Industry and equality: A progressive manifesto

The views expressed in this article are solely my own and not representative of any institution affiliated with me. The article is intended to inspire further discussion about the merits of different kinds of economic policy in broadly progressive politics, and (perhaps) politics in general. 

The Left has traditionally fought for the cause of equality: political equality among citizens, social equality along religious, gender, and racial lines, and economic equality among social classes such as capitalists and workers. What is sometimes overlooked is how the Left, starting with Karl Marx, aims to achieve this egalitarian vision: through the development and enhancement of industry — what Marx calls the “forces of production.”

Senator Bernie Sanders, self-proclaimed "democratic socialist", with mittens. 

Today, an array of political figures on the New Right advocate for “reindustrialisation” — reshoring manufacturing so that cities like Chicago and Manchester have new factories in them that would otherwise be built in countries like China and Vietnam. The economist Professor Michael Pettis argues that this would be good for developed and developing countries: China, for example, would benefit from more consumer spending and less investment in its excessive productive capacity, while the United States and other “Western” countries would benefit from less consumer spending and more productive investment, made possible by less financial speculation and a transfer of power from “Wall Street” to “Main Street” (to paraphrase Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent). 

The Left, surprisingly, has resorted to occasionally defending the economic status quo — criticising plans to create reindustrialisation through spending (without sufficiently taxing) programmes as “Liz Truss economics.” Some on Wall Street fear the spectre of “Bernie Sanders economics” in Trump’s plan to lower drug prices and idea for a wealth tax to redistribute income from capital to labour (while businessman Elon Musk similarly fears the deficit spending of Trump and the Congressional Republican Party’s “Big Beautiful Bill”, a partial departure from the Republican Party’s traditional austerity economics - though sizeable cuts are on the table [some weeks after writing, Medicaid has been cut by the order of around $1 trillion, tragically]). 

I dream of a different Left — one that ties the productive forces to the “relations of production”, such as the relationship between social classes. More equality would be made possible by investment in industry, not financial speculation — which Aristotle criticised as making money from money. Marxists have historically seen finance capital as a crucial condition for authoritarianism. Today, the Left talks about financialisation but not consistently: if finance capital is weakened, what part of the economy is strengthened? The answer, surely, is productive industries such as nuclear energy and both old and new energy sources such as solar. The idea that industrial production is uniquely fossil fuel-led may be flawed —arguably, keeping technological development arbitrarily low will decelerate a green transition. A genuine green transition requires reindustrialisation, and vice versa, thus reconciling today's irrational "culture wars" over energy. Low-end and high-end manufacturing both matter in today’s interconnected and imperfectly technological world. 

The Left is losing the political battle even as its ideas win the economic war. How can the Left translate its economic popularity into political wins? Many commentators such as Professors Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed Jr. have advocated for a winding down of “culture war” so the Left can double down on “class war”. I propose to make a different suggestion — reconceptualising what it means to wage “class war”.

To unlock a new class order, or even a classless society, Marx reasoned that new productive forces had to develop. This is why China’s government has talked about “new productive forces” such as solar energy and nuclear fusion for the good part of the last decade. Now it is cautiously pivoting to boost consumer spending, the West could do well to learn from some of the recent-past economics (and not, in any way, the far-from-democratic politics) of the Chinese Communist Party. To reduce inequality among classes — and therefore, among all social groups — it may be necessary to unlock new productive forces through reindustrialisation. To make AI possible, Trump reasons, the U.S. needs more nuclear reactors. The Left could build its own rival platform to radically redistribute wealth, socialise finance and production, and invest in productive sectors such as tech manufacturing, nuclear energy, and other new productive forces — while building up low-end manufacturing, too. 

The Left in the West has seemed less aggressive at times than the Left in the Global South. Third-World Marxism produced Maoist China and the Soviet Union. Social democrats such as Attlee and Roosevelt unlocked greater economic and social equality in democratic countries. The Left needs to embrace democracy wholeheartedly while taming capitalism more aggressively. The New Right, as a friend who works for progressive politicians remarked to me, has borrowed from the ideas of the Left. The writer and founder of the alternative-leftist Platypus Society Chris Cutrone notes: “Nixon and Mao agreed that “what the Left proposes we [the Right] push through””. It is time for the Left to adapt to the New Right by winning on its own terms. 

The Left could also learn from its centrist nemesis, too. Starmer and Carney, like their predecessors such as Blair, have mobilised support by promising economic security. When they fail, the New Right jumps in to deliver radical political, economic, and social change — in a mixture of inegalitarian and egalitarian directions. This may be a potent electoral formula but it is doomed to fail at some point as the revolution against the West rallies: Iran, Russia, and China are not decoupling — they’re coming closer together. Finance capital has tamed Trump’s tariffs and may not tolerate changes to the free movement of capital, relatively untaxed across borders. Capitalism is being tamed, but it is fighting back. Perhaps, as the early Frankfurt School and Hannah Arendt argued, right-wing authoritarianism is an expression of capitalism - but is also, in a sense, its Achilles' heel. 

Bernie Sanders has rightly condemned Trump on Gaza, and accurately critiqued the alignment of capitalist and imperial forces, as Hilferding predicted in his prophetic book “Finance Capital” in 1910. But critique is not enough. We need a coalition for a new, green industrial revolution — to benefit the global working class, which, as Marx said, has no country. 

To quote Bill Clinton’s adviser James Carville: “It’s the economy, stupid.”