AMA Answers

In lieu of a real essay this week, here are some answers to subscriber questions on topics ranging from analytical Marxism to Black Sabbath to why there's something rather than nothing.

I’m in London right now for the Historical Materialism conference. I was over the Atlantic Ocean on Tuesday night, watching Bridge of Spies in ten or twenty minute chunks as I kept letting my anxiety get the better of me, each time pausing the movie to neurotically open up my laptop, fire up the slow and flaky in-flight Wi-Fi, and neurotically refresh the election results.

I’m giving three talks (and spending a couple of days visiting the UK branch of my family) over the course of this short visit, and I knew I wouldn’t have time to write a real Substack this week, so I put out a call for AMA questions from paid subscribers.

Lest anyone claim that I have the kind of subscribers here who only lob softballs, the very first question was, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

One of responding is to ask what this “nothing” is that we’re treating as an alternate possibility to the various “somethings” that have existed. The harder you try to actually wrap your mind around the concept of absolute nothingness, the less clear it seems (at least to me), and looked at from the right vantage point, you can start to convince yourself that “why is there something rather than nothing?” is a meaningless pseudo-question. (If you adopt Quine’s framework for thinking about these issues in “On What There Is,” for example, it’s surprisingly hard to reconstruct what the claim that “nothing exists” could have been true even amounts to.)

I have to say I’m not totally satisfied with answers along these lines, though. It certainly seems like we’re asking something meaningful when we ask why there’s something rather than nothing. Maybe a different way of getting at the underlying worry is this:

It's not mysterious why this or that particular object exists. I exist because my parents reproduced, and they exist because my two pairs of grandparents did, and so on. The computer I’m typing this on exists because it was produced by some factory workers. Etc. But even if the chain of causes extends infinitely into the past, we could ask why the entire chain exists. If this is supposed to set up “because of God, as the First Cause that explains the existence of everything besides Himself,” I’d point out that if your need for causal explanations is so extreme that you demand causes not just for each thing but also for the totality of things, I really don’t see why God should get away with not needing a cause.

But pointing out that “bringing in God won’t help us answer this question” doesn’t add up to a non-God answer! The question itself remains. Is the total chain of causes the kind of thing that needs a causal explanation? If so, what, even in principle, could that explanation be? And the embarrassing truth is that I’m just not sure about any of this. I’m uncertain even about the first part of the question and I’m even more out to sea on the second.

I’ve had an idea in the back of my head for a while about an essay here some Sunday called “On Not Needing to Have an Opinion About Everything” where I go over various philosophical (and some hot-button political) questions where I just don’t have a clue which position is correct, and talk about how and why I’ve gotten more comfortable admitting that over the years.

The next question was, “What do you think the prospects are for a specifically ‘analytical Marxist’ research program in the second quarter of the twenty-first century?”

I’m pretty optimistic! The fact that so many socialists work in academia rather than in blue collar jobs may be a pretty obvious strategic problem for us (I say, as part of the problem), but it does mean that the general resurgence of socialist ideas in recent years is likely to lead to the most accessible-to-newcomers subgenre of academic Marxist theory getting some renewed interest. That’s already happening to some degree, and I’m certainly doing everything in my power to help it along. (See, for example, the anthology Matt McManus and I are co-editing for Palgrave on G.A. Cohen.) There has been, and I’m sure there will continue to be, lots of interest in the “analytical” kind of socialist normative political philosophy, which is all to the good, but in particular I at least really hope to see a lot more work done on empirical topics like the “analytical” reconstruction of historical materialism that Cohen was doing in Karl Marx’s Theory of History (and Erik Olin Wright, Andrew Levine, and Elliot Sober were continuing in Reconstructing Marxism). I’d also like to see a bit more engagement with people doing Marxist theory in non-analytical registers. We’re in an era where Marxist academics are routinely writing papers with names like “Abstract Labor as a Dildo” (this is a real example), and those of us who’d like a form of Marxist theory exhibiting a bit more clarity and rigor probably need to be displaying a bit more missionary zeal.

Continuing the movement from the abstract to the concrete, the next question was how socialists should respond to the second Trump presidency. If what the questioner means is what we should do to resist the specific horrendous things Trump will doubtless try to pull off to e.g. fulfill his campaign promise to “deport pro-Hamas radicals and make campuses safe and patriotic again,” then beyond the obvious advice to hook up with whoever’s organizing around a particular issue who seems to be most level-headed and serious about power, I don’t know that I have much to offer. On the bigger question of what the priorities of the socialist left should be during the (second) Trump era, I think Benjamin Fong has good advice in his new piece for Damage. It’s all very well to make the “economic populism would have won” argument. (In fact, that was the exact take I wrote for Jacobin several times during the election and once for good measure after it was over.) The point my brother-in-Ben-ness makes in his article, though, is that, while this is perfectly correct as far as it goes, it’s strategically insufficient. The only way to change the basic dynamics of American politics to the point where anyone is going to *listen* to this argument is "if a resurgent labor movement forces them to do so."

Finally, since this is an ask me anything, I got a question about ranking the various singers who’ve strolled in and out of Black Sabbath. The questioner wanted to know what I thought of the singers outside of the big two, but sadly I can’t really answer that because I never much bothered to listen to any of the post-Dio stuff.

I’m a giant fan of the Ozzy era, though. In his memoir Osbourne says the last really solid album they made was Vol. 4, and that seems right to me. The Dio era does less for me, although I genuinely love the shit out of a lot of Dio’s solo work. If Holy Diver comes on the radio, I will turn up the volume no matter who else is in the car or how they feel about it. In general, my feeling is that Dio solo and Ozzy solo are both formidable, with the former maybe actually better as an overall body of work but the early parts of the former elevated like crazy by the artistry of Randy Rhoads (which is not to say that I don’t enjoy plenty of post-Rhoads Ozzy a great deal), and Ozzy-era Sabbath, Ozzy solo, and Dio solo all better than Dio-era Sabbath. (My neighbor, frequent podcast collaborator, and good friend Jason Myles deeply loves Heaven and Hell and considers this take of mine to be slightly insane.) My general assumption has been that the other guys weren’t worth bothering with, but perhaps I should go back and give those albums a listen. Let me know in the comments!

With that, though, I think that’ll do us for today. I promise I’ll be back next week with a real essay.