GlacialTurtle

On Oct. 27, 2023, the Israeli army released an animated video claiming to reveal what lay beneath Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical complex. It showed underground tunnels, bunkers, and a Hamas command room — all depicted through slick 3D graphics.

“That information is ironclad,” insisted Mark Regev, then-senior adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during an interview the same day on CNN. “It’s based on Israeli intelligence.”

[...]

But no such base was ever discovered. Moreover, the command room featured in the video was not unique; it had already appeared more than a year earlier in another animation published by the Israeli army, illustrating what it said was a tunnel beneath a UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) school in Gaza. The surrounding streets in the “Al-Shifa” video, meanwhile, were populated with storefronts from a commercial 3D asset pack — replete with fictional establishments like “Fabio’s Pizzeria,” “Andre’s Bakery,” and “Revolution Bike Shop.”

The “Al-Shifa” animation would become one of the most notorious examples of Israel’s new wartime communication strategy. It also marked the beginning of an accelerated phase of production within the IDF’s Spokesperson’s Unit: having published only a handful of 3D visualizations before October 7, the unit has since released dozens of similar videos depicting supposed terror sites in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.

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A months-long investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call together with the research collective Viewfinder, the Swiss network SRF, and the Scottish outlet The Ferret analyzed 43 animations produced by the Israeli army since October 7 and found that many contain serious spatial inaccuracies or prefabricated assets — sourced not from classified intelligence but rather from commercial libraries, content creators, and cultural institutions.

Interviews with soldiers involved in the production of these videos further illuminate how the army prioritizes the aesthetic value of the animations over their accuracy, while animators routinely embellish in order to emphasize a supposed threat.

The outcome is a communications campaign that mimics the graphics of forensic reconstructions in pursuit of legitimizing military strikes on civilian infrastructure. And as most of the sites depicted in the army’s animations remain inaccessible to journalists and researchers, and many have been blown up or demolished, Israel’s illustrated allegations effectively defy verification.

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In some cases, the “illustration” goes one step further, with fabricated environments replacing real places. In September 2024, the army published an animation depicting houses in southern Lebanon that it claimed were concealing missiles. Our investigation identified the area that the video zooms in on from a satellite image to be the outskirts of the village of Yater.

Yet a visit to the village last week found that no such buildings or streets exist in this area — and not because they were destroyed by the Israeli army, which bombed only a handful of sites in Yater. Indeed, the houses in the video are entirely fabricated, featuring antennas sourced from at least three unique models in Hubert’s “Antenna Kit” asset pack, which was published to his Patreon in March 2021.

The army published a similar 3D model at the start of its attack on Iran in June, depicting a uranium enrichment site in Natanz. As international media outlets rushed to cover the event, dozens republished the animation in part or in full, including the BBC, CNN, and Sky News. The interior of the facility depicted in the animation includes at least six of Hubert’s 3D assets, collectively replicated over 150 times.

[...]

Experts have compared the aesthetics of the army’s burgeoning animation campaign with the fields of visual and open-source investigations, which are becoming increasingly popular for covering areas where traditional reporting can be difficult.

“I think the visual lexicon of open-source investigation is something that the Israelis have co-opted as a way to try to delegitimize [those investigations] and confuse,” said Elizabeth Breiner, head of programmes at the Forensic Architecture research center at Goldsmiths University of London. “These visuals are open about their status as something in between the real and the imaginary, but the real harm is that they stick with people well beyond the point after which something may have been functionally disproven.”

Güney Işıkara and Patrick Mokre have published an insightful book that explains how Marx’s theory of value operates to explain the trends and fluctuations in modern capitalist economies. Called Marx’s Theory of Value at the Frontiers – Classical Political Economics, Imperialism and Ecological Breakdown, the title tells the reader that the book is about taking Marx’s law of value towards what they call its ‘frontiers’, namely markets and trade; imperialism and the global environmental crisis.

This is an ambitious project, but the authors succeed with a high degree of clarity in explaining the way that value (as created by human labour power at the highest level of abstraction) is modified and mediated by competition between capitalists into what Marx called ‘prices of production’ (where individual capitals’ profit rates become equalised) and by market prices (where surplus profits drive capitalists into unceasing competition).

The authors, as former students of Anwar Shaikh, adopt his theory of ‘real competition’ as opposed to the mainstream ‘perfect competition’. The latter is based on a view of capitalist production based on harmony and equilibrium, while real competition is unceasing turbulence. That is real competition at work: “antagonistic by nature and turbulent in operation” (Shaikh). The authors argue that this real competition is the central regulating principle of capitalism, but that “any theory of competition, including real competition, must be underpinned by a value theory. Otherwise, the source of revenues accruing to different social classes (among many other things) will remain undetermined.”

Isikara and Mokre set out to show the logical (and historical) connection between value created by labour power and prices in the market place. They make the important distinction of ‘between-industry’ and ‘within industry’ competition. Within industries, firms compete for shares of the same market; so prices tend to equalize within a given market. The firm that dominates that market will tend to set the price; the ‘regulating capital’. Between industries, capitalists shift investments towards those sectors with the higher rates of profit and so there is tendency for profit rates to equalise across sectors. As a result, the value incorporated in individual commodities is modified into ‘prices of production’ based on costs plus a general average rate of profit. Market prices that consumers and businesses pay move around these prices of production; which in turn are ultimately governed by the ‘direct prices’ of commodities ie the labour value contained. So deviations between direct prices and production prices, on the one hand, and between production prices and market prices on the other hand, follow from changes in value.

It’s clear that the Democratic Party, and the Liberal-Left more broadly, is in total disarray. As the Trump administration continues to erode liberal norms, worker protections, due process, free speech, and civil liberties, there’s a broad consensus that the most impactful way to push back against Trump’s unprecedented power grab is at the ballot box in 2026 and 2028. The stakes for these elections couldn’t be higher, and thus the approach Democrats take to do so couldn’t be any more salient. Attempting to get ahead of this narrative, and steer the party away from anything with even the vaguest whiff stench of Left populism, are a recent constellation of think tanks, PACs, and “movements” designed to keep the fundamentally neoliberal, billionaire-approved Democratic Party fundamentally neoliberal and billionaire-approved.

But simply appealing to the status quo wouldn’t be credible after the Democratic Party has fallen to their lowest point in over 40 years (if not 100). So these factions are creating pseudo-worldviews and political frameworks that are meant to appear bold and forward-looking, but are ultimately just a rebranded defense of the party establishment. And we know this because, to the person, they are funded by the same billionaire donors that have shaped democratic politics for decades and are working in concert with party leaders looking to deflect blame for their own repeated failures.

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Indeed, it’s an exceedingly convenient narrative for the billionaires backing these factions. Post-2024 loss, if I’m a Democratic consultant or “strategist” wanting to hoover up money to “rebuild the party” and polish my personal brand, I won’t find much funding by telling wealthy liberal donors that the problem with the party is that it sold out the working class and didn’t do nearly enough during the Biden years to win them back, or that it needs to embrace bold redistributive policies like Medicare for All or stronger labor unions, or that it needs to embrace Sanders-Mamdani-style politics of class conflict, less hawkish foreign policy, and unapologetically progressive stances on “social issues.” Obviously, this would not only prevent me from getting millions to start my own “institute” or “movement” and being featured in glossy puff pieces in the New York Times, it would actively upset these donors and effectively ice me out of funding networks.

Thus, the buyer’s market for supposedly new “thinkers” and “movements” that will repackage the existing power structure as edgy, bold, and new is hotter than ever. Enter: these three projects.

In August and early September, I spoke with several of the 15 people who ultimately resigned from the Biden administration, having seen this disaster in the making. All described a whiplash akin to what Habash experienced as they watch their former superiors — people they say ignored them, refused to act, and lied — join the opposition to the war and attempt to convince the public that they are blameless. If those officials are successful, the resigners say, they will end up back in power.

Josh Paul, who worked for more than a decade in the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, calls the recent statements “cynical repositioning.” He quit on October 18, 2023, when he realized his bosses expected him to approve arms transfers to Israel with zero oversight. It’s true, he says, that the situation in Gaza is “worse now than it has ever been,” but the road to this point was clear. He describes Israel’s “absolute disregard for civilian life” as undeniable from the start.

Paul’s first reaction to Sullivan’s change of heart “probably isn’t printable,” he tells me. “The tool kit to restrain Israel was always available when Sullivan was national security adviser.” Without any admission of wrongdoing, Sullivan and other newly vocal figures are engaging in “legacy burnishing.” “They don’t want to go down in history as the people who facilitated either a genocide or the pathway to a genocide,” he says; they want jobs in the next White House.

Hala Rharrit, a U.S. diplomat for 18 years, resigned from her role as an Arab-language spokesperson for the State Department after refusing to repeat what she calls Biden-administration lies about the war. Like Paul, she says top officials are trying to “rewrite history” and cautions that it would be a mistake to read their statements as a moral awakening: “It’s all been calculated the entire time, then and now. It’s all for their own political power and greed.”

Stacy Gilbert, who worked on humanitarian and refugee issues for the State Department for more than 20 years before resigning in May 2024, has bitter words for the revisionists. “Good for you, Jake Sullivan. But there’s actually no difference between what Israel is doing now and what they were doing when you had the power to do something about it — except time and about 20,000 more people who’ve died.”

These are the people liberals will tell you were trying everything to pressure Israel to not kill civilians and genocide Palestinians.

But supporting the government in power is a little different than saying we’re going to help this government try to survive.

We didn’t do that, Isaac. We never took a position one way or another on what the government should be. There were people in the government who thought we wanted it to fall. There were people outside of the government who thought we weren’t doing enough. We work to make policy with the government that’s in place. In the essay, you write, “Given the tensions within the government, it took active and consistent U.S. engagement to manage the internal Israeli political dynamics and maintain the adequate flow of assistance. The message to our interlocutors in the Israeli government was in essence, ‘If the politics are hard, blame the United States.’ Allowing Netanyahu to cite a need to satisfy U.S. demands was crucial then—and remains crucial today.” That makes it seem like you were trying to help the current government stay in power. No, I think you’re missing the point. The point I’m making is if your goal is to keep humanitarian aid flowing and you see obstacles that have to be overcome, you have to be realistic about what it takes to achieve the goal that you have. Our goal was to get the aid in. We wanted Israel to prevail in the war. What we’re saying in the essay is realistically there were limitations on how decisions would be taken and the coalition was concerned about not falling. It was their concern, not ours. I take issue with the characterization of our position being that we were trying to defend the coalition when we were trying to solve the immediate, urgent issue, which was getting humanitarian assistance in.

So when you say that, “Allowing Netanyahu to cite a need to satisfy U.S. demands was crucial then—and remains crucial today,” what do you mean? Netanyahu doesn’t want to piss off the super far-right ministers in his government by having it seem that Israel is delivering aid. So you’re saying that allowing Netanyahu to cite the need to satisfy U.S. demands is crucial to him remaining in power, correct?

You’re putting words in my mouth. I’m not going to let that happen. What I’m saying is in order to get a decision through his Cabinet, he needed to be armed with positions that he was able and willing to use. And what we would say is, “We need you to do this, and if that is a strategic concern then you do what we need.” I understand that you can see that as political cover, but it’s political cover to get a policy enacted, not to preserve a coalition. Our goal was to get aid in, and we were trying to help drive the decision-making process in a constructive way. I think that’s very different from taking political sides in a domestic context in another country.

If the goal was to get aid in, some people would say that keeping the current government afloat was a bad idea. Another possibility would have been to seriously threaten to stop arming them. How do you respond to that?

Look, I think President Biden was clear immediately after October 7th that he would support Israel in achieving the military objective of defeating Hamas. There was always a debate about what that meant, and we engaged diplomatically on the difference between defeating Hamas as a military and governing authority and eliminating the last Hamas fighter, which we didn’t believe at the beginning and I don’t believe today is possible. But our goal was to help Israel defend its people and its country. That was not something that we used as a general matter to say, If you don’t do other things we want, we’ll stop defending you. Part of it was that President Biden was so clear in his position that it wouldn’t have even been credible. Well, Biden still had the power to do it. I’m not saying he was going to, but he could have, right?

Right, but when he was Vice-President, Joe Biden was famous for saying great powers can’t bluff. It was something that is deep inside him—his commitment to supporting Israel in a legitimate, just fight was clear, and that had to coexist with pressing them on these humanitarian issues.

This is a war that a former defense minister to Netanyahu has referred to as ethnic cleansing. Whether you agree with this characterization or not, there is a certain point at which the U.S. could choose to stop helping Israel. Your answer is almost tautological, right? Biden wasn’t going to do this, so he couldn’t do this.**

Isaac, I think you have to put things in the perspective of the time frame. We’re talking about late 2023, early 2024, up until 2025. We engaged with Israel on military tactics in a very direct way. Take the decision to proceed in Rafah in May of 2024. [More than one million Palestinians, many of whom had congregated in Rafah in the first months of the war, fled the city during the offensive.] The Israeli military plan that was originally designed and the one that was executed were very different. If you look at the way they fought in Rafah, the reason we didn’t criticize it is that they took the advice that we had given them and they modified their military plans to be consistent with targeted intelligence-driven attacks. So we were engaging not just on humanitarian assistance; we were engaging on the conduct of the war. I’m not saying that everything went the way we would’ve advised, and I’m not saying we didn’t call them in the middle of the night many times saying, What on earth happened just now? When you would call them in the middle of the night and say, “What on earth happened?,” what was usually the answer?

The general pattern was that in-the-moment stories were inaccurate, and that the Israeli military and government establishment were not in a position to fully explain yet. We could almost never get answers that explained what happened before the story was fully framed in international media, and then when the facts were fully developed, it turned out that the casualties were much lower, the number of civilians was much lower, and, in many cases, the children were children of Hamas fighters, not children taking cover in places. Sorry, what did you just say?

In many cases, the original number of casualties—

No, I meant the thing about who the children were.

They were often the children of the fighters themselves.

And therefore what follows from that?

What follows is that whether or not it was a legitimate military target flows from the population that’s there.

Hold on, Mr. Secretary. That’s not, in fact, correct, right? Whether it’s a legitimate target has to do with all kinds of things like proportionality. It doesn’t matter if the kids are the kids of—

If you’re in a command-and-control center, that’s different than if it’s a school that’s emptied out and innocent civilians are taking shelter there. If you’re the commander of a Hamas unit and you bring your family to a military site, that’s different. I’m not saying everything fits into that, and I’m not saying it’s not a tragedy.

It may shine a very poor light on Hamas, but who the kids are does not make a difference in terms of international law.

It is not the simple question that it originally appears to be when the initial report makes it sound like the target was just an empty school that families took cover in. In some cases, I’m not aware of the full explanations, because when I left we were still asking questions to get more detail, and saying to them that they have to be able to explain these things. And I’m not going to say that none of them fall outside of the bounds of things where there should be disciplinary action against some of the officers involved. I don’t know the answer to that.

Also, very obviously stupid and insufficient idea that Israel only offered as a figleaf to cover for their genocidal intent was totally intended to work, we couldn't have known how stupid it was:

Reading your piece, I was shocked to learn that the Biden Administration’s floating aid pier was an Israeli idea. This was the floating pier that Biden talked about in the State of the Union, and was operational in the spring of 2024 briefly before stormy weather made it inoperable. It was embarrassing, and people made fun of the Administration for it. Now it seems like the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was also an Israeli idea. Both of them have been P.R. disasters, and the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has been a humanitarian disaster. The Israeli-American dynamic just seems very strange.

When the decision on the pier was made, it was supposed to work in a better way. It wasn’t supposed to get ripped apart by waves in the Mediterranean. So the things that were ridiculed were something that turned out to be something we’re going to have to deal with when we try to use that technology in another place. I never saw a risk assessment that predicted it was going to have such a difficult engineering challenge. With that said, almost half a million meals came across it and it became a very important diplomatic moment. I think diplomatically it accomplished quite a lot. It fed a lot of people. [The total aid delivered by the pier in its nearly three weeks of operation added up to approximately six hundred truckloads—about the same amount that entered Gaza on an average day prior to the war.] I’m not happy that the pictures are of waves knocking down a U.S. floating pier. But that’s not on the government of Israel. ♦

Unfortunately, the Democratic elite—which has played a crucial role in enabling and perpetuating the slaughter in Gaza—is still clinging to the status quo. And nowhere is that more evident than in how Ken Martin, the recently installed chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), is handling the issue.

As chair of the organization that oversees the Democratic Party’s national fundraising and election efforts, Martin is an important and visible party leader. His statements and committee decisions shape national perceptions of the party and influence which candidates and voters are valued come election time. But it seems that he is siding with the old guard when it comes to Israel.

In early August, The Intercept reported Martin’s aides pressured 26-year-old pro-Palestine DNC delegate Alice Minnerly to water down a symbolic resolution calling for the party to support an immediate ceasefire and an arms embargo, to suspend military aid and recognize Palestine as a state.

When Minnerly refused, Martin publicly backed a competing resolution that maintains a Biden-era commitment to advancing Israel’s “qualitative military edge.” This resolution was crafted with the input of Democratic Majority for Israel, a group whose super PAC worked to oust former representatives Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush. The countermeasure reportedly has the support of the entire DNC leadership in advance of a vote at the upcoming meeting.

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As one Harris campaign staffer explained to The Nation, a senior official in the Harris campaign informed voter engagement organizers at the beginning of October 2024 that they were to no longer to record voter feedback about Gaza in their internal systems.

This meant that the campaign simply stopped engaging with voters concerned about Gaza in the crucial final weeks leading up to the election, around the same time that Kamala Harris embraced Liz and Dick Cheney and sent Bill Clinton to Michigan, where he alienated the swing state’s Arab and Muslim voters by declaring that Israel had been “forced” to kill Palestinian civilians in Gaza. “The thought process in the campaign with Muslim voters, young voters, with anybody who was concerned about Gaza was, OK, we’ll lose you, but we’ll pick up two somewhere else,” the staffer said. We all know what happened after that.

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In May, Martin declared that support for Israel is a foundational Democratic Party value, telling the Jewish Democratic Council of America conference, “It is so important right now for our party to stand up with the Jewish community, to continue to stand up for Israel, to continue to stand up for humanity and to not forget who we are as Americans.”

This is consistent with his record on Israel while chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, particularly in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks.

On October 9, 2023, for example, Martin condemned the Twin Cities DSA’s statement of solidarity with Palestine as “disgusting” for its inclusion of the phrase “from the river to the sea” (calling it “a chant used by extremists to support the destruction of Israel”) and for failing to reference the murders of Israeli and American civilians. An hour later, he returned to X to describe it as a “garbage antisemitic statement.”

A few months later, Martin encouraged pro-Israel activists to get involved in local precinct politics to offset “the extreme voices in our party” who were then organizing for a ceasefire resolution to be passed by the Minneapolis City Council. Martin and his state GOP counterpart joined a January 2024 Zoom call held by the Minnesota and the Dakotas Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC)—which calls itself the “public affairs voice of the Jewish community” and had vigorously opposed the resolution. The JCRC has opposed the description of Israel’s war on Gaza as a genocide, claiming that it inverts both history and reality and leads to the demonization of Jews around the world. The JCRC has also declared that Israel cannot be an apartheid state because minorities live within its borders.

Is Marxism a science? Flowers for Marx provides us an excellent window into this live debate, as it exists on the contemporary Left, through a series of essays that can roughly be split into two camps: Democratic Socialism as exemplified by frequent Jacobin commentators Matthew McManus and Ben Burgis, and a position somewhere between Marxist-Lenininsm and Third Worldism found in the authors Conrad Hamilton and Ernesto Vargas. For sure, these two sides differ on just about everything, from the question of continuity versus rupture between bourgeois society and any future socialism to the historical legacy of actually existing communism to their theoretical methods. Yet, strangely enough, the authors do have one thing in common: neither side seems to want to whole-heartedly defend the position that Marxism is, or should be, a science.

The most interesting parts of the review for me is the critique of Burgis (the unfortunate legacy of Michael Brooks):

The rejection by Cohen of the labor theory of value, Marx’s understanding of exploitation, and things of that nature in favor of “more recent social science” is a very fruitful place to begin considering where the last section of the book left off. This is a rejection of Althusser’s aforementioned theory of heterodox science, but also, importantly, a rejection of the notion that Marxism constitutes its own field of social science at all. This “recent social science” is, in effect, going on somewhere else as a part of the proper social division of labor, Marxist critics on the one hand, and actual social scientists on the other. Marxists should, according to the Analytical Marxists, outsource their understanding of the real world to responsible academics doing neoclassical economics or post-structuralist history and so on.

Frankly, it’s somewhat insulting to compare this sort of relationship to social science to that of Marx’s in the reading room of the British Museum, as Burgis does. Marx painstakingly worked to verify and appraise every claim made by bourgeois political economists. I don’t say this lightly. But it’s the thought I keep coming to after being consistently confronted with Jacobin columnists’ attempt to speak authoritatively on social science and history while making very obvious mistakes and oversights. Vivek Chibber’s The Class Matrix, for example, claimed to defend structuralist understandings of class, but seemed to have been written in total ignorance as to what structures or structuralism are. Seth Ackerman, in his high profile debate with Robert Brenner over the rate of profit,[7] botched his empirical debunking because he hadn’t fully read the paper he was citing as proof of changing depreciation rates.[8]

And now we have this essay by Burgis who, in writing on the necessity of revising views in light of new evidence, appears to have taken an extremely naive epistemological position about social science, rarely checking the accuracy of claims, particularly those found in secondary sources which support his side in this debate.

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Similarly, Burgis goes on to cite Jacobin editor Mike Beggs for the rather incredulous claim that the classical political economists had a totally foreign notion of supply and demand such that we should put no stock into Marx’s critique of supply and demand, the critique being that they only determine temporary divergences from an equilibrium price. Beggs says, pointing to a quote from Marx, that the classical political economists thought about supply and demand in terms of “forces” or “quantities” of goods and not schedules or curves as us moderns do with our fancy Marshallian cross. It doesn’t seem to occur to Beggs that (1) these two descriptions are effectively equivalent as the classicals were quite capable of imagining hypothetical increases in supply versus demand and their effects on price, and (2) that the precursors of the Marshallian curve already existed in Marx’s time and, indeed, he was familiar with one such author who made these sorts of diagrams, Karl Heinrich Rau,[10] who Engels attests Marx was not fond of.[11]

Proto-marginalists were also the source of some of Marx’s most vicious asides in Capital, as is apparent to anyone who has read Marx’s footnotes.[12] Just as well, Marx has other equivalent statements on supply and demand that don’t use the vocabulary of “forces” that Beggs makes so much hay of, and he also uses the language of equilibrium and “natural prices” to indicate a deeper regulator of market prices beyond temporary changes in supply and demand, an equivalent shift from the short term to the longer term in Marshallian language. It’s also well known that the long term classical supply and demand analysis assumed constant returns to scale, whereas the marginalists and Marshall assumed declining returns to scale, and between the two I find the classical assumptions to be more realistic when you freely allow for fixed capital investment.

And the discussion of the final essay:

For all of Burgis and Cohen's emphasis on the forces of production, they never discuss the actual dynamics which determine these forces or give them a scientific treatment. Neither is there any updating of Marx's theory through more recent innovations in social science, such as the Kalecki profit equations which formalized the relationship between profits and investment. I bring this up not as some trivia they should have been aware of, but to suggest how the Jacobin writers might have anticipated some of the rather obvious points in the final essay which they nonetheless appear ignorant of.

This essay, written by Ernesto Vargas, with contributions by Conrad Hamilton, dives into the economic and political history of Mexico in the twentieth century as a case study. The story is somewhat familiar to me. I can place where an uncle was kidnapped and tortured by the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) for being a communist in the 1970s, and other members of extended family belong to the “burgeoning middle class” that Ernesto mentions towards the end of this history, those who have benefited from the rapid economic development around the Monterrey-San Antonio logistical corridor. Still, even in Monterrey, which has transformed quite dramatically the past fifty years, it's quite obvious Mexico remains a ‘developing country,’ having more in common with places like Manila in its infrastructure and concentration of abject poverty than its counterparts north of the border.

The economic story here is the rise and fall of Mexican state-directed capitalism and the import-substitution schemes that accompanied it, a story which is all too familiar in the developing world of the twentieth century, but which, in many ways, has its origins and most concise archetype in one United States of Mexico. Wanting to break the hold of foreign capital on the Mexican economy, while at the same time developing the nation’s productive forces, successive governments pursued policies of domestic investment funded by government deficits while limiting exports.

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The Jacobin ideology rests, more or less, on the assumption that we, in developed countries, are above this same vulgar logic of the development of the productive forces. There is little recognition that our material conditions are closer to Britain in the early 1900s, what Lenin ridiculed as the deindustrializing playground of US millionaires, than any situation of continental Europe past or present. We, those of us in the US, have allowed investment rates to decline significantly and our productive forces to atrophy in order to cater to capitalist consumption, while resting on our currency’s role in the global circulation of capital to extract surplus, a role that itself, more or less, rests on our relatively degrading military superpower status. For the Jacobin authors, the productive forces essentially enter into the equation only as the most abstracted formulations of Marx, as a gestalt portrait of history, rather than any fact of economic reality that can be determined by quantifiable economic activity. Hence why, in the rate of profit debates, they must foreswear any possible contradiction between the development of the productive forces and Social-Democratic politics. In this way, Vargas is the only author in this collection that I believe that comes close to affirming Marxism as a science, by example if not as a theoretical justification.

For the generation that encountered socialism first in the mid 2010s, the Jacobin crowd, despite any complaints we had, represented the adults in the room. They represented a level of competency in both organizing and theoretical rigor which seemed a step above other factions on the Left. That, however, no longer feels true, even if it's only a result of the younger generations slowly accumulating their own theoretical knowledge. This is the other key aspect of maintaining Marxism as a science, which is the dual responsibility that a science places on the individual: to educate oneself, and to challenge the existing orthodoxies, to test in practice that famous standard of refutability. This responsibility demands that we not relax our epistemic standards even for a moment, that we check the footnotes, do background research on our own claims, and refuse to accept any claim we read at face value, even if we happen to agree with it. I would hope people such as the author of Give Them an Argument: Logic for the Left would agree with this notion of rigor.

“‘He’s a madman’: Trump’s team frets about Netanyahu after Syria strikes,” Axios’s Barak Ravid breathlessly reported on July 20. “Trump was agitated all around…in a call with Bibi,” alleged Sohrab Ahmari, citing “sources in and near the administration.”

“Trump’s frustration with the devastation in Gaza is real,” Semafor insists. “After angry call from Trump, PM says Israel deeply regrets mistaken shelling of Gaza church,” The Times of Israel claimed on July 18. “Washington Struggles to Rein In an Emboldened Israel: Trump administration has expressed frustration with Israeli actions in recent days,” The Wall Street Journal reported on July 26.

If this particular genre of reportage looks familiar it’s because it’s a pared-down version of a PR campaign pushed out by former President Biden, his aides, and pro-Israel media allies. I wrote about the trope—Fuming/Helpless Biden—in both TRNN, and, in greater detail, for the Nation the following year. Now that it’s spanned party and administration we can simply call it Fuming/Helpless President. Put simply: it’s any report, analysis, or opinion that describes the president as unable to do anything to stop Israel from committing war crimes or end the genocide overall or, relatedly, any reporting that gives readers the impression that not only is the president helpless, but is very upset/angry/sad at not being able to change Israel’s behavior. It’s an essential media convention because it allows the president to continue all material support to Israel—the endless flow of bombs, military and intelligence support, vetoes at the United Nations—while distancing themselves from the deep unpopularity of Israel’s campaign of indiscriminate bombing and mass starvation.

The primary conduit for Fuming/Helpless President nonstories is Axios’s Ravid, who, as I noted in the Nation last year, had written 25 different examples of this genre up to that point for then-President Biden, quoting either US officials directly or a string of anonymous “US officials”—often as alleged scoops—claiming that Biden and White House officials were some variation of “breaking with Netanyahu,” “increasingly frustrated,” “running out of patience,” or “deeply concerned” about civilian casualties. Ravid, a former member of Unit 8200, Israel’s “secretive cyber warfare unit,” was awarded for his endless Fuming/Deeply Concerned reports with the White House Correspondents’ Association’s award for journalistic excellence in April 2024.

[...]

So why did so many mainstream outlets rush to distance Trump from the horrific images of starving children coming out of Gaza of starving children? Because preservation of American Innocence is an ideological force greater than common sense and “mounting tensions” between US Presidents and Netanyahu is a genre of reportage requiring little evidence and even less effort.

Another recent masterclass in Fuming/Helpless President stenography is a front page story in the Wall Street Journal, “Washington Struggles to Rein In an Emboldened Israel: Trump administration has expressed frustration with Israeli actions in recent days,” by Shayndi Raice and Alexander Ward. The article is littered with every cliche of the genre: Fuming Behind Closed Doors (“The Trump administration in recent days has expressed frustration with Israeli actions in Syria and Gaza”), Trump Forced to Do Israel’s Bidding Against His Will (“So far, they see Netanyahu leading Trump to act against his instincts”), and Out of the Loop (“The White House said this past week that Trump was “caught off guard” by the bombing in Syria and the strike that hit the Catholic church.”)

The piece even doubles as a means for ex-Biden officials Amos Hochstein and Phil Gordon to wash their hands of Gaza and insist they, too, were powerless, helping Trump officials and allies paint a picture of a White House getting run over by an increasingly powerful and willful ally. Kamala Harris foreign policy adviser Phil Gordon, who, on the eve of the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, explicitly promised to never condition aid to Israel, wants WSJ readers to know that Trump is unable to do anything to “rein in” Israel for the same reason Biden was

For anyone hoping Kamala Harris’s disastrous 2024 loss would make the Democratic Party drastically change direction, the bad news can be summed up in two words: Project 2029.

The New York Times reported earlier this month that Democrats are planning their own version of the right-wing policy blueprint that is the driving engine of Donald Trump’s presidency, which they’ll roll out piecemeal each quarter for the next two years in one of the party’s intellectual organs, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. The man leading the effort is also that journal’s founder and coeditor: Andrei Cherny, a New Democrat wunderkind and (briefly) former Arizona Democratic party chair, who claims to have put together a team that’s “the Avengers of public policy.”

[...]

That starts at the very top with Cherny himself, whose most recent project before this was a scandal-ridden corporate venture. For nine years, Cherny was the chief executive of celebrity-backed fintech firm Aspiration, which claimed to be democratizing investing by making it affordable for ordinary people and, in the process, being “in the business of fighting the climate crisis.”

In reality, as a series of exposés from ProPublica and others made clear, the firm sold itself through pathological deception: it boasted that it had planted thirty-five million trees, but counted twenty-three million that hadn’t actually been planted; it claimed that it had five million customers, but the actual number was a little less than six hundred thousand; it let customers round each purchase up to pay for planting a tree, but often pocketed many of the proceeds; it rewarded purchases from companies it deemed sustainable, but were in reality often pollutive; it trumpeted the chance to pay no fee on its investment fund, but actually charged a higher fee than many better performing funds; and far from being “one hundred percent fossil-fuel free,” that fund invested least in renewable energy while owning shares in a number of dirty companies.

[...]

The details of a lawsuit lay bare the less-than-sustainable reality of the industry into which Cherny had steered the firm. In order to ink a lucrative deal with oil-soaked Qatar for the 2022 FIFA World Cup — which was itself a tour de force of greenwashing — Aspiration needed a pile of carbon credits quickly, leading it to do what one executive called “a light version” of the due diligence it would have normally done on a deal that big. Perhaps as a result, the seller never delivered on the $30 million worth of credits they had agreed to.

All of this is a grim prelude to understanding Cherny’s political work, the cause of his life until the nine-year break he took for this ill-fated business venture. Cherny is a loud and proud evangelist for, and former member of, the Bill Clinton administration that laid much of the groundwork for the rise of Trump and the Democrats’ loss of working-class voters, as well as an alum of the corporate-funded Democratic Leadership Council, which was maybe best known for its enthusiasm for privatizing Social Security.

Cherny first showed up on Clinton’s radar as a Harvard senior, when he wrote that the United States needed “government humble enough not to try to solve all our problems for us but strong enough to give us the tools to solve our problems for ourselves.” Clinton loved the line so much, he made his entire Cabinet read it, put it in one of his speeches, and hired Cherny as a speechwriter. He was a perfect fit for an administration that had embarked on its own Democratic version of Trump’s DOGE initiative, called “Reinventing Government,” which boasted of firing three hundred fifty-one thousand federal workers and eliminating hundreds of thousands of pages of rules and regulations. (Some of those Clinton-era powers for carrying out this cull are now being used by Russell Vought to dismantle the federal government at Trump’s behest.)

Cherny cheered on all of it, rejoicing that Clinton had become his “true self”: not “a wild-eyed liberal mad with desire to insert the shadowy hand of the federal government into every nook and cranny of American life,” but a “raging centrist” who purged progressives, pushed budget cuts, and collaborated with Republicans. His “best period as president,” Cherny wrote, came “with Reinventing Government and the extraordinary passage of NAFTA,” and he celebrated that Clinton had cut the deficit, “eliminated scores of government programs,” and made the government “the smallest it has been since John F. Kennedy was president,” insisting that “centrist politics” is “what Americans want now” and “what they have always wanted.”

[...]

In what may be a sign of Cherny’s role in Project 2029, he wrote the Democrats’ losing 2000 platform in a process that was praised for its lack of debate and input from the dreaded “groups,” and its resulting centrist direction, full of “positions that easily could have come from Republican platforms of a generation ago,” as the Los Angeles Times put it. That included support for the death penalty and “open trade,” a boast that Democrats had “ended the era of big government,” and a vow to eliminate the national debt in twelve years.

Cherny beamed with pride that the document’s hawkishness showed “the shift in the party on national security” and that “the old siren songs no longer have a place.” Later, as the country faced whiplash from George W. Bush’s disastrous series of Middle East invasions, Cherny took the side of rabid war-hawk Joe Lieberman, who complained that Democrats were no longer talking about expanding the size of the military, but pulling out of Iraq. There was “a large grain of truth” in what Lieberman was saying, said Cherny, and he predicted that the eventual Democratic nominee would return to themes like “expanding democracy around the world and using force to advance American values.”

Using being undercover and disguising yourself as a segue into talking about imposter syndrome is a skit done unironically