Niall Ferguson tells Europe’s rebellious youth: blame your grandparents, not the banks

 The ruling class searches for an alibi

Across Europe, young people and workers are entering open political struggle. In France, high school students have blockaded hundreds of schools over crumbling infrastructure. In Belgium, students have joined workers on strike against austerity. In Madrid, tens of thousands have marched against a housing crisis that has become a social catastrophe. These movements terrify the ruling class because they expose the bankruptcy of European capitalism and risk uniting workers across generations in a common fight against austerity, war, and social decay.

Into this crisis steps Sir Niall Ferguson, a Hoover Institution fellow, Harvard-affiliated historian, and managing director of New York advisory firm Greenmantle. Ferguson is no neutral observer: he is a paid strategist for the investors whose interests he defends. His essay, Why Europe Is Burning, is an ideological intervention designed to disarm the emerging movement. Its message to young people is simple: don’t blame capitalism; blame your grandparents. This is not analysis but class propaganda.

Ferguson opens with contempt. He mocks French lycée students demanding investment in education for “filling the streets with burning garbage” and “waving Palestinian flags.” He sneers that their first demonstration resembles a Catholic child’s first Communion, a ritual, not a political act. Madrid’s youth are “incensed (they claim)” about housing. This sneering tone is designed to delegitimise young people’s grievances by portraying them as irrational or unserious. Ferguson omits the documented reality: schools plagued by water leaks, rat infestations and collapsing ceilings; more than half of France’s high schools blockaded or closed; mass repression, including hundreds of arrests in a single day; and a student in Lens who lost his hand to police weaponry. Ferguson omits these facts because they point directly to the capitalist state's responsibility.

Ferguson’s central argument is that Europe’s fiscal crisis stems from a “war of the generations.” He claims politicians have been “bribing” pensioners, who are numerous and vote, and insists that the young are paying for the old. Yet Ferguson’s own figures undermine his case. He acknowledges that ageing accounts for only two-fifths of the increase in public debt since 2000. The other three-fifths stem from bank bailouts after the 2008 crash, trillions poured into financial markets during the pandemic, tax cuts for the wealthy, discretionary spending, and rising interest costs. He also concedes that pension spending is not exploding: OECD projections show it rising modestly, from 8.8 to 10 per cent of GDP by 2050, because governments have already cut benefits and raised retirement ages.

In other words, the debt explosion is overwhelmingly the result of state transfers to capital, not payments to retirees. Ferguson’s generational framing is therefore not analysis but ideology. It replaces class with age, obscuring the role of the banks, landlords, and investors who pay him.

Reality exposes the fraud. In Madrid, the movement began with the eviction of 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal; her death then brought 20,000 people into the streets. Young protesters saw her not as a privileged pensioner, but as a victim of the same property speculators who prey on them. In Brussels, young and old marched side by side against austerity. Ferguson’s generational war falls apart on contact with real struggle. His solution is a European Javier Milei: mass layoffs, pension cuts, gutted universities, and the destruction of public services. The investor class demands that workers and young people pay for the crisis, and pay even more.

The protests in Paris, Brussels, and Madrid are early signs of a wider working-class movement against austerity, war, and inequality. Ferguson’s essay is a response from the financial aristocracy to this resistance. Young people seeking a way forward will not find one in generational blame or nationalist demagogy. The answer lies in uniting workers and young people across generations and borders against the system that produces war, debt, and decay, and in expropriating the oligarchy's fortunes.

Contempt for the youth: the opening move of reaction

Ferguson is not interested in the reality documented for Europe’s youth. In France, the movement began not in elite lycées but in Paris’s deprived suburbs. On the movement’s largest day, more than half of all high schools were blockaded or closed. This was no symbolic gesture; it was a mass refusal to accept conditions considered intolerable in any wealthy society. The state responded with repression, not repairs or investment. More than 600 people were arrested in a single day, and a student in Lens lost his hand to police weaponry. Ferguson’s narrative omits these facts because they point directly to the capitalist state's responsibility. Acknowledging them would mean confronting the social devastation wrought by decades of austerity.

The same pattern is evident across Europe. In Madrid, the housing crisis has become catastrophic. Rents have climbed nearly 70 per cent in the past decade, driven by speculation, touristification, and investment funds taking over entire neighbourhoods. Tens of thousands marched following the eviction of 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal, whose death the next day came to symbolise the brutality of Spain’s housing regime. Young people did not view her as a privileged pensioner living at their expense. They saw her as another victim of the same property speculators who prey on them. Ferguson’s generational narrative collapses when confronted with these realities: the conflict is not between young and old, but between the working class and the financial oligarchy.

In Belgium, students joined striking workers in opposing austerity measures that would make workers, pensioners, and low-income households shoulder the burden of deficit reduction. Unions called for higher taxes on top earners instead of cuts to health care and a VAT hike. Young and old marched together, recognising that the crisis is not generational but class-based. This unity is precisely what Ferguson fears. His essay seeks to break it by replacing class with age and turning anger away from the banks, landlords, and investors- the very forces he advises through his firm, Greenmantle.

Ferguson’s contempt for youth is therefore not merely personal disdain; it is ideological. By depicting young people as naïve, emotional, or indoctrinated, he seeks to discredit their demands and obscure the structural causes of their suffering. His sneering tone mirrors the austerity he advocates. If youth are irrational, people can dismiss their calls for investment in schools, housing, and public services. If their protests are mere rituals, state repression can be justified. And if their anger is misdirected, the real culprits the banks bailed out in 2008, the investors enriched during the pandemic, the landlords driving up rents, and the governments slashing social spending can escape scrutiny.

The facts Ferguson leaves out are not incidental; they are essential. They reveal a Europe where public infrastructure is collapsing, social inequality is widening, and the basic conditions of life are worsening for millions. They show a ruling class that responds to every crisis- financial, social, or geopolitical- by demanding sacrifices from workers and young people while protecting elite wealth. They also show a generation entering political struggle not because of “indoctrination,” but because the system offers them no future.

Ferguson’s contempt reflects the ruling class’s contempt for those it has impoverished. His omissions reflect an apologist for capital. His narrative serves as an ideological weapon to divide the working class and disarm its emerging movement. He suppresses a reality we must confront: Europe is burning because capitalism is rotting.

The “war of the generations”: a statistical fraud

Ferguson’s central argument is that Europe’s fiscal crisis is caused by a “war of the generations.” Politicians, he claims, have been “bribing” pensioners, who are numerous and vote. The young, he insists, are paying for the old. This framing is not merely superficial; it is a deliberate ideological construction. It turns a crisis rooted in capitalism's contradictions into a moral fable about selfish grandparents and naïve youth. It is designed to pit workers against one another rather than against the ruling class that has engineered the crisis.

But Ferguson’s own figures contradict him. He acknowledges that ageing accounts for only two-fifths of the rise in public debt since 2000. The other three-fifths stem from forces unrelated to pensioners and closely tied to the financial aristocracy: bank bailouts after the 2008 crash, when governments transferred trillions to rescue the very institutions whose speculation triggered the crisis; trillions poured into financial markets during the pandemic, not to protect public health or workers’ incomes, but to stabilise asset prices and guarantee investor profits; tax cuts for the wealthy, which have depleted public revenues while enriching society’s top layers; discretionary spending, including corporate subsidies and military outlays; and rising interest costs, driven by central bank policies and bond-market demands.

These admissions undermine Ferguson’s thesis. If ageing accounts for only a minority of the rise in debt, then state transfers to capital account for the majority. The surge in public debt does not result from pensioners voting themselves largesse. Rather, it stems from governments socialising bank losses, inflating financial markets, and cutting taxes for the rich. Pensioners are not beneficiaries of this process; they are among its victims. Ferguson further concedes that pensions are not exploding.

 OECD projections show public pension spending rising modestly, from 8.8 per cent to 10 per cent of GDP by 2050. This is not a crisis but a controlled increase following decades of cuts, higher retirement ages, and restricted coverage. In many countries, pensioners have already seen their real incomes fall. Portraying them as a privileged caste draining public finances is a grotesque distortion.

In other words, the debt explosion stems overwhelmingly from state transfers to capital, not payments to retirees. Ferguson’s generational framing is therefore ideology, not analysis. It replaces class with age and obscures the role of the banks, landlords, and investors- the very people who pay him. This substitution serves a clear political purpose: if the crisis is generational, the solution is to make the old pay more, cut their pensions further, and intensify competition between generations. If it is class-based, the solution is to confront the financial oligarchy, expropriate its wealth, and redirect resources to social needs. Ferguson’s argument is designed to prevent the second conclusion and promote the first.

Ferguson’s generational narrative is an ideological weapon designed to divide workers and young people just as they are beginning to unite. It defends the financial aristocracy under the guise of concern for the young. The reality he suppresses is clear: Europe’s fiscal crisis stems from capitalism’s decay, not pensioners’ selfishness. The wealth needed to fund schools, housing, and pensions lies in the oligarchy's fortunes, which Ferguson serves.

War and markets: the real trigger of Europe’s crisis

Ferguson acknowledges that the immediate shock came from the US–Israeli war against Iran, which began at the end of February. More than seven months later, the war continues to destabilise global energy markets and raise borrowing costs. This admission fatally undermines his argument. If Europe’s fiscal crisis was triggered by an imperialist war waged by Washington and its allies, then recasting it as a generational conflict is exposed as a political diversion. The crisis does not result from pensioners voting for their own benefit; it stems from militarism, financial speculation, and the subordination of every aspect of social life to the interests of the capitalist class.

Ferguson notes that French 10-year yields rose from 3.22 per cent to 4.87 per cent, while public debt reached 119 per cent of GDP. These figures do not reflect demographic change; they directly result from war and the financial markets’ response. When energy prices spike, shipping routes are disrupted, and geopolitical instability spreads across the Middle East, bond markets demand higher returns. Governments then pass these costs on to workers through austerity. This is the mechanism of modern imperialism: war drives up the cost of capital, and capital demands that society pay the bill.

Ferguson’s solution makes the old pay too much, which widens the attack on the working class. It is not a critique of austerity but an extension of it. He accepts the premise that workers and youth must bear the burden of rising debt, and merely insists that pensioners should be included in the sacrifice. This is not opposition to austerity; it is austerity intensified. It is the financial aristocracy demanding that every section of the working class, from students to retirees, be made to pay for a crisis they did not create.

The war against Iran is not an aberration. It is part of a broader imperialist offensive driven by the crisis of world capitalism. Facing economic decline and geopolitical challenges, the United States has increasingly turned to militarism to maintain its global dominance. Europe, tied to Washington through NATO and dependent on global energy markets, is dragged into these conflicts. The result is soaring military budgets, rising borrowing costs, and deepening social cuts. Ferguson’s generational narrative conceals this reality. By focusing on pensioners, he obscures the role of the banks, the bond markets, and the military‑industrial complex.

The rise in French borrowing costs is not natural. Financial markets punish governments for geopolitical instability created by the very imperialist policies Ferguson supports. Public debt reaching 119 per cent of GDP does not result from retirees receiving modest pensions. It results from trillions transferred to banks during crises, trillions more pumped into financial markets during the pandemic, and the enormous costs of war. Ferguson’s argument is therefore not simply false; it is a conscious inversion of reality. He blames the victims of austerity for the consequences of the policies he advocates.

The purpose of this inversion is clear. If the crisis is caused by war and financial speculation, then the solution is to oppose war and expropriate the financial oligarchy. If pensioners cause the crisis, then the solution is to cut pensions and raise retirement ages. Ferguson’s narrative exists to prevent the first conclusion and promote the second. It is an ideological weapon aimed at dividing the working class and redirecting anger away from the ruling class.

The reality he suppresses is that Europe’s fiscal crisis is inseparable from imperialist war. The working class is being told to pay for the bombs dropped on Iran, for the weapons sent to Israel, and for the rising interest demanded by the markets. Ferguson’s proposal to make the old pay too is not a critique of this system but a demand to sacrifice its victims further. The answer lies not in generational blame but in a unified struggle of workers and youth against war, austerity, and the capitalist system that produces them.

Generation as a substitute for class

Ferguson’s ideological sleight of hand replaces class with age. His prize statistic, taken from the Wall Street Journal, shows wealth rising for Americans over 75 and falling for those under 35. But median wealth by age tells you nothing about who owns the wealth. It is a statistical trick that dissolves class relations into demographic categories. It lumps together the retired factory worker in Lille and the billionaire shareholder in Neuilly and calls them both “seniors.” The purpose is obvious. By collapsing class into age, Ferguson erases the capitalist class. His clients the investors, fund managers, and financial institutions he advises through Greenmantle disappear into the statistical fog. The billionaire and the pensioner become indistinguishable, and the real structure of wealth ownership is concealed.

This is not an innocent mistake. It is a deliberate ideological manoeuvre. If wealth is described only in terms of age, then the young can be encouraged to resent the old rather than the capitalist class. In Ferguson's narrative, the retired worker living on a modest pension becomes part of a privileged cohort hoarding resources at the expense of youth. Meanwhile, the real beneficiaries of the past four decades- the banks bailed out in 2008, the corporations enriched during the pandemic, the landlords driving up rents, and the investors profiting from austerity- remain invisible.

The Madrid movement makes Ferguson’s argument collapse instantly. If the old were the privileged class, why would the eviction of an elderly woman spark mass outrage among the young? Why would her death become a symbol of the brutality of the housing crisis? The answer is simple: because the conflict is not generational. It is class‑based. Young and old alike are victims of the same capitalist forces landlords, banks, and investment funds that Ferguson represents.

The same dynamic was visible in Brussels. There, young people joined striking workers and pensioners in mass demonstrations against austerity measures that would hit every section of the working class. The unions demanded higher taxes on the highest earners rather than cuts to health care and a VAT hike. Young and old marched together, united by the recognition that the crisis is not caused by pensioners receiving modest benefits but by the capitalist class demanding ever greater sacrifices from society.

Ferguson’s generational war collapses at the first contact with actual struggle. It is an ideological construction designed to divide the working class just as it begins to unite. By portraying pensioners as a privileged caste, Ferguson seeks to redirect youth anger away from the banks, landlords, and investors the real architects of Europe’s crisis and toward their own grandparents. It is a classic strategy of reaction: turn the oppressed against one another so they don't recognise their common enemy. The reality he suppresses is clear. Europe’s crisis is not generational. It is the product of capitalism’s decay, imperialist war, and the domination of society by a financial oligarchy. Young people searching for a way forward will not find it in Ferguson’s statistical distortions. They will find it in workers' unity across generations and borders against the system that exploits them all.

Equating socialism with fascism: the oldest trick in the book

Ferguson claims the left offers socialism and the right offers “national socialism,” and that both converge on industrial policy, public ownership, rent controls, and “blaming Israel.” This is not an analytical argument but a century‑old reactionary trope: the deliberate conflation of socialism with fascism to delegitimise any anti‑capitalist politics. It is the same device used by Cold War ideologues, by Thatcherite polemicists, and by every defender of the capitalist order who needs to portray socialism as inherently authoritarian. By equating socialism with “national socialism,” Ferguson erases the fundamental distinction between a movement rooted in the international unity of the working class and a movement rooted in chauvinism, racism, and the defence of private property. The purpose is to smear the left, sanitise the right, and present capitalism as the only legitimate political horizon.

This rhetorical manoeuvre also serves another function: it obscures the fact that the far right in Europe is not an external threat encroaching on the political mainstream but a product of the mainstream itself. The same governments that slash social spending, militarise borders, and scapegoat migrants cultivate the conditions in which fascist forces grow. The same media outlets that denounce “extremism” amplify anti‑immigrant narratives. The same political establishment that claims to defend democracy adopts the policies of the far right. Ferguson’s argument conceals this reality by pretending that socialism and fascism are mirror images, equally dangerous, equally irrational, equally detached from the “sensible centre” he inhabits.

He then predicts that youth may turn to burning asylum‑seekers’ hotels and synagogues as if this were meteorological inevitability rather than the product of the very anti‑immigrant hysteria he amplifies. He writes as though racist violence simply descends from the sky, as though young people spontaneously become fascists without any influence from the media, the state, or the political establishment. In reality, such violence is the direct outcome of policies and narratives promoted by figures like Ferguson: the demonisation of migrants, the portrayal of refugees as a burden, the insistence that social decay is caused by outsiders rather than by capitalism.

Ferguson’s warning is therefore deeply cynical. He scapegoats migrants while warning that others might do the same. He fuels the fire and then pretends to fear the flames. His prediction of youth burning synagogues is not a neutral forecast but a political provocation, designed to smear the emerging youth movement by associating it with fascist violence. It is an attempt to delegitimise mass protests by suggesting they could slide into pogroms. This suggestion has no basis in reality but serves the ideological needs of the ruling class.

The truth is that Europe’s youth are not turning to fascism. They are turning to collective struggle against austerity, war, and social inequality. They are marching alongside pensioners, migrant workers, and the unemployed. They are demanding investment in schools, housing, and public services. Ferguson’s attempt to portray them as potential fascists is a reactionary fantasy aimed at discrediting their movement and protecting the capitalist system that has produced the crisis.

His argument is not a warning but a threat: if youth do not accept austerity, they will be blamed for extremism. The real danger comes not from the youth but from the ruling class that is stoking nationalism, militarism, and xenophobia to defend its wealth.

What is really burning

The protests in Paris, Brussels, and Madrid are early signs of a broader working‑class movement against austerity, war, and inequality. They express a social reality no European government can stabilise: the capitalist system cannot meet even society's most basic needs. Governments are collapsing because no faction of the ruling class can impose the cuts markets demand without provoking mass resistance. Every attempt to shift the burden onto workers, youth, pensioners, or migrants encounters immediate opposition. The political order is cracking under the pressure of its own contradictions.

Ferguson’s essay responds to the investor class's resistance. It seeks not to understand the crisis but to contain it. His generational narrative divides workers by age, turns youth against pensioners, and obscures the role of banks, landlords, and financial institutions that have enriched themselves through decades of speculation, privatisation, and war. His scapegoating of migrants serves the same purpose: to redirect anger away from capital and toward the most vulnerable sections of society. It is an ideological shield for the ruling class at a moment when its legitimacy is openly challenged.

Young people searching for a way forward will not find it in Ferguson’s generational blame or in the nationalist programs of Le Pen and her equivalents. These forces offer only deeper austerity, intensified repression, and the poisonous politics of division. The real alternative lies in uniting workers and youth across generations and borders in a conscious struggle against the capitalist system that produces war, debt, and decay.

Resources for decent schools, affordable housing, and secure pensions are abundant. They are concentrated in the fortunes of the financial oligarchy Ferguson serves. The task is not to redistribute poverty among generations but to reclaim wealth stolen from society and use it to meet human needs.

Bibliography

Ferguson, Niall. Why Europe Is Burning. The Free Press / Niall Ferguson’s Time Machine, October 2026.

Organisation for Economic Co‑operation and Development (OECD). Pensions at a Glance 2023: OECD and G20 Indicators. OECD Publishing, Paris, 2023.

Wall Street Journal. “Wealth by Age Cohort in the United States.” WSJ Data Feature, 2026.

Taiwan News. “French High School Protests Escalate; Over 600 Arrested.” Taiwan News, September 2026.

Euronews. “Belgium: Workers and Students Strike Against Austerity Measures.” Euronews, October 2026.

Internazionale. “Brussels Mobilises Against Government Cuts.” Internazionale, October 2026.

El País. “La tragedia de Maricarmen Abascal y la crisis de vivienda en Madrid.” El País, 8–9 October 2026.

Gregorio Marañón Hospital, Madrid. Public Statement on the Death of Maricarmen Abascal, 8 October 2026.

OECD. Economic Outlook 2026. OECD Publishing, Paris, 2026.

French Ministry of Education. “État des lycées en France: Rapport sur les infrastructures scolaires.” Government Report, 2025–2026.

French Ministry of the Interior. “Arrests and Public Order Measures During Student Demonstrations.” Press Release, September 2026.

European Central Bank (ECB). Euro Area Bond Market Developments. ECB Statistical Bulletin, 2026.

Ministry of Finance, France. “French Sovereign Debt and Bond Yields: 2025–2026.” Government Statistical Release, October 2026.

World Bank. Global Housing Market Trends 2015–2025. World Bank Publications, Washington, 2025.

International Energy Agency (IEA). Energy Market Impacts of Middle East Conflict. IEA Briefing Paper, 2026.

Hoover Institution. “Profile: Niall Ferguson.” Stanford University, 2026.

 

“Commodity Intimacy: Ella Fleck’s Installation and the Limits of ‘Critical’ Art at Frieze”

Frieze London, the annual meeting point of the global art market, is no neutral stage. Hedge-fund managers, oligarchs’ advisers, and celebrity collectors move through Regent’s Park, selecting luxury commodities for private vaults, freeports, and speculative portfolios. Organisers describe the fair as a meeting place for “global culture,” but in reality, it is one of the clearest expressions of art’s financialisation under late capitalism. Here, artistic labour is stripped of its social meaning and turned into an asset class, valued not for its insight or urgency but for the appetites of the ultra-rich. The fact that this year’s fair rewarded a work exposing the industrialised production of online intimacy is an irony so stark it borders on satire. Yet it also reveals what the contemporary art world is willing to acknowledge and what it refuses to confront.

The 2026 Camden Art Centre Emerging Artist Award has gone to London-based artist Ella Fleck for her installation training material (aria), presented with LA gallery Ehrlich Steinberg in the fair’s Focus section. Fleck’s project draws on her undercover training as a “chatter” for an OnlyFans “parasite company”, a third-party agency that impersonates female creators and holds scripted conversations with subscribers. Often run transnationally by men, these agencies operate as outsourced intimacy factories. Their workers, frequently based in the Global South, perform scripted flirtation and emotional labour designed to maximise revenue. The “girl” a subscriber thinks he is messaging at 2 a.m. is more often than not a poorly paid shift worker following a productivity dashboard. It is a world of impersonation, alienation and relentless monetisation, where human connection becomes a revenue stream and loneliness a commodity.

Fleck’s research is serious, and her installation is one of the few works at Frieze to engage with the realities of life under contemporary capitalism. Visitors stand on a raised server-floor platform, where modular tiles and exposed cabling evoke the digital economy’s hidden infrastructure. Male voices performing chatter scripts reverberate through the structure, transforming the floor into a resonant chamber. Three monitors show a custom-coded manager’s dashboard, adapted from interfaces Fleck encountered during training, exposing the metrics, quotas and supervisory systems that govern this labour. A pheromone-infused scent fills the booth, reminding visitors that the desire being sold is manufactured. The installation’s strongest gesture is its insistence that visitors stand directly on the machinery of commodified intimacy, feeling the scripted voices vibrate beneath their feet. It effectively exposes a workplace usually concealed behind the fantasy of personal connection.

But the response to the work, and how it is framed, reveals the art establishment's ideological boundaries. The Camden Art Centre jury praised the installation for making visible “the hidden architectures and technologies of online desire and commerce,” and for addressing “money, control, labour, manipulation and the power of images.” These are safe, abstract formulations. They gesture toward critique while avoiding the specific social relations underlying the industry Fleck has investigated. Absent is any recognition of the workers themselves: who they are, what they are paid, and how their labour fits into the global chains of exploitation underpinning platform capitalism. The chatter economy is not merely a cultural phenomenon or a question of “desire”; it is a brutally efficient mechanism for extracting profit from both the poorly paid worker typing scripted flirtations and the isolated man paying for companionship he cannot find elsewhere. Fleck’s installation points to these realities, but the art world’s reception reveals how far it will go and where it draws the line.

Inside the machinery of commodified intimacy

The most compelling aspect of Fleck’s project is her immersion in what might be called the chatter economy: a hidden, industrialised sector of digital labour beneath the glossy marketing of “creator platforms.” Using a male alias, she trained as “Eliott,” learning the scripts, behavioural prompts and manipulative techniques used to extract money from isolated men seeking connection. The arrangement is brutally simple: men impersonate women, chat with other men and sell the illusion of intimacy. What is marketed as personal desire is actually a production line governed by metrics, quotas and managerial oversight. The chatter is not a romantic interlocutor but a worker performing emotional labour under conditions shaped entirely by profit.

This is the true subject of Fleck’s installation, and where the work is strongest. She does not present the chatter economy as a metaphor or cultural curiosity; she treats it as a workplace. The installation gives this system physical form, making visitors confront the infrastructure that enables such labour. Its raised server-floor platform with modular tiles, exposed cabling and vibration exciters evokes the hidden architecture of the digital economy. This is the kind of flooring found in data centres, call-centre facilities and server rooms: the literal ground on which contemporary exploitation rests. Standing on it, visitors feel male voices from scripted chatter reverberate through their feet. The fantasy of intimacy gives way to the physical sensation of labour.

Three monitors show a custom-coded manager’s dashboard, adapted from interfaces Fleck encountered during her training. It displays the metrics that shape the chatter’s day: response times, conversion rates, subscriber spending, and productivity targets. The dashboard isn't an artistic invention; it reflects the real tools this industry uses to monitor and discipline workers. A pheromone-infused scent fills the booth, underscoring the manufactured nature of the desire being sold. Everything in the installation points to the same conclusion: intimacy has been industrialised, and the worker’s body reduced to scripts and metrics has been absorbed into a system designed to monetise loneliness.

The platform itself is the installation’s strongest element. It makes the internet’s usually hidden infrastructure tangible, revealing the labour beneath the fantasy. This is a workplace, not a boudoir call centre disguised as a love affair. Visitors stand not in a realm of desire, but amid the machinery of commodification. The voices vibrating through the floor are not whispers of seduction; they are echoes of wage labour. The installation’s power comes from this inversion: it collapses the distance between digital fantasy and the physical conditions that produce it.

Fleck’s decision to foreground the infrastructure is significant. Much contemporary art dealing with digital culture remains at the level of imagery, aesthetics or surface critique. Fleck instead directs attention to the material base: the servers, the scripts, the dashboards, the labour processes. She shows that the chatter economy is not a cultural phenomenon but a node in the global supply chain of platform capitalism. Workers performing these scripts are often based in the Global South, earning low wages, sometimes paid partly on commission. Their labour is outsourced emotional work, sold under the guise of intimacy, and governed by the same managerial logic that structures call centres, content moderation farms and other forms of digital piecework.

In this sense, Fleck’s installation is about more than deception or fantasy. It shows how human connection becomes a commodity and emotional labour is reduced to programmable tasks. It suggests that capitalism colonises even life’s most intimate aspects, turning affection, attention, and companionship into sources of revenue. The installation is most effective when it insists on this material reality and forces visitors to confront the machinery beneath the illusion.

What the jury praised and what it avoided

The Camden Art Centre jury praised Fleck’s installation for exposing “hidden architectures and technologies of online desire and commerce,” and for addressing “money, control, labour, manipulation and the power of images.” Such phrases are typical of contemporary curatorial discourse: safe, abstract and deliberately non-committal. They gesture toward critique without naming the social relations at stake. This allows the institution to appear engaged with labour and exploitation while avoiding confrontation with the actual conditions of the workers whose labour the piece makes visible. In this sense, the jury’s statement is not merely incomplete; it reflects the art world's ideological limits.

It entirely fails to recognise the workers. The chatter economy is neither an aesthetic phenomenon nor a cultural metaphor; it is a workplace staffed by real people doing real labour under conditions of exploitation. Investigative reporting over the past several years has documented chatters in the Philippines and elsewhere in the global South working for low wages, sometimes with part of their pay tied to commission. Their work is outsourced call-centre labour presented as intimacy. They work night shifts, follow scripts, meet quotas, and are monitored by dashboards like those used in customer-service centres and content-moderation farms. Above them are agency owners, creators, and OnlyFans itself, whose billionaire owner takes a cut of every transaction. The chatter economy is not a cultural curiosity but a node in the global supply chain of platform capitalism.

At the bottom of this hierarchy are two exploited figures. First is the poorly paid chatter, typing scripted flirtations, whose work hides behind the illusion of personal connection. Second is the isolated man paying for companionship he cannot find elsewhere, whose loneliness the same system monetises. Each is exploited differently, but by the same system: the chatter’s labour is cheapened and concealed, while the subscriber’s emotional need is commodified and sold back to him. Both are victims of a social order that has turned human connection into a revenue stream.

The jury’s language dissolves these realities into a cloud of abstractions. “Labour” becomes a conceptual motif rather than a class relation. “Desire” becomes a cultural theme rather than a symptom of social breakdown. “Manipulation” becomes an aesthetic category rather than a description of how corporations profit from human vulnerability. This is no accident. The art world is comfortable with metaphors but allergic to material analysis. It can tolerate works that expose mechanisms, but not those that explain them. Explanation would require naming the class relations that structure the industry, and the art world, dependent on the fortunes of the wealthy, is unwilling to do so.

The chatter economy directly expresses the social crisis created by decades of neoliberal restructuring: insecure work, the collapse of public life, atomisation, and the erosion of community. The men who pay for scripted companionship are not simply indulging in “heterosexual male fantasy,” as the fair’s own description suggests. They are responding to lives shaped by austerity, precarity, and social isolation. Their loneliness is not a psychological quirk but a social fact. The chatter’s labour is not merely a cultural phenomenon; it is exploitation. Yet the art world frames both as matters of “desire,” “images,” and “online commerce,” as though the problem were representation rather than political economy.

This abstraction serves a purpose: it allows institutions like Frieze and Camden Art Centre to acknowledge exploitation without implicating themselves in the system that produces it. IMG, a global entertainment corporation, owns Frieze, and it sells luxury goods to the wealthy. It is structurally incapable of addressing the class relations underpinning the chatter economy, because those same relations underpin the art market itself. Speaking plainly about exploitation in one sector would invite questions about exploitation in another. Better, then, to speak in abstractions to praise works for revealing “hidden architectures” while leaving the owners of those architectures unnamed.

Fleck’s installation points to the realities the jury avoids. It reveals the machinery beneath the fantasy. But the art world’s response shows how far it will go and where it draws the line.

Gender as mask, not engine

Frieze’s own description presents Fleck’s installation as an investigation of “heterosexual male fantasies.” This is a familiar move: reducing a social phenomenon to psychology, then reducing psychology to gender. It is the standard reflex of contemporary cultural institutions faced with exploitation they cannot name. Gender becomes a convenient interpretive screen, safe, fashionable, and politically unthreatening. But gender is not the engine of this industry; it is the costume. The engine is the commodification of human need.

The chatter economy is not meaningfully driven by “fantasy.” Capital's logic drives it: the imperative to extract profit from every human vulnerability, every emotional deficit, and every form of isolation produced by a society organised around competition and precarity. Fantasy is merely the interface; the machinery beneath it is economic.

Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism feels almost too literal here. In the chatter economy, what appears to be a relationship between a subscriber and a woman who doesn't exist is really a relationship between a customer and a wage worker, mediated by a corporation and concealed by software. The “girl” is a commodity, the “relationship” a transaction, and the “desire” a revenue stream. The human connection the subscriber believes he is buying is, in fact, a relation between things: a script, a dashboard, and a payment processor. Fleck’s installation brilliantly places the visitor directly on the infrastructure that makes this deception possible. But the work falters when it treats the problem as one of male fantasy rather than capitalist social relations.

The art world refuses to ask the question it must: why so many men, often young and precariously situated, spend money they do not have on scripted companionship. The answer is not some fixed quality of “heterosexual male fantasy.” It lies in the conditions of life under late capitalism: insecure work, the erosion of community life, atomisation, and loneliness on a mass scale. The chatter economy is no cultural aberration; it is a symptom of a society where millions live without stable relationships, public spaces, time, or security. Men who pay for companionship are not indulging a psychological quirk; they are responding to a social crisis.

An industry that profits from loneliness depends on a society that produces it. The chatter economy commercialises a condition shaped by decades of neoliberal restructuring: the destruction of social housing, the erosion of welfare, the casualisation of labour, and the collapse of collective institutions. Loneliness is not an individual failing, but a structural outcome, and the chatter economy monetises it.

Yet Frieze’s framing reduces all of this to “male fantasy,” as if the problem were representation rather than political economy. This reduction serves a clear ideological function: it shifts attention from the class relations structuring the industry to individual behaviour, turns exploitation into psychology, and recasts a social crisis as a cultural trope. It lets the institution appear critical while avoiding any confrontation with the system that produces both the chatter’s labour and the subscriber’s isolation.

This marks the ideological limit of contemporary art discourse. It can acknowledge desire, fantasy, and representation, but not class. It can discuss gender, but not exploitation. It can gesture toward “hidden architectures,” yet it cannot name their owners. Fleck’s installation points to the realities the fair’s framing avoids, revealing the machinery beneath the illusion. But the art world’s response shows how far it will go and where it draws the line.

The art fair as ideological filter

The setting matters. Frieze is not an innocent backdrop but an active ideological filter. IMG, a global entertainment and sports conglomerate, owns the fair, and its business model depends on circulating luxury goods to the wealthy. Its purpose is not cultural enrichment but capital accumulation. In this context, the presentation and celebration of a work exposing the commodification of intimacy becomes a kind of theatre: a momentary glimpse of exploitation staged inside an event devoted to commodifying artistic labour itself. The contradiction is glaring, yet the fair’s framing neutralises it with remarkable efficiency.

The Camden Art Centre jury notes, blandly, that Fleck’s installation is presented in the “particular context” of an international art fair. This phrase is a masterpiece of evasion. It acknowledges the setting only to deflate its significance immediately. The “particular context” is not particular at all; it is the structural condition of the work’s reception. But the jury cannot explore that context. Doing so would require acknowledging that the art world itself is part of the same system of extraction, speculation, and class power that produces the chatter economy Fleck has investigated. The chatter economy monetises loneliness; the art fair monetises culture. Both depend on the same class hierarchy, the same concentration of wealth, the same global circuits of capital.

This is the ideological limit of “critical” art under capitalism. It may expose mechanisms, but it must not explain them. Exposure is safe; explanation is dangerous. Exposure can be absorbed into the fair’s marketing language: “hidden architectures,” “online desire,” “the power of images.” Explanation would require naming the class relations that structure the industry: the billionaire owners, the speculative collectors, the corporate sponsors, the financial institutions that treat art as a hedge against inflation. It would require acknowledging that the fair’s own existence depends on the fortunes of the rich, and that the art world’s economic base is inseparable from the inequalities it occasionally gestures toward.

The chatter economy and the art market are not parallel phenomena; they express the same social order. In both, labour is hidden, value is extracted, and human need is commodified. The chatter’s emotional labour is concealed behind the fantasy of intimacy; the artist’s intellectual labour is concealed behind the glamour of the fair. The subscriber pays for companionship he cannot find elsewhere; the collector pays for cultural capital he cannot produce. Corporations mediate both transactions and profit from individuals' alienation in a society organised around competition and scarcity.

Yet the fair’s framing insists on treating Fleck’s work as a cultural commentary rather than a political one. It reduces exploitation to aesthetics, class relations to “themes,” and structural inequality to “context.” This is not simply a failure of analysis; it is a structural necessity. The art world cannot name the system that sustains it. It cannot acknowledge that the same forces driving workers in the Philippines to perform scripted intimacy for low wages also drive artists to produce market‑friendly work for speculative buyers. It cannot admit that the same social conditions that make art fairs the preserve of the ultra-rich also produce the loneliness monetised by OnlyFans.

Fleck’s installation, by exposing the machinery beneath the fantasy, points toward these realities. But the institution’s response reveals how far it will go and where it draws the line. The fair can tolerate critique, but only if it remains abstract. It can reward exposure, but only if it stops short of explanation. It can acknowledge exploitation, but only if it does not name the exploiters.

Where Fleck’s work points and where it stops

None of this is meant as a criticism of Fleck for exhibiting at Frieze. Artists have to work within existing institutions, not those they wish existed. The contemporary art world offers few places for serious engagement with the realities of exploitation, and fewer still where such work can be funded, shown, and discussed. Fleck’s willingness to enter a squalid corner of the digital economy, rather than theorising about it from a safe distance, is admirable. Much contemporary art is contentless: formal games, lifestyle branding, or gestures of political “concern” that vanish on contact with reality. Fleck’s work has a genuine subject, grounded in research and lived experience. It is rare to see an artist spend time inside the machinery of exploitation rather than merely depict its surface.

But the installation stops at exposure. It reveals the machinery beneath our feet without showing the system that built it. It lays bare the cabling and pipework, but not the ownership and exploitation that make them profitable. It gestures toward class, then retreats into gender. It identifies alienation without tracing its roots. The chatter economy is not an isolated phenomenon; it is a symptom of a broader social order that has commodified every human need and hollowed out every form of collective life. Exposing the mechanism without analysing the system leaves viewers with discomfort, but not understanding.

This limitation is not personal; it reflects the pressures on artists working within institutions whose economic base depends on the very class whose power they might otherwise critique. The art world can tolerate works that reveal exploitation, but only if they do not name the exploiters. It can reward exposure, but not explanation; acknowledge alienation, but not the social relations that produce it. Fleck’s installation pushes against these boundaries, but does not break them. It points beyond itself, toward questions the art world is structurally unwilling to confront.

The next stepone Fleck is well positioned to take in her upcoming solo exhibition at Camden Art Centreis to follow these threads further: from the infrastructure to the people who inhabit it; to the chatters in the global South, whose labour is hidden behind the fantasy of intimacy; to the agency owners who profit from their work; to the platform’s billionaire class, whose wealth is built on monetising loneliness; and to the social conditions that produce mass loneliness in the first place: precarious employment, collapsing public services, atomised communities, and decades of austerity that have stripped life of stability and connection.

Such an approach would not simply expose a mechanism; it would analyse a system. It would show that the chatter economy is not a cultural curiosity but a direct expression of the crisis of social reproduction under late capitalism. It would reveal that men paying for companionship are not indulging a psychological quirk but responding to life conditions shaped by insecurity and isolation. It would also show that the exploitation of chatters and the alienation of subscribers are two sides of the same social order.

This would be work worth seeing. It would move beyond the art world’s comfort zone of abstraction and metaphor to confront the class relations shaping both the digital economy and the cultural institutions that claim to critique it. Fleck has already shown she can uncover the hidden sites of contemporary exploitation. The challenge now is to follow those threads to their source: the system that produces them, and the possibility of a world where human connection is not a commodity.

 

The Financial Times discovers the football terrace: Janan Ganesh’s “Man City theory of politics”

 Abstract

This article examines Janan Ganesh’s recent Financial Times column, “The Man City theory of politics,” as an ideological artefact of late‑capitalist political commentary. Ganesh’s argument that contemporary political allegiance is best understood through the lens of football fandom exemplifies a broader trend within liberal‑bourgeois discourse: the displacement of structural analysis by psychological and cultural metaphors. By situating Ganesh’s intervention within the political economy of financialised sport, the transformation of social‑democratic parties, and the long history of “tribalism” as an explanatory device, this article argues that such frameworks function to obscure the class dynamics of political disaffection. The piece concludes by situating current mass movements within a Marxist theory of consciousness and crisis.

The ideological function of sporting metaphors

Sporting metaphors in political commentary are not new. Ganesh’s column distinguishes itself by claiming that football fandom provides the primary model for understanding political behaviour in the early twenty‑first century. He suggests voters behave like supporters: motivated by identity rather than argument, impervious to evidence, and loyal to their “side” regardless of its conduct. The argument is presented with the stylistic fluency characteristic of Ganesh’s work, but its political function is more significant than its rhetorical polish. It exemplifies a recurring tendency within the liberal commentariat: interpreting political alienation as a failure of mass rationality rather than a product of structural crisis.

This displacement from political economy to psychology is a hallmark of bourgeois ideology in periods of systemic instability. It allows commentators to maintain the fiction of a fundamentally rational social order while pathologising those who reject it. In this respect, Ganesh’s intervention belongs to a long lineage of liberal sociological explanation, one that treats political disaffection as a cognitive or cultural deficiency rather than as a rational response to deteriorating material conditions. The football terrace metaphor is simply the latest iteration of this ideological manoeuvre.

The analytical problem with such frameworks is not merely their superficiality but their systematic exclusion of the structural determinants of political behaviour. Treating voters as football fans brackets out the economic transformations that have reshaped political consciousness over the last four decades: stagnant real wages, the erosion of social provision, the transfer of vast public resources to the financial sector, and the militarisation of state budgets. These developments are not incidental background conditions but the central forces driving political realignment. The “tribalism” thesis functions by rendering them invisible.

Moreover, the sporting metaphor obscures the class character of political institutions themselves. Football fandom is presented as spontaneous, irrational loyalty, but the modern elite game, particularly at Manchester City, is a product of financialisation, oligarchic ownership, and global capital flows. The analogy thus collapses under its own weight. If voters behave like football supporters, then the political parties they support increasingly resemble the clubs they are asked to identify with: hollowed‑out brands owned and operated by forces entirely external to the communities they claim to represent. The metaphor inadvertently reveals more than Ganesh intends.

From a Marxist perspective, the appeal to “tribalism” is best understood as an ideological response to the crisis of bourgeois hegemony. As Antonio Gramsci observed, ruling classes confronted with declining legitimacy often resort to cultural or psychological explanations for political instability. These explanations naturalise the existing order by depicting dissent as irrational, emotional, or pre‑political. They also delegitimise alternative political movements by framing them as expressions of identity rather than responses to objective conditions.

The problem with Ganesh’s argument is therefore not simply that it is empirically thin, but that it reproduces a conceptual framework designed to foreclose structural analysis. It treats political behaviour as affective attachment rather than a historically conditioned response to crisis. In doing so, it reinforces the Financial Times' ideological position: that the political order remains fundamentally sound, and that the challenge lies in managing the electorate's irrational impulses.

A more adequate analysis would start from the opposite premise: that material conditions shape political consciousness, and that the erosion of traditional party loyalties reflects the breakdown of the post‑Cold War political settlement. Workers are not becoming more tribal; they are confronting a political system that no longer offers them meaningful representation. We must understand the rise of new political formations, whether reactionary or progressive, in this context.

Ganesh’s column thus serves as a symptomatic text. It reveals the anxieties of a ruling class confronted with the disintegration of its ideological authority, and it deploys the familiar tools of liberal commentary to explain that disintegration away. The sporting metaphor is not an innocent flourish. It is an ideological device that substitutes psychology for political economy, sentiment for structure, and pathology for critique.

Manchester City and the political economy of elite sport

Ganesh’s choice of Manchester City is analytically revealing. Since the Abu Dhabi ruling family acquired the club in 2008, Manchester City has become a paradigmatic example of the financialisation of elite sport. It functions simultaneously as a prestige asset, a node within a global sovereign‑wealth network, and the flagship of City Football Group’s multinational portfolio. Its competitive success cannot be separated from football's structural transformation into a globalised entertainment commodity. Several interlocking processes characterise this transformation: the inflation of transfer markets to levels unimaginable even two decades ago; the systematic pricing‑out of traditional working‑class supporters who once constituted the social base of the sport; the conversion of clubs into vehicles for oligarchic, private‑equity and state capital; and the juridification of competition through increasingly complex financial regulations, arbitration procedures and litigation. Manchester City is not merely an illustrative case but a concentrated expression of these tendencies.

This example matters not only for what it reveals about football but also for the parallel it exposes with developments in the political sphere. Over the same period, the historic parties of the capitalist class- Labour in Britain, the Democratic Party in the United States, Germany’s SPD, and France’s Socialist Party- underwent their own form of financialisation. They retained their traditional symbols, organisational shells and rhetorical markers, but abandoned the reformist programmes that once linked them to sections of the working class. Banks, the military-intelligence apparatus, and the transnational corporate elite effectively took ownership. The parties continued to present themselves as vehicles of popular representation, but their internal structures, policy agendas, and funding networks increasingly reflected capital's interests rather than labour's.

The parallel between football clubs and political parties is precise. Both have been hollowed out, repurposed and rebranded. Both rely on maintaining sentimental loyalties among their respective publics, supporters in one case, voters in the other, while no longer representing the material interests of those constituencies. In both domains, the outward continuity of symbols masks a profound transformation of ownership, purpose and class function. The modern football club and the modern centre‑left party are institutions whose legitimacy depends on identities rendered historically obsolete by structural change.

From an academic perspective, this parallel invites a broader reflection on the political economy of representation under late capitalism. The financialisation of football is not an isolated cultural phenomenon but part of a wider process in which previously embedded social institutions are transformed into assets within global circuits of capital. The same logic applies to political parties, which have shifted from mass organisations rooted in specific class constituencies to professionalised entities integrated into state and corporate networks. The erosion of democratic participation, declining party membership, and the rise of technocratic governance are not merely political trends but symptoms of this deeper structural reconfiguration.

Ganesh’s invocation of Manchester City thus inadvertently illuminates the very dynamics his column seeks to obscure. By framing political allegiance as irrational fandom, he shifts attention away from the structural processes that have hollowed out political institutions and generated widespread disaffection. The football metaphor, intended as a critique of voter behaviour, instead becomes a revealing analogy for the transformation of political parties themselves. The problem is not that voters behave like supporters, but that the institutions they are asked to support have been reconstructed along lines analogous to those of elite sport: commodified, financialised and detached from the communities they once served.

In this sense, the sporting metaphor is not merely inadequate but symptomatic. It reflects an ideological tendency within liberal commentary to interpret political crisis through cultural or psychological categories rather than through the material dynamics of capitalist restructuring. The hollowing out of football clubs and political parties alike is not a matter of identity or sentiment but of ownership, class power, and the global reorganisation of capital.

The “tribalism” thesis in liberal political sociology

The notion that voters behave tribally has a long pedigree in liberal political sociology. It appears in discussions of “low‑information voters,” “left‑behind communities,” and Hillary Clinton’s now‑canonical phrase “basket of deplorables.” In each case, the explanatory burden falls on the electorate's cognitive or cultural deficiencies rather than on the structural conditions that shape political behaviour. The electorate is imagined as fragmented into affective blocs, driven by identity, resentment, or irrational loyalty, and therefore incapable of responding to political arguments rationally or deliberatively. This interpretive framework has become increasingly prominent in commentary over the last decade, serving as a convenient shorthand for explaining political volatility without confronting the deeper social transformations that underlie it.

What this framework systematically excludes is the material history of the past four decades. Since the late 1970s, the political economy of advanced capitalist societies has changed profoundly. Stagnant real wages have become a defining feature of working-class life across the OECD: productivity growth has decoupled from wage growth, while labour’s share of national income has declined. The promise of rising living standards that underpinned the post-war settlement has broken down, giving way to precarious employment, insecure housing, and declining social mobility.

At the same time, trillions have flowed to the financial oligarchy through bank bailouts, quantitative easing and other extraordinary interventions. Though justified as necessary to stabilise the financial system, these policies have inflated asset prices, enriched capital holders and widened inequality. The political consequences of this redistribution have been profound: a growing sense that the state primarily protects financial interests and that democratic institutions are structurally incapable of representing the majority.

Austerity has also shaped the period, an agenda Ganesh himself defended in his biography of George Osborne. Austerity has brought deep cuts to public services, welfare provision and local government budgets, with working-class communities bearing a disproportionate share of the impact. It has weakened social infrastructure, from libraries and youth centres to hospitals and schools. The political effects of austerity cannot be reduced to tribalism; they stem from the lived experience of social decline and institutional abandonment.

Alongside these developments, entire regions, including Manchester and its surrounding areas, have been deindustrialised. The closure of factories, mines and steelworks has not only destroyed jobs but also dismantled the social and cultural institutions that sustained working-class life. The resulting landscape of unemployment, underemployment and economic stagnation has produced political disaffection that is rational, historically grounded and structurally determined.

Finally, over the past two decades, state budgets have become increasingly militarised, with vast sums spent on war, defence procurement, and security apparatuses even as public services collapse. Prioritising military spending over social investment reflects a broader shift in state strategy: strengthening coercive capacities at the expense of welfare functions. This shift has political consequences that cannot be reduced to identity or affect; it reflects the reorientation of state power amid capitalist crisis.

To interpret political disaffection as “tribalism” is therefore to deny the rationality of working‑class responses to these conditions. It is an ideological manoeuvre that absolves the ruling class of responsibility for the crisis it has produced. By framing political behaviour as irrational, commentators can avoid confronting the structural determinants of disaffection: the erosion of living standards, the collapse of social infrastructure, the concentration of wealth, and the militarisation of state power. The tribalism thesis functions as ideological displacement, shifting attention from political economy to psychology and from class relations to cultural identity.

From a Marxist perspective, this displacement itself signals a deeper crisis of bourgeois hegemony. When the material foundations of political legitimacy erode, ruling‑class ideology increasingly relies on cultural and psychological explanations to account for political instability. The electorate is pathologised because acknowledging the rationality of its disaffection would require confronting the social order's failures. The tribalism thesis thus naturalises the existing system by depicting dissent as irrational, emotional, or pre‑political.

In this sense, the appeal to tribalism is not merely analytically inadequate but politically functional. It reinforces the liberal commentariat's ideological position by framing political crisis as a problem of voter psychology rather than capitalist restructuring. It protects the ruling class's legitimacy while delegitimising the working class's grievances.

The commentator’s vantage point: distance as ideology

Ganesh’s column adopts the stance of the detached observer, a position he has cultivated throughout his career. He describes his ideal reader as someone who watches politics from a calm distance, like a naturalist observing animal behaviour. This self‑presentation is central to his authority at the Financial Times: a cultivated impression of disinterested sophistication, a commentator who stands above the fray and surveys political conflict with anthropological curiosity. The football metaphor reinforces this posture. In Ganesh’s framing, the commentator sits in the directors’ box, insulated from the passions of the crowd below, able to interpret their behaviour precisely because he does not share it. The terrace becomes a site of irrational collective emotion, while the hospitality suite becomes a vantage point of clarity, reason and detachment.

Yet this stance is itself ideological. The claim to neutrality, distance, and dispassion describes not Ganesh’s position but a rhetorical device that conceals its political content. Ganesh is not a neutral spectator. He is a partisan of the City of London, the transatlantic financial order and the NATO‑aligned “rules‑based” international system. His columns consistently defend the institutional architecture of contemporary capitalism: fiscal orthodoxy, Atlanticist foreign policy, technocratic governance and the primacy of financial markets. His prose's apparent detachment is therefore not a withdrawal from politics but a mode of political intervention. It lets him present the ruling class's interests as the natural horizon of political reason.

The Financial Times itself embodies this ideological position. Its editorial line has been unwavering in its support for austerity, its defence of militarism and its hostility to strikes. It frames these positions not as expressions of partisan loyalty but as reflections of economic necessity, geopolitical realism, or institutional responsibility. The FT’s own tribalism- its alignment with the priorities of finance capital and Western strategic power- is never described as such because it is the tribalism of the ruling class. Bourgeois ideology naturalises its own commitments while pathologising those of the masses.

This dynamic is central to understanding Ganesh’s use of the football metaphor. By depicting voters as supporters driven by irrational loyalty, he implicitly contrasts their behaviour with the rationality of elite institutions. The passions of the terrace are juxtaposed with the calm deliberation of the directors’ box. But this contrast is misleading. The ruling class is no less tribal than the masses; it expresses its loyalties through different institutional forms. The commitment to fiscal austerity, for example, is not the product of dispassionate analysis but of an ideological attachment to capital's interests. Support for NATO’s strategic posture is not a neutral assessment of global security but reflects Western elites' geopolitical commitments. The hostility to strikes is not an objective evaluation of economic efficiency but an expression of class interest.

Ganesh’s ideological function becomes clearer when situated within the broader context of liberal political commentary. The claim to neutrality is a hallmark of bourgeois journalism, which presents its own class position as universal reason. This rhetorical strategy lets commentators delegitimise alternative political perspectives by framing them as irrational, emotional, or tribal. The working class is depicted as driven by identity, resentment or affect, while the ruling class is portrayed as guided by expertise, moderation and rationality. This asymmetry is not accidental; it is a structural feature of bourgeois ideology.

From a Marxist perspective, the problem is not merely that Ganesh misrepresents voter behaviour but that he misrepresents his own. The detachment he claims is ideological camouflage. It conceals the fact that his analysis is shaped by the interests and worldview of the class fraction he represents. The directors’ box is not a neutral vantage point; it is a site of power. The calm distance he celebrates is not a methodological virtue but a political position.

In this sense, the football metaphor is doubly revealing. It exposes the contempt with which sections of the liberal commentariat view the electorate, and it inadvertently reveals the tribalism of the ruling class itself. The passions of the terrace are pathologised, while the commitments of the boardroom are naturalised. The ideological work of Ganesh’s column lies precisely in this inversion.

Consciousness, crisis and the Marxist perspective

Marxism does not deny that identity, habit and emotion shape political consciousness. These elements form part of what Marx called the “ideological superstructure,” the ensemble of cultural and psychological forms through which individuals interpret their social world. But, as Trotsky emphasised, consciousness lags behind objective conditions and is then propelled forward by them, often violently. Political loyalties that appear stable or even innate are, in fact, historically conditioned. They reflect past stages of development and can shift rapidly when the underlying material relations change. The loyalties Ganesh treats as permanent features of human nature- tribal attachments, affective identifications, irrational solidarities- are not anthropological constants. They are historically specific and subject to abrupt reconfiguration under conditions of crisis.

This dynamic is visible in the mass movements that have emerged across Britain, Europe and the United States in recent years. The wave of strikes that has swept through transport, education, health care, logistics and manufacturing is not a tribal phenomenon. It is a rational, collective response to decades of wage suppression, deteriorating working conditions, and intensifying exploitation. Workers who may differ in nationality, race, religion or cultural identity, including football allegiance, have found common cause in struggles over pay, conditions and the defence of public services. These movements cut across the divisions the ruling class works so hard to maintain. They demonstrate that class solidarity is not an abstract ideal but an objective tendency rooted in shared material interests.

The same holds for the anti‑war demonstrations that have filled city centres from London to Berlin to New York. These mobilisations are not expressions of irrational emotion or tribal identity. They are grounded in a clear understanding of militarism's consequences: diverting resources from social needs, escalating geopolitical conflict, and the human cost borne overwhelmingly by ordinary people. The breadth of these protests, drawing participants from diverse backgrounds and political traditions, reveals an emerging collective consciousness that transcends the narrow identities commentators like Ganesh invoke.

In both cases, what is taking shape is not tribalism but the early stages of a politically coherent response to systemic breakdown. As objective conditions deteriorate, consciousness is forced to catch up. The forms of loyalty that once anchored individuals to existing institutions- political parties, national myths, cultural identities- are eroding. In their place, new solidarities are emerging, grounded not in sentiment but in the shared experience of crisis. These movements represent the working class's rational, collective agency in confronting a social order that can no longer meet its needs.

Conclusion: Beyond the terrace metaphor

The task is not to lament voters’ irrationality, as Ganesh and the Financial Times do, but to articulate the rational content of working‑class disaffection. The political crisis confronting the advanced capitalist states is not the product of tribal psychology, nor of some sudden collapse in civic virtue. It results from a social order that offers the majority no future. When commentators reduce political volatility to identity, affect or irrational loyalty, they obscure the material foundations of discontent and transform a structurally generated crisis into a behavioural problem. This ideological manoeuvre protects the ruling class's legitimacy by locating the source of instability in the electorate rather than in capitalism’s own contradictions.

A Marxist analysis begins from the opposite premise: that political consciousness, however uneven or contradictory, contains within it a rational core shaped by lived experience. Workers’ instinctive opposition to austerity, militarism, inequality and the degradation of public services is not a failure of reason but an expression of it. The challenge is not to correct an irrational electorate but to clarify and develop the rational content of its disaffection. Consciousness lags behind objective conditions, as Trotsky observed, but crisis propels it forward. The erosion of traditional party loyalties, the collapse of trust in institutions, and the search for alternatives, however inchoate, are symptoms of a deeper process in which the old ideological anchors are losing their grip.

For this reason, the central political task is not to defend the existing order against “tribalism” but to provide a coherent alternative to it. Workers' spontaneous opposition must be given a conscious, internationalist, socialist programme that links immediate struggles to the broader transformation of society. Such a programme must reject all forms of nationalism, identity‑based fragmentation and class collaboration. It must address the structural roots of crisis: the domination of finance capital, the militarisation of state policy, and the systematic erosion of democratic and social rights.

Therefore, we need a party independent of all factions of the capitalist class, whatever shirts they wear. Only an organisation grounded in the interests of the international working class can transform disaffection into political agency. The crisis of capitalism has stripped away the illusions that once sustained the old parties. The task now is to build the leadership capable of turning opposition into a conscious movement for socialist reconstruction.

Further Reading

Marxist Theory, Political Economy, and Class Analysis

Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso, 1994.

Brenner, Robert. The Boom and the Bubble: The US and the World Economy. London: Verso, 2002.

Callinicos, Alex. Bonfire of Illusions: The Twin Crises of the Liberal World. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010.

Clarke, Simon. Marx’s Theory of Crisis. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994.

Harman, Chris. Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx. London: Bookmarks, 2009.

Harvey, David. The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Luxemburg, Rosa. The Accumulation of Capital. London: Routledge, 2003 (original work published 1913).

Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume I. London: Penguin Classics, 1990 (original work published 1867).

Shaikh, Anwar. Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Streeck, Wolfgang. How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System. London: Verso, 2016.

Financialisation, Neoliberalism, and State Restructuring

Crouch, Colin. The Strange Non‑Death of Neoliberalism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011.

Duménil, Gérard and Lévy, Dominique. The Crisis of Neoliberalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.

Fine, Ben. Theories of Social Capital: Researchers Behaving Badly. London: Pluto Press, 2010.

Gamble, Andrew. The Spectre at the Feast: Capitalist Crisis and the Politics of Recession. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Mirowski, Philip and Plehwe, Dieter (eds.). The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Pistor, Katharina. The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019.

Labour, Deindustrialisation, and Working‑Class Politics

Beatty, Christina and Fothergill, Steve. The State of the Coalfields. Sheffield: CRESR, 2021.

Bluestone, Barry and Harrison, Bennett. The Deindustrialisation of America. New York: Basic Books, 1982.

Kirk, Neville. Comrades and Cousins: Globalisation, Workers and Labour Movements in Britain, the USA and Australia from the 1880s to 1914. London: Merlin Press, 2003.

Moody, Kim. On New Terrain: How Capital Is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017.

Silver, Beverly. Forces of Labour: Workers’ Movements and Globalisation since 1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Media, Ideology, and Political Commentary

Bourdieu, Pierre. Political Interventions: Social Science and Political Action. London: Verso, 2008.

Chomsky, Noam and Herman, Edward S. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.

Curran, James and Seaton, Jean. Power Without Responsibility: Press, Broadcasting and the Internet in Britain. London: Routledge, 2018.

Davis, Aeron. Reckless Opportunists: Elites at the End of the Establishment. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018.

Schudson, Michael. The Power of News. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Imperialism, Militarism, and Geopolitics

Callinicos, Alex. Imperialism and Global Political Economy. London: Polity Press, 2009.

Foster, John Bellamy. The New Imperialism of Globalised Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2021.

Kiely, Ray. The Politics of Empire: Globalisation and the Postcolonial World. London: Routledge, 2005.

Panitch, Leo and Gindin, Sam. The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire. London: Verso, 2012.

Football, Capital, and Cultural Political Economy

Conn, David. The Fall of the House of FIFA. London: Yellow Jersey Press, 2017.

Giulianotti, Richard. Football: A Sociology of the Global Game. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999.

Hognestad, Hans and Tolvhed, Daniel (eds.). Sport and the Transformation of Modern Europe: States, Media and Markets 1950–2010. London: Routledge, 2020.

Millward, Peter. The Global Football League: Transnational Networks, Social Movements and Sport in the New Media Age. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Szymanski, Stefan. Money and Football: A Soccernomics Guide. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.

 

France’s Erupting Student Revolt and the Political Lessons of 1968: A Warning Against the SWP’s Spontaneity Myths

 Mass student protests across France mark a new phase in the breakdown of European capitalism. Beginning with lycée blockades in Créteil on 18 September, the movement has spread at extraordinary speed. By mid-October, the main student union reported that around 90 per cent of France’s universities were blockaded or closed; unions claimed 480,000 demonstrators nationwide; and protests had already spread to Belgium, Albania, Greece and Italy. One demonstrator has been killed, more than 2,000 arrested, and Limoges’ 143-year-old town hall burned. Macron is preparing to address the nation- a sign of the ruling class’s fear, not its strength.

The crisis unfolding in France is not an isolated national event. It is part of a global rise in class struggle, driven by war, austerity, and the collapse of the post-Cold War order. Across Europe, governments are cutting social spending to fund rearmament, militarising domestic policing, and preparing for confrontation with Russia. The eruption of youth anger in France is one expression of this broader crisis. Still, you can't understand the political questions it raises without confronting the lessons of France’s last great revolutionary crisis: May–June 1968.

In a recent article, Socialist Worker (SWP) asks whether the present revolt is “our 1968.” It is a legitimate question, but their answer is politically evasive. Their account suppresses 1968’s central lesson: the Stalinist bureaucracy's decisive role in betraying the general strike, and the need to build an independent revolutionary leadership before mass upheavals. This suppression is no accident. It follows from the SWP’s own political orientation: its adaptation to the trade-union apparatus, its glorification of spontaneity, and its refusal to confront the bureaucracies that strangle every major working-class movement.

Murden’s article repeats a familiar mythology: students fought, workers joined them, the president “fled,” and the movement ultimately lost because socialist parties focused too much on elections. This narrative is politically convenient because it obscures the real forces that determined the outcome. The May–June 1968 general strike, involving ten million workers, was not defeated by “electoralism.” The French Communist Party (PCF) and the CGT trade-union bureaucracy it controlled betrayed it. These forces negotiated the Grenelle accords behind the strikers’ backs, broke the strike factory by factory, and led the working class into the June elections, which the Gaullists won by a landslide.

De Gaulle did not flee. He flew to Baden-Baden to secure the army’s support, then returned to dissolve the Assembly and call elections, confident that the PCF would keep the workers in line. This betrayal was no aberration; it was the predictable outcome of Stalinism’s nationalist, reformist programme and hostility to workers’ power. The SWP refuses to name this betrayal because its own state-capitalist tradition has always adapted to the bureaucracies- Stalinist, social-democratic, or trade-union that sit atop mass movements.

The Role of the Unions Today

The SWP’s silence on the unions is not merely a matter of history; it directly affects the present movement. Youth anger has not erupted in a political vacuum. It confronts a trade-union apparatus with a decade-long record of systematic demobilisation, fragmentation, and defeat. Any serious analysis of the current struggle must begin with this fact. Murden’s article omits it because acknowledging it would require breaking with the SWP’s entire political orientation.

The Intersyndicale’s record is well known. In 2023, it led millions in a series of isolated “days of action” as Macron’s pension reform passed. These demonstrations were deliberately designed to prevent a general strike. With weeks of inactivity between each “day,” the government could wait out the movement while the unions kept control of the calendar. Last autumn’s Bloquons tout movement dissipated similarly. Youth and workers repeatedly called for indefinite action, only to be told to wait for the next scheduled march. Many participants objected that the unions were setting the protest calendar and called for dates independent of the bureaucracies. Their demands were ignored.

By December 2025, the consequences of this strategy were clear. A CGT–FSU–Solidaires strike day drew just 31,900 protesters, according to interior ministry estimates, and caused little disruption. Years of controlled, symbolic protest had worn workers down and convinced many that union-led mobilisations were futile. The bureaucracies had achieved their real aim: preventing a unified national movement from emerging to challenge the state.

Today, the unions have joined the marches “to protect pupils and limit violence.” This wording is revealing. Their role is not to lead a struggle against the state, but to contain it, regulate it, and ultimately channel it back into parliamentary politics. They appear at demonstrations as stewards, not fighters. Their presence is a warning, not a promise.

Murden’s article says nothing about this. Workers and young people are not warned that the same apparatus is preparing the same outcome. They are not told that the unions are already negotiating with the interior ministry, discussing “security,” and preparing the next controlled march. Nor are they told that the bureaucracies will oppose any attempt to connect lycée blockades with strikes in transport, health, logistics, or industry. They are not told that the unions will fight rank-and-file organisation harder than they fight Macron.

Most importantly, they are not urged to build rank-and-file committees independent of the union bureaucracies, linking schools, factories, transport and hospitals across France and internationally. These committees are the only organisational form capable of coordinating a general strike, resisting bureaucratic sabotage, and articulating the working class's political demands. They embody the lessons of every major struggle of the past century, from the factory occupations of 1936 to the mass strikes of 1968.

This silence is political. It reflects the SWP’s refusal to break with the trade‑union apparatus, which it treats as a vehicle for “pressure from below” rather than as an instrument of state control over the working class. The SWP’s state‑capitalist tradition has always adapted to whatever bureaucracy sits atop a movement. It insists that militancy can force unions into action, even though their function is precisely to keep militancy from becoming political. It celebrates “the streets” while refusing to confront the organisations that police them.

Mélenchon and the Electoral Trap

Murden warns that “the logic of the system” will try to channel street anger into electoral politics. In the next breath, she praises Jean‑Luc Mélenchon for showing up at protests. The warning and the endorsement cancel each other out. It is impossible to denounce the diversion of mass anger into parliamentary channels while simultaneously legitimising the politician whose central function is to carry out that diversion.

Mélenchon’s role is clear. In 2024, La France Insoumise (LFI) entered a “New Popular Front” with the Socialist Party, the party responsible for Hollande’s austerity, labour‑market deregulation, and entrenching the state of emergency. LFI then withdrew candidates in run‑offs to benefit Macron’s camp under the banner of a “republican front.” This was not a tactical misstep but the logical expression of LFI’s programme: defence of the Fifth Republic, French nationalism, and the preservation of capitalist order through parliamentary manoeuvres.

With the 2027 election approaching, LFI faces the same challenge the PCF faced in June 1968: turning a mass movement into votes. In 1968, the PCF broke the general strike factory by factory, then led ten million workers to the polls, where they delivered a landslide victory for the Gaullists. Today, Mélenchon’s presence at demonstrations serves a similar purpose: presenting himself as the “responsible” left alternative, channelling youth anger into electoral support, and preventing the emergence of independent organs of working-class power.

Presenting Mélenchon as an ally repeats the political logic that destroyed 1968. Murden’s article concludes by declaring that “the power to change the system lies in the streets.” This is spontaneism dressed up as revolutionary rhetoric. In 1968, the streets did not lack militancy. They lacked a party fighting for workers’ power against the Stalinists. The general strike was defeated not because workers failed to act, but because they acted under the leadership of a bureaucracy committed to preserving the capitalist state.

Celebrating “the streets” while remaining silent on programme and leadership leaves the field open to the bureaucracies and to Mélenchon. It is a politics of mood, not strategy. It replaces emotional identification with protest with the hard, necessary work of building independent rank-and-file committees and a revolutionary leadership capable of confronting the state and breaking the union apparatus's grip. This is the lesson of 1968and the lesson Murden’s article refuses to draw.

What Is Required

Conditions today may be more explosive than in 1968. The crisis is global, the ruling class has nothing left to concede, and the movement is already crossing borders. The French protests are not an isolated national disturbance but part of a worldwide breakdown of capitalist stability: war in Europe and the Middle East, austerity budgets across the continent, collapsing public services, and a generation of youth confronting a future of permanent insecurity. Under these conditions, even movements that begin in schools and universities can quickly take on a broader social character. The SWP avoids the question of leadership, but it becomes decisive.

The ruling class is acutely aware of the danger. Macron’s preparations to address the nation, the mass arrests, and the deployment of riot police are not signs of confidence but of fear. The state understands that social anger among youth can ignite broader layers of workers whose living standards have eroded over more than a decade. The unions understand this too, which is why they have intervened not to escalate the struggle but to contain it. The pseudo‑left parties understand it, which is why they are already positioning themselves as electoral safety valves. The only force that is not being prepared is the working class itself.

What is needed is the independent political mobilisation of the working class, internationally and on a socialist programme, against Macron, the RN, and the bureaucratic and pseudo-left apparatuses that will seek to block it. No movement can move forward while confined to the organisational structures that have repeatedly sabotaged struggles in France: the trade-union bureaucracies, the parliamentary left, and nationalist frameworks that divide workers by race, religion or citizenship. The youth blockades have shown courage and initiative. Still, without a deliberate strategy to connect their actions with workplaces, hospitals, transport hubs and logistics centres, their struggle will remain isolated and vulnerable.

The lessons of 1968 are clear. A general strike, prepared by rank-and-file committees, democratically controlled by workers, and coordinated across sectors and borders, is the only way to break the union apparatus’s grip. A revolutionary leadership, built in advance, rooted in the international working class, and armed with a Marxist programme, is the only force capable of turning mass anger into a struggle for power. An article that omits these lessons offers a miniature version of the PCF’s road a road that leads not to victory, but to defeat.

Bibliography

Trotskyist and Marxist Analysis

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