Forms of the Implausible

On Frédéric Lordon’s Misreading of One Battle After Another

In a recent piece, Frédéric Lordon approaches Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film with his conclusions already in hand, a kind of a priori certainty that betrays an aesthetic traditionalism and prevents him from recognizing, in the very absurdities he mocks (such as the neo-Nazi headquarters of the “Christmas Adventurers”, with its minimalist design and built-in gas chamber), a form of deliberate exaggeration.

For these moments are not lapses of taste but strategies of critical hyperbole, the means by which Anderson renders the truth-content of a specific historical configuration. To demand realism here is to miss the point: the excess is part of the diagnosis. What Lordon condemns as implausible is, in fact, the necessary form of a critique attuned to its own time. His socialist-realist framework cannot register this.

More broadly, Lordon conflates a fragment of the bourgeois reception of the film with its own aesthetic and political project. He treats the enthusiasm of a particular audience as if it revealed the film’s inner meaning.

Yet One Battle After Another is not about “the Revolution” in the abstract; it is historically grounded – despite its temporal shifts between the militant legacies of the 70s-80s and the post-2008 landscape. Far from romanticizing armed activism, Anderson’s film criticizes precisely those vanguardist petty-bourgeois formations – the Weather Underground, the RAF, the Brigate Rosse, the Action Directe in France, the CCC in Belgium, the JRA in Japan – that sought to carry on a socialist revolution without any popular base. To read the film as a mere celebration of such movements is to invert its meaning.

Even more revealing is Lordon’s silence on what is arguably the film’s most powerful dimension, both ethically and aesthetically: the clandestine network that protects undocumented immigrants (by several accounts, largely Benicio del Toro’s invention). This sequence embodies the very collective process he insists is missing: popular organization and mutual aid, but also the apprenticeship of revolution, the people in motion, mainly the youth, rendered with exquisite photographic care.

Ultimately, Lordon’s piece has little to do with One Battle After Another itself. His true object is its reception by a narrow cultural milieu – the bourgeois-bohème de gauche – which he mistakes for the film’s message. In doing so, he abandons aesthetic analysis in favor of sociological caricature, reducing a complex cinematic experience to the projection surface of his own polemical habits.

Residual Revolution

The Quiet Politics of Vineland and One Battle After Another

When Thomas Pynchon published Vineland in 1990, the novel read as a post-Reagan elegy for the long twilight of the ’60s, populated by ex-radicals, countercultural communes, and a society that had learned to domesticate dissent. Thirty-five years later, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, his loose, fever-bright adaptation of Vineland, feels tuned to our late-digital moment: a vision of political disillusion refracted through cinematic spectacle.

One Battle After Another has been justly praised on many fronts: for its storytelling, plot construction, pacing, and blending of multiple tonal registers (political satire, action thriller, noir comedy), as well as for the profound humanity of the main characters, so vividly rendered that even the worst of them, the cruel and despicable Col. Lockjaw, elicits a fleeting sense of empathy by the end — which is not the case with the even more vile and obnoxious “Christmas adventurers”.

The cast, to be sure, delivers career-best performances, breathing life into every nuance. And visually, the film is indeed a feast, filled with arresting vistas and breathtaking sequences — from the opening border-wall tableau to the final car chase, with the camera arcing and plunging like a surfer chasing a monstrous wave—, all crafted with artistry and bound together by Jonny Greenwood’s astonishing score, which functions not merely as accompaniment but as an interpretive force in its own right.

And yet, critical reservations have emerged, particularly regarding the film’s depiction of revolution and political action, and the ambiguity of its moral centre; reservations that open a window onto its dialogue with Vineland.

Pynchon’s novel is a sustained meditation on lost revolutionary potential and how remnants of that energy might still be tapped at a time of political exhaustion. Set in 1984, it continually flashes back to the ’60s counterculture, where spectral figures — the Thanatoids — are haunted by the defeats of that era’s radical movements. By contrast, One Battle After Another has been criticized, particularly from a leftist perspective, for transforming political longing into spectacle, turning resistance into mere display. In this view, revolutionary desire becomes kink or stylistic flourish rather than collective orientation, obscuring the subtler, enduring political currents that Pynchon cultivates.

Such a binary — the power of memory versus the seduction of spectacle — misses the deeper continuity between the works. Vineland reflects a moment of disillusionment. Pynchon looks back at the ’60s through the lens of the Reagan era, defined by corporate dominance, militarization, and the emergence of the culture wars — features that today attain the paroxysm.

Though the Vietnam War was over, the psychic aftermath of both the war and the counterculture’s failure to sustain its radical ideals remained vivid. The novel is thus less an exercise in nostalgia than an inquiry into the collapse of a particular vision of freedom and revolution, exploring the gulf opened between promise and reality.

Pynchon portrays a generation suspended between the remnants of non-conformism and the entrenched conservative order that replaced it, a moment when resistance was simultaneously fragmented, repressed, and co-opted, caught in the constant tension between the desire for transformation and the crushing weight of power structures.

The connection between the two periods is tenuous but not entirely lost. Prairie Wheeler, the fourteen-year-old daughter of former radicals, embodies this fragile continuity. She may not inherit her mother Frenesi Gates’s revolutionary fervor, yet she still inhabits a world shaped by that earlier struggle.

Beneath its comic surface, Vineland exposes the legacy of COINTELPRO-style repression and the ways in which the state systematically dismantled and absorbed anti-establishment dissent. Though that utopian charge has waned, Pynchon suggests that traces persist, in memory, in scattered acts of resistance, and in the absurd resilience of figures like Zoyd Wheeler.

In Vineland, the middle names of Prairie’s parents — Frenesi Margaret Gates and Zoyd Herbert Wheeler — function as covert historical signifiers that condense the ideological shift from the radical ’60s to the neoliberal ’80s. “Margaret” invokes Thatcher and the consolidation of market hegemony, while “Herbert” alludes to Marcuse, emblem of the countercultural Left. Frenesi personifies seduction and betrayal: a onetime radical turned state collaborator, moving from underground film collectives to work for the Nixonian political pornography machine. Zoyd, by contrast, now hapless, aging, and stuck in ritualized rebellion, represents a ghostly trace of that earlier intellectual ferment, now faded into nostalgia and farce. 

Their unlikely union, producing Prairie, allegorizes the fusion of these antagonistic legacies: the utopian impulse of the ’60s — the radical vision of a civilization of Eros — absorbed and neutralized within the hyper-commodified, “post-ideological” landscape of the Reagan era. Through this pairing, Pynchon dramatizes the passage from the utopian and collectivist aspirations of the New Left to the besieged and managed subjectivity of late imperial America.

That’s where the deviations and overlapping between Pynchon’s novel and Anderson’s film come into play. As critic Rory Doherty notes in his review for Time magazine: 

“Apart from their contrasting structural approaches and character backstories, the biggest difference between text and film is setting. Vineland is overflowing with period detail, often ludicrous and sometimes satirically invented, rooted in the history of radicals being expunged by the Nixonian establishment, leading to the inevitable, reductive confines of Reagan’s ‘War on Drugs’ project. But the immediacy of One Battle After Another — with its ICE-like detention camps, unlawful militias storming American streets, and elites who promote white supremacy in closed-door meetings — was intended to embellish the spirit of Vineland rather than undermine it.”

Both novel and film imagine the wreckage of American radicalism, but they do so through different narrative devices and angles. In Pynchon’s novel, the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll (PR³) and the film collective 24fps form a paired allegory for the counterculture’s collapse into image and surveillance. In One Battle After Another, the militant faction French 75 re-stages that collapse in a more literal, violent key, turning the mediated irony of Pynchon’s world into a cinematic drama of insurgency and defeat. Taken together, they trace the passage from revolution as festival to revolution as ghost story.

In Vineland, PR³ is born from the irreverent utopian impulse of the ’60s: a college enclave that proclaims itself a sovereign micro-nation of peace, music, and weed. Pynchon renders it with the tone of a deadpan fable: the moment when political desire turns theatrical. Yet its very theatricality bears the imprint of its undoing. The members of the commune are already performing their freedom for the camera, which belongs to 24fps, the film collective that both documents and aestheticizes dissent. When Frenesi, 24fps’s camerawoman, begins filming for the authorities, the line between art and surveillance blurs. The revolution’s dream of visibility curdles into exposure. 

Allegorically, PR³ and 24fps represent the two faces of late-’60s radicalism: the yearning for liberated community and the fatal belief that liberation could be seen — that image was truth. Pynchon suggests that the counterculture’s tragedy lay not in repression alone but in its transformation into spectacle, its incorporation into the media economy it meant to overthrow.

One Battle After Another retools this parable into a more direct historical allegory. Its insurgent cell, French 75, condenses the real-world Weather Underground and similar militant groups that turned from protest to armed struggle. Where PR³ parodies the carnival republic, French 75 enacts the firing squad’s logic, yielding to the twin temptations of moral witness and elite voluntarism: the despairing revolt of a dissident petty-bourgeois group without a popular base.

The film compresses Pynchon’s layered temporality into a streamlined narrative of rise and ruin: bombings, betrayals, the erosion of ideals. Allegorically, French 75 stands for the afterimages of the ’60s, the moment when the spectacle of revolution sought to shatter itself through violence, only to become another genre of entertainment. The movie’s sleek cinematography and rhythmic editing make its very depiction of militancy complicit in the spectacle it critiques, accentuating that in both media ecologies, there is no exit from mediation.

Thus, PR³/24fps and French 75 form a dialectic. If Pynchon’s countercultural rebels are undone by representation, Anderson’s radicals implode in the immediacy of outrage. One is undone by the camera, the other by the gun. Between them unfolds the allegory of American idealism’s decay: the slow drift from communal euphoria to paranoia, from visibility to its weaponization.

By transforming PR³’s stoned republic into French 75’s guerrilla network, One Battle After Another trades Pynchon’s postmodern melancholy for tragic immediacy, yet both works end in the same space: the Reaganite (or Trumpist, it makes no difference) wasteland where rebellion survives only as image, an image that, in Anderson’s hands, intensifies rather than resolves that condition.

In that sense, PR³, 24fps, and French 75 are not different factions but sequential masks of the same fallen dream. Each names a stage in the long allegory of resistance: first the commune, then the camera, then the cell, each crushed, recorded, and replayed, until nostalgia is all that remains.

Yet there is another side to this story. Despite their differing emphases, both book and film are less concerned with simply recalling the past than with imagining how resistance, drawing on past experience, might persist in the present.

In Vineland, Pynchon’s focus on family (Prairie, Zoyd, Frenesi) and on the fragile solidarity of those left behind after the collapse of the counterculture points to the endurance of resistance through everyday care, loyalty, and kinship. If One Battle After Another carries this impulse forward, then what might appear to some viewers as spectacularization becomes instead a cinematic retranslation of that same political energy: a vision of how small solidarities, improvised alliances, and acts of attention persist within the hypermediated landscape of late neoliberalism. The parallel with Vineland might, in this sense, shed further light on this transformation.

Pynchon’s novel moves in the dreamlike, mnemonic, and fragmentary logic that defines his work: memory, transgression, failure, and the not-yet matter as much as the ostensible plot. Dreams and fantasies in Pynchon often operate as latent sites of political desire.

In Vineland, Prairie, the teenage girl yearning to reunite with her mother, stands in for the desire to maintain continuity with a radical past, a past foreclosed amid Reagan’s re-election campaign and by the then already omnipresent Tube (television), yet enduring virtually. Prairie inherits history and its defeats, though not in the same way as her parent’s generation. The crushed utopian energies of the ’60s persist, lingering in the present and waiting for another historical opening.

Watching archival footage of an earlier protest, she feels a belated surge of its lost intensity: 

“Even through the crude old color and distorted sound, Prairie could feel the liberation in the place that night, the faith that anything was possible, that nothing could stand in the way of such joyous certainty. She’d never seen anything like it before.” (Vineland, London: Minerva, 1990, p. 210)

Unlike in other Pynchon novels, where stronger revolutionary dynamics offer some measure of redemption — think the rocket counterforce in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) or the anarchists of Against the Day (2006) — Vineland presents a kind of smaller-scale survival. This has little to do with the survivalism of contemporary ideology; it concerns instead the endurance of a daughter, a broken family, a deferred dream. The novel’s ironic, “sitcom-like” closure signals the collapse of grand revolutionary energies, yet it also preserves the conditions for residual hope, as a not-yet-conscious desire.

Domesticity, seemingly apolitical, acquires a quiet political charge: everyday intimacy — family, storytelling, solidarity — carries its own utopian weight, a quiet refusal to surrender to surveillance and state power.

Back to Anderson’s film, reading it solely as a spectacle-driven flattening of utopian potential misses its attention to alternative forms of resistance: the ways family (however dysfunctional), lasting friendship, and the solidarity of margin-walkers operate as loci of present-day political possibility, echoing Vineland’s intimate counterforces.

In both works, “family” does not mean private retreat but a resistant social microstructure. In Vineland, Prairie’s search for her mother and the reconstitution of family becomes an allegory for rebuilding social memory and solidarity among the dispossessed. In One Battle After Another, family or communal ties among marginal figures resist incorporation into spectacle.

The margins, here, are not merely social but ontological — spaces of possibility where people can still act outside pre-scripted media narratives. This is Pynchon’s “counterforce” transposed into the visual register: not heroic revolution but distributed, everyday persistence.

Consider, for instance, Sensei Sergio’s — Willa’s Latino karate teacher — quiet kindness, resourcefulness, and composure, each put to work within the underground network protecting undocumented immigrants from fascist violence. Also, in the same sequence of this whole alternative organization of urban daily life — one of the film’s highpoints –, the row-on-skateboard shot: youth in motion becomes a visual motif for marginality and improvisation, recalling the latent, restless energies of Pynchon’s world.

Skateboarding and urban or suburban youth culture resurge here as a figurative synthesis of life pulsating through camaraderie, rebellion, freedom, and the survival of alternative social spaces within rigidly structured, often oppressive environments. Like Prairie’s navigation of domestic and marginal spaces in Vineland, these fleeting moments of youthful mobility suggest the ongoing possibility of living otherwise, of asserting autonomy and solidarity under conditions that would otherwise constrain and surveil. In such gestures, Anderson’s new film finds its quiet politics: not the spectacle of sacrifice, but the slow labour of care. Not, therefore, a revolution televised, but one quietly sustained, in movement, memory, and ongoing attention.

Still, as Richard Brody recently noted in The New Yorker, whereas films such as Godard’s La Chinoise (1967) and Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970) sustained a documentary rapport with real activists and with the immediate experience of the political action they depict, One Battle After Another privileges instead the register of affective labor, resulting, according to the critic, in a film that is at once “brilliant and hollow”, “a vision of hopeful possibilities” yet “unmoored from realities”.

What may appear as vacuity, however, is less a failure of the film than the index of an objective impasse. The absence of direct “revolutionary labor” reflects the very logic of late neoliberalism, in which collective action, in the context of displaced industrialization and hyperproductivity, has been utterly fragmented, depleted, and aestheticized.

Ultimately, both Vineland and One Battle After Another converge in the imagination of a politics of the remainder, a politics of what persists when the grand narratives of emancipation seem exhausted. Pynchon had already intuited, amid the conservative backlash of the ’80s, that resistance would survive less as armed insurgency than as residual energy, dispersed through everyday gestures of care, memory, and solidarity. Anderson, in turn, translates this intuition into the visual regime of the twenty-first century, in which total mediation and spectacle have replaced direct experience. His wager is that pockets of meaning and community can still be cultivated within this regime: autonomous zones of affect and attention, where politics is relearned as a patient and shared practice.

Far from standing in opposition to collective organization, these zones may in fact be more closely in tune with forms of control of economic power devised by and for the working class, rooted in networks of material solidarity, mutual care, and the democratic reappropriation of urban space, and the available resources and means of production and survival.

What the film inherits from Vineland is not merely disillusionment, but the persistence of the possible in a time when we seem unable to see even a hand’s breadth ahead: a minimal utopia, that insists on germinating beneath the ruins of the spectacle.

[A previous version of this piece appeared in Portuguese on A Terra é Redonda]

Altruism Without Illusions

Kafka and the Ethics of the End

‘Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much.’ (letter to Milena)

This is classic, counterintuitive Kafka, isn’t it? Like when he says, ‘there is hope, only not for us’. Most people, when faced with the idea that the world might end tomorrow, would likely veer into some Dostoyevskian freefall: like, if there’s no future, then anything goes, all restraint vanishing. In our times, the absence of a future (at least a future different from the calamitous present) becomes a license for retreat into self-help mantras, survivalist mindset, individualistic carpe diem clichés, hollow pleasures...

Not Kafka! For him, the end of the world doesn’t entail chaos, nor is it a pretext for selfishness. It is instead a call to solidarity: if the world ends tomorrow, then today we help each other. There’s something like a quiet defiance in there, a refusal to abandon collective responsibility in building a world worthy of the human being even in the face of absolute futility. That one powerful sentence contains a whole ethical/political stance: not hope in any outcome, but in cooperative/altruistic collective action, hopeless as they might be.

Patchworks of the Possible

Reinvesting Meaning in 'Postmodern' Art

In contemporary discourse, postmodernism is frequently reduced to a catch-all for fragmented, ironic, or pastiche-driven art, a flattening that obscures how these same techniques can carry radically different aesthetic and political intentions. While irony, eclecticism, and the blurring of high and low culture define much postmodern art, not all works using these devices are cynically detached or nihilistic. 

Thomas Pynchon’s novels are dense, fragmented, and full with intertextual references – all hallmarks of postmodern fiction. Yet his stories are imbued with a deep concern for history, technology and power relations. The paranoia in Gravity's Rainbow or The Crying of Lot 49 is not merely stylistic; it reflects a sincere critique of systems of control and the erosion of personal agency. In Vineland, this preoccupation takes the form of a meditation on the legacy of 60s counterculture and its suppression by the increasingly ubiquitous state apparatus. The novel's apparent lightness of tone conceals a darker interrogation of how memory, media and surveillance overlap to neutralize dissent. Pynchon describes the transformation of resistance into nostalgia and the commodification of rebellion, while the omnipresent Tube echoes the broader postmodern condition of a reality thoroughly mediated by images. Vineland retains Pynchon's characteristic playfulness and humor, for sure, but it is also critical and profoundly human, revealing the tragic decline of utopian hopes in the context of corporate capitalism.

In films like Neighboring Sounds and Aquarius, Kléber Mendonça Filho blends realism with genre tropes – a postmodern trait – yet the result is neither hollow nor purely stylistic. Instead, these formal experiments are deeply rooted in Brazilian urban and social realities. The fragmentation in his storytelling mirrors the fractured nature of class structures and memory in contemporary Recife. His aesthetic is political, and his politics are aesthetic: each cinematic technique reinforces a lived experience of inequality (the tensions and clashes between classes), resistance, and identity.

Musically, Manu Chao is a collage artist par excellence. But while his songs span languages, genres, and geographies, this eclecticism does not amount to a playful anything-goes devoid of meaning; it reflects a politics of internationalism and solidarity (for years it was the main soundtrack of alter-globalism); it uses musical pastiche to elevate scattered voices, to protest borders, and to foreground the experiences of migrants and the marginalized. In contrast to the depoliticized, ironic pastiche often critiqued in postmodernism, his patchwork aesthetic is a joyous call to action.

To this list we might also add the work of Judy Baca and the broader tradition of L.A. muralism. Far from embracing postmodern detachment, Baca’s monumental community murals – such as The Great Wall of Los Angeles – reimagine public space as a canvas for collective memory and historical redress. These visual narratives, built collaboratively with hundreds of young people from marginalized communities, defy commodification through their scale, permanence, and rootedness in place. They turn postmodern plurality into an act of solidarity rather than dispersion, and in doing so, exemplify an aesthetics of resistance grounded in class and grassroots political practice. 

To group all these artists under a monolithic view of postmodernism is to misread their work. Yes, they use techniques usually associated with postmodernism, but with radically different intentions. Their art is not a celebration of surface, but a dive into structure, systemic logic, and soul rebellion. In an era where cultural production is increasingly remix-based, they demonstrate that not all collage is kitsch, not all pastiche is empty; that some patchworks are maps of survival, and some fragments carry the charge of a future still in formation.

Though stylistically diverse, they share a refusal to treat aesthetic form as mere ornament, operating at the crossroads of artistic invention and political intervention. In this, they align more closely with the modernists, resisting accommodation with capitalism, eschewing production tailored simply to the demands of mass media. Style does not dissolve into spectacle; rather, it becomes a way of tracing the fractures of subjectivity under neoliberalism without conceding to fatalism. The subject in their work may be wounded, dispersed, surveilled, but never entirely crushed. Even in fragmentation a voice persists, asking what it means to live, to love, to resist, to remember...  

Through a class-conscious lens, they illuminate rather than obscure the contours of social reality. Aesthetic value arises not in retreat of social struggle, but in its articulation – even when that struggle appears stalled. By reclaiming explicit social themes often dismissed or treated with suspicion in postmodern discourse, they reinvest critique with emotional content and historical force. They gain in acuity: their art does not simply reflect the world as it is; it exposes everything that should not be, and gestures toward what might yet come. It opens space for counter-histories, ways of seeing uncolonized by the dominant imaginaries. Meaning – or its pursuit – endures; and from the cracks, alternative visions of the future may still emerge.

Borderless Winds

Clandestino in the Park

Manu Chao & Co. delivering a powerful acoustic set at a night of solidarity organized by BelRefugees.

Last night, my wife and I took our son to see Manu Chao strumming the pulse of revolution for two and a half hours beneath the green hush of Josaphat Park in Schaerbeek, Brussels. A benefit for the displaced, but also a communion of the once-dreaming.

For a moment, it did feel like the early 2000s again: alter-globalism with all its messy joy, drums pounding with ebullient refusal, guitars speaking in Southern tongues...

Palestinian flags and keffiyehs danced like borderless winds, while voices – ours, his – rose together, not just in memory of lost futures, but in motion: remembering how to move, how to be joyful again, despite everything.

Our ten-year-old danced and sang through it all, carried by the beat like it was already his. As if the music had passed through us just to find a new home in him; as if he felt, somehow, that this music wasn’t just another rhythm, but lived resistance.

Breaking the Divide

Borders, Labor, and the Struggles to Come

What if the working class recognized immigration not as a wedge issue, but as a battleground for collective power?

In an earlier piece, I outlined how contemporary left-wing movements have largely failed to connect with the working class in meaningful ways. Since publishing it on Medium, I’ve received a range of thoughtful feedback from readers. Some found my analysis too narrow or overly ideological, even out of touch with everyday reality; others thought I had mischaracterized certain perspectives.

In this follow-up, I respond to key criticisms and expand on the need for an internationalist Left that doesn’t retreat into pragmatism or identity silos, but instead dares to organize across borders, confront capital head-on, and build a politics of more: more solidarity, more economic power, and more egalitarian justice in the face of planetary crisis.

To begin with, a smaller but interesting criticism came from a reader who took issue with my tone and language, particularly the idea that I might be alienating the very working-class audience I claim the Left should engage by using ‘academic’ or ‘too complex’ a language. But not all ideas can be compressed into a tweet, can they? Serious intellectual discussions are necessary to provoke thought and inspire relevant change. And the notion that valid political discourse must be filtered through a caricatured ‘voice of the working class’ is unconvincing. Writing as if I were a poor, uneducated worker when I’m not would be condescending. The challenge is rather to bridge different registers of communication without flattening thought in the process. If I were addressing steelworkers on strike, I’d likely adapt my delivery to fit the context, but not the substance of my argument.

Another reader pointed out, rightly so, that many working-class people are educated, well-informed, capable of making their own minds about issues that concern them, and care deeply about social issues such as racial and LGBTQ+ rights. I fully acknowledge that. The working class is not a monolithic group. However, my critique wasn’t about individuals; it was about laying down a major tendency, and broader societal dynamics that shape how political messages land. People make their own judgments, for sure, but no judgment exists in a vacuum. Economic shifts, media narratives, and political realignments all affect how ideas are perceived. When a message is rejected, the question isn’t only whether it was flawed, but whether prevailing conditions made it difficult for people to see its relevance. Recognizing these dynamics means acknowledging that perception is influenced by structural forces, not just individual reasoning. My argument, then, isn’t that ‘people have been corrupted’, as someone seemed to suggest; it’s that the Left has failed to effectively engage with their real needs and concerns.

One reader tossed a Nietzschean jab my way, asserting that humans are tribal, immigration a dangerous topic, and winning the working class incompatible with open borders, just like how Utilitarianism, he added, is a noble but impractical idea. Well, to begin with, are humans tribal? Sometimes, yes, but just as often, they are not. History is full of moments when people have transcended tribal instincts and reached across boundaries in favor of outgroup solidarity, collective action, and internationalism, from the Paris Commune to the anti-war coalitions of the 1960s and early 2000s. Regarding (im)migration, it’s not just a ‘topic’ up for debate; it’s a lived reality for millions (and in the decades to come, billions) of human beings shaped by forces far beyond their control. Dismissing it as a ‘dangerous idea’ erases its complexity and obscures the fact that it is also a deeply human, often tragic phenomenon.

As for Utilitarianism, that’s a strange comparison, for the matter has nothing whatsoever to do with moral calculus or cost-benefit analysis (what Rorty in another context framed as ‘moral universalism vs. economic triage’). Capital moves freely across borders, often insulated from democratic control or local regulation (see Quinn Slobodian’s Crack-Up Capitalism, which maps out how elites have been building pockets of deregulated capitalism around the world, unburdened by national taxes, labor laws, or redistributive policies), while people, especially working-class, remain legally constrained within national borders. As the global economy is increasingly carved up in ways that privilege capital over labor, and mobility becomes a key site of that power asymmetry, expanding citizenship rights across borders is not merely a philosophical discussion; it’s a necessary step toward reversing the decline of organized labor in the 21st century.

Which brings me to other objections I received, also centered on immigration. Some viewed my call for a borderless world as too idealistic. But I don’t see how my stance on immigration and immigrant rights should be dismissed as unrealistic fantasy; it is rooted, rather, in the material connections between mass displacement, colossal economic inequality, climate change, declining labor conditions, state violence... Some readers argued that focusing on immigration is impractical because it places unsustainable pressure on Western economies. My response here is simple: the real issue is not just immigration itself, but how it fits into broader economic and social policies, and whether Western nations are willing to reckon with the role they’ve played (and continue to play) in destabilizing the very regions people are fleeing from. Many of the crises driving migration – political instability, endemic conflicts, scarcity of resources, the economic meltdown of whole countries and regions, even environmental cataclysms – haven’t just emerged organically in the so-called Global South. They’ve been shaped, and often directly caused, by imperialism, economic dependency, and a long history of Western interventionism. From colonial exploitation to Cold War-era military coups to structural adjustment programs and the ongoing support of authoritarian regimes that serve Western economic and strategic interests, industrialized nations have had their hands on the wheel, playing a major role in creating the very conditions that currently force people to flee.

Another critique I received was that immigration dilutes the wages and collective bargaining power of native laborers, hurting them while the wealthy get bigger profits by underpaying workers. This is a familiar argument, and a misleading one. Not only does it ignore the history of internationalist labor movements, it also misses the real political stakes of cross-border solidarity and the defense of migrants' rights.

Following Justin Akers Chacón and Mike Davis in No One Is Illegal, a humanizing counter-history to mainstream immigration discourse, I take a different (if not radically opposite) view. Instead of treating immigration as a threat to labor’s power, we should recognize that fighting for full citizenship rights for immigrants, alongside strong unionization efforts, strengthens collective bargaining power. When immigrant workers are protected by law, they’re less easily exploited, which raises working standards for everyone. A good reason why, rather than allowing capital to use immigration to drive a wedge between workers, as a tool to undercut wages and working conditions, we should be organizing across national lines to ensure all workers (whatever their origin) have the power to push back against exploitation.

Pro-immigrant action at a national level is thus a strategic necessity. Chacón and Davis’ account of the Wobblies’ struggle to organize all outcast workers, regardless of ethnicity, is both inspiring and exemplary in this respect: fighting for immigrant rights and labor protections within core societies actively weakens capital’s ability to pit workers against each other globally. When we demand rights and protections for immigrant workers, we don’t just appeal to the goodwill of bourgeois governments; we consolidate our power, change narratives, disrupt the usual divide-and-conquer tactics, and lay the foundations for broader transformation.

The first step toward a renewed internationalist Left movement is to name the real enemy in front of us: not immigrants, but capital, and its obscene concentration in the hands of the few. What I argued in my original piece, and what I still hold, is that the Left must focus on building institutions, networks, and movements capable of protecting people now while also fighting for structural transformation.

On that note, I want to conclude by addressing the accusations of idealism or utopianism. While I don’t think our task is to out-fantasize the Right with empty spectacle or mythic schemes, it’s worth remembering that the whole move to reject grand narratives – by Lyotard and his pomo pals – was aimed largely at delegitimizing Marxism, severing the Left from its historical imagination and sense of trajectory. Daring more and rejecting pragmatism is not the same as retreating into fantasy. We should reject the idea that practical solutions can only emerge from mainstream political approaches, the kind of managerial liberalism that tweaks the edges of collapse while pretending it’s stability. We must focus instead on uniting workers from all walks of life, not around fancy dreamworlds or narrow identity issues, but in pursuit of shared economic interests. And we need to organize beyond electoral cycles, and reach people not just with policies, but with real solidarity, framing real economic transformation in bold, compelling terms, matching the scale of the crisis with the scale of the vision.

Take the climate crisis. What actually resonates with people who’ve been systematically stripped of power, stability, and agency isn’t moralizing about carbon footprints or lifestyle tweaks. As Matthew T. Huber argues in Climate Change as Class War, that kind of neoliberal, bourgeois-bohemian rhetoric around degrowth and austerity – individualized guilt about flying or eating meat – falls flat when you’re unemployed, working multiple shitty jobs, facing housing insecurity, and living paycheck to paycheck.

We on the Left can’t afford to offer less to people who’ve already been given nothing. On the contrary, we need a politics of more: more public power, more housing, more transit, more community organization, more popular control over the economy, over the energy and food systems... And all that framed as the kind of climate justice that materially benefits the working class. That’s the sort of visionary story that can ignite imagination and build commitment; not abstract fantasy therefore, but grounded, collective ambition. Something people can see themselves in, fight for, and build together.

Brussels, circa 2004

On the Intoxication of Youth and Fleeting Infinities

We sowed in youth a mustard seed,/ We cut an almond rod;/ We are now grown up to riper age:/ Are they withered in the sod?/ Are they blighted, failed and faded,/ Are they mouldered back to clay? (the Brontës)

A few luminous sequences in a film can cast a glow over the whole, transforming what might have left us indifferent into something distinct. In A Complete Unknown, within the shoebox dimensions of Dylan’s apartment – especially in those scenes circling the Cuban Missile Crisis – the dust and daylight conspire just so, sending me skidding down a wormhole to Brussels, around 2004, a time suspended in the aftermath of the great alter-globalization and anti-war protests, a moment that, in hindsight, rhymes more with 1962 than with anything that followed (specially after 2008, where everything started to go awry at an accelerated pace).

No television (no one seemed to take notice that it even existed), no internet (or barely: we checked our emails once or twice a week, at a call center, keeping online surfing to a minimum; it cost 50 cents per half-hour, money we’d rather spend on things that actually mattered), a phone, sure, portable in theory but mostly inert (with no cameras in hand, people seldom attempted to capture the living strand: pin-down a butterfly, and its wings forget the sky...).

Nobody seemed to really work. Money, when it appeared, vanished in an instant, funneled into booze & books. But somehow, that precarious edge of existence made everything shimmer. Reading like a beatnik, writing in a fever, making love to girls with names like forgotten poems, slipping in and out of second-hand bookstores where the yellowed pages carried the magical scent of new discoveries, the cinémathèque screening Tarkovsky, Fassbinder, or some New Wave deep cut, a jazz jam veering toward the sublime before collapsing into utter chaos, a friend’s apartment swelling nightly with bodies, bottles, and smoke, surrounded by a sea of possibility, moving beyond isolation through bright, bouncing synths, in the wild, surreal glam of moonage daydreams, the city itself, lights that never go out, unfolding in endless late-night conversations, each a whispered conspiracy against whatever dawn might bring...

Life had this lazy, unhurried rhythm, like it was stretching out, inhaling deep. We sprawled across the Grand Place like it was a secret we’d discovered, cheap beers sweating in our hands, the guilds catching the final rays of sunlight, shimmering in a way that felt like a half-remembered dream from some old Flemish painter, no panic about the passage of time, just this quiet, unspoken certainty that this moment, this exact moment, was infinite. 

Our Brussels was a polyphonic mestizo city where the notion of race held no dominion; a fleeting glimpse of a democratic oasis unsullied by commerce or greed (to borrow a phrase from Greil Marcus’ Invisible Republic), drawing wandering souls from across the globe: Angola, Argentina, Brazil, Cyprus, France, Germany, Ghana, Morocco, Martinique, Syria, Vietnam... In the many vernissages, encounters that felt like verses coming to life, fragments of poetry walking, speaking, unfolding in gestures, in glances that lingered just long enough to suggest entire unwritten stories. In the squats, their boots barely leaving the floor, pretty punkettes danced as if channeling some ancient, forgotten ritual. The music then – a collision of intensity, longing, rebellion, and transcendence – sounded like the emotional landscape of life-altering years, a soundtrack of raw desire, poetic defiance, dreamy evasion, pulling at something – an electric current – just beneath the surface of the night. And for a while, we believed – we knew – that we were perched at the edge of something vast, unnamed, vital. A threshold. A signal just beyond reach. Was the belief – that knowledge – the thing itself?

The countless difficult morning-afters, naturally, would perform their usual alchemy, softening the edges, thinning the thing out like smoke drifting on a breeze that never manages to touch the earth. But come nightfall, it would creep back, murmuring it hadn’t gone anywhere, one of those subterranean moods, lurking in the unseen places, waiting, unreadable, to be stumbled upon when the time was ripe, a time that never quite came, always just out of reach, like a horizon that keeps retreating the closer you get, until at last it simply flickered, wavered, and dissolved like a mirage. 

I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call Brussels back then, like Fitzgerald with his lost city, my lost city, but looking at it today – overcrowded with tourists, armed forces patrolling with machine guns, the homeless growing exponentially in number, gunfights almost weekly, violent flare-ups between rival soccer supporters on a regular basis, young minds too busy scrolling to imagine a life beyond the screen – it’s hard not to feel a stir, some quiet ache. I don’t mean to veer into deceptive nostalgia, the siren song of better days that never fully were, but damn, when everything’s unraveled into the gigantic quagmire we’re stuck in today, you start to think maybe looking back to times like that isn’t the worst instinct; if nothing else, that half-remembered dream of the possibility of another world – back then still in the air – may whisper of other paths, half-lit and long overgrown, yes, but never fully gone...