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In the past two decades, a succession of crises has led to the rise of authoritarian states, acutely showing how capitalism and democracy were never compatible to begin with.

A squad of police stand on guard during a demonstration against the new pension reform law in Paris, France, June 6, 2023. (Telmo Pinto / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images)

It’s increasingly hard to ignore the fact that democracy around the world is in retreat.

On the one hand, many of the world’s most powerful states — from China to Saudi Arabia — are governed by authoritarian administrations that seem only to be growing in strength. On the other hand, the respect for liberal democratic norms — like the right to protest and the independence of the judiciary — is on the decline in established governments. And many states that seemed to be on the road to democracy — like Hungary and Turkey — are stuck in a kind of “illiberal democratic” purgatory.

In total, around 72 percent of the world’s population lives under some form of authoritarian rule, according to some experts. Researchers at Freedom House claim that around 38 percent of the world’s population live in countries that can be characterized as “not free.” Liberal academic Larry Diamond has termed the retreat of democracy around the world a “democratic recession.”

The erosion of democracy has been particularly hard for liberals to conceptualize. After all, things were not supposed to be this way.

The fall of the Berlin Wall was meant to finally put an end to any outstanding questions about the compatibility of democracy and capitalism. The latter was inevitably going to expand, bringing with it the rights and freedoms that many in the rich world had come to take for granted. The rest of the world was destined to converge on the model pioneered by the West.

Liberal theorists and policymakers have come up with a number of arguments to explain the apparent contradiction between the spread of capitalism and the retreat of democracy.

Those on the right of the political spectrum locate the problem with foreign “enemies of democracy.” For these pioneers of the new Cold War, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin — though curiously not Mohammed bin Salman or Viktor Orbán — are to blame for brainwashing the democracy-loving peoples of the West with authoritarian propaganda.

Centrists tend to claim the real issue is “extremists on both sides,” arguing that democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, who have never even come close to achieving state power, share just as much of the blame for the democratic retreat as former world leaders on the populist right like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump.

Every evaluation of the problem is, of course, entirely individualistic. Many liberals genuinely believe that the greatest challenge to democracy today is a few “bad guys” corrupting an otherwise well-functioning system.

These arguments are, of course, utterly absurd. Support for democracy is not in decline because voters are being brainwashed by enemy propaganda on TikTok. Support for democracy is declining because democracy is simply not working the way we were told it would.

Firstly, the combination of capitalism and democracy was supposed to bring prosperity and progress to all nations that adopted them. For a brief time after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when globalization went into overdrive, this seemed a believable story.

The financial crisis brought this collective delusion to an end in the Global North. Members of the generation that came of age during the crisis of 2008 have had to adjust to the reality that they are unlikely to be better off than their parents.

But even before the financial crisis, the Asian crisis of the late 1990s showed many in the developing world that opening up one’s markets to international capital could be a recipe for disaster. Some combination of authoritarianism and market controls seemed like the natural response.

Secondly, the progress brought by democracy and capitalism was supposed to give rise to yet more democracy. Checks and balances would put an end to corruption. An educated population would choose the “right” leaders. And rather than campaigning based on outdated ideologies, those leaders would compete for votes by appealing to the “median voter,” bringing moderation to previously divided societies.

Instead, corruption is on the rise, ideology is back, and people keep picking the “wrong” leaders. Perhaps the creation of societies so stratified that the ruling class can barely comprehend the concerns of ordinary voters was not such a foolproof recipe for democracy after all.

Some slightly more thoughtful commentators accept that this astonishingly simplistic reading might not capture the whole story. In a new podcast series for the Financial Times, Martin Wolf seems genuinely concerned about the future of democracy — and accepts a small part of the blame for himself and his colleagues.

The problem, Wolf seems to believe, is that neoliberals, in all their zeal for the end of history, spread free markets too far and too fast. The shock therapy of the 1990s was not coupled with measures to alleviate the social and economic tensions that came with it.

The argument is reminiscent of that put forward by progressive political theorist Karl Polanyi, who believed that capitalist free markets spread too quickly for societies to adapt. Those whose lives and ideals were threatened by the emergence of this brave new world would push back against the encroachment of the “market society” — often supporting authoritarian strongmen to do so.

Progressive liberals like Wolf tend to believe that the solution to the problem will come in some form of regulated capitalism. Often, these commentators are Keynesians who advocate a return to the social democratic consensus of the postwar period.

But this kind of nostalgia is no healthier than that evinced by Trump fans longing for a return to a world before the spread of “gender ideology.” There is, after all, a reason why the Keynesian consensus broke down.

As soon as economic growth slowed, the latent battle between workers and bosses that had been bubbling away below the surface suddenly exploded into the political mainstream. Without excess profits extracted from the rest of the world to keep this conflict under wraps, there was only one choice for the ruling class: all-out war on workers.

For this reason, despite the fact that it is blindingly obvious that capitalist democracies require some measures to reduce inequality while tackling climate breakdown, the progressive capitalist vision for the future stands no chance of being implemented.

There’s only one conclusion left to draw — that capitalism and democracy were never really all that compatible to begin with.

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On June 6th, Ethan Vogel and his father, Zach Vogel, were biking on the trails of North Table Mountain in Golden, Colorado. About 90 minutes into their trek Ethan clipped a boulder and fell off his bike. Unfortunately, when he fell, he landed directly on top of a prairie rattlesnake, which bit him in the torso near his armpit.

When Zach saw the bloodstains on Ethan’s shirt, he quickly realized the seriousness of the situation and raced to his son’s side. Ethan had already begun to lose feeling in his face and hands. The father then called 911 while holding his son’s head and trying to keep Ethan calm and his heart rate low. Ethan started to throw up, and his heartbeat rose to 165 beats per minute while lying down.

Zach called 911, and when the responders arrived, Ethan was taken to St. Anthony’s Hospital in Littleton, where he was given antivenom and other medication to stabilize him. He was later transferred to Children’s Hospital Colorado and given a 90-minute slow drip.

Fortunately, Ethan is expected to fully recover in about three weeks. He is already looking forward to returning to his bike and riding the trails again. His father has also learned an important lesson on the dangers of rattlesnakes and urges others to stay aware and listen for the sound.

On Thursday, a jury in Oakland County, Michigan, convicted Megan Joyce Imirowicz, 19, for unlawfully using irritants that caused her father’s death. Konrad Imirowicz, 64, had been struggling with alcoholism and was too drunk to drive his daughter to the hair salon for her 18th birthday, prompting her to take matters into her own hands.

Megan Imirowicz threw lye powder and water on her father as he slept, leading to chemical burns across his body and eventually his death. Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald said, “This is a tragic case. The defendant lashed out in anger and wound up killing her father. I commend the prosecution team for the tremendous work that went into the prosecution and in securing justice for the victim in this case.”

Megan’s brother Austin Imirowicz and her mother, Joyce Conrad, testified at the trial. Austin revealed that Konrad had to undergo skin grafts and infections which led to the amputation of both his legs. He eventually died at home three days after being released from the hospital. He also testified about his sister’s call to him on the night of the incident, in which she asked for the PIN to their father’s ATM card to pay for a hotel room without inquiring about Konrad’s condition. Austin said, “I was angry – to show no care at all, to dismiss something so serious.” Megan Imirowicz has now been convicted and is facing up to life in prison when she is sentenced on July 25.

Alberta, Canada’s most conservative province, recently went to the polls. The purportedly left-wing New Democratic Party, in its attempt to court conservative voters, provided the Left with an abject lesson in acquiescence — a road map of exactly what not to do.

Then Alberta premier Rachel Notley seen speaking to supporters at the campaign office of Jasvir Deol during the Alberta provincial election campaign in Edmonton, Canada, March 22, 2019. (Ron Palmer / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images)

If you ask the most fervent partisans of Alberta’s nominally progressive New Democratic Party (NDP), they will tell you that they did a great job in the May 29 provincial election. They got the most votes in the party’s history; they elected two indigenous legislators; they won the popular vote in the province’s two largest cities; they defeated six of the governing United Conservative Party’s (UCP) cabinet ministers.

All of this obscures the fact that they lost and that the popular vote wasn’t even close — the NDP lost by 8.6 percentage points, amounting to more than 150,000 votes. While the NDP may form the largest Official Opposition in Alberta’s history, that will be cold comfort for those who have to suffer the consequences of living under four more years of Alberta premier Danielle Smith’s hard-core libertarian political philosophy.

Priorities for a Smith government include forcing a referendum on any future tax increases (but not cuts); involuntary treatment for people who use drugs; more money flowing from public to charter schools; increased publicly funded health care delivery from for-profit corporations; and subsidizing oil and gas companies in the midst of the climate emergency.

The NDP’s campaign was tailor-made to appeal to an imaginary suburban conservative voter who is so incensed by Smith and the outlandish conspiracy theories she espouses that they would vote NDP just this one time if the party only had the right configuration of center-right policies. The problem is that these voters, in large part, don’t exist. Most of the NDP’s gains came not at the expense of the UCP, but of the centrist Alberta Party, which ran a considerably smaller slate of candidates than it did in 2019.

A Failure of Leadership

NDP leader Rachel Notley, who was premier from 2015 to 2019, hinted that she has no desire to step aside, but is evaluating her options while applauding her own leadership abilities.

“It’s good leadership to consider your role leading up to an election and to consider your role after an election. I did that in 2015, did it in 2019, did it leading into 2023, and of course I’m doing it now,” she told reporters at a June 13 press conference. That Notley considered stepping aside after she formed the first NDP government in Alberta’s history in 2015 after eighty years of right-wing rule is surprising news indeed. The difference in outcome between these elections is profound, and this claim of soul-searching ought to stretch credulity even in sympathetic members of the public.

If the NDP is going to have a future in the province, Notley and everyone else responsible for two consecutive catastrophic defeats to hard-right candidates needs to go. In both instances, the party adopted a strategy of excessively emphasizing the personal foibles of former premier Jason Kenney and later Danielle Smith, while failing to adequately defend its own track record. Despite the prevarications of deluded partisans, this approach was an utter failure.

Housing Policy for Landlords

During a housing affordability crisis across Canada, the Alberta NDP leadership made the gobsmackingly tone-deaf decision to bring in AirBnB lobbyist and executive Nathan Rotman to manage its campaign. Rotman, who served as Notley’s chief of staff when she was premier, was quietly confirmed as involved in the campaign mid-March, but the party didn’t otherwise acknowledge his involvement.

By the end of the month, Rotman was running away from reporters in Montreal after a fire at an apartment building hosting illegal AirBnB units killed seven people. “Thanks guys,” he said to reporters who cornered him in an elevator asking him in English and French if he feels responsibility or remorse for the deaths.

Rotman didn’t confirm his involvement with the campaign until less than an hour before polls closed on May 29. When journalist Jonathan Goldsbie pointed this out on Twitter, Rotman responded: “You guys sure are upset that I took holiday to work on a campaign. Have fun writing hit pieces with your pals.”

The choice to not only hire Rotman but keep him on the campaign makes sense when one considers that Notley herself and Official Opposition Critic for Seniors and Housing Lori Sigurdson are landlords. In a country contending with an ongoing housing crisis, this means that Notley and Sigurdson are profiting from a lack of affordable housing. Incidentally, the NDP’s housing policy consisted largely of subsidies for low-income people, which would go directly to their landlords. “You want to make sure we’re considering the renters themselves, but [also the] people who own the facilities,” Sigurdson explained, failing to acknowledge the self-referential nature of her statement.

While the NDP campaigned on introducing rent control in its sole victorious campaign of 2015, it refused to do so once in power. And the issue has not been mentioned by the party since.

Smith Controlled the Terms of Debate

The NDP’s 2023 campaign strategy, for the most part, centered around Smith’s untrustworthiness, digging up various wild remarks Smith has made over the past two years in her role as a podcast shock jock. The views she espoused are undeniably concerning — such as the comparison of the three-quarters of Albertans who are vaccinated to followers of Adolf Hitler, her calling for the privatization of hospitals, and her desire to see an armed blockade of Alberta’s Coutts border with Montana “win.”

The problem is that Smith wasn’t running on any of these policies. Smith ran a typical conservative campaign, emphasizing tax cuts and adopting a hard-line, tough-on-crime stance on social disorder. Despite a significant mid-campaign revelation from Alberta’s ethics commissioner — who concluded that Smith’s actions to influence the justice system regarding a Calgary-based street preacher involved in the Coutts blockade represented a conflict of interest — Smith remained steadfast in her focused messaging.

Furthermore, Smith did not make hay of her key achievement during the first six months of her term, the Alberta Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act. This grandstanding legislation grants the Alberta government the authority to disregard federal laws that it disagrees with — but has yet to be invoked.

The NDP’s policy proposals were all crafted in response to Smith’s offerings, presenting minor policy distinctions aimed at appealing to conservative voters in the suburbs. To that effect, there was no discussion of the climate crisis, despite the wildfires raging across the province as the campaign kicked off.

Whereas Smith proposed a new, lower-income tax bracket for those who make less than Can$60,000 a year, Notley proposed freezing income taxes, eliminating the small business tax entirely, and raising corporate taxes by three percentage points. Rather than provide a rationale for a corporate tax hike that would resonate with the vast majority of the population who don’t actually own corporations, the party establishment thought that boasting that Alberta still has the lowest tax rate in Canada — even lower than that in Doug Ford’s Ontario — would suffice.

While Smith proposed hiring one hundred new police officers to patrol the downtowns of Alberta’s two largest cities — Calgary and Edmonton — Notley offered 150 new police officers across the province, who would be partnered with 150 social workers, furthering the entrenchment of social work in the carceral system.

Notley, responding to the UCP’s attacks on some NDP candidates who expressed sensible criticisms of ballooning police budgets, thought she was being quite clever when she attacked the UCP for having “actually defunded the police.” This was a reference to the UCP’s reduction of the amount of traffic fine revenues that  municipalities collect to help pay for policing. However, the result of that quip was that the debate over policing ended up being framed according to Smith’s terms.

The NDP’s intense focus on winning over conservative voters in the suburbs of Edmonton and Calgary aimed to attract individuals who may not have supported some of Smith’s more extreme views. However, these voters were more than willing to overlook those positions in favor of tax cuts. Rural Alberta was written off as irredeemable — a basket of deplorables, if you will. On Substack, Edmonton-based writer Alexander Delorme aptly noted “the irony of convincing yourself to run a conservative campaign while ignoring the most traditionally conservative regions of the province.”

A Mixed Legacy

The NDP’s tenure in power was imperfect. Its strategy of watering down climate policy to secure support from the oil and gas industry — which inexplicably included support for a pipeline that would triple the province’s capacity to export planet-killing tar sands crude — was doomed to failure. The party supported the expansion of privatized long-term care, which produced deadly results during the pandemic. It made no effort to reduce public funding for private schools.

But there were undeniable accomplishments. The NDP reduced child poverty by half during its one term. It took Alberta’s minimum wage from the lowest in the country to the highest. It began phasing out coal power. It halted the privatization of lab services, which proceeded under the party’s successors with disastrous consequences.

The problem is that you didn’t hear about any of these achievements during the election campaign. It was all about Smith, all of the time.

Unless there’s a changing of the guards, expect the NDP to take all the wrong lessons from this defeat. It will further acquiesce to Smith’s agenda, actively participating in the continued narrowing of political debate in Alberta.

But it’s not enough to simply change the party leader. It’s going to take a mass movement outside the confines of electoral politics to forge a consensus in favor of an unabashedly progressive agenda in Alberta. There are already groups working to this end, such as Climate Justice Edmonton, Migrante, Public Interest Alberta, Support Our Students, and Friends of Medicare, all of whose advice was contemptuously dismissed by Notley’s clique.

A progressive challenger for the NDP leadership who seeks to return the party to its social democratic roots will need all the public support they can get. Only then will Alberta’s left have the strength to seize the party machinery and purge it of all the careerists, sycophants, and technocrats whose failures allowed Smith to achieve power.

When he became Burlington’s mayor in 1980, Bernie Sanders was a socialist outsider who had to face down a hostile political establishment. His successful mayoralty may contain lessons for Chicago’s new progressive mayor, Brandon Johnson.

Brandon Johnson (left), mayor of Chicago, at his swearing-in on May 15, 2023, and Bernie Sanders (right), then mayor of Burlington, in 1985. (Jacek Boczarski / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images) (Bettmann Archive / Getty Images)

He’s a political outsider running on a progressive platform who narrowly won a mayoral election against a well-connected, business-friendly, Republican-backed Democrat. His opponents are in hysterics. And now that he’s in office, he’ll have to face down a hostile political establishment, which will likely try to derail most of his proposed agenda for the city.

All of this describes the situation confronting Brandon Johnson, who was recently inaugurated after beating conservative Democrat Paul Vallas by a four-point margin to become Chicago’s newest mayor. But it also would have been an apt characterization of Burlington, Vermont, in 1980, when a young Bernie Sanders had just squeaked out a victory in his first mayoral campaign.

There are also, of course, many differences. Chicago in 2023, with a racially diverse population of 2.75 million, is a very different city, facing different opportunities and challenges, than the 38,000-person Burlington of the early 1980s. Johnson certainly has a much bigger and tougher task governing his city than Sanders did.

Still, some of what Sanders was up against as mayor of Burlington — and what he did to overcome fierce opposition — will be relevant to Johnson’s mayoralty. Here are a few lessons Johnson might take from Sanders’s “outsider” approach to governing as mayor.

Winning the Council Wars

Johnson’s campaign platform included support for “Treatment, Not Trauma,” which would reopen health clinics closed by former mayor Rahm Emanuel and send social workers and emergency medical technicians (EMTs) rather than police to address emergency mental health calls. Johnson has also called for $800 million in new taxes on the rich to fund generous investment in jobs, public schools, housing, and social services.

In trying to enact this program, Johnson is up against powerful foes. Most immediately, Johnson is likely to face strong opposition from more conservative members on the Chicago City Council itself. A worst-case scenario would be a repeat of the “council wars” under the progressive Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor, in which aldermen opposed to Washington organized to block all of the mayor’s initiatives.

Bernie Sanders dealt with council wars of his own after his first election victory. He improbably became Burlington’s first socialist mayor by winning with a razor-thin margin in a four-way race against longtime incumbent Gordon Paquette. (The original vote count had Sanders winning by twenty-two votes; a recount reduced that margin to ten.)

Paquette, a Democrat, had been in the mayor’s office since 1971; he largely deferred to business interests. “The urban renewal projects Paquette ended up supporting displaced communities and, combined with the county’s exploding population, raised rents and shrank the pool of available housing,” Branko Marcetic wrote of his tenure as mayor. “Meanwhile, as the city’s finances grew tighter, Paquette opted to cut services and fight demands for better pay and benefits from city employees.”

Sanders, like Johnson, had run a progressive campaign, with a platform of reducing property taxes, which he regarded as “regressive and unfair,” and shifting the tax burden to businesses and wealthier residents. (Johnson also pledged not to raise property taxes.) He additionally campaigned on rent control, opposing new developments that would displace low-income residents, and raising salaries for city workers.

Sanders, like Johnson, had run a progressive campaign, with a platform of reducing property taxes, which he regarded as ‘regressive and unfair,’ and shifting the tax burden to businesses and wealthier residents.

His victory shocked and dismayed the local Democratic Party establishment that had long dominated Burlington politics. The Democrats on the city council went to fairly extreme measures to try to limit Sanders to one term as mayor.

According to Sanders, when he took office in 1981, he had only two allies on the city council: Terry Bouricius, a fellow socialist who had won on the progressive Citizen Party line, and Sadie White, an independent. Then there were three Republicans and eight Democrats. Burlington’s city charter gave the mayor the authority to appoint various staff positions, but the Democrats and Republicans on the city council rejected all of Sanders’s appointees, and even fired the secretary he had just hired.

In his first book, Sanders recalled:

We were outflanked by the opposition on every major decision. The votes were always the same: eleven to two, the eight Democrats and three Republicans on one side, Terry and Sadie on the other.

The Democrats’ strategy was not too complicated: they would tie my hands, make it impossible for me to accomplish anything, then win back the mayor’s office by claiming that I had been ineffective.

Faced with opposition like this, a different sort of politician might have abandoned his progressive platform and attempted to mollify his opponents, hoping to at least be able to score some minor achievements. But this is not what Sanders did.

Instead, he and his supporters devised a plan to oust his opponents on the city council and replace them with allies. They began building a third party in all but legal status, aiming to win a Sanders-supportive majority on the city council and change the balance of power in Burlington politics. The group was initially called the Independent Coalition; later it was known as the Progressive Coalition, and it eventually became the dominant force in city politics and the beginning of the statewide Vermont Progressive Party.

Sanders and his supporters quickly began organizing for the next alderman elections, in 1982, when they ran candidates in six of the city’s wards. A vigorous campaign through the winter of 1981–82, in which the Independent Coalition indicted the Democratic and Republican candidates for hamstringing the mayor’s agenda, produced a record-high turnout for Burlington city council elections. The coalition ended up winning three out of the six seats, giving the progressives five aldermen total and forcing Sanders’s opponents to negotiate with him; the Democrats and Republicans finally let Sanders appoint an administration.

On this score, at least, Johnson is perhaps beginning his mayoralty on more favorable terrain than Sanders. Johnson’s agenda will likely have the support of much of Chicago’s city council members backed by the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), which totals about two-fifths of aldermanic seats, including the six occupied by Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)–backed councilmembers.

Johnson himself is a product of the militant CTU. For the past decade, the CTU has been building an independent, member-based political organization, United Working Families (UWF), that backs defenders of public education and other working-class causes. (In addition to Johnson, UWF has elected a number of aldermen, county commissioners, and Illinois state legislators, as well as one member of Congress, Representative Delia Ramirez.)

Along with other growing left groups like DSA, UWF has the potential to be the beginning of a party-like alternative to the neoliberal Democratic Party establishment in Chicago. If and when Johnson does face opposition to his platform on the city council, whether he succeeds will depend on his ability to maintain and expand the legislative coalition around these groups, including by primarying his neoliberal opponents and empowering allies.

Recently, Johnson appointed five members of the Democratic Socialist Caucus to be city council committee chairs. Socialist alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa in particular “will not only lead the powerful Zoning Committee but also serve as Johnson’s floor leader, making [him] the most powerful member of the City Council,” as Heather Cherone reported for WTTW. This is a hopeful sign. Johnson also appointed a former Lori Lightfoot and Rahm Emanuel staffer as his own chief of staff, but progressives appear to dominate Johnson’s major cabinet positions thus far.

Aggressive Executive Action and Opening Up City Government

That’s not to say that Johnson needs to wait for future elections to deal with aldermanic opposition. Again, Sanders’s fraught first year in office might hold a lesson, when the new mayor tried to do whatever he could without the city council’s support.

With his staff appointments blocked, Sanders set up his own informal cabinet of advisers, with which he organized a number of task forces to come up with ideas for what the city should do. His aim, he says — in line with the slogan of “Not Me, Us” that he popularized during his presidential campaigns — was to “democratize Burlington politics and open up city government to all the people.”

Some of these task forces were eventually incorporated into the city government officially, but before that they acted as a kind of “parallel government,” Sanders says. These task forces included what became the Burlington Women’s Council, for instance, bringing together a diverse group of women’s organizations, which introduced legislation on a variety of issues affecting women from domestic violence protections to job training for low-income women in male-dominated fields.

Sanders also began cleaning up municipal corruption by introducing competitive bidding for companies that were doing business with the city, which saved the government tens of thousands of dollars per year. In addition, Sanders and supporters began organizing cultural and recreational activities for the city, to demonstrate that government could improve people’s lives: they began a Little League program in Burlington’s poorest neighborhood and started a popular summer concert series on the city’s waterfront that attracted thousands of attendees and brought in entertainers from around the world.

These popular initiatives no doubt aided Sanders and the Progressive Coalition in boosting turnout and shifting Burlington’s balance of power in subsequent elections, first in the city council race and then in the 1982 mayoral campaign. Sanders boasts that, between the mayoral election in 1979 preceding his first campaign and his first reelection campaign, turnout nearly doubled, from seven thousand to 13,320. Support for Sanders and the Progressives was concentrated in lower-income and working-class wards, where he won nearly 70 percent of the vote in 1983.

Brandon Johnson can also build popular support for his agenda and the coalition behind him by creatively using executive action and promoting government participation. Johnson issued a handful of executive orders immediately upon being sworn in, including one that “instructs the Office of Budget and Management to prepare an analysis of all resources in the City’s FY2023 budget that are available to fund youth employment and enrichment programs” and another establishing a deputy mayor of labor relations, tasked with “improving working conditions, advancing new job opportunities for employment, and protecting workers’ rights,” among other responsibilities. The executive orders also created similar positions for immigrant rights and community safety.

Brandon Johnson can also build popular support for his agenda and the coalition behind him by creatively using executive action and promoting government participation.

Hopefully, Johnson will continue using his mayor’s pen to expand the remit of city government and fulfill his campaign promises wherever possible. Doing so may be necessary to get around potential intransigence on the city council, as it was for Sanders, and help Johnson rally and energize his supporters.

Building Power Outside City Hall

The opposition to Johnson will not just come from the city council, of course. Immediately after he won, Bloomberg ran a report quoting financial and business executives voicing serious concerns about the incoming mayor’s plans to impose new taxes; these executives are more or less threatening a capital strike. Meanwhile, John Catanzara, president of Chicago’s Lodge 7 of the Fraternal Order of Police, said before Johnson’s victory that there would be “blood in the streets,” predicting that police would leave the force en masse if Johnson won.

Neutralizing the threat of capital flight or a police strike will mean mobilizing supporters for their own disruptive strikes and protests, to force capitalists and rogue elements within the state (like the police union) to accept the need for progressive reforms. Johnson got his start in the CTU, where he was a rank-and-file organizer who helped transform the union into the militant force it became, leading the counterattack on the school privatization movement and demonstrating the effectiveness of strikes that speak to the concerns of teachers and the broader public they serve. That background, and his base among CTU workers and supporters, means that he is well positioned to lead the kind of mass mobilization and organization that will be required to overcome capitalist and police resistance to his program.

Johnson could, for instance, use his bully pulpit to support and encourage strikes by CTU and other unions in support of his program. Should protests against inequality and police violence break out as they did in the summer of 2020, Johnson could use the moment to push for badly needed reforms — and refrain from going to war with protesters as former mayor Lori Lightfoot did, raising bridges across the city and shutting down public transportation to try to stop the demonstrations. To mitigate capitalists’ structural leverage over the economy, Johnson can encourage nonunionized workers to organize and start democratizing municipal finance through establishing a public bank.

How Johnson ultimately governs will in part be a function of what kind of public pressure he faces from CTU and other activists and social movements. Even Sanders was not immune to compromising in the face of business’s power. In his first year, he angered environmentalists by greenlighting a wood-chip burning plant that later caused “long-term environmental issues for the city,” according to Marcetic. And activists claim that the city’s large public waterfront beautification project, for which Sanders has long taken credit, would have been blighted by high-rise condos and a hotel if not for public opposition. It was only because activists helped kill Sanders’s original, more business-friendly proposal, they say, that much of the waterfront has been reserved for public use.

Nevertheless, Sanders’s tenure in Burlington is largely a testament to the power of a mayor who governed by the principle “Not Me, Us,” and the strength of the movement behind him. Sanders served as mayor for four terms, until 1989. He and his supporters notched a number of victories, including establishing more progressive revenue sources, like higher taxes on commercial property; raising pay for city workers; funding community land-trust housing, upgrading public housing, and passing tenants’ rights legislation; and important environmental wins, including upgrading the city’s sewer system, shutting down an “environmentally unsound” landfill, and preventing construction of a proposed trash-burning plant.

The economic and political opposition to Brandon Johnson as mayor of Chicago is sure to be much more intense. If he proves himself somehow able to withstand these pressures, it will be because he helped organize working people to confront the capitalist economic and political establishment head on. That will be needed to significantly redistribute power and wealth from corporations to Chicago’s working class — and, as it was for Sanders and his allies, it could be the start of a broader transformation of politics across his state and the country.

Amid a historic upsurge of worker militancy in 1960s Italy, communist composer Luigi Nono turned his efforts to dramatizing the plight of exploited factory employees. The result was musically groundbreaking, and beloved by the workers who inspired it.

Two workers pouring the cast steel from the ladle into the ingot maker at the Cornigliano Steelworks, 1963. The Cornigliano metalworkers were the inspiration for Luigi Nono’s composition La fabbrica illuminata. (Mondadori via Getty Images).

It’s a common prejudice that working people are less able to appreciate “culture” in the form of high art. The avant-garde is for the upper classes; workers and the poor should just be left to enjoy their Top 40 hits and the next Marvel Cinematic Universe or Star Wars spinoff.

The story of the 1964 art music composition La fabbrica illuminata (The Illuminated Factory), by the Italian modernist composer and Communist Party member Luigi Nono, is a beautiful refutation of this trope. Nono’s work was directly inspired by, and drew from, his observations of and interviews with Genoese steelworkers; and the workers whose plight Nono dramatized were themselves enraptured by his experimental piece, which was both politically and musically challenging.

The early ’60s were a tumultuous time for the relatively young Republic of Italy, which celebrated one hundred years as a unified nation-state in 1961. That same year, the country marked only fifteen years as a true republic since the overthrow of the fascist government in 1946. Italy’s economy had grown steadily since World War II thanks to rapid industrialization powered by significant public investment from the Italian government — a phenomenon called the “economic miracle.” In the largely agricultural south, however, lack of education and poor wages contributed to financial hardships that invited organized crime and institutional corruption.

Many agricultural workers responded by migrating north, chasing the perceived prosperity of industrial centers like Turin, Milan, and Genoa. The economic miracle saw some 1.3 million farmers abandon the south in favor of dangerous, low-paying jobs in auto manufacturing and metal work. Though the industrialized north fared a little better economically, it still suffered from neofascist terrorist attacks and expansive corporate greed, on top of a growing “new mafia” that feasted on increased demand for drugs, alcohol, and tobacco brought on by rapid urbanization and corporate commerce.

To this new criminal element, every emerging market was an indispensable source of income. Fledgling workers’ coalitions from north to south found themselves the targets of organized crime, as well as of the traditional pallbearers of capital like the national police, corrupt judicial courts, and international lobbyists. The capitalists, for their part, fought against union-won wage raises with price increases to maintain their profit margins, diverting investment to real estate speculation, and state suppression of union action.

The Italian workers moved sharply left, and a wave of strikes erupted throughout the Italian north between 1959 and 1963. This period marked the most vigorous labor militancy Italy had ever seen, only trumped by the “Hot Autumn” strikes of 1969–1972 in labor hours lost, according to labor historian Roberto Franzosi.

In June of 1960, a group of Genoese workers called a general strike to stand with students and citizens alike to expel a neofascist conference attempting to organize in the city. A performance of Arrigo Boito’s Mefistofele was canceled in March of 1964 when over four thousand opera workers struck for higher wages. Later in July, thirty thousand railroad workers shut down railways in Rome for weeks, demanding higher wages and improved benefits.

Perhaps the most important of these labor actions was the 1963 FIAT wildcat strike, which saw 6,200 men defy union leadership with an impromptu work stoppage. The workers were frustrated with concessions the union had made on their behalf, and with problems outside of work like soaring rent prices and subpar living conditions. This strike quickly grew to over one hundred thousand auto workers across Turin and helped popularize the idea of the working class in Italy as an independent political bloc.

This message caught and held the attention of Luigi Nono, then an emerging voice for communism and the third world within the European avant-garde. Nono, born in 1924, grew up a committed anti-fascist, and became a communist during his university years in Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Italy. Nono’s approach to music and politics took after Antonio Gransci’s idea of the “organic intellectual,” an artist or thinker who advocates for the interests of the working class against capitalist and imperialist influence in academia, the arts, and government. Rather than pursue art solely for art’s sake, the organic intellectual sees art as a class effort.

Nono saw a path toward establishing a working-class cultural presence through music. He made it clear that his motives were not to write music for himself, but for the laboring class: “The relationship between the creator and the masses must no longer be those of professor to pupil, of initiator to neophyte. They must find themselves at the origin of the work.” Accessibility and direct messaging were central to Nono’s understanding of art.

Nono was a composer for whom the act of music making was itself a political act, if not a transcendental one. But music didn’t simply complement working-class agitation. To Nono, making subversive music was no less revolutionary than hucking projectiles at riot police — and he did both. Contemplating the role of the revolutionary musician, he said that one needs “spiritual order, artistic discipline, and a clarity of insight . . . [to be] a revolutionary with a clear idea of the situation in which he finds himself who is thus able to bring down existing structures to make way for existing structures that are growing up in their place.” It was with this penchant for tearing down structures that he turned his eye on Cornigliano, a western district of Genoa.

The Strike as Musical Inspiration

In May of 1964, over forty thousand metalworkers in Cornigliano walked off the job. Many more steel- and ironworkers declared strikes throughout Italy, leaving only a handful of foundries operational and crippling the country’s manufacturing sector. Topping the workers’ demands was a rejection of productivity agreements and a rise in living and working standards — the Cornigliano steelworks had some of the most dangerous working conditions in Northern Italy at the time. The uproar was widespread and captured the nation’s attention.

Nono scholar Jonathan Impett writes:

It seemed that while their government was helping near-monopoly companies create unprecedented wealth, Italian workers saw no rise in their living standards but ever-harsher working conditions. They felt treated by their employers with state-sponsored contempt; German steelworkers earned twice as much.

When another set of strikes was scheduled for June, Nono saw a window of opportunity. He and a team of collaborators had been working on a massive piece titled Da un diario italiano, a composition that would synthesize quotes from Sicilian workers, excerpts from Fidel Castro’s Second Declaration of Havana, and writings by the anti-fascist poet Cesare Pavese. The work was to be set in six scenes depicting Italy’s recent history; this six-movement structure wasn’t dissimilar from a Bach cantata, a composer who Nono drew on repeatedly for the project.

Each scene was connected to a world event but was described without specific reference to historical details. Nono likely chose this route in order to avoid censorship and make the work approachable, while maintaining the piece’s political message. The Holocaust became “human oppression,” the worker’s condition became “nightmare,” fascism became “violence,” Italy after fascism became “joy,” the nuclear arms race became “catastrophe,” a humanist rediscovery of mankind’s good — “life returning.”

The result was a haunting, inhuman work of industrialized music, exhibiting the macabre reality of life as a slave to the foundries.

Five movements came easily enough given the composer’s chosen source material. But the second movement, “nightmare,” seemed to demand connection to the historical moment. It was while plotting out this second movement that Nono began to consider the strikes at Genoa as a source for musical inspiration.

In May, Nono had received an invitation from the Radiotelevisione italiana (RAI) to write a piece for the September Prix Italia, one of the most significant radio art contests in Europe. That year’s Prix Italia would be held in Genoa, the perfect audience for the debut of the second movement of Un diario. Nono, along with his collaborators, sound engineer Marino Zuccheri and writer Giuliano Scabia, packed their recording equipment and set off for the Cornigliano Steelworks.

The trio was welcomed onto the campus by workers who were eager to guide them on their sound rummage. To Nono, it was not a safari to ogle at workers in pity, but a study of reactions and the human condition. “I was shocked not just by the seemingly fantastic acoustic and visual spectacle . . . but really by the violence with which I was struck by the reality of the complex conditions of the workers in those places.” The three gathered any sound they could find, from the roar of the blast furnace to lunchtime conversations with the workers who risked their lives to fuel it.

They returned to their studio in Venice invigorated for the project yet horrified by the conditions they had witnessed. Nono’s Prix Italia submission was to be an excerpt of the fully realized second movement, set to existing text by Scabia. He would call it La fabbrica illuminata. For this standalone work, he would stage a lone soprano with reactive magnetic tape, a much more intimate — and confrontational — setting than Un diario.

The result was a haunting, inhuman work of industrialized music, exhibiting the macabre reality of life as a slave to the foundries. Opening on the line, “The factory of death, they call it,” the soprano acts as a sort of Virgil through the processes of alienation and dehumanization. As was the case with the Cornigliano steelworkers, she never really has control over the dialogues that play out around her. By the end of the work, her own recorded sounds from the beginning are brought back — now disfigured and consolidated with the hellish chorus of factory noise and the work cries of laborers. No longer her own voice, she belongs to the factory.

The audience is transported to the material sound-space of the steelworks and to the soprano’s personal world of suffering. This unification of factory, performer, and audience is not accidental. Nono’s goal here was to give the audience a work with “no camouflage . . . no popular or populist naturalism.” The brilliance here lies in the confrontation: a work of high art that assaults the audience so directly that it creates a monologue, from alienated worker to captive listener.

La fabbrica illuminata wouldn’t premiere in Genoa, however. Italian authorities found the work too subversive for the political climate in the industrial center, fearing a state-sponsored event that could provoke thousands of already agitated workers (this would not be the last time Nono would be censored by the state). Instead, Nono premiered it at the independent Venice Biennale in late September.

The work was an immediate success with the patrons most important to Nono, the metalworkers themselves, who insisted that he return to the factory for another performance. When he obliged, the composer found an audience who, contrary to stereotype, had a deep interest in art music. The foundry workers were eager to understand the artistic process and its applications: “[They asked] very concrete questions, but also very serious and deep, not ideological hot air.” The Italian workers were not only capable of but hungry for “highbrow” cultural engagement.

By valuing the interests of the working class over the aesthetic sensibilities of the upper classes, Nono made a strong case for art music as a revolutionary tool. But his concern with the situation of the exploited factory worker is also what inspired him to break new musical ground — showing that the plight of the oppressed can be material not just for propaganda, but for transcendent art of a kind that can be appreciated by people of all classes.

On Friday morning, tragedy struck near the Groom Creek area in Arizona, when a randomly unprovoked bear attack resulted in the death of resident Steven Jackson, 66.

According to the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office the bear attacked and killed Jackson as he was outside drinking coffee on his property where he is currently building a home.

The bear dragged Jackson approximately 75 feet down an embankment, despite neighbors’ attempts to deter the animal with shouts and car horns. One of the neighbors managed to get a rifle and shoot the bear. Still, unfortunately, Jackson had already passed away due to his injuries.

The Arizona Game and Fish Department expresses that the incident is highly unusual, not having had a similar attack since the mid-1980s. Upon inspection, nothing was found on the site that would have provoked the bear such as food or water.

Officials believe that the animal’s aggression was potentially a “predatory response,” but the cause of this response is unknown. Sheriff David Rhodes of Yavapai County expressed deep sadness and sympathy to Jackson’s family, and the county is actively investigating the incident.

Officials ask residents not to shoot bears unless they detect an imminent threat.

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