right that endless defensive struggle squanders human energies. The question is whether those energies can be organized otherwise. I think that was the question glimpsed in the teachers’ strike too. It’s a question that Marxism poses.

Perhaps that is where life under capital begins becoming life against it.

Notes

[1] Amílcar Cabral, ‘Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories’ and ‘Return to the Source.’ [2] Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions.
[3] Walter Rodney, Groundings with My Brothers.
[4] Karl Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach.’
[5] Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
[6] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party.
[7] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology.
[8] Anton Pannekoek, Workers’ Councils.
[9] Vladimir Lenin, What Is To Be Done?
[10] Clara Fraser, writings on revolutionary integration and socialist feminism.
[11] Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom; related remarks on crisis and policy change.
[12] Philip Sidney, Arcadia; and historical material on Penshurst, enclosure, and the West Country Men.
[13] Michael Gilson, ‘Arcadia is a Place of Rural Bliss.’

Today, a person close to me watched a teenager tearing through Melbourne’s western suburbs on a dirt bike and, from bearing and behaviour alone, decided he was probably a criminal and would end up killing someone. Later, she told my seven-year-old child that some people deserve to die.

The experience of her words struck me, not simply the cruelty of the statement, but how ordinary the structure behind it was. A reckless act became a type of person, then a type of person became morally disposable. I disagreed, publicly, because felt my son should hear some of the reasons why I felt the idea wasn’t curious, even reflective, enough.

But I understand that people, including those shaped by working-class life under capitalist conditions, can come to read the world through reified and ideological forms. Still, it made me think about how, if we do not keep social relations in sight, and reflect, we can make troubling assumptions and seek conceptual frameworks that normalize troubling forms of exclusion based on objectifying living beings.

Later the same day, after the incident with my child, I read “Some People Deserve to Die”, an essay published in Simplifying Socialism.

I understand the impulse behind the writing. The author seems to want to resist a sanctification of life so absolute that it cannot distinguish atrocity from ordinary wrongdoing. They seem to want to make sense of extreme cases of coercion, punishment, justified violence, perhaps even resistance to counterrevolutionary violence, without moral evasion. These are serious problems.

But I think the argument misses its mark.

It moves from asking how violence may be resisted to asking who may fall outside protection, Another way of saying this: it moves from condemning domination to authorizing exclusion, and from resisting disposability to theorizing a route back to it. And that is a shift that might reflect dangerous ideologies.

My concern is that dignity in the essay becomes a primal category doing metaphysical work that a Marxian critique might ask us to demystify. Worse, it is tied to reflection in a way that seems not just exclusionary but unstable.

Frantz Fanon, revolutionary psychiatrist and anti-colonial thinker, sharpens that suspicion. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Fanon included his chapter on “The Fact of Blackness”, detailing the way ontology itself is disrupted by social domination: “Ontology… does not permit us to understand the being of the black man,” because being is mediated through a racialized social relation. If this basic insight is correct, then neither reflection nor dignity can be treated as a primal possession abstracted from history that one can destroy or deny. They are already traversed by social power.

Why dignity and reflection as primal, rather than sentience, vulnerability, or social being? And why assume reflection is uniquely human? And why assume those who act monstrously “deserve” to be without it?

Another problem is that a calculating torturer may be reflective, and pause just before torturing again. A fascist may be reflective. Famous letters between Schmitt and Heidegger show world-historical, Hegelian level reflection. But we should have no trouble in seeing Schmitt’s philosophy of friends and enemies as dangerous. War criminals may and do reflect, but does their dignity suddenly spring back to life - in reflection?

If such persons become morally killable, it cannot be because reflection is absent. Something else is doing the work. And I worry that something else is a theory of exclusion.

To return to Fanon, he also wrote in his anti-colonial work: “I am overdetermined from without”. The fact of blackness becomes the fact and moral contamination of the enemy. That is, one can be fixed, classified, reduced under a social gaze before one acts at all. That matters here because theories of forfeiture risk forgetting how often the “dangerous,” the “criminal,” the “enemy,” are socially produced categories before they become moral judgments. In any juridical system, including a revolutionary one, I hope that we would not take Schmitt more seriously than Fanon.

That led me to wonder whether the problem lies deeper, in the theory of dignity itself. What if dignity is not a primal property persons possess and can forfeit, but something else?

Three possibilities occur to me.

First, dignity as social relation, not intrinsic essence.
Dignity would name not a metaphysical status but a relation in which beings are not degraded, dominated, or rendered disposable. There are resources in Marx, including the Grundrisse and Capital, for thinking dignity in something like this way.

Second, dignity as non-domination rather than rank.
Dignity would not be something one loses through moral failure. It would be what is attacked whenever domination reduces a being to an instrument or an object of disposal. Dignity in death as in life. Social death is a mechanism we should abolish in the transition to Communism.

Third, dignity as grounded in shared vulnerability rather than reflective capacity.
Not reason as threshold, but exposure to harm, interdependence, and the fragile conditions of flourishing as what morally matters.

If something like this is right, then the question is no longer who has forfeited dignity, but how social conditions produce indignity and disposability, and how those conditions are overcome.

And here my concern sharpens. Because if dignity depends on reflective thresholds, or can be forfeited through failures of moral reciprocity, what exclusions might quietly follow? We are familiar these kinds of concerns, but it’s worth listing out the lives that do not reflect according to this possible threshold: Children? People with dementia? People with cognitive disabilities? People in psychosis? Nonhuman animals?

And politically: Those deemed counterrevolutionary? The criminalized poor? Those marked socially dangerous? Enemies of the state?

The theory might never be this overdetermined. Perhaps. But structures matter precisely because they can travel farther than intentions.

None of this should mean denying that there may be tragic circumstances in which killing is justified. There may be situations where someone is actively inflicting grave harm without end, where people face annihilation, where counterrevolutionary violence seeks to destroy any possibility of meeting human needs, or where force is necessary to prevent the reproduction of institutions organized through domination and injury.

A Marxian response, as I understand it, need not deny this. But it frames the question differently, less Kantian or Schmittian. It’s not Who deserves to die? Instead, it is a question that resists idealism and foregrounds the social relations of power: What social relation is being defended, reproduced, or transformed through force?

That matters because violence is not merely an act between individuals. It is often a social relation. Fanon helps here too. Colonial violence for him is not first episodic acts, but a structuring relation that forms the field in which counter-violence emerges. That matters because it pushes the question away from who deserves death, and toward how violent social relations are reproduced, resisted, and transformed. That is much closer to the question I am trying to ask.

From this standpoint, revolutionary violence, where it can be justified, is not justified because enemies have fallen outside moral concern, but because in concrete conditions force may arise within the defense of shared life against domination. Killing can be justified using tools familiar to Marxists, such as this kind of immanent critique. This approach asks whether force is necessary, proportionate, historically situated, oriented to abolishing domination rather than reproducing it, and accountable to the very emancipatory ends it claims to defend.

There’s a contradiction I see in the claims in the essay. The contradiction, as I see it, is that it seeks to abolish disposability while theorizing a route to disposability. It opposes reducing beings to objects of domination, yet risks reintroducing domination in the form of sovereign judgment over who may fall outside protection.

But to authorize exclusion through a metaphysics of forfeited dignity seems outside the scope of Marxism, unless Marxism is reduced to an ideology attached to an unexamined ontology in which persons appear as isolable moral substances before the social relations that constitute them. For me, a Marxian critique begins elsewhere: not by deciding who has forfeited protection, but by asking how the social relations that produce domination, violence, and disposability are transformed.

There’s a much harder ethic of dignity we could develop than moral forfeiture. And, I think, a much more Marxian one. For me, this is where the power of Marxism lies. Not in sanctifying life, and not in sorting some life into the disposable. In refusing both, and in asking instead how to abolish the conditions that make beings disposable in the first place. What we call dignity may be one expression of deeper relations of non-domination, shared need, and collective flourishing.

That is what I am trying to think through in Life Against Capital, and also: not life as sacred substance, and not life as conditionally excludable, but life as that which resists domination precisely by refusing the power to decide whose existence lies beyond concern. That seems to me a stronger emancipatory starting point than moral forfeiture.

A further thought, prompted by revolutionary traditions often neglected in these debates, is that Marxism may have resources here beyond the language of dignity itself. Amílcar Cabral, the anti-colonial revolutionary theorist of struggle, liberation, culture, and transformation, suggests one.. His idea of class suicide names not the elimination of persons, but the transformation of social position, interest, and practice through struggle. That matters because it offers a revolutionary way of thinking antagonism without turning antagonists into morally killable beings.

At its emancipatory strongest, Marxism refuses both sanctification and disposability because it treats antagonism not only as conflict, but as a field of possible transformation. Transforming conditions and self-transformation belong together.

This raises another possibility. Perhaps the problem is not simply that the essay has the wrong theory of dignity, but that dignity is being asked to do work better done by a theory of social relations, liberation, struggle, and transformation. The deeper relations of non-domination, shared need, and collective flourishing await recognition.

If so, Life Against Capital may not finally need dignity as a primal category at all. It may need a theory of flourishing against domination, of which dignity is only a secondary expression.

That, too, seems to me a stronger emancipatory starting point than moral forfeiture.

And perhaps this is where I return to that earlier moment. Someone today saw a reckless teenager and imagined a criminal, then she told my child that some people deserve to die.

I return to it because it reminds me how easily disposability enters ordinary life before it enters theory, how quickly a judgment about conduct can harden into a theory of disposable persons.

I think Marxism is strongest where it interrupts that hardening. Not by denying antagonism, force or struggle. But by refusing to let struggle become a philosophy of expulsion.

Even where force may tragically be necessary, emancipation does not begin by deciding whose life lies beyond concern. It begins by refusing the social relations that teach us to think that way, and by abolishing the conditions that make such judgments seem natural.

And I would rather my son learn that the task of emancipation is not to decide whose life is beyond concern, but to transform the conditions in which life is rendered disposable at all.

That, too, is life against capital.

Postscript:
These are provisional notes, not a closed position. I would welcome responses, especially on whether Marxism needs a theory of dignity at all, whether resistance to extreme violence can be justified without opening a logic of disposability, and whether I have misread the essay.

If the author at Simplifying Socialism responds, I will update this piece and continue the exchange.

The vegan community has also been highly engaged with the episode, which brought it to my attention, and in what follows I am going to focus on what this tells us about the kind of ethical encounters that veganism tends to promote, and how we might begin to shift what feels like an inevitable outcome in these sorts of debates.

In this piece at Life Against Capital, I’m going to explore what a shift from utilitarian ethics to what I would call Marxist ethics or analysis could give veganism, by turning to concepts I have introduced recently: class consciousness and a commons of becoming. Without the concept of class consciousness, in particular, to help explain the economic roles of working-class people structured by Capitalism, I do not think we can explain or transform the conditions of the power system that causes animal exploitation and suffering.

Before addressing the questions generated by the shift from recognition of suffering to the conditions that cause suffering, I want to touch on my discomfort in discussing the Jubilee debate. Jubilee is not a space designed for careful ethical reflection. It is a platform organised around spectacle: the staging of disagreement, the compression of argument, the conversion of conflict into circulation. It has platformed figures that make its limits clear, including an avowed Nazi, which reveals a highly questionable ethical and political compass. Clearly, Jubilee is not where one would go to think seriously about how we ought to live. And yet, it is one of the few places where questions like veganism appear at scale at all.

That fact is not incidental. It tells us something about the conditions under which ethical life is discussed today: fragmented, accelerated, individualised, and detached from the structures that organise it. Within those conditions, the debate unfolds.

“1 Vegan vs 20 Meat Eaters” was, on the surface, a familiar format: one vegan arguing that animals suffer and that this suffering is unjustifiable, against a range of responses that oscillate between defensiveness, dismissal, and uneasy agreement. But what struck me was not the obvious clashes. It was the quieter moments, where something like recognition appears and then fails to become anything more.

Because even when participants clearly know that animal agriculture produces immense suffering, to animals, the environment, humans, they do not change. They do not reject the argument. They do not defeat it. They simply fail to live it.

This is what requires explanation.

Vegans recognise this pattern well. It is often experienced as frustration: why, when the argument is won, do meat eaters refuse to go vegan? The dominant answers tend to remain within a grievance or a liberal frame: weakness of will, ego, defensiveness, habit. And in many cases, these are not wrong. But they are not sufficient. Veganism has typically engaged in more scrupulous attention to the methods of activism and advocacy, combined with an in-depth discussion of why people do not change their habits and take up a more ethical position. Talented advocates such as Symes emerge from this familiar pattern.

At the same time, the meat eaters who participated in this debate showed their own scrupulous attention to deflecting arguments and defending habits. One moment stands out for me when Fodella, a professional boxer, hammered Symes on being emotional, and then emotionally reacted to the “judgemental side” of vegans. Why does this stand-off happen? Fodella clearly accepted information and recognised that animals suffer. And, in fact, the majority of meat eaters in this debate accepted the information shared by Symes. Yet why is their recognition not enough?

Because what appears in these debates is something more difficult: recognition that does not hold. We can see the way recognition builds that does not hold across many of the exchanges in the Jubilee debate.

When Symes speaks with Bea, known as “Girl Gone Carnivore,” she explains that she has gastroesophageal reflux disease, and that plant-based food makes her feel ill. She does not deny the ethical argument. In fact, when pushed into a hypothetical, she concedes that if she did not have this condition, she would likely be vegan. She even begins to articulate agreement:

“I do see where you are coming from as far as where it could be more ethically sound, but, unfortunately…”

Unfortunately, she does not get to finish that sentence. Symes interrupts to reassert a general claim:

“very few people—“0.1% or 1%”—cannot sustain a plant-based diet … I'd just encourage you to go as far toward veganism as possible.”

On one level, this is reasonable. It maintains ethical consistency. But something is missed. Bea is speaking from the conditions of her life—her body, her experience—while Symes returns the conversation to a general principle. The discussion moves back to suffering—its presence, its scale, its unjustifiability—but does not remain long enough with the conditions under which people are able, or unable, to live differently.

This is not incidental. It follows from the ethical framework being used.

What we are seeing here is a broadly utilitarian structure of argument. Suffering is identified as the central moral problem. The task is to reduce it. Individuals are asked to align their behaviour with that aim. Symes does this well. But within this frame, the key question becomes: If animals suffer, and we can avoid contributing to that suffering, why don’t we?

The answers to this question tend toward individual psychology, a narrow individual lens in a problem reduced to a simple decision. This is effective advocacy within a utilitarian framework, and yet it clearly did not lead to any change in the habits of the meat eaters.

A Marxist approach, however, to the ethical questions contained in this debate begins elsewhere. It does not begin with what individuals ought to do. It begins with social being: the way life is organised through relations of labour, property, time, and survival. From this perspective, the question is not simply: What is the right thing to do? It’s not even: How do we reduce suffering? Instead, it is: What conditions make certain ways of living possible, and others difficult or unsustainable? Or more precisely: What conditions make it difficult to sustain what one already knows to be right?

A shift like this matters. Because what appears in the debate is not ignorance, but contradiction. People agree, and yet do not change. Vidur, for example, admits:

“I know I won’t succeed… I’ve tried it before.”

He accepts the ethical claim. He feels its force. And yet he retreats into habit, not because he has defeated the argument, but because he cannot reorganise his life around it.

For Marx, who foregrounded the social relations of life, this is not surprising. Social practices reproduce themselves independently of what people know. As he put it:

“They do not know it, but they are doing it.”

We might extend this: even when they do know, they are still doing it. Because knowledge alone does not reorganise life.

Let me illustrate this through my own becoming vegan. When I became vegan, about twenty years ago, I did not do so alone. I first became vegetarian with my already vegetarian partner, who supported and guided me. Her mother supported us. My own mostly vegetarian mother supported that step. Together, we moved gradually, relationally, through a transformation.

When my partner became vegan, she faced resistance from her family, which I supported her through. When I followed, I faced resistance from mine. I remember clearly the social friction—the loss of shared meals, the confusion, the discomfort. I remember a dinner with shared friends with the creative theme of “black dinner”. It was organised around wearing black and eating black foods—squid ink pasta among them—which we could not eat, and as we began tucking into the black rice we brought to share in the black dinner, we were asked about why we became vegan and lectured on our “privilege.” There was strong, uncomfortable resistance, and the black dinner lived up to its name.

Becoming vegan was not easy. It required years of adjustment, support, experimentation, community. It required others. Looking back, this is obvious. But like parents in the decades after having children, we tend to forget how difficult and challenging the transformation of our lives can be for us.

This is rarely how veganism is narrated. Veganism is typically framed as an easy or positive individual ethical choice: a moment of recognition followed by a decision. The relational conditions that make that decision livable are backgrounded or erased.

Such an erasure is not accidental. It reflects a broader pattern—what is sometimes described as “White Veganism”—in which ethical transformation is framed as an individual moral act, rather than a relational and material process. The issue here is not moral failure, but structural framing: the tendency to treat barriers as personal rather than shared.

Other traditions foreground relationality differently. You can see this clearly in Syl Ko’s talk on Black Veganism as a “revolutionary tradition” here, with her Aphro-ism is a recommended read. For Ko, Black Veganism is revolutionary because it refuses to divide humans from animals and the focus is on shared struggle on an anti-racist grounding rather than individual alignment. Such approaches do not begin with abstract suffering, but with systems of domination and the conditions of life within them. What this shifts is not only the object of concern, but the form of ethics itself: from individual alignment to shared struggle.

We can now see more clearly what is happening in the Jubilee debate. Bea’s condition is treated as an exception—a statistical outlier. But the form of her problem is general. Across the debate, people encounter limits: health constraints, time scarcity, cost pressures, family expectations, cultural habits, emotional attachments, exhaustion. These are not simply excuses. They are conditions structured by Capitalism.

People do not eat in abstraction. They eat within systems. Food is organised through cost, time, availability, habit, culture, and social relations. Dr Pete’s eating is embedded in religious practice. Vidur’s in routine and comfort. Bea’s in health. None are acting in isolation.

A Marxist approach here shifts the ground entirely. It does not ask, first, how individuals can reduce suffering. It asks how suffering is produced and reproduced through social relations. The factory farm and the slaughterhouse do not exist because people reason incorrectly. They exist because land is owned, labour is organised, supply chains are secured, and profit is extracted. Animal suffering is not incidental. It is systemic.

At the same time, the lives of those who might oppose that suffering are also organised by that system. This is the contradiction. People are asked to transform their lives within conditions that continuously reproduce the very practices they are trying to escape. This is why recognition fails to hold.

And this is not unique to veganism. It is the same problem Marx identified in class consciousness. Workers recognise exploitation. They experience it directly. They speak about it in moments of clarity. And yet that recognition does not consolidate into a durable, collective orientation capable of transforming the system.

Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács described class consciousness not as individual awareness, but as a collective form capable of grasping totality. Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci showed how consciousness is layered, contradictory, composed of fragments of truth and ideology. Silvia Federici and Tithi Bhattacharya, Marxists who have introduced social reproduction theory, have shown how these contradictions are rooted in social reproduction: the everyday work of sustaining life, in food, care, time, health.

This is where veganism lives or fails. Not in abstract ethical reasoning, but in kitchens, supermarkets, clinics, commutes, routines, and bodies already under pressure.

So the question is not: Why don’t people go vegan, even when they know animals suffer? Instead, we should ask: What would it take for that knowledge to become something that can be lived, shared, and sustained?

This is where I return to what I have elsewhere called the commons of becoming. Not a space outside capitalism, but a relation within it. It emerges when private contradictions become shared. When difficulty is recognised as collective condition rather than individual failure. When explanation shifts from blame to structure. When practices begin to be organised together rather than alone.

This is what allows recognition to hold.

If we return to the debate, we can imagine a different question being asked of Bea. Not interrupting her to frame her problem as the problem of the 1%. Instead, to strategise with her: What would need to exist for someone in your position to live differently? What conditions—dietary, medical, social—would make that possible? Who else faces similar limits? How could those limits be addressed collectively?

Across the debate, and beyond it, people encounter limits that prevent them from aligning their lives with what they recognise. These are social conditions, structured and shaped by Capitalism, which is uneven in its provision and response to needs, and is in fact structured (if we strip back the organising that opposes it) by wage labour and the coercive demand that workers must sell their labour for a wage or starve. This structural reality, usually denied by liberals and utilitarians in debates, touches on everything from health conditions, to time scarcity, cost pressures, family expectations, social pressure, cultural habits, emotional attachments and exhaustion.

None of these are simply excuses, something that vegans normally raise when they slip back into grievance consciousness. In fact, they are structural conditions which we can functionally explain only in reference to Capitalism as a power structure. And those conditions are not randomly distributed. Class, power, dependence, race, gender, identity, labour roles, locations, histories all shape how these conditions are organised.

This does not abandon the ethical claim. It deepens it. It situates suffering not as a problem of individual alignment, but as a problem of how life is organised. Marxist ethics then does not focus on necessary and unnecessary suffering. Instead, it asks us to consider what causes suffering and exploitation of others within a system of power.

The question of who, what and how is primary for Marxism, as it combines an immanent critique of a system of power (Capitalism) with a practical ethics (how to transform Capitalism). Marxism concerns itself with the necessities of power. It asks us to recognise our role within a system of power in suffering from and participating in making others suffer, and to practically address this by working together by building class consciousness and sharing strategies to collectively and individually to analyse, struggle against and abolish the conditions that cause suffering, any and all.

Marxism refuses to take on the one-dimensional, reductive individualism of so much ethical discussion by foregrounding the relational webs which ground us in reality. Animal suffering is not an accidental by-product. It is built into a system that turns life into a resource. At the same time, the lives of those who might oppose that suffering are also organised by that system. Their food, time, health, and habits are structured within it.

This is why debates like Symes’ encounter a limit. They can produce recognition and even produce agreement. But they cannot, on their own, produce the conditions under which that recognition becomes livable. People might agree, even feel the contradiction, and say words such as “I see where you’re coming from.” Meanwhile, what they do on their plate and in everyday shopping will continue as before.

Part of the problem here is not just individual, but political. Politics unfortunately is often treated like kryptonite in Veganism. In the absence of any everyday understanding of what politics is, vegans often treat politics as socially divisive or as a matter of biasing. But this is because they background the social conditions that always already divide us and that sit between us even in shared recognition. The decision to reject the authorities of a society telling us that meat eating is normal, is a political decision structured by the dynamics of power.

The Left, especially the liberal and Marxist-informed varieties of the Left, has historically marginalised questions of animal life, treating them as secondary to labour, class struggle, or imperialism. It has remained mostly within a human-animal division that supports a production system in which supremacy against animals is unaddressed, or at best given a vague utopian treatment. The assumption that animals are outside social relations is what is most contestable about this approach. And, as we have seen, there are clear alternatives such as Black Veganism and Indigenous ontologies that do not separate humans from animals.

Veganism, in turn, has often developed as a response to that absence, attempting to hold people to account for a form of suffering that is clearly visible and ethically overwhelming. But in doing so, it has frequently remained at the level of moral recognition rather than structural analysis. What this produces is a split. Marxism can explain the organisation of labour, land, and capital, but has often failed to integrate animals into that analysis as part of the same system of extraction. Veganism can make suffering visible with extraordinary clarity, but often struggles to explain why that suffering persists at the level of production, property, and power.

Both are confronting the same system from different entry points. And both, in isolation, remain incomplete. This is why the recognition does not hold, because it is not built into the relations that organise everyday life. So it fragments into moralisation, defensiveness, and becomes partial change. Or it becomes what I have elsewhere described as the condition of the free-floating animal advocate. The lone wolf, someone who has seen suffering, cannot unsee it, but lacks a political home capable of explaining or confronting the structures that produce it. An affective labourer who produces the spectacle of animal suffering, and needs to gain class consciousness to organise against the industries that stabilise the very power system they should be working to transform.

We’ve seen then in the Jubilee Symes debate that the lone utilitarian debating meat eaters and presenting the spectacle of animal suffering can generate broad agreement, with distressingly little action. Recognitions do not stabilise. They can appear and then disappear back into everyday life. If the brutal system of power that shapes the context of this debate and conditions both the vegan and the meat eaters is unnamed and unchallenged, then recognition flickers and cannot become class consciousness in a Marxist sense, the awareness of a historically situated role that provides the possibilities and strategizing to transform power. It becomes the missed challenge of recruiting those who recognise into the collective endeavour of sharing ways we can become revolutionary together.

Class consciousness is not only the awareness of a system. It is, rather, the capacity to act within and against it together. Veganism, if it is to move beyond moral appeal, must find itself shaping the capacities of being anti-system. But never to reproduce this as a demand placed on individuals, shouldered by them alone. Rather, to go vegan should be a chance to join a form of life best lived together to build, sustain, and share the transformation of the social conditions in which we are all differently placed. It is a web of relations that has no singular name of vegan. Every moment recognition is possible, it becomes an opportunity to hold people together in class consciousness, in the historic awareness of their position in power and the possibility of their resistance to advance the lives and capacities of everyone. In what I have called, elsewhere, the commons of becoming.

Veganism and class consciousness meet here. It is not that they are identical projects, but they are parallel problems. Both begin in recognition. Both confront systems that organise life against that recognition. And both depend on whether that recognition can become something more than a private burden. Something held in common and lived. Class consciousness does not begin as theory. It begins as pressure in your working life: low wages, exhaustion, precarity, workplace conflict. Similarly, veganism often begins in a discomfort, a contradiction, a sense that something about how we eat is wrong.

The refusal to name this power system—Capitalism—and organise to transform it, to address the social circumstances that shape us, before we make a spectacle of people’s beliefs and thoughts that flow from this power system, is one of the most important barriers to the wider distribution of veganism in a system where such a transformation is so necessary.

Vegans I believe could additionally use the concept and practices of the commons of becoming to help them explain their class consciousness and their role as affective labourers in the system of power that commodifies animal suffering. The commons is not a space outside capitalism, not a purified ethical enclave, but a relation and an intercommunal practice that can emerge within the spaces we already inhabit, when isolated experiences begin to be held in common.

The commons of becoming appears when a private contradiction becomes recognisable across people. Difficulty is not treated as individual failure, but as shared condition; explanation shifts from blame to structure; and practices begin to be organised collectively rather than individually. This commons is what allows recognition to hold. Our struggles are shared, and we seek ways to bring communities together to address power that causes our harm.

Until then, the pattern will repeat. Recognition will appear. Agreement will be expressed. And life will continue as before.

If, instead, vegans want to challenge the power system that conditions our lives, we can begin to see that veganism can be both recognisable and realised. Not as an individual achievement, but as something that becomes livable within shared relations.

In the commons of becoming.