The Republic of Toil: Building Democracy in the Age of Billionaires and Machines

The Republic of Toil: Building Democracy in the Age of Billionaires and Machines resurrects the voice of Irish revolutionary James Connolly and places him squarely in the twenty-first century—an America ruled by credit, algorithms, and the quiet tyranny of convenience. In prose that burns with clarity and compassion, Shannon Meade channels Connolly’s wit, defiance, and moral fire to diagnose the modern worker’s condition and to chart a path toward renewal.

Across twelve chapters, Connolly walks through the factories of automation, the warehouses of surveillance capitalism, and the boardrooms of false philanthropy, exposing how labor has been chained by code instead of iron. Yet his message is not despair—it is instruction. He calls for a new labor movement fit for the digital age: unions built across industries, cooperative ownership of data and production, and a moral economy that measures progress not by profit, but by human flourishing.

The book’s two acts—The Chains You Cannot See and The Republic of Toil—move from revelation to blueprint. The first uncovers the psychological and economic systems that keep workers docile in an empire of debt. The second imagines a society reborn: co-ops, digital guilds, and public technologies serving people, not shareholders. The appendices expand the vision with a Manifesto of the Digital Workers’ Republic, a Glossary of the New Class War, and a Blueprint for Industrial Democracy 2.0—each a practical tool for organizing a just economy in the age of machines.

Meade’s work stands at the crossroads of literature and revolution. Written in the voice of Connolly yet grounded in the modern world, The Republic of Toil blends political theory, social critique, and lyrical narrative into a work that feels both ancient and urgently new. It belongs beside Zinn, Klein, Davis, and Du Bois—a testament to the enduring truth that the working class, armed with knowledge and solidarity, remains the only secure foundation upon which a free nation can be built.