In February 2001, the Welsh rock group Manic Street Preachers played a concert in Havana. It was the first visit by a major Western artist to Cuba in 20 years. Prior to the show Fidel Castro met the group backstage, who advised him that the concert would be loud. To which Castro replied, “It can’t be louder than war, can it?”
In early 2001 war must have been the last thing on Castro’s mind. In 1999 the global price of sugar had dropped by one third, while the price of oil increased 2.5 times. Whether oil, sugar or war, or likely a combination of all three, ends up killing the Cuban Revolution, the conversation serves to illustrate the Left’s deaf, dumb and blind relationship to revolution: Volume. One louder. Turn the amps up to 11. Protest until you dry-heave.
The expansion of war from Palestine to Iran has at least managed to dispel the myth of a universally divided Left, no longer capable of rising above its internal contradictions. What’s being revealed instead with every precision airstrike is the spectacle of the Left everywhere… in power, which is to say ruling the world through the occupation of the moral high ground; the only power today’s Left—both parliamentarian and “sectarian”—is really interested in.
Cynics who believe the opposition to the current war on Iran is simply performative—a flurry of interviews, analysis, podcasts, all providing digital artisans with much needed income—couldn’t be more wrong. The fact that sugar declined and oil increased—and in the coming weeks may rise to 200 dollars a barrel—is the reason why the “digital economy” accounts for approximately 15% or 16 trillion dollars of global GDP.
Governing is hard work. Collective State management—an insult for leftists haunted by the spectre of Communism—obliges political subjects 1) to think and 2) to act in circumstances lacking recognition and any guarantee of reproducing the means of life. Why bother acting or thinking when you can sit on your backside all day, doing “journalism,” on Facebook, X, YouTube and Instagram? If national broadcasters are nothing more than global hedge funds, then citizen journalism, which shares the same platforms and is owned by the same dozen or so oligarchs, is nothing but a parody of what the national broadcasters also fail to do: namely, journalism.
The decision by Jeff Bezos in February 2026 to fire 300 Washington Post journalists and one third of its newsroom—essentially in order to transform the outlet into a boutique advertising platform—was completely misinterpreted as evidence of the owner’s desire for censorship. Which suggests an implausible level of political literacy among the billionaire class. A far likelier explanation is simply the decline in AI traffic to the Post’s website.
The reality of the war on Iran, and any attempt by the Left to mitigate that country’s destruction, is exactly the same, caught in the same bind, and facing exactly the same obstacle: hit the like button. Valorise. Increase visibility, and with it, advertising revenues. Today’s anti-war Left encounters its own impotence in the mirror of news production.
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In December 1969, in the fallout of the French General Strike of the previous year, Jacques Lacan predicted the fate of the dissident Left, in terms which today are seldom understood. In his “Impromptu” at the University of Vincennes, he accused his unruly student audience of trying to impose “university discourse,” or discourse of the perverse master, meaning the desire to replace the master with a new authoritarian master, i.e., themselves.
Lacan was wrong in one key respect: perversion. Is that the real object nowadays? Surely perversion constitutes enjoyment, just as repression constitutes enjoyment. With perversion taking up so much airtime, animating so much angry “opposition,” why would anyone want a cure? The Left is delighted by the Epstein scandal, since now they can finally name their desire in terms reminiscent of Saint Just, who when asking “What do they want, those who want neither Terror nor Virtue?” might have been talking to Tucker Carlson, Jimmy Fallon or Bad Bunny.
Imperialist adventures are today condensed in the social laboratory of Facebook posts to their bare essentials of public decency (like) and indecency (dislike). It’s not that morality has become binary. Instead, the binary reflex is now a moral imperative. The war on Iran has to this extent already been resolved in public discourse, just as the genocide was in Gaza: we know which side of history we’re on, the good people say, while failing to recognise that history has already ended. Sometimes there’s nothing to be done in the face of overwhelming repression. And yet when the combined forces of the Left merely contrive to march up and down and make speeches one still wonders whatever happened to political imagination.
So practised has the opposition (in power) become, so delighted with the spectacle of their own moral authority, that they will gladly take to the streets, in their millions when push comes to shove, in order to document it all on their gadgets, before gauging the reaction on X. Even so, far from being merely performative, the real effects of such activity cannot be downplayed or underestimated. In the first week of the war on Iran, US military spending was estimated at 11 billion dollars. The relationship between the billions of internet “users” (or nodes in the system) and the platforms invested in the software and hardware powering them, has become part of the balance sheet of this and every contemporary war.
The sci-fi proposition that we might end up simply betting on the outcome of a permanent virtual wargame, where the stakes simply consist of game credits, is implausible when one considers that the real stakes of war haven’t greatly altered since the beginning of mercantilism in the sixteenth century. Again the Left deludes itself with its combination of extraparliamentary activism (marching, posting on social media) and parliamentary agitation (one more rallying around a left-leaning candidate in pursuit of the pink unicorn of political office) because without the extractive economy that powers liberal democracy, and its mercantile valorisation (balance of payments), politics would become a far different proposition; one which the populations of Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and now Iran are being forced to live with.
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In early September 2025, when the Left’s narcissistic mobilisation over Palestine Action was reaching delirious heights—an activism that involved ordinary people having orgasms over the spectacle of their own arrest—a different form of activism was taking place across London. The media failed to do this uncanny incident justice, even if the spectacle had been newsworthy, which it wasn’t, because it was everywhere, and affected everyone.
Between 8 and 11 September the London Underground strike closed down the entire tube network, affecting 16 million commuter journeys. No attempt at mediation was made, no intervention from the London Mayor to bring management and workers together. The strike was simply allowed to run its course, as commuters scrambled for taxis and traffic ground to a halt.
The General Strike remains somewhat underdetermined in the history of modernity, and its political outcomes something of a mixed bag. Nonetheless one struggles to imagine a scenario in which today’s Left might overcome their collective ADHD and “down tools” with any singular-universal objective in mind. This is no moral failing on their part. In the context of the war on Iran, the sarcastic call to “take over your country” runs into exactly the same obstacle when the regime switches off the Internet. This raises the somewhat naive and perplexing question: What exactly is a revolution when it isn’t televised? What might that actually be?
Featured image: Fidel Castro greets Manic Street Preachers before a concert played by the Welsh band at the Karl Marx Theatre in Havana in February 2001. Photo: Tom Sheehan. Courtesy of Outsideleft.
