This is the transcript of a talk I gave yesterday at a conference at NYU. And SPEAKING OF HOW I’M IN NEW YORK RIGHT NOW, if you live there or thereabouts, consider coming out to see me and Sohrab Ahmari in dialogue about populism tonight in Queens.

What I want to explore in this presentation, and in the paper, is what I think of as the “new skepticism” about objective material interests from academic Marxists. To try to be as clear as possible about what I’m talking about, an “objective material interest” is an interest that someone has purely by virtue of their material position. In other words, as soon as you know what someone’s material position is, that’s enough to know that they have these interests. A particularly interesting and important category of objective material interests would be objective interests people have by virtue of their class location. Workers have an interest in being exploited at a lower rate, and ultimately abolishing exploitation. Capitalists have an interest in being able to squeeze more hours of labor out of their workforce for less money. Etc. Of course, it would be extremely foolish to deny that people also have various material interests that don’t stem from their class location. But the core Marxist claim would be that, once you know someone’s class location, you know at least some interesting and important things about what their material interests are. The kind of materialism that’s typically taken to be central to Marxism is, I have to say, pretty hard to make sense of if we don’t assume at least that much.

OK. So I said I was going to be talking about a “new” skepticism about all of this. And in some ways this might just a recent expression of ideas that have been kicking around left academia for a long time. But one thing that makes this particular iteration of this kind of skepticism interesting is a combination of a couple of elements. First, the conclusion that we should be skeptical about objective material interests tends to be presented as if it were so obvious it barely requires explanation, never mind argument. Second, the skeptics about objective material interests I want to discuss tend to present themselves as firmly within the Marxist tradition, rather than coming from a self-consciously heterodox position with the Marxist tradition or just calling themselves post-Marxists or anything like that. Which is surprising, because, again, maybe I’m just suffering from a lack of imagination, but I have trouble understanding how the core of Marxist analysis is supposed to work without belief in objective material interests and in particular objective material interests stemming from class locations—belief, for example, that workers and capitalists have innately antagonistic interests regardless of the subjective consciousness anyone might or might not have about it.

And I want to be clear that I’m not resting anything here on a Marxist appeal to tradition. Heterodox doesn’t mean wrong. Revisionist doesn’t mean wrong. Sometimes Marxist orthodoxy is wrong, and it should be revised or some aspect of it should be rejected entirely. That’s all fine. But I do think that breezy skepticism about the very idea of objective material interests expressed from a position that presents itself as firmly Marxist is an odd combination.

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One of the two main authors I’m thinking of here is William Clare Roberts, best known for a book on Marx’s Capital. If you read that book, which by the way has some real insights, there are real things I learned from it, but if you read it, Roberts never presents himself there as a critic of Marx, always as a defender. And the other is Dylan Riley of the New Left Review. Again, often a sharp and insightful thinker, and one clearly thinking within Marxist categories.

OK. Let’s start with him.

In a widely shared note last fall in NLR, Riley takes aim at what he describes as a “new Marxist culture that emerged in the United States from about 2010.” He says that a particularly important feature of this new strain of Marxism is a “worldview” where “there are classes whose members have material interests deriving from their position in a system of property relations.”

And again, you might wonder how what he’s describing here isn’t just a general feature of Marxism, not some specific kind of Marxism that arose around 2010. Surely, to be a “materialist” in the Marxist sense is among other things to believe that people have material interests by virtue of their position in a system of property relations. Without that, what would a Marxist analysis of capitalism even be?

But Riley objects, saying that the idea that interests can be derived from property relations has a peculiarly “timeless and metaphysical quality.”

Why is that? Well, he says that people “live toward the future as they perceive and imagine it.” Fair enough. But when we’re asking what someone’s interests are, the question is surely which of various possible futures would be better for them. If some futures would be better for them, independent of their attitudes, it makes sense to describe those as objective interests. And the traditional Marxist claim would be that when we know a person’s position within a class structure, we at least know quite a bit about which outcomes would be good and bad for them.

To bring all this down to earth a little, it’s worth noting that even most non-Marxists would probably find the claim that people’s position in a system of property relations tells us something about what’s good or bad for them pretty intuitive at least for some positions within some systems of property relations. I suspect that most people would agree, for example, that if someone is a slave—so, their position within a system of property relations is that someone else owns them—we don’t need to know anything else about them to have a very strong reason to believe they’d be better off if slavery were abolished, or failing that if they could escape to a different polity where they could live a decent life and not be returned to bondage. Would Riley agree with that?

Hold that thought while we take a look at Roberts. Writing in Crisis & Critique, Roberts takes Jeremy Gong and Eric Blanc to task for claiming that, “Wage exploitation means that the interests of the whole working class and the capitalist class are diametrically opposed.”

Roberts calls this a “soothing fiction” and objects that different fractions of the working class and of the capitalist class often have wildly divergent interests. For example:

“Capitalist employer A does not have an interest in capitalist employer B extracting more surplus labor from B’s workforce. Capitalist employer B extracting more surplus labor may well be a threat to capitalist employer A.”

Individual capitalist firms, Roberts grants, are “hierarchically arranged and organized for the pursuit of a particular interest,” and the workers at a given firm can have a straightforward common interest in workplace-level organizing against their particular boss. But he thinks it’s a conceptual confusion to think whole capitalist economies work in an analogous way, and that this confusion obscures the complexities and contingencies of real-world socialist strategy.

To help us keep track, let’s call this Reason #1 to Be Skeptical That People Have Interests by Virtue of Their Class Locations. And that’s that membership in a class defined by general relationship to the means of production is too abstracted from specific concrete details about anyone’s economic life to tell you much about their interests.

And it’s probably worth taking a moment to differentiate this from a slightly different concern that wouldn’t really activate the same kind of skepticism. I’m going to call this Reason 1.5 because it’s a little sideways to what we’re talking about here. And that’s that membership in a class based on general relationship of production is too coarse-grained to provide us with a lot of the information we want about people’s interests. Nick French has a great essay in Left Notes from a couple weeks ago where he addresses this, and as he points out there, Reason #1.5 doesn’t give us any reason at all to reject the idea that people have interests based on their class location. It just gives us a reason to complement our coarse-grained theory of class structure with a more fine-grained theory of specific locations within that structure. And of course as Nick quite rightly points out, that’s not intellectual work that would need to be done from scratch in the 2020s. We already have just such a theory in Erik Olin Wright’s work on contradictory class locations, which is a theory he develops different versions of in his very rich discussions in these books:

The key point is that, if you accept any version of the account of contradictory class locations, you can absolutely continue to believe that people have objective interests that can be derived from nothing but their position in a system of property relations. It’s just that for certain analytical purposes you want to zoom in and look not just at whether they own the means of production or have to work for people who do but also at questions like whether they have managerial authority or whether they’re a credentialed expert with more individual bargaining power than other workers and so on. The core of what Riley and Roberts seem to be objecting to is left untouched there. But what makes Reason #1 different from Reason #1.5 is that according to Reason #1, you don’t know what someone’s interests are based on their abstract class location—even when we provide a higher level of resolution by looking at sub-class categories differentiated by things like workplace autonomy and specialized skills and managerial authority—because interests tend to reside in concrete fragments of classes. We need to know things like which specific company you work for if you’re a worker, or which one you own if you’re a capitalist. That’s what the Capitalist A and Capitalist B business was supposed to establish.

But, let’s think a little harder about this example about Roberts’s discussion Capitalist A and Capitalist B. Specifically, the passage I had highlighted earlier:

“Capitalist employer A does not have an interest in capitalist employer B extracting more surplus labor from B’s workforce. Capitalist employer B extracting more surplus labor may well be a threat to capitalist employer A.”

Based on that, you might suspect that Capitalist A would be incentivized to fund a union organizing drive at Capitalist B’s workplace so that B will extract less surplus and do worse in competition against A. It’s interesting, then, that this is the kind of thing that doesn’t happen all the time. In fact, as far as I know, if it happens, it’s very rare. Why is that?

Well, my guess would be that it doesn’t happen much for about the same reason that, if I’m having a conflict with my next-door neighbor, even if the conflict turns violent, even if we get into a fistfight or I try to shoot him, one strategy I probably won’t consider is setting fire to the dry grass on his front lawn. It wouldn’t be in my interests to do that. And that suggests a sense in which the basic truth of Blanc and Gong’s observation about all workers sharing interests and all capitalists sharing interests is consistent with the obvious interest individual capitalists have in out-competing each other. Marx described capitalists as a “band of warring brothers,” and the basic point, I think, is that the warring takes place within well-defined class parameters. And those parameters are what bands them together as brothers.

If I’m hunting for deer in the woods of northern Michigan, my interests are counterposed in some straightforward ways to the interests of other hunters who frequent the same forest. If there’s a particularly desirable eight-point buck that’s been sighted in the woods where I’m hunting, I hope I’ll bring him down before some rival does. But if the state government in Lansing tries to shorten deer season, or if local authorities try to close the forest to hunting entirely, me and my rival will be on the same side by virtue of our common position as hunters. Similarly, social democratic reforms that reduce the sting of unemployment, for example, tend to be bad for the whole band of warring brothers, and a transition to a fully socialist economy would be really bad for the whole band, and vice versa holds for the working class, all that stuff is in their interests. Workers of course have individual interests that can point in the opposite direction. That’s why you get scabs during strikes! More generally, it’s why organizing is hard. Collective action problems are big problems. But this is all compatible with saying that at least one big part of the matrix of relevant interests is the interest workers have in achieving social democracy or socialism.

Or so it seems to me, anyway. But perhaps there are deeper reasons than the ones I’ve considered so far why we can’t derive interests from class locations in this way. Perhaps the view that membership in either a class or a fraction of one is sufficient all by itself to produce interests is misguided. Both of these guys have suggested as much. In the Riley note in New Left Review, he says that material interests “are ‘material’ to the extent that they emerge from those objective circumstances; they are ‘interests’ to the degree that they are oriented toward a horizon.” The first part is clear enough. But what does “oriented toward a horizon” mean?

At the end of the paragraph, Riley says that Marxism, if it’s going to be plausible, can’t be a “philosophy of the stomach.” So, even if someone’s objective location in a class structure tells us what they have to do to fill their stomach, something other than that provides the “horizon.” OK. So, what’s the missing, non-stomach component?

Here I think Roberts is usefully clearer than Riley. In another essay, this one published in Radical Philosophy, Roberts that “the crucial point to understand about any discussion of interests” is that “to say that x is in your interest is to say that you have a good reason to want x, or that x is what you should rationally want, given your aims.”

And that phrase “given your aims,” I have to say, really triggered my inner analytic philosopher. It was an a-ha moment. Like, oh, right, that’s what’s going on here. That’s what Riley is getting at with all of this talk about how someone’s position in a system of property relations doesn’t tell you what their material interests are because first you need to know which horizon they’re aiming it. Riley assumes that the relevant horizons are provided by the consciousness people form as a result of political struggles, which seems a bit arbitrary—certainly, that’s one way people can come to care about goals, but it’s far from the only way—but putting that aside, the basic philosophical point is this:

Roberts and Riley both just sort of take it for granted that the only sense in which anything is good or bad for anyone is a purely instrumental one—in other words, a sense that arises from nothing but means/ends rationality. I have this goal and that strategy is the one that would best advance it, and so I rationally “should” do it, and this is the only sense in which any course of action can be more rational than any other. So, again, to make sure everyone’s tracking all of this, they accept that there can be objective interests in the sense that a certain course of action is objectively the best way to achieve someone’s goals, but they deny that people can have “objective” interests in the sense that they deny that some goals are more rational to aim at regardless of how they fit with the goals you happen to have.

Hence, in the next line, Roberts writes that “you can’t say what people’s interests are unless and until you figure out what they are trying or otherwise aiming to do or be.”

OK, so this is the last of the big reasons to be skeptical of the idea that people have interests by virtue of their class locations that I want to talk about today. Reason #2 would apply not just to membership in classes defined by general relation to the means of production but also to zoomed-in Wrightean class locations or even to membership in concrete fractions of classes. And that even if there are objective facts about people’s class locations, those don’t give rise to objective facts about people’s interests because interests can only be defined relative to subjective aims.

And once again I want you to notice that in both the Roberts essay in Radical Philosophy and the Riley note in New Left Review, they take this point to be so basic, so obvious, that they don’t really need to argue for it. They just kind of announce it and move on. Roberts at least pauses to explain the general philosophical position, but he doesn’t feel the need to tell us why he thinks it’s correct. They just treat it as a settled issue. But they really shouldn’t.

David Hume, historically the most famous advocate of this view of practical rationality, at least understood that he was saying something extremely provocative. In fact, he reveled in that. In his Treatise of Human Nature, he says that it is “not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.”

The fundamental philosophical debate here, which is very much an open one, is whether there’s such a thing as objective well-being. That’s the thing Riley thinks is “timeless and immaterial”—thinking that there are things that are good or bad for people for reasons more fundamental than that a particular person happens to have a particular goal. That, in other words, there are things we know are good or bad for people simply by virtue of knowing that they are people. Which is a premise that, in combination with the premise that people occupy certain positions in class structures, gets you objective—in other words, remember, attitude-independent—class interests.

And on that note, I want to go back to the thought I asked you to hold earlier about the slave. In presenting that example, I didn’t tell you a single specific concrete thing about that person. I didn’t tell you who he or she was, what specific experiences he or she had, what kind of personality he or she had, what his or her hopes or dreams were, any of that. I haven’t even told you what his or her general beliefs about the justice or injustice of slavery were. I just said that the character in the example was (a) a person who (b) was held as property by another person, and I took it as a given that (c) this gives us a very strong reason to believe that he or she would be better off being freed. That, in other words, it would be in his or her interests to be freed.

One view you might have about this, on the opposite end of the spectrum from the Riley/Roberts position, would be a belief in classical hedonic utilitarianism. What’s best for people is whatever makes them happiest and that’s that. Or if you think (like I do) that that’s a little too simplistic to be plausible, another possibility that’s also on the opposite end from Riley/Roberts is that you believe in something like an Aristotelian conception of human flourishing. That the same way we can look at various kinds of plants or non-human animals and see which ones have succeeded in fulfilling their functions, we can look at some very basic facts about human nature and see that there’s a development of our intellectual and moral and creative capacities that can make some humans successful humans, and conversely there are various ways that human lives can go wrong that make us fail to flourish. Aristotle himself was in some important ways a prisoner of the stage of historical development that produced him, and he took it for granted that there were different kinds of humans—that women didn’t have the same rational capacities as men, for example, and even that some people were natural slaves. But obviously there have also been lots of robustly universalist versions of the same line of thought. And since we’re talking here about Marxism, it’s surely worth pointing out that Marx himself fell into that tradition—there are recent books by Vanessa Wills and Sam Badger dedicated to rediscovering the dimension of Marx’s thought that assumed something at least generally along the lines of a neo-Aristotelian theory of human flourishing.

That’s often been neglected. Many Marxists have the idea that being a Marxist requires denying that there are any transhistorical facts about human nature, but I’ve never really understood why they think that. Positing that all humans have a robust interest in developing various important capacities and flourishing as people fits pretty naturally with the thought that we should be horrified by class societies where slaves and serfs and proletarians are constantly and predictably blocked from flourishing in these ways.

Now, I’m pretty sympathetic to this line of thought. If you read some of what Erik Olin Wright says about flourishing in Envisioning Real Utopias, for example, that sounds about right to me.1 But I’d be engaged in dereliction of philosophical duty here if I didn’t at least briefly gesture at the existence of all sorts of views that are somewhere in between the Marx/Aristotle/Wright end of the spectrum and the Riley/Roberts/Hume end. My graduate school friend Benjamin Yelle, for example, wrote his dissertation on this, it’s called “Realizing What Matters” if you want to look it up online, where he tries to reconcile two commonly-held intuitions about this, which are that, first, different lives are good for different people, and second, that it’s possible not just for people to pursue bad or irrational strategies relative to whatever ends they happen to have, but also for people to pursue ends that go against their interests. As I understand it, his view is that an objectively good life is one that’s lived in accordance with whatever values a particular person happens to most deeply hold, which might come apart from what you’re “aiming to do or be” if you’ve adopted irrational aims or you hold bad beliefs about what’s good for you—so, there can be levels of subjectivity, and we can at least critique the shallower ones in the name of the deper ones, and it can function a little bit like objective interests.2

Now, I certainly won’t pretend to be able to settle a philosophical debate of this magnitude in a short talk. But I do want to insist that this is a live debate, and that important things are at stake here. To see how the pieces fit together, let’s end by going back to our example about the slave. Instead of just thinking about any slave, let’s think about a particular slave and psychologically describe her.

Let’s say that the slave in question has been effectively brainwashed to believe that God decided at the dawn of time which souls would be born into slavery and which ones into freedom and that it would be sinful for her to participate in a slave revolt or even to individually try to escape. Is it still the case that it’s not in her interests to do those things?

On an extreme subjectivism about well-being, we might actually say that right now, the slave’s interests are served by remaining in bondage. If we convinced her that the cultural story she was brainwashed into accepting was incorrect, and thus she was convinced to start aiming at freedom, have we made her aware of the interests she always had? Or have we actually served her poorly by bringing her interests and her circumstances out of alignment?

The classic description of the state of affairs where she piously refrains from trying to escape is that she has false consciousness. And my sense is that, whether or not this applies to either Roberts or Riley, at least some otherwise Marxist-influenced people who are drawn to the Riley/Roberts kind of position are motivated at least in part by a discomfort with attributing false consciousness to anyone, for the basically honorable reason that they worry that it’s ridiculous and condescending to go around telling people that they don’t know what their real interests are. The reason I say that’s a basically honorable instinct is that, if you’ve convinced yourself that the great mass of the population are total dupes who don’t know what’s good for them and only you and your intellectual friends know what’s what, I really do think it’s a healthy instinct to wonder if you might be the one who’s missing something.

But let’s slow down and notice that, to reject the hypothesis of widespread false consciousness, you don’t actually have to reject the premise of objective material interests (and hence the very possibility of disconnects between material interests and subjective aims). In fact, if your worry about postulating rampant false consciousness is that it’s condescending, simply defining the problem out of existence may be the most condescending way of going about things. Compare: You think it would be bad to accuse people of being stupid, but you also think most people aren’t smart enough to know how to tie their own shoes, so you redefine “stupid” so that you don’t have to be smart enough to know how to tie your own shoes in order to be “not stupid.” Serious rejection of rampant false consciousness shouldn’t proceed by conceptual fiddling to stop the issue from arising, but from actual empirical belief that it’s not a widespread phenomenon.

And that’s the correct position! It turns out that most people have a pretty good idea of what their interests are, at least as those interests most clearly arise in their day-to-day lives, is a relatively rare one. Yes, brainwashing exists, cults exist, drug abuse and addiction exist, there are certainly some situations in which people deeply mistaken about what’s good for them. But generally speaking, and all of this totally tracks on something like a neo-Aristotelian flourishing account, by the way, generally speaking people have a pretty good idea. Most people who see someone with a good job and a high income and a loving family and enriching projects that they have lots of free time to pursue and a community they’re nourished by and that they give back to in a deeply satisfying way aren’t confused about whether that person is doing well in life. Conversely, most people who pass by someone shooting up on a park bench have a pretty good idea that they’re not looking at a life well-lived. And the same is true even with vastly less extreme examples on either end. This is why good union organizers are trained to listen more than they talk, When you start listening to people talk about their lives, they know perfectly well what their problems are, what their needs are. Your job is to show them that collective action is the way to get those goods.

And this, it seems to me, gets us to the most basic premise of materialism. Marxism is “materialist” in at least two senses. The narrow sense is historical materialism—what Marx is talking about in the 1859 preface, what Cohen is defending in Karl Marx’s Theory of History. At least in its classic form, that’s a series of linked premises about the development of the forces of production over the course of history and how that enables the reorganization of the relations of production within a society and how that in turn leads to the formation of a legal and political superstructure that serves to perpetuate those relations of production. And it seems to me that, whether you ultimately accept that story or not, an absolutely vital premise without which it wouldn’t make any sense is materialism in a looser, simpler sense, which is just the view that enough people will be motivated by their objective material interests enough of the time that we can use that assumption to build explanatory models and make interesting and important predictions about the world around us. That looser sense is what we’re typically thinking of when we talk about giving a “materialist” account of this or that contemporary event or phenomenon. Without even materialism in this loose sense, you just can’t cobble together anything that looks much like Marxism.

Or so, at any rate, it seems to me. But now I want to know what all of you think.

Here’s the recording for the sixteenth session of our Substack philosophy class for paid subscribers (where we just barely started talking about Section II of Ch. 7 of Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia finally). Next Tuesday we’ll be reading the “The Original Position and End-Result Principles” section.

Also, remember that this and all the previous class recordings so far can be found here.

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No essay this week, sorry!

But I’m unlocking I’m Pretty Sure Feudalism Existed after a year and change behind the paywall:

…and as a quick preview, Andy has already made the graphic for next Sunday:

Speaking of Andy:

As many of you I’m sure know, he makes all the artwork for my show and my Substack. He also does a lot of artwork for other shows, and album covers for bands and posters for concerts and pro bono stuff for local leftie political stuff where he lives. In other words, like me, like a lot of us, he strings together several precarious gigs to make a living. And he heavily relies on his computer to do all that. Right now, it’s broken, so he’s got a GoFundMe going. Right now, it’s just shy of 2/3rds of the way there.

I’ve said all this before. But let me clarify a bit more than I have in the past:

You might have seen him put out artwork since the fundraiser started and thought “oh ok, no problem then.” (Look how nice that image I just previewed is, for example!) But it’s worth emphasizing that what he’s doing now he’s doing laboriously by hand, because that’s the only way he can work right now. He really needs a new computer.

So, if you possibly can, chip in!

Finally, just as a reminder, if you’re in NYC or thereabouts, I’m doing an event next Sunday.

Would be great to see some of you there!

Here’s the recording for the fifteenth session of our Substack philosophy class for paid subscribers (where we actually finished Section I of Ch. 7 of Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia finally). Next Tuesday we’ll be starting 7.2 (so we’re finally getting to the Nozick vs. Rawls stuff!). We decided to read the first couple subsections (so, ending just before “The Original Position and End-Result Principles”).

Also, remember that this and all the previous class recordings so far can be found here.

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Two weeks from today (on Sunday, May 17th) I’ll be one half of a discsussion on “Trump, Zohran, and the Future of Populism” with UnHerd editor Sohrab Ahmari at Bar Freda in Queens.

You can get tickets here.

I’ve known Sohrab for years. He’s edited my work first at Compact and then at UnHerd, and as far as I know he’s the only conservative to have ever taken one of my Capital classes, which says something about his intellectual curiosity. I’d certainly consider him to be a personal friend (I’ve sat around drinking whiskey on the roof of his apartment), but I’ve often half-jokingly called him an “ideological frenemy.” I agree with him on a long list of issues, from the war in Iran to the importance of rebuilding the labor movement, but we also have a long list of disagreements on issues that matter to me. While he turned hard on the administration after the beginning of the war (and he had many criticisms earlier), he supported Trump in 2024 and he’s generally conservative on social issues. All of that makes him a relatively unusual creature in the U.S. setting, though he’d be less so in any of the European countries where “Christian Democrat” parties are a normal part of the political landscape.

On the “Trump” part of the discussion topic on the 17th, during the 2024 election Kuba Wrzesniewski and I argued that a second Trump term was likely to be far uglier and more authoritarian than the first round. Since he took office, our worst fears about that were realized, and a lot of my commentary in the last year and a half has probably make me sound a bit like first-term “resistance lib.”

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Bluntly: The kidnappings of Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk for political speech that displeases the administration, the transfer of detainees convicted of nothing to CECOT, and the murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti scared the hell out of me, and in a strange way even negatively polarized me into realizing how attached I am to many existing American institutions. Birthright citizenship, for example, really is a civilizational achievement, as I argued in Jacobin last year and again in a different register for a 4th of July article at UnHerd. The same is true of America’s unusually expansive free speech protections.

In my Jacobin article about the No Kings protests in March, I wrote:

Anyone on the socialist left who thinks the fight against Trump’s authoritarianism isn’t our fight because it merely pits liberals against conservatives is very deeply missing the point. Liberal capitalist democracy is profoundly flawed, and its promises are destined to go unfulfilled. But as workers’ movements have always understood, it’s a good starting point for the struggle for something better.

If we’re going to arrive at a form of society that extends democracy from politics to economics, we need to fight like hell to defend the level of democracy we already have — which is precisely what gives us room to agitate, organize, and maneuver.

So, while it’s not going to be a “debate” so much as an open-ended discussion that includes elements of strong disagreement, I do think Sohrab and I are coming from substantially different places here. My sense is that his position is that Trump’s second term has been bitterly disappointing, but he was on board with at least significant elements of what Trump and Vance were talking about in 2024. Without being too flippant about serious issues, I come about as close as an atheistic materialist can to agreeing with Tucker Carlson’s recent speculation that Trump may be the Antichrist.

On Zohran, there’s a broadly similar split. Sohrab has been sympathetic to aspects of the mayor’s agenda, but he’s also been very critical of the Cea Weaver nomination and the inauguration line about “the warmth of collectivism.” I wrote articles for Jacobin defending the mayor on both issues. The night he won the election last year, there was a GTAA live show in the same venue that the discussion with Sohrab is going to be in, and the bar gave everyone champagne to toast after his victory speech. I’m an unabashed partisan.

Even though “Trump” and “Zohran” are included in the title more as illustrative figures for a broader discussion on types of left and right “populism,” their contradictions, and their possibilities going forward, I’m still sure several of these disagreements will come up in some form in the discussion on the 17th. (I asked my friend Cynthia, who might soon be starting a podcast of her own, to moderate the discussion, and I’m sure if we get into an extended stretch of boring everyone about the things we agree on, she’ll prompt us to go down a more interesting fork.) But it really is going to be a discussion more than a real debate, since part of what makes Sohrab such an interesting interlocutor is that (a) he’s thoughtful and tends to take a pretty long view of political developments, and (b) we really do have some common premises.

The man got through all of Capital Vol. 1, and it shows—he’s one of the rare non-Marxists (especially on the contemporary right) to make a real effort to understand it and incorporate some of the framework’s insights. It’s interesting to see, for example, how the class analysis near the end of his article Cole Tomas Allen is a Postmodern Symptom rhymes with some of what Nick French writes (from an explicitly Marxist perspective) here.

My goal isn’t to, like, have a clip I can post as “Ben Burgis DESTROYS Sohrab Ahmari.” I think he’s often insightful and I’m interested in what he has to say as we both think through the current moment.

Also, it should be fun. Living out here on the opposite coast, I really don’t spend that much time in NYC, and this kind of thing is always a bit of a reunion with people I don’t see nearly as often as I’d like to. I’d be pretty shocked if we didn’t get some Q&A questions from faces you’ll find familiar from the podcast.

So, if you’re going to be anywhere near New York on the 17th, come check it out. It’s going to be a good time.

Here’s the recording for the fourteenth session of our Substack philosophy class for paid subscribers (covering the “Sen’s Argument” and some of the “Redistribution and Property Rights” sections of Nozick’s “Anarchy, State, and Utopia”). Next Tuesday we will, I promise, finish up 7.1. (Third time’s the charm!)

Also, remember that this and all the previous class recordings so far can be found here.

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This is an edited transcript of a talk I gave back in November at King’s College London. The original title was the one I’ve used here, but when we got closer to the event we ended up deciding to merge it with a book launch for my Everyday Analysis pamphlet Confessions of a “Class Reductionist.” So, essentially the first part of the talk covered the media issues—roughly, what’s happened to the media in the last several decades, what’s happened to the Left in the same timeframe, and the frustrations and opportunities that come out of how the two intersect—and the second covered my case for class-first left political strategy in the pamphlet. What follows is a slightly condensed transcript of the first half, since that already seemed more than long enough for a Philosophy for the People essay and anyone who wants to know what I say in the pamphlet can (ahem!) pick up a copy.

When Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman put out their classic book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media in 1988, the media landscape they were writing about was, in some ways, as different from what we have now as the kind of early factories where they used horses to pull heavy equipment were from factories in 2025 that are so heavily automated that they only have a handful of human workers.

I’ll focus my examples here on my homeland, since that is unfortunately where all this stuff gets field-tested before it gets exported to the rest of the world. (All I can say about that, on behalf of myself and my 340 million countymen, is that we’re very sorry.) In 1988, there were three 24/7 cable news channels in the United States. One of them was restricted to financial news…and the other two were CNN. Really. There was CNN and a channel with the very creative name CNN2. The transition from there to the thriving universe of competing right-wing vs. centrist “progressive” cable news channels, supplemented by all day and all night barking reactionary talk radio bullshit, that I can remember in, say, the middle of the Obama era already feels a bit like the part in Ch. 15 of Capital where Marx is describing the explosion of steam-engine technology over a few short decades. And like the steam-powered world Marx was marveling about in Capital, that media universe now feels like a bygone world. CNN still exists, just about, but I’m pretty sure its executives would sacrifice their mothers at Bohemian Grove if they thought it would get them the kind of ratings routinely racked up by Joe Rogan or Theo Von—half-political comedians who just kinda record themselves having conversations and dump them onto the internet.

It’s easier now than it’s ever been before to curate your own media diet according to your particular preferences. Not getting the same high you used to from Fox News? No problem. Switch to the harder stuff, like Newsmax. Or there’s a really godforsaken one called the One American Network. Think even OAN are cucks? Brother, have you heard about Nick Fuentes? You can have him in your ear all day every day if he’s the only that still gets you where you’re trying to go. And conversely, of course, there’s a vastly greater niche for content that I actually like—that departs from mainstream narratives in a direction that’s actually useful in terms of building support for some sort of movement in the direction of a less insanely cruel and inegalitarian world than the one we have right now. More on that in a moment.

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First, though, I want to pull back from thinking about the disanalogies between the world Chomsky and Herman were talking about and the new and updated hellscape, and think about the common threads. Because…just as we’ve moved a very long way away from steam engines powering ocean liners being the cutting edge of technological progress but even so Capital remains the most illuminating book anyone has written about the core dynamics of the economic order that still shapes our lives…as different as our current fragmented media landscape is from the one described in Manufacturing Consent, it’s not as if Chomsky and Herman’s “propaganda model” doesn’t tell us anything salient about the media wars of 2025.

In fact, last year as the Palestine encampments were going on at American universities, a thought I kept having was that the kind of propaganda that was being spewed nonstop in major media about these student protesters was actually far cruder than the relatively sophisticated model of how propaganda works that you get in Manufacturing Consent. Basically, if you imagine the most excitable 19-year-old leftist you’ve ever met, the way that guy thinks media propaganda works is a fairly decent model for what was all over media in the spring semester of 2024. At the height of all that hysteria, I did a teach-in at the Palestine encampment at Princeton, and I couldn’t stop thinking about this. Every day, I was hearing in the media about how the protesters were these violent hordes of antisemites raging around college campuses doing mini-kristallnachts, but all the students I interacted with at my teach-in were just these very earnest kids, tons of whom were Jewish, who were having a very healthy and appropriate human reaction to the horrors of a livestreamed genocide.

Perhaps that’s a topic that’s best steered away from here, though, since as I understand it I’m speaking in a country where if I said the sentence “I support Palestine Action” (rather than keeping it safely on the mention side of the use/mention distinction and merely mentioning that forbidden sentence), I’d be committing some sort of punishable thoughtcrime. Even under the Trump administration, we’re not quite there yet in the United States.

Anyway, what Chomsky and Herman describe is a very sophisticated form of propaganda where a thriving debate is allowed within narrowly prescribed limits. Chomsky always used to contrast this to the crude Stalinist version, where, like, Soviet citizens all knew better than to trust what they read in Pravda. Everyone took it for granted that there was a fair amount of distortion there. Americans could feel like sophisticated news consumers who knew all about “both sides” of a debate and had sophisticated views on who was right even though any serious critique of capitalism or imperialism was well outside of the brackets of that “both,” off in a region of the map marked Here There Be Dragons.

And, look. To a great extent, legacy media is still trying to make that model work. They’ll probably be trying straight until the last cable news hack goes off air, like the TV studio that’s still trying to operate during the zombie apocalypse at the beginning of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. But the seams are showing, even in legacy media.

When Henry Kissinger died two years ago, I was invited onto a mid-tier cable network called News Nation to argue with a guy from American Conservative magazine about Kissinger’s legacy and absolutely everything about the way that the host who was jointly interviewing me and the American Conservative guy said was an effort at gently enforcing the old standards. But the fact that they had someone like me on at all is already a sign that the system is breaking down. Like, this is a network where Andrew Cuomo’s brother Chris is one of the anchors! Weird marginal commies like me wouldn’t be booked there if things were still functioning at a 1988 level of efficiency. On the other hand, it’s also interesting that Chris Cuomo is working there. If he’d had to resign from CNN in disgrace even a decade before he did, that probably would have been the last anyone heard of him for a long time. In the 2020s, he had a kind of semi-CNN thing to land at when he fell.

Or, switching to the American Right, the highest-profile guy on Fox News used to be one Tucker Carlson, who’s now doing a weird version of his show, unaffiliated to any cable network, from the cottage where he lives in the middle of nowhere, and it’s a big enough deal that the current president of the United States went on Tucker’s show last year instead of going to the first Republican debate. And just now, like a week ago, Tucker aired a long friendly interview with Nick Fuentes, where he oh-so-gently disagreed with Nick’s love of the most prodigiously murderous dictators of the 20^th century, and suggested that perhaps not all Jews are bad, but mostly he seemed to welcome Nick as an ally in good standing. To go back to the map analogy from earlier, it’s safe to say that at this point the dragons are wandering around on the mainland.

And hell, thinking about this particular dragon is almost enough to make even someone like me wish we still had the old bookends of acceptable discourse Chomsky was critiquing firmly in place. Or at least to wish for that for exactly as long as it takes me to remember how that version of the media functioned when I was an undergrad in the runup to the invasion of Iraq. That’s generally enough for me to shake myself out of it. One way or the other, though, we’re in an environment where all sorts of political factions that used to be firmly locked outside are in a position to at least make a play for a real audience. Not the single unified audience that used to tune in to watch Tom Brookaw talk about Vietnam or whatever, since for better or worse that audience no longer exists. But a strange fragmented one where the fragments often fly around and collide with each other in ways that can be maddening but also shake loose new opportunities. And we can bemoan our most toxic enemies getting those opportunities, but that’s both pointless, since there’s nothing to be done about it, and deeply misguided, because any halfway plausible vision of the kind of socialist democracy we’re fighting for has to start from the premise of free speech and letting everyone have their say and trusting ordinary people to sort it all out. The question instead has to be how we’re going to effectively counter the flood of reactionary muck with a more compelling message of our own.

And thinking that through has to start by thinking hard about what’s happened to the Left while the rest of the world has been changing in the ways I’ve been describing. I don’t want to tell the kind of simple story that’s supposed to explain everything here because I think the reality is manifestly vastly more complicated than any simple monocausal story can hope to capture, but I do want to start with some basic core facts. And to establish those core facts, I want to go back a lot further than the Manufacturing Consent era in the 1980s. Let’s start in the 1840s.

When Marx and Engels were starting their careers as young radicals, and for a good while thereafter, they were perpetually convinced that capitalism was one more big market crisis away from being overthrown by the rebellious workers of the world. Now, Marx seems to have rethought that by the time he wrote Capital, there’s a whole interesting bit about this in the last part of Soren Mau’s book Mute Compulsion, where Mau traces the story of Marx coming to recognize that the periodic crises of capitalism could function almost like forest fires that renew the forest ecosystem for the next round of accumulation. Perhaps also experience was starting to teach Marx that the dynamics of class consciousness were a lot more complicated than just, people experience a crisis, decide they have nothing to lose but their chains, and rise up. I might be making this up, because I’ve never been able to find it again, but I could swear I remember reading some very late in life letter from Engels where he says that back in the 1840s he and Marx mistook capitalism’s “birth pangs” for its “death agony.”

Even so, during Engels’s final years, the Second International had gotten going, and in the decades leading up to the First World War it was racking up progressively more impressive electoral successes, especially in Germany, that for a while there it was possible to believe that capitalism would radicalize its own gravediggers more or less automatically. As industrialization continued, the proletariat would get bigger and bigger, packed together in factories and working-class neighborhoods, and socialist ideas would naturally flourish in those conditions and sooner or later, to borrow a phrase used much later in the 20^th century by Fidel Castro, trying to stop the transition to socialism would be like trying to stop a pregnant wale from giving birth.

There’s a lot we could say about why that didn’t happen. Again, I want to be clear that I’m under no illusions that it’s a simple story reducible to a few easily diagnosed causes. We’re talking about well over a century of human history here. More than one thing happened! But, as we’re having this conversation near the end of Marxism’s second century, I think one thing we have to acknowledge is that, whatever else is true, there’s nothing automatic about class consciousness and socialist organizing and working-class radicalization. Class consciousness is always a precious but heart-breakingly contingent cultural achievement.

If I was going to recommend just one book about all of this, it would be the one I wrote about in the second essay of this thing, which is Vivek Chibber’s short but very sharp book The Class Matrix. One of the things that Chibber does in that book is turn the tables in a really interesting way on all the Marxist and post-Marxist theorists over the course of the last several decades who’ve said that, if we just go with basic Marxist economic analysis, we should expect that a successful global movement to transition to socialism should have happened by this point in the history of capitalism (because, after all, that would be in the class interests of the working-class majority) and since it hasn’t happened yet, we need to either revise the basic class analysis or else supplement it with other intellectual resources to figure out what’s the counteracting factors are—maybe some sort of analysis about culture, about ideology, maybe even psychoanalysis. And Chibber essentially says, no, whatever interesting things we might be able to learn from all of that, we don’t actually need any of that to explain working class non-resistance.

I’m sure everyone here is familiar with Marx’s “mute compulsion” concept in a basic way, wherever you all are in the spectrum from “I read an article in Jacobin every once in a while” to “I’ve not only memorized every word of all three volumes of Capital, but also all of the punctuation marks.” But in broad strokes, the idea is that, in all class systems—slavery, feudalism, capitalism, whatever—the immediate producers, whether proletarians, peasants, serfs, or slaves, spend part of their day working to meet their own needs and then they’re forced to spend part of it working to enrich some sort of exploiting class. Under capitalism, since all this is mediated through market relations, workers spend part of their day reproducing their own wages and part generating profits for the boss. That much is what capitalism has in common with all those previous systems. But one of the most important differences between capitalism and its predecessors is that serfs and slaves are directly, violently compelled to do that surplus labor. Fail to show up for your week of corvee labor as a feudal serf and you’ll end up having a conversation with some guys with swords. Try to escape from the plantation as a slave and you’ll be chased down by the slave patrol. And of course that’s not how capitalism works, at least in typical cases. In fact, workers show up every day at even the most tedious, degrading, or dangerous jobs, precisely because the threat of losing employment is such a potent disciplinary tool. They’re terrified of losing those awful jobs. No one needs to be frog-marched to work at an Amazon warehouse by guys with rifles. The “compulsion” of their economic circumstances does the trick just fine on its own.

And so a big part of what Chibber argues is that, when we take Marx’s insight about mute compulsion, his basic picture of class relations, and zoom into look at the matrix of particular incentives that particular individuals have by virtue of their class location, the Frankfurt School kind of assumption that Marxist structural analysis would predict proletarian resistance and we have to bring in culture and ideology to explain non-resistance ends up getting things exactly backward. Once we zoom in on the individual incentives, the balance of incentives for individual proletarians, precisely by virtue of the circumstances that mutely compel them to participate in the structure, is to keep their heads down and pursue individual-level solutions. Even the lowest-income workers really do have a bit more to lose than just their chains! They have families and kids to worry about. Even if they live in cramped apartments, they make those apartments their homes and they don’t want to get evicted. Even if their jobs suck, they don’t want to lose them. And while reforms within the system can blunt at least some of these edges, for example with better labor laws, the default result of basic capitalist economic structures mean that collective action always comes with tremendous risks. If you get involved a union organizing campaign, you might get fired. If you go on strike, the boss might shut down your warehouse entirely. If you elect a socialist government to power, you might trigger capital flight orthe rest of the world might economically cripple your country with sanctions. The hard work, the terribly hard work, of organizers is to build solidaristic culture in order to get people to take risks on one another’s behalf. So the punchline here is that, once we zoom in to the level of individual incentives, Marxist structural analysis predicts non-resistance and you actually have to bring in culture and ideology to explain resistance.

And a point Chibber often makes very sharply about all of this is that organizers tend to be psychologically unusual people. You sort of have to be a moral fanatic to dedicate your life to this stuff. Realistically, most human beings just aren’t going to be like that. So, material incentives still have to do an awful lot of the heavy lifting. The disincentives to collective action are going to win out in the end unless you’re actually delivering the goods through collective victories. In the best-case, the absolute best-case scenario, there’s a virtuous cycle here, where you can build up enough solidaristic culture to put some points on the board with concrete victories, and you can start to change that risk-reward matrix to create better incentives for sticking with the movement to get even more. And the frustrating thing about this picture, but I think this is absolutely correct, is that class consciousness and class organization is always a contingent and fragile achievement. There’s no structural guarantee.

So, I want to make two points about all of this, one connecting back to what we were talking about before and one that might advance the plot a little. The first is that if you accept Chibber’s analysis that you need a core of hardcore fanatics to make any movement work, that tells me something about what purpose is being served by trying to intervene in our weird fragmented media landscape to promote socialist politics. What are we trying to do when we do that? Sometimes people who think they’re being sophisticated materialists will say, what are you trying to do when you do all these debates, or write all these articles for Jacobin to give people talking points for arguments with their non-leftist friends, or write all these articles for the non-socialist press trying to get left-wing ideas in there? Do you think that we can somehow achieve socialism this way? In other words, are you such a simpleton that you actually think we can debate our way to socialism? And for the record I do not in fact think that. No one anywhere thinks that. But if we want to create a socialist political culture that’s going to breed the kind of fanatical hard-core organizers we need, if we understand this as a big part of the task, then all of this discourse-level stuff does become relevant. You never know where future organizers might first encounter socialist ideas and get excited about them. That’s one point.

The second point is that I want to admit that I haven’t really done what I promised earlier. I haven’t actually said what I think happened to the Left in the period from the Manufacturing Consent era in the 1980s to the present. Because the Class Matrix story is a general story rooted in the basic structure of capitalism. And of course we can’t explain any particular shift that took place within the history of capitalism by appealing only to the general story. You have to look at particular events. But the starting point of that analysis, the thing I think we can take from that as we start to think about what happened, is that class consciousness and working-class militancy and working-class organization can only be a terribly fragile cultural achievement.

And what we’ve seen in the last several decades is really a catastrophic collapse in a lot of the progress on that front that had previously been made in societies like the UK and even the US. That happened for a lot of specific concrete reasons, not deducible of course from the general we’ve just been discussing. Neoliberal restructuring of global trade conspired with automation to undercut a lot of the big industrial unions that had previously been the heavy battalions of the workers’ movement, for example—that’s an obvious piece of the puzzle. Smaller workplaces are harder to organize. The collapse of the deeply flawed experiments in authoritarian state socialism that existed in the 20^th century also just took a lot of wind out of the sails of a lot of the people who’d be our necessary hard core of fanatics, that’s absolutely another puzzle piece. Even basic social democracy in Europe, or the most successful movements in the US, couldn’t have been built up without the contributions of a lot of people who were inspired by a long-term radical socialist vision, and capitalism’s triumph in the Cold War terribly undermined a lot of that confidence that something better is possible. I don’t think you can discount that. And obviously we could say a lot more about what happened to the left in between the 1980s and today, but there’s just one more factor I want to highlight, which is the way a lot of the political evolution that’s happened in a lot of different countries over the last several decades has been shaped by what political scientists call the “diploma divide.” The explosion of higher education has historically meant that whether or not you went to college defines a lot of culture war battlelines, and the combination of that with the decline of those powerful industrial unions has contributed to class dealignment—the phenomenon whereby left-of-center parties that might traditionally look to union workers as a voting base end up increasingly being captured by the values and worldview of credentialed professionals. That in turn opens up space for the real monsters, the really poisonous xenophobic authoritarian dragons, on the pseudo-populist Right.

And I want to point out that my claim here is absolutely NOT that the non-diploma-addled working class is culturally conservative while credentialed professional types are culturally progressive. In fact, that story would just be inaccurate in a basic ways, if you look at opinion polling. We live in a vastly more secular, more cosmopolitan, more pluralistic, less sexist, and so on society than anything our grandparents could have imagined at this stage of their lives—that’s true at all class levels—and the trend line at all class levels is very very clear. But if different parts of society don’t necessarily move on the same speed on various social and cultural issues, the culture war can be mixed up with the diploma divide in ways that are just profoundly un-conducive to a flourishing socialist left. And the diploma divide is obviously not the only divide. There are all sorts of other cultural divides, and various culture wars that mostly play out within the professional classes themselves.

So, when you put it all together? what’s the Left going to do? How do we proceed? That brings me to the new book.

Here’s the recording for the thirteenth session of our Substack philosophy class for paid subscribers (covering the “How Liberty Upsets Patterns” section of “Anarchy, State, and Utopia”). Next Tuesday we will, I promise, finish up 7.1.

(Also, remember that this and all the previous class recordings so far can be found here.)

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Every Friday I’m going to be posting a short note like this highlighting something I’ve read in the last week that I’d recommend. You can read the last one here.

A few days ago, my friend Bhaskar Sunkara was awarded the 2026 Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize by the Broadbent Institute and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. His comments at that ceremony so perfectly complement last week’s pick that, breaking previous practice, I’m directing readers to articles by the same guy two weeks in a row.

In the article I highlighted last week, he wrote about a baby step that would get us a little bit closer to a socialist economy. In this one, he describes the long-term goal, connecting it to the book he and I and Mike Beggs wrote (coming out this fall!), to the twin failures of Soviet-style planning and European social democracy in the twentieth century, and to the work of Ellen Meiksins Wood, whose work helped teach a young Bhaskar to think in terms of “continents and centuries” and not just the next election.

Most of all, [that work] insisted on capitalism as the system. Not one social arrangement among many. Not the “economy.” Not "modernity." But the underlying key to understanding the world we live in — what Ellen would later call, in Democracy Against Capitalism, "a system of social relations and political power." A system that arose contingently — and therefore a system that is not permanent. Ellen refused to let us naturalize capitalism, even backward into history. If it had a beginning, it could have an end.

Numerous progressives in 2026 who insist on their own common sense and groundedness point to the high water mark of twentieth century social democracy as a way of insisting that we can be good egalitarians without indulging in wildly utopian dreams of transcending captialism entirely. Bhaskar argues persuasively that these progressives miss the point.

If socialism outside of capitalism failed because it tried to abolish markets, socialism within capitalism, social democracy, failed for the opposite reason — it tried to tame capitalism without transcending it.

For a while, it worked beautifully. Postwar Sweden was probably the most livable society in the world: full employment, centralized unions that negotiated on equal footing with employers, and a universal welfare state supported by a growing economy. Workers had dignity, security, and real power on the shop floor and at the ballot box. And as they got more secure, they practiced more and more solidarity. Not just with each other, but with those in the Third World. Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme’s final public speech, days before his death, was delivered alongside ANC (African National Congress) President Oliver Tambo. In it, he said that “a system like apartheid cannot be reformed; it can only be abolished.” Palme might have been killed for it.

But there was a contradiction at the core of Palme’s project that derailed it long before his death. Social democracy empowered workers politically while leaving ownership of production and investment power in the hands of capitalists. It produced a standoff between a mighty workers’ movement and these traditional sources of business power.

As long as the economy was growing, the standoff held. There was enough surplus to give labor raises, provide capital profits, and fund the welfare state on top. But the moment growth slowed in the 1970s, the whole arrangement started to buckle.

The left wing of social democracy saw the problem clearly and tried to solve it. The Meidner Plan of 1976 proposed gradually transferring ownership of large firms to worker-controlled funds — a real path from social democracy to socialism, funded by the profits workers were generating through years of wage restraint. It was a brilliant solution to both Sweden’s economic difficulties and its political impasse.

It was also something that could not have been won without a mass mobilization of workers from below that the Swedish social democratic leadership could not abide.

Even with lukewarm support from the Social Democratic Party, Swedish capital treated the Meidner Plan as an existential threat. The scheme was gutted.

The real lesson from this history is very different from the one today’s social democrats draw from it. They say, Social democracy is as far as you can go and was itself a radically egalitarian achievement, so settle for it. BE REALISTIC and keep making slow and steady progress. But capital is a constantly moving target, not a static one, and it doesn’t accept a draw or allow you to slowly besiege it. At some point, a war of position must become a war of maneuver.

What would long-term victory in that war of maneuver look like, such that it didn’t just replicate the pathologies of Soviet-style economies?

Read the full article to find out!

No new writing from me since last Sunday’s Substack, sorry! I’m in the process of moving apartments and racing to do some work for longer-term writing deadlines.

While I’ve got your attention, though, J. Andrew World is a crazily talented graphic artist who makes all the images for both this Substack and my show. He’s also made art for other shows, and very often makes album covers and posters for bands (in other words, like me, like a lot of us, he’s stringing together a bunch of part-time gigs), and outside of that paying work he does a lot of artwork for his local DSA. His computer broke recently, and he’s been doing what he can without it, but there’s a lot he can’t do until he gets this taken care of, and he’s been having to turn down gigs. He started a GoFundMe to help him buy a new one so he can fully get back into the swing of doing what he does best, and last I checked he’s just under two thirds of the way there. Consider chipping in!

Robert Nozick’s book Anarchy, State, and Utopia is divided into two sections. Part I is dedicated to arguing for a libertarian “minimal state.” His primary target there is the “individualist anarchist” who rejects any state, even a minimal one. Part II is dedicated to arguing against any sort of more-than-minimal state that does things like giving all of its citizens health care (never mind, y’know, nationalizing the means of production).

At the beginning of Part II, Nozick tells us that, if “the world were wholly just,” the subject of “justice in holdings” (i.e. of who has a right to what) would be “exhaustively” covered by these cases:

1. A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in acquisition is entitled to that holding.

2.  A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in transfer, from someone else entitled to the holding, is entitled to the holding.

3. No one is entitled to a holding except by (repeated) applications of 1 and 2.

Since the world isn’t wholly just, he has to add a principle of “rectification.” Like left-wing “redistribution,” libertarian “rectification” takes from some to give to others. But the goal of “rectification” isn’t to deliver what it’s fair or reasonable that everyone should have, but just to deliver to individuals what they in particular plausibly would have had if not for previous violations of their libertarian rights.1

Nozick differentiates his theory of “justice in holdings” from more standard views about distributive justice by describing the latter as theories of which patterns of distribution are just. Egalitarianism, for example, holds that there’s some important sense in which everyone has the same basic claim to whatever it is (resources, opportunities, etc.) that a given egalitarian theory says we should equalize. Sufficientarianism says that while inequalities per se aren’t objectionable, it’s unjust for the people at the bottom end of unequal distributions to not have enough. Meritocracy says that people with more merit should have more. And, as my favorite Slovenian would say, “and so on and so on and so on.”

In all cases, what makes these “patterned” views of justice is that we can test whether a particular distribution passes muster on each of them by asking questions like:

• Does anyone have less that S (where S is some standard of sufficiency)?

• If some people only have S, do other people have S x 400?

• If so, is it because the people who have more are especially meritorious?

…and so on. If you find out that there’s there’s an individual A who has 400 times more of whatever an egalitarian wants to equally distribute than individuals B, C, and D have, the egalitarian will condemn this as unjust without even knowing who A, B, C, or D are. If B, C, and D have less than S, the sufficientarian doesn’t need to know who they are to object, and so on. These are theories of which patterns of distribution are justified, regardless of who in particular occupies each point in the structure.

Nozick denies that justice operates at this level at all. He thinks particular individuals have particular claims to particular holdings, understood in terms of 1-3 above (plus a principle of rectification) and that’s all there is to say about which distributions are just.2

Nozick’s best remembered critique of “patterned” views of justice in Anarchy, State, and Utopia is his Wilt Chamberlain argument. I wrote about that one at the end of 2024 for Jacobin. What I’m interested in here, though, comes just before he introduces that thought experiment.

At the beginning of Ch. 7, which I just went over with the Substack philosophy class, Nozick explains his preference for the slightly awkward phrase “justice in holdings.”

The term “distributive justice” is not a neutral one. Hearing the term “distribution,” most people presume that some thing or mechanism uses some principle or criterion to give out a supply of things. Into this process of distributing shares some error may have crept. So it is an open question, at least, whether redistribution should take place; whether we should do again what has already been done once, though poorly. However, we are not in the position of children who have been given portions of pie by someone who now makes last minute adjustments to rectify careless cutting. There is no central distribution, no person or group entitled to control all the resources, jointly deciding how they are to be doled out. What each person gets, he gets from others who give to him in exchange for something, or as a gift. In a free society, diverse persons control different resources, and new holdings arise out of the voluntary exchanges and actions of persons. There is no more a distributing or distribution of shares than there is a distributing of mates in a society in which persons choose whom they shall marry.

I obviously disagree with the central conclusions of the book. But Nozick is a careful philosopher, often attentive to distinctions others miss, and Anarchy, State, and Utopia contains real insights. (As I’ve mentioned before, I think the critique of utilitarianism in Part I is brilliant.)3 Nozick is also a top-notch philosophical writer. When he wants you to feel the force of a moral intuition, he knows just how to draw it out.

This last virtue, though, can be a double-edged sword. Nozick at his best is cautious and rigorous, but when he’s not, sometimes his rhetoric is so good it covers over massive holes in his logic.

Nozick plays up the contrast between “patterned” distributions and the glorious chaos of a “free society” by reference to a slogan most famously used by Karl Marx in his Critique of the Gotha Program (1875). “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”

To think that the task of a theory of distributive justice is to fill in the blank in “to each according to his _______” is to be predisposed to search for a pattern; and the separate treatment of “from each according to his_______” treats production and distribution as two separate and independent issues. On an entitlement view these are not two separate questions. Whoever makes something, having bought or contracted for all other held resources used in the process (transferring some of his holdings for these cooperating factors), is entitled to it. The situation is not one of something’s getting made, and there being an open question of who is to get it. Things come into the world already attached to people having entitlements over them. From the point of view of the historical entitlement conception of justice in holdings, those who start afresh to complete “to each according to his_______” treat objects as if they appeared from nowhere, out of nothing. A complete theory of justice might cover this limit case as well; perhaps here is a use for the usual conceptions of distributive justice.

If you were nodding along to the rest of that paragraph, you might barely notice the part I’ve put in bold. You might just register it as Nozick scrupulously covering all of his bases. Taken seriously, though, it’s a game-changing concession.

To ease our way into thinking about this, let’s think about a very different way you could get a distribution that showed no obvious pattern. Imagine an absolute monarchy ruled by a mad king, prone to sudden and dramatic mood swings.4 The king can and does demote high-ranking nobles to the landless peasantry and award vast estates to his random people he meets on the street as the fancy strikes him. To celebrate the birthday of a household servant he’s taken a liking to, he may have a duke executed, and present the duke’s severed head, with a proclamation stuck in the mouth declaring the servant to be the new duke, entitled to all the duke’s lands and treasure.

If the king somehow escaped assassination plots, and the kingdom escaped catastrophic economic collapse, over the course of a decade or two of this kind of thing, the distribution of wealth and property might start to seem as random and chaotic as the distribution “of mates in a society in which persons choose whom they shall marry.”

The unpatterned nature of spouse-distribution (where two people might end up married despite coming from radically different backgrounds, or having such apparently different personalities that their friends are baffled by the union, or they might end up getting divorced and then someone getting remarried a few years later) really does feel like a healthy symptom of a society that respects personal choice. We’re unlikely to feel the same way about the chaotic property distributions that emerge from the sum of the mad king’s whims, even though it’s certainly true that the king himself is radically free from any constraints on his behavior.

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There are (at least) two important differences between the cases. One is pointed to by Nozick’s occasional talk in Anarchy, State, and Utopia of “the separateness of persons” and how we each have our own distinctive life to live and we should be able to guide it in the direction that seems best to us. He seems to assume that this way of rhetorically supporting libertarianism fits together seamlessly with his official theory of libertarian rights (1-3 above, plus rectification). Hold that thought. Putting aside Nozick’s official theory, though, one very common and intuitive way of thinking about the idea that each of us has a wide-ranging right to steer our own life course is that each of us should have as much power over our life as is compatible with everyone else having the same amount of control over their own. (“My right to swing my first ends at your face” and all that.) If so, one obvious distinction between the chaotic distribution of spouses in a liberal-cosmopolitan society and the chaotic distribution of wealth under the mad king is that the decisions of the mad king have large and asymmetrical consequences for everyone else’s ability to steer the course of their lives.

Note that the issue here isn’t just that the king’s decisions have consequences for the lives of his subjects. Everyone’s decisions have consequences for other people’s lives. If Lucy is trying to choose between suitors Arthur, John, and Quincey, whichever decision she makes will change the life plans of the other two. But not being able to marry one particular person leaves open a vast array of life possibilities, and the impacts are roughly symmetrical. If Lucy chooses Arthur, that’s bad news for Quincey, but then, if Arthur changes his mind (perhaps because he runs away with Lucy’s friend Mina), that’s equally bad news for Lucy.

While I think this difference (between the mad king’s decisions imposing large and asymmetrical limitations on the course of his subjects’ lives and everyone’s choice of spouse imposing modest and at least very roughly symmetrical limitations on other people’s love lives) is an important and morally relevant one, though, I don’t think it’s the most important difference between the cases. Nozick certainly wouldn’t think so. He’d say (and I think he would have a point here) that the really important difference is that your affections are yours to do with what you like, while the king has no morally legitimate claim to treat the kingdom as a whole, with all its land and all its people, as his playthings.

So when we go to the question of capitalist property relations and the beautifully “unpatterned” distribution of property they give rise to, the question is whether we should think of that as more like the distribution of spouses in liberal modernity or the distribution of wealth under the mad king—a symptom of a kind of human freedom worth wanting, or a symptom of arbitrary power running roughshod over ordinary people’s ability to govern the course of their lives?

Remember, Nozick wrote:

From the point of view of the historical entitlement conception of justice in holdings, those who start afresh to complete “to each according to his_______” treat objects as if they appeared from nowhere, out of nothing. A complete theory of justice might cover this limit case as well; perhaps here is a use for the usual conceptions of distributive justice.

Let’s think a bit harder about that. Nozick presents a situation where we have to decide how to divide up resources that were not themselves the results of human labor as a fanciful “limit case.” As G.A. Cohen puts in a footnote buried in his paper “How to Do Political Philosophy” (published as Ch. 11 of On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice), Nozick seems to be imagining something outlandish here along the lines of manna that’s supposed to have miraculously fallen from heaven to feed the Israelites as they wandered through the desert after the exodus from Egypt. Like, yeah yeah, sure, if manna starting falling from heaven, maybe some patterned view of justice would be relevant to how we should distribute it. But Nozick, Cohen notes, “signally and consequentially failed to observe that the raw resources of the planet Earth are manna from heaven.”

If he had noticed it, Nozick would have faced a choice between closing the loophole for pattern-based determinations of distributive justice and throwing out the Locke-inspired view of “justice in acquisition” with which he fleshes out point 1 above. Locke thinks that someone who starts homesteading unowned land acquires a right to that land. But that only makes sense if you think no one else had a right to it prior to the homesteading. If some pattern-based view of justice tells us how the planet’s resources should be distributed, though, the homesteader taking more than they would get in whatever pattern we settle on would be like a squatter farming someone else’s land.

And that’s a homesteader who’s personally mixing his own labor with the land. The typical situation of capitalist agriculture is one where you as the owner have a legal entitlement to the land (acquired by whatever historical mechanism) and this together with the rest of your resources lets you hire the labor of people who are only working for you because they lack the resources they’d need to work for themselves. To switch examples, no one would work in a coal mine if they owned a coal mine (and had enough starting capital to buy mining equipment and pay the wage bill of the miners while they waited to sell enough coal to earn it back). But the coal wasn’t put in the ground by previous human labor. It’s manna.

Some Marxists dislike this kind of point because it reminds them of “property is theft” (an expression associated with Proudhon) and they know that Marx had many criticisms of Proudhon. But they should pay attention to what Marx said about this subject.

In the same section of Critique of the Gotha Program from which Nozick pulls the “from each _______, to each _______” phrasing, Marx objects to the slogan “labor creates all wealth” proposed by his Lassallean factional rivals. He explains:

Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power. […] And insofar as man from the beginning behaves toward nature, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labor, as an owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labor becomes the source of use values, therefore also of wealth. The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor; since precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission.

Marx, to be clear, wasn’t doing moral philosophy. His work often contains implicit moral judgments, but his intellectual energies were put into theorizing about economics and historical change, not rigorously thinking through different principles about rights and justice. Even so, it seems to me that this paragraph perfectly and succinctly connects capitalist property relations and the massive distributive inequalities they generate to both of the points we made above about spouse distribution vs. the distributive mood swings of the mad king.

The distribution of property underlying capitalism gives some people an arbitrary claim on the use of manna from heaven that’s denied others. And that in turn is used to award the beneficiaries wildly asymmetrical power over the lives of others.

At the end of the chunk of Anarchy, State, and Utopia we’ve been discussing (so, just before the Wilt Chamberlain example), Nozick suggests that there’s one “from each _______, to each _______” slogan that would describe his views after all. We can cover all the dizzying variety of ways that property might change hands as people freely buy, sell, barter, give each other gifts, lose property in poker games, and so on, with the motto, "From each as they choose, to each as they are chosen.”

The contrast here is supposed to be that all the other “from each _______, to each _______” slogans reflect patterns imposed on society, while “as they choose, as they are chosen” merely summarizes the results of individual choice. But the contrast misrepresents what Marx means when he uses the slogan “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” in Critique of the Gotha Program.5

Marx isn’t suggesting criteria that will be used by some future Committee of People’s Commissars for Labor and Distribution to decide who will be required to do what work (as the commissars evaluate each person’s abilities) or who will be permitted to have which consumer goods (as they decide what, in their judgment, each person needs). In context, the picture Marx is painting is pretty well the opposite of that.

He grants that in the first phase of a post-capitalist society, consumption will still have to be tied to labor contributions (as it is, at least for the working class, under capitalism). He sees this as an unfortunate necessity, and highlights various normative “defects” of any such set-up (e.g. the uneven distribution of natural talents, which means some people are able to do more or better work than others, and the uneven distribution of needs). But he thinks in the “lower” stage of socialism we may just have to live with these “defects.” He’s optimistic, though, that as technology continues to develop, and cultural progress follows in its wake, we can move to a “higher” stage.

Under capitalism, the benefits of advancing technology are captured by the owners of the means of production, while workers who are lucky enough to have a job continue to work as many hours as ever and those who aren’t so lucky are thrown into destitution. Under socialism, though, when we all collectively and democratically control the means of production, Marx thinks we can all reap the benefits of automation, working shorter and shorter hours with no loss to consumption, until, as Matt McManus and I put it in our Current Affairs article earlier this week, “we’re all living in post-scarcity idyll where everyone can pursue their own projects without income needing to be tied to labor contributions, and there will be so much to go around, everyone can simply take what they want.” At this point, to put the point anachronistically, some people might sit around playing videogames all day, and others will spend their days writing novels or climbing mountains, but enough people’s idiosyncratic personal passion will be computer engineering that what work still needs to be done by humans will get done as a side effect of everyone pursuing whatever their passions happen to be. That’s what Marx means by “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”

Is this a plausible prediction? Perhaps not. I certainly think some form of socialism is possible, and I’m optimistic that under socialism most people can have far more free time than the working class (or even the constantly hustling petty bourgeoise) has right now. But all of that is compatible with skepticism that we’ll ever quite make all the way to Marx’s vision of collectivized super-abundance.

Either way, though, it seem to me that at least the “from each as they choose” half of Nozick’s motto is actually a pretty good description of that vision. In fact, to put a finer point on it, what Marx is doing is giving an exact description of what it would take to fully realize “from each as they choose.” And even if it’s never fully realized, if in other words we never make it all the way to that kind of post-work utopia, every step society takes in that direction (even incremental “reformist” steps like moving from a 40- to a 32-hour workweek) expands the kind of human freedom that’s actually worth wanting.

On the other hand, it strikes me as an absurdly misleading description of Nozick’s “minimal state,” where the free-market chips fall where they may, there’s no redistribution to pay for a social safety net, and there are no restrictions on what labor contracts people can back into “voluntarily” agreeing to in order to keep their heads above destitution. If where the chips fall is that some people inherit coal mines from their fathers, and other people have to spend the only life they get working 16-hour days in those mines because it beats begging or stealing or prostitution, there’s a lot you could say about how the second group’s lives are going. But one thing you couldn’t (sanely) say is that they’re living “as they choose.”

Here’s the recording for the twelfth session of our Substack philosophy class for paid subscribers (covering the first chunk of Ch. 7 of Nozick’s “Anarchy, State, and Utopia,” ending just before the start of the “How Liberty Upsets Patterns” section). Next Tuesday we’ll finish up 7.1—so, we’re finally getting to Wilt Chamberlain.

(Also, remember that this and all the previous class recordings so far can be found here.)

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Every Friday I’m going to be posting a short note like this highlighting something I’ve read in the last week that I’d recommend. You can read the last one here.

Charleroi, a little town of about 4,000 in the heart of western Pennsylvania’s Monongahela Valley, lost not one but three major manufacturers last year. First to go was the Quality Pasta company, with 100 jobs lost. Next was the more than a century-old Corelle glass-making plant that employed 300. Finally, just in October, the Fourth Street Foods processing plant announced it would be closing and permanently laying off 250 workers.

This example opens up a short essay by Bhaskar Sunkara that just came out at the journal Democracy. The larger problem underlying these kinds of plant closures, that often take place when businesses are still profitable but not quite as profitable as owners think they could make them by relocating elsewhere is, he argues, “not only question of what we produce or how much we invest—it is also a question of who has the authority to decide when productive enterprises are allowed to disappear, and why workers so rarely have a say.” A complete solution would “require massive investments in infrastructure and industry and ultimately a reorganization of the economic structure.”

Shameless plug: Bhaskar and I and our friend Mike Beggs co-wrote a book about what that long-term reorganization might look like that’s coming out this fall from Verso. And a short preview of the model we develop there can be found in the opening chapter of Bhaskar’s first book, The Socialist Manifesto (“A Day in the Life of a Socialist Citizen”), which also involves an example about a pasta company.

In this essay, though, instead of dwelling on that long-term vision, he focuses on an incremental step in the right direction that left-populist politicians could put in their platforms in 2026.

A federal right of first refusal for employees to purchase their workplace would take this asymmetry seriously without trying to suppress economic change. The basic idea is straightforward. When a firm with more than 100 workers is being sold, closed, or relocated in a way that would eliminate a substantial share of local jobs, employees would have a legally enforceable opportunity to purchase the enterprise themselves. This guarantee would apply to a range of firms, from those that are already profitable to ones where workers can present a credible plan to restructure operations and return the business to viability.

That right would mean nothing without institutional backing, however. The proposal must include access to standard-form public financing that allows workers to quickly assemble takeover plans, secure technical assistance, and apply for funding. This financing should take the form of long-term, fixed-repayment loans priced at or near the prime rate, offered through existing federal lending channels such as the Small Business Administration.

This isn’t a new idea. I can remember Richard Wolff talking about it at a conference I went to in 2018, for example. Jeremy Corbyn talked about things like this when he was the leader of the Labour Party. And Italy’s Marcora Law offers some real-world precedent.

But this is the best version I’ve read of the case. Bhaskar is a socialist who sees this as a baby step in the direction of long-term socialist hopes, but the argument he makes here doesn’t assume readers who are on board with any of that, and takes a variety of possible objections that could be raised from other parts of the political spectrum seriously. He agrees that soft budget constraints can be economically crippling, for example, and doesn’t want to keep firms afloat if the new owners can’t make them viable.

He has several sharp responses to mainstream economic arguments that could be wielded against a right of first refusal. But the part I found the most interesting was about the politics of the proposal:

In a country that has failed to secure even something as basic as single-payer healthcare, it might sound absurd to suggest that Americans would welcome a policy that expands worker control over the means of production. Yet, according to survey data from the Center for Working-Class Politics, a majority of working-class voters support major government interventions to alleviate mass layoffs, raise wages, stimulate manufacturing, and even provide public jobs. This isn’t a paradox. The populist sentiment that helped propel President Trump to power was informed in large part by discussions of industry, production, and the fate of the “American worker” in an increasingly lopsided economy where many workers are being left behind. In this environment, progressives need to offer reforms that treat citizens less as passive recipients of welfare, and more as producers who deserve a voice in the decisions that shape their lives.

Redistributive policies are, of course, necessary, and any serious egalitarian politics will require more of it. But redistribution alone has proven to be a brittle foundation for rebuilding working-class allegiance, in part because it too easily maps economic politics onto a moralized divide between those who “contribute” and those who merely “receive,” rather than onto the identities people most readily recognize in their working lives.

For most workers, the defining economic experience is not the level of after-tax inequality in the abstract, but instability and the feeling of powerlessness in the modern economy. Factories are closed, offices relocated, and plants sold off not only when they fail, but often when ownership changes or financial incentives shift. The people who depend on those firms—for income, yes, but also as a font of individual and local identity—absorb the consequences, while the decision itself remains firmly out of reach.

If Democrats want a reform that will shape our national political conversation and how the party is perceived, they could champion demands more closely tied the point of production. One concrete way to do that would be to establish a federal right of first refusal for workers to buy their workplace when it is being sold, closed, or relocated, paired with access to standard-form public financing that makes that right real.

This policy does not mandate worker ownership, abolish markets, or require ideological buy-in from the people it affects. It simply recognizes that when a firm can plausibly continue operating, the people who built it and rely on it should have a legally enforceable opportunity to keep it running.

Read the rest here.

If you want to check out my own writing outside of this Substack in the last week, check out the article Matt McManus and I wrote for Current Affairs:

Steven Pinker Doesn’t Know Anything About Marxism

Finally, while I’ve got your attention, J. Andrew World is a crazily talented graphic artist who makes all the images for both this Substack and my show. He’s also made art for other shows, and very often makes album covers and posters for bands (in other words, like me, like a lot of us, he’s stringing together a bunch of part-time gigs), and outside of that paying work he does a lot of artwork for his local DSA. His computer broke recently, and he’s been doing what he can without it, but there’s a lot he can’t do until he gets this taken care of, and he’s been having to turn down gigs. He started a GoFundMe to help him buy a new one so he can fully get back into the swing of doing what he does best, and last I checked he’s just under two thirds of the way there. Consider chipping in!

Just over a week ago, I participated in a debate on Spencer Case’s podcast about the war in Iran

Spencer is a philosophy professor at Bowling Green State University. He has a Ph.D. from UC-Boulder, where he wrote a dissertation defending moral realism. He’s the co-author of a book on the same subject from Routledge, and the author of a forthcoming book on patriotism. He also spent several years as an active-duty soldier, including one tour each in Iraq and Afghanistan. As I understand it, he now thinks those wars were misguided (though he resists any induction that the new war in Iran is just as bad).

Daniel Kodsi is a visiting scholar in the Philosophy Department at NYU. He has a doctorate from Oxford and he’s the editor-in-chief of The Philosophers’ Magazine. I don’t think it would be too uncharitable to say that you wouldn’t have guessed any of this from anything he said during our debate. In both substance and affect, he was indistinguishable from a young National Review writer participating in a cable-news segment. At one point he called me a “useful idiot.”

Everyone else, though, seemed to be committed to using their philosophical training in taking arguments apart and putting them back together again to reason more carefully about the matters of life and death we were there to talk about than anyone normally would on CNN or Fox. Whether any of us succeeded in that is something I’ll leave to the judgment of viewers and listeners. I’ve said what I have to say about that elsewhere. Here, I’ll focus not on evaluating how anyone did but on a bit of further reflection on the underlying arguments.

The fourth participant was on my side of the debate (although, as he pointed out, we’d strongly disagree on many other issues). Craig White has taught at the Political Science Department at UC-Boulder, although the more relevant part for the debate may be that he spent twenty years working as a diplomat, much of it in the Middle East. He’s a conservative Catholic who voted for Trump in the past (he regrets it) and he takes Thomistic just war theory seriously enough to be horrified by the war in Iran. He wrote a book on Iraq (Iraq: The Moral Reckoning) and one on technical moral philosophy (Acts, Intentions, and Moral Evaluation).

On a basic normative level, Craig is deeply suspicious of appeal to “future facts” (what adversaries might do in the future) to justify present aggression. And on an empirical level, he thinks that the track record of the Iranian regime consistently shows that its leaders are rational actors. They’re far from pacifists, and they’ve been willing to provide arms and support to militias and insurgent factions in nearby countries in an effort to form a regional counterweight to U.S./Israeli hegemony. Some of these forces have certainly committed war crimes. But none of this comes within a million miles of showing that the Islamic Republic is suicidal. The key “future fact” on which the case for war rests, that they’d initiate a nuclear first strike, is supported by exactly nothing in the last 47 years of Iranian foreign policy.

Spencer took a tentatively pro-war position, and Daniel a much more strident one. In both cases, the key argument seemed to go something like this:

(1) Iran’s leaders are Islamic fundamentalists

(2) The form of fundamentalism they subscribe to involves heavy emphasis on the end times

(3) It’s possible that someone somewhere thinks initiating a nuclear exchange would be a good way to bring about the end times

Therefore:

(4) There’s a significant danger that, if Iran (a) is pursuing nuclear weapons and (b) it succeeds in this pursuit, then (c) it would initiate a nuclear exchange

Also:

(5) There’s a non-negligible chance of (a) and (b) actually happening

So:

(6) The U.S. and Israel are justified in attacking Iran

At a few points, Spencer or Daniel also emphasized that Iran has a repressive and authoritarian political system. It certainly does. But what’s supposed to follow from that?

The world is full of repressive and authoritarian systems. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, for example, has practiced a much more repressive and authoritarian form of Islamic theocracy than Iran, and it’s awkwardly a close ally of the United States against Iran.

Moreover, Iran’s repressiveness would only be relevant to the case for war if anyone thought that the intention or likely effect of the war was to bring freedom to the Iranian people. Did anyone anywhere still think that after all the weeks of jaw-dropping American and Israeli war crimes in the city (Tehran) where the secular liberals who’d form the backbone of any political transition are concentrated? If so, I hope that the events of last Tuesday set them straight.

On the same day that the debate was released on Spencer’s podcast, Trump issued an outright genocidal threat to bring Iran’s “civilization” to an end. He flip-flopped by the end of the day but the episode should clarify exactly how much the people of Iran count for in the warmongers’ calculations.

Going back to the central argument summarized above, an obvious initial point is that (5) is extremely dubious. Trump’s own director of national intelligence flatly contradicted it in early 2025. And no one with a better memory than a goldfish should take such claims seriously from the Israelis. I’m pretty sure Netanyahu has been regularly claiming that the Iranians were 15 minutes away from acquiring a nuke since I was in high school.

I’m also deeply skeptical that (1)-(3) add up to much of a case for (4). American evangelical Christianity puts heavy emphasis on the end times too. I can remember when the Left Behind books were runaway bestsellers. But, my (long) list of concerns about conservative evangelicals holding political power in the U.S. never included the possibility that an evangelical president would try to speed up the end times by initiating a nuclear exchange.

It’s also worth noting that, even if we did all agree that (4) and (5) were true, that wouldn’t get us all the way to (6).

To get to an even a halfway plausible case for a war guaranteed to generate vast amounts of human suffering, at the very least we’d need to add:

(5.5) Going to war with Iran will make them less likely to pursue nuclear weapons (or succeed in that pursuit) in the future.

The truth of (5.5) is very far from obvious. As even Trump now seems to have realized, Iran in 2026 is vastly more capable of defending itself than Afghanistan in 2001 or Iraq in 2003. A ground invasion that could actually topple the government might well involve American casualties at a level that wouldn’t be remotely politically sustainable.

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The Trump administration is so erratic, and the overall situation so chaotic, that it would be foolish to place much confidence in any prediction about how things will develop from here. As of this moment, though, it looks quite likely that (whether in a week or a month or ten years in the future) the war will end without regime change. And if so, after all the death and destruction, the likely effect of the whole thing will be to make the Islamic Republic much more likely to pursue a nuclear weapon, for the staggeringly obvious reason that what’s been done to them in the last six weeks wouldn’t have been done to a nuclear-armed state.

Of the three countries in George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech, the only one that hasn’t been targeted with such a war is North Korea, for the simple reason that it’s the only one that actually had Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Spencer hedged a bit on (6) (or at least on the sense in which he would accept (6)). As far as I can tell, his position is that (1)-(5) add up to a reason to think that “there’s a just war to be waged against Iran” in principle, but the pragmatic consequences of doing so might be bad enough that Trump and Netanyahu’s initial decision wasn’t justified.

His hesitation here flows from a more general principle that, when it comes to justifications for the use of violence, the moral and pragmatic aren’t entirely separate. Whatever other conditions you’ve met, you can’t be justified in taking human life without a high enough probability that doing so is going to lead to success in achieving some worthwhile goal. (I agree.)

Nevertheless, he thinks that, having started the war, the U.S. might have a moral obligation to finish it, since after going to war with a Pearl Harbor-style surprise attack while negotiations were ongoing, assassinating their head of state and wiping out much of their senior leadership on the first day of fighting, butchering 175 people, most of them young girls, at the Shajareh Tayyebeh school on the same day, Israel ethnically cleansing Shiites from much of Southern Lebanon on that front, and…well…etc.…the Iranian regime will be in a far bigger hurry to develop nuclear weapons if it’s left in power.

What should we make of this argument?

I think it’s useful to separate a few questions here. On the more abstract issue, is it possible that there can be actions that (i) it would be wrong to initiate but (ii) it would be morally better to complete after starting? Sure. Anyone used to thinking about hypothetical thought experiments should be able to construct such a case without too much trouble. But this is consistent with thinking that a very strong default assumption should be that if an act is wrong, justice is best served by changing course. (In this particular case, my own position is that, as a show of good faith following impeachment or the use of the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from power, the U.S. should start negotiations to end the war by offering to pay Iran reparations and extradite Trump and Hegseth to stand trial at the Hague. I’m under no illusions that this will actually happen. Honestly, though, I think it’s pretty damning that it won’t.) And I’ve already indicated that I think there are excellent reasons to suspect that continuing the war, for another week or another decade, will likely just lead to a lot more suffering and death without even removing the regime from power.

All of this is to say that, even if you could convince me of (4) (the claim, remember, that there’s a serious chance that a nuclear-armed Iran would perpetrate a first strike), you’d still have a long way to go to convince me to support the war.

To be clear, though, my actual position is that (4) is ludicrous on its face.

Daniel’s opening statement included an eye-rolling reference to Craig’s appeal to Thomistic just war doctrine. He wasn’t, he said, going to appeal to his “pet philosophical commitments” to explain how he could derive his position on Iran. Instead (and, while this is obviously a deeply unsympathetic paraphrase, I don’t think it’s an unfair one) he preferred to just run through a bunch of Fox News-style talking points about how Iran is Very Bad and anyone who doesn’t want to attack them must just not understand their badness.

This struck me as fundamentally wrongheaded. I don’t think everyone everywhere needs to have a fully worked-out, philosophically sophisticated account of when wars are justifiable. But, especially on a philosophy podcast (but not just in that context), I do think it’s a fair expectation that you should be able to give us some sense of what general principles you’re appealing to, if only so we can see whether you’re applying those principles in a remotely consistent way.

Apologists for bombing campaigns that kill vast numbers of non-combatants often like to say that war is hell. It seems to me that, as often as that phrase is uttered as thought-terminating cliche, it is a useful starting point for discussion. War is hell. Even wars fought with muskets and cavalry charges were hell, never mind the kind fought by sending missiles into population centers. Anyone who actually thinks war is hell should be extremely reluctant to plunge whole societies full of ordinary people trying to live their lives into that hell.

So, my view is that there should at the very least be an extraordinarily strong default assumption that initiating wars of aggression is wrong. Perhaps there could be a (realistic, non-hypothetical) scenario in which doing so would be justified. But, we should need a lot of convincing.

Iran’s actual behavior over the course of the last 47 years hasn’t provided the slightest shred of support to the idea that the regime would be eager to commit collective suicide as soon as it joined the nuclear club. In the entire time the Islamic Republic has existed, while it’s often given arms and support to ideologically aligned factions in conflicts around the region, it hasn’t used its own military to start a war with another country even once.

Here’s an exercise for the reader:

See if you can list off all the wars the U.S. and/or Israel have started since 1979. Then look them up to see if you forgot any.

I’d be surprised if you got them all on your first try.

Even when the U.S. has directly attacked Iran, for example by assassinating Soleimani during Trump’s first term, or the first surprise attack during negotiations (“Operation Midnight Hammer” last summer), Iran has been so concerned to avoid escalation that it’s often restricted itself to token retaliation, sometimes even warning the countries hosting the U.S. military bases it was planning to symbolically strike. We’re seriously supposed to believe that the same regime that acts this way would sacrifice its own existence in a nuclear exchange?

Sometimes war supporters will claim, a la Bush and Cheney’s speculation that Saddam Hussein might share WMDs with Al Queda, that Iran’s reluctance to use its own military in conflicts is irrelevant. Even if it wouldn’t initiate a nuclear exchange itself, it might share its nukes with one of the “proxy” forces it supports elsewhere in the region.

But this entirely misses the point. Iran’s whole incentive for restricting themselves to providing support for local factions rather than directly intervening in those conflicts is that the consequences the former has usually led to (e.g. sanctions) are vastly less severe than the likely consequences of direct involvement. And no one seriously believes that an Iranian nuke being lobbed at Israel by (for example) Hezbollah would lead to less severe consequences for Iran than it being directly sent by the Iranians.

An argument that Daniel and Spencer both gestured at is that:

• Iran’s form of Islamic fundamentalism involves glorifying individuals fighting in various regional conflicts who become “martyrs” (e.g. through suicide bombing) therefore

• The entire regime would be willing to become a collective “martyr” by ceasing to exist in a nuclear exchange

But this is a non sequitur on its face. Nations, empires, churches, rebel militias, and so on throughout history have glorified people who were willing to give up their lives for a cause, without any of those entities being equally willing to give up their own collective existence. Leaders approving of individuals dying for the sake of preserving, defending, or extending a system (or those leaders even being willing to individually join their ranks by e.g. remaining defiant in the face of decapitation strikes) is no evidence at all that they’re willing to throw away the existence of the system itself.

There’s also the pesky matter of what possible motive Iran could have for engaging in a nuclear first strike against Israel.

Craig made a powerful point about this at the beginning of the debate that unfortunately got lost in the shuffle. Paraphrasing a bit, he asked:

Would Iran’s motive for a nuclear first strike be sheer Jew-hatred, or would it have something to do with the plight of the Palestinians?

If the former, why wouldn’t they start with the Jewish community in Iran? (No nukes required there!) And if the latter, why would they wipe out the Palestinians with a nuclear strike on Israel?

In the comments on one of the YouTube videos on the debate, someone called me “one of the most sophisticated apologists” for Iran’s theocratic regime. I suppose that’s better than being an unsophisticated apologist.

As a matter of fact, though, I don’t have the slightest sympathy for that regime. It enforces gender apartheid, it’s killed lots of socialists and communists, and it brutally quashes anyone who tires to organize real independent labor unions. The world is full of systems I find unjust or abhorrent, but if we were going to rank countries by how far they are from my democratic socialist ideals, the Islamic Republic would occupy a pretty dismal spot on that list.

I can’t for the life of me, though, see how acknowledging that is supposed to lend any plausibility at all to the case for war.

One of the more obvious points you can make about all this is that Taliban-ruled Afghanistan would have an even more dismal place on the list. Nor was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq exactly a beacon of human rights. But who in America in 2026 still seriously believes that Bush’s wars were righteous and wise? Is the president of the United States, who scored political points in 2016 by retroactively criticizing the Iraq War, an apologist for Saddam Hussein? And if not, what’s the difference?

A slightly more interesting point is that positive political change in any society is far more likely to be historically durable when it comes from within that society. It’s not just that domestic revolutions are more morally legitimate than imperialist wars waged from the outside. The latter are also just far less likely to deliver the goods. And that’s true even when democratization actually a goal or likely near-term effect of foreign intervention (which is, to put it mildly, not typically the case for America’s wars).

It’s less likely because, first, accepting the support of foreign conquerors has the entirely predictable effect of delegitimizing the revolutionaries in the eyes of vast swathes of the population who now see them as enemy collaborators, and second, the conquerors will pack their bags and leave as soon as the politics in their country no longer sustain the intervention. Structurally, the element of the conquered society that would benefit from the conquerors sticking around has no way to hold the conquering state accountable for abandoning them.

So, even if you think that it’s likely that continuing the war in Iran for another week or another year or another decade will result in regime change, and even if you think the new regime will be a democratic one (as opposed to, say, installing the Shah’s pathetic son), the idea that any of this would serve the long-term goal of positive change in Iran is dubious in the extreme.

The most viscerally powerful point about all this to me, though, is a lot simpler than any of that.

It’s just this:

If you support the war in Iran, let’s be very clear about what that means. You want to turn that nation into a war zone, disrupt the lives of several tens of millions of people, make them mourn the friends and relatives who were in the wrong place at the wrong time when a missile hit, make them fear for their lives and the lives of their children and siblings and parents and cousins. The idea that you want to do this to them because you care so much about their well-being is, I’m sorry, offensively absurd.

If you tell me that you want to do these things to the Iranians because you think it’s going to make Americans or Israelis safer, you and I have a disagreement. I don’t think it’s going to have that effect, and in any case, I think the Iranians count just as much as we do. But fine. We can argue about all that.

If you tell me that you want to do this for the sake of the Iranians, though, that’s a bad joke.

Every Friday I’m going to be posting a short note like this highlighting something I’ve read in the last week that I’d recommend. You can read the last one here.

The history of Marxist theory is replete with figures who lament the sectarianism of everyone except themselves. In his new book, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?, Gabriel Rockhill stands in this august tradition…

As that opening signals, this book review is McManus at its most exasperated (or, at least, about as as exasperated as he gets in intra-left contexts). I’ll be interviewing him about it on my podcast on Tuesday, so I’ll save my own thoughts for that conversation. For now, I’ll just say that if you’re even slightly interested in the Frankfurt School, “western Marxism,” or the mind-numbing confluence of shoddy scholarship and neo-Stalinism of which Rockhill is perhaps the main current representative (see his attempted takedown of Slavoj Žižek, which I discussed here, for another example), you should give Matt’s review a read.

If you want to check out my own writing outside of this Substack in the last week, check out the two articles I wrote for Jacobin:

Trump’s Goal Is to Suppress Votes, Not Prevent Election Fraud

On Iran, Trump and the American Empire Blinked

On the same subject as that last one (and of interest to Philosophy for the People readers, three of the four participants were philosophy professors and the fourth has written extensively about moral philosophy), see this debate, which was recorded late last week and released this week.

Finally, while I’ve got your attention, J. Andrew World is a crazily talented graphic artist who makes all the images for both this Substack and my show. He’s also made art for other shows, and very often makes album covers and posters for bands (in other words, like me, like a lot of us, he’s stringing together a bunch of part-time gigs), and outside of that paying work he does a lot of artwork for his local DSA. His computer broke recently, and he’s been doing what he can without it, but there’s a lot he can’t do until he gets this taken care of, and he’s been having to turn down gigs. He started a GoFundMe to help him buy a new one so he can fully get back into the swing of doing what he does best, and last I checked he’s just over halfway there. Consider chipping in!

In Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a T-800 cyborg originally created to help crush the humans who survived the nuclear apocalypse but reprogrammed by the human resistance to go back in time and protect Sarah Connor and her young son John (who will one day lead that resistance). In a key scene, he fills in the Connors on what will happen in the future.

The system goes online August 4th, 1997.

Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate.

It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th.

In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

Skynet, he goes on to explain, fought back by launching its missiles at Russia. In a small sign of how much the world has changed since 1991, young John asks, “Why attack Russia? Aren’t they our friends now?”

Schwarzenegger-bot explains that Skynet knew that “the Russian counterattack will eliminate its enemies over here.”

1997 came and went without this happening, but in 2026, plenty of people are worried that it still might. The explosive development of AI since 2022 has led to widespread believe that human-like “artificial general intelligence” (AGI) is on the horizon, and super-intelligence isn’t far behind. While “AI risk” is a broad category covering both the most outlandish science fiction scenarios and far more grounded concerns, I’m interested here in the extreme end of the spectrum.

How worried should we be about anything like what we can call “the August 29th scenario” ever happening?

For a long time my position was basically “not at all.” The whole thing struck me as nonsense cobbled together by stringing extremely speculative premises and assuming that real life would play out like a Hollywood movie. It always reminded me of the Simpsons episode parodying Jurassic Park, where Professor Frink says, “Elementary choas theory tell us that all robots will eventually turn against their masters and run amuck.”

So, in winter 2022, for example, I wrote an article for a print issue of Jacobin criticizing the Effective Altruism crowd. One of the things I dinged them for was that many of them were turning to “long-termism.” They now thought more charitable funds should be spent on figuring out how to save future generations from hypothetical “existential risks” (e.g. malevolent AI) because the potential utility of heading off such risks was greater than classic Effective Altruism projects like distributing malaria nets.

The main argument of the piece was that socialism, rather than better-targeted charity, was the path to eliminating poverty, at home and ultimately around the world. In the middle of summarizing that argument at the end of the article, I took the opportunity to roll my eyes at the “AI kills us all” scenario.

The gains won by ordinary people banding together to fight for an improved social contract in the short term and more basic structural changes to the economy in the long term, I wrote,

are vastly more durable and predictable than the whims of either an individual check-writing plutocrat or an EA organization that could decide tomorrow its funds are better spent on thwarting Skynet rather than malaria. And such gains offer a level of dignity, security, and autonomy to their beneficiaries that can’t be replicated by even the most effective form of altruistic charity.

In 2026, I’d stand by almost everything in that article except the phrase I’ve bolded there. And I’m still deeply skeptical that money spent on think-tankers sitting around thinking about such scenarios is actually going to do anything whatsoever to make an August 29th event less likely to happen. But I’m far less inclined to roll my eyes at the scenario itself.

One of the oddest things about this discourse is how much overlap there seems to be between “AI will kill us all” doomsayers and Silicon Valley libertarians who certainly don’t want AI development to be nationalized. But if you take the doomsaying seriously, doesn’t keeping the industry in private hands mean that we have the equivalent of a whole bunch of competing private-sector Manhattan Projects?

One way to understand why I never used to take it seriously is that the most common presentations of the scenario tend to combine three assumptions:

• Some AI system will become a human-equivalent or eventually super-human mind (the Mind Premise)

• That mind will have goals that are so severely misaligned with human interests that it might want to do something August 29th-ish (the Misalignment Premise)

• The system will be given control over levers it could use to carry it out something August 29th-ish (the Autonomy Premise)

I don’t think I ever had any trouble accepting Misalignment. If we do think a non-human super-intelligence will one day come into existence, what possible guarantee would there be that its plans would include the continued flourishing of the human race. As the late science fiction writer and Computer Science professor Vernor Vinge put it in a classic essay on the subject, “physical extinction” may not even be “the scariest possibility” when you start thinking through analogies to “the different ways” that human beings have related to the lower animals.

Again, all this rests on accepting Mind at least for the sake of argument, but given that premise, sure. It’s easy to see Misalignment as at least a real possibility.

I was, however, always deeply skeptical about both Mind and Autonomy.

Let’s start with Autonomy.

A key line in Schwarzenegger-bot’s explanation of the lead-up to August 29th, 1997 is:

Human decisions are removed from strategic defense.

And an obvious skeptical question is, “Why on earth would human decision-makers do that?”

It’s like watching some sci-fi show where humanoid robots designed to do menial labor tasks turn against their masters and they start melting everyone with red laser beams from their eyes. Any reasonable viewer should ask themselves, “Why did the human engineers who designed them put in that feature?”

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Amazingly, though, the existential risk fearmongers have been decisively proven correct about this part. The day before the beginning of the war in Iran, the Trump administration ordered all federal agencies to begin phasing out their use of the AI firm Anthropic. In typical Trumpian fashion, the president explained his decision by saying he would “NEVER ALLOW A RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY TO DICTATE HOW OUR GREAT MILITARY FIGHTS AND WINS WARS.”

And what was the specific way that the “RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY” in question was trying to tell “OUR GREAT MILITARY” its business?

It drew the line at developing “fully autonomous” AI weapons systems.

Before you give Anthropic executives too much credit here, keep in mind that the issue isn’t AI targeting. It’s “fully autonomous” targeting.

We’re in the early days of the planned six-month phaseout (if it’s ultimately allowed to go through), and Stavroula Pabst writes at Responsible Statecraft that Anthropic’s Claude system has been extensively used in Iran.

Despite a DoD ban on Anthropic over its demands that its tech not be used for fully autonomous military targeting, its AI model, Claude, is enjoying prime time use in the U.S. war on Iran.

Indeed, the U.S. military leveraged its AI targeting tools — which still employ Claude — to strike over 1,000 targets in Iran during the first 24 hours of the now rapidly expanding war.

The U.S. is using Claude through Anthropic’s partnership with controversial software company Palantir. As sources told Bloomberg, Claude is central to Palantir’s Maven Smart System, which provides real-time targeting for military operations against Iran. Because of its centrality to the war targeting, Claude won’t be phased out until the DoD has found a replacement…

To put this in perspective, current AIs often tell people that they might as well walk to the car wash to get their cars washed instead of driving there if it’s not very far away. They’ve had a shocking amount of trouble in the recent past figuring out that there are three Rs rather than just two in the word “strawberry.” No one has a right to be shocked if AI targeting generates results like 175 innocents (most of them young students between the ages of 7 and 12) losing their lives when the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school was targeted on the first day of the war in Iran.1

Pabst writes:

The use of AI in military targeting has been controversial dating back at least to the Gaza war. Indeed, IDF forces largely ignored its AI targeting software’s 10% false positive rate when using its “Lavender” system to target and attack alleged militants in Gaza — killing an untold number of civilians in the process.

Now there is concern about its use in Iran. Leading up to the initial attack on Iran, the Washington Post reported that Maven, powered by Claude, proposed “hundreds” of targets for the U.S. military to strike, prioritized them in order of importance, and provided location coordinates for them — helping the U.S. carry out attacks quickly, and blunting Iran’s ability to respond in kind.

But what about oversight? It is not comforting that DoD Secretary Pete Hegseth exclaimed there were “no stupid rules of engagement” in the war at a press conference early this week.

The Pentagon’s Law of War Manual says the U.S. military must take “feasible precautions to verify that the targets [it plans to attack] are military objectives” such as enemy combatants. As these rules dictate, civilians and military medical and religious personnel, and locations like schools, hospitals, places of worship are not to be attacked.

Given the rapid deployment of AI in wartime, whether the U.S. military is truly taking “feasible precautions,” to ensure it is targeting true military objectives, rather than civilians, deserves scrutiny.

More bluntly:

If your mental model for what’s going on here is that a giant robot is shooting lasers at Iran, but every time it picks a new target a human soldier has to manually press a green APPROVE button, and the soldier is just constantly pressing APPROVE APPROVE APPROVE without looking very hard at where the robot is shooting….

…I’m sure this is a crass oversimplification in many ways…

…but honestly you’re probably closer to the truth than someone who gives a lot of credence to official palbum about how they’re being extremely careful.

And sticking with that analogy, the thing that led to “Secretary of War” Hegseth fighting with Anthropic’s executives, and Trump ranting about how Anthropic is a “RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY” that’s trying “TO DICTATE HOW OUR GREAT MILITARY FIGHTS AND WINS WARS” was that, in the long term, Trump and Hegseth want to phase out the soldier with the green button and just let the giant robot fire at will.

So, Autonomy is no longer an outlandish possibility but an official goal of the federal government. The Trump administration is so angry about Anthropic’s squeamishness about “fully autonomous” murderbots that they tried to officially designate the company as a “national security risk.”

And Misalignment was always at least somewhat plausible.

That leaves Mind.

To decide whether an AI system could ever truly count as “having a mind,” first we have to figure out what it is for anything to truly count as “having a mind.” Anyone who knows a little about the philosophy of mind knows that this isn’t an easy thing to do.

Substance dualism holds that minds are non-physical entities that somehow interact with physical brains and bodies. Property dualism is a kind of halfway house between that view and materialism. It doesn’t stipulate a non-physical entity doing the thinking, feeling, and so on, but it does say that we as physical beings have mental properties that can’t be reduced to anything physical.

Even property dualism, though, runs up against problems about a principle philosophers call “the causal closure of the physical” (the principle, which certainly seems like a awfully important implicit assumption of the sciences, that physical effects have to have exclusively physical causes). If I feel pain and then I speak or type the words “the sensation of pain I’m experiencing right now is a reminder of why I’m a property dualist, this qualitative experience is surely irreducibly non-physical” then it sure seems like there’s a cause and effect connection between the pain itself and what’s going on with my vocal chords or typing fingers. But if there is, and the content of my statement is correct, then so much for the causal closure of the physical.

What about materialism? Even if (like me) you tend to assume that some materialist account of mind must be correct, the fleshed-out theories currently on the table might all be a bit unsatisfying. Functionalism (the view often assumed by AGI boosters) holds that mental states are nothing more than roles in input-output systems. This runs into problems like the Chinese Room Argument discussed below.

Alternately, you can revert to an older form of materialism that holds that mental states just are brain states. This has problems of its own like “Martian pain” examples. If we discover aliens who seem to have complex inner lives, are we really going to rule out a priori the idea that the aliens could experience pain on the grounds that they would surely have very different brains than ours and thus not have whatever brain state that mind-brain identity theory tells us “just is” what pain is?

It would be ridiculous to derive any substantive conclusion about a subject as complicated as philosophy of mind from such a short and superficial four-paragraph tour. (Note that I haven’t even begun to tease apart issues like whether “having a mind” in the sense of thinking in human-like or superhuman ways comes apart from “having a mind” in the sense of having mental experiences. This stuff gets very messy very quickly.) But I hope the tour at least has the effect of at least gesturing suggestively in the direction of one reason why it might be very hard to say whether the Mind Premise is correct. Before we can even evaluate Mind, we need to finish figuring out what makes us “truly count” as “having minds.”

A longstanding view of least many functionalists excited about the possibility of machine intelligence was that we should accept any future AI as a mind if it passed a Turing Test. Without too much simplification, the idea there was that if the AI does a good enough job of tricking humans into thinking it is a human, we should accept that it’s achieved human-level intelligence.

The classic argument against this comes from the late philosopher of mind John Searle. In his 1980 article “Minds Brains, and Programs,” Searle wrote:

Suppose that I'm locked in a room and given a large batch of Chinese writing. Suppose furthermore (as is indeed the case) that I know no Chinese, either written or spoken, and that I'm not even confident that I could recognize Chinese writing as Chinese writing distinct from, say, Japanese writing or meaningless squiggles. To me, Chinese writing is just so many meaningless squiggles.

Now suppose further that after this first batch of Chinese writing I am given a second batch of Chinese script together with a set of rules for correlating the second batch with the first batch. The rules are in English, and I understand these rules as well as any other native speaker of English. They enable me to correlate one set of formal symbols with another set of formal symbols, and all that 'formal' means here is that I can identify the symbols entirely by their shapes. Now suppose also that I am given a third batch of Chinese symbols together with some instructions, again in English, that enable me to correlate elements of this third batch with the first two batches, and these rules instruct me how to give back certain Chinese symbols with certain sorts of shapes in response to certain sorts of shapes given me in the third batch. Unknown to me, the people who are giving me all of these symbols call the first batch "a script," they call the second batch a "story,” and they call the third batch "questions." Furthermore, they call the symbols I give them back in response to the third batch "answers to the questions." and the set of rules in English that they gave me, they call "the program.”

Now just to complicate the story a little, imagine that these people also give me stories in English, which I understand, and they then ask me questions in English about these stories, and I give them back answers in English. Suppose also that after a while I get so good at following the instructions for manipulating the Chinese symbols and the programmers get so good at writing the programs that from the external point of view that is, from the point of view of somebody outside the room in which I am locked -- my answers to the questions are absolutely indistinguishable from those of native Chinese speakers.

It would, Searle thought, be obviously wrong to describe this situation by saying that he “understood Chinese.” And he thought a closely parallel mistake was being made by anyone who thought an AI blowing through a Turing Test was sufficient to show that it had a genuine mental life.

Searle died last September. At the time, I remember thinking at least he lived long enough to see himself thoroughly vindicated.

I don’t mean that everyone now agrees that functionalism is wrong (it’s still a very popular view) or that “Strong AI” is impossible (more people than ever think it’s on the horizon) but just that nearly everyone who’s held onto their sanity now agrees that, even if an AI eats Turing Tests for breakfast, that’s not a good enough reason to think it genuinely counts as a mind. Think back to the last couple weeks of your life. It’s very likely that you can think of at least a few borderline cases where you were in an online customer service chat or you saw some social media post and you genuinely had no idea whether the text or images you were interacting with were produced by a human being or an AI. It’s often obvious, but not always. Some degree of uncertainty has become routine.

When I first started reading and thinking about this stuff, I’d constantly encounter people who claimed to be unmoved by the Chinese Room case, or who would say things like “the man in the room might not understand Chinese, but the system as a whole understands Chinese” and thus resist the move to saying that a Turing Test-passing AI wasn’t sentient. In 2026, though, we’ve invented a special term for people who are tricked into believing their AIs are sentient because they do such a good imitation of human beings. We call it “AI psychosis.”

Increasingly, though, I’m not sure whether any of that matters for the August 29th question.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Searle was right not just about the part everyone not in the throes of AI psychosis now seems to agree he got right, but about the bigger and more controversial questions. Let’s assume that AI will never be conscious. Let’s even go ahead and assume that it will never “have a mind” in the sense of having at least human-level cognitive powers but without having conscious experiences of its exercise of those powers (or of anything else). As I awkwardly acknowledged earlier, I haven’t been separating out those two issues even though I probably should. But let’s just assume that no AI will ever have any of that.

Why exactly is that supposed to make existential risks from AI any less worrying? If a giant robot was shooting lasers in your general direction, would you feel better if you were told that it was mindless?

To put the point more carefully:

Mind, Misalignment, and Autonomy are all assumptions of standard presentations of the worry. But I’m not sure why Autonomy alone can’t get it done, along with the all too plausible assumption that robustly mindless AI might often act in ways that aren’t aligned with human interests (let’s call that weak claim Misalignment*). We don’t have to speculate about Misalignment*. We’ve seen it play out, in actually existing wars, in the here and now. And given more and more levers of autonomous decision-making being turned over to the machines, the consequences (for Americans and Europeans and Israelis, not “just” for Iranians or Palestinians) could get more and more dire. An article by Chris Stokel-Walker for for The New Scientist, dated three days before the beginning of the war in Iran, had a jaw-dropping headline.

Stokel-Walker writes:

Kenneth Payne at King’s College London set three leading large language models – GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4 and Gemini 3 Flash – against each other in simulated war games. The scenarios involved intense international standoffs, including border disputes, competition for scarce resources and existential threats to regime survival.

The AIs were given an escalation ladder, allowing them to choose actions ranging from diplomatic protests and complete surrender to full strategic nuclear war. The AI models played 21 games, taking 329 turns in total, and produced around 780,000 words describing the reasoning behind their decisions.

In 95 per cent of the simulated games, at least one tactical nuclear weapon was deployed by the AI models.

Do GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4, or Gemini 3 Flash meet any of the standards people typically have in mind when they throw around phrases like “AGI” or “Strong AI”?

No.

But I can’t see why that would make us all any less dead if the

Human decisions are removed from strategic defense

part of the August 29th scenario ever came to pass.

I’m not saying that this will happen. I think it probably won’t. But the fact that right now, in 2026, the president of the United States can rail against “RADICAL LEFT, WOKE” tech executives for drawing the line at “fully autonomous” killing machines, and the whole thing barely makes a political ripple, should make us all take the possibility a bit more seriously.

Every Friday I’m going to be posting a short note like this highlighting something I’ve read in the last week that I’d recommend. You can read the last one here

Last week I was struck by a clip of NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani responding to a heckler. Corey Robin wrote an article for Jacobin crisply summarizing key lessons:

Notice the four things Mamdani is doing.

First, he remains unflappable, gracious, calm, and funny.

Second, he doesn’t treat the heckler as a crazy or an enemy, as a problem to be managed or an alien to be tossed out. He treats the heckler for what he presumably is, a fellow New Yorker.

Third, not only does Mamdani pivot immediately to the issue he cares most about, affordability, but he turns the very fact of the man’s heckling into the issue he cares most about.

Last, Mamdani artfully points out that one of the main ways in which speech is stifled in a capitalist society is economics. If you can’t afford to live in New York, if you can’t afford to travel to New York, you can’t speak in New York.

This is all very well-said. I was nodding along in enthusiastic agreement even before Robin related the last point to a classic essay by the philosopher I recently called “the patron saint of this Substack.”

Read the rest of Robin’s article “Study How Zohran Mamdani Handles This Heckler” here.

If you want to check out my own writing outside of this Substack in the last week, check out my article in Jacobin:

The No Kings Protests Are Cause for Hope

Also, while I’ve got your attention, J. Andrew World is a crazily talented graphic artist who makes all the images for both this Substack and my show. He’s also made art for other shows, and very often makes album covers and posters for bands (in other words, like me, like a lot of us, he’s stringing together a bunch of part-time gigs), and outside of that paying work he does a lot of artwork for his local DSA. His computer broke recently, and he’s been doing what he can without it, but there’s a lot he can’t do until he gets this taken care of, and he’s been having to turn down gigs. He started a GoFundMe to help him buy a new one so he can fully get back into the swing of doing what he does best, and last I checked he’s just over halfway there. Consider chipping in!

Here’s the recording for the eleventh session of our Substack philosophy class for paid subscribers (covering Ch. 6 of Nozick’s “Anarchy, State, and Utopia.”). Next Tuesday is my birthday so no class, but we’ll pick up with the first part of Ch. 7 (ending just before “How Liberty Upsets Patterns”) in two weeks!

(Also, remember that this and all the previous class recordings so far can be found here.)

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Last Monday, I participated in a panel at York University in Toronto on the collection I co-edited with Matt McManus on the late analytical Marxist philosopher G.A. Cohen. (The collection itself is now due in early May. Prices in academic publishing being what they are, I can understand if you don’t want to buy this one, but here it is if you want to get your library to order a copy.) Contributors Les Jacobs and Christine Sypnowich spoke first, then Matt, and I went last. I think someone was filming it for people in the department who wanted to watch over Zoom but I’m not sure if there’s going to be a public video. I hope so, since I’d love to share the other presentations (and there were definitely some interesting moments in the Q&A). Meanwhile, though, this is a lightly revised transcript of my comments.

There’s so much I want to say about all three of those! I’ll try to be good for the most part, though, and save it for the discussion in the Q&A. I do just want to point out three things, though.

One is that, with regard to what Les said about Cohen’s humor and impressions, way back in I think 2019, I remember playing a YouTube video of Cohen’s impression of his advisor Gilbert Ryle to the late great socialist podcaster Michael Brooks. Michael told me it made him mad that Cohen wasn’t still with us because he really wanted to get him on the show.

The second is that, while it might not be obvious, there’s an interesting range of views here about Cohen’s luck-egalitarianism. Christine was arguing that Cohen’s view actually isn’t demandingly egalitarian enough, and I think Les was saying that in his own way, while I suspect that Matt is, y’know, a right-deviationist. It sounds to me like he’s actually siding with Rawls on a lot of this stuff. So, while it’s not what I’m doing to be talking about today, I do want to point out that I’m sitting here alone in the sensible center as someone who thinks Cohen was basically right about all that!

Finally, in the actual paper in our book, I do include a short defense of, if not every detail of Cohen’s version in Karl Marx’s Theory of History, at least the general viability of an analytical reconstruction and defense of historical materialism. The state of the art there is still Reconstructing Marxism, which Erik Olin Wright, Andrew Levine, and Eliot Sober put out in the early 90s. It’s not like some devastating new objection was raised to the view after that, it’s just that sadly academic interest in thinking about historical materialism generally waned. If there are any grad students in the room today looking for thesis topics, I’d absolutely love to see someone pick up that torch where Wright, Levine, and Sober left it.

The main thing I do explore in the paper is the relationship between that analytical reconstruction and defense of historical materialism and Cohen’s normative philosophy. There’s a narrative about the trajectory of his career that I think anyone who’s interested in Cohen has run into. Even some of his friends and admirers sometimes subscribe to some version of it, I think we basically got at least one iteration of it here, and it’s certainly popular among both anti-Cohen people within the Marxist camp and liberal philosophers who distrust any attempt to rehabilitate what they see as stale Marxist dogmas. According to this narrative, Cohen started out attempting to combine real hard-core Marxism with the methodology of analytic philosophy, and that at some point that project ran into trouble or ran out of gas, and so he was forced to “switch” to doing moral philosophy. Having given up on the capital-L capital-H Laws of History, he settled for making normative arguments for the desirability of socialism.

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The anti-Marxist version of this comes from Canada’s own Joseph Heath, who wrote a widely circulated essay two years ago called “John Rawls and the Death of Western Marxism.” And the story Heath tells is that starting with the publication of Karl Marx’s Theory of History at the end of the 70s, there was this tremendous upsurge of academic interest in renewing and clarifying Marxism, and you had all these “no bullshit” analytical Marxists who were doing some of the most intellectually interesting work out there, but somewhere along the line it all ran out of steam and Rawlsian liberalism just sort of absorbed it all like a philosophical version of the Borg. Obviously, Cohen, for example, very famously had deep disagreements with Rawls, but in Heath’s story, those are all just details. The important thing is that Cohen and the rest of the analytical Marxist crew started out being interested in exploitation, which is a properly Marxist concept (the different forms of class society that have existed over the course of history, Marx tells as, are differentiated by the form taken by exploitation), and trying to make sense of that was a bit of a conceptual mess, and anyway the analytical Marxists realized over time that exploitation didn’t matter very much and what actually mattered was inequality, which is a fundamentally liberal concern. And one of the things that was interesting to me about Heath’s essay when it started making the rounds was that Heath is an anti-Marxist liberal but his essay was being shared with equal enthusiasm by anti-liberal Marxists who signed off on the whole story but put the pluses and minuses in different places.

Liberals like Heath, or some conservatives and libertarians I also saw sharing the essay back then, basically think, ok, Cohen started out in Karl Marx’s Theory of History trying to do no-bullshit Marxism, and then he came to realize that when you took out all the bullshit there was nothing left—it turns out Marxism was bullshit all the way down—and that’s when he had to abandon the project and switch to making moral arguments. The parallel story told by orthodox Marxist critics of Cohen sometimes goes like this: The heart of Marxism is the dialectical method. (There’s a famous quote from Leon Trotsky about how Marxism without the dialectic is like a clock without a spring.) In dismissing that method in favor of the methodologies of analytic philosophy and the bourgeois social sciences, it was inevitable that a thinker like Cohen would wind up adopting fundamentally bourgeois-liberal conclusions. They might agree with the idea that real-deal Marxists only care about exploitation, not inequality. And some of them key into places where Cohen uses words like “Platonism,” where he endorses a “transhistorical” concept of justice, and say, see, this is all fundamentally incompatible with the historical materialism he started out endorsing.

And what I argue in the paper is that both the Marxist and anti-Marxist versions of this story are just wrong, for several reasons, and in the time I have left I’m going to mention a few of those reasons as well as at least gesturing at the positive agenda of the paper, the work I do think there is to do in improving on Cohen’s picture of historical progress.

The first reason is maybe the least interesting, although I also think that as far as the actual claim people like Heath make about the trajectory of Cohen’s career goes, it’s absolutely decisive. And that’s that the chronology doesn’t check out. If you read Cohen’s big paper about Nozick’s Wilt Chamberlain example, that was published in 1977, and every major element of the moral case for socialism that Cohen makes at the very end of his life in Why Not Socialism? is already there. He’s already talking about equality as the most important socialist value. He’s already saying, this is footnote 8 in that paper, that justice just is equality, although strict justice sometimes has to give way to other values, and he’s already saying that the socialist principle of justice has to be tempered with a socialist principle of community. It’s all there, in a paper published before Karl Marx’s Theory of History even came out in 1978, in fact at whatever point he wrote that paper, the book wasn’t even going to be called that, in another footnote he calls his forthcoming book Philosophical Defense of Marx’s Theory of History. So, all the most important elements of the supposedly post-Marxist phase of Cohen were already there before he even came on the scene with the big attention-grabbing defense of historical materialism.

And a related point is that the idea that equality is somehow an un-Marxist concern would have been very surprising, I think, to Karl Marx. An argument Marx essentially makes in a few different places is that one of the reasons exploitation is so bad is because it leads to so much inequality. And anyone who’s read Capital knows there are a couple of points in there where Marx is talking about scenarios where the poverty of the working class might decrease at the same time as capital continues its skyrocketing accumulation, and every time he touches on that scenario he always says, well, but don’t get too excited, because “relative poverty” would actually be increasing, since the wealth of the capitalists is increasing more than the poverty of the workers and their families is decreasing. Even when the floor is rising, the size of the gap between the floor and the ceiling is always front and center as a concern for Marx. People who insist that Marx is dismissive about equality often quote-mine in a really misleading way from his brilliant and subtle discussion of distributive equality in Critique of the Gotha Program, where yes, he argues strenuously against a Lassallean slogan about equality in the distribution of the fruits of the workers’ labor, but if you pay attention to the actual argument he’s making there, Marx is bringing up exactly, and I mean exactly, the kind of considerations that would inform the “equality of what?” debates between different kinds of egalitarian philosophers in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries.

Like, and I want to be clear about this, I’m not attributing luck-egalitarianism or any other particular view of these questions to Marx. That would be anachronistic, and besides, he was many things but one thing he definitely wasn’t was a moral philosopher. If anything, in some early writings he seems to find the whole enterprise of moral philosophy a bit suspect, and at any rate, over the course of his career he was far too busy theorizing about history and developing his history-changing critique of political economy to spend his time on moral philosophy. But those passages in Critique of the Gotha Program make me think he would have been a brilliant moral philosopher if that’s where he had focused his energies.

In those few pages, he’s anticipating those “equality of what?” debates in really interesting ways, talking for example about how distributing equally in the sense of giving everyone the same package of resources for putting in the same day’s work ignores that different workers have different needs. Meanwhile, distributing equally in the sense of equal reward for equal amounts of labor, measured in duration or intensity or both, ignores that different people have different bundles of natural talents. Not everyone is able to work as hard or as long, so giving equal rewards for equal labor contributions actually means inappropriately rewarding what Marx calls “natural privilege.” At the same time, he anticipates a line of thought about how these injustices have to be accepted for the sake of other values during the lower stage of socialist development that matches up very nicely with the kinds of points that Cohen would make in Why Not Socialism? about how, at any given stage of history, his demanding ideal of luck-egalitarian justice (“socialist equality of opportunity”) may have to give way in complicated tradeoffs with competing values, including economic efficiency, but we should still maintain the socialist equality of opportunity principle as our north star.

There’s another passage in Critique of the Gotha Program that trips people up about all of this, where Marx says that Right can “never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.” Marxists often take that as Marx being a historical relativist about justice, denying that there’s a single “transhistorical standard” you can use to judge different societies where different material conditions prevail, but as Cohen points out in passing in his brilliant essay about Marx and Isaiah Berlin, the plain meaning of the passage is actually exactly the opposite of that. If we’re talking about how “high” Right can go, if we’re contrasting “lower” and “higher” stages of communism, then all of that is actually totally incoherent if we don’t have a transhistoric standard of justice. We need that “Platonic” yardstick to make sense of the basic picture.

And that brings me to one more reason many critics assume there’s a conflict between Cohenian moral philosophy and Marxist historical materialism, which is that they assume that historical materialism means that all ideas in everyone’s heads, about morality or anything else, are superstructural, so the idea that we can reason about moral philosophy without just vomiting back up capitalist ideology doesn’t make sense. Now, I don’t think Marx himself believed that, I’d be happy to cash this check as best I can in Q&A, but for the record I think that’s not a very careful reading of the sentences in Marx’s 1859 preface that people are getting it from. I’ll just note for now that Cohen himself certainly never believed anything like that. If you read Karl Marx’s Theory of History, he goes out of his way to explicitly deny that historical materialism as he understands it entails that all ideas in everyone’s head are always superstructural and if anything he seems to think that this is an incoherent idea. What’s superstructural for Cohen and for Cohen’s reading of Marx is primarily legal and political institutions.

OK, so everything I’ve said so far has been defensive, and I want to spend the last minute or two of this at least gesturing suggestively in the direction of where I think Cohen’s picture can be improved on. Historical materialism gives us a very powerful and, I still think, a very compelling picture of how historical change happens, on the fact side of the fact/value line. But then on the value side, we can ask when what we’re looking at is historical progress and how satisfied we should be with that progress. And one way of thinking about what Cohen is doing, though this obviously isn’t how it’s usually framed, is that he’s well within the tradition of thinking that socialism represents a deeper fulfillment of the values of the bourgeois revolutions. In publishing a collection on Cohen in Palgrave’s series on classical liberalism, I guess Matt and I are tipping our hands that this is what both of us think.

So, what are those values? In the classic slogan from the French Revolution, you’ve got:

• liberte

• egalite

• fraternite

Well, Cohen’s got his socialist equality of opportunity principle. That’s a powerful principle of egalite that he explicitly contrasts with bourgeois equality of opportunity, as a deeper form of the same principle. He’s got his community principle, which corresponds to fraternite, taken more seriously than the bourgeois revolutionaries could ever afford to, since the liberal-capitalist society they were building was necessarily still a wildly materially unequal one. Anyone who wants to be able to psychologically function in that society had better not take too seriously the idea that people who have fewer crumbs than them are their brothers and sisters. So, Cohen’s on top of equality and fraternity. But I think there’s a liberte-sized hole in his normative case for socialism.

I want to be clear about what I am (and am not) claiming here. I’m not saying he’s indifferent to liberty. He’s not. There are any number of places where he talks about the ways that our pursuit of equality has to be limited by proper respect for individual autonomy, for example. And there are places where he’ll defend traditional Marxist claims about freedom (most obviously in his “Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom Paper”) or where he’ll seizing the opportunity to turn the tables on bourgeois apologists by showing that they want to restrict freedom, which is basically what’s going on in Cohen’s wonderful “Freedom and Money” paper that Matt mentioned earlier.

But you don’t really see freedom playing any role in his main case for socialism, as he makes it for example in Why Not Socialism? You don’t really see him developing a rich account of freedom that he could contrast with a shallower liberal account, like he’s doing for equality with his demanding luck-egalitarianism. And this is where I think his contributions could be usefully supplemented by a lot of recent work that’s been done in rediscovering the small-r republican elements of Marx’s thought, as for example in William Clare Roberts’s Marx’s Inferno, or better yet in Bruno Leipold’s Citizen Marx. And there’s obviously a lot more to be said about this but I also said I’d keep this on the short side, so let’s go to discussion!

Every Friday I’m going to be posting a short note like this highlighting something I’ve read in the last week that I’d recommend. You can read the last one here.

In their article How to Slander a Humanitarian Mission, Alex Skopic and Nathan J. Robinson write:

The two of us just returned this week to New Orleans from Havana, Cuba. We had traveled there alongside hundreds of volunteers from around the world on the Nuestra América aid mission, delivering tons of desperately-needed supplies to a country suffering under a U.S. blockade of fuel (in addition to the preexisting U.S. trade embargo). Current Affairs went along to report on the convoy and to document firsthand the effects of the blockade on ordinary Cubans. A longer report will be appearing in the next print edition of our magazine, but what we saw was harrowing. The whole country plunged into a blackout while we were there, because the fuel shortage brought down the national electrical grid. The entire city of Havana was in almost total darkness, with only a handful of solar or generator lamps shining out.

We have both seen things that will be permanently burned into our minds. People moving around in the shadows like ghosts. Mounds of foul-smelling trash in the street, with sanitation workers in the few running trucks overwhelmed by the task of collecting it—and worse, old men picking through the heaps, looking for anything they can use or sell. Live fish dying slowly in tanks filled with stagnant green water. Shopkeepers losing all of their refrigerated and frozen food. Taxi drivers calling out desperately for a fare, because tourism to the island has shrunk to a trickle. Restaurants having to close in the middle of a busy dinner service after losing power mid-meal. The look of worry on medical workers’ faces, as they contemplate rationing their remaining antibiotics or painkillers.

Our government is systematically torturing the Cuban people. It is doing so purposefully in order to extract concessions from the Cuban government. (Not human rights concessions, mind you, but favorable investment terms.) For a rich country to punish a poor country like this is morally grotesque. The issue is not difficult to grasp.

Indeed it’s not. Even so, there was a concerted media campaign to change the subject and/or portray the trip as nefarious. Privileged tone-deaf American leftists, we were told, were living it up in five-star hotels, thus diverting resources desperately needed by Cubans themselves. Or: By bringing resources, they were saving a dictatorship otherwise on the verge of collapse. Or both. Why not? Internal consistency doesn’t matter much for this kind of thing.

Patiently and methodically, Skopic and Robinson demolish all of the lies and evasions. Did Kneecap somehow procure desperately needed electricity for a concert? Nope. They gave an eight-minute set as part of a long-standing Cuban musical festival. All the Cuban bands who’d already been scheduled most certainly would have gone ahead without them. Did the hotels they stayed at have power while hospitals struggled with blackouts? Yep. Because U.S. law mandates that American visitors stay at private hotels, and the U.S. blockade is explicitly set up to allow fuel for the private sector while denying it to public institutions like hospitals.1 To circle and underline that point, there isn’t fuel coming into the country that could be used by either hotels or hospitals, because that’s specifically and intentionally prevented by U.S. policy. (As Marco Rubio has, said, that policy is “entirely designed” to put the private sector in a “privileged position.”) Was the delegation that brought massive amounts of desperately needed humanitarian aid to hospitals and other institutions in Cuba somehow diverting resources needed by Cubans by doing things like staying in hotels, taking cabs, and drinking at bars? No, and the idea that they were is grotesquely stupid, considering that

Cubans urgently want more Americans to come and visit the island and spend money there. Because Cuba isn’t allowed to export much, tourism has become one of the key sectors of its economy, and the drying up of the tourist trade is destroying so many people’s livelihoods. They do not think of visitors as parasitic. They want the hotels, restaurants, nightclubs, and taxicabs to be full. Right now, people are staying away, and if they think that by doing so they’re helping Cubans, they are wrong.

Is Cuba’s economic system responsible for the bulk of the suffering? Pretty dubious, they point out, considering that even before the very recent and far more extreme blockade, a fairly stringent U.S. embargo has been in place since the Kennedy administration. (If the latter doesn’t play a significant role in damaging the Cuban economy, what on earth is the point of imposing it?) They also could have pointed out that, when the Cubans have taken steps on the Sino-Vietnamese road of market reforms, they haven’t exactly been rewarded by gentler U.S. policy. If anything, as all that was happening, the economic warfare intensified. And, in one of my favorite points in the whole article, Skopic and Robinson take a step back from arguing about what proportion of the island’s pre-January 29th misery was caused by endogenous flaws in Cuba’s economic model and what percentage was caused by economic strangulation by the giant next door.

For the sake of argument, let’s set aside the facts. Let’s assume that the Cuban government was 100 percent responsible for the state of the Cuban economy before the January 29 fuel blockade, and that the longstanding prior U.S. embargo had zero negative impact on the country. It would still be true that the Trump administration’s fuel embargo was a criminal act, because turning off the power of a poor country is cruel regardless of how the country’s poverty was caused. Nothing can justify inflicting the suffering we saw in Havana.

And that’s exactly why the hacks and propagandists smearing the delegation would rather talk about just about anything but the core of the issue.

Read the full article here.

Every Friday I’m going to be posting a short note like this highlighting something I’ve read in the last week that I’d recommend. You can read the first eight here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

If you want to check out my own writing outside of this Substack in the last week, check out my article in Jacobin:

There Was No “Right" Way to Attack Iran

Also, while I’ve got your attention, J. Andrew World is a crazily talented graphic artist who makes all the images for both this Substack and my show. He’s also made art for other shows, and very often makes album covers and posters for bands (in other words, like me, like a lot of us, he’s stringing together a bunch of part-time gigs), and outside of that paying work he does a lot of artwork for his local DSA. His computer broke recently, and he’s been doing what he can without it, but there’s a lot he can’t do until he gets this taken care of, and he’s been having to turn down gigs. He started a GoFundMe to help him buy a new one so he can fully get back into the swing of doing what he does best, and last I checked he’s just over halfway there. Consider chipping in!

The classes on Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick:

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Ch. 7 Pt. 1 (Up Until “How Liberty Upsets Patterns”) Recording

“How Liberty Upsets Pa…

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