Here’s the recording for the LAST session of our Substack philosophy class for paid subscribers. I’ll be gone next Tuesday but two weeks from today (so, Tuesday, August 18th) we can start G.A. Cohen’s response-book Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality. Oh, and remember that this and all the previous class recordings so far can be found here.

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No real essay this week, sorry! My computer was out of comission for a couple days and now that I’ve more or less got it working again I’m frantically catching up on other work. But Andy already made some excellent artwork for next week’s essay “Steve Paxton’s Defense of G.A. Cohen’s Defense of Karl Marx’s Theory of History”:

…and, speaking of Cohen:

For the last several months of Tuesdays (twenty-four class sessions plus the inevitable off-weeks), the Zoom Substack Philosophy Class has been working through Robert Nozick’s classic Anarchy, State, and Utopia. It’s a good book for a class of (mostly) socialists to read. Nozick is an excellent writer and an extremely sharp philosopher (however massive his ideological blindspots) and ASU is still probably the most intellectually rigorous (in-principle) defense of capitalist property rights that’s ever been written It’s a book that can be frustrating, in the best and most useful way. I know I’ve gotten a lot of going through it this carefully (see here for the first of what I hope are several things I’m going to write based on that class), and I think the students have enjoyed it. We’re finally going to finish it off in the twenty-fifth session, covering the very last bit of the book, day after tomorrow.

Having thus finally finished our dinner, it’s going to be time for dessert—G.A. Cohen’s book Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality, in which (among other things) he systematically dismantles every part of Nozick’s case for libertarianism, brick by brick.

Anyone who skipped dinner but wants to join us for dessert all the same (flagrantly ignoring everything Pink Floyd has taught us about meat, pudding, and the relationship between the two) can do so by just becoming a paid subscriber to this Substack:

Class meets on Tuesdays at 1 PM East Coast/10 AM West Coast and lasts about an hour. Zoom links are posted for paid subscribers the day before. If you have the kind of job where you can’t put on a Zoom class in the background for an hour, or if you have to miss the occasional class and catch up later, the recordings are always posted here by the following weekend.

So, again, we’ll be finishing Nozick this Tuesday (August 4th). I’m going to be in airports and on planes all day the following Tuesday (August 11th) coming back from my annual trip back to Michigan to hang out with some friends from high school at a cabin by a body of water in my home state that is called, I swear to God, Crystal Lake. (I’ve been going for many years and remain un-slashed so I’m cautiously optimistic that I’ll make it back this time as well.) The Cohen class starts on Tuesday, August 18th.

I hope to see some of you then!

Here’s the recording for the twenty-fifth session of our Substack philosophy class for paid subscribers. We’ve just got one chapter left of Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Ch. 10 next week), then we’ll have to skip a week when I’m back in Michigan, and then we can move on to reading G.A. Cohen’s response-book Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality. Oh, and remember that this and all the previous class recordings so far can be found here.

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I’ve been extremely bad about making time to post these for a while now. (In general, time-juggling has gotten dramatically worse since I started working on the Matt Christman book. But I am excited to be able to share that one with you guys in the not-too-distant future!) In any case, I really am trying to get into better habits, and resume my previous practice of posting a short note like this every Friday highlighting something I’ve read in the last week that I’d recommend.

In the opening lines of Branko Marcetic’s Jacobin article The Left Is Rising, So Centrist Dems Are Cynically Woke Again, he asks you to stretch your memory all the way back to November 2024:

Remember when establishment Democrats were saying with a straight face that they had been forced to adopt the grating, alienating brand of wokeness and identity politics that made them toxic to working-class voters? You should: it wasn’t even two years ago.

After handing the White House to Donald Trump a second time and scrambling to dump the blame on someone else, Democrats did what they usually do when they royally screw up: they blamed the Left, pretending that this deeply unpopular and cynical political style — whose hallmarks include shallow appeals to racial and gender identity, questionable insinuations of bigotry against their political opponents, and a fixation on bashing men, a demographic the party is desperate to win back — was something that had been forced on them by progressives and socialists.

As this magazine pointed out at the time, this was pretty rich. There are certainly forces on the progressive left, rooted in college campuses and nonprofit groups, that stoked and continue to stoke the worst of wokeness. But it was Bernie Sanders and the movement behind him that had been saying the way forward was a politics that put people’s bread-and-butter concerns front and center and divisive identity politics and finger-wagging to the side.

For their troubles, establishment Democrats lined up to declare them a bunch of racist, sexist “Bernie Bros,” even secret right-wingers who, being white guys, were out of touch with a voting public that wanted to only talk about race and gender, and that they should move out of the way entirely. (Why is the Democratic brand in the toilet with working-class men? We’ll never know.)

So the idea that Democratic elites had had this political style forced on them, and forced on them by the Left no less, is laughable. But what’s extra comical is that they couldn’t even keep this pretense up for two years before going back to doing the thing they claimed they had never wanted to do in the first place.

As he goes on to chronicle, the moment the Left put some points on the board once again, with the Dem establishment being spooked by the rise of Zohran Mamdani, the prospect of AOC as a serious contender for the 2028 presidential nominations, and the recent spate of DSA victories in Congressional primaries, the rhetorical tools of 2016 are being dusted off as if nothing had changed.

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In my home state of Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed’s history of making harsh political judgments about his political opponents (Gretchen Whitmer in his 2018 run for Governor and the lavishly AIPAC-funded Haley Stevens in his current race) are reinterpreted as expressions of deep-seated misogyny. At the DNC, the Left’s opposition to making South Carolina the first state to vote in 2028 (a fairly transparent attempt to let one of the most conservative states in the Union nip a possible AOC nomination in the bud) is being branded as anti-black racism, never mind that SC is “significantly whiter than Nevada and, especially, the purple Georgia — both of which, unlike the Palmetto State, Democrats have actually won in the last fifty years…”

None of it makes much sense. But it doesn’t have to. Every minute that people spend navel-gazing and self-flagellating about identity and subconscious bigotry is a minute that’s not spent on talking about the chasm separating the Democratic establishment from Democratic voters on what kind of society we’re going to have in concrete material terms. The obvious fact that a democratic socialist “minimum program” of universalist economic reforms would disproportionately help members of marginalized groups is, as always, carefully ignored in favor of focusing on an endless inventory of individual souls.

Read the full article here.

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

The Democratic Socialists of America Want to Expand Democracy

Yes, We Really Should Abolish the Senate

Mamdani Is Right. Netanyahu Belongs Behind Bars.

No essay today, sorry! I was going to write about something I have reason to think will be out very soon, but didn’t come out quite in time to write about it for this week’s Substack.

Meanwhile, though, here’s the recording for the twenty-fourth session of our Substack philosophy class for paid subscribers. We’re finally done with Ch. 8! We should be able to knock out Chs. 9 and 10 in one Tuesday each in the next two weeks, then we’ll probably have to skip a week when I’m back in Michigan, and then we can move on to reading G.A. Cohen’s response-book Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality. Oh, and remember that this and all the previous class recordings so far can be found here.

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I’m fan of Jesse Spafford.

His views aren’t mine, exactly, but there’s lots of overlap, and he’s extraordinarily sharp thinker. One small example of Spafford-at-his-best is his response to arguments like those made by libertarian philosopher Michael Huemer (and discussed here). Huemer thinks a government taxing your income to finance a welfare state is like a mugger who plans to spend the money in your wallet on charity. In both cases, maybe the theft can be justified if the purpose is morally urgent enough, but both are theft, and are therefore morally guilty until proven innocent. The fact that the particular gang of muggers that finances the welfare state is a particularly large and powerful one that calls itself a “government” and has considerable public support is neither here nor there. People are just people, and if it’s wrong for random people to use force in particular way, it’s equally wrong for a “government” to do so.

Spafford points out in response that an argument of the same type and with the same intuitive weight as Huemer’s Charity Mugger argument could be constructed about the use of force by property-owners. He imagines a case where a cruise ship docks on an uninhabited and hitherto undiscovered island.

The passengers are excited to spend the day exploring the island, but, before they have a chance to disembark, one passenger runs to the end of the gangplank and declares, “Sorry, but I have decided that this island is for my personal use only! I forbid any of you from setting foot on it — unless, of course, you pay me $50 and take off your shoes before getting off the boat.”

When the first passenger in line ignores this edict and walks onto the island, the declaration-issuer’s friends rush over and seize the “trespasser” and begin binding her wrists and ankles. She struggles a bit, but after they spray sunscreen in her eyes, she stops resisting and is carried back onto the ship and locked in one of the cabins until she agrees to stay off the island.

All the points Huemer makes about the Charity Mugger and the tax collector seem to apply to the passenger who decides the island is his and a “legitimate” property-owner. If we wouldn’t accept the passenger’s behavior, why should we accept the behavior of a “legitimate” property-owner asserting the same rights over particular bits of the world?

Perhaps taxation and property-ownership (even the individual ownership of toothbrushes!) are both illegitimate across the board and we should just live in what Roderick Long calls the “Grab What You Can World,” where no one ever gets to stop anyone from using anything. That sounds like an awfully chaotic world that certainly wouldn’t be able to sustain a functional enough economy to keep several billion human beings fed and housed, but perhaps the collective misery of that world is what Justice requires.

Alternately, we could conclude that, since no sane person wants Grab What You Can World and hence “No Coercion” is not really an option on the table in these debates, the question is always which distribution of resources we want to be enforced by monopolistic institutions of some sort (whether “governments” or just “property-owners who recognize one another’s claims”). In order to answer that question, we need to think through substantive questions about fairness—in other words, about what share of society’s resources each of us deserves.

Both Spafford and I are start from a commitment to egalitarianism (the claim that, in some important sense, we all have equal claim). More specifically, while the devil’s in the details, we’re both sympathetic to a smaller family of views called luck-egalitarianism, which holds that the thing we should be trying to equalize is what the Marxist philosopher G.A. Cohen called “equality of access to advantage.” Roughly, inequalities are unjust to the extent that they trace to factors outside of the control of whoever ends up with the short end of the stick.

This is one of the most important reasons that I’m a socialist.

By "socialism,” I have in mind an economic system where democracy has been extended from politics to economics through collective ownership of the means of production. Whether the Soviet economy, for example, counts as a deeply flawed form of socialism or is better thought of us a form of pseudo-socialism depends on how you understand “collective ownership.” In theory, Soviet state enterprises were collectively owned by the public as a whole, but you could argue that this was a legal fiction and really they were the property of the ruling bureaucracy of the one-party state.1

Eighteen years before the Russian Revolution, the Irish republican socialist James Connolly wrote an article arguing that whether state ownership counted as socialist depended on who owned the state:

Socialism properly implies above all things the co-operative control by the workers of the machinery of production; without this co-operative control the public ownership by the State is not Socialism…2

I think that’s a respectable position. I’ve never been too hot and bothered, though, about the semantic dispute about how strictly we should define the word. If you want to parse “collective” ownership loosely enough that the Soviet economy would count, I’m happy enough to just accept that and express my position by saying that I advocate a very different form of socialism. That’s the rhetorical position that my co-authors and I take in our forthcoming book The Blueprint: How Socialism Could Work in the Real World, where we lay out what we think an economically viable and politically desirable form of socialism might look like in the twenty-first century.

In that book, we argue that our kind of socialism, in which the “commanding heights” of the economy would be directly publicly owned and the remaining market sector would be composed of internally democratic, worker-owned firms partnering with nationalized banks, would be desirable (among other reasons) because it would more closely realize egalitarian ideals than even the gentlest and most social-democratic versions of capitalism.3 (Note: It wouldn’t perfectly realize those ideals. It would better realize them.) In other words, we follow socialist tradition in thinking of socialism as a way for society to organize production, and thinking that one of the reasons it would be better to organize production that way is that it would lead to a better distribution of consumption.

Spafford argues in a new essay that this way of mapping the conceptual terrain doesn’t work. He writes:

With a slate of socialists having recently won numerous Democratic primaries across New York City, there has been a renewed surge of public interest in socialism. However, there is quite a bit of confusion and disagreement about what, exactly, socialism is. For some, the term “socialism” denotes systems of authoritarian control like what existed in the USSR under Stalin or China under Mao. For others, “socialism” refers to the present-day Nordic countries with their expansive welfare states. In this post, I aim to clear things up a bit by, first, explaining what socialism is not—controversially suggesting that a large portion of self-described socialists are actually wrong about the nature of socialism. I will then briefly offer a positive alternative account of socialism.

He then quickly covers the the same points we just went over in his own way:

Most generally, socialism is aptly described as an economic system that predominately involves social—as opposed to private—ownership of the means of production (i.e., the land, factories, and tools that are used to make all the things we consume). However, there are different ways of understanding social ownership, which, in turn, give rise to different conceptions of socialism.

On one interpretation, to own the means of production is to have control rights over them. Thus, the defining feature of capitalism is that private individuals—i.e., capitalists—get to decide how all the land, factories, and tools are used and, by extension, what gets produced. By contrast, a socialist society would wrest this control from the capitalist class and hand it over to the public, giving all members of society democratic control over what gets produced and how. Exactly how this would work is an open question; perhaps voters would elect an economic planning board or perhaps they might vote on certain production decisions directly. However, at the end of the day, what is produced must be a function of society’s democratic will. Call this the democratic conception of socialism.

My general impression is that most self-described socialists endorse this democratic conception. In fact, I don’t know that I’ve seen any other view defended in popular discourse.

He himself, though, doesn’t buy it for two reasons.

First, there is the tyranny of the majority problem. Suppose that the majority decides to direct production in a way that is to their benefit but impoverishes or otherwise harms the minority. Or perhaps the minority fares reasonably well in absolute terms, but the majority directs the bulk of the social product to themselves, thereby producing significant inequality. According to the democratic conception, such a society would still be a socialist one. However, this outcome would be anathema to most socialists.

Granted, this objection is not decisive, as a proponent of the democratic conception might maintain that “socialism” is strictly a descriptive term that is not intended to have any normative implications. Thus, socialism might be either good or evil depending on how the majority exercises its democratic will. However, I suspect that few self-described socialists would want the goodness of socialism to be contingent in this way.

All I can say on this last point is that I don’t share his suspicion. I think most socialists think, and have good reasons to think, that strict-definition socialism will lead to good results, not that “socialism leading to bad results” would somehow be definitionally incoherent. (Probably many also think, as I do, that democracy is valuable in itself and not just because it leads to good results.) At any rate, whichever of us is right about what most socialists think, speaking for myself I’m certainly not committed to the incoherence claim. In fact, the idea that it’s definitionally incoherent—that socialism is good by definition, so any “socialism” that led to bad stuff must really not be socialism after all—sounds pretty silly to me.

I said above that the USSR under the reign of Joseph Stalin, Lavrentiy Beria, and their associates—a regime that committed any number of genuinely horrifying atrocities—could be counted at “socialist” under a loose but not entirely crazy definition. (Again, if we want to talk that way, I’d just say it’s a very different form of socialism than the one I advocate.) But I also think it’s reasonable to define our terms in a stricter way that would exclude it.

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Anti-socialists typically roll their eyes at the stricter definition because they suspect socialists who offer it of playing “No True Scotsman” games to give socialism a reprieve from the verdict of history. I don’t think that’s fair, which is why I brought up the James Connolly passage. (Connolly is chronologically safe from any suspicion of trying to No True Scotsman his way out of the lessons of Stalinism.) But if we start saying that the goodness of socialism shouldn’t be “contingent,” the anti-socialists’ point starts to look pretty reasonable.

To be fair, when Spafford talks about “goodness,” he seems to mean less all-around goodness than the specific goodness of fulfilling egalitarian ideals. So, let’s talk about that. Remember, these were his examples:

Suppose that the majority decides to direct production in a way that is to their benefit but impoverishes or otherwise harms the minority. Or perhaps the minority fares reasonably well in absolute terms, but the majority directs the bulk of the social product to themselves, thereby producing significant inequality.

We could imagine a really advanced socialist society—something way beyond the socialism of The Blueprint, maybe an economy that had moved beyond markets or even money, where some sort of participatory, decentralized, democratic planning bodies decided both what would be produced and how it would be allocated to individual consumers. Now, imagine that a really grotesque, virulent form of racism takes hold, and the planning bodies decide that all black and Jewish citizens are only allowed to pick up half as many groceries as Aryan citizens at the decommodified state distribution centers. If there are still collectively-owned restaurants of some kind in this society, we imagine that they all put “Whites Only” signs in their windows.

Would this severe violation of egalitarian ideals within the context of a democratically collectivized economy (indeed, in our version of Spafford’s case, a democratically collectivized economy that had transcended the commodity form, so it would meet the strictest definition of socialism I know of) be a form of non-socialism? I have to say that sounds like an absurd result to me.

I certainly don’t think this scenario would play out under socialism, but that’s an empirical prediction grounded in an analysis of why Jim Crow, Naziism, etc., happened in the real world and what sorts of material conditions I think would or wouldn’t be likely to lead to similar things happening in the future. If I’m trying to make the case for socialism to someone whose primary political concern is racial equality, the least interesting or reassuring answer I could possibly give them about why I don’t think this scenario would come to pass under socialism would be “because then it would no longer count as socialism.”

Here’s Spafford’s second reason for resisting the idea that socialism means collective ownership and democratic control of the means of production:

Even if proponents of the democratic conception were willing to bite this bullet and allow for minority-impoverishing socialisms4, they face an even bigger problem, namely, that the democratic conception implies that all existing democratic states are socialist in character—a result that would render socialist demands trivial.

How’s that?

To see why this is the case, consider how production decisions might be made in a socialist society. Presumably, there is no way for the mass public to make every production decision, e.g., how many pencils should be made relative to coat hangers, shoe soles, and brushes for electric motors. Rather, some degree of delegation will have to happen such that there is a class of planners tasked with making production and allocation decisions—but where those planners can be recalled if the voting public disapproves of their choices. Most plausibly, this public control would take the form of elected representatives pledging to either preserve the status quo by leaving the current slate of planners unmolested or bring about reform by either replacing the planners or modifying their decisions directly. While there might be other ways of achieving democratic control of the means of production, the just-described arrangement seemingly has to qualify as an instance of such control, i.e., of socialism.

So far, so good. It’s very different from the version of socialism Sunkara and Beggs and I advocate, but I’m happy to grant that what he’s describing—basically, appointed state planning bodies overseen by an elected government—would be one of the many forms that collective democratic control of the means of production might take.

However, the just-described system is also the one that already governs every existing (representative) democracy.

This is a confusing claim! I’m writing my response to Spafford, for example, on a MacBook that I seem to recall purchasing from a wildly profitable private company that manufactured it on its own initiative, rather than from a state-owned enterprise carrying out the directives of a planning office run by appointees of the elected government. When I finish the essay, I’m going to schedule it to post Sunday morning on the privately-owned Substack platform, and then I’m going to drive into town to sit at a privately-owned coffee shop and drink some coffee while reading a book published by a privatized, for-profit publisher.

So, what does Spafford mean?

He writes:

In any such democracy, there will be a group of people who are legally tasked with making production and allocation decisions. Granted we call these people “capitalists” rather than “planners,” but they serve an identical function, namely, deciding what to produce with society’s resources as well as how to carry out that production and how to distribute the resultant product. And, while they also don’t collaborate in the way that we might imagine a socialist planning board collaborating (as each capitalist has been delegated their own slice of the means of production to manage), one can imagine the paradigmatic socialist planning board dividing up labor in just the same way across a similarly large group of planners. In fact, such a division of management is plausibly unavoidable, as the alternative of collective, deliberation-based management seems infeasible given a suitably large economy. Thus, strictly speaking, the current day-to-day management of any capitalist economy is compatible with the democratic conception of socialism.

There is, I think, a logical leap here. If, under System 1, X performs “an identical function” that Y performs under System 2, that doesn’t mean that System 1 just is System 2, especially when that judgment of the function being “identical” is happening at this level of abstraction. Under feudalism, local lords might act as judges in disputes between their peasants and generals when it was time to mobilize for war. But the existence of judges and generals to fulfill the same functions in capitalist nation-states doesn’t make modern liberal capitalism a form of feudalism. It seems to matter a lot, when trying to figure out what’s the same and what’s different about the two systems, that the feudal lord assumes these functions merely by virtue of his hereditary relationship to the land, whereas judges and generals in liberal capitalist democracies are appointed to these positions by a separate state power. Similarly, what seems most relevant when comparing the form of democratic socialism Spafford described above to what happens under capitalism is that the capitalists derive their ability to decide what’s produced and how it’s distributed not from being appointed by and responsible to a democratic government but just by virtue of having enough money to buy the means of production. That’s not a small distinction!

Spafford continues:

But what about the element of democratic control that socialism requires? This element, too, is present in most existing democratic countries. As noted above, in a socialist economy large enough to require the delegated management of production, i.e., planners, democratic control will take the form of the public being able to vote to recall those planners and have them replaced (most plausibly by electing representatives to implement the recall). But note that this form of control already exists in practically every democracy! After all, if the voting public is unhappy with how the means of production are being managed, there is nothing preventing them from electing a slate of representatives who will oust the current managers of the economy and replace them with individuals who will change what is produced or how production is carried out.

This could take the form of anything from a democratic transition to socialism to a democratic decision to take away the means of production from the existing private owners and gift them to new private owners.

Starting with the second option, let’s ask a simple followup question:

Would this be a one-time shakeup, analogous to a new feudal king who, having taken power in a particularly bloody war, executes every single local lord and creates an all-new nobility (so the descendants of the new lords he creates will then have hereditary rights to the land and the serfs working there)? Or is the idea that each new owner will be chosen by the state?

Jesse Spafford's Substack

What Socialism Is (and Is Not)

With a slate of socialists having recently won numerous Democratic primaries across New York City, there has been a renewed surge of public interest in socialism. However, there is quite a bit of confusion and disagreement about what, exactly, socialism is. For some, the term “socialism” denotes systems of authoritarian control like what existed in the …

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a month ago · 4 likes · 4 comments · Jesse Spafford

If the latter, so we have a new system where private individuals are chosen to run the means of production on their own accord (rather than carrying out the directives of a planning agency) and they extract private profits in the usual way, but rather than getting to sell it to new owners or pass it on to heirs, each next owner is decided by the state, that sounds like a substantively new and interesting economic arrangement that we could all have fun arguing about how to classify. (Would it be a radically mutated form of capitalism? Or would it be something new, neither capitalist nor socialist?)

On the other hand, if we assume that the state-selected owners will now have full ownership rights and were able to dispose of their property as they saw fit, and the next owners got their ownership rights from standard market mechanisms, then I would agree with Spafford that what we’re imagining would still be the system we’re living under, not because there’s any sense in which we’re already living under a system of democratic control of the means of production, but because we’re living under plain old standard-issue capitalism now and we’ll continue to do so in this scenario.

On the other hand, if what we’re talking about is not democratically reassigning the means of production to different capitalists but a democratic transition to socialism, then two points seem relevant.

First, whether representative political institutions existing suffices to give voters the ability to transition to socialism is a vastly bigger and more complicated question than Spafford’s discussion suggests. (In the U.S. context, for example, any attempt to sweepingly nationalize the means of production would surely be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. And even if it weren’t, the current owners of the means of production would surely turn to extra-constitutional attempts to keep their economic power rather than meekly accepting their expropriation. That doesn’t necessarily mean that that the transition to socialism would be violent (plenty of coups around the world have been defeated peacefully through overwhelming mass noncompliance, for example), but it does mean that it’s hard to imagine getting all the way to socialism without some sort of constitutional crisis.

Putting all that aside, though, even if the public does have the capacity to use existing political institutions to seize control of the means of production, that doesn’t actually mean that it already has control of the means of production. To adapt another Michael Huemer thought experiment about property rights, if I find a hermit living by himself whose only weapon is a spear he fashioned himself, and I have a gun, then I have the capacity to seize control of the spear. That doesn’t mean that I control the spear already.

Spafford writes:

One can now see how the two objections to the democratic conception of socialism come together. The first objection worried that the conception allows for societies to be declared socialist even when the voting majority opts for production decisions that are anathema to self-described socialists.

Again, that it’s logically possible that a socialist society could do things that would be anathema to the values that make socialists prefer socialism to capitalism doesn’t strike me as any sort of reason to think we should adopt a definition that would rule this out a priori. Rather, socialists need to give substantive arguments that socialism wouldn’t play out this way. If they’re unable to do so, that should lower our confidence that socialism would be as good as socialists say.

And the second objection reveals that this isn’t just a fanciful hypothetical, but, in fact, is exactly what is happening now: voters already have democratic control over the means of production, and what they have chosen to do with them is nothing more or less than our current processes of production and the associated allocation of the social product. If voters wanted to do organize production and distribution differently, they could. Given that they have so far declined to take advantage of this opportunity, it seems hard to deny that this is because the status quo mode of production is how the majority likes to do things. But, surely, we are not now living under socialism. So, the democratic conception of socialism surely can’t be correct.

In other words, we already live under a regime of democratic control of the means of production, and this has in fact led to grotesque inequality—because it’s led to the perpetuation of capitalism! At the end of Spafford’s chain of reasoning, we’ve arrived at the conclusion that capitalism and collective democratic control of the means of production are fully compatible after all.

Pretty clearly, something somewhere has gone wrong. What?

First, it doesn’t follow from the fact that ordinary citizens of liberal capitalist democracies enjoy some degree of political power (severely limited by the disproportionate political power of capitalists!) that if we’re still living under capitalism, the majority must love capitalism. Many people vaguely assume capitalism is the only way things could be, of course (or know of no alternative but twentieth-century Stalinism), but even that’s not the biggest obstacle. Even assuming that there’s a peaceful democratic road that goes all the way from where we are to socialism using nothing but standard peaceful democratic left-wing tools like labor organizing, building mass socialist political parties out of the social base of that organized working class, and so on, every step along that road involves tremendous risks and pitfalls. As Vivek Chibber argues in effect in his excellent book The Class Matrix (which I discussed here), the most important stumbling block to this happening is not the enthusiasm of the masses, who love the share of society’s resources they have now and have no wish for more, but a variant of the same collective action problems that are also the most important obstacle of citizens of authoritarian dictatorships using their collective power to achieve political democracy. In theory, as a confident, militant, organized working class demanded more and more within the system, pushed up against its limits, etc., it should be easy to imagine support building for trying to find a way to make a leap beyond it. But as the entire history of capitalism shows us, the formation of a confident, militant, organized working class is the far bigger challenge.

Second, even if it were the easiest thing in the world to collectively organize people around maximally ambitious goals about how to improve their situation, the spear example above reminds us of the large distinction between having the power to take possession of something and actually having possession of it.

Let’s think about two versions of that case:

• Spear 1: I stumble on the hermit, who lives nowhere near civilization. I have a gun and the hermit only has a spear. If I took the spear away from him, there’s no one he could appeal to for help getting it back. Nevertheless, I choose not to take it.

• Spear 2: Let’s make the hermit a bit less of a hermit. He lives close enough to civilization to hike to the home of someone he pays to take care of the spear for him, with strict instructions on where to keep it and how to handle it until he comes back for it.

In Spear 1, I have a capacity to get my hands on the spear any time I want (by seizing control of it with my gun), just like in Spear 2, the hermit has the capacity to get his hands back on the spear any time he wants (by hiking back to retrieve it from his employee). That much we have in common. But in Spear 2, the hermit controls the spear. He exercises the control indirectly, through someone he’s entrusted to keep it safe for him, but he still exercises control. In Spear 1, there is simply no normal sense of “control” under which I am currently in control of the hermit’s spear.5

Spafford’s own alternative to the “democratic conception of socialism” is what he calls the “egalitarian conception of socialism”:

The obvious solution to this problem, then, is to define socialism in terms of outcomes rather than process. On this proposal, social ownership of the means of production is understood in terms of the public having a right to the social product rather than control rights over the means of production. Specifically, under socialism, each person has a right to an equal share of what has been produced. Thus, socialism is realized when and to the extent that there is an egalitarian distribution of resources.

Even if I’m right that Spafford’s case against the “democratic conception” fails, I should say something about why I find it more plausible than his “egalitarian conception.” There are, basically, three reasons.

First, terms like “feudalism,” “capitalism,” and “socialism” are normally (and, I think, appropriately) understood as the names of economic systems that either have existed already or might come into existence in the future. Socialism is the name of a system that (if all goes really well!) might one day replace capitalism. But the demanding form of egalitarianism that Spafford and I both subscribe to versions of is one it’s very unlikely that any economic system we could implement any time soon could fully realize.

The Soviet economy didn’t have entirely flat wage scales. Neither do actually existing worker cooperatives. It’s likely that any economically viable world of collective ownership and workplace democracy would, while distributing goods in a vastly more egalitarian way than capitalism, still violate luck-egalitarian principles to some extent. For example, people who would be particularly good at certain jobs might not be enticed to do them without a higher salary (or, if we’re imagining a marketless and moneyless form of socialism, “a greater consumption allotment”) than they’d get for many other jobs. To whatever extent this reflects unchosen differences in natural talents, their larger share violates luck-egalitarian principles.

Not only does it seem overwhelmingly likely that any post-capitalist system we could implement at this point in history would involve some degree of such violations, it’s at least an open empirical question whether we can ever completely bring economic practice into alignment with the ideal. This doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be our moral North Star, even if we never get all the way there. But it does mean that we have to choose between thinking a society is socialist “to the extent that” it fulfills the egalitarian ideal and thinking that socialism (and not just “some degree of socialism”) is actually achievable in material reality. The premise of my political life has been that it is, and I’m very reluctant to let that go without a very good reason.

Second, socialists have historically argued that one of the reasons socialist “processes” are desirable is because it would lead to more egalitarian “outcomes.” Karl Marx, for example, put it this way in his Critique of the Gotha Program:

Any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves. The latter distribution, however, is a feature of the mode of production itself. The capitalist mode of production, for example, rests on the fact that the material conditions of production are in the hands of nonworkers in the form of property in capital and land, while the masses are only owners of the personal condition of production, of labor power. If the elements of production are so distributed, then the present-day distribution of the means of consumption results automatically. If the material conditions of production are the co-operative property of the workers themselves, then there likewise results a distribution of the means of consumption different from the present one.

I worry that we would lose the ability to express thoughts like this in their clearest, most natural, and most forceful way if we redefine socialism as the realization of distributive egalitarianism, rather than saying that one good reason to be a socialist is because a socialist system of production will lead to a comparatively more egalitarian distribution.

Finally, socialists have historically been motivated not just by egalitarianism but also, and often at least as much, by other values like freedom from domination. (Read Citizen Marx.) You could argue that they were wrong to care about those other values but I’m skeptical. It seems to me that more than one thing matters.

We could, I suppose, define socialism as whatever best realizes all the ideals that are relevant to evaluating social systems—freedom, equality, material sufficiency, optimal conditions for individual flourishing—but then we really would be in the position of defining socialism as goodness, such that “socialism would bring more good things than capitalism” would become totally vacuous, like “salt is saltier than anything other than salt.”

Let’s not do that. There’s an excellent substantive case to be made for socialism. Let’s make it, and not just define the challenge out of existence.

Here’s the recording for the twenty-third session of our Substack philosophy class for paid subscribers. We read the “Marxian Exploitation” of Ch. 8 of Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Next Tuesday, we’ll finish the chapter, then I think we should be able to do a session each on the last two chapters of the book and then we can move on to reading G.A. Cohen’s response-book Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality. Oh, and remember that this and all the previous class recordings so far can be found here.

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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, a…

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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:

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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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