One day in 2023, after finishing his shift, a pharmacy assistant in Rio de Janeiro called Rick Azevedo decided to record a video railing against the six-day work schedule to which much of the Brazilian working class are subject, including a disproportionate number of black workers. In the video, he referred to the 6 x 1, the colloquial name for this work regime, as a “modern form of slavery” and asked when the working class was going to make a revolution to put an end to it.

Azevedo went on to note that if he, as a single man, had no time to do anything, he could only imagine how bad things are for others with kids. He ended the video with a call to revolt, warning that if ordinary workers like him did not organize behind the issue, things would never change. He originally archived the video, but after his manager called him in to work early the next day, he decided to post it on TikTok during his shift.

The video quickly went viral, with thousands of interactions shortly after it was posted. Azevedo, who already had a following on TikTok for posts about pop culture and Beyoncé Knowles, received messages from others who felt the same way. In response, he founded the social movement Vida Além do Trabalho (VAT, “Life Beyond Work”), organizing first through live streams and WhatsApp groups, then through petitions to change the law.

Azevedo, who had spent much of his life jumping from job to job but never finding enough time to finish formal university studies, became a movement leader overnight. The movement soon spread to other states and crowdfunded a protest in São Paulo to organize around the issue, gaining the attention of Erika Hilton, a rising star in the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL). Because of his newfound popularity, Azevedo decided to run for Rio’s City Council in 2024 with PSOL’s support, further popularizing the movement and solidifying his alliance with Erika Hilton.

After the initial 2024 protests and news of Azevedo’s election in Rio, calls to change the workweek gained momentum and were taken up by some of Brazil’s progressive members of Congress. However, under Brazilian law, a change of this kind could not be made through a simple legislative process; it required an amendment to the Brazilian Constitution.

In Brazil, a constitutional amendment requires one-third of members in both houses to sign on. This seemed very hard to achieve at the time because many of those in Congress belonged to right-wing and center-right parties that initially opposed the change.

In February 2025, Hilton got 234 members of Congress to sign on to the constitutional amendment proposal, well over the third needed, allowing her to bring the amendment up for formal debate in Congress. The initial proposal also proved to be quite ambitious, calling for a thirty-six-hour workweek spread over four days without any cut to pay, which would have transformed Brazil’s labor regulations into some of the most progressive in Latin America.

The thirty-six-hour workweek met opposition from sectors on the center and Right who chose to side with capital and oppose it. Azevedo’s VAT movement and the Brazilian labor movement mobilized around the demand on May 1, and President Lula made the end of the 6 x 1 work schedule a centerpiece in his May Day address in 2025.

Lula stated that this change was necessary to build a balance between workers’ professional lives and their well-being. But despite the pressure, the legislation sat in Congress for the rest of 2025. In April 2026, the president sent his own proposal to Congress to keep the issue in the media cycle and continue putting pressure on the lower chamber.

The combination of pressure from above and below worked, and in May the proposal finally passed the lower chamber and moved to the Senate. By this point, the reform had been modified so that it would establish a forty-hour workweek with two days off instead of the four-day workweek Hilton had initially proposed.

The timing now meant that labor reform would be a key part of the national debate in Brazil’s presidential election. The right-wing candidate Flávio Bolsonaro was a sitting senator at the time, and he felt obliged to support the proposed constitutional change for fear of losing working-class voters. This essentially meant conceding that the Right had been wrong to oppose the labor reform.

After the first round of elections on October 4, it seemed that Bolsonaro’s compromise might have sufficed to shore up support for his candidacy, as he topped the polls and his far-right Liberal Party made significant gains in both houses of Congress. However, Rick Azevedo was elected to Congress on the same night, and Erika Hilton became the female deputy with the highest number of votes in Brazilian history: 1,596,472. This demonstrated how the fight for a shorter workweek connected with diverse sectors of the Brazilian electorate.

On October 14, a week after the first round of the election, the Brazilian Senate voted 75–1 to end the forty-four-hour workweek. This promised a change to the lives of sixteen million Brazilians who previously had only one day off a week. Although the legislation that eventually passed was less ambitious than Hilton’s original proposal, it still lowered the work week to forty hours with two days off. This promises to empower millions of workers by making Brazil into one of the few countries in Latin America, a region where businesses are notorious for exploiting workers, to have a forty-hour week.

The debate around the forty-hour week became a key space for Lula’s campaign to regain momentum after it initially fell behind Bolsonaro in the first round, shifting the focus to what was at stake for the Brazilian working class and the possibility of future reforms. The issue forced the Right to concede that Lula and his coalition had the best interests of workers at heart.

The debate also revealed the hypocrisy of the Right’s homophobic and transphobic rhetoric around the family, with a gay man and a trans woman leading the fight for working-class families to be able to spend more time together, get an education, and watch their children grow. Now, as Lula enters his fourth (and surely final) term, the global left should watch closely to learn how to take back the narrative from the Right and connect working-class interests with the diverse forms of oppression that workers face.

Government agencies around the country are building partnerships with worker organizations to enforce labor standards. Drawing on the knowledge that workers have about their industries and specific worksites, these efforts in coenforcement have achieved important gains in addressing legal violations.

At Amazon’s San Bernardino International Airport (KSBD) air hub in Southern California, for instance, workers organizing with Inland Empire Amazon Workers United have collected and shared information about the facility’s weak safety protections during extreme summer temperatures, leading to several government citations. This work comes on the heels of over a decade of worker education and organizing that has raised consciousness around heat safety in the Inland Empire’s booming warehousing sector and contributed to the passage of statewide heat illness prevention standards.

In response to another acute threat faced by workers — the rapid deployment of artificial intelligence technologies — California, New York, and other states have also begun enforcing new quota transparency laws in the warehousing sector. In 2024, the California Labor Commission fined Amazon almost $6 million for violating Assembly Bill 701, which requires warehousing employers to provide written notice of quotas on which they are evaluated. Here, too, worker knowledge and organization proved crucial to enforcement, with workers at ONT8 (Optical Network Terminal) and ONT9 fulfillment centers sharing information with the Labor Commissioner’s Office under the auspices of the California Strategic Enforcement Partnership.

Increasingly, Amazon is challenging these efforts at enforcing quota standards. In California, the company has appealed the Labor Commission’s citations by arguing that it does not use predetermined quotas to evaluate workers, while in New York, workers report that management has been able to sidestep new quota provisions by evaluating workers on the basis of their relative productivity — a tactic that makes injured and pregnant workers especially vulnerable to heightened work intensity.

In maintaining its de facto quota system, Amazon insists that the data it collects on workflows and then uses to train computational systems constitutes proprietary information. Even in jurisdictions with strong data protections like Germany, the company refuses to give works councils (elected workplace bodies that represent employees’ interests to management) access to datasets and algorithms managed by engineers often hundreds or thousands of miles away from the worksite — the very measures that would enable frontline workers to intervene more directly in the technical processes that shape their working conditions.

Government agencies around the country are building partnerships with worker organizations to enforce labor standards.

In challenging the separation that capitalist production engenders between the conception and execution of labor, peer education offers a potential antidote. At a recent workshop, workers from different Amazon divisions came together to analyze the impacts of AI and explore strategies for expanding worker voice in its design and deployment. As a collective exercise in knowledge production, the gathering showed what may be possible if workers are empowered to disrupt hierarchical information flows in the workplace and policymaking arenas.

Highlighting worker knowledge for policymaking purposes suggests wider implications concerning the intersection of labor renewal and mass governance. For the most part, legislation aimed at supporting efforts to revitalize the labor movement (e.g., the Protecting the Right to Organize [PRO] Act) has been focused on making it easier for workers to organize. As necessary as these measures are for expanding the associational capacities of the working class, they are insufficient for expanding its governing capacities. Unions serve as a potentially politicizing force within the workplace, but they largely operate within legal frameworks that regularize collective bargaining while muting shop floor contestation. These frameworks not only enshrine capitalist control over production but also shift the task of governing away from workers’ daily struggles. Workers can try to influence the policy process either through union representatives appointed to tripartite structures or by lobbying elected officials.

Mass worker education challenges this distinction, emphasizing the agency of workers in more directly shaping and enforcing their rights on the shop floor. We draw inspiration from the factory councils of interwar Europe, experiments with autogestion (self-management) in decolonized Africa and Asia, and the cordones industriales (industrial belts) and comunas (communes) at the heart of socialist projects in Latin America. More immediately, we look to occupational health movements that used peer education to expand popular sovereignty under a range of authoritarian politics of early neoliberalism. During the Brazilian military dictatorship, for instance, metalworkers used their firsthand knowledge of the sector’s acute injury crisis to expose the state’s cosmetic fixes, laying the groundwork for a disability rights movement that made key legislative advances after the fall of the junta. In the Indian state of Chhattisgarh, mine workers in the 1980s partnered with health professionals to train “barefoot doctors” and establish a people’s hospital that broke down hierarchies of expertise in the health sector. Meanwhile, during the Reaganite offensive in the United States, worker movements within the United Auto Workers (UAW) and Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers International Union (OCAW) used peer education to link health and safety organizing to broader questions of environmental justice.

Presently, we see this legacy extended by Amazon workers building power across the company’s global network. Through meetings organized by Amazon Workers International and other networks, worker representatives exchange information about hazardous work and bring this knowledge home to share with coworkers on the shop floor. Moreover, in refusing unsafe work during the pandemic and other emergencies, Amazon workers have been articulating a common vision of making company operations safer for themselves and their communities.

These examples illustrate the openings that exist for workers to build shop floor power and influence policy even in challenging conditions. Through spaces of collective experimentation and reflection, workers can confront the root of the harms they face — power relations embodied in the production process itself.

In NYC, the Office of Labor Policy & Standards (OLPS), a division of the DCWP, has undertaken important legal enforcement measures in recent years. For example, following the 2010 passage of the New York Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, OLPS convened focus groups with nannies, cleaners, and home health aides across the city to discuss violations and other issues. A parallel set of efforts led to the 2017 formation of the We Rise Nanny Training program, through which a coalition of domestic worker organizations have partnered with the Worker Institute at Cornell University in developing a peer education program centering around rights awareness, workforce development, and organizing skills. The coalition has since expanded the program to cover other sectors, training hundreds of nannies, cleaners, and home health aides, as well as day laborers and farmworkers. New research shows that NYC, with its strong enforcement of the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, has seen major improvements in job quality indicators such as overtime relative to the rest of the state.

These experiences highlight the importance of not only responding to legal violations after they have occurred but also promoting organizing strategies that shift larger workplace cultures. A mass worker education program could support legal coenforcement while also equipping workers with resources to exercise greater control over their conditions, addressing shop floor challenges before they become acute.

To illustrate what such a program could look like, we return to the example of warehousing and parcel delivery. With its rapid expansion amid the e-commerce boom, the industry has attracted growing public concern over its impacts on workers, residents, and the environment. Amazon’s invasive deployments of AI and other digital technologies have received particular scrutiny, spurring wider discussion among consumers and workers across a variety of industries. Building on existing legislation and organizing in New York, a program of mass worker education could strengthen governance of warehousing and parcel delivery and serve as a model for other industries.

Legislation passed at the state level over the past five years regulates production quotas and mandates that employers implement injury reduction plans. In 2025, worker and advocacy groups in New Yorkers for a Fair Economy (NYFE) — a coalition convened by the Alliance for a Greater New York (ALIGN) — turned attention to the question of how to implement this legislation effectively. Amazon Labor Union–International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 1 (ALU-IBT Local 1), representing five thousand workers at the JFK8 fulfillment center in Staten Island, focused on raising awareness of these laws as part of its safety campaign. Following several worker summits and stakeholder meetings, ALU-IBT Local 1 partnered with the Athena Coalition and National Employment Law Project (NELP) to pilot a training around laws relevant to advancing health and safety in the workplace, body and hazard mapping, and formation of workplace safety committees. With support from the Consortium for Worker Education (CWE), ALU-IBT Local 1 has carried out additional training with shop floor leaders and is building a training center near JFK8.

At the city level, the NYFE coalition is currently mobilizing in support of the Delivery Protection Act (DPA), introduced by NYC Council Member Tiffany Cabán in September 2025. The legislation would require operators of last-mile delivery facilities to obtain business licenses from DCWP and directly hire delivery drivers (including those who have unionized with Teamsters Local 804 at Amazon delivery facilities DBK4 and DBK1 in Queens) rather than misclassifying them as independent contractors. Importantly, the legislation would require employers to grant access to an independent certified organization to conduct safety and rights training with workers and managers. Drawing on a recent study commissioned by the NYC Comptroller’s office that shows an increase in traffic crashes and injuries in areas near last-mile delivery facilities like the ones in Maspeth, Queens, advocates argue that promoting the safety of workers would also help to safeguard residents. “The impact goes far beyond us,” according to Luc Rene, an Amazon Teamster based at DBK4. “The endless churn of underpaid drivers creates congestion, pollution, and wear on city streets.” If the bill passes, DCWP could partner with members of the NYFE coalition to develop a coenforcement strategy that builds on work around recent state laws.

Focusing on the training provision, we draw on an insight common among many evaluations of union education programs, which shows that workers more readily incorporate lessons received through peer education as opposed to other forms of pedagogy. A particularly instructive example comes from a peer education program developed to address sexual harassment and violence in California’s janitorial industry, where a coalition of labor and anti-violence organizations created a framework for anti-sexual-harassment training by peer educators, known as promotoras, for janitorial workers across the state. The coalition, which included worker leaders, saw that managers and supervisors often enable or enact harmful behaviors themselves, and determined that trained janitors — particularly survivors of sexual violence — were best positioned to educate their peers about relevant rights and strategies. Coalition members went on to support the creation of the Ya Basta Center in Los Angeles, which has trained hundreds of janitor promotoras to provide peer training in workplaces across California. Drawing on trauma-informed methods originally developed by the East Los Angeles Women’s Center, janitor promotoras facilitate spaces where workers can establish the trust needed to share their stories. These healing spaces have given janitors the confidence to stand with each other in the workplace and speak up against harassment, often joining fights around other issues like wage theft as well.

In New York, working together with an enforcement agency like DCWP as well as key anchoring institutions like MOWP, OME, and CWE, members of the NYFE coalition could set up a training program akin to the promotora program in California. Focusing initially on enforcement of the DPA, the program could prepare a core of last-mile delivery drivers and warehouse workers — including those engaging with local unions — to deliver training around issues of misclassification and safety addressed by the legislation. Like the promotora model, employers across this industry would be required to grant access to peer educators, enabling the program to cover nonunion workforces as well. Through program evaluation, the city could develop an evidence base showing whether and how peer training impacts worker awareness of legal rights and the sense of efficacy workers have in exercising these rights. Drawing on the city’s increasing agency capacities as well as its growing movement of labor and community groups targeting Amazon’s abuses, such work could evolve into the development of a training center like the Ya Basta Center.

Over time, building on emergent city-state partnerships around childcare and other issues, a peer education program could train a corps of warehouse workers and parcel delivery drivers in promoting awareness and enforcement of the right to organize as well as health and safety laws that Amazon and other employers have been known to violate. Given employers’ use of tech-enabled worker surveillance strategies to enforce unsustainable work rates and impede worker responses, peer educators could draw connections between these individual and collective forms of disempowerment. By bringing together workers from different parts of the logistics sector, a mass worker education program could generate broader knowledge about the infrastructures undergirding harmful practices and foster dialogue about strategies for building worker voice across the supply chain. Moreover, linking worker and community safety, the program could also generate support for other legislative efforts.

A partnership between the city and state could assist with the development of this program in multiple respects. First, Albany could generate revenue for the peer education training center by imposing a “robot tax” on Amazon and other corporations investing in high levels of automation. Second, implementing and refining a peer education program at the city level would serve as a test case before expanding its reach across New York state. In California, labor and anti-violence groups leveraged a rich movement ecosystem in Los Angeles, the historic birthplace of the Justice for Janitors campaign, toward establishing the Ya Basta Center as a base for strengthening statewide rights enforcement. A peer education training center based in NYC could serve a similar function. Last and most ambitiously, the state and city could follow the example of work-sharing agreements between government agencies, establishing coenforcement powers between NYS Department of Labor (DOL) and NYC DCWP that promote accountability for serial law breakers and discourage harmful employer behaviors. For instance, current state law mandates annual worksite evaluations by state-appointed industrial hygienists (government officials who identify and control workplace hazards to protect public health). Employers are then required to take concrete steps to address whatever ergonomic risk factors are identified in the evaluations, but it has not been specified what steps employers would need to take to comply. Establishing coenforcement powers between NYS DOL and NYC DCWP would enable the city government to work with unions and other partners in establishing participatory structures.

Recent years have seen numerous proposals calling for sectoral governance as a labor renewal strategy in New York and other parts of the country, including wage boards and tripartite bargaining structures. In their implementation, however, such developments often have been relatively detached from and at times contradictory to grassroots efforts to grow worker power. This disconnect weakens legal enforcement, hampers ongoing policy development that could be responsive to evolving worker needs and concerns, and limits possibilities for the kind of consciousness-raising work that can engender positive feedback loops between policy and organizing. This separation also constrains the capacity of workers to build direct associational power vis-à-vis employers, clients, and other holders of economic power.

In institutionalizing channels for workers to promote labor standards enforcement and shift broader workplace cultures, an infrastructure of mass worker education could amplify the capacity of frontline workers to meaningfully shape policy. Specifically, peer education could build on workers’ existing job-related knowledge to deepen understandings of industry dynamics and relevant policy debates; seed the formation of what ALU-IBT Local 1 leaders have called “tech governance councils,” which would combine strategic reflection on shop floor organizing with proposals for enhancing worker voice in technology deployment; and facilitate recruitment of workers into mass sectoral assemblies. These assemblies could provide a forum for workers from different worksites, occupations, and job titles to convene around developing citywide organizing and policy strategies. Such assemblies could deepen member engagement in areas where unions already have a foothold and provide a space for unions to continue deepening their coalitional relationships with other communities. Critically, amid continued employer attacks on legal rights to free association, mass assemblies could build networks of support for collective action in areas with little or no union density as well.

We end by returning to our opening vignette of Amazon workers resisting acute forms of digital surveillance. Amid growing interest in the regulation of data collection and computational systems, the framework we have proposed would anchor shop-floor governance practices, like the efforts of Amazon workers to teach each other how to navigate the company’s surveillance systems, in the insights of workers who encounter these systems daily. Moreover, in establishing a consistent feedback loop from the point of production to sectoral assemblies and the halls of state power, the policy process would be infused with ongoing experimentation, reflection, and refinement. As Big Tech and other corporate actors seek greater control over nearly every aspect of economic, social, and political life, the Mamdani administration has a historic opportunity to create agile policy mechanisms that can respond to this rapidly shifting terrain — moving from the shop floor up.

Malm’s contributions are many. His seminal 2016 work, Fossil Capital, is perhaps the most important theoretical account of the historical entanglement of fossil fuel production in capitalism. The Progress of This Storm stakes out a clear position in ecological Marxist debates, asserting the need for human agency in confronting the crises we face. In the early 2020s, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency and How to Blow Up a Pipeline elaborated on this with essential contributions to debates on climate strategy following the insurgency of Extinction Rebellion and school climate strikes. Coauthored with Wim Carton, Overshoot and The Long Heat then offered masterful accounts of the ideological and technological bases of the march toward climate catastrophe.

More recently, Malm’s impassioned 2025 work, The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth, places Israel’s genocide in Palestine in its proper historical setting, locating it in the context of British empire and enduring expansion of the fossil economy.

Malm, like Rooney, is no terrorist. In fact, it is the power of his ideas and the clarity of his expression that make him particularly dangerous for the British government. It clearly fears that Malm — like Rooney, Palestine Action, and Just Stop Oil (JSO) — will expose their inexcusable negligence on the most consequential questions of our time.

This episode raises a sobering question not just for the Marxist left, but for anyone in Britain committed to freedom of speech and political expression, and anyone who might expect to publicly criticize any government failing to act on genocide and climate collapse in the coming years: If Burnham’s government is prepared to ban Malm from entering the country, how many of its own citizens would it gladly deprive of their political freedoms if it had the opportunity?

This is an instructive moment. The only real difference between Burnham’s Labour and his predecessor Keir Starmer’s rule lies in the world of vibes and affect. Burnham says he identifies with ordinary people’s problems, names neoliberalism as an enemy, and shares your cultural tastes, perhaps evoking some combination of hope, nostalgia, and northern English pride.

But his government shares with Starmer’s an inability to confront the precipitous decline in living standards, an enthusiasm for growing the destructive defense and AI industries, and ongoing material support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

It leaves untouched the massive intensification of state repression of peaceful protest introduced under the last Tory government (in response to Extinction Rebellion and JSO), which was extended to Palestine Action by Starmer’s government.

Even worse than Starmer’s, Burnham’s government has abandoned Labour’s hard-won commitment to stop new fossil fuel production in the North Sea.

Each of these positions undermines the medium- to long-term viability of human civilization as we know it. The banning of Malm is an insight into how ostensibly center-left governments will deal with political dissent as they fail to address the crises in the years to come.

The Marxist left, within and outside the UK, is not only a legitimate political tradition that must be protected from repression on principle. It is the political tradition offering the strongest insights and most vibrant debate on the nature of the crises we face and how to overcome them. Its repression is an assault on everyone.

We should express our solidarity with Andreas Malm and Sally Rooney. But this situation also raises wider demands: for the de-proscription of Palestine Action and the repealing of anti-protest legislation. And, more materially, for an end to the UK’s practical support for Israel’s genocide in Palestine and to fossil fuel production in the North Sea.

Each of these claims are basic expressions of humanity and should be uncontroversial to state out loud in Britain today. It is the moral responsibility of anybody in the public sphere to express them. Burnham’s government rejects them all, and for this deserves our unrelenting opposition.

Much of Stewart’s radical political perspective emerged at an early age. Born in 1940, he grew up poor in Yorkshire, England, the youngest of three brothers. Stewart’s mother worked in a textile factory, while his father worked several working-class jobs, including as a day laborer and postman, never coming to terms with the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) he suffered from after his experiences during World War II.

Stewart’s father would often subject his wife to domestic violence. Witnessing his mother’s exploitation at work and abuse at home profoundly shaped Stewart’s politics. Rather than accepting these injustices as inevitable, he committed himself to fighting them. Stewart said he became a socialist at the age of five. Later in life, he became an outspoken campaigner against domestic violence, drawing on the experiences that had so blighted his childhood:

I’ve been a witness to unfairness in society all my life. To the conditions under which my mother worked all her life, working in an industrial weaving shed in the north of England. And it has been this feature of unfairness that has motivated me in all of my political thinking.

Stewart also discovered from a young age, with the encouragement of his grammar school English teacher, that he had a wonderful talent for acting. Indeed, at the age of ten, that very teacher gave the young Patrick a copy of Macbeth and told him to get up on stage and perform. Stewart was a natural. He continued to act throughout his school career, often working alongside friend Brian Blessed, who would also go on to an impressive dramatic career of his own. Stewart and Blessed later received grants to attend the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. Stewart was reportedly the first person who was neither a graduate of Oxford nor Cambridge to receive a grant from West Riding Council.

Stewart began his professional career in 1959 with a production of Cyrano de Bergerac in Bristol. In 1966, he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he worked alongside actors such as Ben Kingsley. In 1967, he also made his on-screen debut, landing a one-off bit part in the long-running UK soap opera Coronation Street.

He subsequently appeared in Shakespearean plays and BBC dramas, including turns playing Vladimir Lenin in Fall of Eagles (1974) and the KGB mastermind Karla in the critically acclaimed adaptations of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979) and Smiley’s People (1982). It also paved the way for a number of bit parts in films. These included John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981) and David Lynch’s Dune (1984), where his character Gurney Halleck memorably charges into battle cradling a pug.

Even as his screen career developed, Stewart maintained a deep commitment to the theater, encouraged by his lifelong friend and fellow Shakespearean powerhouse actor, Ian McKellen. Indeed, Stewart’s longtime connection to the theater and to Shakespeare proved to be key in his landing the role that would propel him to global fame.

When Stewart was cast as Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–1994), he drew on his years of Shakespearean training to develop the starship captain. As he put it, “There is a formality to the way they speak and comport themselves that reminds me of numerous Shakespearean situations I’d been in onstage. I should play Jean-Luc, I realized, as if he were a character in Henry IV, which is about brave men.”

This proved to be a stroke of genius, with Picard immediately becoming a fan favorite. Picard’s assured and wise but commanding demeanor alongside his philosophical bent proved to be the very ideal representation of who one would want to have exploring the cosmos on behalf of humanity. The show is considered by many to be the greatest iteration of Star Trek, and it is likely the version that hewed most firmly to series creator Gene Roddenberry’s famously left-wing politics, politics shared by Stewart. His singular performance helped make the show a success, and it made Stewart a household name and transformed him into an international star.

To viewers like me, who grew up watching The Next Generation, Picard represented the ideal father figure, something he himself never had. Yes, Picard had a quiet authority — Stewart said his own father could command any room he walked into — but Picard was also a man of deep kindness, intelligence, and compassion with a strong aversion to violence. His mission was one of peace, and though the USS Enterprise often found itself in peril, Picard was almost always able to negotiate a nonviolent way out. Picard embodied a vision of authority based not on domination but on cooperation, reason, and mutual respect. It was a vision compatible with Stewart’s socialism — a commitment to humanity over the barbarism of domination and violence.

Perhaps Stewart’s most powerful exploration of these themes came in the two-part Next Generation episode “The Best of Both Worlds.” Over the course of the two episodes, the Enterprise encounters the Borg, a monstrous cybernetic collective that absorbs other civilizations into a single hive mind — an unsettling vision of the individual entirely subordinated to a larger power. Captured and assimilated by the Borg, Picard is eventually rescued by his crew. But the experience leaves him profoundly traumatized, forcing him to struggle with the lasting consequences of having his humanity stripped away.

Throughout the rest of the series, whenever Picard has further encounters with the Borg, he must struggle with his own belief in the sanctity of all life in the universe, versus resentment and the desire for revenge. Stewart’s portrayal of Picard’s anguish may have drawn on his own experience of childhood trauma growing up in a violent household — he had certainly spoken about the lasting psychological damage caused by his father’s abuse.

Picard’s subsequent encounters with the Borg repeatedly tested his commitment to compassion over revenge. His struggle to resist violence, even against those who had harmed him, remains one of the series’ most affecting expressions of its humanistic ideals.

Stewart also became a fierce defender of science fiction as a genre, recognizing its ability to explore complex moral, ethical, and philosophical questions. He once reportedly walked off a Good Morning America promotional appearance after learning that producers intended to ridicule the show and science fiction as a whole. The series of course was wildly successful, not only reviving the Star Trek franchise but spawning four feature films, each time with Stewart reprising his starring role.

This respect for science fiction and genre entertainment was also probably what helped guide Stewart to his other most iconic role: Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men film franchise. Beginning with the Bryan Singer adaptation X-Men (2000), Stewart played the psychically powered founder of, and mentor to, the X-Men across several films. Working alongside old friend Ian McKellen (in the roll of the antagonist of the series, Magneto), the films, much like the comics they were based on, explored the conflicting philosophies of the two men in a wider metaphor for the civil rights movement. Stewart’s Xavier sought equality and coexistence between humans and superpowered mutants, while McKellen’s Magneto favored a more militant response to persecution, a conflict often interpreted as an allegory of the contrasting political approaches associated with Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X.

Despite some unwieldy scripts, Stewart and McKellen brought Shakespearean gravitas to their roles, making the ideological conflict between Xavier and Magneto genuinely compelling. The two would also reunite onstage in 2009 for a celebrated performance of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, a lifelong ambition for the pair.

Off-screen, Stewart used his newfound fame to champion causes that mattered to him. He campaigned against domestic violence and championed women’s rights, trade unions, animal welfare, and greater recognition of PTSD among veterans. He also opposed Brexit and spoke out against right-wing demagogues, including Donald Trump. A resounding belief in fairness, ingrained in him from an early age, remained his guiding light.

Stewart also revealed a gift for comedy, gleefully parodying his own dignified persona in appearances on Extras and the animated program Family Guy as well as a legendary turn hosting Saturday Night Live in 1994. Stewart continued to work right up until his death: his final film arriving in theaters this winter will see him reprise the part of Charles Xavier one last time.

He will be remembered not just as one of the finest actors of his generation but also as a committed socialist who believed that compassion, equality, and solidarity were principles worth fighting for.

For those of us who grew up watching Jean-Luc Picard, he offered something equally valuable: an example of leadership rooted not in intimidation or force but in intelligence, cooperation, and respect for others. It was a vision of humanity worth aspiring to, both on earth and among the stars.

The first place to look when trying to understand China’s system is the foundational role of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in its economy. Since opening up its economy to private capital and global markets from 1978 onward, China has maintained a strong network of SOEs. While their share in industrial production decreased over the past decades, they comprise 62 percent of total SOE assets worldwide. Europe follows with a mere 14 percent, after decades of privatization substantially reduced public ownership.

The strength of SOEs lies in their ability to operate beyond profitability as the central objective. That does not mean they are unprofitable, but they can prioritize long-term and capital-intensive investments where returns are low and uncertain.

With leadership appointed by the Communist Party of China (CPC), SOEs are central to China’s industrial strategy and form what is called the “lifeblood of the national economy” in sectors like energy, transportation, and finance. They also support employment stability by maintaining jobs during economic downturns instead of carrying out mass layoffs, which has an anchoring effect on employment in associated industries. In addition, SOEs train a large number of engineers who later move into private manufacturing and technology firms. According to China’s State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council (SASAC), SOEs account for more than 70 percent of assets in strategically important sectors.

This makes SOEs a powerful industrial policy tool — especially when they include giants such as China’s State Grid Corporation, the world’s third-largest company by revenue, which delivers an essential economic input: electricity. Thanks to robust public investments into transmission and generation guided by political objectives rather than just profitability, China has achieved the world’s highest electrification rate. In parallel, it has established global leadership in clean technologies, producing renewable energy that increasingly powers its industrial development. After focusing on coal-intensive growth of manufacturing and heavy industry, China now has a major advantage in scaling up electricity-hungry sectors such as AI and robotics, the next realms of global “competitiveness.”

The Asian electrostate stands in a stark contrast to Europe’s reliance on private investment and market profitability to drive the rollout of renewable power. Europe has the capacity to expand its lending to a public renewable electricity system, for example through its European Investment Bank and the European Central Bank. But conservative interpretations of these institutions’ mandates, coupled with fears of “crowding out” private capital, have denied the public sector a more active role in decarbonization. Meanwhile, fossil fuel companies’ interests continue to shape the European energy market.

The problem is that the EU’s green transition plan, the Green Deal, was designed from the outset to make the transition profitable for private capital rather than to plan long-term, strategic investment. When that failed to materialize at the desired scale, green policies have been increasingly rolled back across the bloc. This is evident from the EU’s current deregulation agenda aimed at “cutting red tape” for businesses — which in practice means dismantling workers’ rights and environmental protections.

As a result, European industrial electricity prices are twice as high as those in the United States — and 50 percent higher than in China. Its electrification rate has been rather stagnant over the past decade, matched unsurprisingly by a slow progress in electric mobility and the decarbonization of industries such as steel. Worse, some European industries are even rejecting subsidies for green investments for lack of profitability.

The second major difference is the relationship between the public and private sectors in China and the EU.

In China, public and private companies don’t simply operate in parallel. Deeply connected through industrial clusters, they can share the benefits of SOEs’ political mandates and their access to cheap financing from public banks. Private companies are part and parcel of the country’s socialist market economy. According to figures cited by Xi Jinping in 2018, the private economy accounted for 60 percent of GDP and provided over 80 percent of urban employment.

At the same time, the state maintains a considerable degree of control over private capital. Market access remains restricted in some sectors, such as finance, telecommunications, or health care. Recently, China has also launched a historic tax recovery campaign on its companies. One of its largest agricultural conglomerates, for example, should reportedly repay a sum amounting to 120 percent of its 2025 profits.

Unthinkable in today’s Western economies, many Chinese private companies, especially large ones, have CPC units within their structures that help align business with party priorities and national objectives. They date back to 1994, when company law introduced the ambition to establish the CPC units to serve as a “fighting fortress in the non-public economy.” They appear to be concentrated in sectors where SOEs are more present, ranging from manufacturing and finance to real estate and high tech.

Private companies are linked to SOEs through industrial clusters and special economic zones, created in 1980 as test sites for markets with private and foreign capital. With significant state support, these zones bring together public and private resources to reap the benefits of integrated supply chains, joint research institutions, and skilled workers. SOEs also build supporting infrastructure — electricity networks or high-speed rail interconnections — which increases their chances to grow economies of scale and lower production costs. Today the government continues to embrace this model as a way to develop strategic clusters beyond manufacturing of the 2000s toward high-tech development zones.

One example is the Greater Bay Area, a city cluster that includes Shenzhen, China’s first special economic zone launched in 1980 and now home to companies such as consumer electronics giant Huawei and carmaker BYD. In 2017, national and provincial governments of Guangdong, Macao, and Hong Kong launched a development plan to transform the region from a traditional export-oriented and low-cost manufacturing area into a global innovation and technology hub, including ambitions to provide good living standards and ecological conservation. While still in development, the Greater Bay Area has become a key site for electric vehicles, artificial intelligence, and humanoid robotics. According to Professor Cai Huajie of Fujian Normal University, the area’s total economic output reached 14.79 trillion yuan (around $2.21 trillion) in 2024, placing it close to that of the New York area, the world’s largest metropolitan economy.

When CATL — now one of the world’s leading battery manufacturers — opened in Ningde in 2011, provincial and local authorities helped develop a supply chain of component manufacturers to support its business, which now includes over ninety companies. In turn, CATL helped create one of the world’s leading battery manufacturing hubs that has shaped the city’s economy.

State subsidies and protectionist measures shielding domestic battery production from foreign competition surely played a role in CATL’s rise. But unlike Western governments that are reluctant to use subsidies as a strategic and time-bound tool within a long-term industrial plan, China adjusts them as industries mature. In 2018, China lifted its foreign equity cap on manufacturers of new energy vehicles, and those produced by foreign enterprises gradually became eligible for the same consumer subsidies as domestic models. Subsidies were scaled back, and national purchase subsidies for consumers were phased out at the end of 2022. CATL invested further into research and development to adapt to the less protective environment. When demand for electric vehicles slowed in 2023, CATL cut battery prices to help automakers boost sales and secure its market share.

Naturally, the state has a much bigger stake in this mixed economy. This also means that the private sector’s production and sales are in effect included in a form of public planning that goes beyond “market signals” — particularly in sectors where China competes with foreign companies.

For instance, following the slow rise of companies such as BYD, the government launched the “Ten Cities, Thousand Vehicles” pilot project in 2009 to introduce at least one thousand electric vehicles annually into the public transport system of ten cities. BYD, now the world’s largest electric vehicle manufacturer by sales, was one of the electric bus suppliers for the project. In Shenzhen, this project helped the city achieve 100 percent fleet electrification by 2017.

This approach is now extended to robotics. The Robot+ application plan, developed by sixteen governmental agencies and the Ministry of Industry and Information in 2023, promotes the innovative use of robots in manufacturing, health care, eldercare, and other sectors. China’s 2025 AI+ plan similarly supports adoption of artificial intelligence by SOEs for aviation fatigue detection, health monitoring, operations of the State Grid’s power lines, and other uses.

The benefits of China’s public-private ecosystem are also evident when it comes to financing. China’s robust public banking system and its cheap loans are one part of the story. The other is equity: in China, companies in which the public sector holds over a quarter of the shares make up almost half of market capitalization. Across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), this level is just 2 percent.

But both public and private capital are actively used for equity investment. China has created thousands of government guidance funds to pool finance from governments, public banks, and public and private companies. These funds provide long-term, patient capital but also an avenue to generate returns while sharing high investment risks. One of the largest such funds is the National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund to help China achieve self-sufficiency in semiconductors.

Compared to Europe’s de-risking model, consisting mostly of loans and guarantees, the scale of public sector equity ownership is striking. According to OECD data, China’s public sector held around $3.5 trillion in listed equities in 2023, 79 percent of which was owned by national and local governments. Europe’s public sector held $1.3 trillion, with around half of it owned by governments. In the United States, the figure was $1.6 trillion, and most of the listed equity belonged to public pension funds and foreign-owned sovereign wealth funds.

Far from increasing joint and strategic public spending, the EU is heading in the opposite direction. As negotiations are underway on its next multiyear budget for 2028–34, several countries, including Germany, demand radical cuts in the spirit of austerity. These could reduce the budget’s real value by 10 percent compared with the current one. Yet as the Green Deal retreats, military spending — not investment in a productive economy — is growing dangerously.

Learning from the successes of China’s “socialism with market characteristics” doesn’t mean that Europe should imitate China’s industrial policies and try to win the race for global market dominance. The massive scale of production and resource use that such competition would require is bound to have a range of destructive consequences for workers and the planet.

Europe’s current leaders are already showing what this race would look like. After returning from China, Merz advised that, instead of work-life balance, “we simply have to do a little more now.” Workers are increasingly squeezed as working hours are pushed up across Europe, along with austerity cuts to pensions, unemployment, and public services. But as Mariana Mazzucato has demonstrated in her study of Europe’s three hundred largest publicly listed nonfinancial corporations: labor costs aren’t the problem in the European economy. It’s the failure to reinvest corporate profits, an electricity system not fit for decarbonization, and a lack of public ownership.

The wave of mass strikes and protests across Europe over collapsing school systems, housing shortages, and the intolerable cost of living is a predictable consequence of the EU’s misguided approach. Workers, young and old, demand socially necessary investments that the pursuit of “competitiveness” simply can’t deliver.

Instead of sacrificing collective bargaining achievements for which the working class struggled for centuries, Europe should think beyond “Made in Europe” protectionism and start nurturing its industries — above all by reining in big capital and directing it into productive investments. With this strategic approach, it can also tap into opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperation with China on technologies necessary for a low-carbon economy.

Cracks are emerging in the current obsession with competitiveness amid collapsing public investment. The Left can take this moment to campaign for a socialized economy based on public ownership, workers’ decision-making, and people’s real needs — not dividends, export markets, or the production of utterly unnecessary products such as AI-powered kettles or flying cars. Here, China’s political economy can provide some useful lessons, though Europe must create its own path.