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solidarity
The Fire This Time: Capitalism and the Limits of Survival
Can capitalism survive the climate crisis it helped create? Or must we finally admit that it’s the system itself that’s killing us?
Jul 17, 2025
The world is burning, both literally and figuratively. Temperatures are shattering records. Wildfires sweep across continents. Glaciers melt while droughts deepen. Inequality balloons. Billions go hungry while billionaires build bunkers. And through it all, one system marches forward, extracting, exploiting, expanding.
Its name is capitalism.
And the question we must now face, urgently, collectively, without illusion, is this: Can capitalism survive the climate crisis it helped create? Or must we finally admit that it’s the system itself that’s killing us?
This isn’t just a theoretical question. It’s a matter of survival.
Contrary to what some economists would have us believe, capitalism didn’t arise through peaceful trade or natural evolution. It was forged in conquest, enclosure, slavery, and plunder.
Capitalism is not broken because it has failed to innovate. It’s broken because it has succeeded, at concentrating wealth, externalizing costs, and turning the Earth into a profit machine.
In early modern Europe, peasants were forced off common lands so the wealthy could raise sheep for profit. The so-called “Enclosure Movement” turned shared resources into private property, creating the first landless laborers, people with no choice but to sell their labor to survive.
From there, capitalism scaled outward. Empires expanded, fueled by the theft of land, labor, and life. The Atlantic slave trade, the colonization of the Americas, and the pillaging of India and Africa were not side effects, they were the fuel that powered capitalist growth.
Later came the Industrial Revolution, mechanizing exploitation, churning out commodities, and giving birth to the cult of “growth.” What had once been measured in survival and sustenance was now measured in productivity, output, and profit.
By the 20th century, capitalism had globalized. And by the 21st, it had digitized, financialized, and fully detached from the ecological limits of the planet.
The Myth of Green Capitalism
Today, we’re told that capitalism can fix the very crises it’s caused. Silicon Valley technologists, global financiers, and political centrists speak of green growth, decoupling, and innovation. Solar panels, electric vehicles, carbon markets, environmental and social governance portfolios, these are the new gospel.
But while emissions rise, forests fall, and temperatures climb, the promises feel increasingly hollow.
Capitalism is not broken because it has failed to innovate. It’s broken because it has succeeded, at concentrating wealth, externalizing costs, and turning the Earth into a profit machine.
The logic of endless growth is fundamentally at odds with a planet that cannot grow. And no amount of green branding can change that.
In places like Rochester, New York we see both the consequences of capitalism and the seeds of resistance.
The private utility company, Rochester Gas and Electric, is facing a people-powered campaign for public takeover after years of rate hikes and service failures. Community land trusts are reclaiming housing from speculative markets. Regenerative farms are feeding neighbors instead of shareholders. These are not utopias, they’re struggles. But they are real, local, and rooted in solidarity.
They remind us that the fight for climate justice is also a fight for energy democracy, housing justice, and food sovereignty. It’s not about tweaking the system. It’s about transforming it.
Gandhi’s Warning and Vision
Over a century ago, Mohandas Gandhi warned of where industrial capitalism would lead. In Hind Swaraj, he rejected not only colonial rule, but the Western model of “progress” itself. He saw clearly that a civilization based on speed, greed, and machinery would eventually consume itself.
“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs,” he wrote, “but not every man’s greed.”
Gandhi’s vision wasn’t a return to the past, it was a radical call for restraint, community, and moral clarity. He called for economies rooted in place, not profit. He believed wealth should be held in trusteeship, not hoarded for personal gain. And he insisted that any real revolution must begin within the soul.
Capitalism is not compatible with climate justice. It never was.
To many, this sounded naïve. Today, it sounds prophetic.
The reckoning is now. A dead planet can not turn a profit. Capitalism gave us vaccines, satellites, supercomputers. But it also gave us rising seas, poisoned air, and mass extinction. We cannot separate the gifts from the costs. And we can no longer pretend that reform is enough.
Yes, we need innovation. Yes, we need policy. But we also need imagination. We need the courage to envision systems not based on extraction, but on care. Not on growth, but on balance. Not on domination, but on solidarity.
We need, as the late David Graeber wrote, a world where we treat each other as if we actually matter.
The road ahead will not be easy. It will be full of contradictions, compromises, and uncertainty. But we must begin with honesty: Capitalism is not compatible with climate justice. It never was.
And we cannot build a livable future with the same tools that built the crisis.
It’s time to stop asking whether capitalism can be fixed, and start building the alternatives that already exist in our communities, our movements, and our collective memory.
There may still be time.
But not much.
And history, like the atmosphere, is watching.
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Kilmar Abrego García and the Trump Torture Regime
In the age of Donald Trump, we face a government which is willing to directly terrorize people in this country with the threat of torture (even if in a distant land).
Jul 14, 2025
I didn’t want to write this article.
In fact, I had something relatively uplifting planned: an Independence Day piece about the rich implications for the present moment to be found in the Declaration of Independence. But other excellent writers beat me to that one.
So instead, I reluctantly find myself once again focusing on U.S. torture, a subject I’ve studied and written about since the autumn of 2001, including in a couple of books. I’d naively hoped never to have to do so again, but here we are.
The Rendition of Kilmar Abrego García
This March, the Trump administration illegally sent Kilmar Abrego García to a notorious hellhole in El Salvador. That mega-prison is known by the acronym CECOT for Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo. (In English, the Terrorism Confinement Center.) There he was beaten and tortured in violation of both this country’s immigration and federal laws, as well as the United Nations’ Convention against Torture, or CAT, to which the United States is a signatory.
It didn’t matter that Abrego García was in this country legally and that, as a Justice Department attorney told a federal judge, his deportation was the result of an “administrative error.” In fact, the Department of Justice later rewarded its own lawyer’s honesty by firing him.
Kilmar Abrego García is a citizen of El Salvador who entered the United States “without inspection” (that is, undetected by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE) in 2011. He was 16-years-old and fleeing his home country where, “[b]eginning around 2006, gang members stalked, hit, and threatened to kidnap and kill him in order to coerce his parents to succumb to their increasing demands for extortion,” according to a civil suit filed against various U.S. officials. “He then made his way to the state of Maryland, where his older brother, a U.S. citizen, resided.”
There’s another expression to describe what happened to Abrego García, one that will be familiar to anyone who followed the news during the first decade and a half of this century: extraordinary rendition.
Abrego García lived in Maryland for years, working as a day laborer. In 2016, he began a relationship with a U.S. citizen, Jennifer Vásquez Sura, and in 2018, they moved in together. They conceived a child and Abrego García did construction work to support the family, which included his wife’s two children, both U.S. citizens. In March 2019, however, he and three other men were arrested outside a Home Depot by Prince George’s County, Maryland police. They turned him over to ICE, claiming on the flimsiest of evidence that he was a member of the Salvadoran gang, MS-13. The “evidence” in question included the fact that he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie and that a confidential informant had identified him to a detective as a member of an MS-13 group operating out of Long Island, New York, where he had never lived. (The detective was later suspended for unrelated infractions.)
After almost six months in detention, during which time his son was born, an immigration court granted Abrego García a “withholding of removal.” That meant he would be allowed to remain in the United States and could legally work here, because he was believed to face genuine danger were he to be deported to El Salvador. He was required to check in annually with ICE, which he did, most recently in early January 2025.
Things were going relatively well. He had become a union member and was employed full time as a first-year sheet metal apprentice on a trajectory toward a rewarding career in the building trades. On March 12, 2025, however, everything changed. He was driving home from his jobsite after picking up his son (who is deaf in one ear, has intellectual disabilities, and does not speak) when ICE officers pulled his car over and arrested him. Officers gave his wife just 10 minutes to arrive and get their child, threatening to turn him over to Child Protective Services if she missed that deadline.
After being shuttled from state to state, Abrego García ended up at a Louisiana detention center, from which he was indeed deported to El Salvador along with several other men late on the evening of March 15. The people detaining him kept saying he would have a chance to speak to a judge about his legal status, but that was a blatant lie. As his court filing recounts:
He repeatedly requested judicial review. Officials consistently responded with false assurances that he would see a judge, deliberately misleading Plaintiff Abrego Garcia to prevent him from taking actions to assert his legal rights. Plaintiff Abrego Garcia only realized the true nature of his dire situation upon arrival at the airport in El Salvador, at which point it was too late to challenge the unlawful deportation.
Meanwhile, his wife had been desperately trying to find him by checking ICE’s online Detainee Locator System and calling detention centers around the country. Days after he’d already been shipped to El Salvador, the Locator System continued to say that he was at the East Hidalgo Detention Center in La Villa, Texas.
In fact, Kilmar Abrego García had been disappeared. His wife might never have found him if it weren’t for a photo someone sent her from an article about more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants dispatched to CECOT in El Salvador at the same time. His face wasn’t visible, but she recognized him from two scars on his shaved head and some of his personal (but not gang-related) tattoos. She was well aware of CECOT’s reputation as a brutal mega-prison, a site of organized physical and psychological torture.
Once she knew where her husband was, efforts to get him back began. In April, a federal district judge ordered his return, a decision later affirmed by the Supreme Court (which has in these months rarely sided against U.S. President Donald Trump). But the government dragged its feet, refusing to abide by either court’s ruling. Eventually, after maintaining for months that Abrego García was beyond its reach, the Department of Justice reversed itself and brought him back to the United States to face charges of human smuggling in Tennessee, where he remains in federal prison today. Those charges, based on a 2016 Tennessee traffic stop, appear flimsy at best.
Echoes of the “War on Terror”
There’s another expression to describe what happened to Abrego García, one that will be familiar to anyone who followed the news during the first decade and a half of this century: extraordinary rendition. That U.S. government practice of shipping detainees to torture sites around the world was a feature of the “Global War on Terror” (declared by the George W. Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks). As early as 2002, Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and Barton Gellman quoted a U.S. official in Afghanistan, who told them: “We don’t kick the shit out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the shit out of them.”
Ordinary rendition involves sending someone to another country after a formal request for extradition. Extraordinary rendition bypasses all the legal niceties and sends a prisoner to another country without any due process whatsoever. It’s important to call things by their proper names. Extraordinary rendition is what happened to Abrego García. During the “war on terror,” and once again today, such an act carries the risk of torture with it. As Human Rights Watch reported in 2011:
Detainees were… unlawfully rendered [transferred] to countries such as Syria, Egypt, and Jordan, where they were likely to be tortured.... Evidence suggests that torture in such cases was not a regrettable consequence of rendition; it may have been the purpose.
Abrego García was unlawfully rendered to El Salvador where, according to his suit, he was subjected to sleep deprivation, beatings, and psychological torture. Specifically,
Upon arrival at CECOT, the detainees were greeted by a prison official who stated, “Welcome to CECOT. Whoever enters here doesn’t leave.” Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was then forced to strip, issued prison clothing, and subjected to physical abuse including being kicked in the legs with boots and struck on his head and arms to make him change clothes faster. His head was shaved with a zero razor, and he was frog-marched to cell 15, being struck with wooden batons along the way. By the following day, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia had visible bruises and lumps all over his body.
In Cell 15, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia and 20 other Salvadorans were forced to kneel from approximately 9:00 pm to 6:00 am, with guards striking anyone who fell from exhaustion. During this time, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was denied bathroom access and soiled himself. The detainees were confined to metal bunks with no mattresses in an overcrowded cell with no windows, bright lights that remained on 24 hours a day, and minimal access to sanitation.
Note that extraordinary rendition is illegal, both under the United Nations Convention Against Torture, where it is identified by the term “refoulement,” and under the U.S. Foreign Affairs Act of 1998, which states, “It shall be the policy of the United States not to expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States.” That last clause relates to a practice known as “chain refoulement,” in which someone is first sent to a third country where the risk of torture is less, only to be sent on to the original prohibited destination. In the unlikely event that, in the future, district federal courts and then the Supreme Court prohibit the Trump administration from shipping detainees off to countries with well-known torture risks, its officials are likely to resort to paying off other, non-torturing nations to serve as trans-shipment sites.
Not the Only Victim
Kilmar Abrego García may turn out to be the most fortunate of the hundreds of migrants shipped from the U.S. to El Salvador in March. An intervention by Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen pried him out of CECOT and got him transferred to a different Salvadoran prison. (It’s unclear why the Trump administration finally decided to bring him back to the United States.) Although he remains in federal custody, at least for the moment, he isn’t languishing incommunicado in El Salvador.
The 238 Venezuelan detainees sent to CECOT at the same time haven’t been that lucky. Like Abrego García, they were labeled terrorists and deported without benefit of due process. Trump and his aides called them “rapists,” “savages,” “monsters,” and “the worst of the worst.” But as the investigative journalism organization ProPublica revealed, the administration knew all along that those allegations were false. As the data they reviewed indicates:
The government knew that only six of the immigrants were convicted of violent crimes: four for assault, one for kidnapping, and one for a weapons offense. And it shows that officials were aware that more than half, or 130, of the deportees were not labeled as having any criminal convictions or pending charges; they were labeled as only having violated immigration laws.
Yet it seems likely that, without any judicial proceedings whatsoever, those men have received life sentences in a Salvadoran hellhole for the crime of seeking a better life in the United States.
It Could Happen to You
Most of the discussion in the press and in legal and philosophical circles about the U.S. use of torture during the war on terror assumed the legitimacy of torture’s main pretext: the need to extract lifesaving information from unwilling detainees. At the time, some arguments against it focused on torture’s efficacy: did torturing people truly produce “actionable intelligence”? Others took that effectiveness for granted, while questioning its ethics: Could the torture of a few be justified to save the many? The apotheosis of that false conundrum was the “ticking time bomb” problem.
I say “false conundrum” because such gathering of information is almost always a pretext for a program of institutionalized state torture. Its real political purpose is to maintain the power of the torturing regime by generating fear in anyone who might oppose it. This has been proven repeatedly in studies of torture regimes from Latin America to the Philippines and was no less true, in an oblique way, for the well-documented U.S. torture program of those “war on terror” years.
Anything we do today to maintain human connections—that smile at a grocery cashier, that phone call to an old friend, that little gathering with fellow knitters—is also an act of solidarity in such grim times.
Most torture regimes directly target members of their own societies, hoping to frighten them into compliance through the knowledge that opponents of the regime are being tortured and that they could be next. The Bush-Cheney administration, however, used torture more indirectly to remind Americans that they were in mortal danger from the country’s enemies and that only the administration could protect them from that. The proof of that danger was the very fact that a self-evidently good government nonetheless was forced to commit such terrible acts at CIA “black sites” globally and elsewhere.
Today, in the age of Donald Trump, we face a government which is indeed willing to directly terrorize people in this country with the threat of torture (even if in a distant land). Every torture regime will identify a group or groups of people as “legitimate” targets. In the United States today, immigrants form just such a group, characterized by the Trump administration as either superhuman (“terrorists,” “monsters”) or subhuman (“vermin”). Super- or sub-, they are deemed unworthy of ordinary human rights.
But the fear generated by such threats of torture penetrates beyond those most immediately threatened, encouraging everyone else to comply with and bow down before the regime. Trump has indeed claimed that “the homegrowns are next.”
Building Solidarity
Institutionalized state torture destroys social solidarity by sowing distrust. Writing about Uruguay’s 1973-1985 dictatorship, Lawrence Weschler described how that government assigned every citizen a letter “grade” of A, B, or C. A’s were deemed good citizens and eligible for state employment; B’s were suspect and eligible only for private employment; C’s lost all their rights and posed a danger to anyone who hired or associated with them. “And,” wrote Weschler, “the point was that anyone at any time could suddenly find himself reclassified as a ‘C’—because, after all, they knew everything.” (And how much more do “they” know about us today, now that federal data about each one of us is rapidly being centralized and consolidated?)
One effect of Uruguay’s torture regime was a profound social isolation. As one respondent told Weschler:
Fear exterminated all social life in the public realm. Nobody spoke in the streets for fear of being heard… One tried not to make new friends, for fear of being held responsible for their unknown pasts. One suspected immediately those who were more open or less afraid, of being “agents provocateurs” of the intelligence services. Rumors about torture, arrests, mistreatments were so magnified by our terror as to take on epic proportions.
Those of us living in the United States of 2025 are already being called on to resist the centrifugal forces of isolation and mistreatment in the age of Trump. In this time of torture redux, small efforts to maintain social connections become real acts of resistance. We have already seen whole neighborhoods spontaneously resist ICE raids by pouring into the streets. That is one crucial kind of solidarity. I’d argue that anything we do today to maintain human connections—that smile at a grocery cashier, that phone call to an old friend, that little gathering with fellow knitters—is also an act of solidarity in such grim times. We will need them all in the days to come.
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Mamdani’s Victory With Jewish Support Was A Triumph for Solidarity
Animated by a common vision and uncommon integrity, Brad Lander and Zohran Mamdani’s principled progressive partnership is an invitation to imagine something better for New York—and the country.
Jul 12, 2025
Brad Lander called me in the middle of NYC’s Democratic primary Election Day, during one of his breaks from the heat. I asked how he was feeling. “To be honest, I didn’t expect this, but I probably feel better than any other third place candidate in history.”
He had good reason to feel this way. As a Jewish candidate for mayor who aligned with and stood by his ostensible rival Zohran Mamdani, Lander had just done something extraordinary—he had modelled a kind of genuine solidarity that is all but unheard of in mainstream politics. What he was celebrating is the joy that comes with rejecting the politics of fear and division and allowing yourself to instead dream beyond the permissible.
As the executive director of a progressive Jewish organization fighting to make New York City a safe, affordable, caring home for all, dreaming beyond the permissible is our mission. Cynical politicians like former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, current New York City Mayor Eric Adams, and U.S. President Donald Trump have made careers out of playing to people’s fears and telling us, again and again, what we can’t do—what is impermissible to dream.
From lying, scare-tactic mailers to TV ads that prompted death threats against his loved ones, the attacks on Zohran Mamdani reflect the worst impulses of a MAGA-friendly Democratic establishment willing to use anti-Muslim bigotry and distorted claims of antisemitism to derail a threat to their power. The viciousness of the backlash in the days following Mamdani’s win has been breathtaking, even to those of us familiar with the extent to which racism and Islamophobia are acceptable in American politics. To politicians who want to weaponize the machinery of fear, New York’s Jewish community might look like a soft target.
In a culture starved for political imagination, Mamdani and Lander represented a thrilling embrace of something new—permission for New Yorkers to reach for so much more than the table scraps we’ve been offered by the political establishment.
Too often that strategy is successful. But what we saw during the primary is that this time they hit a wall built of hope. Despite millions of dollars in attack ads from billionaire donors, it proved impossible to convince most Jewish New Yorkers that Zohran Mamdani was a rabid antisemite. It is telling that the attacks on Zohran come from high-priced political consultants and pundits who experience New York City the same way Andrew Cuomo does—from the back seat of hired black SUVs. For most of us, Mr. Mamdani is a deeply recognizable and loveable New York character. It’s the machine politicians who are the weirdos.
That’s why Jews For Racial & Economic Justice (JFREJ) was able to mobilize thousands of Jewish voters to canvass, knock doors, phone bank, and become an integral part of the people-powered revolution that changed the direction of New York City politics last month. In a culture starved for political imagination, Mamdani and Lander represented a thrilling embrace of something new—permission for New Yorkers to reach for so much more than the table scraps we’ve been offered by the political establishment.
I saw this firsthand canvassing in Kensington, Brooklyn when I knocked on the door of an Orthodox Jewish woman who welcomed me onto her porch and spoke to me for a good 10 minutes. At a moment when so many members of the political class were debating the meaning of the word “intifada,” she wanted to talk about Section 8 vouchers. As her adorable children vied for attention she pointed to the semidetached homes to the right and left of her own. Both were sitting empty, she said, because her neighbors had been priced out. She was excited about Lander and Mamdani’s affordability proposals. The subject of Israel didn’t come up once.
Her story should not and does not minimize the concerns of some Jewish New Yorkers who are focused on safety and antisemitism. JFREJ has been fighting antisemitism for years, and we believe not enough attention and resources are directed to effectively addressing the dangers that American Jews face. But we also understand that most of what allows Jews to thrive are the same things that make all New Yorkers safe—a healthy city that works for all New York’s residents. Cuomo lost because he had nothing of substance to offer any of us. He spent millions stoking fears of antisemitism. Zohran showed up with a bold plan to fight it.
Twenty years after 9-11, when New York’s Muslim community was terrorized by hate violence and illegal New York Police Department surveillance, and several years into the ongoing surge of antisemitism, Lander and Mamdani campaigning arm-in-arm embodied the very best of New York City. For many Americans this was an inspiring lesson in the practice of radical solidarity—something we sorely need in the age of Donald Trump.
Solidarity like this isn’t easy. Lander wanted to be mayor, and would have been great in the role. When he let go of that dream to prioritize solidarity and support for Mamdani, he demonstrated the liberating power of believing that if we dream big enough, everyone wins.
As we head into a hotly contested general election we are already seeing the awful anti-Muslim rhetoric, baseless accusations of antisemitism, and cheap fearmongering we’ve come to expect from the Eric Adams-Donald Trump wing of our political class. New Yorkers deserve more.
Animated by a common vision and uncommon integrity, Brad Lander and Zohran Mamdani’s principled progressive partnership is an invitation to imagine something better for New York. The entire country is watching our city to see if we succeed in November. When we do, our impermissible dreams will transform what elections, politics, and democracy look and feel like in New York City for decades to come.
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