Rubio’s “spirit of Marx” speech: The American ruling class confronts its spectre

On Friday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered an extraordinary address to the Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention in Washington. Thirty-five years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and after decades in which the ideologues of capitalism proclaimed the death of socialism, Rubio informed the assembled representatives of the conservative legal establishment that their system had failed to exorcise its greatest ideological enemy. “Even as we defeated the institution of Soviet communism, we did not triumph over the spirit of Marx,” Rubio declared. “That spirit of Marx, it lives.”

The words deserve to be taken seriously. Rubio was not addressing an obscure gathering of anti-communist eccentrics. He was speaking as the US Secretary of State to the Federalist Society. This organisation has played a central role in building the right-wing legal apparatus in the United States. Rubio himself devoted the opening portion of his speech to celebrating its rise from a handful of conservative law students in the early 1980s into a powerful institution capable of shaping American jurisprudence.

The irony is unmistakable. More than three decades after capitalism supposedly demonstrated its historical superiority over socialism, one of the most powerful representatives of American imperialism finds itself compelled to announce that the ghost has not departed publicly. Marx and Engels opened the Communist Manifesto in 1848 with one of the most famous sentences in political literature: “A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of communism.” They added that “all the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre.” Rubio has effectively volunteered for membership in the twenty-first-century version of that alliance.

“Stop quoting laws to men with swords”

What supposedly constitutes this renewed “spirit of Marx”? According to Rubio, it is no longer simply communism or the organised socialist movement. It appears in international law, international institutions, universities, journalism, NGOs, the courts and every other institution that might impose even limited restraints upon the exercise of American power. Rubio devoted much of his address to attacking the International Criminal Court and the wider system of international law. He denounced what he termed the “glittering generalities of international law” and accused international institutions of attempting to subordinate American sovereignty to an unaccountable global bureaucracy.

His most revealing statement came during his denunciation of the ICC. Should the court attempt to enforce its decisions against Americans, Rubio declared, Washington might answer in the words traditionally attributed to the Roman general Pompey: “Stop quoting laws to men with swords.”The remark drew laughter and applause.

Rubio's theatrical delivery should not obscure its significance. The chief diplomat of the United States was telling an audience of lawyers that when legal restrictions collide with the interests of American imperialism, military power has the final word. The invocation of Pompey is particularly revealing. Rubio sought to present it as evidence of hard-headed realism against the pretensions of international lawyers. But the image he selected was that of armed power brushing aside civil authority. The sword stands above the law because the state possessing overwhelming military force considers itself entitled to decide when law applies.

The post-1945 institutions that Rubio now excoriates as vehicles for forces supposedly animated by the “spirit of Marx” were never socialist. The United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions and the wider infrastructure of the post-war international system developed under conditions of overwhelming American economic and military predominance. Whatever disagreements existed among the major powers, Washington played the decisive role in constructing the international framework through which it exercised global leadership.

International law never abolished imperialism. Nor did the United Nations overcome the nation-state system. Korea, Vietnam, the coups and dictatorships backed by Washington during the Cold War, and later the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya made sufficiently clear how readily the language of international order could coexist with military violence. Rubio’s speech therefore matters elsewhere. An American ruling class increasingly unwilling to tolerate even legal restraints fashioned during its own period of global ascendancy is dispensing with the language through which it once presented its domination as the universal interest of mankind.

When American capitalism stood at the summit of the world economy after the Second World War, its representatives could more easily identify American power with economic reconstruction, international cooperation and universal progress. The immense industrial strength of the United States provided the foundation for this ideological confidence. That world has disappeared. American capitalism remains extraordinarily powerful, particularly militarily and financially, but it confronts intensifying economic competition, immense social inequality at home and growing challenges to the international position established after 1945. Under these conditions, the language of universal principles increasingly gives way to the blunt assertion of national power. Hence Pompey and the sword.

An ideology of expansion

Rubio’s speech went far beyond criticism of the ICC. At one point he offered a remarkable description of American history. The American national character, he argued, had always been driven by a desire “to expand, to grow, to explore, to conquer, to stake a claim to new frontiers.” Speaking of the nineteenth century, he celebrated the transformation of the original 13 states into a continental power stretching to the Pacific. America, he declared, had been a nation “advancing across the continent, settling land, building cities, laying roads and railways, subduing the wilderness.”

What disappears from this narrative is precisely what must disappear for the mythology of American expansion to survive: indigenous peoples, slavery, the conquest of Mexican territory, the brutal development of capitalist property relations and the class struggles produced by industrialisation. The history of American capitalism is transformed into the heroic unfolding of a timeless national personality. This mythology then becomes a programme for the present. Rubio explicitly rejected the proposition that the United States must accept its position as merely “one nation among the many.” Americans, he insisted, must reject arguments that they cannot “impose ourselves upon the world.” The phrase is remarkable in its candour.

Imperialist domination is presented not as the consequence of particular economic and class interests but as an expression of American civilisation itself. Expansion ceases to be a historical process rooted in capitalism and becomes a national virtue. Rubio therefore arrives at an openly imperial conception of American sovereignty: the United States possesses the right to determine its interests independently, while international institutions have no corresponding right to restrain the exercise of American power. The “men with swords” supply the ultimate constitutional principle.

“Every society has a ruling class”

But perhaps the most revealing section of Rubio’s address came before his attack upon international law. “Every society,” Rubio said, “has an elite, has a ruling class. “It is an extraordinary phrase coming from an American Secretary of State. For decades, the official mythology of American political life has denied this reality precisely. The United States supposedly consists of individuals competing freely within democratic institutions. Classes may exist as income categories, but the concept of a ruling class possessing definite material interests has traditionally been dismissed as Marxist dogma.

Yet Rubio stood before the Federalist Society and discussed the problem of political power in explicitly class terms. He identified the ruling class as residing not simply in government but in “academia, in powerful nonprofits, and in nongovernment organisations,” as well as “corporate boardrooms and C-suites and think tanks and journals, in foundations and in mass media. “There is an important sleight of hand here.

Rubio correctly acknowledges that political domination extends beyond elections and formal government. But he then dissolves the ruling class's capitalist character into an amorphous cultural elite. Corporate executives somehow occupy the same analytical category as university professors, journalists and NGO officials. Ownership of the means of production disappears as the decisive social relation. Marxism begins precisely where Rubio stops. A ruling class is not defined principally by its opinions, university degrees, or cultural preferences. Capitalists constitute a ruling class because they own and control society's productive resources and appropriate the surplus produced by wage labour. Political and cultural institutions ultimately operate under social conditions established by these relations of ownership.

Rubio therefore borrows the language of class while stripping it of its material content. The result is a familiar form of right-wing populism in which sections of the capitalist oligarchy portray themselves as insurgents against an alleged establishment consisting of professors, civil servants, liberal journalists and bureaucrats. The billionaire no longer belongs to the elite. The university lecturer becomes the embodiment of ruling-class power.

Rubio’s discussion of the Federalist Society exposes the fraud of this presentation. The organisation, he explained approvingly, understood it could not control political institutions merely by winning elections. Long-term victory required networks, recruitment, intellectual organisation and what Rubio himself described as pipelines to power. He praised the organisation for changing the intellectual environment within which American judges operated and for cultivating generations of conservative lawyers capable of carrying its ideas from lecture rooms into the highest courts.

This is worth emphasising because Rubio simultaneously attacked the left for allegedly pursuing domination through institutions. He delivered his own speech celebrating one of the American right's most successful institutional political projects. From Rubio’s standpoint, there is no contradiction. Institutional power exercised on behalf of capitalist nationalism is legitimate. Institutional influence impeding that programme becomes Marxism.

This conception also illuminates the political purpose of his extraordinary expansion of the definition of Marxism. Liberal judges are Marxists. Human rights organisations become Marxist. International lawyers become Marxist. Academics become Marxist. Criticism of American history becomes Marxist. International institutions become manifestations of Marxism. Eventually any political or legal restraint upon the executive power of the capitalist state can be interpreted as an expression of the “spirit of Marx. “This has little to do with Marx’s actual ideas. It has everything to do with identifying an internal enemy.

The ideological heart of Rubio’s speech was concentrated in one passage: “Marxism sought to abolish the distinctions between men. The radicals of our time seek to abolish the distinctions between nations themselves.” Rubio almost accidentally approaches the real issue. Marxism does indeed seek to abolish certain distinctions between human beings, but not individuality, personality, culture or difference. It seeks to abolish the class divisions arising from private ownership of the means of production: capitalist and worker, exploiter and exploited. For Rubio, these social distinctions disappear into the abstract category of inequality between “men.” But capitalism does not simply produce differences between individuals. It concentrates productive property and wealth within a comparatively tiny social layer, while the overwhelming majority depend on selling their labour power to live. Rubio's formulation converts historically developed class relations into natural human distinctions. The defence of “distinctions” therefore becomes, consciously or otherwise, a defence of hierarchy itself. Behind the denunciation of Marxism stands the defence of private property in the means of production.

Nations and the world economy

Rubio’s second proposition is equally revealing. The supposedly new Marxists, he argues, seek to eliminate distinctions between nations. But international lawyers, academics, or NGOs have not brought about the historical erosion of national economic self-sufficiency. Capitalism has itself created an integrated world economy. Modern production operates through vast international networks of manufacture, transport, finance, communication and labour. Raw materials extracted on one continent are processed on another and incorporated into commodities assembled elsewhere, then sold worldwide.

Capital has globalised production while preserving the political framework of competing nation-states. This is one of the central contradictions of the contemporary world. Production is international, but capitalist property and political power remain organised through rival nation-states whose ruling classes struggle over markets, resources, investment opportunities, and strategic influence. The more integrated the world economy becomes, the more explosive its collision with the nation-state system becomes.

Trade war and military conflict are not aberrations imposed upon an otherwise harmonious system. They grow out of capitalism itself. Rubio proposes to solve this contradiction by asserting the unrestricted primacy of the American nation. Marxism advances the opposite programme: the international unification of the working class. “The working men have no country,” Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto. That declaration does not mean workers have no languages, cultures, or historical identities. It means that their fundamental social interests cannot be reconciled with the competing national programmes of capitalist ruling classes. An American worker has more fundamental interests in common with workers in China, Mexico, Britain, Germany or Russia than with the billionaire owners of American corporations. That is precisely why nationalism becomes increasingly indispensable to the ruling class.

What collapsed in 1991?

Rubio's assertion that the United States “defeated the institution of Soviet communism” reproduces one of the central historical falsifications of bourgeois ideology. What collapsed in 1991 was not Marxism. The October Revolution of 1917 had established the first workers’ state based on international socialist revolution. It degenerated under specific historical conditions: economic backwardness, the devastation of civil war and imperialist intervention, and, above all, the isolation produced by the defeats of revolutionary movements internationally. From these conditions arose a privileged Soviet bureaucracy personified politically by Stalin.

Against the internationalist programme of the Bolsheviks, Stalin advanced the nationalist theory of “socialism in one country.” The bureaucracy increasingly monopolised political power. The revolutionary generation was ultimately subjected to systematic repression and murder. Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition waged an irreconcilable struggle against this degeneration. In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky warned that the Soviet bureaucracy did not represent a new socialist ruling class and that its continued domination threatened the October Revolution's achievements. Unless the working class carried through a political revolution and restored Soviet democracy, capitalist restoration would ultimately result.

That warning was vindicated. The liquidation of the Soviet Union in 1991 was carried through by forces emerging from within the Stalinist bureaucracy itself. State property was dismantled and appropriated, producing oligarchic capitalism and immense social catastrophe. The USSR did not collapse because capitalism overcame the contradictions Marx analysed. On the contrary, those contradictions subsequently emerged in increasingly acute forms on a world scale.

The return of Marx

This explains Rubio’s dilemma. If 1991 truly represented the historic victory of capitalism over Marxism, why must the Secretary of State of the United States warn his audience in 2026 that the “spirit of Marx” remains alive? Marxism survives because the social relations Marx analysed survive. Capital still confronts wage labour. Production remains subordinated to profit. Wealth accumulates at one pole of society while insecurity accumulates at the other.

Technological development capable of reducing human labour and dramatically raising living standards instead threatens workers with displacement whenever greater profitability demands it. Enormous productive capacities coexist with poverty and social deprivation. A globally integrated productive system remains imprisoned within competing capitalist nation-states. The fundamental contradiction Marx identified between the social character of production and private appropriation has not disappeared. It has assumed an unprecedented international scale. One of the most significant moments in Rubio’s remarks came during the question-and-answer session when he acknowledged that young Americans were falling behind previous generations and that millions judged economic conditions not by the stock market but by whether they could afford what they needed. This admission speaks far more directly to the renewed interest in socialism than all his denunciations of international bureaucrats. Young people are not turning towards socialist ideas because international lawyers have secretly indoctrinated them. They are responding to social conditions.

Rubio nevertheless attempts to identify Marxism with the institutions of the liberal establishment: universities, NGOs, judges, journalists and Democratic Party politicians. This identification is politically indispensable to the American right because it conceals the actual character of Marxism. The Democratic Party is not a socialist organisation. It is one of the two principal parties of American capitalism. Whatever bitter tactical and institutional conflicts separate Democrats and Republicans, both defend capitalist property relations and the geopolitical interests of American imperialism.

Liberal appeals to international law are likewise highly selective. The differences within the ruling class concern how American capitalism should defend its global interests and manage mounting domestic opposition, not whether capitalism should be replaced with socialism. Nor should the identity politics entrenched throughout substantial sections of academia and the professional upper-middle class be confused with Marxism. Marxism locates the fundamental division in capitalist society in class relations arising from production. Contemporary identity politics fragments society along racial, gender and other identities while generally leaving capitalist property relations untouched.

Rubio benefits enormously from conflating the two. By describing liberal identity politics as Marxism, the right can simultaneously attack genuine socialism and discredit opposition to social inequality without confronting the actual Marxist critique of capitalism. The result is an ideological hall of mirrors in which representatives of a capitalist government define other defenders of capitalism as communists.

From the “end of history” to men with swords

The historical contrast could hardly be sharper. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, bourgeois ideologues proclaimed that the great ideological struggles of history had essentially concluded. Capitalist liberal democracy supposedly represented humanity's final political horizon. The coming decades produced something very different. The United States launched successive wars while social inequality soared. The 2008 financial crash exposed the global financial system's instability. Governments poured enormous resources into stabilising banks and financial markets. Political institutions increasingly lost popular legitimacy. Trade conflicts intensified alongside geopolitical confrontation.

The confident language of capitalist universalism steadily gave way to economic nationalism. Rubio’s speech belongs to this historical transition. The representative of American imperialism no longer promises a universally applicable order in which all nations will eventually converge upon liberal capitalism. Instead, he asserts America's particular right to pursue its interests and condemns institutions that claim universal jurisdiction when they obstruct those interests. The ideological progression from the “end of history” to “stop quoting laws to men with swords” expresses a profound transformation in the position and psychology of the American ruling class. The first formula reflected triumphalism. The second reflects crisis. 

The spectre behind the speech

Rubio delivered his remarks immediately after serious Republican reverses in the midterm elections. He responded by instructing the Federalist Society not to regard electoral defeat as decisive. He argued that genuine political power must be developed across institutions over decades. That argument confirms how seriously powerful sections of the American ruling class are approaching the coming period. Rubio's rhetoric cannot be reduced to eccentric anti-communism.

His invocation of national destiny, his celebration of conquest, his hostility towards legal restraints upon American power, his identification of adversaries throughout universities and courts, and his appeal for organised institutional mobilisation form a coherent political outlook. It is an ideology suited to a ruling class confronting intensifying crisis. Unable to resolve deteriorating social conditions through reform, the capitalist oligarchy turns increasingly towards nationalism and the strengthening of executive authority. Unable to maintain unquestioned international dominance through economic supremacy alone, it resorts more openly to military power. Unable to explain capitalism's contradictions, it searches for scapegoats and internal enemies. And unable finally to dispose of Marx, it announces that Marx is everywhere.

Rubio is nevertheless correct about one thing. The spirit of Marx lives. But it does not live where Rubio claims to find it. It does not reside in the International Criminal Court. It does not reside in United Nations bureaucracies. It does not reside in Democratic Party headquarters. It does not reside in corporate diversity programmes or fashionable departments of elite universities. Marxism lives because capitalism has reproduced on an enormously expanded scale the social contradictions that gave rise to Marxism in the first place. Its objective foundation is the international working class.

The global integration of capitalist production has created a working class that is larger and more internationally interconnected than at any previous period in history. Workers separated by enormous geographical distances participate in common chains of production and confront corporations whose activities transcend national boundaries.

Capitalism has thereby created the very social force that can replace it. But objective contradictions do not automatically produce socialist consciousness. Workers confronting declining living standards, austerity, unemployment, authoritarianism and war can be diverted behind nationalism, racial antagonisms, religious divisions and the competing factions of bourgeois politics. The decisive question is political leadership. The struggle against capitalism therefore requires building a consciously international socialist movement in the working class, assimilating the strategic lessons of the twentieth century and, above all, the struggle of Trotskyism against Stalinism and nationalism.

The alternative the capitalist crisis increasingly presents is not reform versus revolution, but socialism versus barbarism. Rubio's address exposes something normally concealed beneath the ritual language of American politics. Beneath the denunciations of international bureaucrats stands the assertion of naked state power. Beneath the celebration of national sovereignty stands the defence of capitalist property. Beneath the invocation of national unity stands a society divided by irreconcilable class interests.

And beneath the attack on the “spirit of Marx” stands a ruling class deeply conscious that the social order it represents has failed to overcome the contradictions Marx identified more than a century and a half ago. Marx and Engels wrote in 1848 that Europe's ruling powers had entered into a holy alliance against the spectre of communism. Every government denounced its opponents as communist while the defenders of the existing order united against the emerging political movement of the working class.

The names have changed. The institutions have changed. The world economy has developed on a scale Marx and Engels could scarcely have imagined. But the fundamental antagonism remains. Rubio's speech therefore deserves to be remembered not simply for its crude anti-communism but for its extraordinary involuntary confession. Thirty-five years after the supposed death of socialism, the most powerful capitalist state on earth is still haunted by Marx. The spectre has not disappeared. The task is to give it conscious political form.

Bibliography and further reading

Primary sources

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. 1848.

Rubio, Marco. “Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Federalist Society’s 2026 National Lawyers Convention.” US Department of State, Washington, DC, 13 November 2026.

Trotsky, Leon. The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? 1936.

Trotsky, Leon. The Transitional Program: The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International. 1938.

Marx, capitalism and the world economy

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I. 1867.

Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. 1852.

Lenin, V. I. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. 1916.

Lenin, V. I. The State and Revolution. 1917.

Trotsky, Leon. The Permanent Revolution. 1930.

Stalinism and the Soviet Union

Trotsky, Leon. The Revolution Betrayed. 1936.

Trotsky, Leon. In Defence of Marxism. 1942.

North, David. The Heritage We Defend: A Contribution to the History of the Fourth International. Labour Publications, 1988.

American capitalism, imperialism and political reaction

Beard, Charles A. An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. Macmillan, 1913.

Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. Harper & Row, 1980.

Williams, William Appleman. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. 1959.

Contemporary source material

US Department of State. Transcript of Marco Rubio's address to the Federalist Society National Lawyers Convention, 13 November 2026.

Reuters. “Rubio assails international court in speech to conservative legal group.” 14 November 2026.

Federalist Society. Materials relating to the 2026 National Lawyers Convention, Washington, DC.

 

The November 2026 Microsoft outage: Private monopoly and the fragility of global digital infrastructure

On Thursday, 12 November, a critical communications system underpinning modern capitalism began to fail. Outlook and other components of Microsoft 365 became inaccessible or unreliable across much of the world, with Teams and Copilot functions also affected. Government agencies, health services, courts, police forces, and private corporations relied on a single American technology corporation to restore communications over which they had virtually no direct control.

The immediate cause was technical. Microsoft later said the incident began with an earlier network capacity upgrade and became apparent after a subsequent network change. The company rejected suggestions that a cyberattack or artificial intelligence agents were responsible. The outage's significance is heightened by the fact that it did not require intervention by a hostile state, criminal organisation, or sophisticated computer attack. A failure within a single corporation's infrastructure was sufficient to disrupt institutions across multiple countries.

The outage revealed a fundamental contradiction in the organisation of contemporary technological society. Communications systems that serve hundreds of millions of people and are increasingly essential to hospitals, government departments, and other public services have been consolidated within a small number of privately owned corporations. While technology has become more international and social in character, ownership remains private, and strategic decisions are ultimately driven by profitability, competition, and shareholder interests.

Problems became apparent on Thursday afternoon when users reported being unable to access Exchange Online and Outlook. Microsoft initially described the disruption as affecting the Americas, before acknowledging that users in other regions were also impacted. Outlook was central to the failure, but other Microsoft 365 services were disrupted as well, along with external organisations whose systems relied on Microsoft's infrastructure.

Microsoft's explanation evolved as engineers worked to understand and contain the failure. Servers became unexpectedly unavailable, increasing the load on the remaining infrastructure. Initial restoration efforts achieved only limited success, as recovered capacity was insufficient to achieve immediate stability. Ultimately, Microsoft attributed the incident to a problem introduced during an earlier network capacity upgrade, which became apparent after a subsequent network change.

Currently, there is no evidence that Microsoft's job cuts or AI investments directly caused the outage. Determining the precise chain of technical and organisational responsibility requires significantly more evidence than is currently available. However, this does not negate the broader economic issue. The central question is not whether a specific redundant engineer could have prevented this failure, but rather what occurs when essential infrastructure is managed according to the investment priorities of competing corporations.

The breakdown occurred less than three years after the July 2024 CrowdStrike incident, which demonstrated the vulnerability of extreme concentration in global computing. A faulty security update crashed millions of Windows computers and disrupted airlines, hospitals, banks, and businesses worldwide. Although governments and corporations pledged to learn from this event, the concentration of technological infrastructure that allowed a single defect to have global consequences remained fundamentally unaddressed.

The Microsoft outage should not be regarded merely as another instance of the CrowdStrike event. The immediate technical causes differed. However, both incidents share the same underlying social structure: large portions of global communications and computing infrastructure are concentrated among a small number of corporations. As a result, a decision or error that once affected only a single organisation can now propagate across countries and continents.

Cloud computing has intensified this contradiction. Centralisation brings enormous technical advantages. Computing resources can be distributed internationally, immense quantities of information can be processed and transmitted almost instantaneously, and sophisticated applications can be made available to organisations that cannot build such systems independently. These are genuine achievements representing an extraordinary development of humanity's productive capabilities.

Under private ownership, however, technological integration results in corporate dependence. Governments, which are responsible for administering the lives of millions, increasingly operate as customers of Microsoft, Amazon, and a few other technology companies. Hospitals, police forces, courts, councils, and entire government departments therefore rely on infrastructure whose fundamental operation is beyond their direct control.

The most significant consequences of the November outage did not occur among office workers inconvenienced by the temporary loss of email, but rather in areas where public administration had become dependent on Microsoft's systems. Health organisations, police forces, government institutions, and judicial bodies were affected internationally. The interruption revealed how deeply ordinary communications software has become embedded in essential social services.

It also exposed the increasingly artificial distinction between "front-line" and "back-office" services. Hospitals depend upon administrative communications to coordinate staff and information. Police forces use digital systems to receive and distribute reports. Courts depend upon them for official communications. Referrals, appointments, records, and innumerable administrative processes depend on systems that seem secondary until they stop working.

When these systems fail, their associated work does not vanish. The burden shifts directly to workers. Nurses, administrative staff, call handlers, doctors, police personnel, and IT engineers must set up alternative arrangements, revert to telephones or manual methods, address accumulated backlogs, and reassure members of the public who are unsure whether their communications have been received.

This additional labour represents one of the largely invisible social costs of corporate technology failures. Microsoft's financial accounts do not adequately reflect these costs because much of the work is performed elsewhere. Public-sector employees, local IT departments, and users absorb the disruption while corporate engineers focus on repairing the central infrastructure. As a result, the economic damage from the failure is socialised, even though ownership and control remain private.

The outage also took place amid an unprecedented international investment race in artificial intelligence. Microsoft is one of the principal corporations allocating substantial resources to data centres, computing capacity, and AI infrastructure, competing with Amazon, Google, Meta, and other technology giants for a dominant position in what investors anticipate will become a central market in the coming decades.

It would be inappropriate to interpret this coincidence as an unsupported explanation for the outage. No evidence currently indicates that AI expenditure caused the November failure, just as Microsoft's workforce reductions cannot automatically be blamed for a specific network malfunction. The significance lies in the priorities established by an economic system where investment is allocated based on anticipated profitability rather than democratically determined social needs.

Technology analyst Rupert Goodwins raised this broader issue during the disruption, contending that Microsoft's intense focus on artificial intelligence risked marginalising mature services such as email and Teams. He also highlighted the departure of experienced engineers and the risk of losing accumulated institutional knowledge. While this argument does not establish the technical origin of the November failure, it sheds light on the corporate environment in which essential infrastructure is maintained.

For investors, artificial intelligence represents a potentially vast new field for capital accumulation. Outlook and Exchange are mature services whose operation may generate limited enthusiasm in financial markets. However, from a societal perspective, providing reliable communications to hospitals, ambulance services, courts, and government departments is likely more important than developing the next commercially promising AI application.

The market cannot resolve this contradiction because it generates it. Capital flows towards anticipated returns. Labour simultaneously appears as an expense to be reduced. Experienced engineers, administrators and support workers remain costs on corporate balance sheets even when the networks they maintain have become indispensable to the functioning of modern society.

The institutions of the capitalist state already acknowledge the extraordinary degree of concentration involved. Britain's Competition and Markets Authority concluded that Amazon and Microsoft have significant market power in cloud services. It also identified obstacles to switching providers or operating effectively across multiple clouds, including interoperability issues and Microsoft's software licensing practices.

Notably, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) describes cloud computing as "core infrastructure for the UK economy." This characterisation raises a more fundamental question than the regulator may intend. If cloud computing constitutes core national infrastructure, and if hospitals, government institutions, and businesses cannot function effectively without it, we must ask why its organisation, staffing, and investment priorities should remain the private concern of Microsoft, Amazon, and other technology corporations.

The conventional answer is increased competition. Regulators propose making it easier for customers to move between cloud providers by lowering barriers to transferring data, increasing interoperability, and challenging restrictive licensing arrangements. Some of these changes could undoubtedly improve resilience and make individual organisations less dependent upon a particular provider. But competition between monopolies does not constitute democratic ownership. Dividing an organisation's dependency between Microsoft and Amazon may reduce the consequences of one supplier's failure, but society remains a customer, not the owner, of its essential infrastructure. The basic relationship therefore persists.

Perhaps the most politically revealing feature of the November failure was accordingly the position occupied by governments themselves. Ministers could investigate the effects upon public services, engineers could cooperate with Microsoft, and officials could communicate the corporation's assurances that the event was not a cyberattack. But governments themselves could not repair Microsoft's infrastructure.

They had to wait for Microsoft to diagnose its network, implement repairs, and explain the failure. Governments commanding intelligence services, armed forces, and enormous administrative bureaucracies have nevertheless allowed essential components of their civilian communications systems to depend on infrastructure controlled by private technology corporations.

This dependence partly explains the growing discussion of "digital sovereignty", particularly within Europe. Yet reducing European dependence upon American technology companies is not equivalent to establishing democratic control over technology. Replacing Microsoft with nationally favoured European corporations would merely reorganise private technological dependency along geographical lines.

Under conditions of increasing protectionism, economic nationalism and geopolitical conflict, the demand for technological sovereignty can readily become part of the struggle between competing capitalist states. Workers have no fundamental interest in choosing between American, European or Chinese technology monopolies. The question facing them is who owns and controls the infrastructure itself.

Government policy nevertheless remains confined to regulation. Every major technological breakdown produces the same declarations. Resilience must be strengthened, updates tested more carefully, contingency arrangements improved, suppliers diversified and lessons learned. Investigations are promised, and regulators consider modifications to existing market structures. Then another failure occurs.

The problem is not that technical failures can be permanently eliminated. Any sufficiently complex computing system will eventually experience hardware problems, programming errors, configuration mistakes or unforeseen interactions. Public ownership would no more abolish computer failures than public ownership of transport could abolish mechanical breakdowns.

The decisive question is who controls the conditions within which those failures take place. Who determines staffing levels, maintenance budgets and investment priorities? Who decides whether experienced engineers are retained? Who determines the level of redundancy built into critical systems? And who possesses the information necessary to investigate failures affecting millions of people?

Under the existing system, these questions are ultimately subordinate to corporate property. Microsoft's engineers may possess immense technical expertise, but they do not determine Microsoft's overall economic strategy. Decisions involving capital expenditure, employment and corporate priorities are conditioned by competition for markets, profitability and shareholder returns.

The contradiction therefore is not between competent engineers and unreliable technology. It lies between an immensely sophisticated collective productive apparatus and the social relations that control it. Digital networks are created and maintained through the labour of enormous numbers of people, yet decisive control over those networks remains concentrated within a tiny number of corporations.

The November breakdown belongs to a wider series of technological infrastructure failures. CrowdStrike in July 2024 demonstrated the international consequences of distributing a defective update across millions of computers. Amazon Web Services subsequently experienced major disruption, while Microsoft has suffered repeated service problems. The immediate technical explanations have varied considerably, but the underlying social relationship has remained remarkably consistent.

In each case, innumerable organisations depended upon technological infrastructure concentrated within a handful of companies. When something failed, customers depended on those companies to diagnose their systems, repair their infrastructure, and explain their failures. Corporate ownership survived while workers and the wider population absorbed the consequences.

This is why describing such events simply as "outages" is inadequate. The word isolates the immediate technical fault from the economic structure that gives it extraordinary social significance. A server malfunction is a technological event. Hundreds of millions of people becoming dependent upon the functioning of a relatively small number of privately controlled systems is a social relationship.

Cloud computing itself represents an extraordinary form of socialised production. Engineers, programmers, electricians, construction workers, semiconductor workers, scientists and telecommunications workers across numerous countries contribute to systems no individual corporation could have created independently of the accumulated development of modern science and technology.

The internet emerged from decades of scientific research and enormous public investment. Contemporary computing rests upon generations of work in physics, mathematics, telecommunications, semiconductor manufacturing and software engineering. Yet the resulting infrastructure confronts society as the private property of corporations.

Microsoft 365 expresses this contradiction starkly. Hospitals, courts, governments and businesses can communicate through interconnected networks spanning the globe. The technology demonstrates humanity's extraordinary capacity to integrate productive and intellectual activity internationally. Yet a network change within one corporation can simultaneously interrupt those communications across national boundaries.

Capitalism has therefore created technological interdependence without creating democratic control over interconnected technology. Modern production and communication have taken on an increasingly international and social character, while ownership of essential infrastructure remains private and highly concentrated.

More careful testing, redundant systems, open standards and improved interoperability are all worthwhile. Governments, hospitals and other essential organisations plainly require reliable contingency arrangements when centralised systems fail. But these measures cannot answer the political question exposed by the events of 12 November.

Why should infrastructure upon which hospitals, courts, emergency services and governments depend be privately owned at all?

Microsoft's technology is not the enemy, nor are the engineers who created and maintain it. On the contrary, the global communications systems operated by Microsoft and its competitors embody an extraordinary technical and social achievement. They show what internationally coordinated human labour and scientific development can produce.

The obstacle is subordinating this social achievement to private ownership. Essential digital infrastructure should instead be treated as a public utility, publicly owned and democratically controlled by the workers who build and maintain it together with the population that depends upon it.

Investment decisions could then be guided by social needs rather than corporate rivalry. Reliability, adequate staffing, redundancy, security and the preservation of accumulated engineering knowledge could become explicit social priorities rather than costs continually weighed against profit margins and investor expectations.

Such organisation cannot ultimately be achieved simply by nationalising one corporation within an otherwise capitalist economy. Digital infrastructure is already international. The workers producing it are international, the networks themselves cross borders, and the populations depending upon them extend across continents. The rational organisation of such infrastructure must therefore also assume an international character.

The November 2026 Microsoft outage demonstrated in concentrated form one of the central contradictions of contemporary capitalism. Humanity has created communications technology capable of integrating society on an unprecedented scale, yet control of that technology is increasingly concentrated within corporations accountable principally to private capital.

The solution is neither nostalgia for the world before cloud computing nor the nationalist project of replacing American monopolies with European or other national competitors. It is to bring ownership into conformity with the technology's already social character.

Infrastructure society depends on should be collectively owned and democratically controlled. Until we resolve that fundamental contradiction, another massive technological failure will not be an inexplicable aberration. It will remain an ever-present possibility built into a system that has placed the increasingly interconnected infrastructure of social life under private monopoly control.

Bibliography

Al Jazeera. Heba Habib, “Microsoft hit by global outages: What happened and why?” 13 November 2026.

Competition and Markets Authority. Cloud Market Investigation: Final Decision Report. London: CMA, 2025.

Competition and Markets Authority. Update on Cloud Actions: Covering March–October 2026. London: CMA, 16 October 2026.

Competition and Markets Authority. Microsoft's Business Software Ecosystem: Strategic Market Status Investigation. 2026.

CrowdStrike. Preliminary Post Incident Review: Windows Sensor Content Update. 2024.

Forbes. Kate O'Flaherty, “Microsoft Apologises for Outage and Reveals Cause.” 13 November 2026, updated 14 November 2026.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I. London: Penguin/New Left Review, 1976.

Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin/New Left Review, 1973.

Braverman, Harry. Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974.

Mandel, Ernest. Late Capitalism. London: New Left Books, 1975.

Noble, David F. Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Srnicek, Nick. Platform Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity, 2017.

Wu, Tim. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.

US House Committee on Homeland Security. Committee materials on the July 2024 CrowdStrike global IT outage. September 2024.

  

Sixty years since Cathy Come Home: Ken Loach's indictment of the housing crisis has lost none of its force

On November 16, 1966, the BBC broadcast a 75-minute drama about a young mother driven into destitution by Britain's housing shortage. Six decades later, record numbers of children are growing up in temporary accommodation, and the social order that produced Cathy's fate remains in place.

On the evening of 16th November 1966, some 12 million people (a quarter of the UK population) were watching the Wednesday Play on BBC1 and saw Cathy Come Home. Jeremy Sandford wrote it, Tony Garnett produced it, and 30-year-old Ken Loach directed it. It's the story of a young working-class woman going from a brief period of security to homelessness. It ends with her children being taken from her by the social workers in a railway station as she screams and writhes and the passers-by look on.

60 years on, that ending is not a historical footnote. The government's own stats show that on 31st March 2026, 135,580 households in England were living in temporary accommodation (the highest ever recorded). Of those, 177,530 were children (another record, up 5% in the year). One in five families with children in temporary accommodation have been there for five years or more (one in three in London). In April, a parliamentary group reported that between April 2019 and March 2025, 104 children had died in England with temporary accommodation being a factor in their vulnerability, ill health or death. Of those 104, 76 were babies under one.

These are not the conditions of a society that had learned the lessons of Cathy Come Home. They are the conditions of a society that celebrated Cathy Come Home, set up all sorts of charities in its name, and then, over the next fifty years, systematically dismantled the modest gains achieved in the period that followed. The liberal framing of this anniversary is very telling. The "sixty years on and all we've really achieved is nothing" lament treats the continuing housing crisis as a mystery or a policy failure that some more enlightened government could have fixed. It isn't. The housing crisis is not a failure of capitalism. It is a product of it.

A drama in the form of a documentary

It's a very simple story, and that's its strength. Cathy (Carol White) moves from the provinces to London where she meets and marries Reg (Ray Brooks), a lorry driver. For a brief period, they live in a fairly modern flat with all the paraphernalia of the postwar consumer boom. Reg gets injured at work, his wages cease, and the family are off down the dunny. They get evicted. They move into his mother's overcrowded tenement flat, where tempers run high. They get rooms with a very kind old landlady and are then pushed out through the courts when she dies. They live in a caravan until the locals come over and attack the site. Then they're in a derelict building. Eventually Cathy and the kids are put into a council hostel for the homeless. Husbands aren't allowed there. The rules split up the family before force does.

Loach and Garnett had worked together on Up the Junction (1965), and in Cathy they went even further in defying the conventions of television drama. Much of it was actually shot on 16mm film on location with handheld cameras, real streets and real hostels. Union rules at the time meant that about ten minutes still had to be shot in the studio and spliced in. Over the images, Loach laid the voices of people experiencing homelessness that Sandford had recorded over many years of research, together with the rather dry pronouncements of officials. The film ends with a series of captions giving the bare statistics of the housing crisis.

The impact was absolutely staggering, and it caused real concern within the establishment. Critics were in no doubt that blending documentary with fiction was a form of deception, and that the viewer could not tell what was real. Underlying the complaint about the form was a complaint about the content. What the critics found so troubling wasn't that Cathy was a fiction; it was that it was true. Every episode in the film drew on actual cases Sandford had documented. The welfare state the postwar Labour government had promised would look after its people 'from cradle to grave' was shown, in its day-to-day operation, to be a system that, in fact, penalised the poor for being poor.

The film's real artistic achievement is that it doesn't present Cathy and Reg as victims of their own shortcomings. They're just ordinary, likeable, occasionally foolish young people. Nothing they do is in any way to blame for what happens to them. Each step down results from an external force: an injury, a landlord, a rule, a waiting list, a rent they can't pay. The middle-class viewer who wanted to believe that homelessness was the inevitable fate of drunks and wasters had that belief completely eradicated.

This is what gives the film its enduring power. It doesn't present homelessness as some individual's misfortune or moral failing. It shows it as something the system does to people, the result of the system's machinery in action (the landlord, the court, the council official, the hostel regime). Cathy is absolutely part of the great current of British art of that period: the realist tradition of the late 1950s and 1960s, when a whole generation of writers and filmmakers turned their attention to the pressing social issues of the day. As the WSWS pointed out in 2010, Loach "first came to prominence in the late 1960s with television work such as Cathy Come Home". It is the most complete example of what that tradition could achieve in a mass medium.

What followed, and what was taken back

Shelter was founded on 1st December 1966, just a couple of weeks after the broadcast. It was a planned organisation, but it rode the wave of public outrage the film generated. The crisis returned in 1967, with the play performed again, taken up in Parliament, and discussed for years. It's frequently credited with helping bring about the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act 1977, which for the first time placed a legal obligation on local authorities to house certain categories of homeless families.

It would be a mistake to think the TV play shifted housing policy through moral suasion. Cathy came out at the height of the postwar boom, when a militant working class could still be expected to win concessions from the ruling class. Council house building was at its peak. Housing completions in Britain actually peaked in 1968 at over 400,000. The changes of that period resulted from the balance of class forces rather than any particularly enlightened policy by politicians.

When that balance was upset, they took back the concessions. Thatcher's Right to Buy (1980) saw some 2 million council homes sold off in England, and councils were effectively prevented from using the proceeds to build new homes. New Labour under Blair and Brown continued the process via stock transfers and a reliance on private developers. The Conservative-Lib Dem coalition after 2010 froze housing benefit, introduced the bedroom tax and cut council budgets right across the board. The most horrific example of what decades of neglect of the working-class tenant had led to was the Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017, which killed 72 people.

The Labour government elected in 2024 promised to build 1.5m homes by 2029. They're not on track. Their National Plan to End Homelessness (which only emerged in December 2025 after a very long delay) contains no assurance that the social housing required to end homelessness will actually be built. Their flagship £39bn programme targets around 300,000 social and affordable homes over the next decade, of which some 180,000 would be for social rent. That's a very small proportion of what is required, and it's spread over ten years. The freeze on Local Housing Allowance (the cap on housing benefit for private renters) was maintained in the Autumn Budget 2026, despite clear warnings from homelessness charities that this would push more and more families out of their homes.

Meanwhile, councils across England are now spending nearly £3bn a year on temporary accommodation. A significant portion of that goes to private landlords and hotel operators to house families in single rooms, often some way from their schools, their jobs and their families. The social workers who looked after Cathy's children have all been replaced by 'out of area placements' and for many families the result is the same.

What's changed in the last 60 years isn't the crisis per se but the framework in which the crisis exists. The post-war social democratic settlement, which was the very context of Cathy Come Home and which the film implicitly sought to appeal to, is gone. Council housing has been sold off, rent controls have been removed, and housing has become a financial asset class. The crisis that Cathy Come Home first exposed in embryo has been generalised.

The limits of a perspective

The film's makers were not neutral observers. Garnett and Loach were drawn towards revolutionary socialist politics in the years after Cathy, and their later collaborations, such as Days of Hope (1975), written with Jim Allen, dealt directly with the betrayals of the Labour leadership. Loach has remained the most consistently socially critical filmmaker Britain has produced, from Kes (1969) to I, Daniel Blake (2016) and The Old Oak (2023).

The WSWS have repeatedly acknowledged the seriousness and integrity of this body of work from Kes through to Riff Raff, My Name is Joe, I, Daniel Blake, The Navigators and I and Route Irish. David Walsh's 2010 review of Route Irish said Loach had stood out in the rather dismal cinematic landscape of the previous 30 years. His political journey has also shown the limits of an approach that pressures Labour and the state into doing the right thing. He founded Left Unity in 2013, backed Corbyn's leadership from the outset and was kicked out of the Labour Party in 2021 under Keir Starmer. The party he had so passionately encouraged working people to put their faith in has, in fact, turned on him and, in office, has seen record levels of child homelessness.

Loach's political perspective has remained anchored to the Labour Party and the trade union bureaucracy, the very institutions that, in office, presided over the destruction of the housing stock his films document. His 2013 documentary The Spirit of '45 expressed this most clearly. It looked back on the Attlee government's nationalisations and council housebuilding with nostalgia, as a lost golden age to be restored rather than a period whose limits the following decades exposed. Stefan Steinberg's review on the WSWS argued that the film revealed Loach's "very serious and even fatal limitations." A return to 1945 cannot solve the housing crisis, because the reforms of 1945 were themselves concessions made within capitalism, and capitalism has spent the decades since clawing them back.

This attitude also appears in Cathy Come Home itself. The film's anger is directed at the bureaucracy, the rules and the sheer indifference of the officials. The closing captions are, in effect, a plea to the government to build more houses. That was a legitimate and very valid demand in 1966. The film doesn't ask why, in one of the richest countries in the world, housing should be treated as a commodity and a source of profit rather than a social right.

To the Guardian, on the film's 50th anniversary in 2016, Loach said more people than ever wanted a home. Back in 1966, there was still council housing; now there is only the market, and the market has failed. That description of the state of affairs is spot on. The diagnosis is a bit off. From the point of view of the developers, landlords, and financial investors who own housing in Britain, the market has not failed in the least. Rents and house prices are at record levels, and housing is one of the most profitable assets in the economy. The market is working perfectly, as designed. It has failed the working class.

This was Engels' point in The Housing Question (1872) in direct opposition to the petty-bourgeois reformers of his day who thought they could solve the housing question within the existing order. He showed that the housing shortage was a product of the capitalist mode of production: the subordination of land and shelter to the pursuit of profit, rising rents, and the periodic clearance of working-class districts to make way for commercial development. As long as the capitalist mode of production exists, then "it is sheer folly to hope for an isolated solution of the housing question". Only its abolition could make a real solution possible. That analysis is just as valid in 2026 as it was in 1872 or 1966. Every gain won within the system is only temporary and is easily reversed, as the last 60 years have so clearly demonstrated.

A film for today

Cathy Come Home has not lost an iota of its power. The images of a young family being shuffled from room to hostel to the street, of a mother having her children taken from her because she has no place to live, are just as potent in 2026 as they were in 1966. The technique remains remarkable in its urgency, its complete lack of sentimentality, and its use of real voices to cut through the fiction.

The real lesson of Cathy Come Home at 60 is not so much that nothing has changed as why that is the case. Housing is still a commodity. The parties that profess to be the voice of the working people have, in fact, served the property-owning class in office. The working class have not yet forged the independent political force which could take housing out of the market. Over 177,000 children in England today have no home at all. The solution isn't a better charity or a more compassionate government. The solution is socialist expropriation of banks, landlords, and property developers, and the conversion of housing from a source of profit to a social right.

---

Bibliography

The film

Cathy Come Home. Dir. Ken Loach. Writ. Jeremy Sandford. Prod. Tony Garnett. The Wednesday Play, BBC1, first broadcast November 16, 1966.

The Spirit of '45. Dir. Ken Loach. 2013.

Books and articles

Cooke, Lez. British Television Drama: A History. London: BFI Publishing, 2003.

Engels, Friedrich. The Housing Question. 1872. Various editions, including Marx/Engels Selected Works, Vol. 2.

Fitzpatrick, Suzanne, and Hal Pawson. "Fifty Years since Cathy Come Home: Critical Reflections on the UK Homelessness Safety Net." International Journal of Housing Policy 16, no. 4 (2016): 543–555.

Fuller, Graham, ed. Loach on Loach. London: Faber and Faber, 1998.

Garnett, Tony. The Day the Music Died: A Life Behind the Lens. London: Constable, 2016.

Hill, John. Ken Loach: The Politics of Film and Television. London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Sandford, Jeremy. Cathy Come Home. London: Pan Books, 1967.

Steinberg, Stefan. "What filmmaker Ken Loach makes of The Spirit of '45." World Socialist Web Site, 2013; republished March 26, 2023.

Walsh, David. "Ken Loach's Route Irish: the Iraq war comes home." World Socialist Web Site, October 21, 2010.

Whitehouse, Lisa. "Are there any 'deserving poor' anymore?" Southampton Law School Blog, April 1, 2026.

Official statistics and reports

All-Party Parliamentary Group for Households in Temporary Accommodation / Shared Health Foundation. Child Mortality in Temporary Accommodation. April 2026.

Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee. England's Homeless Children: The Crisis in Temporary Accommodation. House of Commons, 2025.

Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. National Plan to End Homelessness. December 11, 2025.

Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. Statutory Homelessness in England: January to March 2026. Published August 13, 2026.

Press and campaign sources

Big Issue. "Everything you need to know about Labour's homelessness strategy." 2025.

Big Issue. "104 children's deaths linked to living in temporary accommodation: 'We should be outraged'." April 2026.

Big Issue North. "Preview: Cathy" (on Cardboard Citizens' adaptation and Loach's 2016 Guardian interview). December 2016.

Jeraj, Samir. "How homeless children die." New Statesman, April 26, 2026.

Puddicombe, Stephen. "50 years on, Ken Loach's Cathy Come Home is as powerful as ever." Little White Lies, November 16, 2016.

Shelter. "Number of children homeless in England highest since records began." Press release, August 13, 2026.

 

Philippines: Poverty, Big Tech and the sextortion economy

 Sextortion, image-based sexual abuse and the online exploitation of children are spreading fast across the Philippines. They grow out of mass poverty, a labour-export economy and the profit drive of the tech monopolies, and Manila's political establishment has neither the will nor the means to stop them.

Over the past decade, the Philippines has become one of the main centres of a global trade in sexual blackmail. In its most common form, a perpetrator wins a victim's trust online, gets hold of intimate images, then threatens to send them to family, friends or employers unless the victim pays money or hands over more material. Images are sometimes obtained by deception, sometimes recorded in secret, and increasingly faked outright with artificial intelligence.

The victims are Filipino and foreign: schoolchildren in the provinces, young women blackmailed by former partners, overseas workers, and teenage boys in Britain, the United States and Hong Kong. The crimes are carried out on Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram and TikTok. Some of the richest corporations on earth own the platforms.

The arrests reported in the Philippine press this year give only a glimpse. A man in Zamboanga City was arrested in February for blackmailing a former girlfriend with explicit photographs. The National Bureau of Investigation arrested another man in January for leaking intimate videos to coerce an ex-partner. A woman overseas Filipino worker (OFW) was targeted by a sextortionist shortly after landing at Ninoy Aquino International Airport. In March, police in Manila arrested a suspect accused of extorting foreign nationals online.

The Foundation for Media Alternatives (FMA), which tracks technology-facilitated gender-based violence, documented 52 cases in the first half of 2026 alone. It noted that reports rose in the opening months of the year. It covers only cases that reach the foundation. The real figure is many times higher. Shame, family pressure to protect the household's reputation and distrust of the police keep most victims silent.

A generation targeted

Children and adolescents bear the brunt. The Disrupting Harm in the Philippines study was published in 2022 by ECPAT International, Interpol and UNICEF's Office of Research-Innocenti. It surveyed internet-using children aged 12 to 17. One in five said they had suffered grave forms of online sexual exploitation and abuse in the previous year, including blackmail into sexual acts and the sharing of their images without consent. Scaled to the population, the researchers estimated that as many as two million children were affected in a single year.

Where this abuse happened on social media, Facebook and Messenger accounted for more than 90 per cent of cases. Most cases Philippine authorities investigated were first reported by foreign police forces and NGOs, not detected at home.

UNICEF has estimated that 80 per cent of Filipino children are vulnerable to online sexual abuse. In 2016, it described the country as the global epicentre of the trade in live-streamed child sexual abuse. Its national study listed the conditions that make the country such fertile ground: widespread English, cheap access to phones and the internet, and well-established money-transfer networks built to serve the remittance economy. In some cases, it found, children's own parents arranged the abuse.

A July 2025 report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime found that teenage boys are by far the largest target group in the recent surge of financial sextortion. Typically, criminals approach them through fake profiles posing as girls. The same report noted that the Philippines is home to criminals who run sextortion schemes against victims in other countries. Britain's National Crime Agency made this point in a 2025 campaign aimed at boys. Government operations rescued 41 minors from online sexual abuse in January and February 2026 alone.

Blackmail runs like a call centre.

Sextortion in the Philippines is not mainly the work of lone individuals. Much of it is an organised industry, and it copies the labour discipline of the business process outsourcing (BPO) sector that dominates the country's urban employment.

This became clear in 2014, when Philippine police and Interpol arrested 58 people in a crackdown on an international sextortion network. In Bicol, investigators found that the operations were disguised as call centres. The Bicol groups had also built their own payment arrangements, designed to be hard for the authorities to trace. A Hong Kong police official told Inquirer.net that almost all the sextortion cases in his territory could be traced back to the Philippines.

At the time, the national police chief called the Philippines the "sextortion capital of the world." Interpol officials rejected the label, pointing out that similar operations existed elsewhere and that the Philippines had been singled out because Manila had requested cooperation. That point deserves to be stressed. The problem is not a Filipino national trait. It is what happens when a desperate, educated, English-speaking workforce is plugged into a global digital economy with few legitimate outlets.

The money flows through the same channels as the remittances of millions of OFWs. A 2023 study by the University of Nottingham's Rights Lab found that money service businesses such as Western Union and PayPal remain the main payment routes in online child exploitation cases in the Philippines. The corporations that profit from the remittance trade have every incentive to keep that infrastructure fast, cheap and lightly policed.

The class roots of the crisis

The official discourse treats sextortion as a problem of individual morality, parental neglect or poor "digital literacy." This conveniently ignores the social conditions that produce it.

The Philippines is a country where millions of workers survive on informal and precarious jobs. Millions more are exported abroad as domestic workers, seafarers and care workers because the domestic economy cannot employ them. Whole families depend on remittances. Phones and cheap data are everywhere, but decent jobs are not. In these conditions, criminal syndicates find no shortage of recruits, and abusers find no shortage of vulnerable targets.

The COVID-19 pandemic made everything worse. Under Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines imposed some of the longest and harshest lockdowns in the world, enforced by police and the military. Children were banned from public spaces such as parks and shopping malls and confined to their homes and their phones. At the same time, mass layoffs plunged millions of families into deeper poverty. Researchers and child welfare agencies agree that online sexual exploitation surged in this period, driven in part by job losses and economic hardship.

The overseas worker system adds its own vulnerabilities. Long separations break up families and relationships, and intimate communication moves online. Workers abroad and their partners at home become targets for blackmail, and the threat of exposure to an employer can mean the loss of a job on which a whole family depends.

The tech monopolies and the deepfake threat

The platforms through which this abuse is carried out are not neutral pipes. Meta, which owns Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp, built its fortune on maximising engagement and harvesting user data. Its business model depends on letting strangers connect with as little friction as possible. Facebook dominates internet use in the Philippines to the point that, for many, it is the internet.

These corporations spend vast sums on lobbying and public relations, and comparatively little on protecting the people who use their services in poorer countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Content moderation in Filipino languages has long been under-resourced. When Meta made end-to-end encryption the default on Messenger at the end of 2023, child protection organisations warned it would make abuse harder to detect. The company went ahead regardless.

Now artificial intelligence is adding a new dimension. Cheap tools can produce convincing fake sexual images of anyone from an ordinary photograph. In February 2026, Philippine child-rights groups warned of rising online child exploitation using AI tools. Victims no longer need ever to have shared an intimate image to be blackmailed or humiliated. The same technology companies racing to dominate the AI market, and pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into it, have shown little interest in the social consequences.

Laws on paper, poverty in practice

The Philippine ruling class points to its laws: the Anti-Photo and Video Voyeurism Act of 2009, the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012, the Safe Spaces Act of 2019 and the Anti-Online Sexual Abuse or Exploitation of Children law of 2022. Each was passed with fanfare. Neither has stemmed the tide.

The Cybercrime Prevention Act is telling. Its most vigorous use has been its online libel provisions, wielded against journalists and critics of the government. The police anti-cybercrime units are small and swamped. Courts are slow. Victims who come forward face a gruelling process, and many give up.

Ferdinand Marcos Jr.'s administration has other priorities. It has thrown open the country to an expanded US military presence and is integrating the Philippines into Washington's war preparations against China. Resources flow to the armed forces while public schools, social welfare and child protection services are starved. Arrests of individual blackmailers and periodic raids on "dens" make good headlines, but they leave untouched the conditions that keep recruits and new victims coming.

The sexual exploitation of Filipino children and young people is a crime of global capitalism. It is fed by the poverty created by decades of imperialist domination, by an economy organised around exporting cheap labour, and by tech corporations that profit from every click. Ending it requires more than awareness campaigns and tougher sentences. It requires that the vast resources monopolised by a tiny elite be used to guarantee every family secure, well-paid jobs, decent housing, free quality education and real social services.

It also requires that the social media giants be taken out of private hands and placed under the democratic control of the working class, so that they are run to meet human need rather than to maximise profit. That is a task facing workers in the Philippines, the United States, Britain, and around the world, who must unite across borders in the fight for socialism.

Sources

• Foundation for Media Alternatives: Mid-Year Report on TFGBV in the Philippines, January–June 2026
• Philstar: 2 million children in Philippines may have been victims of online sexual abuse (Disrupting Harm)
• The Guardian via Yahoo: One in five older children in the Philippines suffer online sexual abuse
• UNICEF Philippines: National Study on OSAEC, Executive Summary
• Quartz: UNICEF calls the Philippines the global epicentre of live-streamed abuse
• DevelopmentAid: Philippines grapples with online child sexual abuse
• GI-TOC: Organised child sexual exploitation in Southeast Asia (July 2025)
• Inquirer.net: Remittances, IP addresses led to arrest of 58 sextortionists
• University of Nottingham Rights Lab: Payment methods in OSEC cases (2023)
• GMA News: 41 minors rescued in anti-online sexual abuse ops, Jan–Feb 2026
• Brigada News: Man arrested in Zamboanga for blackmailing ex-girlfriend
• Diskurso PH: NBI arrests man for leaking intimate videos
• Dubai OFW: OFW threatened with private video, suspect arrested at NAIA
• Daily Tribune: Online extortion suspect targeting foreign

 

London Library members fight commercial redevelopment of historic institution.

Members of the London Library are contesting a multimillion-pound redevelopment that would allocate significant space in the historic St James’s Square institution to catering, events, and a rooftop terrace, even as the Library acknowledges it is running out of room for books. The dispute has highlighted fundamental questions regarding the commercialisation of libraries and other cultural institutions. Space for books, reading, and research is increasingly evaluated in terms of revenue and financial return. At the same time, users of these institutions have little influence over decisions that shape their future.

Book historian Nicholas Pickwoad has intervened by challenging both the redevelopment and the treatment of dissenting members in a recent letter to the Times Literary Supplement. Pickwoad trained in bookbinding and conservation and has served as an adviser on book conservation to the National Trust. His career includes work at Harvard University Library and the Ligatus Research Centre. Founded in 1841, the London Library calls itself the world’s largest independent lending library, with a collection of about one million volumes. It has served generations of writers and researchers and continues to promote itself as a place for reading, writing, and research. The institution now also prominently brands itself as “the home of literary inspiration”. This shift in language coincides with a physical transformation of the building, as catering, events, and attracting new audiences become increasingly significant.

A central contradiction underlies the controversy. The London Library states that its shelf capacity is “effectively full,” with occupancy in many areas between 92 and 95 per cent. The Library adds approximately 6,000 books each year, necessitating about 180 metres of additional shelving annually. Space constraints are already impacting the collection. The Library has acknowledged that it is considering removing materials that no longer meet members’ needs, are available electronically, or fall outside its core collection strengths. Depending on the material, this may involve sale, donation, or recycling. Under these conditions, valuable space is being committed to enhanced catering and events provision.

The controversy is not fundamentally about members’ access to coffee. The essential issue concerns what should take priority when one of Britain’s most important independent libraries lacks sufficient space for its books. The plans' financial scale has intensified opposition. GB News reported in January 2026 that a development including a rooftop garden and café was estimated at £5 million. By March, The Londoner described opponents contesting £7 million plans for a sixth-floor café and rooftop terrace.

Management has presented the development as part of an effort to expand the institution. GB News reported a target of attracting 800 additional members, generating more than £400,000 a year in membership fees. Such arguments are now commonplace across the cultural sector. Libraries, museums, universities, galleries, and similar institutions are required to seek additional revenue sources and to utilise their buildings for commercial purposes. Catering, venue hire, and events are presented as essential ways to finance the institution’s core cultural functions.

But the supposedly supporting activities increasingly reshape the institution they are meant to sustain. A reading room or a collection of books generates no immediate financial return, whereas a commercial event, catered function, or café does. When income generation becomes the primary criterion for evaluating space, activities fundamental to a library inevitably face pressure from those that can produce revenue.

The conflict has intensified as opponents claim that efforts to organise among members have been restricted. Campaigners distributed leaflets opposing the development, after which the Library introduced a rule prohibiting the distribution of “posters, flyers, leaflets, notices or similar anywhere on the premises”. Historian and former trustee Rick Stroud publicly condemned the restriction as censorship “right at the heart of a library”. The Library denied accusations of suppressing debate and said it welcomed members expressing their views on its plans.

The controversy persisted. The Londoner reported that chairman Simon Godwin confronted campaigners distributing flyers on the Library steps and informed them that leafleting would be prohibited. Godwin was formally confirmed as chairman of the trustees in November 2023. Before this role, he was a founding partner and finance director of the asset-management firm Fundsmith. He was also a long-standing London Library member and part of its Founders’ Circle of supporters.

This background is not primarily personal. It points towards the wider system of governance imposed upon cultural institutions. Decisions affecting collections, reading spaces and the conditions experienced by researchers are increasingly made within structures dominated by considerations of fundraising, finance, property utilisation, branding and institutional growth. Members and professional users are asked for their views, but they do not exercise effective control. Defenders of the redevelopment have attempted to present the controversy as a conflict between modernisation and conservative resistance to change. This is a false opposition.

There is nothing inherently progressive about replacing space devoted to books or scholarship with commercial activities. Nor is there anything reactionary about insisting that a library's principal responsibility is to preserve books, develop its collections, and provide the best possible conditions in which they can be studied.

The members’ alternative is modest. Rather than a fully catered commercial café, opponents have supported an improved members’ room where readers can rest, talk, eat and obtain tea or coffee without transforming another part of the institution into a hospitality operation.

The issue is therefore not improvement versus stagnation. It is what constitutes an improvement to a library. The London Library dispute has important precedents. In 2013, an intense controversy erupted at Senate House Libraries at the University of London over plans to sell four seventeenth-century Shakespeare folios. Academic opposition led to the abandonment of the proposed sale, and the library director subsequently resigned.

The Senate House struggle revealed in particularly stark form a contradiction that confronts collections everywhere. From a scholarly standpoint, rare books and historic collections constitute part of humanity’s accumulated cultural inheritance. From the market's standpoint, they can appear as financial assets whose sale might release capital for another purpose. The same contradiction applies to buildings. To a reader or historian, a reading room provides the physical conditions necessary for intellectual work. Viewed according to commercial criteria, the same room occupies extraordinarily expensive central London property while generating little or no direct income.

The London Library is admittedly a private subscription institution whose membership cannot be identified with the millions who depend on public-library services. But this does not make the controversy any less significant. If an institution with an international reputation, around a million volumes and a comparatively affluent membership is under pressure to devote scarce space to catering and income-generating functions even while its book stacks approach capacity, the situation facing public libraries deprived of adequate funding is still more severe.

Years of austerity have demonstrated the consequences. Libraries must reduce expenditure, justify their premises, and dispose of supposedly surplus resources. Cultural provision that previous generations fought to establish is treated as a financial liability whenever it cannot demonstrate an immediate commercial return. This development cannot be separated from the increasing concentration of social wealth at the opposite pole of society. Vast private fortunes coexist with libraries, universities, museums, and arts institutions permanently instructed that they lack sufficient money to support their basic activities.

The claim that cultural institutions must therefore accommodate themselves to the market accepts precisely the conditions responsible for their degradation. Libraries cannot ultimately be defended according to commercial criteria because their true social value cannot be measured commercially. No meaningful financial calculation can express the value of preserving an obscure book until a future researcher needs it, allowing a young writer to encounter ideas unavailable elsewhere, or maintaining collections accumulated through generations of intellectual labour. The same principle extends beyond libraries to archives, museums, galleries, orchestras and universities. Their essential purpose is incompatible with reducing every part of cultural life to a source of income. The opposition mounted by London Library members therefore deserves support. But defending the institution means more than defeating a particular café plan. It requires rejecting the idea that culture must continually demonstrate its profitability to justify its existence.

Libraries and other cultural institutions should receive the resources required to expand their collections, employ skilled staff, preserve their buildings and make knowledge as widely accessible as possible. Readers, researchers and those who work in these institutions must have a genuine democratic voice in determining their development. The struggle over the London Library is, in this sense, one expression of a much broader conflict: whether humanity’s accumulated cultural inheritance is to be maintained and expanded as a social resource, or increasingly subordinated to the demands of the market.

Bibliography

Primary source

Pickwoad, Nicholas. Letter concerning the London Library redevelopment and members’ opposition. Times Literary Supplement, 2026. Exact issue number and publication date to be confirmed.

London Library and governance

The London Library. The home of literary inspiration. London Library website. https://www.londonlibrary.co.uk/

The London Library. Building Connections: Phase One Update. London Library website.

The London Library. Making Space: Our Collection – Making Space for the Future. London Library website. https://www.londonlibrary.co.uk/making-space

The London Library. Minutes of the 183rd Annual General Meeting. November 2024.

The London Library. History of The London Library. London Library website.

Charity Commission for England and Wales. The London Library, charity no. 312175: Trustees.

The Bookseller. “Godwin confirmed as new chair of trustees at The London Library.” 15 November 2023.

 Coverage of the dispute

Jeffries, Richard. “Historic 180-year-old library engulfed in censorship row as members left furious by strict new rule.” GB News, 31 January 2026.

The Londoner. “The civil war inside the capital’s most elite literary institution.” 11 March 2026.

Moore, Charles. “Has the assisted dying lobby considered the guillotine?” The Spectator, 2 November 2024.

Marr, Andrew. Commentary on the London Library dispute. New Statesman, 2026. Exact title and publication date to be confirmed.

The Bookseller. “The London Library begins consultation on improvements to St James’s home.”

Historical and wider context

Eliot, T. S., and Rupert Hart-Davis. “London Library.” Letter to The Times, 5 November 1959.

AEC Café. “The London Library in St James’ Square, London by Haworth Tompkins Ltd.” 30 May 2013.

Stillman, Michael. “Library Director Resigns Over Attempt to Sell Shakespeare Folios.” Rare Book Monthly, November 2013.

Ligatus Research Centre. “Nicholas Pickwoad.”