Full Transcript for Liberal Socialism Explained with Matt McManus

themselves liberal socialists wasn't at all unusual. 00:05:27.409 --> 00:05:39.250 You had people like John Stuart Mill, who I've mentioned a few times before, uh, who's very happy to be simultaneously the greatest liberal philosopher and declare himself as falling under the general designation of socialist in his autobiography. 00:05:39.409 --> 00:05:44.370 Uh, you got things like the Saint-Liberisme movement that was self-cautiously liberal socialist in France. 00:05:44.610 --> 00:05:52.689 Many people in the FBD, people like Edward Bernstein, you know, used to say that um there's nothing in the arsenal of socialism that stood yet its start in liberalism. 00:05:52.769 --> 00:05:59.329 Uh, and in many ways, socialism is just an extension of liberal principles into the economy through democratization, etc. 00:05:59.810 --> 00:06:09.889 All of that really came to a halt with the Cold War, largely because of an intellectual tradition, or at least in large part because of an intellectual tradition that we now call Cold War liberalism. 00:06:09.969 --> 00:06:12.050 This is where you start to see people like F.A. 00:06:12.290 --> 00:06:21.649 Hayek, Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin, all of whom would really stress that there's a big difference, or from their perspective, a big difference between liberalism and socialism. 00:06:21.730 --> 00:06:24.449 You know, a lot of the binaries that we still use emerged in this time. 00:06:24.529 --> 00:06:28.449 You know, socialists believe in collectivism, whereas liberals believed in individualism. 00:06:28.689 --> 00:06:33.730 Liberals were for an open society, whereas socialists or communists were for a closed society. 00:06:34.370 --> 00:06:37.170 Liberals, you know, believed in freedom, socialists believed in equality. 00:06:37.250 --> 00:06:37.810 You get the idea. 00:06:37.889 --> 00:06:39.409 All these kind of binaries appeared. 00:06:39.569 --> 00:06:52.209 And a lot of these, as plenty of academics, that dreaded word have pointed out, were pretty artificial binaries that did a lot of disrespect to the history of actual socialist thinking and certainly actual liberal thinking. 00:06:52.290 --> 00:07:01.889 Uh, but it didn't really matter because for ideological purposes, these binaries were very useful and juxtaposing liberalism against Soviet-style collectivism, etc. 00:07:02.290 --> 00:07:09.409 And that really monopolized the intellectual discourse on a lot of different fronts for the better part of the latter half of the 20th century. 00:07:09.490 --> 00:07:14.529 And we're really only beginning to develop a more nuanced analysis of these things right now. 00:07:18.209 --> 00:07:24.610 So in the introduction to your book, What is Liberal Socialism, you propose a synthesis between Karl Marx and John Rawls. 00:07:24.769 --> 00:07:27.250 Yeah, you know exactly how I feel about that. 00:07:27.490 --> 00:07:50.610 But given that Marx was a historical materialist, focused primarily on political economy, and was

famously cagey about whether or not his work was normative or not, and that Rawls was a normative philosopher working from both kind of trying to bridge the consequentialist and deontological tradition simultaneously. 00:07:50.930 --> 00:07:53.969 Where exactly do you see their frameworks connecting up? 00:07:54.129 --> 00:07:57.009 And where do you think they are incompatible? 00:07:57.730 --> 00:07:58.050 Sure. 00:07:58.209 --> 00:08:09.329 Well, one of the reasons I proposed this synthesis is I think that Rawls offers the best normative case for liberal socialism, particularly in his book, Justice is Fairness, a Restatement. 00:08:09.409 --> 00:08:10.610 And then, you know, other people like Will M. 00:08:11.170 --> 00:08:16.129 have done a lot to kind of um put meat on the bones of his um his ideas in this respect. 00:08:16.290 --> 00:08:21.569 Uh, but Rawls is not a very gifted theorist or critic of power or ideology. 00:08:21.649 --> 00:08:24.769 Uh, all the stuff that Marxists are very gifted critics of. 00:08:24.930 --> 00:08:29.009 And that's not a small problem for Rawls's normative project. 00:08:29.250 --> 00:08:32.769 Many people have pointed out that it's very much an ideal theoretic project, right? 00:08:32.850 --> 00:08:45.330 It ones that it's a project that sketches out a vision uh of what a just society would look like and says, well, if we compare actually existing society to that vision, pretty clearly we fall very far short of that. 00:08:45.409 --> 00:08:57.009 But why we fall short of it, why it's so difficult to actually enact justice in the real world, what kinds of power are barriers to the achievement of justice, Rawls just really does not have very much to say about that at all. 00:08:57.170 --> 00:08:58.450 Like he doesn't have nothing, right? 00:08:58.529 --> 00:09:00.930 That's a bit of a cliche, but there's not very much, right? 00:09:01.170 --> 00:09:18.290 By contrast, as you point out, Marx was extremely good at analyzing the operations of power, how that connected to ideology, the different ways that reifications posed illusory barriers to even being able to vision what a socialist society might look like. 00:09:18.450 --> 00:09:24.050 But he really didn't have very much to say about what socialism or communism was going to look like. 00:09:24.129 --> 00:09:30.930 Uh, you know, Marx's famous quip about this was he wasn't in the business of um writing recipe books for the cookshops of the future, right? 00:09:31.090 --> 00:09:33.250 That was to be left to the utopian socialists. 00:09:33.410 --> 00:09:38.770 And there are good reasons for Marx to adopt this standpoint from you know the position of historical materialism. 00:09:38.850 --> 00:09:41.970 Uh, but I think it's really done a disservice to socialism. 00:09:42.450 --> 00:09:54.050 I tend to be of the view that it is actually useful to have a vision of what it is that we're trying to achieve in mind when we engage in activism and to kind of rework Marx's

quip. 00:09:54.129 --> 00:10:01.970 Uh, I don't necessarily know if we need recipe books for the cookshops of the future, but we should probably have a good sense of what we're trying to make at the very least. 00:10:02.210 --> 00:10:09.650 Because just sitting there and saying, you know, we're going to go in the kitchen and smash a few things together and see what comes with it, it doesn't really seem like a very viable long-term project for me. 00:10:09.810 --> 00:10:17.090 Uh, so as you point out, in this book, I announced that my goal is to kind of reconcile these different um theoretical traditions together. 00:10:17.170 --> 00:10:32.610 Uh, I don't actually do that in the book, uh, What is Liberal Socialism, which, as you mentioned, is meant to be kind of a popular essay collection, but I'm writing on that right now in my new big, very, very academic book, Liberal Socialism and Defense, that should be coming out in a couple of years, uh, and that'll be footnoted to death. 00:10:32.930 --> 00:10:37.490 All right, so that will be the uh academic apologia as opposed to the popular one. 00:10:37.730 --> 00:10:53.090 Yeah, well, one thing I agree with you on is that Marx's normative beliefs are they're there, he doesn't want them to be there, but they are clearly there, you know. 00:10:53.250 --> 00:10:54.930 Having read everything from G.A. 00:10:55.010 --> 00:10:56.850 Cohen is one of the things I'm sympathetic to G.A. 00:10:56.930 --> 00:11:26.610 Cohen on, and as we will get to later, I'm not as sympathetic to Ja Cohen as you are, but but to Vanessa Wills, to Sam Badger, both of whom have been on my show, I do think that the that the idea that you could get past the normative and descriptive being separate, which is something Marx inherents uh inherits from German idealism tote court, is actually problematic and it leads to all kinds of problems. 00:11:27.250 --> 00:11:32.290 The because it it does, for example, one thing that I find fascinating, right? 00:11:32.450 --> 00:11:34.690 The DSA just released a program. 00:11:35.010 --> 00:11:40.930 I'm writing a very long contextualization and commentary on it right now. 00:11:41.090 --> 00:11:44.450 I don't know when it'll be done, but it'll because I'm going deep. 00:11:44.770 --> 00:11:53.730 But one of the things that I've noticed is people don't view this program as a program, they view it as a platform for for a variety of reasons. 00:11:53.810 --> 00:12:05.410 One, the DSA's never had a program before, to it's not written exactly like a like a traditional historical program, and it's not scaffolded and scoped like a program. 00:12:05.810 --> 00:12:10.690 So you'll have maximalist and minimalist demands like hanging together in the same point. 00:12:11.490 --> 00:12:21.330 Um now I bring that up because it seems to me that Marx was actually radically inconsistent on the we don't do cookshops of the future thing. 00:12:21.490 --> 00:12:43.330 Yeah, because he wrote programs, like commented

on programs, wrote the the manifesto, which is a program, it's like the basis of all future socialist programs, is actually the Campus Manifesto, where you have the the immediate and minimum demand basically, then you have this longer scope thing, then you have some maximalist vision. 00:12:43.490 --> 00:12:48.850 Like that does seem like a uh like an actual blueprint in some ways. 00:12:51.170 --> 00:13:11.890 I get very frustrated similar to you, and I want to get your response to this, and how how you think Rawls might help help on this, but like when we talk about what a classless society is, which is used in the DSA program today, it's not defined, and so people can use it as almost Laclalian empty signifier. 00:13:11.970 --> 00:13:13.970 That's been on my mind a lot lately. 00:13:14.450 --> 00:13:18.450 Whereas in historical Marxism, that was defined. 00:13:18.930 --> 00:13:34.850 Like the reason why you have to eventually fade out the state, blah blah blah, has to do with the ultimate goal of a class of society, and what's confused about that is that people think, oh, state, there's no governmentality, no, there's still a governmentality. 00:13:35.410 --> 00:13:49.890 Uh Ben and I have gone back and forth on things like abolishing the police, which I do think is part of the socialist tradition, but I don't think is defined right because I actually it means having no standing police and no standing army, but universal militias for both. 00:13:50.450 --> 00:13:58.290 And that's what that was clearly stated, actually, in in early communist and socialist literature, and it's not today. 00:13:58.450 --> 00:14:26.210 Uh uh I bring this all up to you because it does seem to me that like you do get some kind of normative claim towards fairness, and you mention uh uh justice as fairness is actually somewhat you know interesting in that it does point towards a property owning, a property-owning governmental democracy or something like liberal socialism, that it doesn't deal with class power dynamics at all. 00:14:26.850 --> 00:14:32.210 And I've always found that to be like almost irreconcilable with Marxism. 00:14:32.290 --> 00:14:39.250 So I wanted to ask you like, what do you see needs to change in the Rawlsian framework to make it compatible? 00:14:40.530 --> 00:14:41.890 Well, that there's a lot, right? 00:14:42.050 --> 00:14:43.650 So there's a few things to say about this. 00:14:43.810 --> 00:15:04.050 First off, I completely agree with you that uh as much as Marx would sometimes insist that he doesn't want to write blueprints for the cookshops of the future, sorry, recipe books for the cookshops of the future, uh, or blueprints for the future society, sometimes he will very much indulge in just this kind of blueprinting or writing out what look like quite specific recipes for what the future is going to look like. 00:15:04.290 --> 00:15:13.810 A good example of this, of course, as you mentioned, is the Communist Manifesto itself, which ends

with a number of different proposals that should be immediately enacted once the communists are victorious in the revolution. 00:15:13.970 --> 00:15:15.490 And of course, that didn't come to pass. 00:15:15.650 --> 00:15:30.450 But even you know, in the future, just to kind of nip a kind of Althazarianism in the butt, uh, if you read the Civil War in France with the Critique of the Gotha program, Marx would sometimes explore what he thought a socialist society or a socialist republic is probably the better term, would end up looking like. 00:15:30.610 --> 00:15:36.930 And the Civil War in France uh suggests there's going to be a national legislature that looks an awful lot like the Paris Commune. 00:15:37.090 --> 00:15:42.530 It would have an awful lot of power concentrated in its hands, but elected officials would be immediately recallable. 00:15:42.690 --> 00:16:05.490 And there would also be various local governments or communes uh that have a great deal of discretion in organizing the common life for their districts, which makes a lot of sense if you're someone like Marx and you think that um beyond just having good Republican reasons for wanting local people to be able to govern their own affairs, there's even moral and historical reasons why they ought to do that for the sake of freedom, et cetera, et cetera, right? 00:16:05.570 --> 00:16:20.290 Uh and then the Clark of the Gotham program, Marx actually, and this kind of lends some credibility to what I'm saying, is critical of utopian socialists who imagine in this kind of millenarian, nowadays I call it like almost Bajuan way, that socialism is just going to be the complete negation of bourgeois society. 00:16:20.450 --> 00:16:22.530 Marx says, you know, that's a ridiculous society. 00:16:22.610 --> 00:16:33.570 We know from reading angle, we know from looking at real existing history that any kind of transition means that a new society is going to be fundamentally uh his terminology is stamped with many features of the old society. 00:16:33.810 --> 00:16:42.930 A new socialist state as it emerges from the moon bourgeois society is going to have many characteristics of um, he uses Hegellian term right, bourgeois right, right, or bourgeois rect, right? 00:16:43.090 --> 00:16:55.170 You know, and then he suggests that, you know, this is why we're gonna need to keep things like um not necessarily wage labor, uh, but compensation, right, for labor, and that's gonna be paid its actual value, not its kind of abstract value under a social society. 00:16:55.330 --> 00:16:57.410 There's gonna be the state, there's gonna be laws, etc. 00:16:57.730 --> 00:17:06.369 And only after a long period of time, once we have sufficiently developed the modes of production and we can move on to just complete abundance, right? 00:17:06.450 --> 00:17:12.690 Are we going to kind of transition to the truly communist principle of from each according to his ability to each according to his needs, right? 00:17:12.769 --> 00:17:15.890 And Marx doesn't give a time scale with that. 00:17:16.129 --> 00:17:24.769 So he's definitely willing to sometimes flirt with blueprinting or recipe shop or recipe book writing, even though there's a lot of inconsistencies between these different programs, right? 00:17:24.930 --> 00:17:30.450 Some of them are more status and characterized by a democratic centralism, like the Communist Manifesto. 00:17:30.529 --> 00:17:34.210 Uh, others are quite decentralized, like what you get in the Civil War in France, right? 00:17:34.289 --> 00:17:38.210 Where there is going to be a powerful National Assembly, but also quite powerful national communes. 00:17:38.450 --> 00:17:43.730 Rawls, by contrast, is very consistent about what he thinks a new society should look like. 00:17:43.970 --> 00:17:47.890 Some people have accused him of basically writing the same book three different times. 00:17:48.049 --> 00:17:54.450 That's a little bit unfair because there's important alterations and shifts and emphasis, uh, but it's not entirely unfair, right? 00:17:54.529 --> 00:17:57.009 There's definitely a lot of repetition that appears, right? 00:17:57.250 --> 00:17:58.129 Subconsciously. 00:17:58.289 --> 00:18:02.609 So by and large, he says, look, there's the original position behind the veil of ignorance. 00:18:02.689 --> 00:18:07.730 People are asked what principles of justice they want to enact and apply to the basic structure of society. 00:18:07.889 --> 00:18:21.089 Uh, and it's important to note that when he says the basic structure of society is the first subject of justice, that in itself indicates an important way in which there is a there is a point of contact between um Rawls and the Hegelian Marxist tradition. 00:18:21.169 --> 00:18:31.009 Uh, because in the lectures on moral philosophy and in the lectures of political philosophy, he says, traditionally, liberals have taken the individual and his or her rights to be the first subject of justice. 00:18:31.169 --> 00:18:32.609 Think about somebody like Locke, right? 00:18:32.849 --> 00:18:35.889 Rawls says, drawing upon Hegel, he's very explicit here. 00:18:36.049 --> 00:18:39.169 I say that the basic structure is the first subject of justice, right? 00:18:39.329 --> 00:18:44.210 Because you can only flourish as an individual or have rights be meaningful in the right social context, right? 00:18:44.289 --> 00:18:53.089 And later on in his lectures on Marx, he makes a very similar point about how Marx was concerned properly with the basic structure of society rather than uh atomized individuals, right? 00:18:53.409 --> 00:18:59.569 So, long story short, he thinks that justice is fairness is the right set of principles to apply to the basic structure. 00:18:59.649 --> 00:19:05.569 That includes a principle of equal liberty or basic liberties for all, uh, compatible with everyone else's scheme of basic liberties. 00:19:05.730 --> 00:19:09.809 And then the second principle is fair quality of

opportunity and the difference principle. 00:19:09.889 --> 00:19:17.970 Uh, and in his last book, Justice is fairness restatement, Rawls says welfare state capitalism does not cut it in terms of uh showing respect for these principles. 00:19:18.129 --> 00:19:23.329 Uh, there are too many inequalities, there are certainly too many political inequalities that even welfare state capitalism emerges. 00:19:23.409 --> 00:19:29.730 So only property-owning democracy or liberal socialism would be the proper regimes for instantiating our respect for justice. 00:19:29.889 --> 00:19:38.769 And then in the lectures on Marx, in the um collection on his uh lectures on political economy, Rawls chooses to actually sketch out what liberal socialism would look like. 00:19:38.849 --> 00:19:42.609 Uh so he says, look, many, this is written in the 1990s, right? 00:19:42.689 --> 00:19:43.970 Or published in the 1990s. 00:19:44.129 --> 00:19:49.889 Many commentators have assumed that the fall of the Soviet Union has discredited Marxism and socialism irreparably. 00:19:49.970 --> 00:19:54.609 Uh, he says, certainly it's discredited the command economic model of social organization. 00:19:54.689 --> 00:19:56.929 Uh, that's buried in the ash heap of history. 00:19:57.009 --> 00:20:08.049 Uh, but it's a serious mistake, he says, to think that Marx and socialism are kind of bygone just because the Soviet Union didn't reinstantiate um respect for socialist principles adequately. 00:20:08.129 --> 00:20:14.369 Uh, he says liberal socialism is still very much a viable theory of justice that we ought to take seriously as a regime. 00:20:14.529 --> 00:20:17.009 And then he sketches out what that would look like, drawing on Marx. 00:20:17.089 --> 00:20:22.129 And he says liberal socialism would consist of um the following three premises or four premises, right? 00:20:22.289 --> 00:20:28.210 A liberal democratic state, big surprise there, a market, a market socialism, essentially, right? 00:20:28.289 --> 00:20:36.369 So there would be firms that would, you know, compete with one another, innovate, et cetera, et cetera, but they'd be governed by workers instead. 00:20:36.529 --> 00:20:40.369 There'd be a rough equality of property across the society. 00:20:40.529 --> 00:20:46.609 And then lastly, he says the state would obviously decommodify many sectors of the economy where you don't want worker firms in charge. 00:20:46.689 --> 00:20:49.970 It's like healthcare, education, probably housing, et cetera. 00:20:50.049 --> 00:20:55.089 Right now, he doesn't elaborate much further on what liberal socialism would look like than this sketch. 00:20:55.169 --> 00:21:00.129 Uh, there's a little bit of other stuff in Justice's Fairness's theory's statement, but this is kind of what I'm building upon, right? 00:21:00.210 --> 00:21:06.450 Through Rawls' interpretation of Marx and Marxism, uh, and Hegel, I should add, Hegel's a very important influence of him, him. 00:21:06.769 --> 00:21:13.329 He says, you know, we recognize through Marx and Hegel that the basic structure is the first subject of justice, not the individual and their rights. 00:21:13.490 --> 00:21:15.490 Any liberal needs to be sensitive to that. 00:21:15.649 --> 00:21:25.169 And getting the basic structure right is going to mean a commitment to a much higher level of equality and economic democracy than classical liberals, certainly, if we're willing to countenance. 00:21:31.569 --> 00:21:45.490 I do think that one of the things that you that I I think is a little bit harder to reconcile is fairness versus classlessness, and at least in the way that Marx or Lenin describes it. 00:21:45.569 --> 00:21:46.769 I mean, Lenin defines it. 00:21:47.009 --> 00:21:51.889 Obviously, the Soviet Union never even kind of got to Lenin's definition in State and Revolution. 00:21:51.970 --> 00:22:07.329 I mean, because you're supposed to, you know, that they were supposed to be building up to a society with like universal conscription for the military, no standing army except for a militia, you know, all that's a stated and state and revolution, that's all pretty much abandoned very quickly. 00:22:07.569 --> 00:22:22.450 But what I did found interesting, right, when I went back and looked at these debates and then the debates and the instantiation of liberalism, some of these might even call proto-liberal theories like Machiavelli, that this debate had been had before. 00:22:22.849 --> 00:22:32.929 That in the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th century, liberals were still arguing about the goal of getting rid of a standing army as a prerequisite for freedom. 00:22:33.009 --> 00:22:38.769 So it was even that idea as radical as you know it can strike even our friend Ben Burgess. 00:22:39.009 --> 00:22:42.609 Uh I think is actually interesting. 00:22:42.929 --> 00:22:47.329 Uh, and what I actually point out to people is like the issue for the Marxist. 00:22:47.889 --> 00:23:06.129 Is not that we have someone enforcing law, or not that we have a punitive punitive elements for because I think even the most diehard Marxist knows that like certain kinds of violence, certain kinds of transgression will probably still exist in a relatively free socialist society. 00:23:07.169 --> 00:23:13.409 You can talk about how you know we get rid of most property crime, we get rid of most drug crime, all that stuff goes away. 00:23:13.809 --> 00:23:18.289 But you know, domestic violence, murder will probably still be an issue. 00:23:18.609 --> 00:23:20.929 A lot of violent crimes are crimes of passion, for example. 00:23:21.009 --> 00:23:34.609 And uh, I don't imagine that people are going to cease to be passionate and angry, you know, in the new socialist future about their husband cheating with their best friend, or you know, their best friend cheating on them with their wife, or whatever it happens to be. 00:23:34.849 --> 00:23:35.409 Right. 00:23:35.649 --> 00:23:46.049 So it gets me to thinking about like if you

had a Rawlsian ethical base for this, how do you build towards that society? 00:23:46.210 --> 00:24:05.169 Because the one thing I would say that is different between the liberal socialist vision that you've expanded from late warls and the Marxian vision is a lot of Marxists would agree, not all of them, but a lot of Marxists would agree that the Rawlsian vision would be a step in the right direction towards a towards both a socialist society, blah blah blah blah blah. 00:24:05.250 --> 00:24:14.769 But all of them who are traditional, except for like Dominica Lacerdo, weirdly, would actually say it's necessary as a step, but it's an insufficient goal, right? 00:24:15.009 --> 00:24:29.409 Like, so do you think it is a sufficient goal, or do you are you more that thing that this is the only viable first necessary step, as opposed to like, I don't know, a revolutionary dictatorship of the party or whatever? 00:24:29.649 --> 00:24:31.329 What do you what are your thoughts there? 00:24:31.649 --> 00:24:32.929 It's a really good question. 00:24:33.089 --> 00:24:42.369 And from my perspective, right, I'm enough of a historical materialist to say I'm not really all that keen to speculate what we could achieve after we achieved liberal socialism. 00:24:42.529 --> 00:24:45.329 And here I actually follow Marx in the Critique of the Gotha program, right? 00:24:45.409 --> 00:24:51.970 Where he says, look, any new socialist society is not going to be some kind of millennial split with bourgeois society. 00:24:52.049 --> 00:24:54.849 You'd have to be utopian and an idealist to believe that, right? 00:24:55.009 --> 00:25:05.329 The new society is very clearly going to be stamped with any features of the old, which are going to include, again, all the features of Hegelian right, which means institutions, practice, laws, norms, etc., for a very long time, right? 00:25:05.409 --> 00:25:20.210 Uh now, whether in the future it would be possible to do what Marx speculates in the critique of the Gotha program, you know, transition from an emphasis on fairness to a superabundance of economic goods, which would allow us to say from each according to his ability to each according to his needs. 00:25:20.289 --> 00:25:21.409 Uh, I would hope so, right? 00:25:21.490 --> 00:25:22.849 I would like that to be the case. 00:25:23.089 --> 00:25:24.129 Maybe it will be, right? 00:25:24.289 --> 00:25:30.289 But Marx clearly intimated that that would be on a distant horizon, and I suspect it will also, right? 00:25:30.529 --> 00:25:48.049 Now, in terms of you know, the question of socialist law and the state, I think there was a really good book on this by a contributor to our Cohen collection, Christine Sipner, which is the concept of socialist law, where she um puts Marxism into dialogue with the Marxist-Leninist tradition and the anarchist tradition, right? 00:25:48.210 --> 00:26:00.289 And she points out that Engels was actually the one who hypothesized that uh if you read Marx

in a Hegelian enough way, the long-term goal of communism should be to allow the state to wither away, right? 00:26:00.369 --> 00:26:10.289 And Engels says, look, uh, we understand that the state emerges or has emerged as the primary instrument, or at least a primary instrument of class oppression. 00:26:10.369 --> 00:26:11.329 That's its goal, right? 00:26:11.409 --> 00:26:12.929 You know, or its uh function, right? 00:26:13.089 --> 00:26:20.450 You know, the capitalist state is governed by the executive committee for the management of bourgeois interests, and it's a tool of oppression, right? 00:26:20.529 --> 00:26:27.889 Uh and consequently, you know, Engel says if we do transition to a classless society, there'd be no more historical need for the state. 00:26:27.970 --> 00:26:34.210 It kind of served its purposes in the dialectic, and it's consequently going to wither away, right? 00:26:34.369 --> 00:26:45.089 And uh politics, at least as we understand it, by which he means class politics, is going to be replaced by the uh scientific management or the technical management, as it's sometimes translated of life, right? 00:26:45.250 --> 00:26:51.649 While Sipnowitz points out that, first off, this is very much a kind of um act of utopian speculation on Engels' part, right? 00:26:51.730 --> 00:26:54.769 The idea that the state is going to uh wither away, right? 00:26:54.849 --> 00:27:02.210 Uh but beyond that, Engels also is aware that this is very much on a long time scale, in the same way that Marx anticipates this is going to be on a long time scale. 00:27:02.369 --> 00:27:11.169 Uh, she says nothing precludes us from thinking that in that long interregnum period, there's going to be a state, and that state is going to pass laws, right? 00:27:11.329 --> 00:28:01.809 And she suggests that there's no reason to expect that socialist laws wouldn't be characteristically very different from the laws of bourgeois society, let alone the laws you'd see passed by um reactionary states, right? 00:28:02.049 --> 00:28:10.450 One important distinction that she brings up is that um rights in a socialist society would very much be understood as social rights, right? 00:28:10.609 --> 00:28:17.809 They would entail uh reciprocal obligations rather than just being kind of grants of um for liberty uh pursuit of one's self-interest. 00:28:18.690 --> 00:28:24.210 And so, of course, you know, the socialist state would guarantee things like rights to health care, rights to education, rights to housing, etc. 00:28:24.369 --> 00:28:24.609 etc. 00:28:24.849 --> 00:28:28.129 In a way, most bourgeois states are wary to do so, right? 00:28:28.210 --> 00:28:31.490 And I think that that's by and large the right approach, right? 00:28:31.649 --> 00:28:41.009 Again, whether Engels was right and uh, you know, in the long run, with a long enough liberal, like a long-standing liberal socialist society, you know, we might see the state wither away. 00:28:41.089 --> 00:28:47.490 You know, I would hope so in some cases, but I definitely am not optimistic that that's gonna occur anytime soon. 00:28:49.730 --> 00:28:50.289 Right. 00:28:50.529 --> 00:28:59.490 And the the other thing that I would that I would point out about that is like even if the state went away, you might still have law because empathologically speaking, law predates dates. 00:28:59.649 --> 00:29:02.769 Um, so and I just want to add one thing here, right? 00:29:02.930 --> 00:29:04.690 My dad taught me this last time when I was really young. 00:29:04.769 --> 00:29:06.450 Uh so just be a little folksy here. 00:29:06.529 --> 00:29:10.049 Uh my dad worked as a prison guard in the the Don Jail for a long time, right? 00:29:10.609 --> 00:29:19.569 And you know, my dad's a bright guy, and he said, Look, in the Don jail, most of the people there were there mostly because of economic and social circumstances, right? 00:29:19.649 --> 00:29:22.930 You know, they had stolen, they had robbed, some of them may even kill to get better. 00:29:23.009 --> 00:29:28.930 And my dad was like, Look, if there was a better society where their needs were taken care of, most of those guys probably wouldn't be in jail. 00:29:29.089 --> 00:29:42.849 But he said there was one guy who came in who had sexually assaulted and murdered, I think it was like three or four children, and none of the guys wanted to have anything to do with them because he was clearly just, to use a very technical terminology here, a bad seed, right? 00:29:42.930 --> 00:29:45.089 You know, he was just a bad, bad guy. 00:29:45.250 --> 00:30:00.609 And everyone understood that he was psychologically a different kind of personality than all these people who had done bad things in their self-interest because there's just really not a lot of recognizable human characteristics in his uh decision to inflict pain upon the innocent for this reason. 00:30:00.849 --> 00:30:03.809 And I think any society is always gonna have people like this, you know. 00:30:03.889 --> 00:30:16.849 Forget about crimes and passions, there's always gonna be the uh some very, very bad people in society that are gonna do awful things, and we're gonna need some way of getting rid of them or at least making sure that they can't cause more harm. 00:30:17.569 --> 00:30:18.210 Right. 00:30:18.529 --> 00:30:34.609 Well, I as a former corrections officer myself and a teacher, I have a similar experience where about one, which interestingly is why I am pretty skeptical of prisons, but I'm also very skeptical of a lot of the immediate proposals for prison abolition. 00:30:34.690 --> 00:30:47.329 I don't talk about it a lot because I have come to the conclusion that, like, well, if you have prisons like like what they have in like Norway, I'm not sure I'm gonna complain that much about them. 00:30:47.569 --> 00:30:49.089 Yeah, my wife likes to joke. 00:30:49.170 --> 00:30:53.009 Um, she saw a picture of like a uh Norwegian prison, back security.

00:30:53.250 --> 00:31:03.410 A guy had a TV and a bed, and things she's like, you know, if we ever fucking need to retire and we don't have the money, we should just go commit a crime in Norway and you know, retire to jail. 00:31:03.730 --> 00:31:17.490 Yeah, I mean, because because the the the kind of utilitarian argument there is we're trying to remove an element from society without the reason why I would not gung-ho on capital punishment is not about justice. 00:31:17.569 --> 00:31:29.250 I mean, for me, justice actually would necessitate some kinds of lethal violence, it's about being wrong, it's about the consequences of being long when you take a life because you can't undo it. 00:31:29.889 --> 00:31:32.529 And so, yeah, I wouldn't mind that. 00:31:32.609 --> 00:31:39.730 I'm all but then I also have also said I wouldn't mind stuff like corporal punishment being brought back, so that probably scares the shit out of people. 00:31:40.129 --> 00:31:55.809 Well, you know, I don't normally agree with Jason Brennan, but he had an article about corporal punishment, and he's like, Look, maybe we could replace five-year prison sentences with you getting 10 lashes on the ass or 50 lashes on the ass, and then you know, you give you medical treatment and go home for minor crimes at least. 00:31:55.889 --> 00:32:04.450 And I was like, you know, as weird as it sounds, there's a way in which that's if not more humane, at least probably less draconian. 00:32:04.769 --> 00:32:05.009 Right. 00:32:05.089 --> 00:32:06.690 Well, that's my that was always my argument. 00:32:06.849 --> 00:32:17.649 Having experienced a prison, is just like, well, I know that American and Mexican and Canadian prisons don't aren't really good at rehabilitation. 00:32:17.809 --> 00:32:22.210 Um, and in fact, they're the opposite of that for the most part, and particularly in the United States. 00:32:22.769 --> 00:32:25.809 70 to 75 recidivism, right, right? 00:32:26.049 --> 00:32:26.369 Right. 00:32:26.609 --> 00:32:28.289 Canada has the best record out of that. 00:32:28.450 --> 00:32:31.009 Uh the US has the worst. 00:32:31.329 --> 00:32:33.250 Mexico's somewhere in the middle. 00:32:33.730 --> 00:32:46.450 But what I find very uh interesting is like, you know, the the actual like what we were talking about and what these things meant in socialism has expanded. 00:32:46.529 --> 00:32:49.649 There's been concept creep that as highly utopian. 00:32:50.450 --> 00:33:02.049 Like this idea that and often like a lot of bad social reproduction theory it has this, is this idea that it's oh, if we just got rid of capitalism, most crime would go away. 00:33:02.129 --> 00:33:13.089 And I'm like, well, you know, most societies are like nowhere near as carceral, including some ones that I would find dictatorial in the medieval and ancient world. 00:33:13.649 --> 00:33:25.410 However, murder is a problem that does not seem to be all that tied to capitalism. 00:33:25.649 --> 00:33:36.369 It also is remarkably resistant to rational constraints, so that's why capital punishment is also not a good deterrent for murder. 00:33:36.849 --> 00:33:48.769 Because A, a lot of carns of passion aren't thought out, and B, you know, and if you're a psychopath, it's not gonna work anyway, so it's not really a deterrent in the same way. 00:33:49.009 --> 00:33:57.170 But I do think it's interesting to think about like this is where having a some kind of concept of justice actually does matter. 00:33:57.569 --> 00:33:59.009 Oh, absolutely, yeah. 00:33:59.329 --> 00:34:08.049 And you know me, I I have often been caught saying implied implication most, although I don't usually put that there. 00:34:08.289 --> 00:34:11.730 Justice is either about revenge or it's a childhood fantasy. 00:34:12.049 --> 00:34:22.529 However, I do think you have to have some kind of normative framework for how you handle these kinds of violences that aren't related to property and and whatnot. 00:34:22.769 --> 00:34:37.649 And I don't think the left has a very good job of it, at least to like weird things, like people who celebrate the the Soviet gulag system also being prison abolitionist, which is like baffling to me, but I have really seen it. 00:34:37.809 --> 00:34:43.809 It's like what like um people contain multitudes, I guess, right? 00:34:44.049 --> 00:34:47.490 Yeah, well, or they don't. 00:34:47.889 --> 00:34:51.809 Funnily enough, either way, you it looks about the same. 00:34:51.970 --> 00:35:04.769 Um I guess this we this gets me to think a little bit more about you know the racial liberalism problem, something that's been pointed out by Charles W. 00:35:04.930 --> 00:35:09.250 Mills and and one of Dominica Lacerdo's mildly better books. 00:35:09.490 --> 00:35:11.809 You know, you dedicate a lot of space to Charles W. 00:35:11.970 --> 00:35:23.410 Mills in the N this piece book, and critique of how well you can call the center or you know, accommodationist ring of classical liberals to use. 00:35:23.570 --> 00:35:35.330 I'm trying to like get my Jonathan Israel back in my head, what he would have called the moderate enlightenment folks, like Locke and Kant, were explicitly implicated in racial capitalism and colonialism. 00:35:35.490 --> 00:35:49.650 I mean, Locke, like in a way that is very hard to make intellectual heads or tails of, given his primary theory, when you read his justification for slavery, it's like, how in the hell do you think that works? 00:35:49.970 --> 00:35:51.970 Oh no, it's extremely self-serving, right? 00:35:52.290 --> 00:35:52.850 Right. 00:35:53.090 --> 00:35:57.650 And for those of you who don't know, Locke wrote the South Carolina Constitution, or at least contributed to it. 00:35:57.810 --> 00:36:02.450 So the colonial constitution, but still pretty bad. 00:36:03.090 --> 00:36:18.850 So, how does the concept of racial liberal of radical liberal socialism or black radical liberalism, you know, incorporate Mills's insights without

abandoning the universalist emancipatory promise of either liberalism or socialism? 00:36:18.930 --> 00:36:31.090 Because one of the responses that we saw in the 20th century was to try to throw out any universal claim at all as somehow being inherently racialist, you know, particularly towards the end of the 20th century. 00:36:31.250 --> 00:36:39.330 And ironically, I have found that a lot of those arguments have actually played better on the right in the long term than the left and have ended up being justification for racialism. 00:36:39.730 --> 00:36:42.050 But I wanted to hear you talk about that a little bit. 00:36:42.370 --> 00:36:43.170 Oh, yeah, absolutely. 00:36:43.330 --> 00:36:58.050 I mean, um, my friend Paul Schofield, uh, who wrote a very generous review of my liberal socialism book for Jackman, used to say that an old professor of his used to say, uh, all you leftists love this whole kind of postmodern relativism and games of truth, et cetera, et cetera, because you think it's all so much fun. 00:36:58.290 --> 00:37:03.330 Just wait till the right gets hand on this stuff, and you're gonna feel very, very differently about that. 00:37:03.490 --> 00:37:07.970 And I think that time has borne out this anonymous professor's wisdom on that point. 00:37:08.130 --> 00:37:19.250 But just for those who don't know, you know, Charles Mills began his career as a Marxist, right, from Jamaica, studied at the University of Toronto, and gradually uh he started to move away from that to degrees, right? 00:37:19.490 --> 00:37:29.410 Marx remained an important influence in his work, such that by the 1990s he kind of identified with a kind of critical tradition that looked askew at liberalism. 00:37:29.570 --> 00:37:47.330 Uh, his most important book from the 1990s is a little tiny text called The Racial Contract, uh, where he takes aim at the argument that liberal political theory, by and large, had little to say about race, or to the extent that it did have something to say about race that was bad, most of the times that was just peripheral, right? 00:37:47.410 --> 00:37:53.250 It didn't really say very much one way or another about the legitimacy and cogency of the liberal theoretical project. 00:37:53.410 --> 00:38:05.570 Uh, and what Mills points out in this book is actually if you read Locke or Kant, let alone the American Founding Fathers, an emphasis or a concern with race is omnipresent, right? 00:38:06.210 --> 00:38:08.769 Good example of this, of course, would be Kant, right? 00:38:08.850 --> 00:38:21.570 You know, Kant um famously wrote more about anthropology than almost any other subject, and he was very prone to dividing the world into different racial groups who were to be categorized based on their cognitive capacities. 00:38:21.730 --> 00:38:28.690 And of course, you know, he insinuated that um blacks were inferior, so-called yellow peoples were inferior to white Europeans. 00:38:28.850 --> 00:38:36.769 And aligned with this, Kant suggested white Europeans were probably the only ones who are really capable at that point of self-rule, right? 00:38:36.850 --> 00:38:46.769 You know, being able to organize themselves into these kind of Kantian republics with rights and a constitution, etc., uh, because only they possessed the uh capacity for reason and enlightenment, right? 00:38:46.930 --> 00:38:50.210 Now, I think that some of Mills's arguments are a little overheated. 00:38:51.570 --> 00:39:07.650 Count doctrine, I think, is a pretty critical of colonialism, certainly in his mature period, where he applies, even if these people are subordinate, you're still not allowed to go and intrude in their land because two wrongs don't make a right or a wrong can't be kind of brushed aside because uh it turns out to be right. 00:39:07.730 --> 00:39:09.970 And this is a point he makes in the metaphysics morals. 00:39:10.050 --> 00:39:19.250 But there's no doubt that Mills is right, and Lasotro is right, that if you read liberal theory carefully, there's all kinds of racism that saturates it, and it's not at all irrelevant, right? 00:39:19.410 --> 00:39:29.250 There's many countless justifications for racial hierarchy, subordination, colonialism, imperialism, uh, even by progressive liberals uh that I defend elsewhere like John Sartre Mill, right? 00:39:29.410 --> 00:39:34.290 Mill was famously you know liberal socialist, an advocate for democracy, a great feminist, right? 00:39:34.450 --> 00:39:52.610 Author of the subjection of women, but he routinely defended the British Empire on the basis that um a kind of uh what he thought benign despotism was necessary in India in order to culturally elevate the Indian people to the level where they might one day be capable of liberalism and democracy on their own, right? 00:39:53.010 --> 00:40:00.290 So Mills spends most of his career being a critic of liberal political thought and practice on this basis. 00:40:00.370 --> 00:40:12.850 Uh and shortly before he died, at the relatively young age of, I think it was 70, it might have been 71, uh, he began to argue instead for what he called the black radical liberalism that was intended to be a more constructive and positive project, right? 00:40:13.010 --> 00:40:18.610 Uh sadly, there's not very much that he wrote about this uh because the project was kind of announced and then never defended. 00:40:18.769 --> 00:40:21.650 Uh, mostly you get the you get one essay in W.E. 00:40:21.730 --> 00:40:30.610 Du Bois as a black radical liberal, at least in his mature period, uh, and then a kind of epilogue to his black uh his book on uh black rights, white wrongs, and that's it, right? 00:40:30.769 --> 00:40:42.210 But by and large, Mills says black radical liberalism is obviously going to be much more socialistic in its orientation than Heron Volk or white liberalisms. 00:40:42.690 --> 00:40:45.010 He goes on to say that this might seem strange. 00:40:45.170 --> 00:40:47.970 You know, socialism can mean a

lot more than a command economy. 00:40:48.130 --> 00:40:54.930 There's various forms of market socialism and left-wing liberalism, and obviously black radical liberalism would align with that economically. 00:40:55.090 --> 00:41:05.890 And he argues that we ought to pay attention to the specific ways that a kind of black radical liberalism can try to repair for the damage that racism has caused in liberal societies, right? 00:41:06.050 --> 00:41:09.410 Although, again, he doesn't elaborate on uh in too much detail on that. 00:41:09.570 --> 00:41:34.210 Uh, in my new book, though, I talk a lot about somebody who is very close to Mills philosophically, who does actually provide a lot more meat on these kinds of bones, namely Tommy Shelby, who's currently a uh professor at Harvard University and is a proponent of analytical Marxism and the uh values of analytical Marxism for examining racial issues, um, but who also is uh very friendly towards liberal egalitarianism, particularly Rawls. 00:41:34.290 --> 00:41:36.290 So you can see why I would like Shelby, right? 00:41:36.370 --> 00:41:37.970 Uh and so just give one example, right? 00:41:38.130 --> 00:41:41.570 Shelby says, look, and actually this applies to you're talking about with criminal justice. 00:41:41.810 --> 00:42:00.210 If you apply a kind of uh Marxist liberal lens to racial issues in the United States, uh what you can realize is that in many what he calls dark ghettos, you know, these kind of racialized communes, it's very clear that the state is not meeting its obligations to large numbers of people who have been racialized and denigrated and demonized for a long time. 00:42:00.530 --> 00:42:11.090 This means, he thinks, holding them to a very punitive standard when it comes to their acquiescence to things like criminal justice is deeply unfair, right? 00:42:11.170 --> 00:42:22.850 Because you've essentially denied these communities the resources they've needed to achieve to flourish and succeed, and then impose very harsh criminal sanctions on them when you see people hustling or selling drugs or whatever, right? 00:42:23.010 --> 00:42:35.650 So Shelby, to put it mildly, recommends a lighter touch as the appropriate way that a kind of Marxist liberal approach to justice can respond to the problems of racial demigration in these communities for a very long time. 00:42:35.810 --> 00:42:39.090 And I kind of think that that's the appropriate way of looking at these things. 00:42:42.210 --> 00:42:48.050 Yeah, I mean that that seems to be sort of my issue too. 00:42:48.210 --> 00:43:07.090 I mean, what the the the contradiction of racial capitalism policing is that communities of color and and poor communities in general are indeed both under and over police simultaneously, and that contradiction is like often not dealt with. 00:43:07.250 --> 00:43:11.010 You know, small things, threats, that stuff is not dealt with. 00:43:11.330 --> 00:43:20.210 But punitive raids, uh drug crimes, even though that's lessened in the in the last 20 years, although Texas is bringing it back, so we'll see. 00:43:20.690 --> 00:43:21.730 Return, right? 00:43:22.050 --> 00:43:23.570 Yeah, great. 00:43:23.730 --> 00:43:34.769 Let's let's criminalize something that you had legal a week ago, um, that is legal in like I don't know, uh most of the other states. 00:43:35.010 --> 00:43:48.450 Yeah, I saw Matt Walsh actually pitching about this just the other day because um apparently weed has overtaken booze for the first time in American history as the average American's narcotic of choice on the weekend or the weekday, right? 00:43:48.530 --> 00:43:51.410 And you know, he was doing his typical very racial thing, right? 00:43:51.490 --> 00:43:56.210 Of saying, you know, no great civilization has ever been erected when people are addicted to weed. 00:43:56.290 --> 00:44:03.890 Uh, they're having a lot of great civilizations, he alleges, that have been created when people drink themselves into oblivion night after night, right? 00:44:04.210 --> 00:44:05.650 Where he's getting this from, who knows? 00:44:05.730 --> 00:44:06.930 But it turns out that that's true. 00:44:07.170 --> 00:44:08.850 Americans love wheat. 00:44:09.330 --> 00:44:13.170 Yeah, well, let's just put it this way. 00:44:13.330 --> 00:44:22.130 I do think some of the damages of weed are probably understudied because it took so long for it to get reclassified as a drug so that we can study it. 00:44:22.290 --> 00:44:27.090 But like, I don't know, I know way more people who've died from alcohol. 00:44:27.410 --> 00:44:33.250 Well, I mean, look, I've known people who say you can't get addicted to pot, I've never known a pot ed. 00:44:33.490 --> 00:44:37.090 Uh, I was roommates with a couple of them back in my day, very nice people, you know what I mean? 00:44:37.250 --> 00:44:38.690 Fucking absolutely harmless. 00:44:38.850 --> 00:44:49.730 Uh, but definitely I remember thinking, like, man, like if you have to wake up and smoke a joint and come home from work and smoke a joint and then smoke a couple of joints to go to sleep day in and day out, that seems a lot like dependence to me. 00:44:49.890 --> 00:44:51.810 And it might be time to you know tap. 00:44:52.370 --> 00:44:54.290 And I'm saying this to somebody who likes weed, right? 00:44:54.450 --> 00:45:01.650 But you know, the worst thing I've ever known somebody a pothead to the worst thing I've ever known a pothead to do is forget to clean the dishes, which is annoying. 00:45:01.810 --> 00:45:09.730 I've known people to do a really dumb and really bad things on boots, so yeah, I'm just not inclined to uh a Walsh philosophy on this. 00:45:10.050 --> 00:45:11.170 Yeah, exactly. 00:45:11.250 --> 00:45:14.610 It's it's like I actually think maybe it's progressive. 00:45:14.930 --> 00:45:20.690 Also, plenty of great civilizations have smoked all kinds of things. 00:45:21.170 --> 00:45:24.450 Um weed. 00:45:24.530 --> 00:45:26.290 I I mean, I

don't know, I don't know how much weed consumption. 00:45:26.850 --> 00:45:29.730 Was going on in the Mexica, but I imagine some. 00:45:30.450 --> 00:45:33.810 Anyway, I should probably actually look that up as an anthropological question. 00:45:34.050 --> 00:45:35.570 I'm curious about that too now. 00:45:35.650 --> 00:45:36.050 Yeah. 00:45:36.290 --> 00:45:36.610 Yeah. 00:45:36.850 --> 00:45:46.690 Well, one of the things I I have wanted to talk to you a little about is this critiquing the return philosophy in this uh post-liberal anti-modernity turn. 00:45:46.930 --> 00:46:00.050 And one of the things I wanted to like press you on a bit, not because I disagree with you, but because I see this also happening in socialist circles where like the visions of socialists are basically like, let's bring our 19th century back. 00:46:01.170 --> 00:46:15.970 And while I am pretty sympathetic to the idea that the major class struggles of capitalism are still the same major class struggles as they were 150 years ago, their manifestations are actually quite different. 00:46:16.370 --> 00:46:19.010 In your concluding chapter, what is liberal socialism? 00:46:19.330 --> 00:46:25.010 You really talk a lot about like the use of critics of modernity like Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. 00:46:25.730 --> 00:46:31.490 And you pick up Charles Taylor, who's not the person I necessarily would have thought to have read at the end of this book. 00:46:33.410 --> 00:46:36.370 Is he is he owning being a communitarian these days? 00:46:36.450 --> 00:46:37.650 I never can remember. 00:46:37.970 --> 00:46:38.930 I'm Canadian, right? 00:46:39.010 --> 00:46:42.769 So it just felt like you know, as a that's my own little smidge of nationalism in there, you know. 00:46:42.930 --> 00:46:44.210 Gotta end with Taylor. 00:46:44.530 --> 00:46:48.290 Look, I I I'll allow Canadian nationalism as long as we're doing our shit. 00:46:48.370 --> 00:46:49.490 You guys get a pass. 00:46:49.810 --> 00:46:56.290 Um, but back when we weren't fucking with you, though, it used to annoy me. 00:46:56.530 --> 00:46:58.130 Oh well, yeah. 00:46:58.210 --> 00:47:04.450 I mean, look, Canadian national, just to make a joke about this, even I get tired of that kind of smug shit every now and then, right? 00:47:04.530 --> 00:47:15.650 You know, the kind of running joke is you know, Canadian nationalism expresses itself in being kind of quietly but smugly feeling that you're superior to the average American, right? 00:47:15.810 --> 00:47:17.650 Morally, politically, all that stuff. 00:47:17.810 --> 00:47:19.730 And that always bothered me because I was like, you know what? 00:47:21.090 --> 00:47:23.250 This country has plenty of problems, also, right? 00:47:23.570 --> 00:47:28.850 And more or less, we kind of turned out to be junior partners for America in a lot of their worst imperialist projects. 00:47:28.930 --> 00:47:30.769 So let's not applaud ourselves too much here. 00:47:30.930 --> 00:47:44.370 Uh, that said, now that Trump is basically just constantly threatening Canada with um becoming the 2051st state and calling Mark Carney governor, there's that little smidge of me that's uh kind of become a little more empathetic towards that than I was before, maybe. 00:47:44.690 --> 00:47:46.370 Well, this is this was my thought. 00:47:46.450 --> 00:47:53.170 I was like, oh great, you're gonna bring Canadian nationalism back because the only thing that defines Canadian nationalism is trying to prove they're not Americans. 00:47:53.650 --> 00:48:06.690 And it was hilarious too, because I was like, man, Trump managed to somehow single-handedly make Canadian nationalism or I suppose actually I should say restore it, because if you look at uh the history name nationalism, there's always been a kind of left-wing quality for this. 00:48:06.769 --> 00:48:13.090 But he somehow managed to make Canadian nationalism like a liberal and even left-wing thing again, which a lot of us would have thought was impossible. 00:48:13.250 --> 00:48:26.290 You know, the big loser in the last Canadian election was Pierre Polyev, because the liberals were basically just able to outflank Pierre on being the more we're gonna drape ourselves in the flag and be the elbows up style, you know, critics of Trumpism. 00:48:27.330 --> 00:48:27.970 Yeah. 00:48:28.930 --> 00:48:31.970 But I I uh to tie it back to the question a little bit, though. 00:48:32.050 --> 00:48:45.810 I mean, to pick up from Charles Taylor, like Taylor does for all his communitarian leanings that I was joking about, he is actually a universalist, which is uh actually rare for anyone deemed a communitarian. 00:48:45.970 --> 00:48:54.610 I mean, unless your universalism is like a Lester McIntyre, who I like, but who is basically like you should all become 14th-century Catholics. 00:48:54.769 --> 00:49:03.250 Oh, I universally believe we should all be 14th century Catholics, any capitalist socialist 14th-century Catholics, but Catholics nonetheless, right? 00:49:03.570 --> 00:49:04.130 Right, yeah. 00:49:04.290 --> 00:49:09.250 I mean, you know, very big on social gospel, that sort of thing. 00:49:09.730 --> 00:49:16.610 Hate hated the rich more than most Christians by a lot, but but nonetheless, is what it was, right? 00:49:17.570 --> 00:49:26.530 But you you you talk about modern universals' ethics are more generally more on progress over pre-modern hierarchical complementarity. 00:49:26.690 --> 00:49:39.570 And what I found interesting, so I went back this weekend, and for some weird reason I got a rattled hair up my ass, and I was going through my reactionary literature section that I have in my Kindle, and uh, yeah, as I do. 00:49:39.810 --> 00:49:44.530 You and I are people who you know read right-wing literature so other people don't have to. 00:49:44.690 --> 00:49:48.610 Oh no, yeah, so then you're like, Man, new translation of Ebola's coming out, right? 00:49:48.690 --> 00:49:51.250 Get all the socials behind

it, they're gonna be excited, yeah. 00:49:51.490 --> 00:49:52.210 Yeah, gross. 00:49:52.370 --> 00:50:08.769 But I read Kylie Kyle Minogue's The Servile Mind, and I actually realized that this this return stuff had been creeping up for a lot longer than it seems, it just was not dominant. 00:50:09.010 --> 00:50:59.650 Like when you read The Servile Mind, it feels like that book was would have been more at home in Europe in 1940 or now than it was when it came out in 20, I think like 2011, and and in at least in the United States, and I brought that up because there's this pre-modern hierarchical complementarity argument that the Taylor like d demolishes, but I find it interesting that it keeps coming back, and in to plug my own work, which I don't often do, but my work with Daniel Tut, we talk about like this big push, both light and Daniel, by the way, yeah, for class collaborationism and the idea that like we can all just get along, and I'm just like, there's no universal ethics that can believe that. 00:50:59.970 --> 00:51:07.010 So, why is liberal socialism the best vehicle to really deliver on a modernist universal ethics? 00:51:07.090 --> 00:51:29.010 And how do we deal with the fact that social to be frank to be frank, because I am a believer in decadence theory, which is probably rare on the left, but well, I mean, I watched a video the other day which talked about a billionaire who spent four million dollars buying a banana tape to a wall, and I'm not gonna lie, there's a small part of me that you know went full Carlisle, right? 00:51:29.090 --> 00:51:36.370 And it's like decadence and you know, decline, and you know, this goes to show the cultural banalization that's occurring, right? 00:51:36.450 --> 00:51:38.290 You know, I can have those moments too. 00:51:38.530 --> 00:51:45.250 Yeah, but uh beat enough reactionary authors, and you know that instinct is just hard not to indulge in when you see that kind of shit, right? 00:51:45.490 --> 00:51:55.330 Yeah, oh yeah, particularly when you when you read a lot of reactionary authors, and like I was reading Ross do do Dunhat, whatever Dolphart, stupid last name, anyway. 00:51:55.570 --> 00:52:06.930 Um who uh whose book on on decadence, I like 60 agreed with, and it disturbed me. 00:52:07.090 --> 00:52:09.810 The 40 I didn't agree with was like outlandish. 00:52:09.970 --> 00:52:11.490 Uh I was like, what no? 00:52:11.650 --> 00:52:19.010 Boop, boop, boop, bad, bad, but but the the like, and I'm like, hey dude, why don't you realize you're critiquing capitalism? 00:52:19.250 --> 00:52:21.570 But anyway, they never really do. 00:52:21.890 --> 00:52:37.970 No, it's weird because they seem to think that you could have your capitalism and your pre-modern hierarchy together, which admittedly, before Hans Hermann Hopp, nobody was dumb enough to believe, but after Hans Hermann Hopp has become a lot more commonly believed, I know I've seen that uh before. 00:52:38.050 --> 00:52:44.530 Yeah, like all those online trolls who are like, Well, freedom means that I should be able to outlaw people being gay whenever it is that I want. 00:52:44.610 --> 00:52:49.490 It's like, Well, I suppose that's one way of thinking about freedom. 00:52:49.730 --> 00:52:53.730 Then then the other, then freedom also means I get to kill you before you do that. 00:52:54.050 --> 00:52:56.130 Like, like that, that the implement. 00:52:56.210 --> 00:52:59.330 I mean, Hobbes is right, that is the implication of that kind of freedom. 00:53:00.130 --> 00:53:03.170 I mean, to your point, though, I mean, at least McIntyre is consistent on that one. 00:53:03.250 --> 00:53:13.330 This is one of the reasons I think he's the greatest of those communitarian critics, because at least he was like, Look, if we're gonna be 14th century Catholics again, then we're probably gonna need a mode of production that is not capitalistic. 00:53:13.490 --> 00:53:19.970 Since part of the whole thing about capitalism is you approach the world like a consumer, and eventually you're gonna approach ethics like a consumer, also. 00:53:20.690 --> 00:53:21.010 Right. 00:53:21.170 --> 00:53:23.970 No, I mean that it is it it is admirable. 00:53:24.450 --> 00:53:56.290 I recently reread After Virtue and a book group, and I and I I did like, oh, well, there's just we're just so thoroughly in that book, but it is remarkably consistent that he does realize that, like, if I'm gonna bring back 14th century Augustinianism, I also need some kind of non-capitalist relations, and no, we can't completely go back to the 14th century, and I don't really want to do that, but something, something, something I'm not I actually he never really spells it out, but he is trying to be consistent there. 00:53:56.610 --> 00:54:00.210 Uh anyway, so how do we fight this? 00:54:00.450 --> 00:54:07.570 Because it to me, uh, this anti-modernity stuff is actually coming from a lot of the same places you and I come from. 00:54:08.130 --> 00:54:15.090 Like, we are it's frustrated with like I have been surprised talking to some like paleo-conservatives again now, you know. 00:54:15.170 --> 00:54:28.290 You know, I used to be one, but today that like uh like that Ross Dunhat book, you could you could agree with 60% of it, and then the other 40%, you're like, what the fuck, man? 00:54:30.530 --> 00:54:35.890 So so how do we you you know, how does liberal socialism answer this? 00:54:36.130 --> 00:54:38.769 And why do you think Marxists have been bad at it? 00:54:38.850 --> 00:55:00.610 Because one of the things I was thinking about today is right now there are more people trying to hybridize Marxism and straight up anti-Marxist reactionary philosophy than Marxism and stuff that was neutral towards Marxism or skeptical but not totally dismissive, like early pre-Cold War liberals. 00:55:01.410 --> 00:55:04.050 Yeah, it's one of the things that really surprises me, right? 00:55:04.210 --> 00:55:21.330 Because I've seen a million

efforts to try to synthesize Marxism with Nietzscheanism, with Hideggerianism, you know, with 19th century reactionaries, all of whom were, shall we say, unremitting in their anti-Marxism or anti-socialism or anti-egalitarianism. 00:55:21.490 --> 00:55:27.250 Uh, and you say you want to kind of reconcile Marx with Rawls, who had nothing but praise for Marx, right? 00:55:27.330 --> 00:55:40.130 I mean, if you read Rawls's the opening to Rawls's discussion on Marx in the lectures on political philosophy, he describes Marx as a world historical genius whose accomplishments, uh especially as a singular figure almost unparalleled, from whom we have a great deal to learn, right? 00:55:40.210 --> 00:55:49.010 So I have always been a little bewildered that people think what I'm trying to do is odd when so many of these same people are like, oh, Heideggarian Marxism, sure, let's do it, right? 00:55:49.170 --> 00:55:57.730 And I think a lot of that owes is down more to tonal and rhetorical overlaps than any kind of substantive, you know, issues, right? 00:55:57.810 --> 00:56:02.930 You know, people read Nietzsche and they're like, oh, he's a radical, and then they read Marx and they're like, oh, rhetorically, he's a radical. 00:56:03.010 --> 00:56:14.450 So let's put these two things together, even though they don't really work together as well as I think Rawlsianism and Marxism could work together, since there's a lot of um shared commitments uh in terms of what a good society should look like. 00:56:14.610 --> 00:56:17.410 But just to come to the more important point about Taylor, right? 00:56:17.570 --> 00:56:30.210 So very briefly, in his book Um Modern Social Imaginaries, Taylor, I think, quite rightly says, uh, look, if you go back to antiquity, the reactionaries aren't wrong to think that we thought about the world in very different ways than we do now, right? 00:56:30.690 --> 00:56:49.010 Early or antiquarian or pre-modern social imaginaries were predicated on a very hierarchical worldview that held that we need to envision nature and society like a pyramid, uh, where every rung of the pyramid needed the others, uh, but it was by no means the case that the peasants were going to have as much dignity or power as the Lord, right? 00:56:49.170 --> 00:56:59.970 And you can see this in Aristotle's writing, where of course he says, you know, some people are fit to be natural slaves, some people are fit to be philosophers, women kind of fall somewhere in that squishy middle so they can be in charge of the homestead. 00:57:00.130 --> 00:57:03.730 You see that in people like Leo Strauss when he tries to recover that idea, right? 00:57:03.810 --> 00:57:08.930 When in the City of Man, you know, Strauss is the great um quasi-conservative philosopher, right? 00:57:09.010 --> 00:57:14.850 But in the city of Man, he says, uh, for Aristotle, you know, the social inequalities between men match their natural inequalities. 00:57:15.010 --> 00:57:25.010 There's always

going to be beings of a different rank and different order in society, in nature, and society is meant to respect those differences and those differences in rank in particular, if it's going to be ordered well. 00:57:25.250 --> 00:57:38.769 And Taylor says with the advent of the modern world, which has antecedents in Stoicism, Christianity, I would add Buddhism actually there as well, as another philosophy, uh, what you started to see was this greater emphasis on equality, right? 00:57:38.850 --> 00:57:51.170 You know, the kind of uh moral equality of all human beings, which in later books like uh Cosmic Connections, Taylor argues constitutes a kind of um moral advance on these um earlier antiquarian worldviews. 00:57:51.250 --> 00:58:04.690 Uh the reason being, you know, that Taylor says, look, if you know, were an Athenian, an average Athenian, right, committed to your own moral theory, uh, you'd say there's nothing wrong with mistreating the slaves and working them until they die. 00:58:04.769 --> 00:58:05.330 They're slaves. 00:58:05.410 --> 00:58:06.290 There's lots of them around. 00:58:06.450 --> 00:58:06.930 Who cares? 00:58:07.090 --> 00:58:18.290 And you'd also say there's nothing wrong with us going and demolishing the city or the island of Melos to send a lesson to everyone else that you don't fuck with the Athenians, uh, because we put Athens first, right? 00:58:18.450 --> 00:58:25.890 The interest of our empire is more important than whatever the obligations we might happen to have towards the people of Melos. 00:58:25.970 --> 00:58:36.690 And Taylor says the modern era instead hypothesizes or puts forward this idea that all life is sacred and equally sacred, which has imposed enormous ethical duties on us. 00:58:36.769 --> 00:58:41.570 Uh, in fact, duties that are so demanding that we have yet to build a society that lives up to them, right? 00:58:41.810 --> 00:58:45.970 And there's even a cosmopolitan and universalistic dimension, as you rightly point out, right? 00:58:46.130 --> 00:59:03.970 Because if I believe that all people are equal and ought to be treated equally, uh, then I shouldn't really be instinctively inclined towards saying that we're going to put American lives over Mexican lives over Iranian lives or whatever, uh, because they're all human beings that they're entitled to a reasonably similar level of moral treatment, right? 00:59:04.610 --> 00:59:12.850 And I think this is a very attractive way understanding the transition to modernity generally understood from an ethical standpoint. 00:59:12.930 --> 00:59:18.850 Uh, and I also think as a defense of um the greater demands that modern ethics make of us, it's very convincing as well. 00:59:18.930 --> 00:59:23.010 Uh now, Taylor is not a utopian or an idealist in a crude sense, right? 00:59:23.090 --> 00:59:31.570 He's not saying that the ethical advance that modernity has demonstrated means that ordinary people are better than they were in the past, right? 00:59:31.730 --> 00:59:34.930 Uh, this actually relates back to what we were saying before about criminal justice, right? 00:59:35.010 --> 00:59:45.730 He's not saying that in the modern world there are fewer people who are murderers, or fewer people who cheat on their wives, or fewer people who don't, you know, aren't particularly good friends to people they should be friends to. 00:59:45.890 --> 00:59:48.930 It just means that our standards are higher than theirs were back then. 00:59:49.010 --> 00:59:51.970 Uh, and he says institutionally this has had an impact, right? 00:59:52.130 --> 01:00:04.210 Because we at least create constitutions, create social orders that try to express a commitment to this egalitarian order, even if uh in many respects they they fall short of what we should be trying to do, Brandon. 01:00:04.450 --> 01:00:05.650 Taylor was a leftist, right? 01:00:05.730 --> 01:00:09.250 You know, he's a member of the Socialist New Democratic Party in the 1960s. 01:00:09.330 --> 01:00:11.730 Uh he really thinks that there are serious problems with capitalism. 01:00:11.810 --> 01:00:13.890 And I want to um emphasize that. 01:00:14.530 --> 01:00:14.769 Yeah. 01:00:15.730 --> 01:00:16.130 Go ahead. 01:00:16.690 --> 01:00:38.210 No, I'm saying so, um, just in terms of you know that piece, I don't buy into many of Taylor's arguments about different things, but in terms of the big story that he tells about the transition to kind of um modern ethics and how that constitutes an ethical advancement on what came before, uh, and how modern ethics is characterized by this commitment to equality rather than hierarchical complementarity, that all I take on board. 01:00:39.010 --> 01:00:39.570 Right. 01:00:41.010 --> 01:00:51.170 I mean, I I think I would say if you were to ask me, I would say I'm a power egalitarian and nothing else, but that probably still meets Taylor's view. 01:00:51.410 --> 01:00:59.410 So, but by that I mean I'm concerned about people having equal power, thus I'm actually also very concerned about material inequality because that's very much a proxy for power. 01:01:01.330 --> 01:01:13.250 I am not concerned about abstract equality in the same way that a lot of liberals are, in so much that I actually think a lot of abstract equality actually lets a lot of real inequality off the hook. 01:01:13.410 --> 01:01:30.690 This is a traditional Marxist critique of equality while also I mean, depending on how you read the Critique of the Gertha program, Marx either doesn't believe inequality or he does, and I think he does, but in a very limited sense, because he thinks a lot of the moral equality stuff is actually bullshit. 01:01:31.010 --> 01:01:34.690 Um, and I have always had a similar thing. 01:01:34.769 --> 01:01:39.090 I I've always gone, you know, when when conservatives go, well, people are different. 01:01:39.170 --> 01:01:40.769 I'm like, yeah, no shit. 01:01:41.490 --> 01:01:45.170 Yeah, I want to point out I I have no

problem acknowledging that either, right? 01:01:45.410 --> 01:01:55.170 And I'm honestly I'm not even really sure of any leftist of note who's ever argued that people are equal biologically or cognitively in any kind of meaningful respect. 01:01:55.250 --> 01:01:56.850 That's never really what we've been arguing, right? 01:01:57.330 --> 01:02:02.370 I mean, my sister is a much better shot than I am, my brother's a much better hockey player, despite my best efforts, right? 01:02:02.450 --> 01:02:08.850 I mean, there's just innumerable ways in which I'm very comfortable acknowledging that while still thinking we should be egalitarians in many respects. 01:02:09.170 --> 01:02:25.090 Yeah, well, for me, it's just like, well, these other ways of of dealing with the world, and I don't just mean the obvious ones like race and gender, I mean like other differences between human beings, uh, need to have equal respect in society for a lot of for a lot of reasons. 01:02:25.410 --> 01:02:32.930 And while you know, the promise of hierarchical complementarity is that you can do that, in reality, that's never happened ever. 01:02:33.090 --> 01:02:33.490 Yep. 01:02:34.130 --> 01:02:52.930 And those societies are just as unstable as egalitarian ones, which is also often like the number of civil and social wars that happen and con uh and hierarchical complementarity that we don't really deal with or don't treat as what they are. 01:02:53.090 --> 01:02:57.890 We like, oh, there was a peasants' rebellion, or oh, there is a Taiping Rebellion, or whatever. 01:02:58.050 --> 01:03:02.130 And I'm like, that more people died in that than they did in the American Civil War, dude. 01:03:02.450 --> 01:03:06.610 Like it wasn't it was not a uh a flash in the pan insurrection, right? 01:03:06.690 --> 01:03:07.570 Yeah, right. 01:03:08.210 --> 01:03:12.530 So it doesn't seem like these societies are all that stable either. 01:03:13.170 --> 01:03:22.450 Also, it the thing about kingship that even reactionaries know is you might get a good one, they also and more often than not get a shitty one. 01:03:22.690 --> 01:03:28.850 So that doesn't really work either way, and you have to imagine a world like J.R. 01:03:29.170 --> 01:03:42.210 Tokian did or whatever, where the only people who get power in this system don't want it, and that's the only way it works, which that is way more utopian than anything I ever suggested. 01:03:42.690 --> 01:03:43.570 Oh, yeah, exactly. 01:03:43.650 --> 01:03:43.730 Right. 01:03:43.970 --> 01:04:00.050 I mean, the idea that you're gonna get some kind of beatific line of rulers uh who aren't going to necessarily want to rule, but will assume it is a responsibility, and the way that you know Plato's philosopher kings would probably prefer to be philosophizing, but they recognize they have a social duty, you know, at least he had the honesty of saying that's really utopia, right? 01:04:00.130 --> 01:04:05.010 This is you know an ideal society that you know may never have been and may never be, right? 01:04:05.330 --> 01:04:10.290 I actually tend to think, and I wrote about this recently, and I know Ben feels the same way, and I'm guessing you do too. 01:04:10.450 --> 01:04:22.610 I think that one of the nice things about socialism is precisely that's realistic about human nature, because it says that look, if we allow too much power to concentrate in a few people's hands, which includes economic power, they're gonna do really bad things with that to others, right? 01:04:22.690 --> 01:04:35.570 That are not conducive to our long-term interests, which is precisely why we want a relative equality of power, so that even though people are going to continue to do bad things and be tempted to do bad things, they're gonna be less capable of doing so. 01:04:35.730 --> 01:04:40.690 Uh, in this sense, I'm pretty much a Niburian realist, uh, about human nature, right? 01:04:40.850 --> 01:04:48.450 Our capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but our capacity for injustice is exactly what makes democracy very necessary, right? 01:04:49.010 --> 01:05:01.330 And democracy is given to both, depending, uh which is why the more egalitarian to democracy is, the better it it is, and also why I don't have a constitutional fetish that a lot of people do. 01:05:01.410 --> 01:05:07.890 But anyway, to get into your your work uh on GA Cohen a little bit, because it is relevant here. 01:05:08.450 --> 01:05:17.650 You co-wrote with Ben a book on GA Cohen, which is uh Analytical Marxism and Democratic Socialism in the 21st century. 01:05:18.370 --> 01:05:22.690 Our original title, just in case you're probably sitting there being like, God, that's wordy and boring. 01:05:22.850 --> 01:05:32.210 We were gonna call it no bullshit socialism, which is a kind of play on the analytic Marxist uh claim that there were no bullshit Marxists, but our publisher was like, You're using a duty word there, you know. 01:05:32.370 --> 01:05:34.450 Let's go for something that's a little more scholarly now. 01:05:34.610 --> 01:05:36.050 It's like fine. 01:05:36.290 --> 01:05:39.410 I still think no bullshit socialism would have been a lot more fun. 01:05:41.170 --> 01:05:44.290 I uh, as you know, I'm a lot more mixed on J. 01:05:44.530 --> 01:05:54.930 Cohen and the analytic Marxists in general, and in fact, in my most recent book, I come after the contemporary generation of analytic Marxists for basically being crypto-populist. 01:05:55.570 --> 01:06:08.210 But I do actually think there's some points that Cohen made that are hard to deny, and I want to talk about one of them and its relationship to liberal socialism, actually. 01:06:08.530 --> 01:06:21.010 Which is Cohen, you know, famously got off of Orthodox Marxism because of the view that the downfall of capitalism and the rise of socialism as a replacement was historically inevitable. 01:06:21.170 --> 01:06:25.490 That is what alienated him from Orthodox Marxism. 01:06:26.530 -->

01:06:38.130 What I find interesting today about that is like I don't think I know almost any Marxist, myself included, who are still historical inevitableists. 01:06:38.370 --> 01:06:43.170 And and also, I've done a lot of looking at Marx, and Marx himself is inconsistent on this. 01:06:43.250 --> 01:06:52.769 Again, as a big thing in my work, is like Marx is actually a lot more inconsistent than people are comfortable admitting because there are times where he talks about socialism as inevitable that tends to be in more public-facing works. 01:06:52.930 --> 01:07:05.170 But if you read his notebooks or even some of his statements where he talks about are the contending common ruin of the classes, there is actually an alternative at the end of capitalism to socialism, it's just very bad. 01:07:05.330 --> 01:07:10.370 And he doesn't even seem to want to imagine it, but it seems to be a real fear of his, right? 01:07:10.530 --> 01:07:17.650 That gets erased from the history of socialism and the late 19th century from from the second international forward, basically. 01:07:18.050 --> 01:07:24.769 The idea going from Kowski Ford is the workers are inherently socialistic, look at their look at how they organize their labor. 01:07:25.250 --> 01:07:26.290 And I don't think anyone. 01:07:26.769 --> 01:07:31.010 Can look at society today and think that under current conditions that's true. 01:07:31.650 --> 01:07:43.650 So, you know, did how did the failure of historical inevitably force Cohen and maybe you and Ben to shift towards normative moral philosophies justify socialism? 01:07:43.810 --> 01:07:52.290 Because it, you know, the the whole collapsing the normative and descriptive part of Marxism was actually based on the historical inevitability of socialism. 01:07:52.610 --> 01:07:57.090 And as I've said, I'm not even sure Marx was you was always convinced of that. 01:07:57.650 --> 01:07:59.010 No, I don't think he was either. 01:07:59.090 --> 01:08:05.730 And you know, I kind of fall into the school of the Vanessa Will school of thought, uh, which holds that Marx certainly did have an ethical theory. 01:08:05.890 --> 01:08:06.850 I think it's hard to deny. 01:08:07.090 --> 01:08:09.330 And it's actually a pretty consistent one from beginning to end. 01:08:09.490 --> 01:08:13.570 You still hear him talk about capabilities and flourishing in Capital Volume Three, right? 01:08:13.650 --> 01:08:15.650 But we can we can bracket that for a second, right? 01:08:15.810 --> 01:08:17.170 Uh so very briefly, right? 01:08:17.250 --> 01:08:20.449 This is what uh Cohen refers to as the obstetric thesis. 01:08:20.529 --> 01:08:30.930 Uh, and even though most people don't hold to uh the strict version of the obstetric thesis today, I think it still does have power of a certain sort, which is why I'll get into it and why I think it's so important to probe into this. 01:08:31.090 --> 01:08:37.090 But by and large, right, what Cohen said uh the obstetric thesis referred to was the idea that socialism was inevitable, right? 01:08:37.329 --> 01:08:44.449 Marx's science of history had shown that one way or another, the inherent tensions and contradictions of capitalism were going to lead to its collapse. 01:08:44.689 --> 01:08:55.329 Maybe you could be like Lenin and give socialism a little push, or maybe you could be like Mussolini and Hitler and kind of uh try to uh kill off, you know, one particular version of socialism. 01:08:55.489 --> 01:08:57.729 But it was one way or another, it was coming. 01:08:57.890 --> 01:09:02.289 And it's important to note that it wasn't just socialists who kind of held to this obstetric thesis. 01:09:02.369 --> 01:09:09.810 Uh, you even had very intelligent commentators like Joshua Schuppinter and capitalism, socialism, and democracy, who famously said, Yeah, socialism is coming. 01:09:09.890 --> 01:09:11.409 I'm really not happy about it, right? 01:09:11.489 --> 01:09:15.810 I think it's awful that this is our future, but I just can't see any way of avoiding it. 01:09:15.890 --> 01:09:27.090 Uh, but what Cohen points out is that by the time you hit the 1980s, 1990s, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, uh, anyone who is still committed to the obstetric thesis seemed very naive, right? 01:09:27.250 --> 01:09:40.930 Now, in fairness, Cohen points out that the failure of the Soviet Union actually affirmed certain core tenets of Marxism, namely Marx's claim that the mode of production needs to be sufficiently developed to enable a transition to capital or to socialism. 01:09:41.090 --> 01:09:47.969 You can't kind of skip the bourgeois phase of history, which of course, uh, from Cohen's perspective, what the Soviets tried to do, right? 01:09:48.050 --> 01:09:53.809 Just kind of leapfrog from czarism to fully automated luxury communism and naturally fail us. 01:09:53.969 --> 01:10:02.369 But nevertheless, Cohen says there's no doubt that this inevitabilitarian or obstetric thesis took a serious blow as a result of the fall of the Soviet Union. 01:10:02.609 --> 01:10:13.250 Nobody in the 1990s, aside from a few diehards, really believed that one way or another capitalism was going to collapse and be replaced with a society where the free development of each was a condition for the free development of all. 01:10:13.489 --> 01:10:16.689 Now, that's mostly of historical interest for the reasons you brought up. 01:10:16.849 --> 01:10:26.769 Aside from a couple of like ride or die tankies on the internet, I've very rarely encountered anybody who said that one way or another, capitalism was going to collapse and be replaced by socialism, right? 01:10:26.929 --> 01:10:33.569 Even then, you know, with the tankies, I'm wondering how much they really believe in it, how much they just like kind of cosplaying that idea to annoy the libs. 01:10:33.729 --> 01:10:50.050 But what Cohen pointed out was important about this for theoretical purposes is as long as the obstetric thesis was

popular, it really let socialists off the hook from the need to make moral arguments for what socialism was going to look like and what it ought to look like. 01:10:50.130 --> 01:10:52.849 Uh, because the claim was, well, one way or another, it's coming. 01:10:52.929 --> 01:10:56.210 So just keep giving history a push and eventually it'll arrive at it. 01:10:56.289 --> 01:10:58.929 Uh now, Cohen said, of course, no one was really consistent on that. 01:10:59.090 --> 01:11:11.409 As you and I have both pointed out, Marx himself quite often would engage in writing recipe books for the cookshops of the future, and plenty of socialists would uh fill their writings with references to the importance of equality and emancipation, etc. 01:11:11.729 --> 01:11:18.050 But these were never really systematically argued for at the level and to the degree of rigor that Cohen thought was important. 01:11:18.210 --> 01:11:38.050 So he thought that the goal of socialists post-1990s was to develop more arguments for what democratic socialism ought to look like and also provide a justification for democratic socialism uh that would argue against competing theoretical traditions and uh ideological traditions like uh libertarianism or liberalism, just to give an example, a few examples. 01:11:44.369 --> 01:12:03.250 Yeah, so you know, critics like Joseph Heath, who's frenemy of the show, not directly, but I mention him a lot because I find him to be a much better centrist liberal critic than the American varieties. 01:12:03.409 --> 01:12:07.969 Both his filthy lucre and rebel sell are books I've told people to read, even though I don't agree with them. 01:12:08.529 --> 01:12:12.929 His um viral essay, why academic Marxism was kind of dead in the water. 01:12:13.009 --> 01:12:21.329 I didn't agree with it, by the way, but to your point, I definitely was like, Well, this guy definitely knows a lot more about academic Marxism than than most people, you know what I mean. 01:12:21.409 --> 01:12:24.050 This is why this hurts a little bit, right? 01:12:24.130 --> 01:12:30.929 Yeah, I mean, like he actually you know comes out of things, and he's not you know a dastardly neoliberal. 01:12:31.090 --> 01:12:40.849 I mean, he has his own, he has mathematical critiques of why neoliberalism doesn't make sense, including like the his takedown of of uh equilibrium theory. 01:12:40.929 --> 01:12:45.569 I actually think is of neoliberal equilibrium theory is actually uh brilliant. 01:12:45.809 --> 01:12:46.609 I'll have to read it. 01:12:46.689 --> 01:12:48.050 I don't think I've ever I have never read that before. 01:12:48.210 --> 01:13:00.849 It's in it's a chapter on filthy lucre where he talks about like there is no reason at all to assume that there is a linear progression towards uh towards equilibrium in a market exchange. 01:13:01.009 --> 01:13:22.849 We can mathematically work this out, it doesn't make any sense as an assumption, and that therefore the entire argument of the markets as a as a uh as an epistemic maximalizer uh is mathematically incoherent because it would actually, to be even remotely true, involve the abolition of time. 01:13:23.329 --> 01:13:25.729 Well, that is pretty devastating, yeah. 01:13:26.050 --> 01:13:29.329 But he's also made some very bad arguments in the past, too. 01:13:29.569 --> 01:13:44.609 But anyway, you know, he he argued that once analytic Marxists removed the bullshit, such as dialectical obscurement from Marx, that there really wasn't anything left but rolls, which you know, I'm not even sure you would find that bad, but I do. 01:13:45.170 --> 01:13:49.969 So, how do you refute this narrative in the book? 01:13:50.130 --> 01:13:57.729 And how do you map a Cohen's evolving views from 1977 to his death about what analytic Marxism was? 01:13:57.969 --> 01:14:06.130 And also, I mean, let's be frank, he also abandoned Marxism altogether, even the analytic form towards the very end of his life, but didn't abandon his socialist commitments. 01:14:06.289 --> 01:14:09.649 So I wanted to get your opinion on his development here. 01:14:10.130 --> 01:14:10.449 Sure. 01:14:10.609 --> 01:14:15.329 Well, I will say that I think analytical Marxism was actually in quite a healthy place, contra heat, right? 01:14:15.409 --> 01:14:18.609 Um, just to give one example, I mentioned Tommy Shelby before. 01:14:18.769 --> 01:14:33.329 Uh Shelby gave a long a big talk to the American Philosophical Association defending the relevance of analytical Marxism for understanding things like racial capitalism and you know defending a kind of liberal inflected Marxist theory of justice, right? 01:14:33.569 --> 01:14:38.529 So I think his claim is just um from a scholarly perspective untrue. 01:14:38.609 --> 01:14:40.050 I think that we're we're doing just fine. 01:14:40.130 --> 01:14:40.929 Thank you very much. 01:14:41.090 --> 01:14:50.369 Uh that said, there is no doubt that the analytical Marxists did drop a lot of what uh many of us would consider to be central aspects of Marxism, right? 01:14:50.449 --> 01:14:54.449 And their efforts to kind of purge it of uh of bullshit, so-called. 01:14:54.689 --> 01:15:03.489 One you know, very good example of this uh that I personally have a lot of disagreements with Bette about is the analytical Marxists insisted that there's no special method to Marxism, right? 01:15:03.649 --> 01:15:13.569 That what Marx or what some Marxists refer to as the dialectical method was really just a fancy way of saying everything is connected and everything changes, nothing really of importance. 01:15:13.729 --> 01:15:24.529 From their perspective, Marxism was just a ordinary form of social science, and so there's nothing wrong with incorporating more modern social scientific techniques to try to engage in Marxist analyses of class, etc. 01:15:24.689 --> 01:15:27.809 Um, and in fairness, you know, some of them did really interesting work with that. 01:15:27.969 --> 01:15:40.369 Uh, I

happen to be of the view with Michael Lazarus that there is a dialectical method to Marx's work, and understanding that is central to really um gleaning his core insights, right? 01:15:40.609 --> 01:15:42.529 That said, I also don't think it's unique to Marx. 01:15:42.609 --> 01:15:52.849 I think that you really need to, I'm with Alan Wood in saying you need to situate Marx in the tradition of German idealism, Alakant, and Hegel to really understand uh the core insights, bracketing all that, right? 01:15:52.929 --> 01:15:54.130 Just to come to Cohen, right? 01:15:54.210 --> 01:15:59.250 So, Cohen, I would push back a little bit on the argument that he abandoned Marxism per se. 01:15:59.329 --> 01:16:05.090 Uh, he definitely became more skeptical of historical materialism in an expansive sense near the 2000s. 01:16:05.250 --> 01:16:13.329 So when he released a um revised edition of Karl Marx's theory of history and offense, he's still defending historical materialism in the 2000s. 01:16:13.409 --> 01:16:25.329 Uh, but he says, look, an inclusive historical materialism that tries to account for most social developments with reference to the economic base, that's just not gonna fly, right? 01:16:25.409 --> 01:16:35.170 If you're trying to explain moral developments, religious developments, cultural developments by saying ultimately they're all about uh the economy in the last instance, that's not gonna get you very far. 01:16:35.250 --> 01:16:39.009 Uh, but he still defended what he called the restricted version of historical materialism. 01:16:39.090 --> 01:16:45.649 And that says, look, we can still describe a lot of how it is that the base develops through a historical materialist lens, right? 01:16:45.729 --> 01:16:47.809 And that's obviously very, very important, right? 01:16:47.969 --> 01:16:56.929 Uh now that said, in terms of his moral argumentation, there is no doubt that Heath is right that Cohen became much more distinctively Rawlsian over time, right? 01:16:57.009 --> 01:17:01.489 Uh, he still will every now and then gesture towards the importance of theorizing things like exploitation. 01:17:01.649 --> 01:17:10.769 But by the time of getting to uh rescuing justice and equality, Cohen's big book on Rawls, uh, he even says if you called me a left-wing Rawlsian, I wouldn't be opposed to it, right? 01:17:10.849 --> 01:17:13.409 Which is quite remarkable if you think about that. 01:17:13.569 --> 01:17:21.090 Uh now that said, Cohen is a really bizarre left-wing Rawlsian out of moral from a moral standpoint, uh, for a lot of reasons, right? 01:17:21.649 --> 01:17:40.529 One of which is that in the second half of that book, he defends a meta ethics that is fact-insensitive, basically saying, look, irregardless of social facts, we should still do the right thing if it is the right thing, which is almost like a kind of platonic understanding of justice. 01:17:40.689 --> 01:17:46.289 And in my in the essay that I wrote on Cohen, I point out how weird it is to him to adopt this perspective, right? 01:17:46.449 --> 01:17:53.170 Because whatever else you want to call a fact-insensitive approach to justice, it is not that is not a Marxist approach to justice, right? 01:17:53.250 --> 01:17:57.409 Marxism as a materialist philosophy absolutely has to be fact sensitive. 01:17:57.489 --> 01:18:05.009 Uh, and what's also interesting is that in this respect, it means that Rawls was actually a lot closer to Marx than to Cohen than Cohen was, right? 01:18:05.170 --> 01:18:12.050 Because as I mentioned before, Rawls was very sensitive to the fact that uh the principles of justice were going to apply to the basic structure. 01:18:12.210 --> 01:18:20.529 Uh, he was concerned about things like incentives, which is why he says um the difference principle can allow for certain kinds of inequalities that they are to the benefit of the least well-off. 01:18:20.849 --> 01:18:27.729 You know, this very kind of platonic uh meta-ethics of justice that Cohen adopts is um well defended by him, right? 01:18:27.809 --> 01:18:29.889 It's just not Marxist from my perspective. 01:18:30.050 --> 01:18:35.649 And I also don't think that liberal socialism should get behind it because I'm not a Platonist or an idealist, right? 01:18:35.729 --> 01:18:39.329 I just think that it's uh that I'm never going to kind of um abide by that. 01:18:40.689 --> 01:18:45.409 That said, you know, I think it's a real testament to uh Cohen's creativity as a philosopher. 01:18:46.130 --> 01:18:59.729 Well, it's just it just goes show he's a really creative philosopher, and he he wasn't afraid to uh take big swings at things, and uh even if he didn't always hit, he always at least got close, which means he's a really interesting person to read and learn from. 01:19:01.489 --> 01:19:07.250 Yeah, well, him and especially Wowski are the uh of that generation of analytical Marxists, are the two I take seriously. 01:19:07.409 --> 01:19:10.289 I actually do take Romer and uh what's his face? 01:19:12.609 --> 01:19:28.849 Elder Elder seriously to you, but uh they incorporate things that Cohen doesn't that I think is a lot more problematic to incorporate because I don't think that equilibrium theory has any place in Marxism or any of that, or rational choice. 01:19:29.009 --> 01:19:30.609 I'm talking about rational choice theory. 01:19:30.689 --> 01:19:31.170 Yeah, there we go. 01:19:32.130 --> 01:19:32.929 Yeah, exactly. 01:19:33.250 --> 01:19:58.449 Game theory, I see limited uses for um, you know, but and and my my critique of coin, as you may know, is that he doesn't that weirdly, given the rest of his philosophy, I actually do think this is an interesting oversight, that he doesn't deal with relations of production very deeply or very well, and I actually have a critique for this too. 01:19:58.769 --> 01:20:06.369 Um but but it actually is a problem, and I actually find it interesting that Cohen doesn't for this reason, and I actually am

leading up to question here. 01:20:06.529 --> 01:20:11.329 Uh, this will be one of my last two questions, actually, because you actually covered one I was gonna ask you about facts in sensitive. 01:20:11.569 --> 01:20:14.130 I I want to say that I'm actually sympathetic to that, also, right? 01:20:14.210 --> 01:20:24.130 I think that um there's an excess emphasis on forces of production, which is why I don't think he is a technological determinist, but it's not implausible to kind of impute that to him, right? 01:20:24.609 --> 01:20:26.289 Well, uh for yeah, exactly. 01:20:26.449 --> 01:20:41.969 There are times where I'm like, he sounds just like a Whiggish tech bro, but but I actually do think reading every his because you know, having read more than just Car Mark uh the Car Mark's Theory of History of Defense, I actually do know he's not, and this is one of the questions I was gonna get to because I can't reconcile this. 01:20:42.289 --> 01:20:51.969 Cohen actually picks up the claim, you know, from feminist circles that the personal was political, which means something very different in the 20th century than it did in the 21st. 01:20:52.130 --> 01:20:59.009 Actually, recently went back and went into origins of that phrase, and I'm like, that phrase meant something completely different than the way we were using it 15 years ago. 01:20:59.329 --> 01:21:25.649 But but the Cohen's kind of an in-between stage from the way that it was originally used and feminist circles to the way that it is used now, and that is he talks about that you know, an egalitarian society does actually require uh a personal ethos of egalitarian justice rather than just rules for a just state or just rules for a classless society? 01:21:27.969 --> 01:21:40.449 I actually uh find it interesting because I I I find that to be weird that he brackets out relations of production so much when looking at that. 01:21:40.689 --> 01:21:43.170 And I was gonna ask you, there's two things I want to ask you. 01:21:43.409 --> 01:21:52.609 One, why do you argue that extending distributed demands into personal life choice risk becoming overly demanding and arose personal liberty, which I kind of agree with you on, but I want to get your logic on. 01:21:52.849 --> 01:22:03.090 And two I would say, why is he so voluntaristic on individuals but not systems? 01:22:03.729 --> 01:22:06.130 This is something that I don't actually get from Cohen. 01:22:06.289 --> 01:22:15.329 Like Cohen seems to be really voluntaristic on individual belief structures, but not on systemic development. 01:22:15.489 --> 01:22:19.170 And I wanted to ask you like, how do you think we even should reconcile that? 01:22:19.250 --> 01:22:23.090 Because that seems to be a real problem with Cohen's thought to me. 01:22:23.889 --> 01:22:26.449 Well, the first point is actually a very important one, right? 01:22:26.689 --> 01:22:40.849 So this comes out again in rescuing justice and equality, his book on Rawls, where he points

out that Rawls insists that the principles of justice should only apply to the basic structure of society, which is initially, at least by and large, the state and the economy, right? 01:22:41.170 --> 01:22:42.529 And civil society, right? 01:22:42.769 --> 01:22:44.689 But it shouldn't apply to the private realm. 01:22:44.769 --> 01:22:54.529 Uh but then he points out that Rawls wobbles, that's his term, not mine, on this point, under pressure from feminist critics who insist that egalitarian principles ought to be applied to the family. 01:22:55.090 --> 01:23:00.130 Rawls starts to say, well, maybe they should apply it to the family, although he's a little taciturn about that, right? 01:23:00.210 --> 01:23:09.729 Uh Cohen says once you acknowledge this wobble, or once you accept that we should wobble on this, then we acknowledge that egalitarianism ought to be a principle that we're committed to the whole way down. 01:23:09.809 --> 01:23:12.769 It ought to govern our interpersonal relations as well. 01:23:12.849 --> 01:23:16.289 Uh, and to your point, I'm not opposed to that in some circumstances. 01:23:16.449 --> 01:23:21.090 I think that actually there are good feminist reasons to apply egalitarian principles to the family. 01:23:21.170 --> 01:23:27.170 Uh, the family has very often been a site of domination uh of women and children and men on occasion, right? 01:23:27.250 --> 01:23:29.250 I don't want to kind of uh be one-sided here. 01:23:29.329 --> 01:23:33.889 Uh so we ought to think about how egalitarians protect against domination in that respect. 01:23:34.130 --> 01:23:45.569 That said, right, kind of implying, as Cohen sometimes does, that we should govern most of our life choices through a commitment to equality uh seems to me not only excessively demanding of human nature. 01:23:45.729 --> 01:23:49.969 I'm not even sure it would be desirable for us to kind of be that committed to equality, right? 01:23:50.130 --> 01:23:53.489 Uh, this is where we start to get into Peter Singer type territory, right? 01:23:53.569 --> 01:23:57.569 Where we say, you might want to be a doctor, right? 01:23:58.130 --> 01:24:09.489 But you know, it might be better for you to go do this job instead, because that will demonstrate a deeper commitment to your fellow human beings and their well-being than going and being a doctor or being a novelist or being a poet or whatever it happens to be, right? 01:24:09.729 --> 01:24:25.809 While in these kinds of circumstances, I actually think that there are good reasons to give people a lot of discretion to fulfill or lead or pursue their comprehensive life plans, even if that doesn't entail the deepest commitment to equality that might be possible or available to them at any given time, right? 01:24:25.969 --> 01:24:27.409 And that's for the two reasons I mentioned. 01:24:27.489 --> 01:24:36.369 One I just don't think that it's likely that people are going to become so self-sacrificing and altruistic anytime soon that they could live up to that strong and commitment to equality. 01:24:36.449 --> 01:24:39.250 Uh, but beyond that, I just don't think it would really be desirable either, right? 01:24:39.329 --> 01:24:51.489 I think that uh that starts to lead, frankly, towards these kind of Soviet gray leveling forms of equality that our actionaries have always criticized with mostly unfairness, but a little bit of fairness here, right? 01:24:51.809 --> 01:24:57.170 On the kind of broader point that you brought up, though, which was about sorry, can you repeat the the second point? 01:24:57.489 --> 01:25:05.649 The second point was that do you think why is Cohen so voluntaristic when it comes to individuals but not systems? 01:25:06.289 --> 01:25:07.729 Oh, okay, that's that's very fair. 01:25:07.889 --> 01:25:11.969 I think that this is because this is just an embinding tension in his work that he never reconciles, right? 01:25:12.130 --> 01:25:14.449 Uh and I pointed this out in the essay also, right? 01:25:14.529 --> 01:25:27.889 Uh, if you read Karl Marx's theory of history, it really does read like quite a deterministic text in which uh the importance of individual agency or political actors or even class struggle, as many people have pointed out, is just obliterated, right? 01:25:27.969 --> 01:25:36.849 And what you really see is a narrative that's about the importance of the development of forces of production that are going to be constitutive of the kind of society that we have. 01:25:37.009 --> 01:25:46.849 You know, you compare that with his moral theory, where there's this strong emphasis, again, as we pointed out, individual choice and try to be committed to egalitarianism. 01:25:47.170 --> 01:25:50.529 It's very hard to reconcile these two things together, right? 01:25:50.689 --> 01:26:03.009 Because the one kind of just seems to obliterate the importance of individual choice at all, and the second one makes it very, very central in a way that is uh, in some ways, even more that's actually a lot more demanding than Rawls, right? 01:26:03.090 --> 01:26:10.210 Uh, who just thought that um political theory should settle on focusing on the basic structure and its institutions, right? 01:26:10.369 --> 01:26:14.609 Now that doesn't mean Cohen couldn't have found a way to reconcile these two things together. 01:26:14.769 --> 01:26:15.969 He was a really smart guy, right? 01:26:16.050 --> 01:26:18.289 And it's I don't think it's entirely impossible. 01:26:18.369 --> 01:26:29.409 Uh, but he died relatively young at 68 when I think he still had a lot of gas in the tank intellectually, and there's just never any kind of successful conciliation between these different standpoints in his work. 01:26:29.889 --> 01:26:36.929 And I'm not really sure that there's any Cohen scholar I can think of off the top of my head who does actually manage to put these two things together in a satisfying way. 01:26:37.569 --> 01:26:47.090 Yeah, I I I appreciated that about about your defense of Cohen, is it did admit a lot of these problems that have haunted me for a while since I first read the book. 01:26:47.170 --> 01:26:48.929 God, I must have read this book. 01:26:50.529 --> 01:26:55.250 She was still alive when I read it, so it got like it was so it's gotta be a while back. 01:26:55.489 --> 01:26:57.329 Anyway, I know you have to go. 01:26:57.489 --> 01:27:00.369 I need to go to you, so we're gonna conclude here. 01:27:00.609 --> 01:27:03.729 But you'll be back on, so we'll talk about more of this in the future. 01:27:03.969 --> 01:27:12.130 Uh in fact, I think I'm gonna have Ben and maybe you come back to talk more about this Cohen book in detail and maybe get you two arguing a bit about your different interpretations of Cohen. 01:27:12.449 --> 01:27:17.329 But it's nothing like three friends arguing over my dead political philosopher. 01:27:17.489 --> 01:27:20.369 But anyway, it's the basis of being Ben's friendship, many ways. 01:27:20.609 --> 01:27:22.689 Yeah, uh, weirdly, me too. 01:27:22.769 --> 01:27:27.250 So, on that note, you have a great rest of your day, and I hope I hope these books are successful. 01:27:27.329 --> 01:27:34.130 People should check them out, particularly the repeater one, it's at a really approachable price point, and it's it's a really easy read. 01:27:34.289 --> 01:27:35.649 So thanks, buddy. 01:27:35.729 --> 01:27:36.210 I appreciate that. 01:27:36.369 --> 01:27:37.250 That's what I was attending. 01:27:37.329 --> 01:27:40.529 And uh, yeah, I'll see you around, and uh we'll catch up soon. 01:27:40.689 --> 01:27:41.649 All right, see you around. 01:27:41.729 --> 01:27:42.449 Bye bye.