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No representatives of Podemos attended Díaz’s candidacy launch, as party leader Ione Belarra insisted a bilateral agreement between Sumar and her formation on left primaries and the internal distribution of funds would be needed to secure her presence. In the wake of this public display of disunity, both sides have gone on the attack in the media ratcheting up tensions further.

Yet in an interview with Jacobin’s Eoghan Gilmartin, PCE leader and Izquierda Unida MP Enrique Santiago argues that the Left is ultimately “condemned to work together.”

For example, the 2022 labor law reform, which cracks down on short-term precarious work contracts and secures new trade union protections, was not vetoed by the EU. Or after the European Commission repeatedly told us that we could not intervene in the energy markets, it ultimately had to accept the so-called “Iberian Exception” [under which Spain and Portugal passed a partial cap on the cost of electricity production].

Sumar as a political project is not about moderating political discourse or renouncing principles but rather widening the Left’s limits to form a majoritarian project capable of changing the political balance of forces in this country.

In contemporary societies, which are ever more complex, parties alone only have a certain social reach; but new processes of political aggregation require opening up participatory mechanisms beyond internal party structures.

The latter include major reductions in the cost of public transport, even making commuter trains free of charge.

We are condemned to work together and to reach an agreement. There is no other option. One Podemos leader told me the other day, as we were negotiating coalition for May’s local and regional elections, that “we don’t like that you are sitting down with splinter groups that broke off from us [such as Íñigo Errejón’s Más País].” My response was, “You were formed as a splinter group from us, and we are constantly working with you.” And if we go back far enough, we are all splinter groups from the Socialist International!

The most unlikeable among them aren’t totally unredeemable. For the most part, they are smart, reasonable people taking desperate actions inspired by desperate circumstances.

The movement’s dogmatic commitment to nonviolence, he argued, was based on a cherry-picked reading of history. Malm accused advocates of both strategic and principled nonviolence in the climate movement of having ignored violent flanks that complemented the effective civil disobedience movements of prior generations. “The civil rights movement won the [Civil Rights] Act of 1964,” he wrote, “because it had a radical flank that made it appear as a lesser evil in the eyes of state power.” (His emphasis.)

Earth First!, ALF, and ELF—now even more marginal than in their modest peak in the 1990s and 2000s—mingled “punk and hardcore with dumpster diving and veganism, spiritual voyages and holistic meditation with squatting and guerrilla gardening, fanzines and herbs,” Malm wrote. “All those thousands of monkeywrenching actions achieved little if anything and had no lasting gains to show for them. They were not performed in a dynamic relation to a mass movement, but largely in a void.” When the climate movement finally “took off,” it did so “because it had no connections to the ecosystem of EF!, ALF and ELF.”

The film offers a relatively happy ending that will alarm more conservative viewers. There’s no hero cop, for instance, who shows the crew a righteous path away from property destruction. And they don’t regret their actions.

It’d be ludicrous, Malm acknowledged, to expect saboteurs to systematically dismantle the fossil fuel economy one homemade incendiary at a time. In this and other work, he’s emphasized that only states can do that. Both he and the film’s protagonists, accordingly, articulate eco-terrorism as a kind of DIY market signal meant to force states’ hand into doing something they otherwise wouldn’t

Activists arrested at a music festival protesting a proposed police training facility in Atlanta—to be built on a razed forest—are being slapped with terrorism charges; one land defender was already killed.

The result is an uncomfortable disparity between who does the work that enables these AI models to function and who gets to control and profit from them.

In that way, modern AI research resembles a digital “enclosure of the commons,” whereby the informational heritage of humanity—a collective treasure that cannot really be owned by anyone—is seen by corporations primarily as a source of potential profit.