Rev Left Radio - Rev Left Radio in Dialogue with Liberalism

Episode Date: March 13, 2018

Matthew Downhour, a liberal historian, joins Brett on Rev Left Radio to have a wide-ranging discussion/debate on the differences between liberalism and leftism.    Reach us at: [e-mail] follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio Follow us on FB at "Revolutionary Left Radio" Intro Music by The String-Bo String Duo. You can listen and support their music here: https://tsbsd.bandcamp.com/track/red-black This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, and the Omaha GDC. Check out Nebraska IWW's new website here: https://www.nebraskaiww.org

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Welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host and comrade, Brett O'Shea. And today we have on Matthew Downhour, and we're going to sort of have a discussion slash friendly debate slash dialogue about the differences between leftism and liberalism. Before we get into how this show is going to be formatted, Matthew, would you like to say,

little bit about yourself and your background so people can get to know who you are? Sure. Yeah. So I'm Matthew Downauer, like you said. And I actually studied international relations, but I've been working in education for the past, I guess, seven years. The last four of them have been focused on history and economics. So that's where I've kind of come to. Politically, I do identify as a liberal. And I think that that's one of the important things that I try to talk to my students about, does that mean? What are the origins of that term? How does that, those ideas affect our day to day in the world that we live in? And so excited to talk about that with you as well. Yeah, and that's one thing. It's the reason I had Matthew on. We met in a debate for him a few years

ago. And Matthew was one of those liberals that is actually aware of liberalism and aware of what the sort of antagonisms to liberalism are. A lot of times people that are liberals will just kind of passively absorb liberalism and just be liberals kind of instinctively because they've been, you know, sort of culturally conditioned to be liberals. And they don't understand the critiques coming from the left. And so they're often bamboozled by it. They're often confused by it. Matthew is not one of those liberals. Matthew was very aware of the sort of Marxist, anarchist, left-wing critiques of liberalism. And so I thought it'd be really interesting to have him on the show. We can have this discussion. It will help clarify distinctions between

liberalism and leftism, I think a lot of younger people, younger comrades coming up, they might have a hard time differentiating between what exactly is liberalism and leftism. And there's not a lot of good sources out in the world that really make that distinction extremely clear. And I know as I was sort of politically developing, that was a question that I always had, but I never had good answers to. And only kind of through the process of years of learning did I sort of acquire the distinctions there. So I just think this is going to be an interesting show. I am excited to put this out and I'm excited for people to learn from it. Now, this is going to be different in format than the other revolutionary left radio episodes. So I want to get a couple things clear up front. The first thing is, me and Matthew are going to be talking about the broad philosophical categories of liberalism and leftism. We're not going to get into the individual tendencies on each side. So with liberalism, broadly It covers what we know in the U.S. colloquially as liberalism, the Democratic Party, progressives, etc. It covers, you know, sort of center-right conservatism.

It covers libertarianism, and it even covers social democracy that's manifested in things like the Green Party. And then leftism, all the tendencies of Marxism and Maoism and anarchism, you know, those are all the sorts of categories on the left, but I'm just going to come at it from a broadly left perspective. I don't want the conversation to be so narrow as, you know, an anarchist arguing a libertarian or a Marxist arguing a conservative. We're going to try to keep this as broad as we possibly can. We also want to argue for core principles, so we don't necessarily want to get mired in individual, individual historical figures or individual instances in history, although those things might come up in passing. the focus of the show is really trying to flesh out what the core differences are in the broad philosophies. The third thing is we really want this to, although it's going to be debate-ish in the sense that

we have different opposing views and we're going to disagree, we want this to be as friendly as possible, more of a friendly dialogue than a confrontational debate. Because I think when the debate gets too confrontational, people stop listening to the other side and they just pick their own side and sort of batten down the hatches. It puts people in a defensive posture where I want this conversation to be open and I want people that are not liberals to learn from the liberal perspective and people that aren't leftist to learn from the leftist perspective. And the best way to do that is to keep a discussion oriented and to not, you know, get

too heated about it. This episode might run a little longer than usual because we have to cover a lot of ground. I mean, we're talking hundreds of years of history here. We'll try to keep it to about an hour and a half. That's our goal. And then as we get into the questions and part of the question segments is listener questions I got off Twitter. Our sound engineer, David, will be reading the questions throughout the episode. So I don't, I think he's been in one or two other episodes, but you'll finally hear him be a part of this one as well.

So I thought a good place to start, since we're going to get into this discussion right now, I thought a good place to start is Thomas Payne. Thomas Payne, for those who don't know, was sort of one of the quote unquote founding followers. others, although I have lots of problems with that phrase in and of itself. Thomas Payne was the author of the pamphlet common sense, which was sort of served as the rhetorical and propagandistic justification for the American Revolution. That sold over, I think, 150,000 copies, which at that time was the best-selling

pamphlet in world history. I think that's correct. That sounds like great. Yeah, but Payne was a unique figure because he was both a main propagandist of, the ultimately bourgeois revolution that was the American Revolution, but he was also, in my opinion, and I think the sort of consensus is he was by far the most radical of the, quote, unquote, founding fathers. And because of his radical nature, he was ultimately, you know, ostracized by the rest of the U.S. founding fathers and was sort of sidelined in history. And you often don't hear about him. He doesn't get taught, talked about in school other than as the author of common sense. And so I think, thought as a figure that both represents aspects of liberalism and sort of a proto-leftist figure in American history, I thought it'd be interesting to start there. So Matthew, how do you think about Thomas Payne? And do you think he's a figure that liberals specifically can draw on?

I think absolutely. I think that Thomas Payne is one of those, one of those figures who is definitely well ahead of his time, even if you read him now, some of his later works like Agrarian Justice, I think you'll find that he really has a lot to say even about the economy and the society we have today. I think liberals really should look at Thomas Payne as somebody who dedicated himself to a liberal cause, the American Revolution, and then was ultimately disappointed with the outcome and kept fighting through whatever means at his disposal to correct the blind spots that probably even he had had, you know, as a member of the American Revolution. So that sort of self-correction, I think, that you see in pain is important. Yeah, absolutely. I think of him as a figure that increasingly radicalized.

I think when he first started off with common sense, he did this really methodical take-down of hereditary monarchies, and he really gave a profound and robust defense in common people's language, mind you, that really spoke to why the monarchy was an absurd concept in general. But as the revolution developed, he went over and also took part in agitating the British working class. And he took part sort of tangentially in the French Revolution. And so as he lived through these sort of world historical revolutions, he became more and more radical. And where in the beginning of his sort of career, writing common sense, he would talk about how so much of the inequality that we experienced goes back to the aristocrats.

sort of advantages in the social system, but as he became more and more familiar with revolution and saw how the sort of bourgeois revolutions were progressing, he started to draw more and more lines in the sand regarding private property itself. And ultimately, in Rights of Man Part 2 and in agrarian justice, he starts explicitly talking about private property as a primary manifester of inequality and so I think this is I mean Thomas Payne was born in 1737

and he died if I'm correct in 1809 and Carl Marx wasn't born until 1818 so Payne did all this work and died a decade before Carl Marx was even born so he was ahead of his time in a lot of ways I'm going to get into some like actual quotes of his before we move on to the actual discussion. Did you have anything more that you wanted to say before I do that, though, on Thomas Payne?

Yeah, I just think one of the things I think we talked about also about Thomas Payne. I think actually our mutual admiration for him was kind of the stimulus behind this conversation. Yeah. I think that also his, even as he moves into this view of private property, in a gruelian justice, he does a couple really important things. He manages to fundamentally question John Locke's idea. of the basis of property rights, while at the same time, I think, holding to a lot of the other ideas that Locke had about liberty. So he's able to question the right to property,

at least the right to property created by societal effort, without casting aside the idea of individual liberty or that people have an illegal rights. I think that's a really important point. I think that one that you and I both agree is one of the most interesting things about pain. Yeah, I mean, I totally agree with that. He was a very interesting figure now. Before we move on, I want to read this little, like a little paragraph from an article in Jacobin titled reading Thomas Payne from the left. I really recommend it because it lays out the history of pain, and it really gives a clear historical account of who Payne was and how he politically developed. But this is sort of the final passage of that article, and I think it really lays out Payne's direct connection to Karl Marx's politics.

and you can view pain as a sort of predecessor to Marx, not directly, because Marx himself never read Payne that we know of, but in the movements that Payne inspired went on to form the foundation that Marx ultimately used to sort of create his analytical project of how capitalism worked and what the critiques were. So I'm just going to read this really quick, and then we can get into the overall discussion. But the article reads, the connection between Thomas Payne's writing and Karl Marx's politics, isn't simply one of an abstract resemblance. Most prominent socialist theorists of Marx's day

were consistently apolitical or anti-political. Some, like Robert Owen and Charles Fourier, advocated the withdrawal from society into utopian communes. Others, like Henry Day St. Simon, offer technocratic schemes to existing governments, and still others like Pierre Joseph Proudhon, called for working-class mutual aid societies and total abstinence from politics.

Against these socialists, Marx advanced a revolutionary politics inspired by the political activities of two national trade union movements, the Chartists in Britain and the Working Men's Movement in the United States, both of which were thoroughly painite or inspired by pain. So that kind of gives that sort of connection. And then just really quick, the article ends with some interesting facts. In the northern United States, property qualifications were removed from the right to vote in the late 1820s as part of the Jacksonian Reform Movement. Taking advantage of their newly won suffrage, Payne-inspired train unionists in Philadelphia founded the Working Men's Party, aka the Workies, in 1828, the first Labor Party in world history

to compete against what they saw as two parties of capital. One of the leaders of the New York Working Men's Party, Thomas Skidmore, the next year wrote Rights of Man to Property, which is a playoff Thomas Payne's Rights of Man. This worky leader seems to be the first figure in history to voice something. close to the exclamation expropriate the expropriators and did so and attract whose title is a deliberate nod to pains's right of man extending pains egalitarianism skidmore argued for full citizenship and voting rights for every resident of new york including blacks american indians and women and an equal share of property for everyone so that just sort of you know lays out the

radical tradition that pain helped inspire in the americas and in britain the sort of working class politics that his work really set in motion in mainstream political discourse. So again, this is just an interesting starting point. This is something that liberals and leftists can both draw from, and I really recommend people go learn more about pain because I think he's a really interesting figure. But now for the overall discussion, we're going to get into it, and we're going to first talk about first basic principles of leftism and liberalism, and for that we're going to bring in our wonderful sound engineer, David, who is rarely heard on this.

podcast, but is an integral part of it to ask the questions. David, go ahead. All right. So our first topic is class conflict versus social harmony. The question is, what are the differences between liberals and leftists regarding their competing conceptions of society, and what is the liberal position? Great. So I think one of the big differences is they, firstly, they both agree that conflict is a thing that exists. And I think that liberals certainly have this reputation as being fundamentally always in favor of incremental reform. I think that when we talked about Thomas Payne, also even going back to John Locke, that's not the case, right? Liberalism has itself justified revolutions in the past.

Liberals have led revolutions. But I think one of the fundamental differences is that the goal of liberalism is to overcome social disharmony, right? that this class conflict isn't necessarily going to be solvable only through revolution, but rather that there are ways in which a society can be set up where there remain groups that have different interests and groups that may be competing for power, but that that society can nonetheless be ultimately harmonious or beneficial for all of its members, that not every source of conflict has to be resolved in a revolutionary fashion, or that conflict has to be entirely eliminated

to accomplish a sort of social harmony that everyone can benefit from. Yeah, and from the sort of left-wing perspective, I know Matthew touched on it, but we view social harmony in the context of bourgeois democracies and bourgeois electoralism to be utterly impossible

because it might sound nice in theory, but in reality, any class society is going to give rise to internal antagonisms that although they can at times be lowered and dealt with temporarily through certain sorts of reforms and certain parliamentary mechanisms, the underlying conflict between classes will remain. And so as long as we have a capitalist class, the bourgeoisie, they're going to be fighting for certain things that directly conflict with the interests of the proletariat of the working class. and that can be contained inside of liberal democracies for a time

but eventually those conflicts will arise to the surface and the only way to ultimately get rid of this cycle of sort of conflict is to get rid of class society in and of itself and that cannot be done it is our contention through bourgeois electoralism but must be done through a revolutionary rupture with bourgeois class society in its entirety yeah i mean i think that's i think that's an entirely accurate uh description of of the difference do you think that um liberal democracy can continue like do you see liberal democracy sort of

eternally unfolding and sort of compensating for the conflict or do you see at some point something has to give i mean how do you kind of think about how society is going to unfold from this point forward um i think that certainly there's going to have to be major changes i think you again, I think you and I have talked about this, about automation and the way that the fundamental idea of labor is probably going to have to change. I think, however, that yes, a sort of liberal democracy is going to, some liberal democracies will certainly show the sort of adaptability to deal with that. One of the critical ways they're going to have to do that, I think, is identify those resources that do remain fundamentally scarce. I think land and natural resources fall in this

category, and they're going to have to find a way that they can more evenly distribute or more fairly distribute those resources, but I don't believe that that necessitates getting rid of capital in the broader sense of produced objects or produced items that aid in production. And so I think that's one of the differences. That that can still exist, I think, of investment and return on investment can still in a liberal democracy and a liberal democracy will be adaptable enough to deal with that so long as it accurately identifies those things that remains and will have to be more carefully

stewarded by the society as a whole. Yeah, so I agree. I think we both agree that some sort of alteration and how we distribute land and resources is going to have to take place. My only contention would be that the moment you start trying to redistribute wealth and resources, you're going to bump up against the interests, the inherent interest of the ruling class, and they will either fight against it explicitly or allow certain mechanisms, like let's say a universal basic income, to be implemented ultimately to preserve their own sort of status atop the hierarchy of wealth and power. And I think the closer you get to actually threatening that hierarchy, the more violently they're going to clamp down and refuse compromise.

And so I think that the basic premise of us needing to distribute wealth will in and of itself be the thing that provokes the sort of bourgeois backlash and makes ultimate progress sort of impossible. Yeah, I think for that, your fundamental question is, is it a zero-sum game, right? Is the pie getting bigger? Because we're going to see, or we should see in any way, wealth continuing to increase as we continue to develop technology and capital stock, it seems to me anyway that there should be a fundamental zone where both sides can be benefited here, right? Whereas a violent conflict is going to lead to the destruction of a great deal of wealth and therefore a great deal of standard of living, at least in the short term.

I think that it's possible for enough people to see that, to recognize that, even the people who currently control the means of production or these scarce resources, that I think it's possible for them to recognize that precarious situation or the possibility of that and find a solution wherein they're able to advance the freedom and the standard of everybody without that fundamental rupture. Yeah, I mean, I think you're absolutely right that when push comes to shove, the sort of, you know, lords of capital are going to have to pick aside. And oftentimes to spare themselves and to spare the inevitable violence that will come, they will make concessions and they will, you know, abide by progressive reforms for a time. But I guess this will have to be dictated ultimately through just sort of letting the train roll on and see what happens. We're not going to be able to solve this today. But I think this fundamental concern about how society is structured and how progress is made, cuts to the core of the

division between liberals and leftists. And so I think it's important to talk about. But let's go ahead and move on because we have a lot of ground to cover. I'm going to be saying that a lot today. We can't touch every single issue on every single question. But Dave, you want to ask the next question? The second topic is the source of inalienable rights. The question is, where do your rights come from and which rights do you value most of all? All right. So I guess I'll start off this one. I'll let Matthew articulate the liberal position, but from the left, at least, you know, there may be some leftists that sort of disagree with me on this, but I think one of the big sorts of lies and deceits or just confusions that stem from our society as a whole

is that rights come from the creator or that rights come from nature and that we can work out by the examination of God or nature, how those rights come about, and what rights we have and which what rights we don't. I fundamentally think, in my personal opinion, that rights only come through struggle, that rights aren't ontologically real things. They don't exist as a part of the universe. They don't exist as a part of the natural world, but they are social constructs that come through struggle. Every right that we've gained in history, human beings have gained in history, came through not some God coming out of the clouds and handing it down or like flowers, rights blossoming up out of the dirt, but rather through protracted, continual fights against oppression. I also think that there is a difference between negative rights and positive rights.

On the liberal side, there's a libertarian instinct that wants to define rights as what you can't do, you know? You can't infringe on my property, you can't infringe on my right to bear arms, you can't infringe. on my right to free speech. Now, those can be construed as positive rights if you frame them differently semantically, but ultimately I think they're about what governments can't infringe on, whereas I would put forward a more robust set of positive rights, a right to health care, a right to food, a right to housing, a right to education, employment, an equal right to the natural environment.

But these rights will not be given to us by anyone. These rights will have to be fought for, and then they'll have to be defended, because rights don't just get obtained and then they're good forever. Rights are obtained and then they're attacked and then people have to defend those rights. Even in the context of the civil rights, you see constant attacks ever since that was formulated into law from the reactionary right, trying to undermine and strip people of those rights. Even the Supreme Court made decisions that impacted what we thought were long-held and inalienable rights that we gained in the 60s.

But it just goes to show that, in my opinion, under Bougoir democracy, bureaucracy, bourgeois electoralism, rights are never fully secure. They must always constantly be defended. Matthew? Yeah, I mean, I think that your last point there is really important for anyone to remember, right, that there is a continual tendency for some humans to strive to dominate others. And even if it's only a small portion of the population, there's always going to be people who, for whatever reasons, are going to be attempting to infringe on the rights of others

for their own benefit, whether realizing it or not even, regardless of how they decide to justify it. I think that when we're talking about rights, it's certainly the case that physically my power to exercise my rights comes from what you're talking about, a struggle that previous people have had, right? Any rights that anyone is currently exercising do. But I think you can also think about guidelines

for rights that people ought to have. And in those rights, I do think, there is, as you put it, an ontological basis for, or at least we can take that as a posture that when we're determining what rights we should attempt to struggle for. I think that some of the ways that those rights have been put forth, obviously there's John Locke's famous life, liberty, and property. I think maybe a more nuanced and better take on that is what Thomas Payne says in agrarian justice, where he basically says, look at the rights that people have before they live in a dense community like we live in. He says, look at people

who are living in clannish or tribal communities. Look at the rights that they have, right? They don't need to work for anybody. They will never be rich in the sense of Europeans, but they also don't suffer the same kind of poverty. And he says, look at the rights that they hold. If what we've imposed as a society is taking away those rights, then are we better off? And so his kind of guideline, and I mean, we can argue forever about are there metaphysical rights, but his guidelines for the rights that a society should have are that a society, people, individuals in a society, should maintain those rights that they were able to exercise prior to a lot of the developments that we would refer to as civilization, right? Living in cities and living in a more

densely populated society. And basically, I think pain is a little bit of a skeptic about even that very idea of civilization, right? Basically, his best justification for it is it allows us to support higher population densities. It allows more people to be alive, right? We couldn't support our population if we went back to that mode of living, although we would almost certainly be, in his opinion, freer. So I think that if we're looking at rights, we can see, at least from the point of view of the society, people had before this, before the advent of our current population densities, a lot of rights and freedoms. And to the extent that it's possible, the rights that we have should be attempting to, to reinstate those, give people the same

level of freedom to the extent that it's possible that they would have had if they weren't living in this kind of society. But then in the social context, rights will conflict with other rights and would it be your position that the sort of liberal state's job is to mediate between those different sorts of conflicts of rights? It is. Yes. I would say that that is the job of the liberal state. And another author who I like very much, Leonard Hobhouse, who literally wrote the book on liberalism, the book called liberalism in 1911. His construct is basically you start with those rights that you know will not affect anybody else, right? Those are essentially your rights to conscience. The

things that you believe. And as you go out from there, when it comes to speech, for the most part, your rights to speech don't harm others. But he admits that the possibility that they will. And so that's where the state needs to start to act, to determine which rights are going to, in some sense, where rights must be sacrificed by some in order to guarantee more of the rights for the population as a whole. Right. Now, there's two things I want to touch on before we move on. The first thing I think is topical in this sort of broad societal discussion we're currently having about the rights to free speech in the context of Nazi or neo-Nazi or fascist organizing. Now, we're going to touch on fascism later and go more in depth into it.

And I actually think Matthew has pretty good ideas about fascism. He might not agree with everything we as leftists engage in, but I think he has a good appreciation for the threat of fascism, and it's sort of illiberal nature. but there's a materialist sort of version of how we think about rights. Now, I have no problem saying that in my ideal society, Nazis, neo-Nazis, reactionaries, violent white supremacists, they would have no rights because the right, in my opinion, for regular people to live and operate unmolested by people that want to genocide them and slaughter them or at least intimidate and constantly harass them, the rights of people just to live, trump the rights of Nazis to sort of recruit and organize. So if there is a dictator breadth in an ideal society and you had a Nazi rally marching down the street, I mean, I would take no hesitation to squash that by any means necessary using the full power of the state. And that

makes liberals very uncomfortable. How do you think about the free speech rights of really distasteful or outright genocidal groups like Nazis or even people that you think are fundamentally illiberal like communists? I think that that's a great question. I think that you have to look at it on a couple of different levels. On the one hand, I think there is, for multiple reasons, there is some value to letting people speak as much as they can do so safely. One, because of the principle of it, because we do live in a state where precedence matters, Um, so it is also, it is always dangerous to set a given precedent. Um, right. And, and, and so there is certainly the danger that there, that just because you, you want to shut somebody down, what does that open up this, the current state, um, doing to do others? And of course, we know that the state is always going to see or has basically always seen communism as the bigger threat than fascism, this state, the United States. Um, so that, that's always a danger. I think you also, you also, you also, you also, you also, run into the issue of practicality in that you have to assess when someone is speaking,

are they, to what extent are they helping their cause? To what extent would you be furthering their cause more by attempting to shut them down? And I think in the 21st century, we've seen a lot of examples where it's very difficult to actually shut down the speech of groups in a way that doesn't, that actually weakens them. I think you can look at a lot of different groups in in illiberal governments that have that have almost prospered as a result of this sort of attempts to restrict their speech and and so the almost the longer that they are suppressed in that way the more they this sort of hatred or resentment or whatever builds until the state can't put a lid on it anymore yeah I mean I think that's a very good argument and something

that we should definitely think about. I would just clarify that instead of relying on the bourgeois state to crack down on Nazis and fascists, which we certainly don't expect and we wouldn't even sort of vet them to do, we take it into our own hands by the militants, often violent attacks on fascists whenever they arise because we know the limitations of the state. We know that even if they would do it, there's a lot of problems there, and it would probably create a reaction of, you know, sort of people being sympathetic to the fascist cause or whatever those conditions may be. So we take it upon ourselves to do it. And then the materialist

argument would be if we transition to a socialist state, if we got rid of some of the underlying contradictions and material conditions that capitalism, especially neoliberal late capitalism produces, which ultimately gives rise to fascism, that we take away the material basis for white supremacy and for fascism over time. And so it wouldn't be something that we'd have to constantly be suppressing, though in the first moments of any revolution, the fascists will align with the state and will use brutal violence, as we've seen through history over and over again. The last thing I want to touch on before we move on from the sort of discussion about rights is the fundamental right that I think liberals and leftists ultimately disagree on, and we

can't meet halfway on, which is the right to property, the bourgeois right to property. You said earlier we should start to sketch out our rights based on how they don't, like the ones that don't affect other people to sort of secure a baseline of rights. The right to property from the left wing perspective would be that it ultimately infringes on the rest of our rights to enjoy the wealth and resources of a society and that we're ultimately coerced through the right of some people to own private property to sell our labor for a few dollars an hour to those who have money. So how do you think about the right to property, and do you defend it? Do you think it's important? Yeah, so I would, I think that an important distinction, this is one that the economist that I follow most closely, Henry George, made, is the difference between property in created things and property and uncreated things. His primary example is land. I think that natural resources are probably even a bigger part of that now.

the fundamental difference being if I own a pencil or even if I own a factory those things have been created and I can at least theoretically have exchanged my labor fairly for the labor that went into them there's a very do and this is not

obviously I'm not representing all liberals here but I think it's much more difficult from a liberal perspective to make the same argument about land or the right to oil or copper in a given place and so I think you find a lot of especially early liberal writers really struggle or even become incoherent when they try to justify that.

Herbert Spencer is a good example. John Stuart Mill, the off-sighted liberal, basically couldn't do it. He couldn't give a reason. And so he didn't believe that land could be owned in that way. And then it goes back to what I was saying about Thomas Payne. If you could create a society where nobody had to work, and I think that's where universal basic income comes in, where nobody had to work to, obtain their food, shelter, their medical care, then I think you could, you could reasonably say that

my right to property does not affect your life because you would have the things that you needed to live. You would have your essential freedoms regardless of whether, like what the employment relationship was between us. But I think that, I think that to some extent, leftists are correct in that the current system, because of the way that it divides up the world into owned parcels so that individuals can't simply go and support themselves as they would have been able to. Ultimately, the current system, and the current system, there are real issues with property that liberalism has to work through if they want to maintain a right to at least that property which a person creates with their own labor.

Yeah, if you had to, I mean, I do appreciate that sort of nuanced liberal approach to property. If you had to sort of summarize or highlight what the most staunch liberal defender of property rights would argue what can you just for the listeners sort of summarize what that argument is and what the basic liberal argument for rights to property are certainly so the most the most fundamental argument i think comes from john locke basically if you own your person you own your labor if you own your labor then you own the things that you create with your labor so if i am to do build a hut and make a bow and whatever all of those things then are are my property because i produced them

my labor went into them. And denying me the right to those things, from Locke's perspective, would be denying that I even have the right to my own labor, ergo the right to my own person. So for him and for many liberals, the right to property springs from this right to your individual person. Yeah, it's centered on the autonomous control over your own person. That's really interesting. The implication, of course, the Lockhean implication, which has been codified in.

in U.S. legal code is that starting from those basic premises, it goes all the way up to, hey, I started this company, therefore it's my property, therefore I can do with it what I please, and I can employ wage labor for you to work it, and I can profit off of that property because it's mine, and I made the initial investment, and I created the initial conditions, which gave rise to the factory. In the same way the Lachian subject goes out into nature and puts his labor into the soil and create something that's sort of extrapolated to the modern day conception of owning a business and owning a factory and doing what you will with it. Yes, I think that that's precisely correct.

Absolutely. All right. We're ready to move on to the next question, David, the honorable, David. All right. So the next topic is theory of the liberal state. And our question is, is the U.S. government legitimate? And from where does that legitimacy spring? Yeah. So I think the very idea of legitimacy is an interesting one. Ultimately, the idea of a legitimate state is much more conservative than it is liberal. And in that, at least to my knowledge, legitimacy comes somewhat from the idea of the Treaty of Westphalia and Westphalian sovereignty. But it really picks up speed after the Congress of Vienna and after the failure or defeat of the French Revolution and Metternich's return to conservatism. I think that the liberal view of a

state is that the state is legitimate as long as it's providing what the people have the right to demand of the state. And that again goes, if you're John Locke, back to life, liberty, and property. If you're Thomas Payne, it's substantially broader. And so you have to ask yourself, well, is the government accomplishing these things? If not, in a liberal framework, it basically instantly loses legitimacy. And so if we ask yourself, is the U.S. government legitimate, I would say there's two answers to that. On the one hand, I would say the U.S. government is not accomplishing all of the things that a government needs to do to maintain its legitimacy, or rather it's doing things, I think, especially in the realm of incarceration, that are not in line with what a liberal

state would have to be legitimate. On the other hand, you also have to look at, okay, even if it has its legitimacy has been compromised, is it better than what we can imagine having overthrown that state. And for me, I would say that that is the case, at least in a reasonable time frame 10 to 20 years, the fall, outright fall of the American state would be a disaster for precisely the people who need to benefit most, right? So the very people who are already being harmed would probably be further harmed by a fall in the American state. So I would say that the U.S. government has compromised its legitimacy in a lot of the ways that it treats its citizens. However, I don't think that typical liberal perspective would say that we will we stand a good chance of bettering

ourselves by overthrowing it right yeah i mean i think one of the sort of coming from the marxist perspective especially the threat of the discontinuity of services that would be created by a revolutionary overthrow of the state is what prompts many marxists leninists especially to want to immediately capture said state and sort of create a continuity of services so that the weakest and most vulnerable amongst us are taken care of and they don't lose that grip on what the social, what little social safety net they have

and you can actually use the state as a way to build up that social net and transform the state over time using the state itself as the apparatus through which you can conduct policy and radical transformation. From the anarchist perspective, I think that the state is, and I think there's

liberal manifestations of this view too in libertarianism, that the state is inherently unjust. On the libertarian-liberal side of things, the arguments are that the role of the state is simply to protect property, to defend the homeland, and to create a system of courts and a system of justice that can deal with contracts and crime, et cetera. But beyond that, the libertarian would scoff that the federal government has any right to do anything, and if there's any government at all, it should be broken down to state governments or local governments. On the more left-wing anarchist side, the critique of the state is that it's inherently antithetical to liberty and to freedom and that it always and everywhere abuses the power that it has as the state to crack down on the least and most the least sort of powerful people in it. And over time, any state will sort of get a momentum of its own and develop interests that are above and beyond the interests of the citizenry that it's, supposed to to represent. So I think on the left wing you have you have us coming at two different

angles. The anarchist angle which says it's inherently fucked up and you have to smash the hierarchies of the state which maintains and keeps in place so many other forms of oppression and that once you do that, that the sort of natural ability for humans to self-organize and to take care of their needs will occur. And the Marxist sense of there is a sort of momentum the state has built up and there's people that rely on said state, and so we want to take it over and use it to not only continue those services and protect those people, but to actively defend any revolution that might have come about that gave rise to the destruction of the liberal state in the first place. Yeah, I think that there's, I think there's two things that you said there, one,

one from each perspective, that are very important. Obviously, the continuity of services is paramount, right? We have millions of people who is very survival depends on things that, at least in the current setup only the state is in a position to do. I would say that we can look at Lenin's own history and see the issue there, which is that once you make that rupture from capital, a successful capture of the state in a way that maintains that continuity is very difficult, where even though I think it would be hard to argue that Lenin was a worse leader than Tsar Nicholas, right, he was almost certainly a better leader, more competent, nonetheless, the rupture that occurred there, still disrupted

services in a way that was catastrophic for a lot of the Russian people. So I think you have to be very careful with that. When you seize the state, if you make this rupture, can you actually maintain the services? As a liberal, I'm doubtful. That if there's that sharp rupture, that that actually can be done. I think the anarchists make a really good point, what you're saying about anarchism, that a state does take on a life of its own. And I think that a lot of liberal writing,

especially from the earlier period from the 18th century, really focuses on how do you then reign in that state, right? No matter what the source of the state, these writers recognize that it does take on a life of its own where it's going to try to increase its own power. So there I can see, again, a liberal is not going to say smash the state, get rid of it entirely. However, I think they can definitely sympathize with that point of view.

the state is always going to be taking more power and you need to have not only a constitutional or a institutional framework to push back against that but the citizenry itself needs to be actively engaged in doing that and once they become complacent or once they believe that their institutions are enough that's where they're in real danger right yeah that's really interesting what you said about the russian revolution specifically i would only add a little bit of nuance there and saying that the context in which the Russian Revolution took place was already a sort of deterioration of the state and a deterioration of the legitimacy of that state in the eyes of many of its citizens. And you had, you know, World War I popping off and you had a bunch of other factors coming into play that made it extremely hard for anybody, but especially the Bolsheviks as they came to power and then were immediately met with a civil war and had to take so much of the wealth and resources that the Russian state might have had and put it towards defending. that revolution right off the bat, but that, to your point, might also speak to the inherent

instability of revolution, and even if those other circumstances about war weren't at play, that the sort of revolution immediately calls forth a counter-revolution, and the chaos that that brings, that any war brings, will put in jeopardy the ability for the state to continue to do its services, at least in the short run. So I think that's something worth thinking about on the leftist side for sure. If you're ready to move on to the capitalist section, I'm ready if you are. I'm ready.

All right, David. In the process of answering the first question here, please address the issues of private property, profit, wage labor, and wealth distribution in your answer. Is capitalism inherently exploitative and unjust? I would say it is not inherently so, although the way that it's been practiced is. And it's possible that it's not,

you can't get to capitalism from a point of view that's not exploitative. Over, I think that the idea behind capitalism is essentially that you gain capital by foregoing consumption. The capitalist, to gain that capital chooses not to consume that wealth. All wealth is either consumed or is capital. And so on the one hand, it can make perfect sense that by foregoing consumption, the capitalists think it's in a position to invest. And that investment can benefit both the capitalist, him or herself, and the laborer. If theoretically, the capitalists could use their capital, but less efficiently than a laborer could if they works together. And similarly, if the laborer has the option to work without the capital, but it can be more efficient using that capital,

then that would not be unjust or exploitative for both of them to share the benefits of that combination of capital and labor. The problem ultimately, I think that has always occurred in capitalist societies, is that the labor doesn't have that option. They don't have the option to even survive if they're not working for somebody who owns capital. And because of that initial power imbalance, you immediately run into the potential for exploitation and injustice. But I think inherently, because the combination of capital and labor does create so much more wealth than the capitalist using his capital alone and the laborer working alone, there's a potential for both of them to benefit without either side being exploited. Okay. Yeah, that's actually really interesting. So sort of disconnected from the history because I think everybody that's even somewhat objective will realize that the history of how capital developed and was accumulated has lots of problems. We don't want to get into it right here.

We might touch on it later. But you're saying that if you could start from a clean slate, that what capitalism ultimately does is offer a mutually beneficial situation to both the capitalist and the worker. Yes, I think that it can. Or at least what it does is it provides an incentive for saving or forgoing consumption

and provides a natural reward for that incentive. So it encourages investment. On the other hand, it gives people who do not, people who consume earlier and therefore don't accumulate capital they nonetheless theoretically have the chance to benefit from it. But as you were saying, a lot of the capitalism comes down

to the history really of the enclosure movement and the idea of pushing people off of their land so they have no option but to go and work for capitalists. So as you said, the history of it, I think nobody can look at that and say oh, in that sense the accumulation of capital was just. However, I think it's possible

you could build a society where an individual can be a laborer or they can choose not to labor and nonetheless have their basic needs met. In that position, I think you can correct for that power imbalance and then capitalism need not be exploitative or unjust. Yeah, I've read some sort of liberal or libertarian thinkers that have sort of conceded the point about the history and said that, you know, at least theoretically, if you set all those parameters back to zero and let everybody start again from a fresh slate of equality, that capitalism would be okay. I think my problem with that and the left-wing problem with that is that the very notion

that one person works for another person not only creates a power imbalance, but that the notion of profit that's connected to wage labor means that the person who started that business who forewent consumption in favor of investment, that then they are somehow indefinitely entitled to to extradile,

extract a certain amount of surplus value that the worker creates and put it in their pocket as a return on that initial investment. Now, from the left-wing perspective, we view that as inherently unjust, no matter what the starting point is, because we think it gives rise to a power imbalance between the two people and a sort of exploited, an inherently exploitative relationship whereby one person endlessly profits off of the labor of another person, whereas the correct situation from a left-wing perspective would be that there is no capitalist worker dynamic, but instead, a lot of those same benefits that you talk about, with regards to wealth building could take place in the context of a democratically controlled workplace where the actual laborers who work that service or that production facility or whatever it may be, democratically organize themselves, decide what to do with any profit they bring in and collectively decide where to invest that money, whereas a capitalist at the top making all those decisions not only is unjust and exploitative, but actually a lot of empirical data suggests that

it actually gives rise to a certain inefficiency especially as the capitalist becomes more and more disconnected from what what happens on the ground every day in the factory as it were. Yeah, and I think that I understand that viewpoint. I think that what you're talking about

a sort of worker collective is ultimately if you were to create a situation where the workers could choose to work or not. And so their wages, they had more power in determining their wages. I think you would actually find that that method of organization would be more successful just in general. Another thing you said is the idea of unending exploitation.

And I think, again, that comes down to the difference between capital, which is created, which always is wearing down, right? There's always depreciation on capital, and that which is not land, natural resources, and then monopoly power. And those three things do not depreciate necessarily. And therefore, I think those things are what actually give rise to the majority. of the exploitation that you see in the current system. I see, that's interesting. Yeah, I think Reagan back in the 80s, he weirdly had this line where he talked about worker cooperatives being the sort of natural logic and conclusion of what he would

like to see himself as far as capitalism progressing to a point where workers kind of run their own democratically organized co-ops. I would really encourage people to go look at that quote just because it's so interesting and weird compared to the actual policies that that Reagan put forth, but that's neither here nor there, I guess. If you're ready to move on, David? What is the relationship between capitalism and freedom? All right. Well, I'll go ahead and start this one.

From our perspective, capitalism always and necessarily is an anti-democratic and anti-freedom sort of set up. We can attack this from many different directions. One of the core places of unfreedom is the workplace. Even theoretically, the power and balance between the capitalist and the worker always suggests that the capitalist can dictate how the worker behaves when they walk into the workplace. For all this talk that capitalists like to make about how capitalism is synonymous with freedom, it's quite ironic that at the point of production in the corporation or on the factory floor, there's there's very little to no freedom whatsoever when you walk into a workplace and your employer tells you what to wear tells you when you have to be there tells you when you can leave tells you how long you can take a shit tells you how long you can eat your lunch there's a sort of

endlessly antithetical sort of antagonism towards freedom that that a lot of us chafe under I know me personally I have a lot of and I work a I work a nine to five job I suffer a lot sort of internally and existentially from being oppressed and sort of dominated by the arbitrary and sort of absurd context of the workplace. I don't like having to bow down to other people. I don't like when I walk into the room with my boss, I'm suddenly taking on this double consciousness where I'm aware of myself as a worker and I'm aware of him as my superior and I suddenly have to straighten my spine and sort of like do these little mannerisms and have this sort of internal anxiety because I'm entering into a space where another

ape exists, but that ape happens to have complete control over whether I can continue to feed my family or not. And so I could go on and talk about other ways that capitalism undermines freedom, but I think I'll hand it over to you and let you work with that. No, and I think again what you're identifying is what pain initially, what hobhouse later, both identify. The problem is that your employer determines whether you can feed your family. And I think any well-developed, nuanced liberal thinker runs into that problem.

I think that it happens in this thought process again and again. Like I said, John Stewart-Mill couldn't ultimately accept that despite being like the primal liberal, right? Hobhouse could not accept that. And so I think that there, I think you've touched on the exact problem with capitalism as it is practiced. But I will say about the potential for capitalism to create freedom is that there are some basic decisions that must be made, some basic economic decisions that must be made. If we look at one of them, it is the difference between what should be consumed now versus what should be invested to provide for consumption later. And what capitalism does is it allows a reward, however skewed, for choosing to forego your consumption and invest currently.

One of the problems with getting rid of that and not having a good alternative is that then you leave it up to potentially the state or to simply individuals to make that decision. Individuals have no, if they don't have a right to property, they have little to no reason to forego consumption in order to invest because their investments cannot pause. possibly give them a return, at least not one that's safe and protected. If the state makes that decision, you end up with states that choose often to overinvest and cut consumption to the point where their people starve because they're investing for a future that strengthens the state.

And so in one way, at least, capitalism decentralizes that decision making. Again, in the current situation where, again, you can't feed your family without access to capital that someone else has, that doesn't provide you with as much freedom as it should. However, it does take away the need for a state apparatus to create investment. And that does contribute a great deal to the individual economic freedom that people have. Okay, and zooming out a little bit, sort of thinking about the 20th century in regards to bourgeois democracy, and their fight against, you know, communism and fascism and all of that, how do you think about, at least in the 20th century, liberalism's ability to preserve freedom?

Do you think it was like the old Winston shitty-ass Churchill's quote about it being the liberal capitalism being the best of all worst possible scenarios or whatever? How do you think about liberal democracies relation to freedom generally? I think that you can see that some of the freest societies that, we've seen in the history of the world came about through liberal democracy, finding good solutions to capitalism. If you look at the way in which democracies have spread to Western Europe, to East Asia, increasingly to Latin America, and you look at the ways that they have dramatically increased the freedom

and the standard of living of their people. in some cases really reduced the need to work, giving you the control over a second fundamental economic question. You were balanced between work and leisure. In many of these countries, you have at least the potential to choose leisure much more than you have in any other society, whether leftist, whether fascist, whether neoliberal like the United States. So I think that you do see this potential that has arisen in a variety of places where you

have a much broader sense of freedom that has been possible before the 20th century. However, I know you're going to bring this up, so I might as well bring it up first. This has often come, especially in the case of the U.S., at the expense of other parts of the world. And so while liberalism and democracy and capitalism have, in my view, definitely increased some of the at least objective standards of living since, say, the 1970s or the 1970s. 1990s, it certainly hasn't made people fundamentally equal, as one might have hoped. Yeah, I mean, that was kind of something I was going to say, just that insofar as liberal capitalist societies have some, you know, room for freedom where the individuals inside those societies have freedom. It's ironically and sort of counterintuitively premised on an unfreedom that's imposed on other parts of the world.

when you think about Bangladesh's garment factories or you think about all the other sort of swept shot models or the imperialist forcing of other countries to abide by certain liberal capitalist paradigms, the IMF, the World Bank, the way that they sort of predatorily attack poor countries in Africa and extract wealth to shift over to Western powers, any sort of freedom that we can have in the centers of global power come. at a price for freedom for somebody else. And there's that old saying, I think it was Bakunin, the famous Russian anarchist, who said, you know, the only way that I'm free is if everybody else is free. I can't be free while other people aren't free. And, of course, that's been, that basic sentiment has been echoed by freedom fighters ever since then in different ways. But that sort of basic premise of freedom, that I can never fully be free if my freedom

is premised on the suppression and oppression of somebody somewhere else in the world. And so to have true, complete freedom, I think capitalism ultimately becomes an impediment and a blockade to it. And the only way that we can really introduce freedom for all people, I think, is to ultimately transcend a system that's premised on the unfreedom of some people over others. Yeah, and I would say that there's no denying the correlation there. I would argue that it is not a causation or at least not a necessary causation, meaning people in, the, the quote-unquote developed order of the industrial world that doesn't actually have as much manufacturing. They do not necessarily need other people to be impoverished to enjoy a free standard of living. It's certainly true that the standard of living, for example, of many people in the United States would have to be lowered if you were going to try to achieve decent living standards for everyone in the world right now.

However, I don't think that it necessarily follows that this freedom that is currently enjoyed by many people, although not everyone in the U.S., or by many or most people in parts of Western Europe or Eastern Asia, there's no reason, I think, that that freedom could not exist at the same time as freedom existed in the global South or in areas that do not currently enjoy it. well yeah um beyond that beyond that discussion because we could get mired down in that for a long time and i think a lot of people are kind of aware of some of the basic dynamics um in that argument i would actually argue for something above and beyond that which is the sort of freedom that comes with self actualization um the freedom that comes with people being able to spend their time on this planet the way that that truly makes them happy and benefits them whether that's spending time with their family or spending time engaged in artistic projects or whatever that may be for all the different people on this planet, whatever would give them existential fulfillment

is sort of blockaded by this need to work, by this need to continually produce and the internal logic of capitalism is that it must continually grow the GDP, that it must infinitely grow and consume and sort of reproduce itself and replicate itself endlessly. And that means that all the technology that that we're getting that capitalism has helped bring about is not leveraged to free people from the drudgeries of wage labor and the toil that comes with it, but it's actually leveraged to just increase the competition between businesses who want to increase profits. And that means even though we have all this amazing technology that could have lessened the

amount of hours we have to work in a week, it's actually the amount of hours we work has not gone down, if anything, it's gone up as the capitalist firms at the top compete for more market shares and more profit margins, the rest of us are continually, you know, forced to go to work more and more to continue that sort of capitalist parade at the top. And so in that sense, the internal logic of capitalism itself sort of undermines the possibility of freedom and self-actualization for most people. Yeah, I think that you're, that's certainly a possibility. I think what you're again getting to is, is the ways that capitalism is currently failing to accomplish that. And I think that if you're looking at the relationship with capitalism freedom, capitalism

itself will not provide freedom. I think that there's no doubt about that. I think that's why you need to get back to real liberal principles. One of those being you have to value the natural human individual over a corporation, which is essentially a creation of the state or a creation of the judicial system. So I agree with you that capitalism is not going to be sufficient. you have, but I think that there are liberal principles that are absolutely sufficient to, to get each of that greater source of freedom, liberal principles that relate essentially to that idea that I started with. How can we create a society where everyone has the freedom that they would have had if they weren't having the society imposed on them? And so, but I think we can, we can come to common ground on that. That capitalism itself is not enough to get there, although I think some idea of return on investment or some idea of ownership. of depreciable capital is going to be part of that when we ultimately see these hopefully freer societies develop in the future. Yeah, and I think later on, I think one of the last questions we're going to address is

how we see the future unfolding, and I think we'll be able to flesh out more of that discussion when we get to that question. But I think that was well put. I respect that view. So let's go ahead and move on to the next question. Is the U.S. government and capitalism itself reformable? all right so i think i'm starting with this one yeah yep yep so uh is the u.s government and capitalism itself reformable i think absolutely i think that the the the framework is in place

for the u.s. government to be reformed and i think i actually expect that in 10 or 20 years you will see some pretty extreme reforms in the direction of real freedom for individuals i mean that's at least, maybe I shouldn't say I expect that. I believe it's a distinct possibility. As far as capitalism itself reformable, I think I've already laid out how I would reform it or how I think it needs to be reformed. We need to, first of all, recognize, as I said,

individuals have freedom and rights. Corporations should not be seen in that light. Moreover, I think for capitalism to be reformable, we need to have the society as a whole be more of the benefits from those things that are by nature finite, land, resources, and monopoly power. But if that is done, then I think that absolutely capitalism is reformable where the return on investment model can absolutely continue to move us forward into the freer society

that I would like to see. Yeah, and juxtapose to that position, I would argue that because capitalism gives rise to a ruling class, which is codified and instantiated in the form of bourgeois democracy, and bourgeois parliamentarianism, that the capitalist class will allow reforms when it's convenient for them to do so. But the moment that those reforms start to really press against their core interests as the ruling class, as capitalist, that you will begin to see those reforms either blocked or drawn back. So I think we're going to touch on FDR in a little bit. But one of the things that's worth noting is the sort of New Deal FDR policies that were implemented

In the 30s, they did a lot for working people for a couple decades, but with the rise of Ronald Reagan, you saw this sort of capitalist backlash to labor power. Unions were systematically deconstructed as the neoliberal globalist period began. And so it became inconvenient for American capitalists and the bourgeoisie to have unions in the workplace and to have this huge social, these social investment programs. And so, you know, they marshaled racism and they marshaled sexism and other forms of hierarchy in the general population to fight back against those reforms and ultimately destroy large chunks of what the FDR New Deal was able to accomplish. So, I mean, although it is reformable in fits and starts and reformable over certain narrow periods of time, the moment those reforms become inconvenient for the rulers of capital, those reforms will be mercilessly attacked. and ultimately deconstructed because the government belongs to the capitalist class, and it always has. So I agree with you that those reforms will always be attacked. I think that that is inevitable. I don't think that those attacks need necessarily always be successful.

I think I see a sort of a cycle that you can see in American history. What was Roosevelt coming out of, except for exactly a period of those attacks by Calvin Koologen and Andrew Mellon, his Treasury Secretary, who had rolled back a lot of the progress that had previously been made by the progressive movement. So I think that, yes, there will always be a tax. But I think that reforms can be successful in the long term.

Reforms can continue. I think you would, if you looked at the United States, certainly there's been a lot of reports that wealth inequality or even relative poverty in the United States is matching where it was in the 1920s. But the overall suffering of the world, workers at least should be less than it is in the 1920s, by the objective measures that we can look at, the absolute poverty has decreased.

Now, it will go up and down, but I think that we are going to be continuously reforming in the right direction, or at least that it is possible to continuously reform in the right direction. So, yeah, I would say I don't get too, obviously it's immensely depressing to look at what the American liberalism or American social democracy had going for it and then see the extent to which has been rolled back, but I think that that's merely a call to action to start those reforms up again. And hopefully, you mentioned many of the hierarchies that were marshaled against that progress.

That was certainly a failure of the New Deal. It did not adequately respond to the needs of African Americans. It did not make enough progress for women. As a result, I think that was a fundamental weakness of it. And so as these reforms also become more and more inclusive and hopefully as a society, we become less and less defined by these hierarchies, then the reforms that we make, the progress that we make,

will be less vulnerable to attacks based on that. That's my hope anyway. Yeah, and one thing I would offer in defense of that hope and in defense of your position is the sort of, if you look at some European countries and their health care systems, they instantiated these health care systems that benefit working people.

These are major reforms that took place and took root. And now that people have them, they don't want to let them go. So those reforms have been under constant attack by certain segments of the capitalist class ever since they were put into place in Britain and France, et cetera. But you also see every time there's an attempt

to take away the health care of regular people, the people themselves, the masses, often rise up and just fight back and oppose it. And it makes it impossible for health care to be taken back and retracted. So I think once you implement really robust, robust reforms that speak directly to people's, that working people's material needs, and you continually let them benefit from it and they see in their real everyday life how much they

benefit from it, it's very hard at that point to take it away. And the only way that you can take it away is cynical use of ideology and manipulation that we've seen in some instances like Reaganomics where he sort of helped, not him personally, but the whole social movement behind him, sort of twisted the law. logic of what they were trying to do and made it seem that it was about liberty and freedom and that spoke to people's not material needs but their idealist conceptions of themselves and so working people were actively willing to go along with reforms that that hurt them and they didn't see it that way the same sort of people that that vote for Donald Trump

there's sort of this smokescreen as one of my friends called it a bourgeois fog that that disallows people to see how certain things actively work against them. They'll actually go out and support things that hurt them because of a whole slew of cultural factors and ideological factors. But I think that you're right that once you can get some of these reforms in and they're robust enough and they really affect people everyday life that the people themselves become the defenders of it

and you don't have to do much work at the policy level. And I think actually I'd never thought about it this way exactly, but if you think about one of the tenets of behavioral economics is that people are always going to more zealously avoid losses than they will seek out gains, right? A loss feels way worse than a gain foregone. I think you can absolutely see that with a lot of these things where it's very difficult maybe to get enough popular support to change the health care system because people are nervous, people are are conservative about it, or they simply are not as energized about making the change.

But once they have it, they're going to zealously guard it precisely because of that psychology that, well, now this is something that I rely on. It's not just a nice thought, but something that every day, you know, I need the ability to take my kid to the doctor and have that covered. So I think that what you're touching on there is absolutely the case. The reforms are hard to make. But those reforms that people feel directly are the ones. that they're going to most strongly identify with and fight hardest for. And there's one thing that I think liberals in the United States need to do, it's find out what those reforms are.

How can you really touch people's lives for the better in a way that's not simply theoretical or a way that doesn't just feel good, but that every day they see the benefits because those are the sort of issues that if you can get them done, they're going to be lasting. Right. And I think we see that empirically in the U.S. in the form of Medicare and Social Security. It's extremely difficult for those programs to be taken away, and people mobilize really strongly to prevent those programs being taken away. Ultimately, I would argue that what radicals need to do insofar as we're stuck inside the confines of this system at the moment is to lead the fight on these things,

and radicals always have led to fight on a lot of these more progressive reforms that speak to regular working people's everyday material needs. So we can't sit back and hand this over to, I mean, I don't want to offend you, but we can't hand it over to liberals. We have to be the ones that lead these fight and always contextualize those fights in a broader fight against class society because it's our contention that as long as class society exists, these reforms are always subject to recall. And the only way to protect them indefinitely is to overthrow a class that is in their interests to take these things away from us. But having said all that, I think now is a good time to transition into listener questions. Sounds great. Attention, attention. This is an official civil defense warning. This is not a test.

The United States is under nuclear attack. Take cover immediately in your area of all-up children. Repealed the United States is under nuclear attack. America's Cold War years were filled with fear. Daily radio and newspaper reports. blared frightening stories of advancing communism, imminent nuclear war, and Soviet spies. America responded with an all-out offensive against communist infiltration. The growing menace of communism arouses the House of Representatives' Un-American Activities Committee.

Among the well-informed witnesses testifying is J. Edgar Hoover, head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mr. Hoover speaks with authority on the subject. Communism in reality is not a political party. It is a way of life, an evil and malignant way of life. It reveals a condition akin to disease that spreads like an epidemic. And like an epidemic, a quarantine is necessary to keep it from infecting this nation. While Hoover's FBI worked behind the scenes, Congress expanded its own high-profile investigations. often ignoring the civil rights of the accused.

Are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? I believe I have the right to be confronted with any evidence which supports this question. I should like to see what you have. Well, you would. Yeah. Beginning in 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee, or Hugh Hack, investigated communist influence in Hollywood. The committee was concerned with the power of movies to be

persuade audiences with subversive messages. With movie stars and other industry professionals called to testify, the hearings became red carpet events. For the anti-communist witch hunt, it was a publicity, Bonanza. It is completely against the un-American feeling, this communistic thing. I believe I would move to the state of Texas if it ever came here, because I think the Texans would kill them on site. We have sold them some films

A good many years ago They bought the three little pigs And used it through Russia If I had my way about it They'd all be sent back to Russia Or some other unpleasant place Most witnesses cooperated with the committee However, a small group who became known as

The Hollywood Ten refused to answer questions Siding protection under the First Amendment Among them, screenwriter John Howard Lawson. The question is, have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? I'm framing my answer in the only way in which any American citizen can frame his answer to a question, which he would invade his absolutely invade me right? Then you deny to, you refuse to answer that question. Is that correct?

I have told you that I will transfer my beliefs, my affiliations and everything else to the American public, and they will know where I stand as they do from what I have with. Stand away from the stand. For Americanism for many years. Stand away from the stand. Therefore, it is the unanimous opinion of this subcommittee. John Howard Lawson is in contempt of Congress. The Hollywood Ten were convicted of contempt and sent to prison.

Thousands of others were blacklisted by the studios, forcing many talented movie makers into exile and obscurity. Among the friendly witnesses who testified in 1947 was a B-movie actor named Ronald Reagan. No one could have suspected that four decades later, Reagan would play a leading role in bringing the Cold War to an end. If communists have attempted to inject their propaganda into the motion picture, they have failed miserably. Perhaps Hollywood wasn't influenced by communists, but it was a very communist. was affected by the hearings. Movie studios added to the hysteria

by cranking out such anti-communist films as, is this tomorrow? Red Planet Mars and dozens of others. But tawdry films did little to distract President Truman from what he saw as a perversion of American democracy. I'm going to tell you how we're not going to fight communism. We're not going to transform our fine FBI into a Gestapo secret police. We're not going to try to control what our people read and say and think.

We're not going to turn the United States into a right-wing totalitarian country in order to deal with a left-wing totalitarian threat. In short, we're not going to end democracy. We're going to keep the Bill of Rights on the books. Against the President's objections, Congress passed more dubious legislation, including the Internal Security Bill of 1950, which empowered the government to take action against anyone it deemed a security risk. Truman called it the greatest danger to freedom of speech, press, and assembly

since the alien and sedition laws of 1798. This first question comes from Barry DeFord. He asks, how would you respond to the argument that liberal capitalism can never free itself from its colonial and genocidal roots? Well, shout out to Barry DeFord. he's an education teacher up in Canada and he's been a longtime supporter of the show so it's nice to hear a question from him I'll go ahead and start

and just say that I mean I would respond by saying that I don't think it ever can a big part of the left is the decolonialization movement where we want to sort of break down the structures of colonization that liberal capitalism

ultimately gave rise to and is maintained by wealth and property and power all these things were rooted in and founded in colonialism and genocide and slavery and to this day in imperialism and that wealth and power was largely passed down via family lines generationally oftentimes

and so the wealth and power we have today many of the people that are at the highest echelons of power are only there because of this rotten root and I think any system that's rooted in such absurd and obscene violence, it can never fully separate itself from it. And we still see to this day the position of indigenous Americans and of women and of African Americans in our society and immigrants. There's still that sort of hatred and sort of second class citizenship status that they have that is in large part rooted in the very structures and

beginnings of this society. So that would be my response to that question. Yeah, I mean, I would say that it's impossible to, at least whatever liberal capitalism attempts to do, it can never forget those events. I don't think that it's accurate to say that liberal capitalism brought about those events so much as it coincided with them. Or was the dominant, the dominant social structure at a period in time that included those events but was in no way the exclusive time when those were occurring. If we look at an equally genocidal period of time, if we look at the 16th through 17th centuries in Central and Latin America and the Caribbean, this is largely under essentially a feudal system that the same level of, indeed, the roots for the future stages of colonialism

and slavery and genocide were really, really lame. So I think that the problem goes beyond liberal capitalism. It goes deeper further back than liberal capitalism. But I do think that liberals need to understand where they have failed, where their philosophy has failed to put a stop to this. And so I think that the only way that liberal capitalism can not free itself from, move beyond its colonial and genocidal roots, is understand those failings and attempts to actively make up for them. and also look to the very foundational ideas of liberalism and apply them evenly, right?

The idea is that every individual has the right to their person, to their life and liberty, that every individual has the right to legal equality with all their individuals. If that had been enforced throughout history, this colonialism and genocide would not have been possible. So where it happened has been where liberals or ill liberals were individuals or societies or societies, or societies or structures have not applied those ideals. So I think that the conscious recognition of those failures and dedication in the future to applying those ideas that, in theory, at least, liberals have always stood for.

From my perspective on the left, I just want to say that any left-wing movement, any revolution-ary movement against capitalism and insofar as capitalism is ultimately defeated and transcended, that movement will have to be hyper conscious of these injustices of the past and have to actively work to combat them I don't think this is very widespread on the left

but there is a certain sort of tendency on the left that wants to say that once we topple capitalism that these things, these problems will largely take care of themselves and I think that's a huge error they won't take care of themselves capitalism from our perspective is merely the necessary prerequisite to addressing these issues.

We have to topple capitalism, which in our opinion maintains these hierarchies and maintains these forms of oppression to this day. And then you have to actively combat them within even the minds of the revolutionaries themselves because we're all so steeped in this culture that a magical toppling of capitalism won't fix it in our society. It won't fix it in our social relations automatically. and it won't fix it in our psychology. So regardless of where you come down on this issue,

I think from Matthew's perspective as the defender of liberalism and from my perspective as a leftist, these things are huge issues and they must be combated and they must be combated continuously. We just differ on those sort of prerequisites that need to take place in order for those things to be sufficiently and fully addressed. Yeah, and I would add that for both of us, the continuation of these hierarchies,

for either philosophy is like a fundamental weakness or a fundamental, it's a brick missing in the foundation that if you don't address this, neither liberalism nor leftism, I think, can really achieve its potential. Definitely. David? All right. Our next question comes from at Dave underscore Riedman, or Riedman.

I'm sorry if I messed up your name. But they want to know, what are liberalism's commitments to individualism, and how does liberal individualism differ from leftist collectivism? I think that liberalism's commitment to individualism are fundamental. They are essential. Liberalism is first and foremost dedicated to the individual being fundamentally free. And so where previous pre-liberal views of quote-unquote liberty or freedom tended to be corporate,

the idea that groups of people, be it churches or guilds, have freedom and rights as a result of being this group, the fundamental idea of liberalism is the individual has rights or the state ought to be guaranteeing the rights of the individual. And so I think that's where liberals come into individualism lies. It's in the very root of it. From the left-wing perspective, we are collectivist. We see that the struggle takes place not on the individual level, but on the collective level, on the class level, on the sort of group level, the sort of engine of history is class struggle. struggle, as Mark said. And so we don't think that things can be meaningfully addressed on the individual level. For instance, a lot of the climate change activism, a lot of the things that bourgeois capitalism wanted to tell us where the solutions to climate change revolved around individual lifestyle choices, you know, change your dryer, change the light bulbs you use,

bike to work. Now, these problems that are facing us increasingly are problems that can only be solved collectively. And another way to highlight our critique of liberal individualism is to look at somebody like Hillary Clinton. I'm not going to put the burden of Hillary Clinton on Matthew because my God, who would want to do that? But I do want to say that she was sort of the great exemplar of liberal individualism. She ran on the premise that because she is a woman, that electing her was an advancement for women everywhere. And that sort of individualism, which posits, you know, individual women represent the entire group, and insofar as an individual black person or an individual gay person or an individual woman rises to high levels of power

in any given society, that that represents an advance for the groups they're supposed to represent. And we totally utterly reject that. Moreover, I don't want to get into all those policies, but clearly somebody like Hillary Clinton actively work against women's movement and women's liberation all over the world and her imperialism and her hawkish militarism actually resulted in the deaths of untolds amounts of women, children, and men. So there's the fundamental hypocrisy there.

But moreover, I would argue that individuals, insofar as we want individuals to flourish and self-actualize, which I believe we as leftists do, we realize that individuals can only flourish in the context of healthy communities, of healthy social groupings and in a collective context in which everybody has each other's backs and everybody watches out for one another.

We can draw this argument back to evolution itself. We are social apes. We evolved in the context of tribes and then villages in which everybody took care of everybody else, in which the burdens of life were broadly shared, and in which the individual potential was fostered because of the sort of reliance on the community, and the appreciation of what a collective social context can give to an individual.

I think a lot of the problems that we see today, especially with regards to, let's say, mass shootings, for example, is really a failure of liberalism to create the sort of community that in past times or in other contexts would have noticed and taken care of some of the people that want to lash out in nihilistic acts of violence. ideology aside a society that atomizes and reduces everybody to individuals is antithetical to our evolutionary impulses and it gives rise to social neuroses that manifests in among many other things nihilistic launchings of violence and in other ways the sort of Donald Trump character which is in some ways the paragon of liberal individualism which deformed results in a sort of Donald Trump character which is in some ways the paragon of liberal individualism which deformed results in a sort of a sort of absurd narcissism, an absurd focus on the self to the exclusion of all else. So that would be our main critique of individualism broadly. I think we both agree that the society is necessary for the individual to flourish.

The big question is, does the society exist for the individual or the individual for the society? And that's, I mean, maybe it's a chicken or an egg question. It may be a nonsensical question. But I think that's that is maybe one difference that liberals are always viewing the creation of society from the perspective of what is the outcome for individuals. Yeah. And I would also agree, and this is not talked about a lot, but I think if you go too far on the collectivist side and you neglect the human individual potential and the day-to-day quality of life for individuals in a society, if you exclude that just to the exclusive focus of the collective or of the society as a whole, you do a lot of damage. there too. So in reality, I really think there has to be a balance. There has to be a balance between a healthy community and healthy individuals because, you know, communities are made up of individuals. And if a community is going to be healthy, the individuals inside it need to be

healthy. And if individuals are going to be healthy, the community that shapes them needs to be healthy. And I think an important distinction that we would both make here is that we're talking about individuals, we're talking about communities. I think neither of us would give that same sort level of precedence to the state as an entity. I think that's where you see the difference between liberalism, leftism, and fascism, right? Does the state have rights unto itself as the state, or is it merely a tool for either individuals or for communities to pursue their interests? I think that's an important distinction. That's a really good point. Yeah. All right, let's move on to the next question, David? At monotone underscore Aric wants to know, what do you believe to be the major

driving force of human development in history? All right. Well, from the left-wing perspective and probably more from a Marxist perspective just because Marx and Engels really gave voice and really fleshed out this theory of dialectical materialism, you know, we really view that the driving force of human development is class struggle, is a sort of dialectical material unfolding of different forces in a society. Every time that you have a new system of oppression, people are going to rise up against it. So you have the thesis of domination, exploitation, oppression. You have the antithesis of oppressed people rising up and fighting back. And then you have a synthesis on a small scale that could mean reforms or on a broader scale,

the synthesis of socialism overcoming the contradictions of capitalism. So ultimately, from a left-wing perspective, we see that the major driving force is not great men, it's not ideas, it is class struggle and the material development of the means of production, of the productive forces of a society. As the productive forces develop, it gives rise to cultural and social differences and movements which press against oppression on the cultural level, but ultimately this underlying productive forces and how it's organized and operates, that's the So that's the, that is sort of the push. So just for example, automation, you know, if and when automation technology comes under the scene, which is inevitable unless something crazy happens,

that's going to radically transform the productive forces of society. And with that radical transformation, we believe that a political and social and cultural revolution will, or at least possibly opens up the possibility for that taking place as well. Matthew? Yeah, and I think that you bring up Marx. I think that's a great contribution of Marx to the theory of history, to historiography, really, is the contribution that material conditions make. I think that liberals would generally look a bit more broadly and say that it's not necessarily material conditions at the root of things, but rather the interplay between material conditions and, for example, ideas. I don't think that there's very many people who would say that great men are the main drivers of history. from a serious historical perspective.

But I think that the role of ideas is certainly one that, in my opinion, Marxists overlook to their peril. You can see, I think, very vastly different societies that nonetheless employ similar means of production or similar organizations economically. I think you can see that throughout history where there can be immense differences in the culture and attitudes of countries. and therefore in the actual experienced freedom of their people or in the trajectories of their systems of governance,

despite the fact that their systems of production may in fact be very similar. So I think that the power of ideas is something that is when you ignore it, you run into a lot of trouble. I think that if you ignore, for example, the power of religious ideas about the proper role of people in society or the proper organization, or the proper organization of society, I mean, try to say, no, it's simply based on materialism. I think that you can miss out on a lot of trends in history

or you would make incorrect predictions where two societies that have the same distribution of the means of production based on these outside factors, these beliefs that they hold, whether they be religious or philosophical, can actually respond very differently to the same stimulus. Yeah, that's actually a good point. And I don't want to articulate a sort of

crude reductionist Marxism here by focusing too much on the material basis of reality. I mean, I think that there's a sort of dialectical relationship between ideas and material realities, and you can introduce the same productive, basically the same productive forces into two different cultures who have two different histories, and as you say, that will play out in different ways. But I also, I think there's a constant feedback loop, and I do, I would predict, like from a Marxist prediction perspective when we're talking about the radical transformation of the productive forces and automation what we would expect to see and what maybe I'm going out on a huge

limb here but the sort of the way religions will react the impulse of the human animal to prop up some sort of spiritual movements or or social movements they will get radically different as automation um as automation takes over so we can expect Um, weird are sort of different movements that we can't even fully see the, the details of cropping up in the context of a fully automated post-scarcity society. Um, when you look at like some of the weird cult movements of the 60s, um, in the 70s, you know, after the, after the sort of failure of the, of the counterculture hippie movement, you saw a lot of, of cropping up of cults. And there's a weird history there. There's an interesting history there. That can't fully

be explained, as Matthew argues, just by some productive forces changing at the bottom of society. But there is an interplay as social movements develop. There's a sort of dialectic that occurs in the superstructure of a society itself that gives rise to some of the movements. And I would agree with you that as historians go, they don't often fall into the fallacy of the Great Man theory of history. But I think the way that popular history is represented, that often becomes the case. I mean, when we're taught in, in school about the founding fathers in America, for example, I mean, we very much are taught to view that as some great men, some brilliant men with some amazing ideas, sat down and

worked out through their own intellectual abilities, you know, how a new society could possibly look, and then they went and put that into action. You know, that kind of is a great man, idealist version of how history was actually made, and it obscures a lot of the class struggle and the shift in capitalist production at that time that helped give rise to the possibility of bourgeois revolutions in the first place. So you're right that historians don't often make that mistake necessarily, but the way that we're taught in popular culture, I think it often does make that mistake. Yeah, and I think that's actually, I don't think we have time for it now, but I think that's a really interesting train of thought, the way that our current culture,

or pop culture, or pop history focuses on individuals, perhaps because individuals are just so interesting, right? It's individuals reading, so individuals like to read about an individual and the way that that distorts our view of how everything in the world works, the way that we tend to view things from an individual perspective rather than a community perspective, perhaps simply because reading about communities doesn't strike our interest or watching movies about communities doesn't strike our interest as much as watching a movie about a great man. Right. And that's partially because we live in a society that excuse community, and so that kind of plays into it as well. But I do think that last thing we'll say,

before we move on, you know, keeping a materialist mindset will help combat some of the instincts to fall prey to those popular histories. But that said, let's go on to the next question. David. This comes from at Unbound Me 13. Jesus. Should liberals and leftists work together to fight fascism? And what are the differences in approach when it comes to this fight?

I think that's a yes. I don't think anyone would disagree with that neither muscle. agree with that. I think absolutely. And I think that that's something that, that liberals and left us both need to look at. From the liberal perspective, there, obviously there's differences in approach. Liberals tend to be more hostile towards direct action, towards direct confrontation. I think from the liberal perspective, the thing that that we as liberals need to keep in mind is not to go to the other extreme and say, like, well, what if Antifa is the real fascists, right? that it seems to my mind absurd to make such a statement and yet you see it time and time again.

So I think that for one thing liberals need to, whether we agree with that particular tactic or not, whether we think that it is productive or not. And we've had discussions where I have maybe questioned the productivity or the efficacy of that. The key thing for liberals to remember is what the real danger is. And I think especially in the United States, the real foundational danger to our society is almost always going to hinge on racism and white supremacism. But that is one of the critical weaknesses of American liberalism. I'm one of the key ways, as you pointed out, that the working class has been able to be divided and turned against itself. And so I think if liberals want to preserve a potentially liberal future, that's what that's what

they have to realize is a fundamentally qualitatively different kind of threat is any movement of that nature. And so I think that liberals need to need to not react against this difference in tactics by saying like, oh, well, maybe left us are just as bad. I think that that's, that there's nothing to, to bear out that failure there. Yeah. I have two points to make on this. One is a sort of positive point, which I think we're going to agree on, which is diversity of tactics. After the Charlottesville incident, which obviously shocked the entire country, there was a liberal group here locally that wanted to have this big rally sort of thing against hate or whatever. And they were liberals and they really wanted to claim the victims, Heather Hire and others who were injured at that protest on the radical left as their own. And we kind of stepped in as an organization.

We said, you're not going to do that. If you're going to have this sort of discussion, the prominent, preeminent leftist organization in Omaha, our organization, we're going to be there and we're going to have the stage. So we can do this a nice way and you can just let us talk or we can be more combative about it and take the stage and disrupt your rally. But we're going to do it one way or the other because we're not going to let liberals take this away from us and make it a liberal sort of pat each other in the back and go home feeling good about it thing. And I was one of the speakers that eventually got on the stage. And I really made an appeal to liberals. I framed what fascism is because I think a lot of liberals don't quite know it. It's not well-defined in our society. It's sort of a new thing. There's stereotypes and sort of caricatures of Nazism that if they don't see people goose-stepping in the streets, they have a hard time thinking that it's actual fascism. So I think clarifying those definitions for liberals is really important.

And then the second thing I did is I told them and I went to many other liberal organizations after this and talked to them. and I was like, you don't have to be the ones that dress in all black and meet them in the streets. You know, that might not be your thing. Your thing can be fliring and outing or calling a university when there's a Nazi on campus or whatever. You know, you can do what you feel comfortable doing. But the worst thing that you could possibly do is punch left in a moment of fascist resurgence to punch left and to attack the left and to draw these false equivalencies between leftists and fascist is not only to muddy the waters

of political discourse, but it's also to actively bolster the fascist right, because the fascist turn around and use liberal rhetoric right back at them. They say, hey, word is doing a free speech rally. Meanwhile, they have guns and weapons and they do a Nazi salutes and they're beating up black people in the street

and a liberal sees, hey, this is just called a free speech rally, so it should be fine. These guys dressing in all black, they're the real problem, and that sort of confusion is a big obstacle to overcome. And so I think we should press on that. And then the second thing I say, which would be a little in disagreement with what you kind of implied is the efficacy of it. The sort of knee-jerk liberal reaction is to say, ignore these assholes.

Like, don't feed into them. If you go to their rallies in all black and you fight them and you make a big scene, you're just going to create sympathy for them. You're just going to get their messages out. People are going to sit at home and see that and then go Google online and they might be drawn in. But I think all evidence in history says that that. is just objectively not true. Fascism is not just something people do for fun. Fascism is a social movement that occurs when certain conditions hold.

And you do not ignore that problem because the conditions which underlie it will continue to give rise to it. And so over and over and over again, the militant confrontation of fascists, not only is it objectively effective in canceling, fascists have routinely canceled their rallies and shuts it down for safety reasons, but it also dissuble. wades people from hitting the streets. If you're some little basement dweller, Pepe, you know, loser sitting in your home being like, yeah, I want to go out and I want to march on the streets.

Yeah, this is my thing. And you tune on the news and you see some fascists getting his nose spread across the side of his face or you hit with the lock over the top of the head or whatever it may be. You're going to think twice about going out into the streets. And so the perspective from the far left is outside of optics, we're going to stop fascists by any means necessary. And if you as a fascist at home feel like you want to get out and go to the street, well, you're going to have an attack on your person. You will be in physical danger when you go out because it's not just free speech. As I said earlier, it's fascist organizing and recruiting

to ultimately carry out genocide. And the more you ignore it, the more it grows, like a cancer. We have to radiate it. We have to attack it. And that's the leftist position. Yeah, I think that, you know, I, we've had this discussion before. I think that, I think, that the danger is that where fascism has been successful, whether it's in Italy, whether it's in Spain or Portugal or Germany, it requires also a climate of chaos. That's what attracts people to a strong manner to a fascist, is this idea that everything is in flux or that what they hold most dear, this idea of order and their property and whatever, is in danger. And so I think liberal perspective is this fear

of creating precisely that situation. However, I think that you referenced the Charlottesville incident, I think that what happened there really put things in focus for a lot of people. And as you saw, almost nobody rallied, almost nobody bought in after that to this sort of both sides

argument, which I think is really positive. And hopefully that's put it in perspective, enough for people that now the movement can begin to, as you said, address these underlying causes of these movements. And we have hopefully stepped back from the edge where you had, I truly feared, the creation of the situations that would lead to an auto coup on the part of the

administration. Those don't appear like they're going to occur in this first term. And hopefully there will not be a second term. So I think that at this point, where we stand, I think that what you're talking about goes back to our discussion on reforms what liberals need to offer people then or what liberals need to work with leftists to offer what liberals need to enable

is the creation of real reforms that people would say I don't want to lose this and it doesn't matter what you tell me about my race or what you tell me about the immigrants coming into my country or whatever these things are more important to me than that and hopefully that's what it's going to take to sap the strength from these movements

yeah I mean I think in large part the breakdown of the economic order, the lack of returns on the promise that capitalism was going to produce an increasingly and ever-evolving high quality of life for people. When that starts to go away and economic precarity comes in and people's material quality of lives are diminished, people are going to start looking for scapegoats. And fascism is in part a reaction to that failure of liberal capitalism to provide a broadband of material support for people. So if you're on the liberal side, you better start thinking damn hard about how you can sort of cut off some of those

that economic momentum of just desicating the middle class and the working class, because ultimately that's what it's founded on. And then moreover, you talked about fascism thriving in a context of chaos. It would be our argument that neoliberalism, that capitalism itself creates the economic chaos that gives rights to fascism. Leftists don't have any power in this country. We don't create the chaos. We just respond to the threat that the chaos creates, which is fascism. So, I mean, that's how I would approach the problem of chaos. And so that would be my pushing back against the liberal notion that we're somehow creating the chaos. We're just responding to it. I think we're ready for the next question. All right. All right.

At Kami Party Hats wants to know what are both leftists and liberal groups stance on oppressed people of occupied or threatened nations like Palestine, Kurdistan, Cuba, Northern Ireland, etc. Yeah, I mean, the answer from the left is obvious. We support the self-determination of all of these oppressed peoples against their oppressors. We support Palestine. We support the Kurds. We support Cuba. And we support the Irish independence movement. We're going to do a show on Easter, on Rev. Left, covering Easter rising in sort of the history of Ireland and their oppression by the British government and so I think for us

the answer is extremely clear I think this more the burden is more on the liberal side to sort of address these problems that from the leftist perspective capitalism and imperialism actively promote

I mean I would say that the tradition of national self-determination is quite strong within liberalism I think you can go back you can go back quite far to Thomas Payne writing about the British East India Company's exploitation of India and sounding a very early alarm on the effect that had in India

and also the effect that it had on the oppressors themselves in corrupting their own society. So I think that a well-rooted liberal tradition or a liberal tradition that draws on its finest writers and thinkers basically has to come to the same conclusion. I guess my question for you would be from a leftist materialist perspective, how do you justify and define national self-determination? Well, yeah, that definition is going to alter based on who we're talking to or talking

about in the case of, let's say Cuba, we would want a complete withdrawal of the embargo, a complete withdrawal of U.S. meddling in that country, and an opening up of international trade to Cuba as if it were just another country. self-determination of the Cuban people can take place inside Cuba, but we need to lift those external pressures on Cuba, which emiserates their society and the working people. In a place like Palestine, you know, the ultimate goals and solutions differ. Obviously, this is one of the most complicated problems in politics, but we support 100% the rights for the Palestinian people to live on that land and to fight against their Israeli oppressors. And we oppose most liberal

democracies in this society, in this world, whether your theories of what liberalism should be are very much juxtaposed and in conflict with the way capitalism and liberal democracies actually play out because there is a lot of support, especially in the center of capitalism, imperialism, the United States for Israel. Now, of course, that plays into the imperial game of having a foothold in the region and wanting to use Israel as a sort of geopolitical pinch your point through which they can operate in the region, but the sort of theory of what you want liberalism to be and the reality of what it is is two different things. So how do you sort of deal with that contradiction or that conflict? Like what are your actual stances towards

a place like Palestine? So I think that most liberals would say that the proper solution there, or at least the most feasible solution, is a two-state solution. But that runs into the very problems that we talked about, the definition of a state, or is that the best structure? But I think that almost anyone describing themselves as a liberal or broadly in that tradition in the United States, and certainly elsewhere in the world, would say that absolutely Palestine needs to have a state unto itself and a state separate from Israel. However, I would say most liberals would also say, at this point, however we got there, at this point, the number of people who live in Israel itself, who identify as Israelis, also have rights and they have the right

also to their own state. And so that, I think, is the fundamental position of liberals based on, again, the individuals and the communities with which they identify, both communities are strong enough in their identification that you can't just wipe them out. Right. So I think you have a lot of difficulty in either a solution that removed Israel or a one-state solution like some people have proposed, at least in the short to medium term, that seems almost impossible from a liberal perspective. So it seems almost like a two-state solution where Palestine is a state like any other has to be the case. Clearly, the Israeli government is going to do whatever it can to drag its feet on that. But it is, I mean, it has basically, there's almost no other territory in the world in this same weird limbo as Palestine is.

And I think that almost any liberal in the world would say that Palestine absolutely needs to become a state. And how that's going to happen, that comes down to the details of how do you make it happen. But any liberal would say Palestine needs to become a state. Israel needs to remain a state. However, those people retain their rights to a state where they live in, regardless of whether it was just for that state to have been created in the first place. Yeah, I mean, I think that's where we're going to differ a little bit, but at the same time, we're not going to be able to solve the Palestine-Israel conflict. on this podcast. So we're probably going to move on, but I do want to have an episode in the future where we really dive deep into that and look at the vast array of leftist sort of ideas on

Palestine. And I would recommend somebody like Edward Saeed for leftists to seek out and read on the Palestinian movement and sort of their claims and their perspective because I think Saeed does a lot of good work on that front. But moving on, David. At Butlerianno, what forces led to the collapse of FDR's liberal order and what should be done to avoid these pitfalls in the future? I think we talked about this. We've talked about this in the past. We talked about this a little bit before the show started. FDR's liberal order, I think, ultimately collapsed due to the circumstances of the Cold War.

The threat of the USSR, to the extent that it was real and to the extent that it was imagined, overwhelmed, overredued. ruled a lot of the liberal impulses in the United States. I think you can go back and look at the 1948 democratic platform and see a lot of things that Democrats would still be applauded for working on now because they seem almost beyond reach. Some of the things that even Truman was proposing and Truman was certainly less forward thinking than Roosevelt had been. What ultimately did that in is probably the fear that any movement in that direction was a movement towards what existed in the USSR and the fear, spread by McCarthy and others, that the USSR was in fact directing the labor unions in the United States, the Democrats in the United States, the liberals

in the United States. I think that fear was really quite real, even if it did not have a real object, even if the USSR was never in that position. And so that fear was played on to really pass a lot of legislation, for example, the Taft-Hartley Act that set in motion the decline of unions to harm the unions and just generally this sort of democratic socialist tendencies in the United States politics and connect that all with the USSR and therefore create the sort of us versus them mentality. And then in the subsequent decades, the imperial projects of the United States, the U.S. war in Vietnam especially, ultimately sapped the strength of whatever strength that the liberal order had. So to avoid these pitfalls in the future, I think liberals have to keep in mind that liberalism at home and oppression abroad are not going to work well together, that the same forces that brought down liberalism in the early 20th century in England are going to do the same thing in the United States any time that liberalism is founded on oppression of other people because imperialism, for no other reason than because imperialism is expensive and imperialism is morally corrupting.

It creates damage to the society, both fiscally or in terms of national treasure, and just in terms of the very fabric of the society that are, in fact, damaging to the creation of a truly liberal order. And by liberal, again, I mean, one that actually guarantees the same freedoms that individuals have in a state before we put them in this kind of society. Yeah, and I think the sort of pinnacle of that historical process resulted in Reagan. Reagan's, you know, was sort of there when the USSR collapsed and he had a role in sort of playing up the U.S. capitalism and U.S. nationalism as an opposition to the USSR. And then ultimately Clintonian Democrats in the 90s thought that they could never go back to a time which, you know, put forward such liberal progressive policies. And so the Democratic Party at that point in history rejected the working class base, helped to first,

undermine unions and turn to sort of Silicon Valley and upper middle class segments of our society as their new voting base, you know, and they disregarded the working class, and that's sort of the neoliberal beginnings in Reagan and through the Clintons really got going, and that's the sort of legacy that we're living in now. So that destruction of FDR's New Deal continues to exist in our current context. When it talks about liberals and their propensity to, engage in these overseas adventures you know liberals hated the USSR just as much you know if not as vociferously or as as explicitly and belligerently as the conservatives they hated it too and part of the problem here is is nationalism you know there is the obvious reactionary form of nationalism which degrades other people calls other country shitholes denigrates immigrants etc. But then there's more this sly, sneaky, liberal nationalism, which doesn't explicitly attack other countries and cultures, but which does the opposite sort of side of the coin work of propping up the U.S. as the city atop a hill and of the best, most freest country in the world

when you hear any democratic politician come to the podium and talk about America from Obama to Hillary to any of them. They're always fawning over how great America is and the American dream, etc. And what that does is it passively inculcates in the general population and in the liberal mind a sort of nationalism which can be marshaled later to attack other countries, whether it's the Iraq War, whether it's Vietnam, you know, whether it's in the future Iran or some other country, North Korea, etc. The liberal sort of low-key nationalism is a real problem and it almost always results in these things. But ultimately, as I've said before, the collapse of FDR's liberal order and the reforms and programs he put forth are never safe in bourgeois democracy.

And only by overthrowing the capitalist class and the class dynamics of this society can real gains for working people be long lasting and eternal. Because as much as we want to say how liberalism could work or some of the best examples of what liberalism should be, the fact is this is what liberalism is in practice. And that same argument that liberals and reactionaries are so willing to use against communists that it looks great on paper but this is what it is in practice well that same argument can be turned around and applied to liberalism itself and i mean so and i would say i think you're right liberals really did dislike the ussr and i think they disliked it on on solid grounds i think especially if you're looking at the ussr in the 1950s you're also

looking at an oppressive and imperialist power so it's difficult to to fault them for their dislike of the USSR. However, I think that what you point to is that then they overcorrect. Their fear of the USSR or the spread of communism then causes them to impose on other people ignoring their material circumstances or even their cultural circumstances and their binary view of the world is what led them down this path. But I don't think they were incorrect in identifying the 1950s USSR as a negative thing, as something that they rightfully wanted to defend the U.S. and American allies from. The problem is those allies that they made were not always willing, as in they made allies with the upper classes of various countries, but they frequently failed to take into account

the desires of everybody else in that society. Yeah, and I think I've talked about this before on other episodes, but the notion of a communist threat, in some respects, it played the role of keeping certain bourgeois societies at bay with regards to worker rights, etc. I mean, there was this fear that they were going to have a Russian-style movement here in the U.S. I mean, that movement was also feared in the Black Panther Party itself. At one point, you know, I think high-ranking politicians called the Black Panther Party, the biggest, single internal threat to do American rule inside the society. And so there was this sort of notion that after the USSR and the overall communist threat

collapsed, that it was much easier to sort of abandon the working class because that threat was gone. And as people like Fukuyama would proclaim the end of history is here, it's just neoliberal capitalism all the way out. And it's just a matter of tending to and managing the system indefinitely. And I think that's a big problem. And we're starting to see the costs of that worldview and that sort of arrogance come back to bite us all in the ass in 2018. So all this stuff is deeply, deeply connected, and we could talk for days about it.

But I think it's best to go on to the next question. David. At commie math, how do each of you think about the Enlightenment in relation to your respective ideologies? Woo! Now, this question is huge. This question is something I'm particularly interested in. And I might be a little indulgent in how much I go into it because I don't think leftists generally have a really good grasp on how to think about the Enlightenment. So one way to think about it is that there's two major camps when it comes to the Enlightenment in today's politics. You have a sort of reactionary centrist camp represented by the Stephen Pinkers and Sam Harris's and Jordan Peterson's of the world,

which view the Enlightenment as a unique sort of outgrowth of the superiority of European culture. and they view the Enlightenment as something that they carry on themselves and their sort of centrist, neoliberal politics. It's very much about scientism. The new atheist movement was certainly a movement that claimed the Enlightenment for itself and in some respects its right in doing so. And then there's been a counter reaction to that, which is the postmodernist movement. The postmodernist movement rejects the Enlightenment entirely as a failed project,

and it also simultaneously tries to tie in communism and Marxism, with the Enlightenment as a way to be anti-Marxist and anti-communist. I think what leftists need to do and what leftists should think about is the failures of the Enlightenment and the failures of postmodernism. Then we should carve out a narrative, we should carve out a place that rejects both narratives of postmodernism and this sort of neoliberal love affair with the Enlightenment. I'm going to hand it over to you in a bit, but I do want to read from a little. an article. And this is not an argument against Matthew or anything like that. I just think this

is a really interesting way of highlighting what a leftist position on the Enlightenment could look like. It might take a minute here. But this article, part of it I'm going to read, but the whole article is called Radiating Disaster Triumphant, Modernity, and its discontents. And it's written by J. Mao Fawad Paul, who is going to be a guest on Rev. Left next week, actually, to talk about Maoism and revolutionary communism. But if you just let me indulge for a minute or two, I'm going to read a little chunk of this article and I think it will really sort of highlight what a leftist view of modernity

in the Enlightenment could look like or should look like. So, try to follow me here. I know it's kind of wordy, but I think it's important. The fact is that the Enlightenment happened in Europe during the long transition to capitalism according to the interrelated processes of one, brutal colonial

expansion and two violent commons enclosures. Moreover, part of the reason it could happen in Europe was largely driven by the knowledge stolen from nations encountered, plundered, invaded, and occupied by the colonial expansion. Hence, the rationality of modern colonialism and emergent capitalism became part of modernity. This colonial capitalist rationale prevented the Enlightenment from being truly universal because of the various unscientific and anti-human logics it generated and injected into the heart of modernity itself.

To understand necessity, to demystify nature, would thus become synonymous with mastery and exploitation. Colonial capitalist logic was clear. That which would be known could also be transformed into exploitable property. Knowledge of the natural world was only knowledge qua knowledge if it was instrumental in maintaining the hegemony of one group of people over many others, and most importantly, allowed the former to enrich themselves and consummate their dominance at the expense of most of the world. This is why France Fanon concludes the wretched of the earth by declaring the need to establish a new enlightenment that will be free from the predations

of Europe. The point here is not to pursue a postmodern ethos which can mean anything from a pre-modern to a bland relativism that is suspicious of all claims the truth, but instead to push for a modernity beyond modernity. I could go on, but that really gets to the heart of what a leftist

critique of the Enlightenment is. It's an extrably bound up with the colonialism and the rise of bourgeois rule at that time. And it's also very patriarchal. It's also very Eurocentric. And this is why it's so easily weaponized by people like the new atheists who want to use it to justify further imperialism and want to use it to be cultural chauvinists and to say that Western society and Western culture is inherently superior to other cultures. But the reaction to that is not postmodernism. It's not to

fall into this postmodernist death spiral of relativism, but rather to carve out a new enlightenment to push forward a new form of modernity that takes into account what the original enlightenment failed to take into account. If you're going to demystify nature, you should also demystify class and nation and property and race and gender because those are also to some extent sort of superstitious cultural constructs that a true full universal enlightenment would ultimately attack. So I know that's a lot to take in and a lot to think about and hopefully I'll have an episode on that in the future. But that's sort of a leftist

version of how to think about the Enlightenment. Matthew? I think one thing that one pitfall that you can fall into when you're talking about the Enlightenment is to view it as a set of ideals, like a list of things that the Enlightenment thinkers believed in,

which I think falls, grievously sort of understanding what in fact was occurring, right? You could read Montesquieu and Diderot and Voltaire and Rousse and Rousse. and Bacaria, for example, and you would struggle to find any real unifying beliefs or theories that applied to all five of them. So I think one thing to think about with the Enlightenment is what it accomplished was not coming up with any particularly unique ideas

or even ways of organizing society. I think most of what they said had been said before, right? We would have to give Montesquieu credit for the idea of a divided government. Machiavelli had already discussed that, and his discourse is on Livy. So there's a lot of ideas that the Enlightenment had that weren't necessarily new ideas. What was new about the Enlightenment was the opening of many different ways of thinking and the popularization of that. So I think that if we were to critique what happened during the Enlightenment, especially from a liberal perspective, right? So the British Enlightenment is often closely connected with liberalism.

We think of John Locke as like the best representation maybe of the British Enlightenment. And Adam Smith, for example, is coming in that same tradition. I think that a great critique of that is what Hobhouse writes in 1911, looking back over liberalism, is that they viewed their project as primarily negative, as tearing down old institutions and old institutions. barriers. But they didn't imagine, they didn't, perhaps they didn't have the capacity to imagine that new institutions would have to be effectively built up. And so at least from the liberal tradition, I think that that's the big, certainly the liberal tradition springs from that period

of the Enlightenment and the new ideas that were able to gain currency in that period where before they may have been relegated to somewhat obscure books. And so I think what liberals need to look at there is, okay, so once those things were torn down, once hierarchical privilege is torn down, once feudalism is torn down, then what needs to be built up to replace them? And as it turns out something, a great deal probably, in terms of our society and culture, needs to be built up to replace that, rather than seeing the Enlightenment as, oh, great, like we're enlightened, now we're good to go. The best things that the Enlightenment did were tear down barriers to new thought. But to treat that as, okay, so the Enlightenment is a single,

coherent philosophy or that it's the end all like we've torn down the bad thought now we're good to go I think is um is a is a grave error and you you touch on that to some extent with the yeah the idea the a lot of modernist or chauvinist philosophers was saying like yeah it was accomplished in the enlightenment that made western civilization what it is everyone else just needs to catch up to that um definitely fails to see that that the enlightenment really didn't do any of that at least not very effectively and didn't really create societies that are that are that are that are the societies that we want to live in they merely if the enlightenment accomplished things it was tearing down barriers to the societies that we want to create yeah and then there's so much we could talk

about there but i think you're absolutely right and to it's not one monolithic thing i mean enlightenment thinkers disagreed with themselves there's a lot of nuance and complexity there and in some sense the Enlightenment Project was only, was one-dimensional, and although it gave way to great progress, it also encoded inside of itself some of the worst aspects of humanity at that time, and those sorts of half-finished projects need to be fully finished in a way by pushing things forward, demystifying social relations themselves, and moving history forward in a way that compensates for the failures of the original Enlightenment, but that doesn't fall into a reaction to it that says, you know, there is no such thing as truth or whatever the case may be. But

David, we have two more questions left, so you want to ask the next one? In what ways has your ideology failed, in your opinion, either in theoretical blind spots or in failure of praxis? Yeah, so I think that liberalism has a ton of failures that liberals need to understand if they're to move their ideology forward. As far as theoretical blind spots, I think that liberals, much like a continuation of what I was saying before, liberals failed to see that many of the things that they were tearing down existed for a reason, right? And they needed to be replaced with better societal structures.

So that theoretical blind spot of, wait, just getting rid of the inherited hierarchies that the original liberals hated so much isn't enough to secure actual freedom. So I think that that theoretical blind spot really has been filled in by later writers, by everyone from pain to mill to onwards. But the people who, as you were described at the beginning of the show, the sort of casual liberals who just kind of absorb it but don't really think about it, retain that blind spot, especially with regard to property.

They never think about what is the basis of property and in what ways and what kinds of property do really limit the freedom, the liberty of other people. And then in practice, I think that one of the big issues has been in allowing or failing to stop imperialism and colonialism, liberal's made a lot of progress. And liberal thinkers were able to make progress in areas like getting rid of slavery. But failing to act more firmly and swiftly, odd imperialism and colonialism caused really an unquantifiable amount of suffering. and so in the future liberals need to keep that failure in mind I think keep that in the fact that in many cases they were they're kind of bamboozled into supporting imperialism they need to keep that failure in mind and make sure that that that doesn't happen again there's there's several more the last one that I would mention is this idea that somehow and I said this also before that somehow corporations have crept into the idea of liberal freedom that somehow corporations have the same freedoms or rights that somehow corporations have the same freedoms or rights that. individuals. There's no real solid or coherent theoretical basis for that to be true from a liberal standpoint, and yet a lot of liberals accepted. The idea that corporations don't have a right to exist, or that corporations should only exist for the benefit of society seems far more

radical than I think it should seem to a lot of liberals that are currently in politics or business today. Yeah, and I guess from the left-wing perspective, there's been a lot of of failures. I mean, what is human history? What is struggle, if not failing, of not trials and tribulations? On some, on the anarchist side of things, there's been struggles with trying to maintain revolutions and not become crushed by stronger state forces, from, you know, from although the Paris commune wasn't strictly speaking anarchist, to Catalonia, 1936, there's been a beautiful blossoming of like really pure worker proletarian power in anarchist to movements, but there's been an inability to maintain those over long periods of time.

On the other hand, Marxists have done a great job at maintaining revolutions over time and defending them from counter-revolutions, but at the same time, they've also made mistakes. They've been excessive. One of the things that I think is a mistake is that we have to take seriously this notion that, as we talked about earlier, states develop momentum of their own, and often the interest of the state becomes incompatible with or intention with the interest of the working people on the ground that the state is ostensibly supposed to support. And so in those moments of mistakes, the solution is not to abandon the socialist project.

The solution is not to abandon the communist project. The solution is to learn from those mistakes and move forward. We are trying to give birth to a brand new world, something totally novel in the history of civilization and the history of human beings. So that process is going to be one of pain, is going to be one of, of, of, of failure and mistakes all of human history is a bloodbath of tragedy and that's no different now than it was 500 years ago um but the the point is to to learn from those mistakes and continue to move forward to not give up to not fall into a sort of nihilistic apathy where you just

recoil into your own personal life and stop fighting for the collective good um one other thing I would like to mention is as Jay Malphawad Paul often talks about, world historical revolutions help refine theory. These attempts at building a new world, even though they fail ultimately or even though they make massive mistakes, are history-changing movements. And the response to them should not be to abandon them and to join in with liberal, capitalist mockery and degradation, but rather to learn from them uphold the good parts and move forward in the long struggle for justice and liberation. Finally, the last question, and I think this last question is a great way to end it because it's forward-looking. We're not looking in the past, we're not looking at the present, but we're looking to the future.

So, David, why don't you go ahead and ask that last question, my buddy? Sure thing, pal. Does the capitalist mode of production and its corresponding political form, liberal democracy, truly represent the so-called end of history, or do you envision the emergence of a new, more advanced social formation beyond bourgeois society? If the latter, on what basis? All right. Well, I think it's my turn to go first.

So, this is pretty simple from a left-wing perspective. The answer is that liberal democracy and capitalism are but a stage of human development, and history unfolds towards, as long as we fight, will unfold. towards more and more liberation. History cannot end inside the confines of a class society because the oppression and exploitation that class society gives rise to

will always be there and the fight for liberation will always continue and will always press things forward. Capitalism can bring about the end of the world, like it can devour existence, but it cannot bring about the end of history. And to say that it does is

to reject how history actually operates and to fall into this sort of bourgeois arrogance that a lot of liberals and bourgeois Z fell into in the 90s, which is to declare at the end of history. There's that old Rosa Luxembourg quote where she says it's socialism or it's barbarism. And what she's saying there is that we either keep fighting to build socialism on our way to communism, on our way to a fully liberated world, or we resign ourselves to this capitalist death spiral. We don't see capitalism as being fundamentally transformative and progressive. We see it as a

is sort of eating up its own tail, and now that after, you know, centuries of colonialism and imperialism, it's bumped up against the outer borders of the planet itself. It can do nothing else other than to turn in and devour itself and everybody inside of it. And so we have to move forward. We have no choice but to fight, and we are the subjects through which history takes place. History is not determined. Socialism and communism are not inevitable. That requires us to pick up the fight and move forward with it and maybe it all ends in in total devastation maybe capitalism will get to the end of devouring itself before we can build this better world but if we don't fight nobody will so that's the view from the from the leftist perspective

i would say certainly there there is no so-called end of history um it's difficult to to imagine that occurring um when we're looking at progress i think that you can see and i i would rattle off some stats, but I don't have them, and they're probably boring. But since the early 90s, you can really see real progress. And as you can see why Fukuyama made this statement that there was an end of history. But obviously, that's not going to be sufficient. So you can see real progress in things like life expectancy, and things like a drop in communicable diseases, childhood deaths, access to clean food and water. Those things are definitely improving. However, I think that the question asks about a new

more advanced social formation, I think that's absolutely going to be necessary. I think one of the big thing that's going to bring that about and could bring about for better or for worse is automation. So Henry George, as far back as the 1870s, discussed automation in this potential future, and he basically laid it out that there were two stark possibilities. One was that everything gets automated, so that labor is no longer scarce, neither quickly is capital, right? As soon as you have robot workers, they can build you infinite.

factories as well. So that all that's left that is scarce are the natural resource and the land that we live on. And barring some huge jumps to space travel, those things are going to remain scarce for a long time. They remain finite. So we said there's basically two, there's two worlds available to us. One where those things are shared by society, in which case everyone has basically all the leisure they want. They can apply themselves. They can self-actualized like you were saying, the other possibility is those things continue to be held as a natural monopoly against everybody else. And that's ultimately, that is a potential end of history, if you say history is cross-conflict, because then the laboring class loses their trump card,

right? So that is kind of maybe my biggest fear is that we come to a society where we have full automation and the resources that remain scarce remain in the hands of a very small number of people. on the other hand I think that that's by no means inevitable I think that a new more advanced social formation that involves giving that real freedom to people is finally going to become possible in the next century as more and more things become non-scarce as as more and more things become essentially limitless we will have the possibility of constructing a society where people can choose how much they want to work how much they want to invest instead of those choices being dictated by necessity and I think that that that's a possibility of a real possibility where we can give people back the same freedom that they've always had at birth, but that society has taken away from them. So I think that there is a possibility that there will be a real freedom, and I guess you could call that an end of history, or at least an end of class conflict. It's not going to look like this looks, particularly because it requires us working together to own or control some of those resources, even as

I think we continue to value the ability of individuals to control their labor and the output of their labor in periods to come. All right. Well, as a gracious guest, I'm going to let you have that as your last word. Matthew, I really appreciate you coming on. This has been a long conversation, but a really interesting one. I know we're not going to be able to do both of our general philosophical categories full justice. I mean, we could spend an hour on every single question, but I really appreciate your willingness to come on. I really appreciate the sort of progressive instincts that you have as a liberal.

It's a rare breed of liberal that can come to a place like this and have this sort of discussion that doesn't devolve into me hating you. So I really do appreciate it. And I think that this conversation, I hope to this conversation, is useful to other people. Before we let you go, do you have any last word you want to say or anything that you want to plug or anything you want to say before we let you go? I would just say it's been a real pleasure to be on this program. I've cited a bunch of works. The ones that I've cited,

Hobhouse's liberalism, Henry George's progress in poverty, and then Thomas Payne, I would highly recommend anyone read those if they want an idea of what exactly the things are talking about, liberalism that you might not hate from a leftist perspective. Liberalism that's, I think, a bit more intellectually coherent and advanced

than sort of the caricature that we're kind of left with in a lot of American culture. Yep, and I totally agree that I think leftists can only benefit from really diving into the long and, you know, treasured history of liberal thinkers because it's not all bad. There's a lot of really interesting stuff in there, and I think it's worthwhile for us to understand liberalism as a philosophical movement and all the ideas that it does represent and can represent.