Five Questions for Punctum Books

A radical publisher canceled an entire book because it contained an essay on Marxism by yours truly. They said they couldn't "associate themselves" with my decision to appear on Joe Rogan's podcast.

Just about two years ago, I wrote a long paper called “Analytical Marxism, Marx’s Marxism, and the Future of Scientific Socialism: Reflections on G.A. Cohen’s Contributions to Socialist Thought” for an anthology edited by Matt McManus and Conrad Hamilton (Flowers for Marx). The book had already been accepted by a small radical press (Punctum) and Matt and Conrad were busy doing what editors of such anthologies tend to do—prodding everyone to hurry up with their contributions so they wouldn’t have to ask the publisher for another extension of the deadline.

I’m on the other end of that right now for a collection I’m co-editing, so I can retroactively empathize, but I was definitely part of the problem in the fall of 2022. It was a long and involved essay, tying together points about Cohen’s normative philosophy, his reading of Marx’s theory of history, and more, so it took me forever, but by the end of October I was done.

I got the edits back from Matt and Conrad by sometime in December 2022, and I guess whatever other contributors they were still waiting for had gotten their papers squared away by then, and the whole manuscript was turned in to Punctum not long after that. After many subsequent delays, the book was supposed to come out…right around now!

In fact, we were originally scheduled to do a book launch when all of us were in London for the Historical Materialism conference. (So, a little over a week from now.) Then, not only years after accepting the proposal but almost two years after they got the complete manuscript, Punctum announced that they’d decided to nix the entire project.

They gave a few reasons. One was that Matt and I have both written articles for right-wing magazines. Of course, we were arguing for left-wing things in those articles, but apparently the Punctum-ites are big believers in the contagion theory of politics. Similarly, they objected that one of the other contributors had heavily drawn on the work of Nick Land in his essay. (I don’t know much about Land. That’s very much not my world. But my general sense is that Land has crazily right-wing political views these days. The author of the essay does not. I’ve never known that guy not to advocate totally standard progressive views about just about everything. His sin was just drawing on the insights of a Bad Thinker.) Finally, they stressed, they decided that they couldn’t “associate” themselves with my decision to appear on the Joe Rogan Experience in 2022. And that point in particular is one I’ve been mulling since Matt forwarded me the email.

I wasn’t even an editor. I was just one of several contributors. But my Going On the Bad Podcast was a major part of the reason they pulled the plug on the entire book.

---

One level, none of this is a particularly big deal. It’s annoying, given how much work everyone put into it, but anthologies like this have relatively narrow readerships, and there’s an excellent chance that Matt and Conrad will be able to find an alternative publisher in any case.

But the reasoning itself fascinates me, and there are several questions I’d put to the Punctum-ites themselves and anyone who thinks about politics the way they do:

(1) If they accepted an anthology for publication, and the editors of that anthology managed to get Bernie Sanders to write something for it, would they feel duty-bound to cancel the publication so as not to associate themselves with Bernie’s 2019 appearance on JRE—and subsequent acceptance of Joe’s endorsement?

(2) Of course, that example is a bit fanciful. It’s hard to imagine Bernie writing something for a press specializing, as far as I can tell, in relatively abstract theoretical interventions. So let’s try this one on for size:

Imagine that Cornel West was convinced to contribute to some such anthology. (Perhaps, in this hypothetical, he writes an essay revisiting and updating the arguments in his book The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought.) Given Brother West’s own decision to go on JRE, would any book that included his contribution have to be dropped?

(3) Let’s assume that they would indeed stick to their principle in both of these cases. What’s the moral basis of this principle? Is Joe Rogan really that much of a force of darkness?

Personally, I’ve never been able to dislike the guy. I thought we had a good conversation. I disagree with him about many things, but the same is often true when I get into political conversations with Uber drivers or college students or random patrons at sports bars. Most human beings aren’t terribly ideologically consistent, and it seems to me that the Left need to find a way to talk to people who are ideologically a bit all over the place in a register other than denunciation.

I realize that some readers will think that all of this is invalidated by Rogan’s often maddening friendly interview with Donald Trump, which dropped on Friday night.¹ Surely, not only should Rogan be denounced as a bitter enemy in the present tense, but everyone who approached him any other spirit in the past has been retroactively refuted. Right?

I’m not so sure about that.

It seems to me that there’s a recognizable subset of the American electorate which was at least somewhat friendly to Bernie when he was running, and might well have voted for him if he’d won the Democratic nomination, but who lean toward Trump now. That drives me crazy, given that the actual things these men stand for could not be more different. Trump filled the National Labor Relations Board with union-busters, cut taxes for rich people, and doubled the rate of drone strikes! He tore up the Iran deal! He went after Medicaid expansion! His “populist” and “anti-interventionist” posturing is abject nonsense.

That feels screamingly obvious to me, and if you’re reading this it probably seems obvious to you, too. But Trump has always managed to convince a lot of Americans that he’s on the level. More than a few of the people he ends up convincing have odd mixtures of divergent political impulses not unlike those of Joe Rogan. Hell, a big part of the pragmatic case for Bernie Sanders was always that he could peel off a portion of voters who might otherwise go with Trump.

It doesn’t seem to me that thinking of all those people as mortal enemies of ours is particularly helpful starting point. And I think a comedian and podcaster like Rogan is much more helpfully thought of as a famous version of those ordinary voters than as the equivalent of some MAGA Congressman who votes to cut Medicaid.

Do the Punctum types disagree with this assessment? If so, why?

(4) Let’s assume for the sake of argument that all this is far too generous and Rogan is in fact Very Bad. Fine. Next question:

If someone who is Very Bad invites you to come on one of the most popular podcasts on the planet to spend three hours chatting about democratic socialism, what exactly is the virtue of declining? Who would declining benefit, and in what way?

And finally:

(5) Assume that there’s some good and convincing answer to (4), and that my own decision to talk to go on Rogan was hopelessly misguided, and that more generally my view on the value of talking to people of varying ideologies (or no clear ideology) is a bad one. Rogan, let’s postulate, should be boycotted. OK. Very good. Even if we accept this, what on earth is the value of not only boycotting the man himself, but doing a second-order boycott of people who have talked to him? Who does that benefit? And how? Do they think it…hurts Joe Rogan? If so, how?

I’d genuinely love to hear either the Punctum editors themselves, or any reader who agrees with their decision, lay out their answers to these questions. Comments are open.

1. I’m writing something about the interview for Jacobin that should probably come out in the next couple of days, but meanwhile this is a useful guide to the worst parts.