Here’s the Zoom info for today’s Substack Philosophy Class:

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Jonathan Chait has a new essay in The Atlantic about the Democratic Socialists of America. It’s one of many anti-DSA pieces that have been published since the Left’s primary victories a week and a half ago. Three self-described democratic socialists (two of them DSA members, all of them aggressively backed by NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani) won their primaries. (All three are running in safe blue districts and will likely join new socialist Representatives from Denver and Philadelphia in the incoming Congress.) Two beat incumbents. One beat an incumbent by thirty points. The challengers’ strong opposition to sending more bombs to drop on refugee camps in Gaza was a major issue in all three races. So, of course, were standard concerns about affordability and the like. There were also several down-ballot victories.

I happened to be on the phone with a friend in NYC when the news started to come in about the results. When I got where I was going, I had some celebratory shots with friends in Los Angeles. One of the first things I saw on social media the next morning was a short video clip of Zohran at the victory party on Tuesday night, hugging a politically aligned state assemblywoman while a giant crowd chanted “free, free Palestine.” I watched it a few times and thought a lot about just how unaccuestomed I am to feeling this happy and optimistic about American politics. In fact, the last time I felt that way was when Zohran himself won last year, and the last time before that was several long miserable years earlier, on the day of the 2020 Nevada Caucus.

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Obviously, though, given Chait’s fundamentally different worldview, he’s going to see very different things in the same political Rorschach blot. Mostly, what he sees seems to be a rabble of dangerous extremists who want to turn the United States into something like East Germany or North Korea.

That last line sounds like I must be caricaturing his critique. Amazingly, I am not. Here’s a quote from Chait:

The organization is still called democratic socialists, of course, but the term does not necessarily mean “liberal democracy” as Americans have traditionally defined it. Many socialist thinkers define what they call “true democracy” as a system in which capitalism has been overturned and the proletarian classes have seized political power through their representative vanguard (that is, them). Totalitarian states such as the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) accordingly labeled themselves “democratic.”

Like many liberal critics of the contemporary DSA, Chait frames the current organization as a betrayal of its better and more moderate past self. This is a pretty standard rhetorical move in any number of directions. See, for example, the way right-populists misleadingly cherry-pick the histories of the Left and the labor movement to portray the current Left’s opposition to Trump’s brutal roundups as a departure from some supposed Old Left anti-immigration orthodoxy. Or the way Democrats love to frame every new Republican as a dangerous departure from the sensible Republicans of yore. I’m old enough to remember George W. Bush being attacked this way, and it’s all but inevitable that a time will eventually come when Democrats attacking some future Republican will say things like, “I didn’t always agree with Donald Trump, but at least he knew how to make a deal…” So it goes.

Chait’s image of the older better DSA is particularly vacuous:

The writer and activist Michael Harrington helped found the DSA in 1982. His goal was to build a socialist movement that would eventually pull the Democratic Party toward more humane domestic and foreign policies.

The best you can say about this is that it’s technically true. On the first part, Harrington was more optimistic about “realigning” the Democratic Party than many of his successors are (even if we acknowledge that, unless and until we reform our election system deeply enough to allow for real multi-party democracy, running candidates on the ballot line of one of the two parties that are allowed to meaningful participate in our elections is the only game in town). And in terms of his political goals, it’s true enough that he “wanted more humane domestic and foreign policies.”

But if you’re describing a lifelong passionate advocate of transforming capitalism into socialism in a way that would also describe the mildest pro-capitalist but anti-Vietnam War liberal, what you’re leaving out matters considerably more than what you’re leaving in. Harrington was the most prominent socialist in a country without a lot of prominent socialists. (As William F. Buckley famously quipped when Harrington died, being the highest-profile American socialist was a bit like being “the tallest building in Wichita, Kansas.”) Agree or disagree with the man in whatever direction you like (ranging from calling Harrington a dangerous radical trying to pull the country down the Road to Serfdom to calling him a sellout who herded the Left into the dead end of Democratic Party politics or whatever), you can’t deny that the thing that got that guy out of bed in the morning was a commitment to socialism, not just short-term goals so modest that Jonathan Chait would cosign them.

The complexities of DSA’s founding are also considerably flattened by Chait’s account. Harrington’s group (DSOC, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee) merged in 1982 with an organization with origins in the 1970s New Left (NAM, the New American Movement) to form DSA. DSOC itself emerged from the break-up of the old Socialist Party of America, in part because Harrington & co. wanted to take a stronger line against the Vietnam War and American imperialism than much of the rest of the SPA did at that point, but the merger with NAM only happened after overcoming NAM’s initial suspicion that DSOC was insufficiently anti-imperialist.

A big part of Chait’s narrative about DSA in 2026 is that the really dangerous commies running the show now are “anti-western.” But, it’s hard to imagine that Chait wouldn’t have had the same critique in 1982. These were “neither Washington nor Moscow” types, not Cold War liberals.

In his excellent response in Jacobin, Jonathan Chait Doesn’t Understand the Socialists He’s Attacking, Bhaskar Sunkara corrects many of the particulars. In Chait’s telling, Harrington insisted on “guardrails” to stop disciplined Marxist-Leninist organizations from infiltrating and taking over DSA, those are gone, and so a succesful infiltration and take-over happened. As Bhaskar points out, though, the “guardrails” were actually inherited from NAM, not DSOC, and they were applied in such a lax way in practice that there was actually a member who was revealed to have been an East German spy who the old DSA still declined to expel “on the grounds that the man had become, by the end of his life, a committed democratic socialist.” And more to the point, if the organization sometimes makes the wrong calls in the ongoing push and pull of strategic pragmatism and radical principles, Chait is simply misdiagnosing the source of the problem.

We are not being infiltrated by disciplined cadre. We are being flooded by people new to the left, new to organized politics of any kind.

Plenty of these people get plenty of subjects wrong, often because they’re making mistakes typical of newly minted lefites trying to figure things out. So it goes. DSA is a sea of casual members, a confusing mess of internal caucuses who often have a hard time explaining their ideological differences with one another to outsiders, and a lot of very dedicated people just kind of quietly plugging away on the ground doing things like electing Zohran Mamdani mayor of New York. It’s also so decentralized that meetings of different local branches can feel like meetings of entirely different organizations.

In my decade and change of membership, there have certainly been times when either the national organization or local branches have made decisions that I’ve found frustrating. But taking the worst of what sometimes emerges from all of this chaos as evidence of some well-organized invasion by Stalinist cadres very badly misses the actual dynamics at play in DSA as it actually exists in the 2020s. It’s just a big loose unwieldy organization, pushed and pulled by a variety of influences and impulses, that doesn’t always get things right.

And nowhere, as Bhaskar points out, does Chait lose the thread as badly as he does on the question of Palestine:

Given the last two years and the destruction of Gaza, it is hard to construct the argument that the American socialist movement’s error is that it is insufficiently Zionist. What Chait reads as ideological capture by campus radicals is something simpler: a generational turn, inside the Democratic coalition and well beyond it, away from the defense of an apartheid state and toward the view that Israel as currently constituted is a barrier to peace for everyone in the region, Jews included.

That’s very well-said.

But what I found most compelling in Bhaskar’s response was his core intervention on socialism.

Chait is right in one key respect. We are members of an organization that has, by the standards of 2026 America, quite revolutionary goals. DSA does aim for a deeper and more radical form of democracy than we have now. What Chait does not seem to know is that this ambition runs straight through Michael Harrington and every other founder of the organization. In his popular books, Harrington argued for the expropriation of the capitalist class, for a democracy that reached into the economy, for workers’ control of the means of production.

What separated him from the rest of the far left was not this goal. It was his means, which were democratic to the core, and his insistence on pluralism — on what Irving Howe, in a 1977 essay in Dissent, called the reconciliation of philosophical liberalism and socialism. Howe’s argument was that socialists should hold on to what liberalism got right, its defense of civil liberties and free speech and social pluralism, while rejecting liberalism’s defense of capitalist property. That’s a tradition that I still see in today’s DSA.

Chait is also right that we lead with affordability, with rent and health care and the demands that look most winnable. Of course we do. If you cannot assemble enough political power to bring down rents or win universal health care, you are certainly not going to socialize the economy.

But this socialization of the economy, the abolition of class divisions that have existed in most places since the Neolithic Revolution, has been a goal of DSA since its founding.

“Hell yes” to all of that. And that brings Bhaskar to a crucial point. He doesn’t mention here the book that he and Mike Beggs and I wrote (ahem, The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World, due out from Verso at the end of September) but the point he does end on doubles as an explanation of why he and Mike and I regard that book as such an important intervention.

What the scenes that made me so happy Tuesday before last in New York vividly illustrate is that the socialist Left is finally in the process of making what looks like it could be a major breakthrough. It’s a moment of enormous positive possibility. But there’s also every chance for things to go wrong.

The most obvious way for things to go wrong would be that we simply lose the day-to-day political war, perhaps as badly as we did in 2020 or perhaps in a way that throws us back to a worse position than that. (In 2020, after all, we were left with a few socialists in Congress, a greatly enlarged DSA, a left media ecosystem big enough to sustain itself during the period of rebuilding, and so on. Anyone whose political memory stretches back a few years earlier than that should be able to imagine a much worse species of defeat.) No one has ever gone broke betting on the Left to lose. But what are the dangers that might accompany short- and medium-term wins?

Chait looks at the “actually East Germany was kind of based” twaddle that makes some newly minted leftists feel edgy and radical (even as they support democratic socialist politics in practice, understanding this as the only game in town for promoting some sort of serious left politics in America in the third decade of the twenty-first century) and he sees not an annoying and counterproductive affectation that most will outgrow but a serious danger. In his nightmares, the current generation of democratic socialists, if we take political power, will rip off our Scooby Doo masks and reveal ourselves to be unreconstructed Stalinists.

Bhaskar has a very different concern.

My fear runs the other way. The likeliest outcome of electing this many socialists is not a lurch into authoritarian communism, but a new wave of reformers who govern competently, who create some good jobs and enshrine health care as a right, but who have no path to, or even desire for, a society free of capitalist exploitation and domination.

Chait is worried that we are too radical to be trusted with power. I am worried that once we have it, we will not be radical enough to finish what Harrington started.

There are many reasons things might play out that way. Some of them have to do with the contingencies of historical processes none of us in 2026 are in much of a position to anticipate, never mind control. But one we are in a position to do something about is the Left’s lack of long-term economic imagination.

The socialism of five-year plans and production quotas didn’t even manage to last as long as some human lifetimes. There were people who born before the October Revolution in 1917 who lived long enough to see McDonalds locations sprout up in both Moscow and Beijing. Where Communist Parties have clung to power, they’ve presided over market economies with deeper levels of material inequality than many capitalist social democracies.

The Soviet model had stopped exerting much gravitational pull on the hopes and dreams of the western Left long decades before the system’s collapse, and even in parts of global South that were sufficiently brutalized by American imperialism that the USSR still had a decent number of defenders later in the twentieth century, few today see recreating it as a promising option. Meanwhile, even after decades of neoliberal erosion, the Nordic strongholds of social democracy continue to look pretty good, certainly when graded on a North American curve. (And new advances really do sometimes happen. In Denmark, my friend Pelle Dragsted’s Red-Green Alliance just secured free dental care for all Danes in the negotiations over the party’s support for the new coalition government.) All of this adds up to a situation where it’s easy for American leftists to see how bits of pieces of socialism administered within a basically capitalist framework can improve people’s lives but, even if “I’m not just a social democrat, I’m a socialist” is easy to say, they find it a lot harder to explain exactly how a socialism that would lie beyond social democracy would even work.

The political obstacles to even achieving a modest reformist “minimum program” in the American context are enormous. (Again, no one goes broke betting that the Left will lose.) But at least, when it comes to those short-term social-democratic goals, we know what winning would look like.

When it comes to a long-term “maximum program” of transcending capitalism entirely, of instituting a stable new way of organizing society where workers ran their own workplaces and investment was taken out of the hands of oligarchs and the whole thing wouldn’t collapse within a single lifetime but would work well enough to replace capitalism as the global economic basis of society going forward, the truth is that most of today’s socialists have a pretty hazy idea at best. And in the long term, it’s going to be hard to convince people to take political risks to steer toward a more ambitious long-term horizon, possibly jeopardizing more modest gains we could secure by limiting our ambitions, if we don’t even know what achieving it would look like and we can’t answer reasonable questions about how it would work.

I want Medicare for All as badly as the next millennial with a history of struggling with medical expenses. That would be a great step in the right direction. But at the core of my politics, I want to live in a world where some people don’t get to spend all day giving orders simply because they have money and other people don’t have to spend all day taking orders simply because they don’t, and where investment decisions that shape all of our lives aren’t in the hands of a minority of the population whose interests predictably and systematically diverge from the interests of the majority. In other words, I want a classless society. At the most basic level, that was the North Star that got everyone from Michael Harrington to Vladimir Lenin to Peter Kropotkin out of bed in the morning, as profoundly as they might have disagreed with each other on how to get there. And we badly need to restore the Left’s confidence that some version of this is even an achievable goal. That’s why we wrote the book.

Here’s the recording for the twenty-second session of our Substack philosophy class for paid subscribers. We read the “Meaningful Work” and “Workers’ Control” sections of Ch. 8 of Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Next time we’ll read the “Marxian Exploitation” section, so that should be a fun one. After that, we should be able to wrap up the book in three more sessions (one to finish out Ch. 8 and one each on Chs. 9 & 10) and then we can move on to reading G.A. Cohen’s response-book Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality. Oh, and here’s the Substack I mentioned at the end (“Walter Block and the Prisoner’s Dilemma”). Finally, remember that this and all the previous class recordings so far can be found here.

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Earlier this month, Elon Musk officially became the planet’s first trillionaire.

Writing at her magazine The Argument, liberal pundit Jerusalem Demsas assures us that this is fine.

Most of the conversation about SpaceX’s IPO was about Musk himself, who has become a reactionary and powerful political figure seeking to prop up far-right political parties, anti-immigration politics, and a broad hostility to the liberal economic and political regime that made his life story possible.

I agree with all of those critiques of Musk, but I want to focus on the specific ire that his inauguration as the first trillionaire has drawn, because it’s exposed an unhealthy habit of mind among populists that focuses on gaps rather than absolute measures.

Like everyone else making the case that it’s no big deal for economic inequality to metastasize to the point that we need the word trillionaire, Demsas wastes some of her readers’ time explaining that Musk doesn’t literally have a trillion dollars in his bank account but merely holds assets valued at a a trillion dollars, and that if he tried to cash it all out at once that value would plummet. My guess would be that the number of likely readers who were actually confused about this point hovers right around zero. But explaining it makes pundits feel smart.

Putting that aside, she says several things about why having trillionaires (even ones who did have it all in their bank accounts, or stuffed under an unfathomable number of mattresses) would actually be fine. I responded to a couple of them in the article I wrote about Elon’s trillionaire status for Jacobin but I want to expand on those responses and cover the rest here.

There are two reasons I’m so interested in Demsas’s defense of this new frontier of inequality. First, the tangle of philosophical and practical-political issues here is interesting in itself. Second, Demsas’s short piece is a good sample of a kind of liberal commentary that does a good job of performing thoughtfulness and rigor in a way that flatters readers and reassures them in their existing ideological prejudices while never descending further than a quarter an inch from the surface of the issue. Bluntly, it annoyed the shit out of me.

Why is it an “unhealthy habit of mind” to “focus on gaps rather than absolute measures”? And why does Demsas think we have to choose?

As far as I can tell, several things are going on at once here.

First, Demsas endorses a position philosophers call sufficientarianism. While the egalitarian thinks that we should be morally concerned with the gap between the economic floor and the economic ceiling, the sufficientarian thinks all that matters is the height of the floor. If everyone has enough, the distance separating that “enough” from the “much more than enough” that others might have is morally irrelevant.

So, near the end of her article, she says:

Gaps between people, absent material deprivation, is simply not a moral problem.

That seems pretty clear.

My own view is that sufficientarianism is extraordinarily implausible. As I wrote in the Jacobin article,

even if we could somehow disentangle these things, we should question her assumption that only deprivation matters and fairness is irrelevant. Imagine a world where everyone had whatever you would personally consider to be “enough.” Now imagine that all the black people in this world stayed at “enough” while all the white people were raised to a vastly higher level. Presumably liberals like Demsas would (quite rightly) find this maddeningly unfair, on the grounds that an arbitrary factor like skin color shouldn’t make a difference to anyone’s life outcome. The problem is that exactly the same reasoning should apply to inequalities that stem from, for example, some people being born into the working class and others being born as the heirs to vast fortunes.

Similarly, I could have added, it should apply to inequalities that stem from the unequal distribution of whatever natural talents might help people to climb upward mobility ladders in a given society. This is the foundation of luck-egalitarianism, the view that inequalities are morally objectionable to the extent that they stem from factors beyond the control of those left holding he short end of the stick. (Demsas doesn’t engage with issues like this. In general, she shows a remarkable lack of curiosity about why so many people who’ve spent their lives thinking about these issues don’t share her conceptual starting-point.)

Second, she helps herself to the assumption, without argument or even explanation, that caring about inequality somehow rules out caring about absolute material deprivation. More on that below.

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Finally, she goes beyond rejecting in-principle egalitarianism (the position that inequality is a moral problem in itself) and strongly suggests that we shouldn’t even be concerned that inequality might be a problem in so far as it has problematic practical consequences. I say suggesting since she never exactly comes out and says this part. But surely she doesn’t think the only reason “populists” have a problem with inequality is because they’re philosophically committed to in-principle egalitarianism.

And she throws in this argument-in-passing:

If we had a system where Elon was still CEO of SpaceX and Tesla but simply had to redistribute more of his shares and make many more billionares, would that really change how much political power he has? I doubt it. He’d still get to decide whether Ukraine or Russia gets Starlink access.

As an argument against the “unhealthy habit of mind” by which “populists” care too much about economic inequality, this is a non-starter. It’s one thing to say that the economic inequality between Musk and an ordinary citizen (or even an unusually prosperous citizen, like the owner of a small chain of car dealerships) had already passed the threshold where Musk’s wealth granted him an outrageous amount of political power long before he became a trillionaire. It’s quite another to say that “populists” are wrong to think that one of the problems with economic inequality is that it makes a mockery of democracy by granting the wealthiest citizens an outrageous amount of political power. In fact, it very much looks like she’s granting the second thing.

Perhaps Demsas also thinks that caring about equality of political power is an “unhealthy habit of mind.” If so, it’s odd that she doesn’t spell that out. And if she does by any chance care about substantive democracy in the political realm, it seems to me that she’s given us an excellent reason to care about limiting inequality to a threshold she says Musk passed long before he became a trillionaire.

Immediately after the odd argument about political power, Demsas switches gears to thinking about the relationship between domestic and global economic inequality.

Sometimes Westerners will do a sort of cope where they point out that the multiples that separate the average American and Musk are way larger than those between the world’s poorest and the average American. But even under inequality-logic, that only works if you ignore the many, many people with zero wealth and negative wealth. After all, the multiple between zero and $193,000 is infinity, whereas the multiple between $193,000 and $1 trillion is 5.2 million.

I have no idea what she means by “inequality-logic” but the gap between $193,000 and zero is $193,000.

Since she includes a hyperlink for the word “cope,” you might be forgiven for assuming that clicking on it would lead you to a source that made the point that “the multiples that separate the average American and Musk are way larger than those between the world’s poorest and the average American.” Or even a source that made any sort of argument expressed in terms of “multiples” at all. It doesn’t. The hyperlink leads to a MoneyWise article by AnnaMarie Houlis called “‘The average American is now closer to Jeff Bezos in net worth than Jeff Bezos is to Elon Musk’ as Musk becomes the world’s first trillionaire.”

Not only does it contain no “cope” comparing the gap between the world’s poorest and the average American to the gap between Elon Musk and the average American, but it never mentions that comparison at all. It’s a very short article, and as the title indicates, what it does is compare the gap between Jeff Bezos and the average American to the gap between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. And it compares them by using subtraction.

Bezos’ fortune is currently estimated at just below $250 billion. That means that the difference between Bezos and Musk is over $750 billion. Meanwhile, according to recent estimates, the median American household has a net worth of roughly $193,000. That means that the difference between the average American household and Bezos, while massive, is indeed smaller.

So, I really have no idea what Demsas is talking about here.

There’s some other interesting number-crunching:

The difference between a billion and a trillion, after all, is far greater than you may think. To put it into perspective: A billion seconds equals almost 32 years. A trillion seconds? More than 31,000 years.

…but no “inequality-logic” employing “multiples” anywhere in sight, and certainly no employment of it for the sake of “cope” about global inequality.

Whatever the target of the “cope” critique is supposed to be, let’s put that aside and think about global inequality itself.

Here’s my big question about that:

Does Demsas think global inequality is “not a moral problem”?

I understand that her sufficientarianism means that she can say that it’s a moral problem if lots of people in Haiti, for example, are deprived on “absolute” measures. But if at least some Haitians actually or hypothetically (a) have whatever standard of living Demsas would regard as “enough,” but (b) are doing vastly worse than their otherwise similar American counterparts because they were born in Haiti, is that morally important?

I can understand thinking that it wasn’t a moral problem for the pre-Columbian residents of Hispaniola and pre-Columbian Europeans to have different living standards, just as it plausibly wouldn’t be for Earthlings and residents of other planets where we don’t even know there’s life to have different living standards, but if we all live together in a global economic system, the dynamics of which have the predictable result that someone who due to nothing but bad luck in the genetic lottery was born in Port-au-Prince has a much worse living standard than an otherwise similar person born in Cleveland or Brooklyn, that does strike me as at least prima facie unjust.

Of course, even if it is unjust, it might be a hard injustice to completely eradicate. In many ways, it’s much easier to formulate a plausible theory of change for domestic inequality.1 But the issue Demsas is writing about is antecedent to all of that. Her contention is that “inequality” (presumably meaning either domestic or global) is “simply not a moral problem.”

She just seems to take it for granted that egalitarians-about-their-own-country won’t even see global equality as a morally significant long-term goal. But why not?

There was a moment in one of the 2016 Democratic presidential debates that seared itself into my memory, when Hillary Clinton bragged about her friendship with Henry Kissinger and Bernie Sanders responded that he was “proud to say” that Kissinger was not his friend and he brought up the coup to overthrow Chile’s democratic socialist president Salvador Allende. It’s a useful useful example of an egalitarian-about-his-own-county caring much more than a liberal technocrat did about their government’s role in thwarting an attempt to alleviate poverty and inequality in the third world. But it’s also a reminder of an important reality that Demsas’s liberal ideological blinders make it hard for her to see.

As she herself seems to vaguely acknowledge in the paragraph about Musk’s political power, inequality (not just in the distribution of wealth, but in structural-economic power upstream of that) systematically shapes the politics and state institutions of unequal societies. Does anyone really think the U.S. would have stomped around Latin America crushing experiments in left-wing economics if not for the domestic influence of wealthy corporations?

Demsas frames domestic economic inequality as a distraction from the plight of “the world’s poorest.” In practice, though, the former makes it far more difficult for people who live in poor countries to alleviate the latter.

She continues:

But most importantly: the difference between me and someone living in rural Eritrea is not just our wealth but the inequality that comes with living in a country without basic access to civil liberties like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, strong property rights protections, government-provided infrastructure, and protection from casual violence.

The “strong property rights protections” is a well-worn bit of conceptual gerrymandering that free-market enthusiasts use to to make it sound like capitalist economics is a package deal with the rest of the list. (See the Fraser Institute’s farcically dishonest “freedom” rankings for another example.) In the real world, there are many instance (e.g. Pinochet’s Chile) where much of the rest of Demsas’s list has been sacrificed on the altar of protecting captial.

Even putting that aside, though, what’s the point? That when all those elements are put in place, the "absolute measures” of economic well-being adjust themselves accordingly? If so, the empirical record hasn’t been kind to that assumption. In 2026, plenty of places in the developing world combine formal protections of liberal-democratic rights with poverty well below where I’d assume Demsas would put her standard of sufficiency. So, even if she thinks all that stuff helps, it clearly doesn’t suffice.

Alternately, she could be saying that the things on her list are even more important than economic sufficiency. If so, though, it seems a bit off-topic in a short article arguing that economic sufficiency matters and economic equality does not.

Perhaps she just threw in a liberal catechism with very little regard to how it fit the overall shape of her argument. If so, as a democratic socialist I concur with much of the catechism. But I wish she’d left it out to free up a bit of space in her article to focus on the issue at hand.

She continues:

Mostly, I just don’t think material inequality is a good way to organize one’s political thinking. Absolute measures of well-being like longevity, access to clean running water, health care, housing, and education are more conceptually clear.

Taken seriously, this is a bizarre argument for two reasons. First, there’s at least one sense in which economic inequality is actually more conceptually clear than many of the absolute measures she lists here. There’s plenty of conceptual wiggle room about what counts as adequate education, for example, whereas the gap between $193,000 and zero (exactly $193,000), or between the average American’s $193,000 and Jeff Bezos’s $250 billion (two hundred forty-nine billion, nine hundred ninety-nine million, eight hundred and seven thousand) is so conceptually clear we can assign an exact number to it.

Of course, any serious egalitarian thinker would say that the kind of inequality that matters most isn’t as simple as dollars and cents. One one account, what matters most might be equalizing absolute well-being. On another, it might be equalizing something like a capacity to act in the world. Luck-egalitarians would say that what matters is “equal access to advantage.” There are complex debates here. But there are with how to think about what counts as a good education too!

Second, even if absolute measures about healthcare, education, and so on were more conceptually clear than equality, how on earth are we supposed to get from that premise to the conclusion that we should only care about absolute measures and regard inequality as a non-problem?

Returning to the list of formal liberal rights Demsas rattled off above, think about free speech. Anyone with a passing knowledge of either the long and tangled history of court cases about America’s First Amendment, or with the even more tangled history of disagreements about what counts as an unacceptable violation of extra-legal norms about free discussion and censorship in non-governmental contexts, knows that the whole subject comes with a lot of conceptual headaches.

But what would Demsas make of someone who made the following argument?

Mostly, I just don’t think caring about free speech and opposing censorship is a good way to organize one’s political thinking. Binary questions like whether someone has a right to vote are more conceptually clear.

Demas writes:

After all, the same flawed logic that would indict Musk for his mindboggling amounts of wealth would indict everyone reading this article when compared to the billions of people living in abject poverty.

Notice the goalpost-shifting here. Are we talking about whether to indict (domestic or global inequality (domestic or global)? Or whether to indict its beneficiaries?

Because if we changed this bit to:

Te same logic that would sees the inequality between average Americans and Elon Musk as a moral problem would also see a moral problem in the inequality between average Americans and the billions of people living in abject poverty.

…I suspect most readers wouldn’t be so quick to jump to the conclusion that the logic was “flawed.”

If we are going to shift the subject from an assessment of the justice or injustice of global or domestic inequality to our moral assessment of the beneficiaries of inequality, then it might matter whether we’re only talking about inequality in resources or also talking about inequality in power. Even leaving Marxist conceptual categories out of the discussion, the vaguest left-populist language about “oligarchs” already assumes the distinction.

Next, we might ask about how that power is being used. A Friedrich Engels, for example, would get a very different grade on that test than an Elon Musk. If we think rampant inequality is unjust, then it’s surely relevant to our moral assessment of Musk that, unlike either Engels or the average American, he’s done everything in his power to make the world more unequal.

Demsas says:

Gaps between people, absent material deprivation, is simply not a moral problem. If everyone in the world had access to a decent standard of living, but some people were quadrillionaires, I don’t know that I would care about the latter. Moreover, it’s easy to imagine a world without much inequality but significant deprivation; that’s just most of human history when most people lived in subsistence agrarian economies.

Everything in this paragraph before the “moreover” is just a table-banging assertion of sufficientarianism, unaccompanied by the barest hint of an argument. After the “moreover,” she’s saying something more interesting, though again, she just takes it for granted that we face a moral zero-sum choice between caring about the height of the floor and caring about the gap between the floor and the ceiling.

As I noted in the Jacobin article:

Saying that both considerations matter isn’t some novel attempt to have it both ways. It’s the traditional socialist position. There’s a reason that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels spend the opening pages of the Communist Manifesto rhapsodizing about the effectiveness of capitalism in building up the machinery of an advanced global economy. They didn’t want to retreat to a world of subsistence farming, but they also didn’t think we needed to learn to live with capitalist inequality. Instead, they thought that the way capitalism supercharged global economic development created the possibility, for the first time in history, of moving toward a postcapitalist world that would be better than either one. This vision remains the socialist North Star.

Again, though, it’s entirely possible that Demsas truly doesn’t know that this is the classical left position. She just doesn’t seem to be curious about this sort of thing.

Finally, she writes:

Largely, when you look at measures of inequality, it’s possible to have high-inequality, high-poverty countries (South Africa, Botswana, Namibia) and low-inequality, high-poverty countries (Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine). I just don’t think inequality is that related to the central problems facing society, and structuring our discourse around it makes for a genuinely incoherent politics.

The first sentence is a sublime irrelevance unless we have some reason to think we can’t care about both dimensions at once.

It’s worth saying one last time:

If she has such a reason in her back pocket, she doesn’t share it with us.

And what can you even say about that last sentence?

I’ve quoted every single thing Jerusalem Demsas says about inequality in the article. In all of that, in the whole thing, do you see anything that backs up this final claim about incoherence?

I see several arguments for the claim that egalitarianism is wrong. None of those arguments are very good, and most of them are based on a blatant false dichotomy, but at least they’re there. What I don’t see is anything that even looks like an attempt to show that egalitarianism is incoherent. But the claim sounds nice and decisive, and it comes after several paragraphs of performing intellectual rigor.

I guess that’s what counts.

Technocratic liberals are going to form some part of our political discourse for the foreseeable future. That’s fine. I accept it as an inevitability.

But can we at least have a better class of technocratic liberals than this?

Here’s the recording for the twenty-first session of our Substack philosophy class for paid subscribers. We read the “Self-Esteem and Envy” section of Ch. 8 of Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, plus we finally went back to the stuff about Rawls and free will we left hanging a while back. Next time we’ll read the “Meaningful Work” and “Workers’ Control” sections.

Oh, and here’s that old Peter Frase article in Jacobin we talked about with regard to status hierarchies and communism. It was later expanded into a short book but everything I mentioned today was in the article.

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

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Here’s the recording for the twentieth session of our Substack philosophy class for paid subscribers. We read the first two chunks of Ch. 8 of Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (“Equality” and “Equality of Opportunity”). We’ll be reading the next chunk ("Self-Esteem and Envy") for next time, though we might or might not get a chance to talk about it because I want to start with the free will cliffhanger we left hanging before and (I hope) make next Tuesday mostly discussion to make up for today ending up being all lecture. Oh, and here’s that “Puzzles for Libertarians” Current Affairs article I mentioned today!

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

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Here’s the recording for the nineteenth session of our Substack philosophy class for paid subscribers. We finally finished Ch. 7 of Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. We’ll be reading the first two chunks of Ch. 8 (“Equality” and “Equality of Opportunity”) for Tuesday.

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

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Here’s the recording for the eighteenth session of our Substack philosophy class for paid subscribers. We went over the “Macro and Micro” and “Natural Assets and Arbitrariness” subsections of Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. We’ll finish up Ch. 7 for next Tuesday.

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

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On Friday, I participated in a panel on “elites” hosted the UC-Irvine chapter of the Platypus Affiliated Society. This was the prompt from the organizers:

What follows is a transcript of my opening statement, lightly revised at a couple of points for clarity. Obviously it’s less of an in-depth treatment of the topic than a suggestive preview of what that treatment might look like, but I hope it’s still interesting!

I’d want to push back against that prompt for two reasons. First of all, with all due respect to my hosts, I think the whole thing about “refounding the left” is one of the Platypus Society’s most unhelpful affectations. Like, if Earth were invaded by the aliens from War of the Worlds and the rest of us were saying “gosh, that looks really bad, let’s see what we can do to stop the invasion,” I’m pretty sure the Platypi would respond by opining on the folly of thinking it was possible to Refound the Left on the Basis of Opposing the Martians. Guys, sometimes people say things because we think they’re true, not because we think what we’re saying is the singular code key to capital-R capital-L Refounding the Left.

Second and more importantly, I’d push back against the idea that Marxists have historically only thought the working class had the potential to overcome capitalism because there was a powerful international workers’ movement. Certainly, if you think about the world of the 1840s when that Marxist analysis first came together, a powerful international workers’ movement was much more hope than reality. The reason Marxists have always thought that the working class was the agent of historical change that could overcome capitalism was that it was and is the only class within capitalist society that has the right combination of interests and capacities to do so.

The capitalist class has tremendous capacity to overcome capitalism. If every member of the capitalist class was separately visited by three ghosts a la Scrooge and woke up as convinced socialists, they could simply make a gift of the means of production to the rest of the society. That just won’t happen, because it wouldn’t serve their interests, and sure, you get the occasional Engels here and there but you really can’t count on ghosts coming through when you need them. The basic premise of all materialist analysis is that over time enough people are going to be moved enough by their economic interests that you have to analytically start from the assumption that this is how they’ll act.

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Conversely, the population of unhoused and long-term jobless people sleeping in parks and under highway overpasses in every major city have a tremendous interest in living in a more equal society—as Joan Robinson liked to point out, as long as we’re living under capitalism, the one thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited—but they have basically zero capacity to bring it about. If that entire population disappeared tomorrow, not only would this not threaten capitalist production in any way, but the capitalists could quietly celebrate a social problem painlessly removed.

By contrast, the entire basis of capitalist society is the labor of workers—without whom, as the lyrics of Solidarity Forever put it, “not a single wheel can turn.” And the wealth of the capitalist class is entirely dependent on the surplus labor extracted from workers, which means that as long as capitalism exists, there’s an antagonistic mutual dependency between the interests of capitalists and the interests of workers. And the crucially important disanalogy is that workers could get along just fine without capitalists if we transition to a different system, whereas—for all the hype about AI supposedly meaning they can do without human labor—the same just isn’t true in the other direction. So the working class is the one class where interests and capacities meet in the right way.

That’s why Marxists think the working class is the necessary agent of radical change. The collective action problems are immense and often depressing. The task of turning a class in itself (i.e. a collection of people with the same class position) into a class for itself (i.e. the kind of powerful international workers movement that once again is now more of a hope than a reality) is immensely difficult and complex. There are certainly no guarantees of success. But as long as the overcoming of capitalism remains the long-term goal, finding a way to organize workers into a working-class movement remains the historical mission.

OK, but what about the elites the panel prompt is really about—not the capitalists at the tippity-top of society, but those messy intermediary layers who have always been such an embarrassment to Marxist analysis?

The argument I just finished laying out only mentioned three layers of society—workers, capitalists, and people who are at a social level below the working class, economically oppressed but not exploited because they’re simply locked out of the economic machine completely. And if you read Capital Vol. 1, which is the volume that’s really about class structure and exploitation, that’s also pretty much the map of class relations you get there. When Marx talks about independent artisans in business for themselves, he tends to present them as pre-capitalist relics—like, when he discusses some trade formerly dominated by independent artisans being subsumed so that the formerly independent artisans who might have even used capitalist merchants as middlemen to get their goods to consumers become direct employees, Marx describes that as the capitalist conquest of that sector of the economy. Otherwise, he’s pretty much talking about workers and capitalists, plus I guess big land-owners he distinguishes from capitalists, and a teensy tiny little bit about the paupers and the lumpenproletarians in Ch. 25.

But the most interesting and suggestive passage hinting at a richer class map—and you’ll have to forgive me for a bit of literary license in how I’m parsing this—is in Ch. 7, when he’s imagining a scenario where some capitalist doesn’t make any profits because the revenues from his sales are only enough to cover the workers’ wages, and he imagines the capitalist complaining about this. It’s a great passage. He puts into the capitalist’s mouth all the standard talking points of bourgeois apologists about merit and entrepreneurial risk and all of that. And toward the end of the riff, he imagines his hypothetical capitalist crying out,

”Have I myself not worked? Have I not performed the labour of superintendence, of overseeing the spinner? And does not this labour, too, create value?’”

And then the next line is:

“The capitalist’s own overseer and manager shrug their shoulders.”

And of course in context the point of that shrug is to say hey guys the things you’re saying the capitalist has done are actually things that, in any decent-sized capitalist firm, aren’t done by the owners at all but by these specialized employees. Which is a good point! But, and this is where the literary license comes in, that image of the worker and the capitalist having an argument while the manager and the foreman “shrug their shoulders” really does feel like a great symbol of the idea that there’s a layer of skilled professionals and managers who have a somewhat ambiguous position in the binary class war between full-on workers and full-on capitalists.

Historically, Marxists have had a few different ways of thinking about these layers. The least helpful has been assuming that even if not everyone neatly fits into one of the main categories yet, eventually this problem will be solved by history, since as capitalism progresses everyone will either rise into the unambiguous capitalist class or (in most cases) sink into the unambiguous working class. Well over a century and a half after Capital was published it’s safe to say that we know better. Another response has been to say that the relatively simple class map you get in Capital, the relatively simple class map I assumed in my argument earlier, has to be substantively revised to reflect social reality. This is where PMC (“Professional-Managerial Class”) theory comes in.

And there are two different lines of thought that need to be disentangled here. First, there’s a way of thinking about professionalized layers in between workers and capitalists that goes back to at least James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution, and really it has roots before that, which says that maybe you’ve actually got a three-sided class war between workers, capitalists, and the PMC, and that the PMC could easily displace the capitalist class as the new ruling class. In some variants, it might say that’s what actually did happen in the Soviet Union. And the intellectual side of contemporary right-populism tends to postulate that there’s some sense in which it’s at least kinda sorta happened in contemporary highly-regulated corporate capitalism, that the real problem isn’t the oligarchs but the Oberlin grads getting paper-pushing jobs. For the record, my own view at least, we can discuss this, is that this whole line of thought is just abject nonsense.

The other, very different version of PMC theory comes from Barbara and John Ehrenreich (who are thinkers I have a lot of respect for), who first coined the term, and people like my friend Catherine Liu (who teaches here!) who have continued in the Ehrenreichs’ vein. That line of thought postulates the PMC as a new subordinate class alongside the working class but with distinct interests from it. I think that’s a lot closer to the mark.1

But the tradition of how to think about this stuff that I find most helpful isn’t PMC theory in any form. It’s the Erik Olin Wright view that the class map of Capital, the class map of the argument I recited before, is perfectly correct as far as it goes. At a view from 10,000 feet, if we’re thinking about grand epochal historical change, that’s the right map to use to think about that stuff.

But just as you can have different kinds of literal maps that are useful for different purposes, ranging from simple maps that just show you state and city names and where the ocean is to topographical maps with little bumps for the mountains, and none of these are incorrect, they just capture different things and are useful for different purposes, if instead of thinking about grand epochal historical change we’re talking about short-term socialist strategy, we’re thinking about which kinds of demands will motivate which alliances of specific people in which specific circumstances, we need to zoom in on some of the details we’re abstracting away from when we use phrases like “the working class” and “the capitalist class.”

For people who own means of production they use to try to turn a profit (so who are “capitalists” if we use that term very broadly), we need to ask are you a self-employed proprietor of a taco truck or something, or someone with a few employees, or someone with many employees? Those are going to have different consequences for how your interests are impacted by what’s at issue in various short term political struggles. Look at how Zohran Mamdani worked during the campaign last year to get guys with street-corner halal stands on board with a democratic socialist program by promising to cut red tape. That was smart.

And for people who work for a wage, we can ask questions about how highly skilled you are, which is going to have consequences for how much individual bargaining power you have and hence maybe what your attitudes are going to be toward collective bargaining power—you might think you’re better off without a union—and how much autonomy you have on the job. We can ask about how much managerial authority you have, if any. (It’s certainly possible to have some while also suffering some degree of capitalist exploitation.) Once we bring in factors like that, we can see ways that people can be pulled in multiple directions at the same time, having some interests that align them with the rest of the working class, and others that align them with the capitalist class in ways that start to feel a little bit like the position of the traditional petty bourgeoise. And I know I’m already more than two minutes over the 10-mintue allotment for these openings so let me make one last point if you’ll indulge me and then I promise I’ll shut up.

I kind of said this already but I want to say it a little more explicitly:

The point of that complicated messy relief map of contradictory class positions isn’t to write off people who are in some sense “PMC.” Look. I’m a very proud member of an adjunct professors’ union. So, that’s clearly not my position!

The point is to more carefully calibrate which alliances between class fragments we need at any given moment, and what demands, what mobilizations around what issues, are going to he helpful in forming and consolidating those alliances, as we try to engage in that immensely difficult and uncertain task of rebuilding the workers movement. Because, again, that’s the whole job.

Here’s the recording for the seventeenth session of our Substack philosophy class for paid subscribers. This one was a bit all over the place but we’re getting a fuller picture of Nozick vs. Rawls. Continuing our slow crawl through Section II of Ch. 7 of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, next Tuesday we’ll be reading the “Macro and Micro” subsection.

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

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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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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.

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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 med…

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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 co…

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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 o…

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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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