With bombs dropping in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and Iran, and rearmament firmly back on the political agenda worldwide, there is no escaping the age-old question: why is there war? Instinctively, we might assume that states go to war to get something they want. War, as per Von Clausewitz’ famous dictum, is then simply the continuation of diplomacy by other means. Unsatisfied with such a simple answer, the causes of war remain the topic of scholarly debate between opposed schools within the somewhat detached academic field of international relations (IR).

The Empire of Civil Society (hereafter ‘Empire’) is a PhD monograph by Justin Rosenberg that forms part of this debate, assailing the dominant school of neorealism – Wikipedia”) from a marginal Marxist position. It is both an argument against neorealism’s core tenets, and an argument for a reappraisal of the utility of Marxist theory to international relations. First published in 1994, it feels surprisingly relevant to the world of 2026 and the conflicts that are raging across the world today.

Neorealism emerged in the United States after World War Two as a fusion of the old idea of the ‘balance of power’ and game theory. The school took its name as a claim to a hard-nosed tradition of statecraft that says that while peace may be nice, the nature of the international system means conflict and war are inevitable, always have been, and always will be. In very short summary, neorealism posits that because there is no central authority in the world to govern inter-state behaviour, there is a perpetual anarchy giving rise to a Hobbesian conflict of all against all. It doesn’t matter what states want, or who is in charge, or what their domestic politics are. Any state must be constantly vigilant lest their security or power is surpassed by others.

This is the sort of abstraction reminiscent of Newtonian physics where for convenience one might momentarily assume that all objects are frictionless spherical penguins in the vacuum of space. And such simplifications have their uses, but they must justify themselves. Empire contends that neorealism does not provide such justification, and offers a competing theory rooted in the specific mode of production of states, arguing that conflict between them emerges predominantly as a result of how they must reproduce domestically, rather than as the inevitable function of a transhistorical states system.

Rosenberg mounts a dual challenge to neorealism’s dominant position. First, Empire undermines neorealism’s claim to transhistoricity by demonstrating that its favourite examples (Greek and Italian city states) were both quite unlike modern sovereign states and were driven to conflict for historically specific reasons that derived from their political, social and economic structure. Empire than expands on this by investigating the early modern Spanish (Castilian) and Portuguese empires to show that even at the supposed dawn of the states system era, international actions were shaped predominantly by domestic considerations and constraints and impulses resulting from the level and configuration of the political economy at that time, rather than as blind reaction to an international balance of power. It is a persuasive argument – insofar as I am qualified to judge – and beyond the realm of IR it also reads as a detailed and interesting history of the time when Europe’s development began to diverge from the rest of the world. As with any history of this period, it is perhaps unintentionally a salutary reminder that for most of history Europe was marginal to global political economy, and that its ascendence was in no small part the result of the violent destruction of pre-existing manufacturing and mercantile capacity in Asia, culminating in the devastating famines in the 19th century that were described in Late Victorian Holocausts.

Having surveyed this history, Rosenberg then proceeds to contrast it with the modern states system, arguing that rather than something eternal it is actually historically contingent. Unsurprising for a Marxist, Rosenberg finds the motive force of history in the specific mode of production of capitalist economies, which at the state level expresses itself in the near complete separation of the economic and political realm. The assumed anarchic system of ‘free and independent’ states is mirrored in the anarchic market of ‘free and equal’ individuals, who can contract with one another at will, unencumbered by the reciprocal bonds of obligation that pertained in, for example, European feudal societies. But this formal, political equality both obscures and is necessary for the profound economic inequality that exists between those who own the means of production and those who do not. Empire thus seeks the roots of state behaviour in the historically contingent form of capitalism, but avoids the crude socialist simplification that states are merely imperial extensions for their capitalist class.

Does this perspective offer anything of value to our present moment? At first glance, the drive to rearmament appears to argue in the neorealists’ favour, with Europe in particular anxious to increase its security and/or power in a more geopolitically unstable and multipolar world where it can no longer rely on the United States as an ally. In the UK, (armchair) generals have quickly emerged to bemoan how the nation’s spending on ‘welfare’ enfeebles its ability to pursue its national interest. Yet on closer inspection, the notion that recent conflicts were not driven by the domestic politics of the instigating states is not tenable. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and American adventurism in Venezuela and Iran are evidently motivated by domestic considerations. The war in Iran in particular makes more sense when read as an effort to forcibly integrate Iran into the capitalist world system than as an inevitable result of some American ‘balance of power’ calculation. Israel, meanwhile, is waging a genocidal war on a people it explicitly refuses to recognise as a state. Perhaps the only ‘realist’ conflict is the one currently perpetrated in Sudan which, while technically a civil war, is being sustained by other nations using it as a proxy to increase their power, influence, or access to resources.

On the face of it therefore, reality seems rather at odds with the claims of the neorealists. Whether it supports Empire’s alternative proposition is hard to tell, as Rosenberg only gives the contours of a possible Marxist IR theory. The second edition ends with a rather self-deprecating afterword where Rosenberg admits that his intention to develop his theory further was diverted by his discovery of the theory of ‘uneven and combined development’ as proposed by Trotsky, which locates some of sources of geopolitical dynamism in the variety of states constituting the international system. Its logic suggests an intriguing possibility for an ‘end of history’ as the result of the complete subsumption of all states in the capitalist world order, ultimately equalising their development and depriving history of a motive force for want of diversity. An IR equivalent of the heat death of the universe. Though whether Rosenberg would have reached that conclusion cannot be inferred from where Empire finishes.

For a contribution to a specific debate within a specialised academic discipline, The Empire of Civil Society is surprisingly readable, in particular its historical chapters. While it remains a niche endeavour, its spirited argument for an IR theory rooted in human agency rather than impersonal and abstract systems is a necessary reminder that we must choose to make our own history, and that statesmen asking us to dissolve our political and class differences for the sake of some putative ‘national interest’ are seldom to be trusted.

Notes & Suggestions

• Rosenberg’s proposition that modern states are built precisely on the separation of political and economic realms struck a chord with me, as it explains my slight scepticism regarding the corpocracy depicted in the otherwise excellent The Ten Percent Thief. Would an entity that fully encompasses the state and the market within itself still act like a corporation? The resultant contradictions are of course part of The Ten Percent Thief’s narrative, and as it is an excellent book, I recommend people read it and draw their own conclusion.
• The enduring debate between the different IR schools put me in mind of Thomas Kuhn’s hypothesis that scientific paradigm shifts don’t happen because people are convinced, but because adherents of obsolete theories are replaced over time by advocates of new, presumably better theories. In the realm of IR and history where we don’t have a control Earth to play with and one can convincingly enough make an argument for any position, one wonders where progress may come from. Plus, I’m unsure if Kuhn allowed for political forces with a vested interest keeping particular sides of a scholarly debate alive.
• I stole the notion that it is Iran’s refusal to be integrated into the US-dominated economic system from the recent Macrodose Extra episode Order as Fiction, which also covers the creation of the The Hague Group, a coalition of Global South nations intending to uphold international law where the West is patently failing. While I prefer not to include paywalled references, in this case honesty demanded that I include my sources.
• There numerous organisations, with a range of political affiliations, that seek to promote peace, which can always do with support in one way or another. In the UK, options include the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Stop the War Coalition, and the Peace & Justice Project.
• Empire relies on the traditional Marxist distinction between feudalist and post-feudalist modes of production, but apparently ‘feudalism’ is no longer a preferred category among historians, and ‘manorialism’ is considered more precise. This distinction between feudalism and manorialism, and its application to the emerging concept of ‘techno-feudalism’ is covered on this episode of Culture, Power, Politics.

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You can use the hashtags on this page to navigate to a page that contains all posts with that hashtag.

Each review is marked either #fiction or #nonfiction

Each review lists the medium of the review’s subject: #books #films #theatre #tv #videogames

Works of fiction will have one or more genres listed: #cyberpunk #dystopia #fantasy #literature #SF #solarpunk #speculative #superheroes

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Finally, I found that some reviews share a theme, or a perspective, that is separate from the topic of the work I’m reviewing. These themes are also marked, and include:

• #boundedimagination for reviews that consider how the limitations of our political imagination express themselves in both fiction and non-fiction works.
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Ronald Reagan infamously said that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”, but Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington would counter that what should really frighten you is: “I’m a consultant and I’m here to advise.” Mazzucato and Collington are the joint authors of The Big Con: How the consulting industry weakens our businesses, infantilizes our governments and warps our economies, which as the title suggests is a full-on critique of the consulting industry and its malignant effects on society.

The Big Con builds on previously published research by Collington and Mazzucato, as well as Mazzucato’s earlier book The Entrepreneurial State. The central argument is as clear as it is intuitive: if you consistently rely on someone else to do something for you, you will not get any better at it yourself. Or as the wise sage Bruce Lee had it: “Growth requires involvement.” The increased use of consultancies creates, to borrow a favourite right-wing phrase, a ‘dependency culture’ among public sector organisations and businesses. And as with any dependency, your dealer usually has little interest in weaning you off what they sell.

Mazzucato and Collington present their argument in three parts across a concise 250 pages. The opening section sets the scene with a history of the consultancy sector and its evolution from roughly 1920 to the present day. With the context in place, The Big Con presents its core argument on how persistent and prevalent use of consultancies harms businesses and governments alike. The book closes on four recommendations for how both the public and private sector can wean themselves off their addiction to consultancy services and rebuild their own capacity and expertise.

In the first part, which corresponds roughly to the first half of the book, Mazzucato and Collington take us from the origins of consulting in optimising manufacturing processes via the birth of IT and computing to the current universal advisory and outsourcing services. It is a lot of history and variety to unpack, and hence this part occasionally feels like a string of disconnected facts and namechecks. While it gives a good sense of the gradual infiltration of consultancies into every facet of society and every layer of government, the detail is either excessive or could have been organised more coherently to enhance the overall effect. Even something as simple as a graph with global consultancy spend over time in inflation-corrected terms, pulling the evidence from different subsections together, would have made a big difference.

Once the history is established, The Big Con sets out the ways by which consultancies impair rather than strengthen the capabilities of their clients. Issues range from failure to actually impart knowledge on a sustained basis, consultancy value being difficult to measure, inability of clients to properly evaluate or control services they have outsourced, and systemic conflicts of interests. At the root of all these issues is a severe principal-agent problem, where consultancies have both strongly divergent interests from their clients and hold a significant information advantage over them. As Collington and Mazzucato show, consultancies are essentially parasites on the productive economy, and like all parasites must weaken their host organism, but not kill it.

Elaborating on the disease metaphor a bit, the question The Big Con implicitly elicits is whether consultancies are the cause of our predicament, or merely a symptom of it. The Big Con connects the rise of consultancies particularly with the neoliberal revolution, although it points out they do predate the 1970s. What is less clear is whether Collington and Mazzucato see consultancies as enabling factors, or merely opportunists. This is in part because both the history and analytical section lack strong aggregate data to ground the argument. There are facts and illustrative anecdotes in the narrative, and to a sympathetic reader these are not unconvincing, but they do not establish a coherent and compelling causality.

This matters, because whether consultancies mostly exploit weaknesses in an impaired system, or are in fact a key cause of those weaknesses, determines what a viable strategy to counter them would be. If consultancies are a symptom but not a cause, then our treatment plan should not focus primarily on them. This ambiguity surfaces in the solutions proposed by The Big Con, which include increasing the capability and learning potential of public institutions, leading to both reduced dependency on consultancies and increased control where they are used. Mazzucato and Collington also propose greater transparency about conflicts of interest and mandatory transfer of learning at the end of contracts.

The common theme connecting all this is, as Collington and Mazzucato set out themselves, “A new vision, remit and narrative for the civil service”. In other words, a reconfiguration of the role of the state in society. But as they themselves have noted throughout the book, the role of the state as a proactive force for good in society has been under sustained assault at least since Reagan’s one-liner about government, and overturning this would require an effort that feels disproportionate to the problem posed by consultancies, harmful though they may be.

All this put me in mind of Donella Meadows’ hierarchy of places to intervene in a system. Viewed through Meadows’ framework, consultancies act as positive feedback loops for the neoliberal project: they are both enabled by neoliberal reforms, and in turn further neoliberal policies. Unchecked, positive feedback loops can drive a system to radically new configurations or even destructive instability. Reducing the strength of positive feedback loops is therefore a way for the system to remain more stable, and for other forces to exercise more control.

Reducing the strength of positive feedback loops is the 7th most powerful intervention in Meadows’ hierarchy, but ‘changing the paradigm’ comes in at number 2. It is both more powerful, but also far more difficult to do. Altering the consensus on the role of the state in society is evidently a paradigm shift, and would undoubtedly change our use of consultancies. But undoing decades of neoliberal hegemony will also be extremely difficult to achieve.

In a way, The Big Con is thinking both too big and too small. Too big, because of the enormity of the political and ideological struggle required to make Mazzucato and Collington’s solutions possible. Too small, because if we did manage to radically reinvent the purpose of the state, we could do so much more than merely diminish our use of consultancies. Compared to ‘solving housing insecurity’ and ‘providing healthcare for all’, reducing our use of McKinsey feels like rather small fry. The more technical solutions that The Big Con suggests, such as moderately increasing state capacity or enforcing greater transparency, are more commensurate to the scale of the problem they are meant to address, though will be more difficult to attain while they go against the neoliberal grain. Nonetheless, they are a more realistic place to start, and the last chapter would have been stronger if it had considered how to implement them under the adversarial conditions imposed by neoliberal hegemony.

In fairness to The Big Con, it does not at any point suggest that consultancies somehow caused the neoliberal revolution, only that they were complicit in it and greatly benefited from it. But neither does it explicitly argue why, of all possible battles to pick to overturn neoliberal hegemony, consultancies should be a primary target. Referring back to Meadow’s leverage points, my own contention would be that reducing the impact of consultancies and their reinforcement of neoliberal dogma is a worthwhile battleground precisely because progress might be made without overturning the existing order of things first, rather than the the other way around as Mazzucato and Collington propose. The Big Con does after all provide ample evidence that consultancies fail to deliver even on their own terms, so reducing our dependency based on the merits of cutting costs and increasing state resilience in an increasingly uncertain world seems, if not straightforward, at least plausible.

To paraphrase Laotzu, being ignorant of your ignorance is a disease, and recognising your ignorance is the first step to being cured. The great service of The Big Con is to expose the harmful effects of the consultancy industry and the way it weakens state capacity. Although its tremendous reach in terms of the history and typology of consultancies comes with a resultant sacrifice of further depth, it convincingly conveys the pervasiveness of consultancies across governments and industries, as well as the unavoidable conflicts of interest that arise from their multifarious entanglements. The book should be required reading for public sector workers and business leaders alike. Having prepared the ground, Mazzucato and Collington could do worse than come out with a sequel: The Big Counter: How to kick out consultancies and learn to become self-reliant again. Such advice would be worth paying for.

Notes & Suggestions

• Readers looking to go into the nefarious world of consultancy in more detail may be interested in When McKinsey Comes to Town, an investigation specifically of how McKinsey shapes business and policy around the world, including for some more unsavoury clients.
• It occurred to me that there is an interesting analogy between consultancies and LLMs. Both are used by people and organisations as a way of compensating for a lack of skill or knowledge, but it is precisely that lack of skill or knowledge that makes it impossible to verify the utility and veracity of any outputs. The logical endpoint is, I suppose, when consultancies in turn outsource the work to an LLM.
• Two books specifically analysing neoliberal hegemony, through with quite different methods, are Hegemony Now! and Capitalist Realism.
• Mazzucato and Collington’s programme of increasing state capability and decreasing reliance on consultants is gaining traction with left-wing parties across the world. In New York, new major Zohran Mamdani is reducing dependence on consultancies to both save money and increase the city government’s capacity to act. In the UK, new Green Party-aligned think-tank Verdant is similarly recommending reducing consultancy spending as a way of reclaiming the theme of government efficiency from the Right.
• The Laotzu paraphrase is loosely based on chapter 71 of the Tao Te Ching, drawing from both the more standard Waley translation and Ursula K. le Guin’s more poetic version.

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“There is no magic money tree” is the stern injunction invoked by politicians, central bankers and economists to explain to a fiscally imprudent public why it cannot have nice things. Fiscal rectitude is now the primary virtue of government, perhaps nowhere more so than in the United Kingdom where the Treasury has shackled itself to the need for approval from an ‘Office for Budget Responsibility’. Running deficits or printing money, we are told, is only one tiny step away from Weimar Republic levels of financial calamity.

But what if it wasn’t thus? That is the alluring promise of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which first gained prominence in the wake of the Great Recession and argues that not only can governments print money to cover expenses, but they should do so to fully realise a nation’s productive capacity. It is a provocative and controversial theory that repudiates the need for permanent austerity in the name of balanced budgets, and finds one of its most ardent advocates in Stephanie Kelton, erstwhile chief economist to US senator Bernie Sanders. In her book The Deficit Myth, she takes her argument for a ‘people’s economy’ built on the insights of MMT to a wider audience.

The Deficit Myth faces the triple challenge of any non-fiction book that assails an existing orthodoxy. It must set out a compelling argument, be intelligible to a lay audience, and dispel hegemonic common sense. This is a daunting task, and the meagre evidence base, weaknesses in Kelton’s writing style, and a different perspective on political economy meant I was left unpersuaded by the book’s stronger claims. Nonetheless, it is a thought-provoking read that provides ample critique of economic orthodoxy, and left me receptive to exploring more rigorous defences of MMT in future.

MMT is based on the chartalist premise that any government operating a freely floating fiat currency can create money to fund its expenditure. Governments can do this because they are the monopoly issuer of their own currency, which means they can never ‘run out’ of it. This money then flows into the economy, from which it can be removed through taxation, to avoid an excess supply of money driving up inflation. I had come across this view before in David Graeber’s Debt: The first 5000 years, although Graeber did not explore the economic consequences as thoroughly as Kelton.

MMT pre-empts the obvious counterargument that governments creating money will simply lead to inflation by positing that the additional money will be absorbed by unutilised productive capacity in the economy instead. In essence, MMT argues that it is not the relationship between money and goods and services available to purchase that drives inflation, but the relationship of money to the productive capacity of an economy to produce goods and services. As long as increased government expenditure results in a commensurate increase in things available for purchase, by stimulating economic activity, inflation will be kept at bay. It is only when the economy is running at full capacity that increasing the money supply further will cause inflation.

This argument will sound familiar to readers acquainted with (post-)Keynesian theories advocating countercyclical spending to dampen the negative effects of the business cycle, and my impression is that different views on the nature of money notwithstanding, MMT advocates and Keynesian economists are at least fellow travelers. It is an intriguing and logically coherent hypothesis, but unfortunately The Deficit Myth does not offer much evidence to buttress the initial premise. Kelton references a number of other heterodox economists, but unless the reader is already predisposed to agree with the argument, the appeal to authority does not work if the reader is unfamiliar with the sources cited, yet still aware that they are not universally accepted.

This lack of evidence and a failure to address any of the obvious critiques or counterexamples to MMT leave the central argument in a precariously weak position after the first two chapters, and The Deficit Myth does little to shore it up in the remainder of the book. Instead, it applies the core premise to a range of policy issues, such as the national debt, trade imbalances and social security commitments. The Deficit Myth’s prescriptions follow logically from the core premise, which Kelton repeats somewhat overmuch, but they do not offer further proof for its truthfulness. If one does not accept MMT’s core tenets, the whole argument immediately falls apart.

Avoiding substantive engagement with critiques of MMT also leads Kelton into a dead end when explaining why her theory isn’t universally accepted. Discounting competing views on MMT’s validity, she resorts instead to ascribing the failure of policymakers and mainstream economists to accept MMT to either an almost delusional psychological investment in the myth that government finances work similarly to a household budget, or to bad faith ploys for continued austerity. I certainly don’t dispute that hegemonic dogma constrains how people think, but it is not persuasive as the only reason why so many economists, including from heterodox traditions, remain stubbornly unconvinced of MMT’s validity.

All this leaves Kelton’s account of MMT exposed to numerous lines of attack. There is no account of how MMT would explain or manage crises such as the 1970s stagflation or the hyperinflation seen in Weimar Germany or contemporary Zimbabwe or Iran. The chapter proposing a jobs guarantee, does not work through how a strengthened bargaining position for labour might cascade through the economy. The chapter on international trade explains the dangers of governments restricting their monetary sovereignty by linking their own currency to that of another country (usually the dollar), but does not address the risk of increases in the money supply or trade deficits causing currency devaluation, making imports more expensive. This chapter also suffers most from the US-centric perspective in The Deficit Myth, because while Kelton notes the exceptional position of the United States as the issuer of the world reserve currency, there is little exploration of the advantages this confers on the US, and the disadvantages it poses for everyone else. No other country can rely on a near-infinite demand for its own currency to maintain favourable exchange rates despite running structural trade deficits. The lack of consideration for higher-order effects certainly makes the book more readable, but on the flipside also makes it feel so too simplistic to remain persuasive.

The last couple of chapters are dedicated to policy problems that Kelton argues are far more important ‘deficits’, such as crumbling infrastructure, inequality, the atrocious healthcare provision in the United States, and imminent environmental collapse. It is these chapters where The Deficit Myth cannot cash the cheques it wrote for itself at the start of the book. Kelton reminds us that it is the productive capacity of the real economy, not the supply of money, that is the real constraint on what is achievable. Yet as we near the end of the book, we are no wiser on what this capacity is, how we would know what it is, and how it is constituted. It is plausible that MMT could solve any of the problems identified by Kelton individually, but it is doubtful it can solve them all at the same time. The Deficit Myth offers no evidence that simply increasing the money supply would enable us to pay for better healthcare and environmental restoration and a jobs guarantee and infrastructure repair and any of the other things Kelton cares about. Instead, Kelton has to concede that other policy measures, such as progressive taxation, environmental legislation, universal healthcare and industrial policy will also be required.

And so we find ourselves back at the political in political economy. The allure of MMT is its promise of a technical fix to a political problem, and Kelton repeatedly stresses that MMT is not ideology but monetary reality. But in the end, until we achieve fully automated luxury communism, we cannot escape political struggle over our societies’ limited productive forces. Kelton falls into the same trap as Rutger Bregman in Utopia for Realists by proposing an ostensibly objectively positive policy as a shortcut to avoid class conflict, but with class antagonism itself standing in the way of the policy being implemented. As Cory Doctorow reminds us, if something is good for workers, the bosses will hate it. The reason why we cannot have nice things is not because of a mismatch between the money supply and productive forces, but because it is not in the interest of the capitalist class to let us have them. Universal healthcare and a jobs guarantee may well benefit society in the abstract, but the bosses know that insecure, desperate workers are much easier to discipline and exploit.

Jane McAlevey said it best. There are no shortcuts. MMT may well be a useful tool in the hands of labour, but if so, it will still require a powerful working class to wield it.

In the end, I was not persuaded that MMT is the gamechanger that Kelton propounds it to be. But The Deficit Myth remains a valuable and critical intervention in public debate on how we run the economy, and a powerful argument for removing artificial constraints on our welfare and prosperity. The book could be read as a first step on one’s MMT journey, rather than the final word, and I expect more in-depth MMT works would address the critiques I’ve raised. As we discovered to our collective detriment following the Great Recession, there are dangers in having a monoculture of economic theory. It will however take more robust defences and sharper arguments if Kelton wants to see MMT emerge victorious.

Notes & Suggestions

• In her early chapters, Kelton introduces the concept of the ‘non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment’ (NAIRU) which is the putative reference point for central banks to manage inflation. It isn’t central to Kelton’s argument and so I didn’t manage to integrate it into the blog proper, but it was the part of the book that made me most furious. The NAIRU is a rate of ‘acceptable’ unemployment that unelected technocrats decide is necessary to avoid inflation. In other words, it is official government policy in all advanced economies to keep a certain percentage of the workforce out of work as a reserve army of labour. Yet the same politicians and technocrats who deliberately inflict suffering and misery on millions of workers for the benefit of ‘the economy’ will simultaneously blame the unemployed for their situation. If there is one other thing to take away from The Deficit Myth, it is that we should never again take serious any politician talking about ‘skivers vs strivers’ or ‘encouraging’ the unemployed back to work.
• Kelton’s book is a decent entry point, but there is a lot more on MMT out there, on both sides of the debate. Jacobin has featured an extensive critique and rebuttal, as well as an interview with Stephanie Kelton. In the UK, Richard Murphy is one of the more vocal MMT advocates.

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Something is wrong with the internet. What once promised a window onto the world now feels like a morass infested with AI generated garbage, trolls, bots, trackers and stupendous amounts of advertising. Every company claims to be your friend in that inane, offensively chummy yet mildly menacing corpospeak – now perfected by LLMs – all while happily stabbing you in the back when you try to buy cheaper ink for your printer. That is, when they’re not busy subverting democracy. Can someone please switch the internet off and switch it on again?

Maybe such a feat is beyond Cory Doctorow, author of The Internet Con, but it would not be for want of trying. Doctorow is a vociferous, veteran campaigner at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a prolific writer, and an insightful critic of the way Big Tech continues to deny the open and democratic potential of the internet. The Internet Con is a manifesto, polemic and primer on how that internet was stolen from us, and how we might get it back. Doctorow has recently gained mainstream prominence with his neologism ‘enshittification’: a descriptor of the downward doom spiral that Big Tech keeps the internet locked into. As I am only slowly going through my backlog of books, I am several Doctorow books behind. Which I don’t regret, as The Internet Con, published in 2023, remains an excellent starting point for anyone seeking to understand what is wrong with the internet.

The Internet Con starts with the insight that tech companies, like all companies, are not simply commercial entities providing goods and services, but systems for extracting wealth and funneling this to the ultra-rich. Congruent with Stafford Beer’s dictum that the purpose of the system is what it does, rather than what it claims to do, Doctorow’s analysis understands that tech company behaviour isn’t governed by something unique about the nature of computers, but by the same demand to maximise shareholder value and maintain power as any other large corporation. The Internet Con convincingly shows how tech’s real power does not derive from something intrinsic in network technology, but from a political economy that fails to prevent the emergence of monopolies across society at large.

One thing The Internet Con excels at is demystifying the discourse around tech, which, analogous to Marx’s observation about vulgar bourgeois economics, serves to obscure its actual relations and operations. We may use networked technology every day, but our understanding of how it works is often about as deep as a touchscreen. This lack of knowledge gives tech companies tremendous power to set the boundaries of the digital Overton Window and, parallel to bourgeois economists’ invocation of ‘the market’, allows them to claim that ‘the cloud’ or ‘privacy’ or ‘pseudoscientific technobabble’ mean that we cannot have nice things, such as interoperability, control or even just an internet that works for us. (For a discussion of how Big Tech’s worldview became hegemonic, see Hegemony Now!)

What is, however, unique about computers is their potential for interoperability: the ability of one system or component to interact with another. Interoperability is core to Doctorow’s argument, and its denial the source of his fury. Because while tech companies are not exceptional, computer technology itself is. Unlike other systems (cars, bookstores, sheep), computers are intrinsically interoperable because any computer can, theoretically, execute any program. That means that anyone with sufficient skill could, for example, write a program that gives you ad-free access to Facebook or allows you to send messages from Signal to Telegram.

The absence of such programs has nothing to do with tech, and everything with tech companies weaponising copyright law to dampen the natural tendency towards interoperability of computers and networked systems, lest it interfere with their ability to extract enormous rents. Walled gardens do not emerge spontaneously due to some natural ‘network effects’. They are built, and scrupulously policed. In this Big Tech is aided and abetted by a US government that forced these copyright enclosures on the rest of us by threatening tariffs, adverse trade terms or withdrawal of aid. This tremendous power extended through digital copyright is so appealing that other sectors of the economy have followed suit. Cars, fridges, printers, watches, TVs, any and all ‘smart’ devices are now infested with bits of hard-, firm- and software that prevent their owners from exercising full control over them. It is not an argument that The Internet Con explores in detail, but its evident that the internet increasingly doesn’t function to let us reach out into the world, but for companies to remotely project their control into our daily lives.

What, then, is to be done? The Internet Con offers several remedies, most of which centre on removing the legal barricades erected against interoperability. As the state giveth, so the state can taketh away. This part of The Internet Con is weaker than Doctorow’s searing and insightful analysis, because it is not clear why a state would try to upend Big Tech’s protections. It may be abundantly clear that the status quo doesn’t work for consumers and even smaller companies, but states have either decided that it works for some of their tech companies, or they don’t want to risk retaliation from the United States. In a way I am persuaded by Doctorow’s argument that winning the fight against Big Tech is a necessary if not sufficient condition to win the other great battles of our time, but it does seem that to win this battle, we first have to exorcise decades of neoliberal capture of the state and replace it with popular democratic control. It is not fair to lay this critique solely at Doctorow’s door, but it does worry me when considering the feasibility of his remedies. Though it is clear from his more recent writing that he perceives an opportunity in the present conjuncture, where Trump is rapidly eroding any reason for other states to collaborate with the United States.

The state-oriented nature of Doctorow’s proposals is also understandable when considering his view that individual action is insufficient to curtail the dominance of Big Tech. The structural advantages they have accumulated are too great for that. Which is not to say that individual choices do not matter, and we would be remiss to waste what power we do have. There is a reason why I am writing this blog on an obscure platform that avoids social media integration and trackers, and promote it only on Mastodon. Every user who leaves Facebook for Mastodon, Google for Kagi, or Microsoft for Linux or LibreOffice diverts a tiny amount of power from Big Tech to organisations that do support an open, democratic and people-centric internet.

If the choice for the 20th century was socialism or barbarism, the choice for the 21st is solarpunk or cyberpunk. In Doctorow, the dream of an internet that fosters community, creativity, solidarity and democracy has one of its staunchest paladins. The Internet Con is a call to arms that everyone who desires a harmonious ecology of technology, humanity and nature should heed. So get your grandmother off Facebook, Occupy the Internet, and subscribe to Cory Doctorow’s newsletter.

Notes & Suggestions

• Numerous organisations and individuals are engaged in what Doctorow calls ‘the war on general purpose computing’. You can check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation or a similar organisation specific to your country, as well as other creators such as Paris Marx with their podcast Tech Won’t Save Us.
• The question over who controls technology, and what we get to use it for, is also central to Pantheon and its exploration of a future where minds can be uploaded to the cloud.
• The discussion on the use of standards to consolidate certain system configurations and prevent others from emerging reminded me of the concept of the ‘Technical Code’ as proposed by Andrew Feenberg in his book Transforming Technology. The General Intellect Unit podcast has an in-depth three part discussion on the Technical Code as a means of understanding how societal use of technology is structured and codified.
• Even though The Internet Con uses the feudal system as a metaphor for Big Tech’s walled gardens, my sense is that Doctorow doesn’t subscribe to a recent current of Left analysis that contends we have moved beyond capitalism and into a new epoch of ‘technofeudalism’. This is because technofeudalism seems predicated on the premise that the tendency to hyperconcentrated platforms is essential to networked technology, whereas Doctorow clearly holds the opposite view, and sees walled gardens as a consequence of copyright restrictions. For an argument in favour of the technofeudalist analysis, there is Yanis Varoufakis’ Technofeudalism. For an argument against, the Culture, Power, Politics podcast by Jeremy Gilbert has a two-part discussion.

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If unions had a collective mythos, then the union-buster would be its demon. Called in by employers to thwart unionisation drives, the union-buster sows fear and discord wherever they tread, skirting and sometimes crossing the bounds of legality. All is fair in love and class war, after all.

In accordance with Sun Tzu’s dictum in The Art of War that warfare is the Tao of deception, union-busters operate, if not in secret, then at least under the cloak of deception and misdirection. Their art consists of appearing to do one thing while actually doing another. Countless organisers have seen their campaigns end in defeat without being fully aware of the forces arrayed against them. However, some of these covert tactics have been illuminated by repentent deserters. One such convert is Martin J. Levitt, a former union-buster from the United States who had his Damascene Moment and revealed the union-buster’s arsenal of deceit and discord in his Confessions of a Union Buster.

I first came across a reference to Levitt’s book in the union organising manuals of veteran activist Jane McAlevey. McAlevey devoted much space in her own writing on preparing union organisers for the inevitable counteroffensives employers unleash on their workers if the latter seek to build a union, with Levitt’s Confessions being a key source. Levitt’s memoirs are indeed insightful, but what I had not expected was the extent to which they are also, and possibly primarily, indeed a confessional.

Central to Confessions of a Union Buster is an equivalence between the immorality of union-busting and the moral collapse of the union-buster’s themselves. The pain inflicted on hundreds of workers deprived of higher wages, better working conditions, and dignity, is mirrored in the pain Levitt inflicts on himself and his marriage through alcoholism and familial neglect. Levitt portrays himself as a Faustian figure, having made a bargain for fame and fortune, he is unable to extricate himself from the union-busting business even as he senses that it is slowly destroying him, until his path culminates in rehab, the dissolution of his marriage, and personal bankruptcy.

There is something quite American about this narrative, and while I have no reason to doubt Levitt’s sincerity – though there are evidently some who do – it fails to convince on multiple counts. For one, it is clearly not the case that undertaking morally objectionable work unfailingly rebounds on people personally. For all Levitt’s faults, there are plenty of people out there inflicting substantially more harm on their fellow human beings without experiencing a similar psychological implosion to Levitt. Reading his memoir, it is not the union-busting that drove him to alcoholism and destroyed his marriage, but rather a combination of unacknowledged trauma, failures to communicate and a lack of emotional regulation. In short, the dysfunctional gender roles prevailing in the US of the 1970s. Regardless of whatever else it may or may not be, Confessions is an excellent portrayal of the havoc caused by toxic masculinity.

Even if unethical actions did have personal consequences, the equivalence that Levitt seeks to draw smacks of the unreconstructed arrogance that derailed his life in the first place. Merely considering sheer numbers it is clear that the cumulative harm inflicted by Levitt on others far exceeds what he brought upon himself. Moreover, Levitt’s bankruptcy was at least preceded by a time of largesse and luxury. The same cannot be said for the workers whom he denied a $1 per hour pay rise.

None of this detracts from the value of the book in illuminating vividly the ugly business of union-busting. The procedure itself is straightforward enough, and is contained in a small appendix at the end of the book. The power of Confessions is Levitt’s detailed evocative descriptions of the psychological terror he unleashes on the unsuspecting workers who had the temerity to try and improve their lot. ‘Show, don’t tell’ fully applies here. It is one thing to understand theoretically that turning supervisors against their workers is an effective strategy. It is another thing altogether to read the harrowing real-life accounts of humans being pummeled into emotional submission before being used as tools against their fellow workers in a psychological war of attrition that can last for months. If nothing else, the insight Levitt gives into the ugly reality of class war should act as a powerful corrective to a naive idealism that believes that all we need to do is win in the marketplace of ideas.

To spare readers the need to read Levitt’s book, the method boils down to these core elements:

1. Recruit all supervisory and middle-management staff as shock troops to be deployed against the workforce, either willingly or unwillingly.

2. Use your shock troops to create a hostile environment in the entire workplace.

3. Remind workers that their pain only started when the union arrived on the scene, and that the easiest way to make it stop is to get rid of the union.

4. Exploit any legal avenue or loophole to your full advantage and refuse to engage in good faith at all times.

5. Gerrymander your bargaining unit, and get rid of any pro-union workers where possible.

6. If you lose and the union wins recognition, drag out the contract negotiations until you can start again at step 1.

Simple, brutal, and clearly effective. Levitt’s heyday may have been fifty years ago, but we see his tactics at work to this day, with employers firing union organisers, indoctrinating workers through constant captive audience propaganda sessions, and inflating the bargaining unit by importing unorganised or agency workers. In that sense, Confessions has lost none of its relevance.

Does that make Confessions the essential activist resource the cover suggests? Probably not. The specificity of the time and place for which it was written, the absolutely atrocious editing, and its primary purpose as a plea for forgiveness, negate Confessions potential as a universal organising manual. Its lessons have been well absorbed and expounded more effectively elsewhere, including in McAlevey’s works. However, as an insight into the practical psychology of a union-busting campaign Confessions still has value, and it works brilliantly as an educational tool to help workers understand their enemy.

We don’t know whether any contemporary union-busters wrestle with the same demons as Levitt. In Confessions he suggests some do. Our lived reality suggests many probably don’t. In a way, it is immaterial. Contrary to Levitt’s implied premise, there is no divine justice we can rely on to rid us of our adversaries. There is only the justice we fight for ourselves. Together. One workplace after another.

Notes & Suggestions

• If you are a worker and you are not yet in a union, you should be. If you are in the UK, the TUC website can help you find an appropriate TUC-affiliated union for your sector. Unaffiliated unions, such as the IWGB, might also be good fits for you. For readers in the United States the AFL-CIO offers resources on how to get started.
• Jane McAlevey sadly passed away recently at too young an age, and with much still left to give. I have no doubt that like Joe Hill, she would exhort us not to mourn, but to organise. All her books remain excellent resources for union organisers, but I would recommend No Shortcuts as a starting point.

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Where have all the comrades gone? Once a common term of address for those engaged in joint struggle for a better world, decades of defeat, betrayal and marginalisation leave it barely used except ironically. In Comrade – An Essay on Political Belonging, Jodi Dean seeks to recover the term by arguing it defines a unique and necessary relationship for common struggle. As a union organiser, I was very sympathetic to this endeavour. Effective collective organising undeniably demands a strong level of commitment and discipline that cannot be attained through allyship or arise spontaneously. As Rodrigo Nunes and Vincent Bevins convincingly argued in Neither Vertical nor Horizontal and If We Burn respectively, neither disorganised horizontalism nor the post-capitalist networked citizen can amass the power we need for the struggles we face. Unfortunately Dean’s argument doesn’t succeed in revitalising the comrade for the 21st century, attempting to resurrect the ideal comrade from the 19th century instead. The effort is commendable, but unconvincing. The old order has gone, and we cannot simply will it back into existence.

Comrade begins with a useful and necessary distinction between allies and comrades. Allies, as Dean points out in the first chapter, are not engaged in our fight, but only asked to offer assistance. They may share our goals, but they cannot share the struggle, because its contours are delimited by one’s identity. Comrades, on the other hand, contribute to a