Over on his blog Bentham’s Bulldog, Matthew Adelstein is arguing that Insects Matter More Than People. It is the sort of counterintuitive premise that can make for a fun little essay, what we called a “hot take” ten years ago, or a “Slate pitch” ten years before that; it’s the kind of thing you might expect from a very young philosophy undergrad who did debate club in high school. Which makes sense since that’s literally what Adelstein is: a very young philosophy undergrad who did debate club in high school. So if I call his post sophomoric, I don’t entirely mean this entirely as an insult: having read a million papers from sophomores in my teaching days, it’s about what you’d expect.

That said, it is — particularly for an aspiring philosopher — a pretty terrible essay. Zero engagement with the rich history of relevant literature, argument that immediately derails onto multiple tangents that he doesn’t recognize as tangents, endless controversial premises that are either unexamined or simply asserted, and so on. Insofar as anything is argued at all, Adelstein mostly tries to find clever ways to finesse difficult questions instead of grappling with them. So we get stuff like this:

Can insects feel pain? I don’t know. But it’s not very unlikely that they can. I’d probably put their being able to feel pain at over 50% odds.

Whether or not creatures like insects can feel pain is a meaty philosophical and scientific question that dates back at least to the 8th century BCE Jainists, if not earlier. For a good millenium of recorded history the standard understanding seems to have been that they could, either by virtue of having a soul of some sort or simply through a projection of the human experience. In the 17th century, Descartes popularized the stance that they could not feel pain — indeed, that non-human animals are essentially automata that do not have experiences like we do. By the twentieth century, the radical subjectivism that emerged from postmodern thought found expression in the idea, advanced by philosophers like Nagel, that we cannot really know how an animal experiences the world; and from here, intellectuals like Singer concluded that we should therefore err on the side of caution and assume that they can experience pain. Against this tendency, however, scientific inquiry into the evolution and operation of the nervous system has demonstrated that we can know certain things about pain. We know for example that pain is a signal to the brain that one may experience (or not experience) at different levels of consciousness; this is why, for example, doctors will often try to distract you right at the moment that they stick you with a needle. We know that in mammals the experience of pain has a lot to do with the cerebral cortex, which is why disrupting communication in the cerebral cortex with anesthesia can eliminate the experience of pain. And we know that organisms like insects simply have no cerebral cortex at all.

This inclines me to suspect that insects probably do not experience pain in the same way that humans do. Granted, I can imagine taking an absolutely agnostic position about this on radically subjectivist Nagelian grounds. But what I cannot imagine, given the knowledge we have and the current state of debate, is just declaring as Adelstein does that it’s likely1 that they can. And I certainly cannot imagine trying to justify this on behavioral grounds, as if the distinction between experiencing pain and reacting to it is at all controversial.2

Again, I don’t think it’s a very big deal that a college undergrad is posting half-baked musings about whether insects experience pain. What troubles me is when you notice the sheer number of people defending this post: and not just random teenagers, but academics, AI professionals, and AI academics. This isn’t the sort of thing you saw ten or twenty years ago when a guy who was too young to buy beer kept a livejournal read by his two closest friends: this is a mainstream intellectual with tens of thousands of subscribers. And if you pay any kind of attention to the kind of thought coming out of the tech-adjacent intelligentsia these days, you will instantly recognize this as an utterly ordinary exercise in semi-erudition on two of their pet topics, intelligence and utilitarianism. This is the sort of thing your oligarchic overlords actually believe.

***
One of liberalism’s most powerful justifications for private property relies on its profound faith in rationalism. It is public reason, after all, which governs the efforts of capitalists and consumers alike to maximize their own welfare in the free market; it is public reason which ensures that capitalist control of mass media confers upon them no real advantage in democracy since their ideas will still be tested in the marketplace of ideas. For this reason, the surest route to progress is simply through education and persuasion. Magnanimously, liberalism even invites Marxists to make their case in the public square; this is a sign of liberalism’s strength, while the censorship of Marxist thought is always an unmistakeable sign that liberalism’s power is in decline.

Why has rationalism proven to be such a compelling perspective, one that so many people accept that liberalism can rely on it as a foundational premise? Foucault suggests that it emerged as traditional explanations of human irrationality (what he calls “unreason”) as expressions of sin or of incomprehensible mystical truth lost their place in secular society. Thus in the seventeenth century, unreason could only be understood as a kind of sinister, destructive force of barbarity — and thus liberalism proclaimed, as Foucault put it, that “rationalism could watch out for and guard against the subterranean danger of unreason”.

This has a certain plausibility to it, but I do not think it adequately accounts for the persistence of a certain kind of pre-Enlightenment rationalism that preceded secular thought. Particularly in the Hellenistic world, in the Islamic Golden Age, and in certain Indus River valley traditions, one can find confidence in rationalism existing side-by-side with distinctly mystical belief. A more thorough explanation, I would argue, has to do with the profound leap in human thought that marked the Axial Age. Here we see, in the flourishing of literature and ideas that accompanied that moment, a sudden turn towards second-order thought, towards thinking about thinking — precisely the sort of thought that ideas like “rationalism” depend on to exist. This shift was not the kind of intellectual movement or cultural fad that Foucault appeals to in his appeal to the emergence of secularism; it is a deeper evolution in the kind of thought that humans, on a mass scale, are able to engage in.

The advent of second-order thought made the problem of unreason impossible to ignore any further, but it did not provide any implicit explanation for this problem or any ways of dealing with it. The mystical explanations for unreason that Foucault grapples with are probably best understood in this regard as remnants of pre-Axial thought. One of the earliest Axial Age texts, found in the fragments of Parmenides of Elea, begins as divine revelation just as so many ancient texts have: but the goddess of this poem challenges Parmenides to choose between “the path of Persuasion (for it attends upon Truth)” and what we could call the unreason of mysticism, a path entirely unable to be investigated: For neither can you know what is not (for it is not to be accomplished) nor can you declare it.” Here we already have the basic duality that Foucault held could only exist in the secular Age of Enlightement.

The better question, then, is why rationalism transitioned from a controversial premise held and debated among elite intellectuals into the default premise of much of the modern world. This is a difficult question (and one that I will return to eventually), but the simplest answer I can provide here is that the Axial Age revolution was not just a cultural fad but a foundational re-ordering of civilization. The institutions required for it to endure, for example — persistent literacy among a reasonable powerful segment of society, the construction of liberaries and universities and of scholastic practices for examining texts that were quite different than the memorization-centric practices of oral society; a persistent level of cultural mixing and dialogue that prevented cultures from decaying into unreflective defence to tradition; and even, as some anthropologists argue, the widespread use of currency, which taught even illiterate people to distinguish between a thing’s actual and ostensible meaning — all of these shifts were both initiated and reinforced by the Axial mind, and they took root much more deeply and much more quickly in some cultures than in others. In cosmopolitan cities where your typical citizen could be bombarded by radically different perspectives all over the world, humans adapted relatively quickly with new ways to evaluate and discriminate among them. In more remote areas and among lower classes where the world was hardly different from bronze age civilization that preceded it, there was little need to think about whether something was rational or irrational, much less to develop a theory about what this meant for society.

This explanation tells us certain things about rationalism’s contemporary hold on the human psyche that I do not think Foucault can quite explain. It casts rationalism not a kind of coping “strategy” that humans society has collectively chosen to rely on to understand irrational behavior, but as a direct expression of our cognitive capacity for second order thought. And it became relevant when it did not just because of the rise of secularism, but because of the arrival of a whole post-Axial mode of civilization that simply took a millenium or so to proliferate. Many of the factors that abetted the rise of rationalism were not intellectual or philosophical at all; they were material in nature, having to do with things like migration patterns and even the circulation of coinage.3

The bottom line, in any case, is that our belief in human rationalism is probably very old, and has deep roots in the kinds of civilization that humans have lived in for over a thousand years. It is not an intellectual fad, or even ideological dogma that has been baked into the bread of capitalism; it expresses an extremely stable adaptation of the human mind to the civilization we have created.

***

And that’s what has made it extraordinarily difficult for me, at least, to accept that rationalism — at least in its in its simplistic form advanced by liberal thought — is absolutely false.

Its theories of human sociology and psychology are demonstrably incorrect on multiple accounts. Humans do not, as popular science writing often suggests, seem to have a limitless curiousity about how the world really works; on the contrary, they will often only seek new information when forced to, and will only accept it when it is consistent with their pre-existing beliefs. Humans are not typically capable of disciplining their reasoning with logic; they often do not even have the opportunity because they are afflicted with cognitive biases and unconscious modes of rationalization that they are not even aware of. And language, which humans rely on to convey rationally acquired knowledge to each other, is not even a very reliable means of transmission; it is simply too semantically flexible, porous, and ambiguous to stand against the problems of sophistry and misinterpretation.

Ironically, meanwhile, even as it ultimately relies on rationalism, modern liberal discourse has often proven unusually hostile to it. A decade ago, for example, it became common to ridicule a certain kind of online pedant for his lawyerly and usually incorrect obsession with calling out logical fallacies in casual debate; today, however, that fad has metastasized into a widespread belief that fallacious reasoning is basically fine, and that objecting to it is a form of petty nit-picking. You do not have to take a philosophy class to understand why our political ideas need to be theorized and internally consistent; but today one often needs to explain this basic point just to make any progress in debate, and it is not at all uncommon to encounter (especially among activists) a kind of Nietzschean rejection of consistency’s demands. Similarly, as almost any writer will tell you, modern audiences don’t merely refuse to read much more than a headline of any given article — they will refuse to read your article and insist on the right to nevertheless criticize it.

This sort of unreason — as Foucault, again, was at pains to point out — has always been with us. Still, it’s clear that at least in the United States the problem has only become worse over the last forty years. The gap between readers achieving the highest literacy scores and the lower percentiles has todays reached its widest levels since 1992; today for example the weakest 10% of readers are doing 16 points worse compared to the strongest 10% than they were at the beginning of the first Obama administration. Similarly, the number of Americans who can only read at the lowest level of competence (level one) has expanded by neary 10% over the last decade. In that same time period, verbal and mathematical reasoning scores on the SAT have declined by 10 and 20 points, respectively.

Perhaps most importantly: over the last forty years, the American ruling class has established and refined mechanisms and techniques for control of the mass media in ways that Edward Bernays never even imagined when his book Propaganda launched the project a hundred years ago. It has abandoned early crude strategies like censorship and replaced them with discursive flooding; it has replaced influence techniques that relied on prestige and authority with techniques that rely on social proximity; it has learned to hide its fingerprints through dark money schemes and messaging decentralization; and most importantly, it has committed levels of capital to the dissemination of messaging that are several orders of magnitude greater than its investments at the beginning of the twentieth century.

All of this — persisting irrationalities in human thought, modern trends in illiteracy and uncritical thinking, and unprecedented investments in propaganda — have created a political discourse where rational persuasion and education play almost no role whatsoever in the evolution of political thought. It is why we now live in a world where arguments like “Insects Matter More Than People” are now not only entertained, but taken seriously by significant segments of the population, and even endorsed by what passes for 21st century intellectuals.

***
You may have noticed that my pace of publication on this site has considerably slowed, not just over the last few years, but in particular over the last few months. The reason is simple: after several decades of believing this academically, I have finally started to take seriously in practice the probability that discursive activism and education just cannot accomplish much at this point in history.

It is impossible to miss that, over the past two months, a certain faction of elite right-wing Democrats have embarked on an aggressive and well-funded campaign to destroy the American left. This is not a conspiracy theory: it is headline news, as reported for example in articles about Third Way’s decision to launch an opposition campaign against DSA. And right now even their strategy is clear: they have chosen to make left streamer Hasan Piker the face of the American left because they think he makes for an easy target. Thus we have an endless barrage of articles, video clips, and social media activity from actors who have obviously coordinated their messaging even as they play coy about it.

I do not want to spend my adult life running a futile volunteer counter-messaging operation against this kind of nonsense, but more and more I find that my writing is getting caught up in it. Just about everything I’ve posted on this site in recent years is in direct response to some well-funded reactionary campaign to propagandize the public in the opposite direction, and I am being outspent and outgunned.

As I have mentioned a few times elsewhere, I have spent most of the last year working on a book. I will continue to use this Substack for my usual impulsive posting, and even have some collaborative efforts in the works that will go public sooner than later. But for now as I consider the way forward, I hope readers will bear with me; I would much rather use my writing to accomplish something than to simply publish for the sake of publishing.

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Remarkably, a majority of Ukrainians would support this first deal. Russia’s de facto control of Crimea has been a bitter pill for the country to swallow, but 60% of Ukrainians seem willing to accept that arrangement with much more territory if it will bring the fighting to an end.

When Russia gains formal control of these territories, however, popular support for the deal collapses. And in fact, Ukrainian attitudes on this have significantly hardened in recent months, swinging 8 points against conceding territories since last April.

On the merits, these number seem difficult to explain. The strategic footing of Ukraine has not significantly changed in the last few months, certainly not so much as to explain an 8 point bump in opposition to land concessions. And given that a frozen conflict would almost certainly create a worse situation for Ukrainians in occupied territories than formal annexation, it’s hard to come up with a practical explanation for the gap in support for those settlements.

On the merits, these numbers seem difficult to explain. In the context of the last year, however, they point us to a war that has become deeply psychological.

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If you are unfamiliar with the term, taqiyya is essentially just the Arabic equivalent of what English speakers call a “white lie,” a lie that is justifiable; but as Carnegie scholar H.A. Hellyer explains,

the word has been popularised and weaponised by anti-Muslim discourse…with grave consequences. For how better to ensure Muslims can never have a voice, or take part in public deliberation, or make certain grievances known, than by insinuating that they are, as a religion, deceitful?

This of course is precisely what Loomer, an infamous white supremacist and Trump ally, is attempting to do. As she has put it herself,

The biggest mistake you can ever make is trusting the word of a Muslim. Muslims are taught to engage in Taqiyya, the act of “permissible lying”. In every mosque, Muslims are taught it’s ok to lie for the sake of advancing Islam…This is mainstream Islam. It can’t be negotiated with.

Nothing I’ve said here is obscure or even easy to miss; it’s been public knowledge for years. Nearly a decade ago Slate released a popular video about the taqiyya trope; in 2015, Shakira Hussein noted how it specifically emerged during Barack Obama’s first term in office:

Taqiyya scare-mongering has a strong online presence and is beginning to enter mainstream media…This paranoia reaches its logical conclusion with the "secret Muslim" rumours surrounding U.S. President Barack Obama…he is under fire for his alleged invisible, clandestine identity as a Muslim.

This of course was precisely the paranoia that swept Donald Trump into office.

Loomer, meanwhile, has long been recognized as a major figure in “the Islamophobia Industry”. As Jasmin Zine notes in a scholarly analysis of North American Islamophobic networks for the Islamophobia Studies Journal, Loomer “has been a benificiary of Shillman Fellowships” set up by major Republican donor Robert Shillman, “who is reported to support US far-right groups that have railed against Muslims and refugees.” CAP knows all of this, of course; in fact, Zine explicitly acknowledged in her study that she built it on the work of Fear Inc., a study on Islamophobia released by CAP in 2011.

Some of the loudest criticism of Tanden, incidentally, has been from the authors of Fear Inc:

But while all of these posts seem to be proceeding as if informing CAP about Tanden’s behavior and demanding a response will elicit any kind of accountability, the odds that CAP’s leadership will take even the barest action to defend their ostensible liberal values are pretty close to zero.

This is not the first, or the second, or even the third article I’ve written about Neera Tanden’s toxic public behavior. And neither am I the only person to bring it up; on the contrary, just about every major media profile of Tanden over the last decade has touched on it. Tanden’s social media presence also, famously, became a national scandal and a major embarrassment for the incoming Biden administration when it was forced to withdraw her Cabinet nomination in 2021.

Everyone at CAP knows who Neera Tanden is and what she does. By now, it’s almost certain that every single member of CAP’s board - Anthony Blinken, Julian Castro, Steve Daetz, Blair Effron, Jane Hartley, Andrew Hauptman, Molly McUsic, Kristin Mugford, John Podesta, Donald Sussman, and Hansjorg Wyss — has heard about her promotion of Loomer and the Islamophobic “taqiyya” attack. And now that we are about two days into the scandal, it’s become perfectly clear that Tanden is going to do exactly what she always does. She is going to simply ignore the public backlash and tweet through it with complete confidence that CAP will refuse to uphold its ostensible values or defend its diminishing reputation.

All you have to do is look at how Neera’s ideological allies talk about her to see what is really going on here. As Jonathan Chait put it, those who are in “geographic proximity to Tanden” see her as a “truth-telling hero” who leaves colleages “impressed and even awed by” her “pithy brutality.” Just look at this article: the entire thing is Chait revelling in Tanden’s willingness to say what they’re all thinking. And she’s particularly gleeful when Tanden punches left: in one unusually revealing passage, Tanden calls Black Lives Matter activists “assholes” and announces to one of Clinton’s operatives, “I’m going to war on this on twitter.” In another — an email to board member John Podesta — she calls critics of her meeting with Netanyahu “freaks”.

If you have ever worked in any kind of public-facing organization in DC the dynamic at work here is unmistakeable. With the failed Cabinet nomination putting a ceiling on her career and no future ambitions to protect, Neera Tanden has settled into the role of CAP’s attack dog, the keyboard warrior who gets to say out loud what they’re all thinking. Tanden’s colleagues see her reputation as an irresponsible loose canon as an asset, because it means that she can use the platform they’ve given her to advance their agenda while staying out of the mud themselves. It is, notably, the exact same strategy that the Trump administration has used with hard right figures like Laura Loomer to advance their own extreme politics while keeping a respectable distance.

Tanden’s colleagues may not openly endorse her Islamophobic attacks on other Democrats, but after a decade of this kind of thing it just isn’t plausible to pretend like they don’t know what’s going on. CAP isn’t going to apologize for Neera’s bigotry, because they agree with her.

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Matt Yglesias, on Abdul El-Sayed’s healthcare plan:

…leftists have absolutely savaged non-leftists who put incremental ideas on the table, including even transformative ones like Pete Buttigieg’s Medicare for All Who Want It…if El-Sayed can create a permission structure for characterizing “Medicare for All” as an aspirational statement of values rather than a specific piece of legislation, he will be doing a tremendous favor to all kinds of center-left Democrats…

There’s a reason why Yglesias specifically brings up Pete Buttigieg’s plan: that’s exactly what El-Sayed is calling for. Leftists seems surprised about this whenever I bring it up, because the Democratic nominee has been at pains throughout his campaign to highlight his support for what he calls “Medicare for All.” But if you look at his actual platform, his position is clear:

Medicare for All does not have to ban additional private insurance through unions or employers, although Medicare for All should make those choices redundant and unnecessary.

Say what you will about this plan, but it is exactly what Buttigieg eventually called “Medicare for All Who Want It.” And his logic was identical. In 2018, he was still positioning himself as a partisan of Medicare for All, and even in 2020 he spun his plan as “a very natural glide path to a single-payer environment” on the logic that even if you left private insurance in place, public healthcare would “become the…preferred means” among Americans. This is precisely what El-Sayed is arguing when he says that Medicare for All should make private insurance “redundant and unnecessary”.

And Yglesias is right: in 2020, socialists ruthlessly opposed anything short of single payer. This piece I wrote, published in Jacobin, is a perfect time capsule of the discourse during that year’s Democratic primaries: Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren were both positioning their plans as a variation of Medicare for All, and the line of the Sanders camp was that it is not Medicare for All if it allows for private insurance. You can argue that socialists were wrong to take a hard line on this, but not without conceding that we owe Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg a big apology.

El-Sayed’s defenders usually dismiss this as a minor policy quibble (Yglesias calls it “disagreement with the extremely specific details of the Medicare for All Act”), but there are good reasons why leftists have long insisted on single-payer. Perhaps the most important is captured in Busemeyer and Iversen’s The welfare state with private alternatives:

Once private alternatives are viable and well-established, however, high-income citizens become opposed to expanding public spending on benefits schemes when these are universal or even income-dependent…Our analysis can be interpreted as indication of strong feedback effects. In a world without or with weakly developed private alternatives, income-related conflicts about public involvement are muted, documenting a strong consensus on the need for public provision. But once private alternatives are introduced, support for continued public provision is undermined by the fact that high-income citizens opt out of public schemes and in turn become more supportive of a selective rather than a universalist model of the welfare state. The public pillar is supposed to provide basic insurance to low-income citizens, but private alternatives are increasingly preferred to public schemes for the bulk of social insurance against major life course risks such as old age. The encompassing welfare state still has strong supporters in the middle class, but they can no longer rely on allies in the upper-middle classes.

Permitting private sector welfare programs also undermines confidence in government welfare programs:

Net of known predictors of trust at the individual and country level, we find that trust in government is significantly lower where the health system is financed to a greater degree by private sources. This negative relationship occurs because in countries with more private financing, low-income citizens perceive themselves to be at greater risk for not receiving needed health care. This perception of risk is associated with more negative evaluations of the performance of the health care system, which in turn is associated with less trust in government.

Argue that a keeping private insurance around is politically necessary if you must, but the notion that it is some harmless “option” that one could only oppose for the sake of ideological purity is absurd. It has clearly deleterious effects on social solidarity and trust in government programs, effects that we have seen playing out in the Nordics and that would be even more severe in the United States. The most likely outcome of offering universal healthcare with a “private option” is not that you would get “a glide-path” to single payer; it’s that rich people who prefer private insurance would ally with the private insurance industry to try to make M4A as defunded and dysfunctional as possible, which has been the right’s strategy with every other welfare program in the United States. The only way this works is if everyone buys in.

El-Sayed is not the first progressive darling to get squishy on Medicare for All. During her run for Congress earlier this year, Illinois influencer Kat Abughazaleh also declared that “we need a universal single-payer healthcare system — with an opt-out if you’re a private insurance super-fan”. To her credit, however, Kat — faced with continuous criticism from the left — eventually dropped the private insurance line and categorically endorsed single payer.

Whether leftists will hold El-Sayed to the same standard isn’t clear. Between his courageous criticism of Israel and reverse polarization against his increasingly deranged critics, it has been easy to look past some of his less appealing stances. It is hard for example to remember a Democratic politician who has been received this warmly by socialists despite his repeated criticism of socialism. Regardless, his rhetoric on healthcare, as it shifts the goalposts towards some nebulously defined aspiration towards “universal coverage,” aligns directly with a rebranding project organizations like The Center for American Progress have been pushing for years. No wonder Yglesias is impressed.

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As it happens, billionaires and celebrities are the only named groups who tend to have accumulated enough wealth to stop selling their labor — a standard definition of the capitalist class or “bourgeoisie” in Marxist thought.

Meanwhile, every other group is excluded from the ranks of “elites” by a majority of Americans. And it turns out that every other listed group does have to work to survive.

The edge cases

Perhaps the most fascinating result of this poll is that the public is generally getting the edge cases right too — refusing to lump in with elites groups that boutique theories of class often get wrong.

Americans do not, for example, necessarily place business executives among the elite. Some socialists tend to include executives among the ruling class because of the supervisory position they play for capital — but Americans have correctly recognized that the actual wealth and power held by executives varies considerably. Similarly, libertarians and anarchists may lump elected officials in with elites, but most people recognize that their actual power is also varied and extremely circumstantial.

Remarkably, Americans also seem to have healthy intuitions about the changing meaning of wealth. Just a few years ago, it was even controversial among socialists to insist that being rich doesn’t just mean making six figures. But today, very few Americans would consider you a part of the “elite” even if you were making $200,000 a year.

It’s the economy

Another stark finding from this poll is that Americans overwhelmingly reject ideas about class that have become extremely widespread among journalists and academics in recent years — ideas that have little to do with the economy.

New America’s Michael Lind, for example, has argued that both of those groups — journalists and academics — belong to a “new ruling class,” the “overclass.” But it’s really just an odd fringe that agrees: only about 10% of Americans rank journalists and college professors among the elite.

Similarly, the notion that class is primarily defined by degree-holding has become so widespread in political and media spheres that pollsters like YouGov have started asking respondents about their education and stopped asking them about their income. But evidently only a single-digit 9% of Americans think degree-holding has anything to do with whether or not one belongs to the “elite.”

The campaign to obscure class

Opinion polls don’t settle who is right about class, of course — but folks like Lind have rarely been content to insist that they are right. One can see this in his comment that “Only the most primitive Marxists believe that a tiny group of individual capitalists—to the manor born or self-made—controls modern societies,” and that “Anyone whose career does not depend on affirming” his critics agrees with him. The standard posture of those who peddle these alternative theories of class is that they are merely voicing the common sense of the silent majority in opposition to a tiny clique of obsolete socialist cranks.

So it’s notable that most of these post-Marx theories of class can’t even lay claim to popular approval. What we have really seen, over the last decade, is a small fringe of political journalists and think tank guys pushing back against rising class consciousness by trying to muddy the waters around class. Bernie Sanders runs in 2016 on a platform of class warfare against billionaires, and then we get, as Matt Bruenig recently put it, “a discursive mess.”

A lot of my writing since then has been an attempt to cut through that mess, but fortunately most Americans don’t need my help. Workers generally seem to have a good idea who the other workers are and who they aren’t.

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This week I remembered why I’ve mostly stayed out of left debates over artificial intelligence: they’re a complete mess. Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer have written a Socialist Case Against Nationalizing AI for Jacobin, and it plays all the usual hits of modern progressive advocacy: fight-capitalism-by-fighting-its-symptoms, crypto-anarchist critiques of wielding the state against capital, a fetish for “movement-building” without explaining what this movement is supposed to do, and a thin veneer of Marxist rhetoric painted over all of it.

I tried writing a piece untangling this knot, but it’s just too tedious — so instead, I thought it might be useful to discuss some relevant passages from Marx’s “Fragment on Machines.”

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Another day, another debate about the role of management in modern capitalism. This time it was with Bhaskar Sunkara, who invoked Erik Olin Wright’s conception of managers as occupying “contradictory locations within class relations.” Ordinarily I like to challenge these ideas about the power of the so-called managerial class with more recent illustrations; but today, I think it might be useful to look back at what Marx had to say on the topic. Marx’s writing is not scripture, of course, but I think his commentary on this topic is unusually insightful, even today.

Let’s not, however, revisit the text that usually comes up in these conversations — The Communist Manifesto, which I have argued is often grossly misread in its discussion of the petit bourgeoisie. Instead, let’s look at some of his more rigorous analysis, which we find in Capital v.3, part 5, chapter 23.

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Theoretical physicist Sean Carroll, on immateriality in the material world:

In fact, most of the particles in the standard model don’t play a role in your everyday life…you don’t need a lot of the ingredients of the standard model to explain you. You are made up of up quarks, down quarks, and electrons, held together by the strong nuclear force and electromagnetism…it doesn’t require that much. We know… [the dark matter particle] doesn’t interact with you and your body. How do we know that? Because there are rules for what happens when one particle interacts with another, and if a certain particle could interact with the things you are made of, the electrons and protons and neutrons, then we would be able to make it.

Carroll is slightly overstating his case here, because as far as we can tell dark matter does seem to interact with our bodies. If you look at the night sky, for example, you will see the effects of dark matter holding our galaxy together; gravity alone cannot explain why the stars of the Milky Way galaxy cluster into a pinwheel instead of spinning out in all directions. This is dark matter exercising a direct influence on the photons that hit the photochemical receptors in your eye. And this is just a known effect of dark matter; for all we know, it is also doing all kinds of other things to our body that we simply do not yet understand.

Still, the point Carroll is making is worth reflecting on. When we think of the material world, we have historically thought of a giant machine with gears turning each other, or of a space of atoms bouncing off of each other like lotto ping pong balls, or (more recently) of a kind of cloudy quantum matrix of fields that influence each other. We have thought, in other words, of things that are material that interact.

To put it another way, interaction is something that the material world does, not something that it is. The grammar of our use suggests that elements of the material world are material whether they happen to interact with each other or not. But this raises the unusual possibility that Carroll touches on: that there are elements of the material universe that do not actually interact with the rest of it.

What do I mean by this? Let’s distinguish between two different claims:

The weak claim: There are things in this universe that cannot interact with other things in any way that we can ever discern. Consider for example so-called local hidden-variable theory — the idea that quantum behavior is not indeterminate, but is in fact determined by particles or forces that, because they are smaller than Planck’s constant, can never be observed. Such particles and forces would certainly be material in any meaningful sense of the word; they would “exist” in precisely the same way that atoms exist, and that you exist, and they would produce effects in our universe in the same way that other material phenomena do. But these are ontological claims; as a point of epistemology, we will never be able to trace these effects back to their causes. So from the perspective of the natural sciences, we will never be able to say that these are truly “interacting” with the rest of the world in any falsifiable way: they could be, but we will never be able to prove it.

The strong claim: There are things in this universe that have properties which seem to qualify them as “material,” but which cannot actually interact with the other material elements universe. Perhaps we might be able to logically infer their existence even though we have no empiricial proof that they exist, in much the same way as Dmitri Mendeleev inferred the existence of Germanium 17 years before it was actually discovered. Or perhaps we will not even be able to logically infer their existence, but they nevertheless exist in some material sense.

Much of this, of course, turns on what we actually mean by “material.”

Historically, again, talk about the material world was often talk about things like atoms or elements — about substances, or what today we would call “matter.” Today however we often recognize as part of the “material” world things that are not matter at all, like gravity. Einstein demonstrated that matter and energy appear to be in some sense interchangeable, and today quantum physics suggests that what we call “matter” is better understood as a property of a kind of abstract field. John Wheeler, meanwhile, goes even further and argues that quantum physics is bringing us towards a universe defined not by substances or matter, but by information: “every physical quantity, every it, derives its ultimate significance from bits, binary yes-or-no indications”.

One way to respond to this scientific trajectory would simply be to declare that “materialism” has been debunked: the word had clear connotations of substance and matter in the past that do not actually appear to describe the universe in which we live. As Chomsky put it in a lecture on Newton, we can’t talk about a relationship between quantum information and the material world because “that’s like saying what’s the relation between information and ectoplasm; you can’t ask that question till you tell us what ectoplasm is and nobody can tell us what material is.”

Another response, however, would simply be to look for the line of continuity between our old conception of the universe-as-material and our new conception of the universe-as-information. From that perspective, you can insist that the material hypothesis has held insofar as it always revolved around ideas of supervience, for example — the notion that there is some kind of ultimate underlying substrate to the universe which defines what it is. From this perspective, “material reality” is something like the pixels that define a computer screen, and the universe is just the picture that we perceive from various configurations of these pixels. From this view it does not much matter what the pixels are made of; what matters is the informational role they play in displaying certain colors and not others.

It seems to me that any salvageable notion of “materialism” has to make this kind of move, but notice what this evolved concept does not bring with it. Nothing about our TV metaphor requires that the things it seems to display on screen need interact in any meaningful way. Supervience, the property of materialism that we think still works, simply implies that the universe reflects its informational subtrate. Imagine an algorithmic process that creates everything we as human can interact with in the universe — the up quarks, the down quarks, the electrons, and so on — but that also creates all kinds of other things with which they simply do not interact. We would not recognize them as “material” in the old discredited sense, but we would have to in the modern sense of the term.

***
This discussion may seem a bit far afield from my usual writing on Marxism, but its implications for Marxist thought are profound and direct. Much of Marxist thought, after all, relies on making a hard distinction between the material world and the immaterial world, and insists that our political and analysis must focus on the former while rejecting the latter. In particular, Marxism often takes aim at liberalism’s conception of ideas as the engine of historical and political change, insisting that it is really the material world that drives change, and even drives the evolution of ideas.

A simplistic but common reading of Marx’s materialism understands this claim from a perspective most analagous to 17th century mechanism: everything, even ideas, can be explained through contact-physics style interactions between matter. In this analysis, it is thus illegitimate to talk about the world in any other way. Concepts like a marketplace of ideas and spiritual forces are obviously ruled out by this naive materialism — but so are concepts like Carroll’s dark matter, which would have to be dismissed as unscientific. And indeed, one often encounters this sort of thinking in certain threads of Soviet scientific thought; see for example the Soviet critique of “psychologism.”

Marx, one must add, did not actually see the world this way. Recall, in Capital, his aspiration “to lay bare the economic laws of motion of modern society.” This was a direct reference to Newton, whose laws of motion served as a definitive rejection of mechanism; what Newton proved is that there were forces in our universe like gravity that were not “material” in the sense of having substance, but that nevertheless had effects on material things.

In his reference to “economic laws of motion,” Marx is insisting that materialism cannot be reduced to an essentially mechanical description of matter. The universe behaves in certain ways that can only be understood informationally, by positing abstract “laws” that it seems to obey, and the task of materialism is to uncover those laws in a way that accurately describes the world around us. Sadly, for those who want Marxism to be an obscure catalogue of arcane metaphysical doctrines, Marx’s “materialism” mostly just reduces into a call for scientific rigor. And if that leads us to strange conclusions like the notion of “material” objects that do not even interact with each other, so be it.

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Chris Rufo is being a hypocrite again. After a good decade of melting down about woke cancel culture and tweet policing, Rufo had the audacity to cry “racism” on Thursday after digging up a six year old tweet of Mayor Zohran Mamdani giving Christopher Columbus the finger. If Mamdani were to respond to literally any act of actual racism in the same way, of course, Rufo would predictably call this a brutal imposition of elite liberal sensitivities on free speech and spend the next year quietly lobbying Congress to deport him to France or whatever. But since it was Mamdani showing disrespect, and since it did it in a way Rufo disapproves of, all of these complaints about cancel culture go out the window.

Whenever Rufo does something like this it’s hard not to focus on the logic of his hypocrisy — as if he and his supporters simply do not appreciate that they are being dishonest, and as if some sufficiently airtight analysis of his contradictions will be enough to show him the error of his ways. By now, however, it should be perfectly obvious that Rufo knows exactly what he’s doing. If you don’t get this, all you need to do is watch his reply to Ezra Klein in a recent interview:

KLEIN: I think that the right’s inability to hold itself to certain epistemelogical or institutional standards…is insane, in my view.

RUFO: …you think I take the rhetorical flourish too far? …I would ask you a question then. Has the New York Times editorial line moved more in my direction since 2020…?

Rufo isn’t worried about the truth. He’s worried about winning. So if you are spending any amount of time explaining to Rufo that he’s being dishonest, you’ve missed the point. Rufo’s error is not in failing to recognize his own hypocrisy. Rufo’s error is in believing that building a culture of deliberate cynicism and Machiavellian sophistry will get him where he wants to go — or that the ends would ultimately justify the means.

Klein focuses on Rufo and the right, of course, but this culture of cynicism is just as prolific among liberals. And if we don’t fight it, it will infect the left as well.

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Credible accusations of sexual assault against Maine Democrat Graham Platner have almost certainly destroyed his campaign for Senate. While Platner hasn’t dropped out of the race yet, CNN suggests that it’s just a matter of time.

Platner’s campaign has been embroiled in scandal from the beginning, but there has been a strange disconnect between what the real red flags were and what people were willing to criticize him for. Shortly after his campaign launch, for example, I argued that he should drop out simply because he was on record criticizing socialism and had not disavowed the comments. Platner had also killed multiple people in Afghanistan as a private military contractor, was vocal about how much he enjoyed the experience, and even defended desecrating the corpses of America’s enemies. These are not things that hawkish, anti-socialist liberals were ever going to take serious issue with, but they should have been dealbreakers for the left.

Instead, for most of the campaign the liberal case against Platner focused on less compelling criticism. Though Platner claimed that he didn’t know what it was and eventually had it removed, for example, liberals directed much of their attention to his Totenkopf tattoo. When that failed to maintain any kind of traction, they began constructing tortured and factually inaccurate arguments that Platner was unappealing to working class voters. And predictably, partisans of Israel insisted all along that he was an anti-semite — placing the left in the awkward position of having to defend him against that particularly toxic line of rhetoric.

One of the strangest complaints about Platner, however, simply revolved around the fact that he is “aesthetically” working class:

This complaint is particularly ironic coming from the former legislative director for Senator Fetterman, who has famously made much more of an effort than anyone else in the Senate to present himself as working class. Platner, of course, did too; though he is well-off, he went out of his way to wear hoodies and grow out a beard.

Two things I find odd about this line of criticism, however. The first is that there just isn’t much evidence that people backed Platner because of his working class presentation. The only poll on this that was even remotely relevant, taken in May, noted that only 3% of respondents thought Platner’s background was “important”. Research suggests that working class identification can give a candidate a roughly 6% bump among working class voters — but Platner’s edge was closer to 20%.

Polls certainly indicated that support for Platner was driven by the usual concerns about cost of living and the economy in general. There is, however, no evidence that it was Platner’s working class aesthetics that drove confidence in his campaign on these issues. A better explanation, I suspect, can be found in the literature on a similar stereotype applied to black voters: that they will reflexively vote for black candidates based wholly on shared identity. In 2020, for example, Wamble and Clemons noted, regarding Kamala Harris and Corey Booker, how

Many political observers presumed [Kamala Harris and Cory Booker]… to have an advantage among Black voters by virtue of shared racial identity.

This is a recurring premise in liberal identitarian rhetoric: groups always vote as monoliths, and they always prefer shared identity. Republicans have often insisted upon this too, pressing the narrative that black voters just reflexively vote as a hivemind for other black people, even when it’s against their interests. But as Wamble and Clemons continue,

Black voters are not going to just give Black candidates positive evaluations no matter what they do…Black politicians are not significantly more likely to receive overly positive evaluations for supporting policies that align with the group’s interests, such as calling out prejudicial behavior, than White politicians are for doing the same.

It’s not hard to guess why so many people think otherwise, of course. If you have a condescending view of black intelligence then you are more likely to suspect them of engaging in groupthink and shallow, identity-based reasoning. Neither, in that light, is it difficult to discern why so many liberals harbor such suspicions about working class voters.

That point becomes especially clear when we consider the second thing I find curious about all this: how we evaluate Platner’s support compared to support for people who do not present as working class. Consider disgraced former Congressman Eric Swallwell. The crimes that Swalwell engaged in were if anything far more egregious, and yet we never head speculation about voters being willing to overlook them because of his class presentation.

Why? Because Swallwell presented himself as a member of a class people like Easton actually approve of. Swallwell wore tailored suits and expensive designer glasses; even when he dressed casually, he preferred the look of a Palo Alto weekend warrior with pastel-colored button-ups and fleece vests. He was always carefully groomed with news anchor hair and, at the very most, a respectable but understated shadow of beard stubble. Swallwell looked like 80% of the men you run into on Capitol Hill or in the C-suite.

There is not a serious problem in our country of indulgence towards the working class when they commit crimes, but there is one with men who look like respectable professionals getting away with all kinds of things. So why weren’t liberals making this point when the accusations surfaced about Swallwell? Why didn’t we get lectures about how Swallwell supporters were all rubes that were suckered in by his GQ aesthetics? I think you know why.

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The left’s solution to this problem, launched during Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins’ campaign for governor in 2010, has been to call for a Green New Deal. Explicitly modeled after President Roosevelt’s New Deal in the early 20th century, GND proposals wedded the fight against climate change and economic inequality into an ambitious national agenda. In 2019 GND proposals went mainstream with a resolution championed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey. By the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries support for a GND was nearly mandatory for aspiring nominees. Only four of 22 candidates refused to endorse it – though one of them, notably, was Joe Biden.

Despite its ambitions, however, a fatal gap began to emerge between the GND and the problems it set out to solve. This was most evident in the challenges posed by international climate finance. Moving forward, it will be the developing world, not the United States, that accounts for the most growth in climate emissions. That’s why, in 2019, People’s Policy Project called for $2 trillion in annual funding from rich nations to the UN’s Green Climate Fund. Some electeds, like Sen. Corey Booker and Sen. Bernie Sanders, showed interest in the proposal; the latter incorporated many of its elements into his presidential platform. But overwhelmingly, Washington had a similar response to GND sponsors AOC and Markey: when asked for comment on the issue, they simply declined.

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Paul Crider asks What Is Liberal in Liberal Socialism for a new piece in Liberal Currents:

What it means to be a socialist in the Trump era has less to do with Marxist theory, revolutionary vanguardism, seizing the means of production, or even worker cooperatives, and much more to do with a series of ethical commitmen…

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A whole constellation of politicians, finance and tech guys, and media personalities have been implicated in yet another bizarre elite secret society, Dell Cameron and Yulia Almazova report for Wired. The reveal comes courtesy of a Swiss hacktivist named maia arson crimew, who was able to uncover a list of 113 members of Peter Thiel’s spooky “Dialog” gr…

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One of the most important and least understood concepts in Marxist thought, in my view, is his theory of the ordinary wage. The ordinary wage is best understood as the lowest possible wage that a capitalist can get away with paying his workers. Some Marxists seem to think this wage is zero — that as capitalists try to slash their payroll in order to expand their wages, they’ll eventually try to get away with paying workers nothing at all. But this would be awfully short sighted, because even if it didn’t lead to revolution, it would deal a heavy blow to productivity as workers begin to starve, fall ill, and die.

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Not quite from the mailbag, but this one is as long as some of the emails I receive:

I think there is something genuinely morbidly curious in how socialists like to talk about "social murder" and it is an incredibly important part of their ideology, while ML societies were genuinely a negative example of all of this in a really puzzling way and they have…

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Matthew Gault, writing for 404media:

Almost 30 years ago a farming family deeded land to the City of Taylor, Texas, on the condition the city use it for a public park…Now the land that was supposed to belong to the community will become a 135,000 square foot data center.

The story Gault tells here is practically tailor made to elicit the sympathy of its liberal audience, pitting plucky local activists against the corporate might of an up-and-coming tech company, and the benevolent, conservationist intentions of a farming family against ruthless profiteering. As local community group HALT Taylor Data Centers put it, “a generous family set aside land for a future park, and this change of use directly impacts a largely working-class community.”

The backlash has been ferocious. “Deed restrictions are suddenly irrelevant?” asks Austin resident Sandia Blanca. Amanda Katz declares this “an atrocious appropriation of what was supposed to be city parkland”. “Really need to get rid of eminent domain,” La Reina del Rye says.

That last comment, however, should probably raise a red flag for socialists — because what ought to occasion a serious critique of privatization has become, for liberals, a chance to defend private property and attack public power.

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Writer and Twitter pundit Ettingermentum recently started a new round of discourse on the failures of wokeness (or as the kids call it, woke 1.0). I remain skeptical of “wokeness” as a concept, mostly because it bundles together a bunch of things that aren’t entirely related, and in part because the concept remains alm…

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Earlier today, a conversation with a socialist friend convinced me that I should probably spend a little more time laying out my thoughts on the law. The conversation revolved around this recent passage from The New York Times:

Piker: I’m pro stealing from big corporations, because they steal quite a bit more from their own workers…

Spiegelman: I feel part of what I’m seeing around me is that people feel like the laws are immoral. The rich don’t play by the rules…So, at some point, if the laws don’t feel moral, do you start to question your own sense of having to abide by them?

Contrary to what this exchange seems to suggest, it is not in fact an orthodox Marxist position to support theft from capitalists. In one of his most important texts on the law, Marx argues that by outlawing the collection of wood lying on the forest floor, the legislature is expanding the definition of private property for the benefit of capitalists. But in the same breath Marx also defends existing law that classifies the wood of living trees as the owner’s private property:

In order to appropriate growing timber, it has to be forcibly separated from its organic association. Since this is an obvious outrage against the tree, it is therefore an obvious outrage against the owner of the tree.

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The Trump administration is awarding $2b in grants to private tech companies in order to advance research and development in quantum computing, the Department of Commerce announced on Thursday. The devil is in the details, of course, but as spending priorities go this isn’t the worst investment. Quantum computing has some true mind-boggling potential use cases for stuff like drug development, physics research, and yes, socialist governance.1 And right now, the technology is stuck precisely at that phase where government intervention is needed the most, where the scientific and engineering challenges are too significant for private investors interested in short-term profits to overcome. Obviously there are other problems that the government should be focused on too, but if you think it should invest in scientific research at all, quantum computing is a perfect candidate.

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I have rock-bottom expectations of Democrats and Virginia Democrats in particular, but Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger’s last week has been shockingly bad even by those abysmal standards:

• Last Friday, she vetoed a bill that would have expanded and protected collective bargaining rights for state public sector workers.

• On Tuesday, she vetoed legislati…

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