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 commitments that remain largely unwelcome within mainstream liberal politics even as they continue to sharpen in salience.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of truth to Paul’s assessment of US socialism in the 21st century. Even at the height of the Bernie Sanders era, in fact, only a minority of Americans associated socialism with worker control of the means of production. The great achievement of Sanders wasn’t about giving Americans a thorough education in socialist thought; it was about challenging a powerful ideological taboo against even talking about socialism. Before, liberalism could simply ignore socialism; now, it has to try to co-opt it.

Thus we get arguments like this:

It’s worth recalling what was illiberal about socialism in the twentieth century…In economics, they enacted central planning that both stifled human creativity and caused poverty…Individual flourishing was suppressed in theory—individual lives were inconsequential next to the transcendent collective…As the Cold War recedes ever further into the rearview mirror, the identification of socialism with illiberalism becomes more and more anachronistic.

So according to Liberal Currents, socialism is not about “central planning” (IE state ownership and management of industry), which Milton Friedman taught us causes poverty; neither is it “an alternative to liberal individualism based on the shared ownership of resources,” as even the most remedial Wikipedia level-texts would have you believe. Instead, it’s about, uh, ethics.

On one hand, it’s hard to blame Liberal Currents for trafficking in these ideas when even Jacobin occasionally flirts with similar sentiments. But on the other hand, this article doesn’t just get “liberal socialism” wrong — it gets it exactly wrong. The idea of liberal socialism has a thorough and well articulated body of literature spelling it out, and the author here just doesn’t seem very familiar with it.

In brief, liberal socialism has always been organized around four ideas:

1. THE DEFENSE OF 20th CENTURY COMMUNISM. Simply put, liberal socialism holds that the foundational liberal ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity were most fully and powerfully realized not in capitalist regimes like the United States, but rather in communist countries like the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. It rightly credits the USSR for the primary role it played in defending the free world against Nazi Germany during World War II. While it acknowledges communism’s crimes and mistakes, it refuses to let capitalism use this to deflect from its death toll of over 2.3 billion over the last 80 years.

2. THE ABOLITION OF PRIVATE PROPERTY. Liberalism must finally decide which will prevail: capitalism, or rationalism. For the capitalist experiment, in true scientific fashion, has been tried for hundreds of years; and the scientific analysis of its operation and its consequences, advanced over 150 years ago by Karl Marx, has proven that it is unsustainable. The question of whether we will abandon private property and abolish the ruling class is not, in that light, merely an economic question; it is also a question about our commitment to the longstanding liberal ideal of reason, of choosing logic and facts over ideology any mysticism.

3. THE END OF BOURGEOIS RIGHTS. The abolition of private property, of course, means that the bourgeoisie will no longer be able to hoard the capital that he leverages to exploit workers. It will lose its right to that wealth. It will lose its right to set wages. It will lose its right to donate inordinate sums of money to public officials in exchange for political power. It will lose its right to build an enormous apparatus of mass media to serve as a megaphone for its exclusive interests. And crucially, before the bourgeoisie loses these rights de facto, it must lose them de jure. “Can there be equality between the exploited and the exploiters?” asked Lenin, one of the central luminaries of liberal socialism. The answer, of course, is no. Thus,

4. THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT. With private property abolished and the bourgeoisie dissolved, only workers will remain. And because liberal socialism means democracy, the sovereign right and authority of workers in the socialist state cannot be challenged. The dictatorship of the proletariat must prevail.

This, of course, is what true liberal socialism has always meant: the defense of communism, the abolition of private property, the end of bourgeois rights, and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Don’t let the revisionists at Liberal Currents convince you otherwise.

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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” group from their poorly secured private website. A lot of the names are predictable, but liberals are likely to be surprised by others:

Though names like Booker and Klein have gotten the most attention so far, I think Hoffman is clearly the most fascinating. Hoffman is the third largest donor to the Democratic Party. In the media he is portrayed as a highly ideological partisan so dismayed at the ascendant right that he was tempted to expatriate from the United States when Trump won re-election in 2024. Yet here he is, immersed in a chatroom salon culture that reportedly occupies an inordinate amount of time among the ruling class, and side-by-side with some of the biggest and most partisan Republican donors there are: Elon Musk, Joe Lonsdale, and of course Peter Thiel himself. By all reports, these groups chats exist precisely to host “debates” that are not “dominated by progressive social movements,” and tend to revolve around the premise that “what really matters is defeating the left”. But for the most part they seem to be entirely cordial affairs:

There is a touch of alchemy to picking the right people to come into a chat. A great dinner party doesn’t have the same kind of person – the best ones have a mix.

Is it a coincidence that this leak comes only a week after multiple progressives like Ro Khanna and Graham Platner started to incorporate into their messaging talk about an “Epstein class”? The sort of parapolitics fans who have been obsessing over Epstein since 2019 would probably say no. But do they understand why? Obviously conspiracies are extremely common under capitalism, as Marx argued:

We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters…But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject…To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals. We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things, which nobody ever hears of.

Just kidding: that was actually Adam Smith, writing in The Wealth of Nations. But it’s worth reflecting on the way that Smith gets at something here that parapolitics commentary rarely talks about. When he insists that the ruling class conspires, he is referring to a certain conspiracy in particular: “not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate.” Later, he adds that “Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate.”

Wage-fixing conspiracies are not what people have in mind when they hear about the “Epstein class,” of course. Neither are they the sort of thing that we hear about from guys with the Eye of Providence as their Twitter avis, or from streamers who think that Trump is just sending arms to Israel because he’s being blackmailed. But if you want to know what Reid Hoffman, Elon Musk, Jeffrey Epstein, and the shadowy “Masters” we find in Wealth all have in common, connect the dots and follow the money: all of them have a direct economic interest in lowering wages.

If you pressed progressives like Khanna and Platner on this point, they’d probably admit it, just like Smith did. But here’s the real red pill that even liberals won’t acknowledge: capitalism doesn’t even need a conspiracy. Reid Hoffman may be a member of Thiel’s Dialog, The Council for Foreign Relations, and The Bilderberg Group, but he doesn’t need to meet in a dark room with his investees to tell them to keep wages low. Everyone just does it without being told because it’s the obvious thing to do, taking for granted that every other capitalist is constantly trying to do the same thing.

Similarly, you are probably never going to find a secret document online where rich people lay out their plan to steal surplus value created by the labor of their employees by leveraging their control over the means of production. This plan has had much greater consequences for our world than stuff like Dialog’s plan to start cults, but nobody spells it out in a private elites-only chatroom because no one has to. That is just the way capitalism works, and it’s not even a secret: it all happens right out in the open.

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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 zero interest in it.

This one is in response to my article last month on how the destruction of PEPFAR signifies yet another round of mass death under capitalism — so it is, in other words, a complete non-sequitur. And does not, of course, happen to be true. In my case, I chose my undergraduate program precisely because I wanted to study under Vasily Aksyonov, whose socialist parents were killed by the Soviet government. Years ago when I lived in Ukraine I went out of my way to visit multiple Holodomor memorials, and in Russia I had some fascinating conversations about Commander Zhukov’s objections to Stalin’s reckless military tactics. In reality I have probably spent far more time thinking about deaths under socialism than folks like Devin have, and almost certainly more than he’s spent thinking about deaths under capitalism.

The fact is that socialism did kill a lot of people. And it is to socialism’s credit that we can say this: that we can so easily attribute so many deaths to the decisions of particular socialists, and then decide whether they were justified or not. This makes it a much more transparent and accountable system than capitalism, which kills even more people and then completely evades responsibility, either blaming the victims or the impersonal machinations of fate. And then, of course, if you try to point any of this out, the response will be exactly what Devin did here: to pretend that you are the one avoiding responsibility.

Let’s return to the example of the Holodomor, since that has always been Exhibit A of the case against socialism. Though the USSR did experience inclement weather (particularly in 1932), research suggests that this likely contributed to only a small fraction of excess mortality in those years. Over the last few decades, scholarship has made it clear that a number of agricultural practices during collectivization set the famine in motion: overfarming leading to soil depletion, poor seed rationing, and so on. When the famine began, the Soviet government refused to accept reductions in Ukraine’s grain exports; and when Ukrainians attempted to hoard grain to survive, Soviet authorities cracked down and left them to starve.

One reading of these events, advanced by historians like Graziosi, holds that the Holodomor was essentially a failed exercise in central planning that spiralled out of control into a brutal imposition of triage and counterinsurgency at the expense of Ukrainians. This seems utterly plausible to me; the documetary record, and internal correspondence in particular, tells an entirely familiar story of government officials shifting from blind denial to ruthless damage control. The alternative take, accepted without skepticism by most US liberals, sees elements of deliberate conspiracy in the famine, with a particular focus on instances of ethnic bias against Ukrainians.

The second explanation seems must more shaky to me, but one thing that everyone should be able to agree on: Stalin himself took responsibility for what he called a “mechanistic approach to the last collection plan”. Stalin himself repeatedly refused to significantly lower export quotas. And it was Stalin who came to see Ukraine’s failure to produce its quotas as a sign of rebellion that had to be put down.

From there, you can go on to attribute responsibility for particular incidents and outcomes to other officials as well; you can identify particular local officials, for example, who suggested that growing cannibalism in Ukraine was a reflection of their barbaric nature rather than a reflection of widespread starvation. Since the socialist state takes responsibility for economic outcomes it is trivially easy to attribute them to various state actors.

Compare this to the Bengel famine of 1943. While Stalin immediately understood the famine as a direct consequence of his collectivization efforts, Bengel’s Famine Inquiry Commission had, by 1945, already concluded that “a serious shortage in the total supply of rice” was the cause of the famine. And this remains a favorite explanation among capitalists today: thus the pro-capitalist CapX editors blame “a serious shortfall of the staple food crop of Bengal – rice.”

The historical consensus on this question has shifted, however, particularly after economist Amartya Sen famously demonstrated that Bengel had more than enough rice at the time to have avoided famine.

Sen’s analysis is often summarized as a critique of markets: there was plenty of rice, but prices were so high that the poor and destitute simply could not afford it. And this is indeed the proximate cause, but a second point Sen makes is just as important. What really crippled the government’s ability to respond to the famine was its refusal to even consider the possibility of market failure. Since the Raj knew that supply was adequate, they were caught flat-footed when starvation began to spread; and even then, their flailing response to the crisis made it clear that they had no idea what was going on. The invisible hand was supposed to fix problems like this by adjusting prices to meet demand; but since it wasn’t doing this, they could only speculate that their must be some kind of problem with supply. As Sen put it,

The government's thinking on the nature of the food problem…seems to have been persistently influenced by attempts to estimate the size of the 'real shortage' on the basis of 'requirements' and 'availability' ; it was a search in a dark room for a black cat which was not there. The approach provided no warning of the development of a gigantic famine arising from shifting exchange entitlements. It also contributed to some reluctance to accept the magnitude of the disaster even after the famine had in fact appeared.

Capitalism, in other words, created an economic system that naturally hid the cause of mass death. And the direct consequence of this was more death.

Our political discourse, nearly a hundred years later, is very good at recognizing the threat that bad decisions by state actors pose to the food supply. When the government let SNAP run out last year, for example, everyone saw it coming and everyone knew how the problem had to be solved. Meanwhile, even though communism is gone, and even though the world produced more than enough food to feed every person on the planet, more than 9 million people starve every year. I think it’s worth asking why.

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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 almost entirely online. Despite what the media would have you believe, there just isn’t much hard polisci-type evidence out there that the things I would associate with wokeness have had much of an impact on things like elections or popular opinion.

Still, it seems hard to deny that starting late in Obama’s second term, a handful of distinct trends emerged on the liberal-left, and that at some point during Biden’s presidency there was a shift that made “wokeness” less salient than it once was. So what exactly are we talking about, then?

If I had to describe wokeness, I would say it’s characterized by a number of things:

1) Prefigurative political change through semantic engineering

Since the way we talk about our world reflects our attitudes and politics, liberals concluded that the reverse is also true: our attitudes and politics are governed by the way we talk about the world. And this, in theory, creates a political shortcut: instead of going through the ordinary procedures of persuading people or changing the incentives that incline them to think in certain ways, you can design an optimal language and simply demand that people speak it. This, in theory, will eventually change everyone’s politics…right?

This reasoning makes for a fun sci-fi premise in books like 1984, but it has two major problems. First, the strong interpretation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis it depends on — that language governs thought — just isn’t something that modern linguists find plausible. Second, even if this approach could work, the level of control over popular speech you would need to pursue it is (as 1984 demonstrates) comically implausible. The liberal-left was never going to be able to enforce a Newspeak so thoroughly that some political ideas would literally become unthinkable.

In my view a whole lot of activists tried to rely on this approach and met with predictable failure. Some trans allies, for example, would take an “it’s not my job to educate you” stance on advocacy and simply demand that people accept their pronouns. Obviously if you are uneducated on questions of sex and gender, or have not encountered the actually persuasive arguments on this question, then you are not going to capitulate to the demand to use someone’s pronouns correctly; and in fact, you are going to understandably resent the way strangers were trying to control how you talk for (from your perspective) no good reason.

Unfortunately, approaching political change as a language engineering problem is always going to create this kind of outcome. When politics, for you, is just about hunting down the infinite number of microaggressions embedded in our semantics and tweaking the rules of acceptable speech accordingly, your ambitions can be limitless and completely out of touch with the hard problems of actually getting people to adopt your language. Consider the infamous “Latinx” term that various academics and NGO comms guys tried to popularize. The idea of degendering language isn’t a bad one; in fact, I have argued for it as an alternative to enforcing a regime of ever-expanding gender identities. But there was basically no public advocacy campaign for this shift, and in fact a lot of people clearly had no idea what the x was for.

In fact, if you look at what is often considered the first English-language discussion of this term, the author — Cristobal Salinas Jr. — grapples with this issue directly. During his research he confronts the same problem over and over again:

A majority of the participants who first learned the term Latinx via social media stated that they were confused. Amanda said that she was “really confused” and that she “didn’t know what it meant. It was used for the Latinx community, and I was like, what does that mean? So, I googled it and I didn’t understand it at the moment.”

Unfortunately, Salinas does not come up with a real strategy for public education. Students report that their friends and family — the usual vector for language change — are not receptive to the shift, and instead of continued advocacy, the students seem to retreat towards like-minded friends in the campus bubble.

when referring to themselves within their home and families, they were identified as Latinas. When the students are in higher education and spaces that tend to be more inclusive, they self-identified as Latinx, to allow all individuals to feel comfortable with regard to their identities.

This is really where the discussion of how to get people to adopt the new word ends. Salinas concludes with precisely the error I described:

People create terms/labels to express their own realities, and we should not let terms/labels create ours.

From the fact that we use language to describe how we see and think about the world, Salinas concludes that language “creates” how we see and think about the world, and that we can therefore adjust it without adjusting the underlying perspective.

2) Irrational debate tricks

Since wokeness tempted so many people to see politics as a language engineering problem that did not require political persuasion, the latter often came to be seen as a pointless inconvenience at best and a reactionary indulgence at worst. There is of course truth to the fact that reactionaries often use debate to normalize controversies that were once uncontroversial; the classic example of this is Holocaust denial, which is why so many people refuse to debate the question as a matter of principle. It is also true that debating certain people can promote them and their platforms to a status of legitimacy they previously did not have. What made wokeness unique, however, was its tendency to overstate these dangers as a pretext for avoiding education and persuasion that they simply did not want to do.

This persuasion-averse sensibility was also manifest in a whole arsenal of debate tricks that woke folks used on a regular basis. The most famous one is the demand for what Matt Bruenig called identitarian deference: by claiming your status as an oppressed identity, or by claiming to speak on their behalf, ID allowed you to avoid advancing your position on the merits. Another was the presumption of bad faith: you prematurely declare that your interlocutor is being cynical, an allegation that undermines anything they say and any attempt they make to defend themselves. A third was just the appeal to outrage, usually through accusations of some sort of bigotry: the point here was not to make a serious case for bigotry, but to leverage the seriousness of the accusation as a way to shut down debate.

The woke have no monopoly on fallacious argumentation, of course. What defined wokeness was a preference for these particular fallacies, and the underlying rationale for using them. The liberal-left, in the late Obama era, became unusually skeptical of reasoned debate as they saw the way that the right employed it to normalize its ideas, and as they saw the way that the right (especially libertarians) accused people of fallacies as a rhetorical trump card. As often happens, however, the liberal-left reverse polarized against this tendency; and since then, the popular reliance on irrational debate tricks has become a serious intellectual crutch on the liberal-left.

3) Instrumental aggression

The liberal-left have good reason to be angry. And it is completely understandable, of course, for the oppressed to react to political attacks with anger and lashing out.

That said: it is perfectly obvious that a significant number of folks on the liberal-left have serious emotional regulation problems, inclinations towards sadism, personal grudges and rivalries, and clinical psychological disorders — diagnosed or undiagnosed — that incline them towards aggression. And that they are using liberal-left politics as an outlet for aggression. Their behavior is not productive, and it is not understandably reactive, either; its exclusive aim is to hurt or humiliate someone.

To appreciate what I am talking about, let me provide an extreme example. For about a dozen years now, a character who I will not name (for obvious reasons) has attempted to cancel a good 70% of the liberal-left. His specific indictment is that they are all participating in a vast conspiracy to promote the agenda of an infamous neo-Nazi named Weev. His efforts to cancel people largely involve finding new liberal-leftists who haven’t heard of him and showing them his extensive library of screenshots and posts on Reddit.

He also, though this is not widely known, is a diagnosed but unmedicated schizophrenic with symptoms of extreme paranoia. And in another context I might say obvious symptoms of extreme paranoia, I can’t here, because folks on the liberal-left constantly misunderstand his behavior. Time and time again, I have watched folks take this man seriously and defend his behavior, and it is only when he inevitably turns on them that they begin to realize that something is seriously wrong.

Here’s another example:

Once you start paying attention, it’s impossible to miss that a significant number of “woke” posters on the liberal-left are actually far right concern trolls trying to cause trouble. And the reason for this is simple: most people don’t pay attention to this. Wokeness has made the liberal-left so tolerant of interpersonal aggression that it’s become a massive weakness that the right actively exploits.

Most examples aren’t this extreme, of course. What they have in common, however, is that people who are not immersed in the Woke Lifestyle can see this kind of aggression for what it is. And when folks on the liberal-left tolerate it, or even encourage it, this completely undermines our credibility.

4) Hostile to the US working class

A month before the 2024 election, it became clear that Kamala Harris’s support among male workers — who are, of course, disproportionately workers — had become slippery. And only a few weeks later, the explanation became clear: Harris had abandoned economic populism for a vague defending democracy platform. Instead of refocusing her campaign on issues like the cost of living, however, the Harris campaign settled on a new strategy: call black men sexists.

When socialists argue that woke politics are hostile to the US working class, the standard parry has always been to argue that it is only critical of the white working class, and that black workers approve of it. But as the Harris campaign proved, wokeness isn’t just a weapon against white workers, or male workers, or straight workers, etcetera. It is a weapon against workers writ large, taken up by the bourgeoisie and its liberal allies to redirect class conflict.

Socialists have long drawn attention to the way that wokeness divides the working class against each other, but that has never been its major role. The primary function of wokeness is to lure us into the political project spelled out in point (1): to pull popular activism into the gravity well of language engineering and policing. That is a project you could invest your entire life into without even once wondering if people engage in reactionary behavior for reasons that are material. I think that, for example, you could make some very interesting arguments about how our linguistic distinction between organisms and the ecosystem they inhabit has contributed to climate change by making it feel like an external problem. That is something you could spend years researching and writing about, forgetting all along that we should probably do something about fossil fuels, too.

Unfortunately, I think the end of wokeness is wildly overstated. Liberals in particular still plainly think that political progress is just an exercise in language engineering. They are still in the grips of postmodern skepticism about rationalism, and their view of discourse-as-combat leads them to be tolerant of kinds of aggression that directly undermine their goals. And they are still, of course, more than eager to aim this brand of politics at socialists. It is good to see more people on the liberal-left express skepticism of wokeness in general, but unless they rethink these tendencies, something equivalent will inevitably return. We may be through with wokeness, but woke isn’t through with us.

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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 legislation that would have protected voters from illegitimate purges from voter rolls.

• Also: on Tuesday, she vetoed two bills that would have provided an affirmative defense and strengthened protections for defendants afflicted with mental illness.

• Oh yeah: she also vetoed a law that would have established Virginia’s first statute allowing for class-action lawsuits.

• Also: a veto on a law capping the use of private funds by election officials.

• And: she vetoed a law that would have shielded universities from speech restrictions imposed by their boards similar to those pushed for by Trump.

• On Wednesday, she vetoed a bill that would have outlawed ICE arrests at courthouses, polls, schools, and hospitals.

• That same day, she also vetoed a bill that would have legalized the sale of marijuana in Virginia.

• Also: on Wednesday, she vetoed legislation that would have lowered prescription drug prices in Virginia.

Spanberger, of course, expressed vague sympathies about the aims of most of these bills while making various pedantic / procedural / lawyerly complaints about how they could be improved. I don’t buy most of them, but that is also beside the point. Virginia is a blue state at the national level, but the governorship and control of the legislature remains up for grabs by both parties. Democrats have had a few very good elections here in recent years and now control both chambers, but it would be absurd to proceed as if we’ve consolidated permanent control of state politics. It’s entirely likely that Republicans are due for some wins in 2027, and that means that Democrats in Virginia only have a short window of time to move get stuff like this through. The obvious thing to do is for them to embrace the right’s “move fast and break stuff” mindset, making big changes as quickly as possible and then going back and patching any real problems if there’s an opportunity.

Spanberger’s veto of the election finance bill illustrates this point perfectly. The bill would establish a $1000 cap on private funding for election administration, creating a barrier against corruption that would likely prove its worth sooner than later. The governor’s stated pretext for vetoing the bill is that it doesn’t specify the term for which this cap applies — is it $1000 an hour, a day, a week, a decade, or a century? — but this is just a case of invented ambiguity, taking advantage of the fact that a bill can literally always be more specific. The only reason private funding is allowed at all was to accomodate cases where (say) some friendly old lady brings a poll worker a coffee or where someone needs to pay-out-of-pocket when they run out of pens. $1000 is just a fringe-case per-cycle exception and the courts would obviously understand this, but even if they didn’t the thing to do would be to pass the bill and then clean it up with an amendment if anyone were actually worried about this.

Virginia’s first CIA governor obviously isn’t worried about any of this. She’s a textbook example of the kind of right-leaning Gen-X Democrat who absolutely would have been a Republican if she had been born a decade earlier or a hundred miles to the south. And if she were a Republican, Democrats would predictably be decrying all of these veteos as an executive’s hyper-partisan obstruction of a fairly moderate legislative majority.

How is this pragmatic?

Instead, however, right-wing Democrats like Neera Tanden and Ethan Wolf have declared Spanberger “the future of the Democratic Party.” Centrists like Virginia Democratic operative Matt Royer have spent the last several months running victory laps over her 15-point win in November, and this has become the centerpiece of their case that her politics are a more pragmatic recipe for success than politicians like Zohran Mamdani, who won by narrower margins.

One problem with this comparison is that while Spanberger’s margins may seem impressive in a vaccuum, they are far less impressive in context:

• Virginia’s shift blue in recent years may not guarantee victory at the state level, but it has given Democrats a growing advantage. Over the last decade, Democratic identification among likely voters in the state has grown by 5 points. But by that measure alone Spanberger underperformed: her margin was only 3.7 points wider than Ralph Northam’s was a decade ago (against a much stronger opponent, by the way).

• Virginia’s politics have always been unmistakably thermostatic, predictably reacting to whoever the last governor was and the current president is; the latter trend, I suspect, is only amplified by the fact that Virginia is one of only a few states to elect its governor in the year immediately after presidential elections. This is why Democratic gubernatorial candidates perform 14.3 points better when a Republican is in office than when a Democrat is in office. That fact alone means that Spanberger only improved on what one might have expected after McAuliffe’s 2021 defeat by 2.9 points.

• Perhaps most revealing: as Josh Mound points out, Spanberger’s vote share was identical to what the Virginia House of Delegates won.

Place in context, all of these comparisons point in the same direction: Spanberger mostly just won because she had a (D) next to her name. This is particularly embarrassing given Trump’s enormous unpopularity, especially in Northern Virginia where his federal layoffs have impacted a disproportionate number of well-off and politically active voters. Between Trump, the thermostatic advantages of following a Republican governor, Virginia’s expanding Democratic population, and her fortune in sailing through Democratic primary season unopposed, Spanberger should have been pulling in Saddam Hussein numbers. Instead, she only won by 15.

That said, Spanberger’s very bad week should remind us of a point I made immediately after her November win — one that completely undercuts all of this celebration of her margins. How exactly are those 15 points helping us right now? Imagine that you are a teacher who wants to unionize because your wages are too low, or a voter whose registration has just been illegitimately purged, or a man with severe autism who has just been sentenced to life in prison, or a mother who was just kidnapped by ICE while she was picking up her child from school, or an epileptic who can’t afford his anticonvulsant medication. What was the advantage of winning with the votes of 263,636 disaffected Republicans instead of with the vote of one more guy from Charlottesville DSA? Both get the Democrat in office, but only of these strategies gets you good political outcomes.

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I prefer markets to central planning. Yes, rich person philanthropy will be idiosyncratic and many will disagree with individual priorities but it avoids the information problems, bureaucratic sclerosis and incentive issues that plague democratic policymaking.

McArdle may be a libertarian, but it would be a mistake to dismiss this as some radical fringe position that only weirdo Ayn Rand fans believe. This is much closer to the liberal position. The Ayn Rand position, insofar as it is distinct at all, is that welfare is a form of theft that the parasitical poor should be denied as a matter of principle. The liberal position, particularly in the neoliberal era, is simply that if you do want to help the poor, the market is much better at this than the state.

There’s some real irony here, however. Here’s the article that Megan is responding to, by Nan Ransohoff:

Hundreds of billions of dollars in new philanthropic capital will soon become liquid. The OpenAI Foundation holds 26% of OpenAI, worth about $220B at today’s valuation. Anthropic’s seven co-founders have pledged to give away 80% of their wealth…I was doing some simple napkin math to wrap my head around the scale of what’s coming, and…I had dramatically underappreciated the scale of the philanthropic capital that’s about to become available and the corresponding gap in talent and organizations that will be needed to make the most of it.

In case you aren’t picking up what I’m putting down, let’s look at these two charts.

LEFT: the infamous Soviet centrally planned economy, distinguished by its top down control by the Communist Party. Though numbers varied over the years, the Party itself was formally governed by 1000-5000 Party Congress members, 100 Central Committee members, and 10 Politboro members.

RIGHT: the basic structure of the philanthropic bureaucracy, based on the schematic Ransohoff provides in her article. She divides the top group (funder) into three bodies in the same way that I might have divided the CPSU into its three main bodies, and she rotates it 90 degrees counterclockwise so that it looks horizontal — but the actual power structure is identical. At the top, you have the funders: about 5000 Anthropic investors, 7 Anthropic co-founders, and 8 OpenAI Foundation board members. All decisions proceed down from there.

There are important complications to both of these arrangements, of course. Historians, for example, will point out that while Party Congress had formal and legal voting power, they were de facto a rubber stamp for the Politboro. In contrast, Anthropic’s 5000 potential investors are also Anthropic employees, which means they are formally subordinate to the company’s 7 board members and 5 trustees. Unlike Party Congress members, however, they have no formal or legal voting power. Similarly, just as figures like Stalin dominated the Politboro, so Sam Altman plainly dominates the board of OpenAI.

In both cases, in other words, we have a governing troika of groups that are independent on paper but not in practice, including one large body that is factually (and in Anthropic’s case, formally) subordinate to a much smaller clique. This troika then administers various welfare and public programs through a vast bureaucracy of hierarchically subordinate organizations. Structurally there are really only two notable differences between these arrangments:

• The USSR’s welfare apparatus, designed around the principle of democratic centralism, is full of mechanisms that promised (and sometimes delivered) popular control. For instance, the Soviet Constitution provided guarantees of democratic elections and universal suffrage. Silicon Valley’s philanthropic apparatus, designed around the principle of private property rights, fundamentally rejects democratic control. The entire project is ultimately controlled by around 25 corporate board members and trustees who ultimately decide where all of the money goes (even when they delegate these decisions out to appointed employees).

• The USSR’s welfare apparatus was comprehensively designed with intention to facilitate central control in the interest of the common good. It was for example a virtue of the Soviet system that corruption and inefficiencies were so visible, and this was often because its chains-of-command were so unambiguously vertical. Silicon Valley’s philanthropic apparatus is being built out completely ad hoc. Its rulers are proceeding under the confused belief that they are not actually engaged in central planning, and instead of using markets as a tool that may o may not be useful to accomplish certain objectives, they are defaulting to them as a universal solution. And while they (probably sincerely) believe that this effort is going to have all kinds of secondary benefits for society, that will just be a side-effect of everyone’s primary objective, which will be to enrich themselves.

If private charity really did avoid “the information problems, bureaucratic sclerosis and incentive issues” that central planning can run into, liberals could conceivably argue that this offsets its obvious democratic deficiencies. But it’s hard to see how Silicon Valley’s latest charity project is going to avoid any of these. And this isn’t just a failing of Silicon Valley: it’s a major problem that afflicts all of capitalism that we can call the concentration of philanthropy.

Without rehashing the entire argument for wealth concentration under capitalism — click above for a more thorough take — the upshot is straightforward. Centuries of empirical data make it crystal clear that barring truly extraordinary historical aberrations like pandemics and world wars, wealth always gravitates under capitalism into fewer and fewer hands. Marx laid out the specific reason this happens long ago, but the general reason is simply that capitalism creates positive feedback loops. This is something we see emerge everywhere in nature, so we shouldn’t be remotely surprised to find it in the realm of economics, either; and in capitalism, the more money you make, the easier it gets.

Listen closely to liberals deliver their homilies to private charity, and you’ll often notice that what they’re really talking about is private microcharity. Politicians love to praise the generosity of your average American — Obama often couldn’t shut up about it!

We are grateful to the countless Americans who serve their communities in soup kitchens and shelters, looking out for those who are less fortunate, and lifting up those who have fallen on hard times. This generosity, this compassion, this belief that we are each other's keepers, is essential to who we are, not just on this day, but every day.

This is the popular image of charity in the United States: individual people giving to soup kitchens, churches doing fundraisers for disaster victims, the jar at a gas station where you can donate your spare change to help someone get a sore tooth pulled. Think about charity at this scale and it’s easy to imagine that individual givers and small groups would have certain advantages that larger organizations would not: they can target their giving, they can make case-by-case judgments about how to help, and the scale of the problems they deal with are relatively small.

The inevitable rise of inequality under capitalism, however, destroys this approach at both ends. On one hand, growing inequality means that the problem of poverty becomes increasingly unmanageable for individuals and small organizations. We saw how this played out just a few months ago when a flood of Americans kicked off of SNAP completely overwhelmed the efforts of local private charities to fill in the gap. On the other hand, inequality also means that the people who do have the resources to help are fewer and fewer in number.

So capitalism doesn’t just give you a concentration of wealth — it also gives you a concentration of philanthropy. One that becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish, in its scale of its economic intervention and the centralization of control, from the necessary scale and centralization of socialist governance. The crucial distinction, of course, is that while one is at least aspirationally democratic, the other is tyrannical as a matter of principle. But even that, if workers seize the means of production, can change.

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So it should not be particularly difficult for the international left to insist that we must oppose the state of Israel. It is a historically, structurally, and operationally ruinous institution that is visiting absolutely unacceptable levels of chaos, misery, and death upon this world. I do not know if it would be plausible to impose some kind of radical transformation upon Israel comparable to the measures imposed upon Axis powers in the wake of World War II or if the entire project of Israel must be ended and replaced with something better; this just seems like a practical question to me. But Israel, as it stands, must be opposed.

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When arguments about socialism’s historical death toll come up, socialists usually have to explain that capitalism has its own death toll, too. This can prove surprisingly difficult to explain. One of the great advantages of socialism is that the state takes responsibility for economic outcomes, which makes it easy to blame any deaths that take place under socialist governance on the ideology. In capitalism, the situation is the exact opposite: responsibility is diffused among a million private economic actors, and the consequences of their decisions can be difficult to distinguish from nature or misfortune.

But “social murder,” as Engels called it, is real, and a recent item in the news gives us an unusually clear look at how this actually works:

The Trump administration has struck what some see as the final blow to the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which over 23 years has saved the lives of an estimated 26 million people in poor countries living with HIV. The Department of State says that as of 30 September, support for PEPFAR by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will end in most countries.

While critics have already begun blaming Trump’s government for the coming wave of death, however, Republicans are laying out the standard defense of liberal capitalism:

Even more important than what Walsh is saying here is what he is not saying. For one thing, he is deliberately not acknowledging that most of this funding will come from the top 3% of earners, with a plurality coming from the top 1%. More importantly, however, he is ignoring why taxpayers need to be forced to do anything. It’s because if a gay man from Uganda takes a dime that he sees lying on the ground, a billionaire can claim that the ground belongs to him, and then armed agents of the state will physically force the gay Ugandan to hand over the money. This isn’t even hyperbole: the Courts have consistently ruled that lost property found on private grounds belongs to whoever owns the grounds, and if you repeatedly refuse to cooperate with a small claims court, they can hold you in contempt and put you in jail.

In other words, Walsh is maintaining the standard liberal capitalist position that the state can and must coerce the population in order to advance their ideas about social justice. The government must force everyone to obey his ideological beliefs even if that means that millions must die in the process. Other politicians (like George W. Bush) set up a little exception to this rule called “PEPFAR” which allowed the government to seize a tiny fraction of the wealth of the rich in order to save all of those lives — but because the Private Property doctrine is so powerful and absolute, even that tiny exception was bound to end sooner or later.

Unfortunately, even well-meaning Democrats fail to appreciate that this is why their redistributive programs are always doomed. Democrats may ridicule capitalists like Walsh for insisting that taxation is theft, but according to the logic of private property Walsh is absolutely correct. Either individuals have a private property right that even a democratic government must not violate — or they do not. Consider these two statements:

• “All [this bill] really does is help people like Donald Trump, his cabinet and wealthy Republican donors keep money in their pockets.”

• “Congress must be clear: there should never be a legal question concerning the rights individuals have to their own homes and property.”

This is not a Democrat arguing with a Republican; this is Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters arguing with herself. One moment liberal Democrats will complain that the rich get to keep their own private property in their pockets, but the next Waters will make speeches like this:

One of the basic Constitutional functions of American government is the protection of private property rights. [The Private Property Rights Protection Act] will protect…privately-owned property from predatory takings under the guise of ‘economic development.’

This is why the private property system must end. As long as liberals like Walsh and Waters continue to defend it, its ruthless logic will destroy even the most trivial attempts to exercise democratic control over our economy. The end of PEPFAR is an unusually vivid proof of this point because it was long considered one of the “good” welfare programs: it was launched by George W. Bush, enacted with overwhelming bipartisan support, and has since been regarded as one of his most important and successful initiatives. But the rule of private property is sovereign under capitalism and will not even be violated by a single dime — even if millions around the world have to suffer and die.

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“20-30% of the elmentary school students in Morgan County, CO read at or above grade-level proficiency,” one reader responds.

“Politics really run deeper than wallets sometimes,” says another.

The discourse is overrun with responses like this, and the subtext is hard to miss: people are still litigating the argument that working class conservatives respond to material conditions. Sometimes that subtext is explicit. “David Sorota is wrong when he claims economics issues will unite the right and left. BS!”

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Wanted to flag this for readers — I have a new article in the first issue of The Bias, a new magazine published by the Institute for Christian Socialism.

Socialists often talk about the fall of capitalism in a way that’s very similar to the way that the early Church talked about the return of Christ, assuming that it was in the near future. And when Christ didn’t return, this didn’t just become a problem for the credibility of the Church; it also became a problem for Christians, who had built their lives around a false hope.

We should take a lesson from this. If we look at history, there is in fact good reason to believe that capitalism isn’t likely to fall anytime soon. And this means that even though some socialists decry the supposed pessimism of “doomers,” we would be much better off talking realistically about what the politics of the near future are going to look like. If we don’t, it will hurt our credibility, and it will also make it more difficult to be a socialist.

The Bias is a print publication but digital editions are also available. For more information check out their website here!

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Matt Huber, writing in the New York Times, argues that for a “shift among progressive Democrats on the campaign trail” that de-prioritizes climate change and focuses on affordability. Later in that piece, he writes that “If Democrats reclaim the House and Senate, their first priority must be to materially improve workers’ lives, rather than propose a grand vision of an energy transition.” The article is predictably taking some serious heat from the left, but I think this is mostly because everyone is conflating these two statements.

As a matter of campaign strategy, Huber’s argument is hard to contest. The great challenge of climate change has always been that while most Americans agree that it is happening, and while a plurality will even say that they “worry a great deal about it,” hardly anyone wants to make it a priority. Even at its peak of public concern in late 2021 only 16% of Americans considered it the most important issue, according to YouGov; today, that number is down to 5.8%. So while there is, as Huber’s critics insist, a good amount of consensus that climate change is a problem, the public just doesn’t think we should focus on it.

The economy, in contrast, remains the primary concern for most Americans. Huber is right to note that focus on this issues is significantly class driven, with more concern about climate change among the better off and more concern about the economy among poorer voters, but this point is probably overstated; even among postgrads, for example, concern about prices is currently 7 points higher than concern about climate change.

Faced with this reality, the liberal-left is faced with two choices — and ideology seems to be playing a major role in which response one prefers. Because while liberals and the left both get that campaign messaging is about winning votes, both have very different ideas for how this is done.

In liberalism, democracy isn’t just a mechanism for society to make decisions; it’s also a forum for rational deliberation. Candidates, in their campaigns, lay out their proposed agenda, and then the public evaluates the agenda that you laid out in your campaign and decides whether or not to support it. This is why debates play such a major role in the process of American elections, and it’s also why politicians are expected to stick to the policy agenda they outlined.

So liberalism’s rationalistic approach to campaigning has direct consequences for how we deal with climate change. If you want to do something about climate change, then you need to run on the issue and persuade voters that they should make it a priority. This is true whether they’re disposed to make it a priority or not; one does it not because it is convenient, but because this is what you have to do to uphold the process of rational deliberation. In that light, polling on what voters actually care about doesn’t really matter except as a way of gauging how well your persuasive efforts are going. It should not dictate what you campaign on.

The main problem with this perspective, of course, is that American politics do not actually operate as disciplined exercises in rationalistic deliberation. Because both our system of campaign finance and our mass media are dominated by capital, capitalism shapes everything from the political options we are offered to the campaign strategies they pursue. Today political campaigns largely rely on flooding propaganda rather than rational persuasion, trying to saturate voters with inflammatory or demotivational messages by pouring millions into ads, particularly near election day. The rich prefer a discourse dominated by flooding tactics because the success of flooding is a direct function of how much money one can invest into it.

In the campaign environment capitalism has created it is utter suicide to try to rely on rationalistic strategies while the opposition is shouting you down. That is why in the long term the left’s goal must be to simply dismantle capitalism so that flooding stops being a useful strategy. In the short term, however, our goal in an election is simply to get as many votes for left-wing politics as possible — and nothing more. Elections may be an opportunity to educate the public and set up a thorough referendum on competing platforms, but for now that cannot be the priority.

For this reason, the left should rely on a very different approach to elections on issues like climate change. You should tell the truth about your position on climate, and you should make it a political priority, but neither of these points imply that you should make it a central issue in your campaign. If voters say that what they care about is affordability then that is what you focus on. If they want to know what your plans are for climate change they can visit your website.

This is why I think both Huber’s piece and its critics are fairly misguided. Both are talking as if what someone does in office has to be dictated by their campaign messaging. As a matter of historical fact this is not how democratic politics have ever functioned in the United States, mostly just because politicians flat-out lie. But even without lying, left politicians can assure voters that they will do what the voters want on affordability — and if they’re persuasive enough on this issue then they won’t need to spend a lot of time on the others. This, as I noted a few months back, is precisely how Abigail Spanberger won in Virginia despite backing positions on trans issues that are relatively unpopular in this state: she simply focused on the economy.

Once we decouple elections from the project of liberal rationalism a lot of these apparent conflicts between political necessity and political expedience disappear. If I were running as a socialist presidential candidate in 2028, I would mention in my official platform that I plan to commit trillions to the Green Climate Fund to combat climate change — and I would spend roughly 100% of my public speaking and media engagements talking about affordability. Save political education for public schools and DSA.

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For the first time since Russia’s invasion in 2022, support for fighting “as long as necessary” has slipped below 50% in Ukraine according to recent polling from the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology.

Only 48% of respondents now support indefinite war, according to KIIS. A third of Ukrainians now say they only support another year or less of fighting, with an additional 19% expressing ambivalence.

These numbers mark an important shift in public opinion. Last August, Gallup reported that Ukrainian belief that they should “continue fighting until [they] win the war” had reached a low of 24% — yet 62% insisted that they could continue fighting indefinitely. This new drop is a more direct measure of popular morale, and suggests that the Ukrainian stance towards the war may be moving from pessimism to exhaustion.

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Yesterday marked the anniversary of Antonio Gramsci’s death, so out of respect I held off from publishing this - but now that Monday’s over, I think a word or two is in order on the man’s critique of determinism. His arguments on the matter are ones that I would say most of the modern left basically accepts, but whatever one wants to say about their role at the time, their role today seems to be to rehabilitate liberal ideas about idealism and individual freedom. They are not, in any case, very good.

The story of Marx, I have argued elsewhere, is one of a man whose philosophical outlook became demonstrably deterministic as his work matured from youthful polemic to scientific analysis. This point is only worth making because Gramsci’s reputation leans so heavily on Marxist prestige. The closest Marx ever comes to writing like Gramsci is in his (odd) doctoral dissertation where he praises Epicurus’ theory that atoms are capable of acts of free will. But within four years, Marx was already arguing that material forces were “the prime governor” of “the will and the action of man.”

Elsewhere, Marx laid out his famous theory of what would come to be known as the base and the superstructure:

The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life.

Though degrees of buy-in vary, this is one of those Marxist ideas that even contemporary liberals significantly accept. It is for example a foundational premise of modern anthropology and sociology that the economic and technological foundation of society has a far reaching impact on its culture. The only real controversy these days is whether one insists that it is the only determinant of the superstructure or whether other things (like free will!) determine it too.

Without wading into that controversy, however, I’ll just make a different point: Marx’s theory of causality is completely ordinary, intuitive, and coherent. There is a cause (the base) and an effect (the superstructure) and that’s their basic relationship.

Compare this to Gramsci. In his essay on Relations of Force, Gramsci writes that

Even the geographical position of a national State does not precede but follows (logically) structural changes, although it also reacts upon them to a certain extent (to the extent prcisely to which superstructures react upon the structure, politics on economics, etc.).

Here, he begins by nodding to the Marxist position: even the boundaries of States are there for reasons that can ultimately be traced back to the economy. Again: ordinary causal relationship. But then we get an odd move: the state also “reacts upon” — by which he means influences — the economy! This is decidedly not a relationship of cause-and-effect as we ordinarily understand it. It’s circular!

Gramsci’s position is easy to defend in an utterly superficial way; it isn’t hard at all to come up with examples of some seemingly cultural phenomena having an effect on the economy. But that isn’t the problem with his position. The real problem with this analysis is that if we say that the base is determining the superstructure, and that the superstructure is determining the base, all we are really saying is that the base influences itself. And it does, but that’s just an ordinary feedback loop, something we find everywhere in nature. Confusion enters into Gramsci’s explanation because he is treating the superstructure one moment like a dependent effect (when the superstructure determines it) and the next like an independent agent acting on the base. Either one can be true, but both cannot be true.

Unfortunately, this mystification has mostly just led, in the modern age, to sloppy analysis and crypto-idealism among American Marxists. In the name of “dialectics,” an endless procession of humanities junior faculty constantly insists that liberals were right about how “ideas have legs,” which of course is a convenient thing to believe when you trade in ideas for a living.

Above, I touched on a related problem: how the belief in an autonomous superstructure smuggles in mysticism about free will. If material forces aren’t wholly determining our culture and our politics, what other cause is there but free will, which lets humans act without any cause whatsoever? To this subtle endorsement of free will, Gramsci also adds this explicit argument against determinism:

When…the struggle itself comes eventually to be identified with a series of defeats, mechanical determinism becomes a tremendous force of moral resistance, of cohesion and of patient and obstinate perserverance. “I have been defeated for the moment, but the tide of history is working for me in the longterm.” …[When this thinking becomes] responsible for the economic activity of the masses, mechanicism at a certain point becomes an imminent danger and a revision must take place in modes of thinking…

I have an article coming out in a few days that takes on this claim that determinism is demobilizing, but here it’s enough to say that the critique is irrelevant to the factual question at hand. If determinism is demobilizing and if it turns out that the universe operates deterministically, that is a problem for the left, not for the universe.

I do not want this to read like I am dismissing Gramsci’s contributions entirely, because some of his ideas — particularly, I think, his discussion of the war of manuver and positon — deserve their reputation. But his ideas about causality range from incoherent to irrelevant, and unfortunately they have significantly contributed to a kind of postmodern analytical sloppiness that remains influential in left academia. Socialists would be better off leaving them behind.

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Yair Rosenberg, writing for The Atlantic:

[Hasan Piker] speaks confidently about things that he does not know much about. And this phenomenon is not unique to Piker. It’s characteristic of the new-media landscape, which now includes smashmouth streamers and podcasters of all political persuasions who talk about everything but are experts in nothing, and whose incentives run toward incendiary virality rather than accuracy.

Would you be shocked if I told you that Yair doesn’t have an academic background in media criticsm, or even in journalism? Here’s how he explained it himself back in 2019:

I didn’t actually set out to be a journalist. I did Jewish studies and history in university. I thought maybe I’d write some things on the side when I had something to say, but it turns out, people are willing to pay you to say things you wanted to say anyway. People kept offering me opportunities, and eventually I got the job that I have now.

While this may seem like a pretty improbable story on its face, it makes a lot more sense when you notice two more points about Yair’s background. First and foremost, Yair went to Harvard. Second, Yair is a radical Zionist, advancing what Yakov Hirsch calls “a worldview that prefers endless war‑management, de facto annexation, and regional work‑arounds to any settlement that would concede equal rights to Palestinians”.

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Early this morning, Donald Trump tweeted, in clear reference to Iran: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought again.” I have generally resisted getting too worked up about Trump’s hyperbolic rhetoric, but it would be unconscionable not to take this threat serious. This is a threat to commit a war crime, and one of such magnitude that it would easily rank among history’s greatest atrocities. From a purely self-interested perspective, Americans have to understand that this would risk not just blowback but an organized international response on a scale that our country has never dealt with. More importantly, however, it would endanger nearly a hundred million lives, and with it the history of one of the world’s oldest and most important civilizations. Even threatening such a crime against humanity should be more than enough to justify immediately removing Trump from office.

So far, the standard response among Democrats — from Chuck Schumer to Bernie Sanders — has been to call for a vote on ending the war. This is not enough. Rep. Ro Khanna’s call for invoking the 25th Amendment and removing Trump from office better reflects the urgency of the situation, but this is still not enough. Members of Congress, and especially those who call themselves socialists, need to follow the lead of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and take action that will immediately impede any criminal action Trump may attempt. Specifically, they need to:

1. Clearly state that anything amounting to the destruction of Iranian civilization would be an unambiguous war crime under international and US law. There is no plausible military justification for wielding weapons of mass destruction, mass attacks on civilians, or anything on the scale that Trump is suggesting.

2. Remind military personnel that they have a legal obligation to disobey any orders to participate in the destruction of Iranian civilization. This is true from the bottom to the top of the chain of command. High ranking officials have a special responsibility to resist illegal orders, but this cannot excuse those further down who choose to participate.

3. Pledge to protect anyone who disobeys unlawful orders from political and professional retaliation. Such retaliation would also, of course, be illegal, but members of Congress need to promise to provide any aid necessary in the defense of their legal rights.

4. Pledge to prosecute anyone who participates in the destruction of Iranian civilization. Even if the president pardons any military personnel who participates in war crimes, it is within the authority of Congress to amend the American Service-Members’ Protection Act and then legislate a legal procedure for authorizing the extradition of said personnel to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court for prosecution. No member of the military should proceed under an assumption of impunity for their crimes.

As it stands, members of the military are likely facing an onslaught of misinformation about both the legality of this operation and their personal liability. Simply by stating these four points, Members of Congress can create an immediate and powerful incentive against an unthinkable crime against humanity. These measures do not end their responsibility to act, of course, but they are where every member of Congress should start.

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