Rev Left Radio - Exploring Political Theory: Liberal Socialism

Episode Date: October 4, 2024

Professor and author Matt McManus returns to the show to discuss his newest book, "The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism". Together they explore the major themes of the book, hash out the disagreements they have between revolutionary Marxism and democratic socialism, explore critical thinkers like Karl Marx, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, and John Rawls, wrestle with the questions of revolution and communism as the ultimate goal of socialism, and much more. "Providing a comprehensive critical genealogy of liberal socialism from a sympathetic but critical standpoint, McManus traces its core to the Revolutionary period that catalyzed major divisions in liberal political theory to the French Revolution that saw the emergence of writers like Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine who argued that liberal principles could only be inadequately instantiated in a society with high levels of material and social inequality to John Stuart Mill, the first major thinker who declared himself a liberal and a socialist and who made major contributions to both traditions through his efforts to synthesize and conciliate them." Check out our other episodes with Matt HERE Outro Song: "Best of All Possible Worlds" by Ajj feat: Kool Keith & Kimya Dawson Support Rev Left HERE Follow us on IG HERE

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we have back on the show, our good friend and repeat guest, Professor Matt McManus, to talk about his newest book, The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism. And as we talk about in the episode, of course, that term liberal socialism will strike some on the Marxist left as anathema or incorrect or something. something that gets your hackles up and we go through it you know we work through our differences there is certainly differences between me and matt politically the the theory of liberal socialism and forms of Marxist leninism and Marxist leninism and Maoism we explore as much of that as possible but in general we just sort of wrestle with this idea of liberal socialism he explocates it talks about its historical antecedents some of the main thinkers in that tradition the

revolutionary aspects of it yeah where we disagree where we agree where we agree agree, et cetera. And overall, as always with Matt, it's a deep, philosophically informed, fascinating, and always generative conversation. And I love having conversations with him, and I hope our listeners love listening to these conversations because I really think they are so, so rich. And his depth of knowledge with political theory is really unmatched. I mean, you know, I mean, in the sense that it's very rarely a person I come across where I can just throw out like the most off the wall difficult you know random questions about political theory and he just immediately knows where to go with it picks it up and runs with it in fascinating ways

so i really love the depth of his knowledge and it's always fun to go back and forth with him even on those points of disagreement between us but again always with rev left you engage with these episodes not always agreeing with everything the guest says but critically engaging with what the guest says and hopefully and it's certainly the case with matt's episodes you will walk away having learned something, having some new piece of information that is absolutely useful regardless of where you fall on the exact arguments that he or I make. So it's in that spirit that I offer this conversation. It's in that spirit that I encourage people to listen to this conversation and to support Matt and his work. One of the things that Matt does is he

gets in the trenches with reactionaries and right-wingers and argues with them in a way that is always robust, always principled, always, you know, often out classes and out shines, his reactionary opponents, which is something that I always enjoy watching him do. He's very good at that. So, yeah, the episode is really great. I'm excited for you all to listen to it. And as always, if you like what we do here at Rev Left, you can join us at patreon.com forward slash Rev Left Radio.

There are at this point hundreds and hundreds of backlogged episodes in our Patreon that you can go through with new. episodes on the Patreon exclusively every single month. We're building a really cool community over there and have for a very long time. As you know, Rev Left is 100% listener supported, always has been, always will be. Over the years, we have gotten random emails and opportunities to do ads on the show. And that's something I will never, ever do to you or to myself. One of the most despicable things, in my opinion, is starting any podcast and immediately

hearing an advertisement. I mean, just disgusting stuff. So you'll never, ever get that from Rev Leves. But part of what makes this show possible and keeps the show on the air for now over seven years is 100% due to our listeners. We deeply appreciate it to the people that support us on Patreon. I mean, we deeply appreciate it. And if you are so inclined to give us a few bucks every month to support what we do,

we in turn will give you a bunch of bonus content and a growing community of really curious, deep-hearted and intelligent people over at our Patreon. So you can go join that. If you are so inclined, without further ado, here is my conversation with Professor Matt McManus on his newest book, The Political Theory of Liberal

Socialism. Enjoy. Hey, I'm Matt McManus. I'm a lecture in political science at the University of Michigan. And in my spare time, I've written a bunch of books like the political right and equality and the emergence of post-modernity. And right now I'm here to talk about my forthcoming book, The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism.

Wonderful. Well, welcome back to the show. It's always a pleasure to have you on, my friend. We've had many great discussions in the past. I'm sure longtime listeners of Rev. Left are familiar with you. I'll link to our other episodes in the show notes for people who enjoy this conversation and want more of these types of conversations. But as you said today, we're talking about your newest book, The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism.

And as we were talking about before we began recording, you know, there's probably a way in which even the term liberal socialism is received by certain people on certain parts of the Marxist left in particular. For other socialist or progressives or democratic socialist types, it seems sort of intuitive that these two things would be melded together. So regardless of how people feel about the term, we're going to get into it. It's going to be a fascinating and worthwhile discussion, regardless of where you ultimately fall. all on the theory itself. And what I love about you and your work is that it's always philosophically rigorous, it's thoughtful, it's thought through, it's always in conversation with political theory, much broad, you know, much more broad than whatever you're advancing.

You're, you know, well aware of various reactionary thinkers. You understand Marx, which I always appreciate about your work. And so this will be a fun conversation. But I think the best way to start off a conversation like this is to really, really lock in some basic definitions, especially with a term like liberal social. which will create certain reactions from certain sorts of people. So with that in mind, let's start with the basic definitions of what is liberalism and what is socialism. Yeah, that's a great question. And one of the things that my book makes clear, I hope, is that it's important to

understand liberalism and socialism as broad families of traditions that are kind of linked by a family resemblance to one another. So I agree with Al and Ryan that it makes a lot more sense to talk about liberalisms than liberalism exclusively. And I'd say to say about socialism, right? There are a lot of socialisms out there, some of which I think are great and others of which I'm a little bit more critical of. But if we have to give a definition of what kind of unites all these things together, I would say that liberalism is a political ideology, at least as understood in my book, that is committed to two principles, maybe three. The first principle is this idea of the moral equality of all human beings. Now, it's not the same as the social

let alone economic quality for all liberalisms. We'll get into that. The second principle is this commitment to the individual's freedom or liberty. You can use whichever term you want, understood by different liberal thinkers and activists in a variety of different ways. And some would add a third principle to that, particularly in French liberal circles. Obviously, you'd have a commitment to equality, liberty, and then solidarity or fraternity, which has a bit more of a Republican quality to it. And in terms of socialism, I'd argue that socialism, I'd argue that social

is a modernist egalitarian doctrine that is committed to social ownership of the means of protection, pretty controversial, although I would add to that, that any desirable version of socialism in the family should understand social control of the means of production in a democratic way, rather than, say, in a command economy or authoritarian manner. So, those are the kind of two definitions that I think I'll plant my flag on. Okay. Yeah, very interesting and yet the social ownership of the of the means of production you're going to support that but it's definitely going to be more focused on the democratic organization of society not necessarily state control which we can we can get into some of the nuances there as we continue on

but so those are some basic definitions on the table and with those definitions in mind let's kind to think about liberalism historically because i think that also helps us understand liberalisms as you as you point out which i think is is very helpful because liberalism isn't one thing, just as socialism isn't one thing. Those are big terms and they have different nuances and they have sort of spectrums within themselves. There's a right-wing, centrist and left spectrum of liberalism, for example. So with all that in mind, how did liberalism emerge historically and what was its emergence sort of premised on or what was it reacting to? Yeah, it's a good question. I talk a little bit more about this in my book, the political

right inequality, because one of the things that I foreground there especially is that these days were pretty committed to the idea that each person's life is as important as anyone else's life, right? There's this commitment to moral equality that many of us take for granted. But it wasn't always that way, right? If you were to go-to, pre-modern

societies, many people certainly educated elites would agree with Aristotle that it was just obvious, even transparent, that some people's lives were more valuable than others, and those whose lives were more valuable than others, recognizably superior people in society were entitled to more pretty much everything, right?

More agency, more political power, more wealth, more status, you know, better tickets to the Coliseum, you name it, right? And there are various different thinkers who've talked about this. One who I reference in my book pretty heavily is a Canadian philosopher called Charles Taylor. Some of your earlier listeners might be familiar with him. But in his book, Modern Social Imaginaries, Taylor talks about premodent social imaginaries, his term for the way that people conceive society. were committed to this idea of hierarchical complementarity. The idea being that you think of society like a pyramid, right?

There are people at the bottom, most people, really, a couple of people in the middle, and then at the very summit you have your aristocrats, your lords, your kings, your Roman emperors, whoever it happens to be. Now, all antiquarian thinkers or pre-modern thinkers would insist that each run of the pyramid needs one another. It's not like the king can get by without serfs or slaves to exploit, but it's clear from their perspective that people at the top of the pyramid are more valuable than others. And if people at the top need to use the people at the bottom for whatever purposes it happens to be, then that's A.K.

Now, how we shifted to a view that's committed to, at least in principle the moral equality of all individuals, is a fascinating question. And I want to be very clear. I don't think liberalism was the first doctrine to put forward this idea of the moral quality of all human beings. There's a bunch of different candidates out there. Various forms of Buddhism, for example, seem pretty committed to the idea of the fundamental equality of human beings. Stoicism, particularly Seneca and Stoism, very much committed to the idea that whether you're a Roman emperor or a Roman slave, you share a kind of deep affinity with one another because our fate is going to be the same. Christianity, right, if you're a Nietzschean, Christianity is the real root, certainly in the Western world,

of all the biggest egalitarian presuppositions. But what I argue in the book is that it's really with the liberal, epoch that we start to see this intimation that people are equal and should be treated equally, at least in certain important ways, it becomes a revolutionary force that transforms the world. I'd like to point out that Marx would agree very much with that, right? From his perspective, the bourgeois class and its kind of liberal ideology obviously has a lot of problems that we can get into it, but it deserves eternal acclaim for ripping down the old feudal systems predicated on these ideas of hierarchical complementarity.

and this vision of society as fundamentally pure middle. Yeah, absolutely. Liberalism was certainly an egalitarian advance in some respects to what came before it. I'm wondering what role that the intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment might have played in the emergence of liberalism historically. Yeah, you know, this is something that I've been wrestling with

a little bit more in the new stuff that I'm working on, actually, because one of the things that I think is really problematic about the kind of left theory that I came up in, at least people like, say, Foucault, for example, is that for all their brilliance, they really adopt this skeptical, somewhat anti-enlightment. You know, if Ocockees, Casey had nice things to say about enlightenment, but pretty skeptical of it overall stance towards the world. And I always think that if your political ideology is advancing skepticism as its main kind of theoretical outlook, that usually means you're all in the back foot. And I don't think it's any coincidence that the left went through was kind of postmodern moment in the 1980s and the 1990s, right, when it looked like socialism

was kind of on the back foot everywhere. And the thing to do was to criticize neoliberal universalism wherever it came from. But if we go back in time, certainly to the revolutionary period, it was very clear that progressive forces saw themselves as being, to use the cliched phrase, on the right side of history. And they were on the right side of history because they were the ones who were approaching the world in a rational way. They were tearing away what were called all the pleasing illusions that supported hierarchical systems of government. And they were trying to advance a more humane system that ideally was going to be better off for everyone. Now, you can quibble with whether or not they actually had the formula or the theory, right?

But I find this kind of an inspiring outlook. And it's telling that when progressivism was at kind of revolutionary peak, progressives were staunchly committed to reason, universalism, and enlightenment, because we thought all those things were on our side. And I think that we should try to recover that, if I at all possible. Yeah, there's a, there's a strain within, you know, within the Marxist tradition that sort of sees itself, I mean, a strain, I think it is core to the Marxist tradition, that sees itself as, as wanting to complete the Enlightenment, to take the Enlightenment project the entire way, this process of the demystification, which which in liberalism is taken in certain ways in science, you know, in technology, in rationalism,

there's certainly in advance over old superstitions, the demystification via science of the natural world, et cetera. But, you know, the Marxist critique of liberalism is that it's still, it maintains some aspects which are mystified, the social relations, the ideological superstructure of capitalism, et cetera, and the sort of ruthless criticism and demystification of everything is something that I think Marx saw himself as trying to do with regards to capitalism itself, trying to understand the laws of motion of capitalism and the development of these modes of production over time and how they shift. And he saw that as sort of a way in which you can kind of complete the Enlightenment Project, which was only sort of half-born or half-completed

under liberalism and its subsequent historical machinations. Do you think that more or less sounds right from a Marxist perspective, that that's sort of the way that Marxist might look at the Enlightenment historically and as part of its own tradition? Oh, absolutely, right? I think that Marx very clearly belongs in a call the canon of mature Enlightenment thinkers, right? And the reason I call out a mature Enlightenment thinker is, of course, Marx was very critical of this idea that would just have a kind of crude access to the world through the senses in the way that, say, the empiricist would suppose, or for that matter, of course, even more famously, that We can just apprehend the world in pure thought, the way the idealist imagined, right, without any engagement with the call creed.

So in the book, I talk a great deal about how, what I call Marxist's phenomenology is an underappreciated dimension to his thinking. And what I mean by his phenomenology is Marx is very clear that what he is engaged in is a critique of political economy, not a defense of political economy or criticism of political economy. And what is meant by critique is very much what Kenton Higel met by critique. We're talking about the generative limitations of a mode of thinking. And they are generative, right? So classical political economy

or the classical political economists did devise a way of understanding the human social world. That was in advance on what came before. And Marx is very clear about this on the Grindrisa, right? The classical political economists start from a better standpoint than their antecedents.

The problem, and this is where the critique that comes in, is while classical political economy constitutes an advance on what came before, the classical political economists and many people, for that matter, within bourgeois society, still assume that the categories through which they apprehend the world correspond to real things that are trans-historical and are always going to exist. And what Marx really adds, of course, is a historical dimension to this by saying, no, no, no, no, it is really the case that in a capitalist economy, the categories of classical political economy, bourgeois political economy,

bourgeois political economy apply, because that's the way that we organize our social world. But there's no trans historical necessity for this. And if you ascribe a trans historical necessity to these bourgeois categories, then you're reifying them in a way that doesn't understand their historicity and their fluidity. And of course, that's very important, since once you recognize their historicity and fluidity, then we can start to think about what a revolutionary overturning of the categories of bourgeois thought that would constitute a further advance would be, And, of course, that's what he anticipated would happen with the transition to, you know, take a pick, socialism, communism, whatever.

But I want to be very clear to anyone who reads the book. The second, the most important chapter in it is the one on Marx, and I have enormous respect for him, even if I think, like everybody, you know, that Mark's made the odd mistake here and there. Yeah, absolutely. I really like that a breakdown of Marxist phenomenology. So now that we have some grasp on liberalism historically, we have some definitions on the table, can you kind of define liberal. socialism as such and summarize your position as an advocate of liberal socialism and then we'll get more into the details. Sure. Well, there's one thing I want to be clear on, right? I characterize my book as a retrieval, which is a term coined by the great Canadian political theater as C.B. McPherson.

And by retrieval, what he means is going back and recovering a theoretical tradition, in his case, you know, an emancipatory egalitarian theoretical tradition that has been kind of lost in the morass of history. And the reason I think that this is important is I want to be clear that my book is not a defense of liberal socialism, even though I do support liberal socialism, in the sense of saying, here's what we should do, you know, or in the kind of lend in the sense of what must be done. I think liberal socialism has pretty significant problems with it as a theoretical tradition, not least problems that Marx himself would have anticipated. And if we are going to not only retrieve the tradition of liberal socialism, but make it viable in the 21st century, boy, boy,

there are a lot of work to be done theoretically and practically, right? But just to get to brass hacks, the way I define liberal socialism is a liberal socialist is somebody who is committed to achieving the democratization of the economy in a liberal parliamentary or legislative context that is respectful of liberal rights, with the exception of the enormous weight that classical liberals at least would put on the right to expansive ownership of private property. Obviously, liberal socialists are critical of this idea that we should put so much weight on expansive notions of private property. But they're critical of that because they think that you can't actually achieve a lot of liberal goals or socialist goals if society is so committed to such an expansive

concept of private property, certainly one that allows exploitation and domination. Yeah, so then just to be clear on that, so what is your position on private property from the position of a liberal socialist? That it, I mean, yeah, could you articulate that? I'm sorry if I'm that? Oh, no, a problem, right? I mean, any liberal socialist would be committed to personal property. For that matter, most of those socialists are as well, right? Nobody wants the state owning your home or your car or your television or whatever it happens to be or society for that matter, right? The difference, of course, is that when socialists and liberals, for that matter, are critical of expansive notions of private property, what they mean is

the entitlement or the right, if you want to put it that way, private actors, in course, corporations to own what I call the commanding heights of the economy or the means of production, if you want to use the Marxist term, in such a way that ownership of the commanding heights of the economy or the means of production creates very, very uneven power relations in society that's not compatible with our commitment to things like them, the welfare quality of opportunity to exercise political power. Yeah. So is there any gap at all between the traditional Marxist view of private property and the liberal socialist view? Well, that's a good question. I think it really means what you mean like what we understand by

Marxism, right? Some mark, almost every Marxist, I think, who's, you know, sensible is committed to this idea that personal property will be retained in a socialist or communist society. I don't think if you look at Marxist's light works, he's pretty clear on this, right? You know, the commune is not going to own your house. It's not going to own your TV. It's not going to own, you know, your horse and buggy, whatever it happens to be, right? The forms of private property that Marx and Ingalls were critical of are the forms of private property or private ownership that allowed the ruling class to dominate the working classes, right? That's what's problematic about it. And that's, of course, what socialists and communists need to be militant in their opposition of. Yeah, absolutely.

So, yeah, so then we totally agree on that. I mean, I think every Marxist that is in any way serious understands the difference between personal and private property. And I think, yeah, that's core to to any form of socialism is this critique of of private property and the want to ultimately socialize it and there's differences on how people envision that socialization process going but certainly that is that is core and so that's retained within liberal socialism so now that we and if I could just add one thing to that right I think there are debates that fall on a continuum about where we might have to draw a line right so most socialist again would have no problem with you owning your house,

owning your car, etc., etc. But I noticed just last week, you know, there was a big debate about the status of small businesses under socialism, right?

Now, I don't think socialists would have any problem more, for that matter, liberal socialist with, you know, a 10-year-old girl who sets up a lemonade stand that's used a cliche example.

Yeah. And pay his brother, you know, five bucks an hour to kind of help sell lemonade, right? Yeah. If you're going there

and demanding, you know, workplace democracy of the lemonade stand that you're kind of silly. You know, a small business with, you know,

two people from a family, maybe not. But once you start reaching points where, you know, you have 10, 15, like, employees, then most socialists will start to get concerned, I think, very rightly, about the potential of exploitation and domination by owners. So there's a continuum of debates that we can have around here. I'm not exactly sure what the cutoff is. You'd have to take it on a case-by-case basis, but very clearly what matters is the kind of power that accrues to people or disempowerment that accrues to others as a result of private ownership or the means of production are the commanding heights of the economy.

Yeah, and certainly in a transitionary period, you know, small businesses are almost certainly allowed to continue to operate. And as you said, the commanding heights of the economy are the things that are focused on, whether that's more state control in, you know, historical examples of more state-oriented socialism or democratic control of the means of production. It just seems like practical that during that transition, you're going to have to make room for, yeah, the sort of small businesses to continue operating while you attack the, the, you know, and nationalize and socialize, the commanding heights of the economy, the crucial

things. But ultimately, there is an end goal in which, you know, all sort of exploitative relationships are eventually ended. And that's part of the vision of Marxist socialism and, of course, communism, where that even small business, sort of, we own the business and we're hiring laborers, that that is eventually overcome in the long run, right? Yeah, absolutely. That was certainly the Marxist ideal, right? Although, as you point out, He's very clear in the critique of the Gotha program that there's going to be a long transitional period in order to get there. One of the things that I'm critical of in my text or in my book is people who adopt what we can call a millennarian approach to communism or socialism. There's this idea that after the revolution, everything is going to be changed.

We're going to live in a brave new world, as it were. I think that that's fundamentally wrong, or at the very least anti-Marxist, right? Marx is very clear in the critique of Gotha program that any new socialist is. that emerges post-revolution or post-reform is going to be in his term stamped by many features of the old. And we have to expect that it's going to be stamped by features the old because if you're a good Marxist, you're a good materialist and historicist, right? You appreciate that there is no such thing as a millennarian break with what came before. So this is one of the reasons I argue that some Marxists might even have good reason to accept or at least

or even, you know, anticipate a way of a transition to liberal socialism. That obviously enact a democratization of the economy retains many features of bourgeois right as it were in a new socialist society. Yeah, and I think, certainly I agree with your point about it's sort of naive to think of this millinarian break

in its entirety. That's sort of anti-dialectical at a deep level and anti-Marxist. There is this element within liberalism though that sees the ability to start a business to own private property to generate a profit it as, I mean, in the liberal tradition, this is seen as at least that theoretically it can be

done in a non-exploitative way. And moreover, many liberals will argue that it is an infringement on individual liberty, individual freedom, something that you advance as core to, you know, even your idea of liberalism in the liberal socialist political theory, to be able to own a business and open it up. And that's an infringement to try to stop somebody from doing that. And certainly it's an infringement. You know, liberals would see it as an infringement to nationalize. you know, Elon Musk's businesses or to take over Walmart. So how do you balance that with your, you know, liberal belief in individual freedom, but also your socialist critique of private property?

Well, I think that this is, again, where we need to assess things on a case-by-case basis, right? Because what socialists and liberals have reason to care about are forms of economic relations that are characterized by dis-equilibriums of power, and particularly domination and exploitation. So in the event that once someone wants to set up a small business of one, right, where you live stream, you know, playing video games, right? You make a little bit of money off Patreon. I don't think that any liberal or socialist has really compelling reasons to want to go in and stop you, right? If you want to set up, you know, your lemonade stand or sell a couple of books on the side or whatever it happens to be, again, I also don't think that liberals are socialists should have particular cost to want to introduce. fear with those forms of freedom. But I would insist that if you are going to

create and start a small business, and let's call it, you know, a transitional phase of socialism, we're going to hire 10 or 15 employees. Well, then I don't think that there's any problem with saying that is not just your business, right, in the sense that you own it. Your employees also contribute an enormous amount to that, if not most of what goes on in the business is dependent on their activities. So they're entitled to things like an economic democracy, where the fruits of everyone's labor should be distributed in a relatively democratic, non-domineering form. So again, it really depends on the case study that you give me. But after a very, a pretty low threshold, I think that we really need to start to think about

how to democratize what can very quickly become domineering and exploitative relationships. Yeah, yeah, I like that. And I agree with that. And I would argue as well, like expanding on your argument, society as a whole makes the very possibility of your small business in the first place. There's a, you know, you're not, you know, an island unto yourself. You are integrated and embedded within a social order that you utterly depend on in order to even think about making your own small business, an army of workers, an army of consumers, the infrastructure of society as well. And that's something that, you know, liberal capitalism tries to obscure and mystify that, you know, these are entrepreneurs with individual rights and liberty.

autonomously creating businesses out of their own self-interest that contribute to the greater good and that is like sort of wholly in that it cannot be impugned upon or impinged upon but of course we understand things as a sort of, you know, dialectically related to everything else in such a way that, you know, we just reject that idea that anybody is an individual or that anybody can survive or do anything outside the context of the broader society. And so that automatically brings any business under the purview of society at large. opinion and I think yours as well. Oh, absolutely, right. I mean, one of the things I continuously harp on about to, you know, the kind of weird Elon stands on the internet who

never seem to fail to take an owl for the boss is, you know, they'll invariably say things like, you know, think about all the jobs Elon Musk creates, think about all the jobs billionaires in general create. And I'm like, well, why don't we actually talk about how thousands of workers are required in order to create one billionaire, right? I mean, why is that Elon Musk is the person that you associate with creating Tesla rather than the people who actually fucking build cars in his factories, right? And I don't think that that's just a

semantic point. It really kind of gestures to who we think are the creative class in society. In this case, these people think it's the billionaires. I'd say that the creative class at Tesla are the people who actually create the cars that people drive that are the reason the company

makes any money at all. But that's just me. I suppose it's an odd way of thinking about things for somebody who's never actually had to work a real day in their life like Elon Musk. But anyway, just to kind of get to your point about the socialization or the social dimensions of property, that's actually a good way of segueing into some of the main themes of the book. So I point out early on in the book that without a doubt, there's a much more pro-market form of liberalism that in many senses is what we call the OG liberalism, right, the original

liberalism. This is what CB McPherson to evoke him again calls possessive individualism. And that's what you see articulated by people like, say, Locke, for example, you know, everyone's favorite, or most hated classical liberal, right? For, from a kind of Lockean von Miesian perspective, the right way to understand individuals is just the way that Margaret Thatcher said we should understand society, right? Society consists of a bunch of different individuals, maybe their families, and they have to look after themselves. And they, what they look after themselves is through competing with one another and the pursuit of their self-interest. And what the pursuit of their self-interest means is, of course, infinite acquisition to the extent possible, right? So pretty consistent with this locking worldview, right? We all started out as individuals with natural rights.

We all, through our labor, or mixing our labor with the matter of the world, try to improve ourselves. And then we engage in entrepreneurial competition to try to further better ourselves. What I point out in the book is it's a mistake to assume that this possessive individualist flavor of liberalism is the only version of liberalism is the only version of liberalism out there or even the only old version of liberalism out there. So one of the things I point out is one of the first major figures to criticize this idea that there's something natural about private property is the revolutionary Thomas Payne. Now, I love Payne. I'm going to go out about them all day. Same. But Thomas Payne for those, sorry, go ahead. I was going to say same. We've talked about this in previous episodes, how much I like and admire

pain. And he was crucial to my political development as I started getting into political philosophy. me my favorite my favorite founding father by far oh yeah 100% right and you know just an overall great guy but anyway long sort of short like people might know claim for his pamphlet common sense probably the piece of his that everyone reads the most classic revolutionary text read by people like george washington to the soldiers do the american revolutionary war and one of the things that i really like about this is just how blistering he is about the idea of aristocracy right the title of common sense is really a snub against our Socratic rule, saying, what a bizarre system to have, right, where we would vest our faith in this frankly weird idea that will pass power on generationally from male heir to male error, regardless of what idiot actually happens to become king. It's just common sense that we transition to our Republican system of government or more democratic rule.

And I really think that left us have quite a lot to learn, including myself, I should add, from Payne's literate. style, because this insistence that a transition to a more progressive social form is inherently commonsensical is a really great way to engage in what we call counter-hegemonic activities. I think sometimes we on the left like to present ourselves as radical and subversive and doing something that's a little bit weird. And there is a time and a place for all that. But presenting yourself as arguing for common sense in the long run, I think is much more likely to have counter-hegemonic effects. To make a long story short, because there's trampling a little bit there in my enthusiasm.

In his later books, The Rights of Man, Part 2, An Agrarian Justice, Payne, is one of the first liberals, in this case, to really emphatically stress, no, private property is not a natural institution. It doesn't appear in the state of nature. It is very much a social institution. And this is extremely important because Payne is going to say, look, once we recognize that it is a social institution, those who have a lot of property, in this case, the rich,

owe an enormous debt to society for the retention of their property and the only way that they can pay this debt is through allowing their wealth to be very, very heavily taxed and redistributed to the poor, to women, to children. So pain in this respect is for proto-welfare state that was extremely generous by 18th century standards. So here we have a very clear example

of an early liberal, revolutionary liberal, pain who recognizes the historicity and the sociality. property. And of course, all the other liberal thinkers that I'm going to talk about in my book would stress very much the same. Yeah. Did you, are you aware of any relationship between Marks and pain? Like, did Marx ever reflect on pain or write about him as far as you can tell? Because I can't remember any instance in which he did, but it seems like he would at some point. But, you know, that's a great question. I don't know. I never saw Marx refer to anything by pain. It would seem to me that if he was going to do that, it would probably be in his journalism. So,

I've been meaning to pick up that Payne collection of articles that Marx wrote for the Tribune. Maybe there'd be something in there because, you know, that's aimed at an American audience and it's supposed to be a bit more accessible and Payne was nothing if not accessible. But, yeah, I couldn't tell you. Certainly, I'm not sure if Marx would have liked Payne. Probably would have liked his revolutionary instincts, not necessarily as theorizing. Right. But, you know, pain probably would have been okay with Merck's, right?

You know, as a lot of commentators on Payne's point out, Pains, every instinct was egalitarian, and he probably would have found a lot to admire Marx because they shared that kind of inclination. Exactly. And I've always said, I wish I could see a post-Marx pain. Like, Marx, or pain that had been introduced to the works of Marx, I think he would have, you know, taken it up. I think, you know, he's operating in the 1700s. So the shift is, you know, away from monarchical feudalism and towards liberalism. And so he was a revolutionary in that context. But, you know, he was even to the significantly to the left of every other sort of major liberalism. thinker of his time. He was used by the founding fathers for his amazing rhetorical and inspirational style, but after he was an abolitionist and sort of advocated for this sort of proto, social democracy before that was even a term that existed, he was, and he was sort of disdained by the other founding fathers over time. And famously, when Payne died, only six people, three of whom were black, I believe, because he was an anti, or he was an abolitionist, attended his funeral. So he had kind of, he

was at the height of his popularity and embrace during common sense and during the revolution but then he was a little too radical for the founding fathers he even went over to revolutionary France to sort of help them and or contribute what he could to that revolution but he ended up rubbing you know robespierre and the others in a wrong way and I think you know eventually he was even imprisoned and slated for execution and only by an error on behalf of the of the guards in the prison was he spared his life. They were supposed to be an X on his door, signaling that pain was to be executed in the reign of terror, but it was on the wrong side of the door.

So when they shut it, you couldn't see it from the outside. And that allowed pain to survive long enough to eventually be bailed out and get back to the U.S. I thought that I always loved that story. Oh, that's cool. I did know they were slated to be executed and he managed to avoid it. I didn't know that was the reason. And yeah, that's a lucky fucking break.

But you're absolutely right. you know, enormously underrated thinker and literary stylist, and for that matter, enormously underrated leftist. I'd just want to add to what you said that the kind of ignorance of his contribution is true of a lot of academics as well, even people who work and pay. So there was this longstanding consensus up until quite recently that Payne was a great literary stylist defending a kind of left liberalism, but he wasn't really all that much of an innovative political theorist. And you can always detect in this a kind of undercurrent, not even an undercurrent, but sometimes there's an oak percurrent of snobbery, particularly intellectual and academic snobbery, because pain was for the most part, you know, a self-tutored, yeah, polymacist, came from the lower middle class and taught himself everything you need to know about politics. But I think recently we've started to see people appreciate just how innovative he was in many respects with this argument for the sociality of property, calling for the foundation of the welfare state, or, a social democratic state, like you point out, before that was even a term, really really stressing

the kind of artificiality and historicity of aristocracy against something that all socialists are going to do. So I'm glad that he's starting to have a moment that's long overdue, not just in leftist circles or radical circles, but in academia as well. Definitely. Yeah. And his early abolitionism was another great point in his favor. I think he even, when Thomas Jefferson acquired the Louisiana a purchase from Napoleon, pain was trying to urge Jefferson to make this new territory completely slave-free to abolish slavery in the new territory. So he was ahead of his time in that respect as well. But I just wanted to reiterate one last thing before we move on from pain, which is, I mean, I really encourage people to go read his books where he's tearing apart monarchism.

And, you know, he calls it common sense and he makes it common sense. By the way, he just pillories the entire idea, the entire structure. And I think it's a, it's a, it's a, really useful inspiration for those of us who are trying to do the same thing with capitalism today point out it's utter irrationalism it's common sense to oppose this insane system and pain has always been a sort of rhetorical um and sort of intellectual inspiration when i try to convey critiques of capitalism and i try to make them common sense right they're not highfalut and academic ideas this system is so stupid so irrational on so many levels and to try to to convey that to people and really when that hits as common sense, it is a really powerful

rhetorical tool that convinces people, you know, very routinely if you can make the argument the way Payne made his argument. Yeah, exactly. And he didn't talk down to people either. That's where I think he was really talented at, right? He could take these very complicated theoretical and political arguments and make them sound, commonsensical, and even kind of sparkling and witty. And one of things that I really admired him for, or I really admire him for that we didn't talk about, is how he was admitted to the first great bricker of conservative sensibilities. So if people want a great example of somebody who knows how to just lay the smackdown, even on intelligent and thoughtful conservatives, go read Thomas Paines, The Rights of Man,

Part 1, which is a book-length critique of Edmund Burke, and it just has killer line after killer line after killer line, that really makes a lot of Berg's defense of the Ache regime and aristocracy seem frankly ridiculous. One of my favorite lines in the book is he's like, you know, Burke will sit there and lament the decline of the plumage in society by which he means the, you know, aristocracy and the monarchy. But he has nothing to say about the dying bird, right, by which he means society that has suffered intensely at the hands of the aristocracy. and it's really a very smart observation delivered with unsparing wit

and it tells you a lot about Burke, right? He's somebody who is fascinated by the glitterati of society but the ordinary working people who are suffering under that same glittering aristocracy and we're entitled to better than what the aristocracy wants to give them. That Burke is pretty silent on. So lots of things to commend pain for

and that's why all the reasons he opens up my book. And that critique still so much applies to conservatives and reactionaries in today's world. Descendants of Burke, for sure. Oh, yeah. Think about all those fucking online guys who complain about how, I mean, this is Dinesh D'Souza and his United States of socialism, right? How we don't appreciate all the wonderful things billionaires like Trump have done for us.

If you were a guy who was parking Trump's car, you should be grateful for what he's done because he's the one who's providing you with the job rather than resentful of the fact that he doesn't even bother to tip you when you're doing that. all the same kind of silly Burkean arguments that masquerade under the auspices of populism. And Payne, if he was alive today, boy, boy, would he just be a fantastic tweeter, right? He would be second to none and his ability to just skewer the Jordan Peterson's and the best diseases of the world.

It's a shame he's not, right? Because I can already foresee it, right? Just pissing them all off day in and day out. It would have been really something to see. Pain and Lenin would be great tweeters for sure. Yeah. All right. Well, let's talk about some more of the historical heirs to this tradition of liberal socialism. We talked about pain. Can you talk a little bit about Mill, Wallstonecroft? And I have another person I want to touch on after you cover those two. Sure, absolutely. So, Mary Wollstonecraft is the second major antecedent figure to liberal socialism that I talk about. Obviously, she is most famous for her famous book, Vindication of the Rights of Woman. And it deserves to be a classic in feminist theory. And it's important.

to note that her commitment to women's equality overlaps with her commitment to a high degree of economic equality. She sees them in part and parcel of the same struggle, and so would I, and that's theoretically important. But what I talk about in the book a lot more than her feminism, which is pretty well-wong-ground, is her critique of intense inequities of property. So Wollstonecraft in a vindication of the rights of women makes it very clear that, as she puts it, one of the major, if not the major sources of the corruption of virtues is the enormous reverence that society pays towards property. Why? Because when we reverence property, what we do is a tribute to people who often contribute very little to society. And we don't recognize that the people who actually

do contribute a lot to society, mothers, workers, laborers, the people who actually build a lot of stuff around us, all of their needs and all their concerns get ignored. And just like pain she was quite critical of edmund burke for exactly the same kinds of since that pain draws attention to uh so in uh a vindication of the rights of man which is her kind of polemical defense of the french revolution uh she says of burke right that um if there's anything he has a mortal antipathy to reason and if there is anything like argument uh it be found in his entire reflections on the revolution of france uh it boils down to we should reverence the rust antiquity with a kind of

filial appreciation. Basically we should admire the aristocracy not because it's doing anything useful, but because it's been around for a very long time. And just like a side admires his dad for being around for a very long time, we should pay homage to it. And she says why, right? That's completely senseless

in her terms. If the ivy happens to be beautiful and old, maybe routine it. But if it starts to choke out new growth, then nobody should have any kind of problem chopping it up at allowing the new to emerge. So very, very, very critical of the inequities of property, the defense and the aristocracy advanced by aristocrats. And where she advances on pain is when she was

touring around Germany in particular. She also starts to become proto-critical of the emerging kind of bourgeois capitalist class. So she was writing at the kind of outset of the industrial era. She actually compares the capitalist in many German cities to mushrooms and funguses. where they kind of grow fat off of the work of others and they don't pay any kind of attention to how they're growing fat off of the work of others. They just like to sit there and kind of suck in and reap where they don't sew.

So some really fantastic proto-pranacisms of industrial capitalism in a work and the way that, again, this distorts many of our moral virtues. How'd you live longer? Who knows what she would have ended up doing or writing about? I imagine she would have continued very much in this vein. Sadly, she passed away at age 38 due to complications with the pregnancy, so we'll never know. But certainly an author that has a lot more to give.

But in my book, I make the claim that it's with John Stewart Mills, that we have, that we really see the advent of a mature liberal socialism in the sense that Mill is one of the first people to kind of put these two together in a systematically and theoretically satisfying way. Now, Mill is a very complicated thinker with a lot of different phases to his work, So we're not going to be able to summarize all of that here. Just to be very brief, in his autobiography, Mel points out how earlier in his life, he was pretty committed to classical political economy

and its kind of defense of capitalist market relations. In fact, he says in those days when he was young, he had seen little further, quite telling that he uses that expression, than pro-capitalist economics. But later in his life, as he matured and actually thought about it, He said that he was decidedly under the designation of a socialist. And he's critical of some of the more authoritarian versions of socialism that Mill anticipated were starting to emerge. But he says, nonetheless, we look forward to a day when the people who actually do most of the work in society get a proportionate reward for their work.

Now, there are many different dimensions to what he understands by this. But my source for this is mainly Helen McCabe's great book, John Strip Mill's Socialist, if people want to hear a little bit more about what Millsian socialism would look like, you know, systematically, I'd suggest they go there. But just to kind of single out three things, Mill points out in his text on socialism that our society has a lot of things backwards, right? In the sense that we very often reverence the rich because we assume that they work harder and work smarter and are more talented and consequently contribute more to society.

And Mill says this is extremely bizarre because actually a lot of people who wind up for, first off, right, had enormous disadvantages at the start of life that kind of skewed things against them to begin with. But more importantly, Mill says actually, the people who are very poor in our society are almost invariably the ones who do the most important jobs in our society. They're the ones who build the shoers, build the roads, you know, more from the major ranks of the army. build houses, you name it, right? A poor person is the one who's actually constructed the material world that we depend upon around us. And he says, it's extraordinarily odd that the rich people who do far less than the poor are so reverence in our society. And the poor people without whom we wouldn't be able to get by for a single day are so widely disdained. So a proper moral society would inverse this order of respect. The second thing that, and that's kind of about a moral level. The second thing that he is characteristic of Millsian socialism is this commitment to what we might call economic or workplace democracy. So Mill is quite critical of what we might

call command economy versions of socialism because he's deeply concerned that they'll lead to authoritarianism. And I have to add, I think those concerns were borne out over the cast of the course of the 20th century, right? But he says, look, just because we shouldn't be committed to a command economy style of socialism, doesn't mean that we have to abandon the project. What it means is we need to focus on how to democratize the workplace by extending liberal concerns where they haven't gone so far. So in later editions, the principle is a political economy. Mill makes it very clear, as he puts it, that capitalists are pretty much useless in firms. They don't do all that much. And if they do do anything, it's mostly just kind of minor forms of planning. And we don't really

need them. And a mature economy wouldn't do away with them. And I said we just have workers run their firms directly in a relatively democratic way. And they'll think that this will be back official for a lot of different reasons. It'll assure that workers get more of the wealth that they

produce, you know, through their work. Back. Annie also thinks that these forms of workplace democracy will be a lot less domineering than workplaces that are governed by parasitical capitalists who don't really do all that much and yet somehow have convinced themselves that they deserve to get almost everything from that workplace at the end of the day.

And then the third thing, a feature of Millsian socialism that we can bring up is Mill is also committed to a kind of proto-welfare state. McCabe talks about this a lot in a book. So again, I recommend people check it out if they won't want more. But in particular, Mill is very insistent that people should get a roughly equal education, that they should receive certain kind of benefits if they need it because of unemployment argues for kind of a proto public health care system, things like baths and recreational facilities so people can look after themselves. None of this is as robust as I'd want, to be clear. But by 19th century standards, it was expansively generous.

And I think following Liz Anderson, we're alive today, there's no reason to expect that mill wouldn't endorse something like, say, a Nordic style, welfare state, very generous and very expansive. since it's pretty clear that those things work very well to look after the working classes that he cared so much about and they're profoundly consistent with liberal freedoms. Yeah, fascinating stuff. Now, you and I are going to get into a conversation here in a little bit, I think, about the critique of authoritarianism

and, you know, I'm probably much more sympathetic to the Soviet Union and Maoist China and stuff than I think the liberal socialist tradition would be. I want to get to that eventually, and I know some listeners will probably be wanting to hear that back and forth, We will get there, but I just want to get all this out on the table first, and one of the things that I wanted to ask you about is one of the thinkers I wanted to ask you about, which you hear a lot in the history of social contract theory in particular, but in political philosophy more broadly, especially when it's tied to liberalism and the development of something like liberal socialism is a figure like Rousseau. historically Locke is this classical liberal, a forerunner of libertarian thought. Hobbes can be seen as like a forerunner of more authoritarian forms of perhaps capitalism, you know, with his sort of analysis of human nature and the state of nature and what a state is for, et cetera, Leviathan. What does Roos play in the history and the theory of liberal socialism? Because he was certainly a critical thinker in the French Revolution, which could be seen as a much more populist. bottom-up, even left-wing revolution than, you know, the American Revolution or some other

revolutions that occurred during this transition out of monarchy and into liberal capitalism. So what is your take on Rousseau and does he fit in at all with your historical lineage of liberal socialists? Yeah, without a doubt he's an important figure. I want to point out I don't talk about him all that extensively in the book, not because he's unimportant, but just because, to be honest, Rousseau is such a complicated, fascinating. multifaccentated figure that I were entirely able to wrap my head around him. And I would say that a lot of people feel all that way, right? It's also important to note that Rousseau has had

an enormous influence all across the political spectrum, right? Most people tend to view Rousseau as a leftist or proto-leftist, given his critiques of inequality, his arguments for kind of robust participatory democracy, depending on how you read the social contract. But it's also worth noting that Karl Schmidt, the Nazi jurist, was an enormous fan of Rousseau for reasons that we can talk about if you want, but it relates back to this idea that democracy does not actually require that the people vote for their leaders, as long as a leader represents the general will through his dictum. Think about Hitler, you can characterize that society as a kind of Russoian democracy. So in terms of how I think Rousseau anticipates a tradition like liberal socialism,

I would say that there are three big ways, right? The first is that Rousseau is really unique in the history of Western political thought, at least, because he's one of the first figures to develop a non-reactionary critique of what we call bourgeois modernity, right? And this is true, particularly of his two discourses. So earlier critiques of bourgeois modernity were almost invariably reactionary, wanted to return to a kind of old, or more conservative period. Think about people like Robert Filmer, for example, or later

on, people like Joseph de Mastra. And Rousseau is very clear that there is no going back to some reactionary idol. In fact, that might in many cases be worse than the emerging bourgeois epoch. But he's very, very strided about the fact that bourgeois liberalism

has many defects to it, particularly the forms of alienation and resentment that induces in people that make them so unhappy. So he deserves there's enormous acclaim for this real innovative stance that he took with regard to bourgeois modernity. The second thing I think makes Rousseau an important antecedent to liberal socialism is, of course, this critique of inequality as articulated in books like a discourse on the origins of inequality. Now, this is such a rich, speculative book that we don't have time to do

anywhere near injustice here. But one of the things that I think he points out very brilliantly is that you can cry to the cows come home about how a rational person would not be concerned with inequality. They don't want to be concerned with whether or not they themselves were doing better as an individual day in and day out, which is very much in keeping with a kind of neoliberal outlook or a neoliberal understanding of rationality, right? Don't bother comparing yourself to other people. Don't ask yourself how Elon Musk is doing compared to yourself. Just ask yourself, are you richer today than you were yesterday? Right. And one of the things that Rousseau says is, as conservatives always like to point out, this is deeply out of touch with human nature. Human beings are invariably social animals. We make interpersonal comparisons of utility all the time. And the idea that you shouldn't be concerned about inequality, you should only be concerned with how you yourself are doing, even if you took it seriously, it's never going to happen, right? Inequality is always going to have a corrosive effect.

society because that's just the kind of preacher we are, and particularly the kind of preacher we are in a competitive bourgeois society like the one we live in, where there's this mythology that the people who get ahead did so because they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and are just better kind of people. In these kinds of circumstances, the toxic psychological cost of not being a getting ahead is extremely painful for a lot of people. Since bourgeois society insists that if you don't get ahead, it's because you're to use the proper Trumpies, a loser, and you couldn't get ahead. Very few people are willing to tolerate that.

So I think that this understanding of human nature and this recognition that we are social beings to make interpersonal comparisons of utility all the time, very sharp on Rousseau's point. And then the third thing that I think I would stress, and here I want to be a little bit more pass a turn, is this emphasis on how freedom shouldn't just be understood in possessive individualist terms, is do them in whatever it is that you want, whatever you you want without, you know, state interference. Freedom needs to be understood as having an invariably social dimension in the sense that if the powers that be control you or have a relationship or

establish a relationship of domination relative to you, you are not free. And so consequently, freedom must be understood as having an invariably social dimension in the sense that to be a truly free person means to have some say, if not maximal say, in the laws that govern me, because if I don't have maximal say in the laws that govern me, even if I'm more or less left to my devices, I am still under the domination of another person who can take away those freedoms whenever it is that he or she wants. So I think there's recognition of the social or civic dimension of freedom. We might not even call the Republican dimension of freedom is something that we're so really for browns very powerfully in the social contract at other books,

although again, there's ambiguity about the solution that he posits to these problems. I'm not entirely convinced that our Rousseauian commitment to the general will or an idea of the general will is really the root socialist want to go down. But certainly he deserves enormous credit for raising very interesting questions about these kinds of issues. And again, it's a testament to his creativity as a thinker that I'm not entirely sure that everything that he always says fits together. He was just some engine for ideas that came up with original ideas, one after another after another. Can I always is that they're all going to fit together perfectly. Yeah, yeah, fascinating stuff. I have a soft spot for Rousseau for sure. He had a

He had a mystical aspect to his life and personality that I also think is underreported on and very, very interesting. He talks about these sort of mystical, semi-spiritual experiences that he's had on long walks. And like, as if at one point he said so many of his core ideas on a long walk, he had just this almost like seizure-like event where he fell down or sat down underneath the tree, so disoriented and felt like these ideas were downloaded into his consciousness. I don't know, very interesting guy. The general will, the general will aspect, I think, is the source of a lot of his critique because Rousseau, as you alluded to, is sort of seen as a forerunner of not only liberalism, but of fascism and of communism because of this general will idea that he advanced. And you could see, you know, in the French Revolution, if you want to talk about some of the excesses of the French Revolution, you can, interestingly, trace them back to some, you know, core thoughts within Rousseauian thought, which is, which is, which is, which. which is fascinating, and Robespierre and many of the leaders of the French Revolution, had all read Rousseau, and he was a monumental figure and a sort of intellectual inspiration for their whole movement and project. Your point about Carl Schmidt is really interesting.

We have a full episode, me and Allison on Red Menace, which people can go look at on his book, The Concept of the Political. He's a despicable human being, a straight-up Nazi, but an interesting thinker. And one of those thinkers that I think is even generative for those of us on the left who wrestle with. And his friend, enemy distinction is an enduring aspect of his thought, which is still embraced to this day. So I would encourage people to check it out. And the very last thing I'll say on Rousseau before we move on is I had a chance to visit his tomb in Paris. Oh, cool. Yeah, he's buried under the Pantheon, which might be the coolest, most beautiful place I've ever visited.

The Pantheon in Paris is this sort of secular temple to the core thing. thinkers that put, you know, Paris and France on the, on the map as a global inspirer, you know, with all their thinkers and, like, their political leaders, revolutionary leaders, etc. So, yeah, going to Rousseau's tomb and underneath the Pantheon was a crazy experience. If anybody ever finds themselves in Paris, I would highly recommend checking that out. But, yeah, so let's go ahead and keep moving forward, and let's bring this back to Marx now. So I'm very interested in these, the different. between liberal socialism and Marxist socialism. So maybe you could talk a little bit about how Marx

conceived of socialism, what his critiques of liberalism were. And just in general, how Marx might react to the idea of liberal socialism as you've defined it. Yeah, absolutely. So as I mentioned, you know, there's a big chapter on Marx. In the book, there's a co-edited collection coming out that I have with Mary Trejo, Ben Burgess, and a few others called Flowers for Mark. So if people are interested in what I have to say, about Marx. There's a lot of stuff coming soon. But to make it, to make a long story very short, or comparatively short, at the very least, there's this kind of understanding of Marx that pertains in some spaces on the online left,

that holds that he was just a relentless critic of liberalism that's not a nothing of value in it. And I don't think that that's true, right? Again, that's more in common with millennarian socialism that sees socialism as a kind of radical break with Bushwell society and the dialect. ethical approach and historical approach that Marx invariably applied to any subject matter. So throughout all of his work, Marx and Engels applaud the bourgeoisie and liberal ideology as an important advance on, you know, the enchant regime. In fact, it's very telling that Marx often tended to engage or spend a lot of time dialoguing or critiquing liberals rather than conservatives or defenders of the

because he famously described people like Burke or de Mestra as beneath contempt, right? They're not worthy of having a dialogue with, whereas people like Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill were. In terms of the kind of historical role the bourgeoisie and liberal ideology played, again, this advance on feudal society, but he's very critical of the bourgeoisie and liberal thinkers for assuming that liberal principles like freedom for all and equality for all and indeed solidarity for all can actually be realized in an economic context where capitalism is the dominant mode of production. I say dominant, because when Marx wrote, there's still a lot of feudal vestiges around, right? And a very good example of this can be found in his classic essay on the Jewish question,

where he points out how the universal rights of man defended by liberal revolutionaries, particularly in France, can see an extremely egalitarian. and an extremely emancipatory until you realize that one person's right to private property means an awful lot more than, or sorry, rich man's right to private property means a lot more to the rich man than does to the poor man. And also there's this failure to recognize that the rich man's right to own private property invariably imposes certain coercive conditions on the poor men because if the rich man owns a factory where the poor man might end up working and doesn't want to hire them, then this denies the poor man access to a job, to the means of

production, etc., that they might otherwise have if they were in a more emancipatory kind of society, because, of course, bourgeois law and bourgeois right are intended to benefit the rich man rather than the poor man, and what liberal ideology is very good at is including that fact. Now, on the more important question of what the difference between liberal socialism and, say, Marxist or communist socialism would look like, I think that. this is extremely complicated, not at least because, as everybody knows, Marx frankly just did not write very much about what Marx's socialism or Marx's communism would end up looking like. And what he did write arguably contradicts itself at various points. You can especially see contradictions

between how the young Marts envision communism and socialism, how an older, arguably more mature marks envisioned communism or socialism. But I think if you added up everything that he had to say about what the future was going to look like, you probably get 20 odd pages. right, out of a thousand, an Uber that runs thousands and thousands of pages, right? And, you know, this is partly by design. You know, Marx was pretty contemptuous of those who are going to write recipe books for the cookshops of the future, as he put it, right? But, you know, to get to the substance of the question, I think that in an earlier works like the Communist Manifesto, this is a point that Gary Dorian makes, you can see Marx and Angles arguing for something that we might

called democratic centralism, right? The idea that the workers' party, whatever that happens to be, is going to obtain control of the state. It is then going to form a dictatorship of the proletariat. And then gradually, as we move through a period of socialization, there will be no more need for the dictatorship of the proletariat. The party will dissolve itself. The state will wither away and will transition to a full communist society. In later works, like the Civil War in France, and the critique of the Gotha program, we see Marx actually adopt quite a different view of what the future might end up looking at,

looking like, inspired by things like the Paris Commune. There you don't see this kind of relentless emphasis on the importance of the party or the Workers' Party. Instead, you see much more of an emphasis on the importance of things like democratic accountability. So one of the reasons why Marx likes the French Commune is precisely that workers and voters, if you want to call them that,

can very, very quickly repeal anyone they elect to office if they think that they are not working in their interests. And Marx really applauds this because he thinks it has a kind of very near direct democratic aspect to it. But, you know, Marx also insists that if we were to expand the model of the Paris commune more generally, what we'd have is a national assembly in France that would be centered in Paris. It looks a lot like the commune. But there would also be different rural communes all across the country. And they'd be seated a wide degree of autonomy. economy to run their own affairs. And the National Assembly would actually not be all that significant in governing the affairs of these more local communes. Why? Well, Mark says, obviously, anybody who's

committed to socialism and communism has to believe that the people who live in a village or live in a town or live in a province should be the ones who make most of the decisions about how that's governed, especially economically. And that is, of course, not going to happen if we see enormous amounts of power to a national assembly, even a socialist or communist national assembly centered in Paris. So we have a much more democratic, participatory, decentralized vision in the Civil War, France, and the critique of the Gotha program of what Marxist socialism or Marxist communism might look like, although again, this is very much just sketched out very briefly. And I would say 100%, there is no way in which a liberal socialist could support more democratic centralist

visions of communism or socialism that Marx and angles kind of commit themselves to in the Communist Manifesto, right? The dictatorship of the proletariat, so called, centered around one party rule or the workers party or whatever it happens to call, it's just incompatible with liberal socialist. There's more decentralized, hyper-democratic form of Marxism or communist, sorry, communism and socialism that Marx argues for on the Civil War and France on the beginning of the Goth program, you might actually be able to make the case that liberal socialism could be consistent with that. The one difficulty that I have, here I draw on the socialist Irving How, is that Marx is very, very insistent that there

should not be checks on legislative power because he associates this desire to check legislative power with a kind of anti-democratic and anti-majoritarian sentiment that you see in some trans bourgeois thought. Think about somebody like the founding father, James Madison, who insisted we need to put a check on direct democracy because it's going to allow the working classes to have too much control over society. Those are the kind of things that Marx is worried about. And I think it's a legitimate worry, right? There's no doubt that an enormous amount, certainly of American anti-democratic thinking, has a kind of anti-warfing class bias to it. But I do also think that a hyper-direct democracy where a majority is

court of rule in any kind of circumstance is potentially threatening to the rights of, let's say, marginalized communities who might be persecuted by an overweening majority. So even in this later marks, I think there are reasons to push back in a somewhat liberal vein and say, no, no, we need to have checks on legislative authority, whether that would mean kind of Montesquian checks on legislative authority or something different is a conversation that we could end up having. so I said a lot there I'll let you ask a question and maybe we can follow up a little bit okay yeah let's go ahead and kind of get into some of these differences I think you've laid them on the table and the next question is about you know critiques of socialism so we can

just kind of get into perhaps probably you and mine's biggest disagreement here I'm somebody very sympathetic to democratic centralism the vanguard party model revolution as the only real way to to move in the direction of socialism and the dictatorship with the pro proletariat as the manifestation of working class power. Despite, you know, not, I certainly don't think anything's perfect. There's plenty of critiques about any political system, any attempt to build anything is going to have flaws, mistakes, errors, et cetera. So all that aside. And I also want to say up front that there's nothing inherently wrong with the core principles that you've laid out with regards to liberalism, the aspects of liberalism that you want to carry forward, moral equality

of every human being. I would also add, of course, the political equality of every human being, individual freedom. I mean, you know, there's nothing about being a communist that wants to crush people's basic human rights, you know, and solidarity, of course, is crucial to both of our ideas. Now, when we're talking about critiques of authoritarian socialism, and this is nothing new to you, nothing that I'm going to say is going to be brand new to you because you have thought and wrestled with these critiques, I think we just have a good faith disagreement here. But it really boils down to revolutionary strategy. If we both want socialism, right, we both want a more democratic society, a society in which

exploitation is eradicated, then the next question becomes, as Lenin said, what is to be done, how do we get there, what works and what doesn't? And so there are certain aspects of the revolutionary strategy found in Leninism and Maoism and these other forms of Marxism that are anathema to certain aspects of liberalism. And some of those are sort of necessitated by the realities of trying to move towards socialism in a global system that is utterly hostile to it and, importantly, in an imperial system that will militarily and economically do everything it can to undermine and sabotage that project, which is why socialist states have had to take certain defensive postures in the past and why the state took on a lot of power. that would be sort of in opposition to your idea of a more decentralized socialist society. Now, if the Soviet Union, if China decided to go in a more decentralized liberal socialist direction, I think it's fair to say that those things would have been crushed. And we would advance on the

sort of Marxist, communist side of things, the example of Chile, as an example of what happens when the best faith, good, well-intentioned, socialist people try to advance their cause through the democratic system and even win democratically and then are immediately met with the global capitalist imperialist system and that system is utterly demolished. A yende is murdered and I fail to see how taking that strategy again would succeed. You know, imagine trying to do that here in the United States. we're going to use the liberal democratic mechanisms of the of the bourgeois state to advance our genuinely popular ideas that that focuses on the vast majority of people in the society working

class regular people that want a better fucking life we're going to start start doing that and what we would immediately see is the entire apparatus do everything they can to prevent the emergence of that movement do everything they can to undermine its political power and momentum use the media apparatus to destroy it. Look what they did to Corbyn. Look what they did to Bernie Sanders. These are tepid, tepid social Democrats. And so, you know, we always have the skepticism of using the Democratic means as the way to get there.

We would love if that were the case. We would prefer to do all of these things peacefully and in that way. But we've seen time and time again those attempts be destroyed. And the last point I'll make and then I'll hand it back over to you to respond is these, experiments, Soviet Union, Maoist, China, Cuba, they're imperfect as you would expect any first experiment to go, right? The transition out of feudalism and towards capitalism was not one of just, you know, progress all the time. There was retreats, there were setbacks, there were reactions, there were distractions of certain, you know, progressive movements, etc. But even in

those instances where, you know, somebody from your position might critique them as overly authoritarian, overly statist. There was still an experimentation with democracy. In Mao is China, there's this top-down and bottom-up dialectic that Mao was consciously playing with to avoid some of the stagnation that he saw in the Soviet Union, where the masses themselves were, and there were excesses, right? There were disasters that resulted from this, but there was also this trust in the masses of handing them power, bombard the headquarters, cultural revolution from the bottom up, as well as a sort of top-down attempt to navigate the problems of trying to implement socialism. And that sort of seems like a necessity.

But even in the early Soviet Russia, there were the Soviets. Of course, we can talk about what happened with them. But there were these genuine attempts to expand democracy in ways that bourgeois society would never allow that I think are often overlooked by critics of quote-unquote authoritarian socialism. So I put those on the table and then I hand it over to you and you can take that in any way you want. Sure. Well, look, there's a lot to be said here, and I don't think that will exhaust the parameters of this discussion now. But I want to make it very clear again that my book is a retrieval of liberal socialism because I think it's a viable and worthwhile political theoretical tradition, and for the matter of viable and worthwhile practical political tradition. But it is not a defense of liberal socialism as it existed as a tradition of thought up until the present day. And one of the reasons I've want to be very clear. It's not a full defense of it. It's precisely because I think that liberal socialist political theorists have always had a much more difficult time of understanding power, to put it very simply, than say Marxists have, right? People like John Strip Mill or John Rawls,

or for that matter, even more contemporary liberal socialist like Axel Honath, I think have very morally inspiring visions about the kind of social form that we'd want to enact. But in terms of the barriers to getting there, the association between capitalism, imperialism, and the creation of bourgeois ideologies, there's very little to be said about those things in most of liberal socialist thoughts. So the kind of liberal socialism that I would eventually want to see that I'm working on producing is going to be a lot marked more Marxist than when you find in John Sturt Mel or John Rawls, precisely because I think that a practical and plausible liberal socialism has to address these problems of power

in a way that previous liberal socialist thinkers didn't. So I just want to acknowledge the importance of what you're getting at and say that, you know, I'm working on it, to put it really simply. On the more substantive points, I think that it's important to note that liberalism, despite what some liberals might say, is not an anti-revolutionary philosophy, right? In fact, you can make a pretty compelling argument that the first authentically revolutionary thinker, certainly in Western history, is John Locke, right? Or for that matter, Jacques-Rousseau, who you mentioned before, right? So it's liberals who, in many ways, introduced this idea of a revolutionary overturning of the previous Osham regime and its

replacement with a new order that Marx and many socialists just take up over the 19th century. And to the extent that liberals today have forgotten their own revolutionary heritage, And for that matter, the fact that the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and Asian Revolution happened, I think that that's the consequence of what Samuel Moyne, who's a huge influence on the book, calls the prestige of Cold War liberalism in the latter half of the 20th century. So Moyne wrote a fantastic book, liberalism against itself. I encourage everyone to read it. If there's any justice in the world, it's all more copies than the Bible. But what he points out is that if you were to go into the early 20th century, most liberals would appreciate it that they have They had a revolutionary heritage and many important liberals who are working quite hard to try to find elements of value in the socialist tradition, which is one of the reasons you start to see liberal socialist thought really begin to burgeon at the beginning of the 20th century. But then, in Moines telling, partly in response to the rise of fascism and partly in response, of course, the Soviet Union, Cold War liberals instead obscure these relationships between liberalism and the left. downplay the revolutionary qualities of thinkers like Locke, and for that matter, the revolutionary history of countries like America or France. And instead, they internalize a lot of conservative arguments articulated by people like Burke and move liberalism pretty firmly to the right

of where it would have been at the beginning of the 20th century. And sometimes you can see really practical instantiations of this. So, for instance, anybody who thinks grade 10 history will think that the Nazis were defeated on D-Day, right? The fact that a left liberal like FDR aligned with the Soviet Union to bring down Nazism and that it was actually the Soviets who did about 70% of the fighting against the Nazis, none of that is something that's really foreground in our teaching of history. And that's partly a consequence of the prestige and spread of this Cold War liberal and for that matter also reactionary kind of outlooks.

So I think that in some ways when I'm calling for as for liberals to, once more acknowledge this revolutionary quality to their own creed, precisely because liberalism was that it's most effective and its most inspiring when it had this kind of revolutionary and radical dimension. I was calling for a more egalitarian society that was genuinely committed to liberty, equality and fraternity for all, rather than what Cold War liberals actually came to argue for, which is basically, this is good enough, this neoliberal epoch that we live in. It's not good enough. And I think that we've recognized today that when liberals are not ambitious about trying to reform society for the better, that is what opens the door to authoritarian, like Trump, not efforts to try to implement things like economic democracy. So the cold little liberals like Hayek, for example, or Popper, were just wrong about this. If liberals don't offer people something better than neoliberalism were to use Moist's term, unlikely to see our creed survive into the 21st century and survival isn't good enough. So now to kind of pivot to talking about the difference between what I imagine a liberal socialist regime and the Soviet Union or Maoist China would look like, look, you know, the closest approximation to a liberal socialist society that I put forward in my book, no surprise of the Nordic social democracies, right? Now, I know many socialists are critical of Nordic social democracy, and I have my own criticism of them for not quite far enough. But it's important to note that even this achievement,

was not acquired, or won, excuse me, by mere reformism, right? A lot of people don't know that if you're to go back to the 19th century, Norway and Sweden and Denmark were some of the most unequal societies in the world. In fact, Mary Wollstonecraft, who toured many of them, pointed out quite consistently just to kind of echo back to what I was talking about before. And it was actually radical militancy on the part of the working class, especially industrial labors and agrarian laborers, that eventually brought about what's called the Great Compact

in the Nordal Social Democracies where Capital agreed at nightpoint to cede enormous powers to workers parties, labor movements, et cetera, et cetera. So even this, what I think is quite a respectable achievement, has to be won by militant agitation because, as you know, Capital and elites are never going to cede anything willingly.

And I think that liberals, again, need to appreciate that, including liberal socialists. Now, on the point about the Soviet Union and Maoist China, here you and I simply disagree in our evaluation of these experiments, as we call them. I appreciate the fact that, again, the Tsarist regime or the Shanghai-Shek regime were monstrous and needed to go. And if, you know, we were transported back in the middle of the 20th century, I would absolutely say that revolutionary force was entitled to overthrow them. But it's very hard for me to have a great deal of sympathy for Stalinism or Maoism. Islam, both because of their enormously anti-democratic qualities and also just because of the disasters that they ended up producing, which are associated to my mind with these anti-democratic

qualities. So Stalin, you know, his policies led to the starvation of millions of people in Ukraine. You might say, well, that was a mistake. But my pushback against this would be, look, many people apologize for British imperialism by saying things like the Great Bengal famine. was a mistake that Churchill didn't really mean to bring about that kind of outcome. And my response to people who apologize for the Great Bengal famine and British imperialism is even if Churchill didn't intend to bring this about, that's still on him. And I'd say the same about the Ukrainian famine and Stalin or, of course, the Great Chinese famine and Mao.

So it's just very hard for me to have a lot of sympathy for these kinds of movements, even if I can understand the social conditions that brought about. these attempts to revolutionarily change things. So, yeah, one response to that would be Winston Churchill famine was obviously in the context of a broader colonialism on a subjected country, whereas in the Soviet Union and in Mao's China, you would have to, I mean, if you want to take the route that they had some intentions in this, that they would do that to what amounts to their own country, their own people, undermining their own ability to move forward, to feed their people, etc. there could be bad policies that lead to terrible things, but it's their own people. Like the Ukraine is part of the broader Soviet Union and the famine in China hurts Chinese people and hurts the Chinese economy and the ability to move forward, whereas in the colonial context of British colonialism, these are subjected people seen as less human and there was much more

of a willingness to just let massive amounts of people die. And so, you know, the whole thing about the famines in the Soviet Union and in China, China, is your argument that they were intentional or they were, they were unintentional products of bad policy that ended up causing tragedy, but they were in no way intended by the leaders of the Soviet Union or China? Sure. I would say probably more the latter, right? I mean, there is some evidence to suggest that, obviously, you know, Stout wanted the Kulaks to be wiped down as a class. probably didn't want all the Ukrainians to die associated with that. But again, I think that one of the reasons for the advent of these mass famines is the fact that these are fundamentally anti-democratic regimes at their very core. And this is problematic in certain foundational ways.

So an important figure who I've said in some of my other books is Amar Chesan. Some of your listeners might be familiar with him. He's a Nobel Prize winning economist. It's actually done quite a bit. to elevate the prestige of Marx and what I call mainstream liberal economics. But he won his Nobel Prize because he points out that the best way for your society to avoid famine is to be a democracy. Now, this might seem strange, but Sen makes the point, very Marxist's point, that look, we've entered into a world where absolute scarcity, for the most part, is a thing of the past, right? We live in a world and stay characterized by relative scarcity of things like food resources in the sense that there is enough food for everyone to have a decent caloric intake every day.

But there's not so much food that, you know, we can just pluck, you know, chickens from a tree or something like that or, you know, get apples from the air. And he points out that given these conditions of relative scarcity, it's a political decision, whether to allow famine to occur or not, both the international. political decision and domestic political decision. And democracies do a much better job out of warning famine, precisely because democratic leaders, there are mechanisms built in that require them to be accountable to the people that elect them. And generally speaking, if you want to win an election, you're not going to allow millions of your own people to starve because the people who survive are probably going to vote you very handily out of office, right? So he points out that there's never been a modern democratic society that has experienced a widespread famine. And this,

course, bears on the Chinese and Soviet examples, where whether or not you think that the famines were brought about intentionally or by happenstance, the fact is it's hard if we take the send line to argue that they would have occurred, had a process of democratization occurred. And the fact that one didn't occur when it should have, it's just something I cannot forget. I mean, that's a fair, that's a fair sort of critique of, you know, wanting these systems to be more democratic. I would point out historically, both China and czarist Russia come from millennia with little to know democratic traditions at all. And so trying to build up any sort of democratic institutions, processes systems, which both of these countries did try to do in really

advanced ways and in sometimes really successful ways, even if they were, you know, temporary at certain points. There was an attempt, but they're coming out of millennia of, you know, emperors and czars. And, you know, there's no tradition of democracy whatsoever. So to build that from the ground up is very hard. I totally believe those famines were completely unintentional. They could have been the result of subpar policy for sure, and perhaps a more robust democracy would have prevented some of those things. But it's also, I think, historically kind of unfair to assume that they could build democracy from nothing with no democratic culture and do it in radical time. What those societies were able to do, that the West was not

able to do was to go through a developmental process very, very quickly and to go from, in Russia's case, you know, a backward, you know, feudal society with serfs and shit. And in China's situation, you know, a backward peasant society to industrialized superpowers in without committing genocide and without the institution of slavery like the West took advantage of. And in a much shorter period of time. And that process of developing into an industrial economy is always and everywhere, a brutal process. There is no example of large-scale societies moving out of monarchical feudalism towards industrial capitalism without great whores. And that's not to say those whores are okay. That's not to dehumanize the people that lost their lives in those

world historical transitions. But there is a certain sense of like understanding that this is part and parcel of a brutal process and these societies were doing their best and I think to to defend them is just to say that these were not intentional these are not evil people they could have had better systems they were kind of starting from scratch they had very little to go off very little precedent and they were doing their best and and these these tragedies did absolutely occur but I don't think that you could put lay them at the feet of the system overall and but I do take your point about democracy and I wish that they were more democratic and that leads to another aspect of this which is, you know, without it. If I could just add one thing to what you're saying. So look,

I agree with what you said about this contrast with the Western powers and the fact that industrialization everywhere has been a brutal process. So I have very little inclination to offer any kind of defenses of Soviet authoritarianism or Maoist authoritarianism about the biggest thigleaf that I could offer is that Western media very little, very rarely talks about the essential role that both countries played in defeating the Axis powers in the Second World War, right? So again, if you were to brought it up in a Western context like I was, you probably hear that, you know, America and Canada and Britain defeated Nazi Germany. Again, not true. Post-1941, 70% of Axis forces were located on the Eastern Front. So it was the Soviets

that stopped the Holocaust and did most of the job of defeating Hitler. and we owe the Soviet Union an enormous debt for that, if nothing else. And the same thing was true, of course, in China, right? Most of the Imperial Japanese Army was located, the IJA, excuse me, in China, and for that matter, nationalist Chinese played an essential role in defeating them, also something that is not appreciated, right? I just do not think that acknowledging that these important contributions means we need to exonerate those regimes of the many bad things

that they ended up doing. And one way that I think that we can move past this conversation is by pointing out exactly what you did, which is that oftentimes liberals and the right ring liberals, excuse me, and conservatives will try to point to Soviet Union and point to Mao's China as a reason to be skeptical of any kind of socialism. Now, there are some good reasons to look at these examples and to draw lessons from them. But I think that we can very easily turn that conversation around, and say, look, no liberal has a problem with signing off on, let's go back to the earlier thinker, the philosophy of John Locke as an exemplar of liberal philosophy. But very few people will talk about how Locke's philosophy was taken up by Andrew Jackson, Tomlin's Jefferson,

William Burnett, the governor of California, and uses a justification for the mass genocide of the indigenous peoples of North America, often exonerating it. by saying, look, these people aren't contributing anything. They're at an underdeveloped level of civilization. And we all know that history is about winners and losers, and they just happen to be the losers at this point. And these are not minor genocides, to be clear. The latest estimate that I saw is that as a result of European colonization of North America and South America, about 95 million people, perhaps more, ended up dying. 95 is on the low end of estimates I've seen, which makes it far and away the largest genocide to have ever been committed on Earth, right?

So if we are going to talk about redeeming liberalism and indeed European or Western civilization from these crimes, then I don't see why it is that liberals or conservatives have any problems with saying, look, there are socialist regimes that have made serious mistakes in the past, but that is no reason to not inquire into the value that socialism brings and to try to build upon those failures and to build something better. Yeah, I appreciate that. And I, you know, I am sympathetic to your line of argumentation. We definitely need to be still critical of these experiments of those formations, pull out what's good, what's useful, and discard what's not, learn from the mistakes, et cetera. And I think, you know, you and I would totally agree with that. The very last thing I would say, what is Beckett say, you know, fail, fail, again, fail better. Exactly.

She's a favorite line, right? I've always liked that one. Me too, absolutely. I totally agree with that. We'll move on. I just want to say for people that want to dive into those. sort of issues in particular. We have a multi-part series on the last 250 years of Chinese history with Professor Ken Hammond in which in one of those episodes we cover the famine in pretty

great detail. And you know, you can at least hear that line of argumentation if you're interested in that. And then my friends over at Prol's Pod are doing a full series on Stalin. They're just coming out now. And they cover the Ukrainian famine in great detail as well. So just to hear that perspective and you can make up your own mind ultimately about what was the ultimate causes of those genuine tragedies. But let's go ahead and move on going forward. My question to you is about how liberal socialism is different. I mean, you're talking about the Nordic countries, which are just sort of social democracies. So is liberal socialism just the same as social democracy? Is it a form of social democracy? Would you say it's more of a form of

democratic socialism insofar as you can, you know, articulate a difference between social democracy and democratic socialism, perhaps the overall vision and the horizon of where they want to go is the difference, even though the mechanism is the same. I'm just kind of wondering your thoughts of on that, where liberal socialism falls on that, that genuine spectrum, general spectrum. Yeah, great. And I'm so happy to hear you call it a spectrum, right? I think that sometimes socialist and liberals, for that matter, can take a kind of analytically rigid, approach to these categories, kind of insisting that you're either one thing or the other, right? Actually, the more dialectical approach to social forums is precisely to say that there's a

continuum, right? As you know, Hegel wants put it, you know, at a certain point, enough quantitative change leads to qualitative change, although at that point is, who knows, right? So, you know, you can tinker around with economic democratization enough. Eventually you'll get something like a robust socialism, even though it's hard to say when that occurs. So in terms of the Nordic democracy question, I think I'd like to just bracket that for one second to talk a little bit about what I think the core principles of liberal socialism are. Is that okay for just one second? Please. Okay, wonderful. So in my book, I argue that there are three core principles that all liberal socialists, regardless of their variation. And it's quite a diverse tradition, as I hope I make clear, what they commit themselves to. So the first commitment of liberal socialism or liberal socialist, excuse me, is to what I call methodological collectivism and normative individualism. Now, these are complicated to parents, but what I just mean is that liberal socialists are methodological collectivists. in holding that all individuals are in society or born in society as the meme goes and are dependent upon society and indeed other people to ensure their full flourishing, right? And this is a point

that has been adopted, going all the way back to Aristotle, who as everyone knows was a huge influence of people like Marx, right, this methodological collectivism and methodological understanding of human flourishing and society. But liberal socialists are also normative individualists. the sense that ultimately liberal socialists believe that good things happen to individual people, individual material people, I should say. And we shouldn't be concerned with the good of reified abstractions like, say, the nation, right? Or our ethno-nationalist people. Because very often, when we appeal to the normative importance of these collective concepts, like the nation, it's used to justify various reactionary kind of positions. Think about all the stuff that's going

on about protecting, you know, American citizens from foreign nationals right now, right? I think that that's a very abstract way of looking at the world that does a disservice to the real suffering of people coming from, say, Haiti, who might need our help here in here and now. The second principle that I argue liberal socialists are committed to, and here I'm really inspired by CB. McPherson, is liberal socialists reject the possessive individualist acquisitive ethic for a developmental ethic. And what I mean by this is, classical liberals and neol liberals, for that matter, tend to see the good of people in terms of acquisition, right, or the pursuit of self-interest. So, you know, if you work hard and you make a lot of money, your life will go better off than if it did it, right?

And this is an idea that goes all the way back to Locke, right, where Locke said the earth belongs to the industrious and the rational and these infinitely acquisitive kind of creatures who labor to better themselves. Now, liberal socialists invariably reject that ethic for a developmental ethic that is consistent, I would say, with Marx, and for that matter, with Aristotle, and arguing that actually what human beings really want is to develop or find our human capacities, right? Marx makes this point, for instance, very expressly in the last volume of capital, where he says that in a transition to socialism and communism, for the first time in human history, the development of human powers or human capacities will be an end in itself rather than just a means of helping people develop certain capacities that are conducive to the needs of capital, or for that matter, any exploitative economic system. And the developmental ethic basically says, obviously people want to have enough to live off of, but really they get a lot more joy in their life by becoming good at things and being empowered to become good at things, whether that's learning how to play the trombone

or becoming a better cook or getting really jacked at the gym. Right. These are the kinds of things that human beings take joy and pleasure and above all else, what Rawls calls an Aristotelian principle. And a good society to be one that foregrounds the development of these human powers as an end of itself, rather than creating the spaces for people to become individually, sorry, infinitely acquisitive consumers and producers. And then the last principle I argue liberal socialist should be committed to is again, they should be committed to liberal democracy and liberal democratic institutions. And the fierce protection of certain kinds of individual rights, exempting, of course, the expansive right to private property you see in classical liberal socialism. And what makes liberal socialism distinct, of course, is the argument that liberal socialists put forward that we need to extend liberal democratic principles into the economy and into the family, in particular through democratizing the workplace and really advocating for the importance of workers' rights in the workplace. A lot of the cutting edge of liberal socialist theory takes up this question. very centrally right now. Again, people like Helen McKay, point out of mention before, Elizabeth Anderson in her book, hijacked in private government, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So those are the three principles that I think define liberal socialism as a theoretical tradition. How does this relate back to the Nordic states? Well, I'd argue that they're a pretty good approximation and they're more radical phases, I should say, particularly in the 1970s in Sweden, of what liberal socialists

want to achieve, but they certainly don't go far enough, right? Now, it's important to appreciate that in the 1970s, there was this push by people like Olaf Palm, for example, to move Nordic social democracy in a more comprehensively socialist direction. In fact, Olaf Palm famously said that his intention was for Sweden to become more socialist than those countries that call themselves socialist. And one of the ways that he hoped to do this was by implementing what's now called the Midner plan, which would essentially give workers' stocks in the companies that they work of or worked at year after year after year until workers' unions became the primary shareholders in every company. And in this way, we'd get worker ownership with the means of production

without revolutionary agitation. But it said in this case, facilitated by the social democratic state, led in this case by a labor party or a workers party. So that kind of 1970s radical approach to social democracy in a Nordic context would be something more in line with the ambitions. I think liberal socialist should project into the future. But obviously, I think that Nordic social democracy right now has demonstrated that has very serious problems to it. And any liberal socialist would need to be critical of those kinds of failures. In particular, this very statist approach that you see in some phases of Nordic social democracy, that focuses exclusively on redistribution rather than the democratization of economic power.

That's proven to be a very serious Achilles heel that even social democratic reform can trip up on. We can talk a little bit more about that if you want. But liberal socialism takes inspiration from Nordic social democracy while realizing that needs to be pushed to its more radical conclusions. Yeah, I think that's interesting. And I think that would put you more on the Democratic socialist side of that wager because I think social democracy is ultimately okay with capitalism as such is okay with the private ownership of the means of production. And then, yeah, on the back end is interested in the redistribution of wealth to help the lower classes, whereas Democratic socialism has the same mechanism by which, you know, we're using the mechanisms of

bourgeois liberal democracy to advance our politics, but with a more robust vision of actually transitioning into socialism proper, which is sort of more in line with, you know, your rejection of exploitative private property ownership and a move into, you know, the actual extending democracy into the realm of the economy and the workplace, which is much more socialistic. So I think that does put you firmly on the democratic side of the social democracy versus democratic socialist spectrum. The questions I would have as a follow-up are twofold, which is, I think you said earlier, that you still hold open. You would prefer to use the basic democratic mechanisms of society to advance your politics, but you're open to revolution as a

possibility, particularly perhaps in the face of anti-democratic, anti-socialist and reactionary opposition, which will not necessarily stop itself to the democratic, limit itself to democratic mechanisms of opposition, but time and time again, we'll go above and beyond the law, will use violence, we'll use all matter of subterfuge to destroy even a liberal socialist program. So the possibility of revolution and the second part of this question is whether or not you genuinely embrace dialectical and historical materialism within Marxism. Okay. Well, the second part of that is a very big question. So I'll just start off kind of small and I'll move big, right? So it's underappreciated the extent to which liberal socialists and their

antecedents are committed to at least various kinds of revolutionary agitation. And that's simply a historical fact, right? So I'll just give, well, two examples, right? One that we've already brought up is Thomas Payne, right? Obviously, Thomas Payne, for an antecedent to liberal socialist. And nobody could say that Thomas Payne was not a revolutionary, right? It's supported the American Revolution, was very, very good for the French Revolution, at least until it imprisoned him, right? And that's somebody who I think we can draw inspiration from. Another figure who is probably a lot less known to your audience than Payne is Carlos, sorry, Carlo Roselli. So Parlor Rosselli wrote a fantastic book called Liberal Socialism, right? And he was an Italian, part of various socialist movements and activism in Italy. And he was imprisoned by the fascist regime where he ended up writing this book. And it's a primarily criticism of fascism, some of the more deterministic forms of Marxism. But it ends with a call for a kind of liberal socialism that he thinks will be an antidote to fascist oppression. And once Rosselli ended up getting out in jail, he ended up going to fight in the Spanish.

civil war for pretty obvious reasons against Francoism. I tragically died quite young. So this is really the only book of his that we have. That's of any substance. But I think that this integral link, Raselli, draws, between being a liberal socialist and being anti-fascist and anti-authoritarian. And he should really stick by that, even up to including militant action against fascism is something that we can all draw inspiration from, especially today.

Right. So liberal socialists are not afraid of militant action. where it's necessary in order to fight against reactionary forms of authoritarianism, whether we're talking about pain in the OSHA regime or Resselli and the kind of surging fascism of a Naziism that was present in Europe over in the early part of the 20th century through the mid part of the 20th century. In terms of my relationship to dialectical materialism and historical materialism, oh my boy, is that a big question, right?

That is a huge question. The cheat answer that I would say is, I am not committed to dialectical materialism as a kind of ontological outlook that can explain all the features of reality. And what I mean by this is I think that there are ontological entities. This is a very academic point, so I bought it. I do think there are ontological entities out there that aren't necessarily material. Number would be a good example, right? I think that we can ascribe number a kind of anthological status, but it's clearly not a material ontological status.

I would also follow the great moral philosopher Derek Carfit and saying moral principles have a kind of ontological status that emerges from human processes of human cognition, rather like laws of logic or laws of mathematics. And, you know, they are binding upon us for this reason. So they have an ontological quality to them. But clearly moral principles aren't material in any kind of meaningful sense of the world, even though they can have a material influence if we abide by them. So that's a more complicated philosophical debate. I would actually argue. Contra, some of the more reductive Marxists out there, that Marx himself is not committed to a materialist ontology the whole way down. I think it's very clear that he leaves space for things like cognition, more principles and sector, et cetera, in his philosophy. But that's maybe so that we can debate at our time. In terms of historical materialism,

there I'm much more comfortable with saying, yes, I do identify with historical materialism as a kind of social account of how our contemporary political, political economic system emerge, with the qualification that any kind of commitment I would make to historical materialism would be a non-deterministic form of historical materialism. I am a historical materialist in the infamous last instance where I think that it is crucial to understand that the basis of our society are things like roads, are things like pipes, are things like buildings and houses, etc., etc., all the stuff that we actually

inhabit and they're necessary to preserving our biological existence. All obits are constructed by workers, right, who are nearly given enough credit for producing the social world around us. But I also think that things like laws, important, ideology, important religion, extremely important in terms of framing people's outlook on the world. And even if we don't accord it the same social priority as we do, the forces of production and, you know, the literal material world around us a sufficiently holistic historical materialism needs to take account of how it is that these things are influential in our way of apprehending social reality. Yeah, I like that answer, and I genuinely, you know, pretty much agree with that. I like the non-determinism within your

historical materialism. I think it's important. And your criticism of ontological materialism is something I'm sort of very sympathetic to, you know, there's a way in which dialectical materialism is applied, you know, strictly to the evolution of societies over time. And then you can expand out and have a sort of dialectical materialist analysis of the cosmos as such, you know, getting into ontology. And I have this idea of like a, you know, I'm sort of interested in monism philosophically and ontologically. And I'm interested in this idea of dialectical monism, which doesn't make a commitment to materialism in the final instance of the structure of the cosmos, which is a different sort of argument than the constitution of human societies and

their evolution over time. So we're talking about nature, you know, in the biggest sense. um i like this idea of dialectical monism um sort of the ideas of spinoza being brought in here and and try to develop this ontological idea because i think dialectics is really important and really crucial and it is a feature it seems to be a feature um of of phenomena writ large um but yeah the question of materialism then comes in and that is something that we just don't have ontologically universally we don't have certainty on in any regard and um it does seem like there's an aspect in which not everything is ultimately reducible to material. And so, you know, the philosophical position of monism has always ultimately, you know, been more alluring to me. Do you,

do you share that, that view? Absolutely. I mean, maybe not the bit about monism. I'd have to hear more about your explanation of that before I'd say, yeah, or nay. But I completely agree that there's nothing wrong with saying that you are a historical materialist or even that you foreground the material base of society as an explanatory mechanism or heuristic for understanding society as a whole, and be committed to autological pluralism or even a different ontology. Now, I think that a lot of the things that do actually exist are matter, bluntly, right? Although we then also have to ask ourselves what matter is, right? Something that, you know, has always acquired into all that deeply in certain philosophical traditions,

as Noam Chosky points out, right? But I think that if we were to just say that all that exists is matter, even matter in motion, that would make it very, very difficult to explain things like cognition, for example. Maybe not if you're Daniel Dennett, but I don't really agree with his position on things like mine. I also think it would be very difficult to explain the existence of things, again, like number, difficult to explain the existence of things like more principles, all of which I think do clearly have a kind of ontological status that warrants explanation. And if that means that we have to push against a reductive ontology that holds that all that

exists as matter, then I'm very comfortable saying, well, so be it. So much the worse for a reductive materialism then. And again, I'd say on my reading of Marx, and I appreciate that this is a very complicated question, I think it's very hard to make the case that Marks was a reductive materialist, even a reductive dialectical materialist. He's very sensitive to the fact that abstraction, for example, is necessary in order to apprehend society scientifically, right? And I don't think that you could have the kind of appreciation for a Hegelian abstraction that Marx does, unless you were described an importance to cognition as an important force in our relationship to reality or even an important feature of reality.

But again, that's a much bigger question, what is reality, right? we can get into here in a conversation about liberal socialism. If people want to know my own views about this, I'm something of an ontological pluralist, right? I do believe in matter, but I also believe in the existence of, again, immaterial, things like number and moral principle, although I wouldn't describe a kind of platonic ontological status to things like number and moral principle, all the existence to heaven or something. I want us called sometimes a quadocognitive moral or I suppose mathematical realist. I think that number and moral principle emerge from processes of human cognition like, you know, logical analysis. And they have an independent status over and above our thinking because I can't just will myself to think that 2 plus 2 equals 5. But nonetheless, you know, you don't get this position that 2 plus 2 equals 4 unless you have cognitive beings who come into the world who start to contemplate.

and envision things like a number. Yeah, very interesting. Yeah, the last thing I'll say, we'll move on from this needlessly philosophical part of discussion is I do agree. It's not fun, though. It is very fun. Your pluralist idea is very in line with my monist idea,

which is non-reductionism, which is just ontologically, I'm not comfortable saying that everything is ultimately reducible to material, and monism would allow for the existence of, let's say, forms of consciousness that perhaps aren't reducible to material. I mean, obviously, in our instance, our consciousness has a material substrate, right?

It seems to be dependent on the functioning of a nervous system to generate consciousness. But I'm agnostic on the question of whether or not there could be a way in which consciousness exists, perhaps as a law, a force in the cosmos like gravity or maybe like time that is not reducible to material, but instantiate itself through material reality. So, again, it's an interesting philosophical discussion that we can maybe have a different time. I mean, if people are interested, you can, you know, look this stuff up and take that route. But, yeah, just interesting, interesting thoughts. Oh, yeah, no, 100%, right?

I mean, it's about a lot of times since I've dove into things like philosophy of mind. But this is a very pressing debate in that field, right? Certainly was back when I was inquiring into it, right? Is mind something separate from the brain or does mind emerge from the brain? And these are important questions to ask beyond, you know, all these political ruminations. since as is often expressed, we need a user's guide to our own brain, which means asking these kinds of questions. So definitely worth people's talking about they're interested in these kinds of more speculative questions. For sure. Well, let's go ahead and move into this question, which is

towards the end of the outline, is this vision of the future, like where liberal socialism ultimately leads. Because I ask this specifically within the Marxist conception of communism, because in the Marxist tradition, as you know very well, we see socialism as the transition out of capitalism and importantly toward communism. Without the ideal of transcending class society in its entirety, Marxism and perhaps socialism loses its ultimate vision for humanity's future. And I deeply believe in this idea that humanity, if it survives, will eventually mature out of what Albert Einstein called this predatory phase of human development in which he meant class society in all of its forms, ancient slave societies, monarchical feudal societies, liberal capitalist societies,

in which the great mass of humanity is broken up between the rich, the poor, and some spectrum in between. I fundamentally reject that idea, and I think a fully mature species will eventually transcend that immature, you know, breaking up of humanity into these various classes. And I always say, like, if aliens were able to reach us and come visit us, they would be so advanced that they would be communist in the sense that they would not have class society. And this also, you know, harkens back to the Star Trek idea of transcending class society. And this is like a core, a core commitment that I have that I do believe that we should or we will ultimately transcend this immature phase of our development. So what do you make of this? Where does

communism or this part of communism fit into your vision, if at all? And then what, what's the ultimate horizon of your version of liberal socialism? Well, I certainly would hope for the day where class society was fundamentally transcended, right? Where I would differ from, let's call orthodox or deterministic Marxism is on the supposition that this was inevitable or history is just going to lead us to this point. So Professor Ben Burgess and myself have a new essay collection coming out for L.A. Cohen. Some of your listeners might be familiar with him. as one of the founders of analytical Marxism, so-called. Now, I'm very critical of Cohen, including in this essay collection,

for a lot of different reasons, including some Marxist reasons. Don't have to get into that. But one of the points that he does make, which I agree with, especially in the later additions to Karl Marx's theory of history, a defense, his classic book, is that there was this longstanding supposition on the part of Socialists up until about the end of the 20th century that we didn't really need to think too hard

about what a classist. society would look like, theoretically at least, because orthodox Marxism had shown that the logic of history dictated that the class of society had come was inbound. All we really needed to do was keep at it, wait for the contradictions of capitalism to kind of work themselves out, and eventually we'd get to a society where the free development of each was a condition for the free development of all. And we all interacted with one and other, according to the principle of, you know, from each according to his ability or her ability to each according to her needs. I don't think that it's very easy to buy in to these deterministic versions of Orthodox Marxism

any longer. For that matter, I don't think Marx's ever bought into that deterministic vision either, although we can back at that conversation. I think it's very clear if we are going to agitate for a classless society. We owe it to the working class and indeed any marginalized class to explain how it is that that is going to make their life materially better and how even in the transitional period towards that they're going to be better off. I think that this is based on years of political activism. One of the reasons leftists sometimes get tripped up is in promising that a better future is going to come and you just have to put your faith in it, which I think is kind of an echo of this deterministic orthodox Marxism that just supposes a transcendent or the transcendence

of class society is inbound. And a lot of people, including the workers class, are very skeptical of that. We need to point out things like, look, when we introduce things like universal public health care, when we radically expand the possibility of forming a union in your workplace, when we introduce things like more robust daycare and mat leave and vacation leave, et cetera, et cetera, all these things are going to make you and your family better off very clearly almost right away. And that's the way that will build working class and indeed middle class support for the kind of outlook that I think could eventually transcend class society. Although, again, I don't think that there's any guarantee of that.

One of the things that my study of the political right has convinced me of is that you should never assume, and many leftists, I think, do assume secretly deep down, that everybody really wants equality or wants solidarity. Many people in our society are quite comfortable, indeed, deeply attached to the idea that they are clearly superior to everyone else in the globe, and they will fight very hard to retain the privileges and status that they associate with that sense of superiority, even against some movements that might actually make them materially better off because this is so integral to their sense of well-being and their kind of egocentric desire to elevate themselves above other people. Yeah, no, that's absolutely true. I agree with

your nondeterminism. Nothing is inevitable. Nothing is guaranteed. I certainly come from that part of the Marxist tradition that believes that it's in the struggle, it's in the fight, it's in the organizing that we can possibly get there. It's not going to just be a natural product of the evolution of the forces of production or whatever. So I think it's important that we do sort of reject that determinism and that inevitableism while still holding on to this ideal and taking into consideration that you're right, that we should think very deeply about the fact that a lot of people outright and consciously reject the idea that all humans are equal or should be equal.

They find it repulsive. They'll fight violently against it. You know, this is what some people might call an authoritarianism on the communist left is something that I'm open to is. the authoritarian sort of imposition on those forms of political formation and movements that genuinely believe themselves to be innately superior to other human beings. And those ideas are just not allowed to take the form of political organization and formation in an ideal socialist society, in my opinion.

And I'm open to quote unquote authoritarian means to repressing those things because I think that is a repulsive idea. They think the idea that we're all equal human beings as a repression. impulsive idea. I think the idea that they think that they're inherently superior to other people is an absolutely unacceptable and repulsive ideal. But you're right. That's a huge part of humanity. There's an element of ideology there, an element of superstructure after millennia of class society that inculcates that idea. And then the history of colonialism of the West makes Western, you know, chauvinist in particular very open to that idea, which you can see historically the roots of that superiority complex very clearly. And we should oppose that absolutely. But, yeah, I appreciate, you know, your breakdown of that idea, and I think it's interesting. But ultimately, I do have this belief that the ultimate growing up of our species will include the transcendence of these ultimately arbitrary class distinctions. Yeah, I'd absolutely agree. And so what every liberal socialist of note, right?

It's interesting that you use this term maturation. So the two key figures in the liberal socialism book are Marx and Rawls, right? Now, marks and roles differ on a lot of fundamental points. No question about it, right? But what they do both agree on is the fact that our modern egalitarian ideas constitute an ethical advance on what came before, precisely because we don't buy into this idea any longer, that just because you are arbitrarily born on one side of a state line, and I was arbitrarily born on the other, that somehow I am morally superior to you or I don't have any kind of. of moral obligation to you, because that just seems to be extremely specious and to reify what are actually very contingent kinds of differences. Now, why it is that we haven't pushed this higher kind of ethical ID deal more strongly than we have, here's where I think

actually Marx has a kind of leg up on people like Marks, or sorry, Rawls, because he's aware of the fact that ideology plays a role. He's aware of the fact that the economic powers that don't want to instantiate a more democratic society and they're going to do everything that they can to fight against it. But what unites liberalism with socialism or Rawls with Marx or anyone else, I think is a lot more powerful than what separates them. And really the goal of the book is to bring these great Enlightenment traditions together and to show them that they have a lot more common with one another, certainly than they do with anything like the political right. And in a context where we're confronting very virulent forms of right-wing authoritarianism

and even fascism, it is extremely important for us to put aside our differences and prevent somebody like Donald Trump or Modi from gaining more power than they absolutely have. So there's one thing liberals and socialists should agree about is that that would be a disaster for everyone involved. Yeah, absolutely. And it's in that anti-fascist, anti-reactionary authoritarian movement that we all certainly unite and have a shared interest in combating and ultimately defeating nationally and globally. Absolutely. All right, my friend, well, I've taken up too much of your time. I know there's some questions still left on the table here. What I'll allow you to do in lieu of touching on all the questions is just give you one more opportunity to say any last

words you would like about the book, any points that we might have missed, your ultimate goal with the book, anything you want to say before we let listeners know where they can find your book online. Sure. So I guess the last thing that I'd say is, again, this is a book of retrieval, not necessarily a defense. I keep coming back to that because what I really want the book to do is invite people to think about what might be necessary in order to rejuvenate liberal socialism if they find the ideal of such a rejuvenation attractive. And that's going to mean learning from the past by retrieving this tradition, but also acknowledging that liberal social in the past failed for a lot of different reasons. But there's no doubt about it, right? We do

not live in a liberal socialist society because liberal socialist failed to construct one. And if we are going to rejuvenate the tradition, that means asking ourselves why it failed. And I think taking that question seriously is going to meet incorporating a lot more more mercantist insights into a liberal socialist tradition that desperately needs them. So I'm hoping one day to write a more full-throated defense of liberal socialism. That'll probably constitute a kind of fusion of Marx and Rawlsian ideas. That's in the future. But anyone else who is interested in this, I invite and encourage you to take a stab at this yourself. See if you think that there's something where liberal socialism worth saving, if there is something worth saving, how would you go about defending in and making

sure that we don't repeat the mistakes in the past? Nice. Yeah, you know, I really, really do appreciate your depth of your knowledge, your good faith and your intellectual rigor, and your willingness to disagree with me and to go back and forth in like an open, friendly way. I really do appreciate that aspect about you. I'm always a fan of your work. Everything you put out is food for thought. Even those areas where we disagree, I take your critiques and your ideas fully on board and wrestle with them in good faith. And I know you do the same. And your respect and your knowledge of Marx is something that I always admire about you as well, even in those areas where you and I might disagree. There's no doubt that you have a deep, an abiding, not only knowledge of Marx,

but a genuine love of him and the Marxist tradition in general. And so that's something I always really appreciate about your work. So thank you so much for coming on, being so generous with your time, as always. I'm sure, without a shadow of a doubt, you'll be back on the show at some point in the hopefully near future. But before I let you go, can you just let listeners know where they can find you, your book, and the rest of your work online? Yeah, thanks, man. It was a great conversation, as always. So if people want, they can email me.

It's Matt McManus 300 at gmail.com. Probably the best way to get attention with me if you want to have, like that, or about us a conversation. Or you can add me on Twitter. It's awesome to me Twitter, not X, fuck Elon. It's at Matt Paul Prof. Just add me. You can chat about whatever it is you want there.

Cool, man. Thanks again for coming on, and I'll talk to you soon. Yeah, take care, buddy. Peace. Six or seven times, pretty sure it happens and keeps happening. Texting while I drive, or skating on a ride, or a little heart attack while I've been sleeping in. And every time I die, my consciousness it flies

to another Sean Bonnet within the multiverse. And everything is fine, time moves in a straight line, can't even find the time to sing this second verse. Is this the best of all possible world? Is the best of all worlds even possible? Is this the best of all possible worlds? Is the best of all worlds even possible? Rockstar living when I was writing on the tour bus across country.

Bogart and everything like Humphrey sitting in the race car with one seat. The fame that took me to the highest stand than 7,000 feet In the air, the black Elvis they couldn't the beat Sunset Boulevard in California When I signed with Columbia and Sony records For one million, I was in hold, I did Doctor Doom, I was so reckless Number one on the checklist

Spinning around in the Dodge Hellcat for breakfast The industry didn't know the symmetrics My shop is free so electric To the day I'm the best in the merry reflected Is the world made of plastic? plastic is the city buried in dreams is the world made of plastic because that's the way it seems if you see me in a haze and my eyes are thick with glaze know that I am just off visiting another place where no one ever dies inland grabs and genocides

And every little child has a smiling face Where bellies are all fed All of states and fresh baked bread And families are snuggled up in warm and comfy bed Where the hum of drones is gone And there's never been a bomb And the lineage and history can't be erased Is this the best of all possible world

Is the best of all world's even possible? Is this the best of all possible world? Is the best of all worlds even possible? Is the best of all worlds even possible? Is this the best of all possible world? Is the best of all worlds even possible? Is this the best of all possible world? Is the best of all worlds even possible?

Is the best of all worlds even possible? Pretty sure I die six or seven times Pretty sure that it keeps happening.