Why G.A. Cohen Would Have Hated Venmo

This is not the way to run a camping trip.

G.A. Cohen’s Why Not Socialism? is a very short book—almost a pamphlet. You can digest it in an afternoon. The writing is extremely accessible, although the underlying argument is more sophisticated than it might seem from a quick skim. It starts out with a simple pair of examples, which I summarized when I wrote about the book for Jacobin in 2022:

Cohen…