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nationalism
Finding Hope for the Future in a Gaza Mother and Doctor
This is peace—this is love—standing in the aftermath of war, refusing to give up.
May 30, 2025
The slaughter goes on, usually in the name of war, which reduces human life to, at best, a strategic abstraction. Dead civilians—dead children—are collateral damage, which means they’re nothing at all.
How can we be more than just spectators as we learn, every day, more stunning details about the hell going on across the planet? How can the human race stand up collectively to the cancer of war? Humanity, in the name of nationalism, has essentially organized itself against itself: We’ve declared one another “the enemy,” which means that only some of us are human. The others are simply in the way.
And nowhere, as we all know, is the news more hellish and shocking than the stories that emerge daily from Gaza, which continues to undergo, in full view on social media... genocide. It looks like this, according to CNN:
Dr. Alaa al-Najjar left her ten children at home on Friday when she went to work in the emergency room at the Nasser Medical Complex in southern Gaza.
Hours later, the bodies of seven children—most of them badly burned—arrived at the hospital, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza. They were Dr. Najjar’s own children, killed in an Israeli airstrike on her family’s home... The bodies of two more of her children—a 7-month-old and a 12-year-old who authorities presume to be dead—remain missing.
Only one of her ten children, 11-year-old Adam, survived. Dr. Najjar’s husband Hamdi, himself a doctor, was also badly injured in the strike.
This is the context in which another piece of news emerges, an opposite event, a beam of light which, oh God, I pray represents the dawn of humanity’s future: Veterans For Peace, along with 28 co-sponsoring organizations, has launched a 40-day fast calling for an end to Israel’s genocidal war on, and starvation of, Gaza. Some of the participants gather daily in front of the United Nations headquarters in New York, aligning themselves—in all their vulnerable humanity—with the organization’s founding purpose.
A letter the fasters wrote to U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres concludes: “Uppermost in our minds with this request to meet with you at your earliest convenience is the U.N. founding goal to save ‘succeeding generations from the scourge of war.’”
I quote these words not with a sense of “yeah, yeah” abstraction but rather because the writers are people like you and me, stepping out of their daily lives and into a determination to be part of, and help create, a world beyond war—beginning with an Israeli cease-fire and the salvation of Palestine, but hardly stopping there.
To put it another way: The words attempt to link individuals with a global institution. What I hear in these words is the call for a collective, planetary effort to transcend war. This effort must include every single human on this planet, including you and me, and demands our participation and sacrifice, not simply our shrug of hope. I hear a call for the United Nations to reinvent itself as United Humanity. And thus the future emerges.
One of the participants in the fast is my old friend Kathy Kelly. I talked to her on day six of the fast. Participants are limiting themselves to consuming 250 calories a day, she noted, which is about the amount Palestinians have available to them. Several hundred people are participating in the fast in New York, with more people, around 600 in total, throughout and beyond the United States. If you’re interested in joining the effort, visit the websites of either Veterans for Peace or Friends of Sabeel North America.
The fast is very much a public event, Kathy told me. On Memorial Day, for instance, a few days into the fast, they ceremonially honored not just veterans but some of the victims of the current genocide, bringing the al-Najjar family into public grief by reading the names of the children who were killed.
Kathy gave me a list of their names and ages. I feel like they belong here: Yahya: 12 years old; Rakan: 10 years old;; Eve: 9 years old; Jubran: 8 years old; Ruslan: 7 years old; Reval: 5 years old; Sadin: 3 years old; Luqman: 2 years old; Sidra: 6 months old. Adam, age 11, the sole surviving child, was critically injured.
Yeah, this is war. Its details matter. And as an American, I am complicit in the hell this country’s militarism has wreaked throughout my lifetime: the collateral damage, the environmental damage, it has bequeathed Planet Earth, followed by nothing more than an indifferent, strategic shrug.
So I feel compelled to return for a moment to Alaa al-Najjar, the doctor and mom who recently lost 9 of her 10 children, with her husband and last surviving child seriously injured. Her niece told CNN that
Dr. Alaa broke down when she showed the last bottle of breast milk she had expressed for her infant daughter, Sidra, whose body remains missing.
She told me today that her chest aches so much as she was breastfeeding, every day at work, Dr. Alaa pumped milk to provide for Sidra, and today she showed me the last bottle she prepared for her.
Dr. Alaa can barely speak. If you could see her face, you would understand her pain. She is only praying for her son and husband to recover.
And also, this: According to a fellow doctor at the hospital, Alaa al-Najjar has “continued to work despite losing her children, while periodically checking on the condition of her husband and Adam.”
This is peace—this is love—standing in the aftermath of war, refusing to give up. I see hope for the future here. I see humanity’s role model.
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It Is Time to Build a World Based on Solidarity
We are at a crossroads in human history. We will either figure out how to share, or we will tear apart the fabric of the world that supports us.
Apr 22, 2025
In Los Angeles, one of the wealthiest cities in the world, a city responsible for producing the images of style and happiness that are propagated around the globe, there are 40,000 people living on the street. Even its wealthy neighborhoods were not safe from the disastrous wildfires of 2025. These problems are the result of an economic system that puts profits over human and environmental needs; a political system that allows money to impact outcomes; and a cultural system dominated by unregulated tech monopolies and other forms of corporate-controlled media.
While the technology is available to replace dirty energy with clean in the time we have left to stabilize the world at 1.5°C, many governments continue to subsidize fossil fuels at higher rates than they subsidize renewable energy. Levels of inequality are increasing both between the Global South and Global North and within countries all around the world. Living standards in the Global North are going down. One of the reasons for this is the corrosive nature of inequality. As long as a society tolerates high levels of inequality, it will contain high levels of social conflict. As people come to resent the existing social order, some turn to reactionary forms of ethno-nationalism.
All around the world voters feeling a sense of precarity have chosen to elect leaders such as former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and U.S. President Donald Trump. People’s faith in the future and sense of security are so under threat that in many places around the world, there are epidemic levels of anxiety and depression. California, one of the richest places on the planet with a two-thirds Democratic majority, has not figured out how to build a livable state. The global rise of right-wing nationalism is the symptom of a disease, rather than its cause.
We are at a crossroads in human history. We will either figure out how to share, or we will tear apart the fabric of the world that supports us. At this crucial moment we need to choose between a world based on reactionary nationalist sentiments and political power plays by the fossil fuel industry and other reactionary forms of capital, or we can figure out how to fairly share the resources we have and learn to live together in healthy relationships with nature. It is time to build a world based on relations of solidarity.
The Deep Roots of the Current Crisis
The forces that are tearing apart the fabric of our world are part of a global set of practices that have developed over the past 500 years that allow people and companies to pursue profit for its own sake without regard for the needs of others. Over those centuries, destructive practices based on capitalism, slavery, colonialism, and particular forms of patriarchy have been woven into the ways that politics, economics, and culture function.
Since its beginning capitalism has been challenged by those it has harmed: from slave revolts and anticolonial rebellions all around the world, to the Levelers and Diggers in capitalism’s original home of England, who opposed the privatization of land. And from capitalism’s beginning there have also been those who fought to get a greater share of the spoils of the system for working people. Unions have fought for better working conditions and wages from employers. Reformers have fought for the state to operate in ways that shifted the balance of power toward the interests of people and the environment.
In many European nations, accords between capital and labor were reached early in the 20th century as the result of strong labor movements. Those accords led to social democratic forms of capitalism, where living standards were kept high, and social safety nets were created, as states managed to regulate businesses while also allowing them to flourish and remain politically powerful. As inequality has increased and governments have been decreasingly able to deliver satisfying lives under these accords, many European nations have seen support for mainstream parties decline and support for right-wing nationalist parties rise.
If a new accord between capital and labor is not likely to be established any time soon, our best hope is to work to build a social world based on principles of solidarity.
In the U.S., after the immiseration and social turmoil of the Great Depression, a similar accord was reached between capital and labor, where businesses were regulated by the state, living standards were somewhat protected, and wages rose. This accord lasted until it was challenged by former President Ronald Reagan, whose began his administration in 1980 by firing striking air traffic controllers. Since that time, the U.S. has seen a steady erosion of protections for workers, regulations to protect the environment, and living standards. The Depression-era accord was broken, and the U.S. has seen a steady decline in living standards ever since.
One could imagine a situation in which a new accord was established, and a detente could be reached again between the working class and capital. As the world falls further into chaos and people’s lives become more precarious, the old accords that were established between capital and labor are no longer holding. While it is possible that rational capitalists who want a stabilized system will come to the rescue and create a new accord, that outcome is highly unlikely, for several reasons.
One reason it is unlikely is the climate crisis. Clean energy is being installed at a rapid rate, and it is transforming lives in much of the Global South. Speeding the transition in ways necessary for our survival will require more regulations on polluting industries, and more government investments in infrastructure. And yet, the fossil fuel oligarchs continue to fight those changes tooth and nail, as seen in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. The fossil fuel oligarchy holds dominant power is the U.S., Russia, the Gulf States, and many powerful transnational institutions. It is not going to peacefully wander into the sunset as the transition away from fossil fuels undermines its power and profits. The fact that the survival interests of a livable planet are in direct conflict with the interests of that politically powerful sector make it difficult for other sectors of capital to come to a new accord to stabilize the system.
Another factor making a new accord unlikely is the political power of the technology oligarchs whose social media products are responsible for much of the current chaos in the world’s information ecosystems. Those oligarchs and their firms are fighting globally to maintain their ability to operate as monopolies, and are preventing more benign forms of social media from developing. They continue to refuse to limit the spread of forms of misinformation that led to massacres in many places including Myanmar. They allow Russian bots and other malign entities to spread disinformation in ways that help us get outcomes like the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Those tech oligarchs are increasingly flexing their political power. A new accord between capital and human society would require strong action to reign in those destructive forces.
A third factor making a new accord difficult is that in earlier periods, businesses functioned largely by making things that met people’s needs. Consumers got the products they desired, and in many parts of the world, living standards rose. In the past decades, capitalism has entered a vampiric phase, where finance capital extracts profits while doing less to create things that meet people’s needs and desires. This has led to the rich getting richer without creating rising living standards as a by-product, as in happened in earlier phases of capitalism.
As inequality increases all around the world, a variety of social ills follow in its wake, as Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson write in The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. These range from obvious ones such as increased crime rates, to less obvious ones such as teen pregnancy, and a tendency for social cohesion to fall apart. Lack of social cohesion can then lead voters to put authoritarian leaders into power who promise to give them a sense of stability as their worlds fall apart.
Solidarity
Rather than trying, under these difficult circumstances, to reestablish a new accord with the exploitative systems that dominate our world, the time is ripe to dig deeply and try to uproot those systems at their cores. That will involve building alternative ways of meeting our needs, fighting against the structures that support the current system, and rethinking our understanding of our social world. If a new accord between capital and labor is not likely to be established any time soon, our best hope is to work to build a social world based on principles of solidarity.
The term solidarity is a call to unite across differences to advocate for a common set of interests. It often means standing up for the needs of others, not in the form of charity, but in the form of building social relations that work for others, or stopping destructive forces such as wars, or social practices that lead to poverty, in the name of building a world based on healthy forms of interdependency.
The movements emerging to protect immigrant rights, to protect democratic institutions, to fight against the fascist takeover of our government can all be part of a movement to build a better world.
In every part of the world there are examples of people managing resources in ways that build solidarity. They are creating community gardens, community land trusts, time banks, and credit unions. They are finding ways to support and promote sharing, gift giving, and caring for one another. They are building networks of socially oriented enterprises. They are developing models to spread. They are working to transform the context in which these enterprises take place to foster their growth and increase their impacts.
Moving to a world based on principles of solidarity involves building that new world from within the belly of the old. We need to challenge the dominant structures that uphold the old order, while simultaneously building and living in viable alternatives, and rethinking how we understand the nature of our shared social world. We need to fight, build, and rethink.
The accords established to stabilize many countries early in the 20th century were the results of tremendous work by people organizing in trade unions and broad-based social movements. Unfortunately, the current crisis comes at a time when trade unions are not as strong as they have been in some periods in the past. And yet union power is developing as are a wide range of oppositional social movements. The movements emerging to protect immigrant rights, to protect democratic institutions, to fight against the fascist takeover of our government can all be part of a movement to build a better world. As we do all we can to stop the current onslaught against a livable world, we should also keep in mind our broader vision of a world that works for all of us, including the natural systems on which our lives depend.
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Neo-Feudalism: the Enemy the Left Must Name to Defeat
The only way forward is to complete the unfinished revolution against feudalism—not through reactionary nationalism, but through systemic transformation.
Mar 18, 2025
In 1776, America declared independence not just from a king, but from an entire feudal order. The promise was radical: no more lords and vassals, no more aristocratic monopolies, no more inherited rule. It was a vision of self-governance, economic freedom, and political democracy.
As we know, this promise was deeply flawed from the outset—built atop the brutal reality of chattel slavery, which entrenched a racial caste system even as the revolution sought to break from feudal hierarchy.
Still, the revolutionary spark—that governance should belong to the people, not an inherited elite—set a course for future struggles, from abolition to labor rights to civil rights. The unfinished promise of 1776 has always been to extend that right to everyone, dismantling old forms of domination wherever they persist.
The fight against neo-feudalism must be reclaimed by a left willing to challenge entrenched power at its roots, not merely manage decline.
Yet nearly 250 years later, we find ourselves under the shadow of a system that eerily resembles the one we once revolted against. Power is no longer held by monarchs but by corporate oligarchs and billionaire dynasties. The vast majority of Americans—trapped in cycles of debt, precarious labor, and diminishing rights—are not citizens in any meaningful sense.
We talk around this reality. We call it “money in politics,” “corporate influence,” and “economic inequality.” But these are symptoms, not the disease. The disease is neo-feudalism—a system in which power is entrenched, inherited, and designed to be impossible to escape. And unless we call it by its true name, we will never build the movement needed to fight it.
Feudalism may have faded in name, but many of its structures remain. Today’s hierarchy mirrors the past in ways we can no longer ignore.
- Then: Lords owned the land, and peasants worked it under their control.
Now: A handful of corporations and investment firms own vast swaths of housing, farmland, and industry. - Then: Aristocracies passed power down through hereditary privilege.
Now: Dynastic billionaires and corporate monopolies ensure that wealth remains concentrated in a ruling class. - Then: The peasantry was bound to their lords by custom, debt, and necessity.
Now: Student debt, medical bills, and stagnant wages trap entire generations in perpetual economic dependence. - Then: Political power was controlled by a small elite who ruled by divine right.
Now: The illusion of democracy masks the fact that billionaires fund both parties, controlling policy no matter who is elected.
This is not the free society America was supposed to be. It is a highly stratified system in which the many serve the interests of the few, with no meaningful path to real power. And worse, the establishment left—rather than challenging this order—has come to represent it.
The Democratic Party was once the party of the working class. Today, it has become the party of the professional-managerial elite—the bureaucrats, consultants, and media figures who believe that governing is their birthright.
The establishment left has in many ways absorbed the role of the aristocracy—not just in terms of wealth but in the way it positions itself as the enlightened ruling class. They claim to stand for “equity” and “democracy,” yet do nothing to challenge the real structures of power.
Instead, they manage decline while maintaining their own privilege—careful not to upset the donor class that sustains them.
As newly elected Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin put it, “There are a lot of good billionaires out there that have been with Democrats, who share our values, and we will take their money. But we’re not taking money from those bad billionaires.”
Pronouncements from global elites certainly don’t help either. The now-infamous slogan “You’ll own nothing and be happy”—popularized by the World Economic Forum and widely interpreted as a blueprint for a hyper-managed future—only fuels growing resentment toward an emerging system where ownership, autonomy, and mobility are increasingly out of reach for the average person.
This is why figures like Steve Bannon and reactionary populists have hijacked the narrative of neo-feudalism. Despite his own ties to oligarchs, Bannon has correctly identified that America is no longer a capitalist democracy but a feudal order where power is locked away from ordinary people.
He explicitly frames this crisis as a return to feudal hierarchy: “The ‘hate America’ crowd… they believe in some sort of techno-feudal situation, like was in Italy, back in the 14th and 15th century… where they are like a city-state, and there are a bunch of serfs that work for them. Not American citizens, but serfs, indentured servants.”
He has also drawn direct comparisons between modern economic conditions and serfdom: “Here’s the thing with millennials, they’re like 19th-century Russian serfs. They’re in better shape, they have more information, they’re better dressed. But they don’t own anything.”
However, Bannon’s solution—a nationalist strongman government—represents just another form of vassalage.
Reactionary populists like Bannon, President Donald Trump, and Tucker Carlson exploit real economic grievances and redirect them into a revenge narrative. Instead of seeing neo-feudalism as a system that transcends party or nationality—one that has evolved from medieval serfdom to corporate vassalage—they reframe it as a nationalist grievance.
Bannon likens “globalists” (an ambiguous term) to feudal overlords, but insists that nationalism can break their grip. Trump labels the deep state and liberal elites as the enemy, but assumes the role of a strongman to restore justice. Carlson says the working class is being crushed, but blames cultural elites rather than the billionaire class as a whole.
This misdirection is key. Rather than exposing the true architects of neo-feudalism—corporate monopolists, financial barons, and entrenched dynasties—these reactionaries redirect public anger toward an amorphous “cultural aristocracy” of media figures, academics, and bureaucrats. The real oligarchs escape scrutiny, while the working class is fed a narrative that pits them against cultural elites rather than the economic structures that keep them in servitude.
The only way forward is to complete the unfinished revolution against feudalism—not through reactionary nationalism, but through systemic transformation. The fight against neo-feudalism must be reclaimed by a left willing to challenge entrenched power at its roots, not merely manage decline.
The question is no longer whether neo-feudalism exists. The question is whether the left will finally recognize it—and act before it’s too late. If it fails, the fight will be lost to those who see the problem but offer only deeper subjugation as the solution.
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