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Ethics Unbound: Marx's Revolutionary Framework with Vanessa Wills
Dr. Vanessa Wills takes us on an intellectual journey through the heart of Marx's ethical vision – perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of his revolutionary philosophy. As we trace her path from anti-war activism to Marxist scholarship, Dr. Wills demolishes the persistent myth that Marx had no ethics or moral framework. Instead, she reveals how his entire project was fundamentally concerned with human flourishing, dignity, and liberation.
The conversation cuts through decades of academic confusion to show how Marx's dialectical method allows us to understand apparent contradictions in his thought. Yes, he rejected abstract moralizing, but simultaneously offered a profound critique of capitalism rooted in human needs and capacities. This isn't inconsistency – it's the recognition that ethics emerge from material conditions while simultaneously guiding our transformation of those conditions.
We explore how Marx's understanding of human nature as dynamic and social challenges both liberal individualism and crude collectivism. The false opposition between individual and society dissolves when we recognize that genuine individuality can only flourish through rich social relations. Capitalism's claim to champion the individual rings hollow when we see how it systematically destroys actual human beings while claiming to celebrate abstract individualism.
Perhaps most urgently, Dr. Wills explains how Marx's ethical vision speaks to our current crises of ecological destruction, social alienation, and political fragmentation. From the commodification of identity in social media to the resurgence of rigid gender roles, modern phenomena reflect the contradictions Marx identified. His materialist approach doesn't abandon ethics but grounds them in the real conditions and potentials of human existence.
This conversation invites us to rediscover Marx not as a cold determinist, but as a thinker whose commitment to human flourishing offers a framework for addressing our most pressing ethical questions. By understanding exploitation, alienation, and commodification as barriers to our collective survival and development, we gain new tools for imagining and creating a world where human dignity isn't just proclaimed but materially possible.
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Hello and welcome to VARVLOG, and I am here with Dr Vanessa Wills, author of Marxist Ethical Vision, political Philosopher, and Ephesus, which is going to be a controversial claim in and of itself at George Washington University, where you are an associate professor of philosophy and you are a founding editor for Spectre, which is a journal of Marxist theory.
Speaker 1:Reading your book, I was actually taken a little bit by how you got to this debate around the ethical norms of Marxism, because I also came of age politically in the same milieu. I'm in my 40s, I was an anti-war activist, although I was a conservative anti-war activist for a long time, and Marxism kind of got me out of that. So it was interesting reading what is likely the more common story, which is someone struggling with the obvious failures of bourgeois liberal ethics and norms around the war. Can you speak about you talked about in 2004 voting for Kerry and knowing that was going to be the last time you ever voted for a Democrat? Can you speak about how that was that got you thinking about moral norms and also was part of your path to Marxism?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's great. So first of all, I felt it on a visceral level. I went, I pushed the button and I think I had been feeling conflicted all the way up to that moment actually irrational, mismatched, contradictory, about going out on the streets protesting against the war, understanding that it was wrong, and yet having this candidate whose position was all about winning the war. And I think this was also a moment where the importance of anti-imperialist politics really became crystallized for me. Because that goal of let us win the war well, what does that mean? Practically right, it just means more death, more destruction of human beings. The only difference between them and me is that they aren't US citizens, is that they're across the world, so why should I support my government destroying them and their lives for that, just for that reason.
Speaker 2:And so then that moment of voting, it became clear to me that I had resolved that contradiction on the wrong side of it and that what I needed to be doing was staying out in the streets and opposing these people, and which is which is what I then went on to do. So it was this very kind of clarifying moment, especially when it didn't even work. Carrie lost with that message, as I think could be expected. If you're Bush-lite, then people that like that are going to vote for the real thing, the actual Republican. And and then I just saw that the sort of electoral movement if we want, if we can even call it that that he had led, it, just it just evaporated as soon as he lost. The people that had put all of their hope for the future in a Democratic Party win were just demoralized and still right, you know, just sort of that is unclear, you know, unclear what to do next, and so it just seemed like that was not a going concern.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I find it interesting because I do think a lot of people were radicalized towards Marxism in that time period. But the more common narrative is the Great Recession, you know, brought Marxism back and that I find that interesting because it does say something about like the moral narratives versus the scientificity claims of Marxism, scientificity claims of Marxism and I, reading your book, I realized that you are trying to in some ways square a circle. That people are right seems contradictory in Marx that he claims that he is not doing any kind of moralizing or, in fact, any norms at all sometimes, and yet his language belies that. And you know, there's there's, there's a freshman philosophy.
Speaker 1:One on one answer to Marx is like well, if you don't think exploitation is wrong, how do you think this is actually going to work like? It does seem like like, even with all the scientific categories. If, if you just as well, exploitation is something that humans naturally do, then are it's morally correct or whatever? It's actually a much harder like. A lot of things fall apart from that kind simple question, why did you feel the need to intervene in the debate about this? Because I do think you're somewhat unique in that you do admit that, yeah, marx does claim this, but there also are moral norms. Why the need to intervene now?
Speaker 2:norms, like why they need to intervene now. Oh, I mean, so it's a question that I think is getting more attention now and that people are thinking about now on a broader scale. But I've been thinking. I've been intervening on this question for almost 20 years at this point, you know, and so you know. So, like you know, confession is that the real answer is just that I became totally obsessed with the question. I had to know, I had to know, I had to figure it out, and so that's why I started writing a dissertation on it.
Speaker 2:I just had to know, and the reason that I had to know was, first of all, I had been very impressed already by what Marxist theory offers in terms of our ability to understand all sorts of features of historical and social change and dynamism, how societies develop, to give an explanation that allowed me to understand the class nature of the United States and to have an explanation of why it is that the people in charge are doing things that are obviously detrimental to the well-being of the vast majority of people in the country. All of a sudden, I understood that, and so that made Marxist theory seem extremely promising then, and Marxist theory does announce itself as a holistic theory as one that can explain anything that has to do with human beings, and so part of what was at stake then for me was a test of that claim, and if it turns out that there's this huge area of human thought and endeavor that Marxism is just silent on and has nothing to offer us in terms of our ability to understand it, that would be one reason to doubt that it really is true that Marxism is the kind of holistic explanatory theory that it presents itself as, and so it was very personal for me. I just I wanted to understand the world. I still want to understand the world. I want to make the world a better place. I want to.
Speaker 2:You know all the things that I face. You know as anybody, as, as as anybody does. You know like, but all the sort of categories of identity and class status, and you know all the, the, the, the suffering. Frankly, you know that I experienced in my life. It was very personal. I just needed to know and, and, and and, happily. You know, when I started working on this stuff, people just thought like how weird, like what a weird niche little because Marx and ethics, like who can you know? In 2006,? It was just like who cares? We already did that in the 80s because of things like the lasting impact of things like 2008. And, of course, more recently, we just have sharper and sharper crises. People want to understand what's going on?
Speaker 1:Yeah, my own trajectory is similar, although my moment for realizing, as I voted, that I was never going to vote for a Democrat again, except, kind of sort of, for Bernie Sanders, was 2008. And it was a similar contradiction because, even though Barack Obama was read as an anti-war president, he was an anti-one war pro another and even though he said that explicitly, his base office didn't hear it.
Speaker 1:And you know I've heard you describe the way that that was able to re-tap into grassroots organizing but effectively liquidate it. You know which I remember feeling in the moment of voting, because, you know, as soon as I heard the cabinet I was like, oh yeah, we're through Right.
Speaker 2:This is not what I expected. Yeah, and just you know, you noted that Obama was pretty explicit about his actual policies and I had that same experience. I remember talking to a friend and saying you know, I don't support Obama because I don't support US militarism. And my friend saying what do you mean Obama's not for US militarism? Where did you get that from? And I'm like his campaign website, from the page where he talks about how you know, basically the same thing, biden.
Speaker 2:They all think, right, the most important thing is to pump up the US military and have the most lethal fighting force in the world. Well, I'm against that, you know. But the idea that there should be some connection between the policies that these people actually have and our political support for them is completely severed in our political discourse in this country. And you kind of got to hand it to the ruling class parties that they've been able to pull that off. That people will explicitly endorse the view that it just doesn't actually matter what the person says or what their policies are. Vote for them anyway vote for them anyway.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and, and I've seen a lot of, uh, I've seen a lot of liberals and even some, even some leftists talk about conservatives doing that and I had, but I was like, but you do it too, like on anti-war politics. It's been my entire life. You keep on telling me these are anti-war candidates. I read what they say and they they're not. And you know I'll let you fool me on that once, but I'm not falling for it multiple times. And you know that was part of I think my journey was a little longer to you. I was a conservative anti-war activist and I realized that that didn't, for economic reasons and also for racism it didn't actually cause a good answer to the problem.
Speaker 2:So like an isolationist kind of politics yeah it was pre-Ron Paul.
Speaker 1:But that sort of world and thinking about economics uh, even before the the 2008 recession, just looking at the economic trends, going like, oh, there's something wrong here. These triumphalist libertarians are there's nothing rational about what is happening now in the longterm and they're redefining rationality and so that's so. That sort of got me to Marx. But you know, I got sucked into that popular frontist attitude that we need to support the Democrats and immediately it was like, oh no, this doesn't really work.
Speaker 1:I did find it interesting that your book does have a kind of not entirely crypto polemic against analytical Marxism in it, and I find it interesting because when you mentioned the eighties, I was like, yeah, when people talk about ethics and Marxism in the eighties, it was either like post Marxist late Frankfurt school after Frankfurt School after Habermas, had led us to give it up, or analytical Marxism, which, in my mind, has made a comeback in a crypto way. It has a disproportionate influence on Catalyst Journal and thus on Jacobin Magazine, even though they don't actually explicitly state it most of the time. Why did you think you needed to push back on analytical Marxism? Because if people aren't really paying attention, for a lot of people like, oh, analytical Marxism died in the 90s, like, and I'm like, ah, it's kind of still around. It just doesn't call itself that anymore. But what's your relations to analytical Marxism and why do you think it was important to intervene there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean that was largely driven by my own experience as an academic philosopher, where I just experienced over the years that nine times out of 10, if not more. First of all, many academic philosophers are just unfamiliar with Marx period. It's, you know it's. It is something that over the years there have been concerted efforts to purge Marxists out of the academy. I end the book talking about the attempt the unsuccessful, thankfully attempt to purge Angela Davis right from the academy in the 60s, and I mentioned other philosophers that were subject to similar purges. And so there's a real physical destruction of the tradition of Marxist theory in philosophy in particular and in the academy in general. And so my experience has been that, to the extent that any version of Marxist theory is able to get through that and survive, it has been in the form of analytical Marxism. And so one thing to say about analytical Marxism.
Speaker 2:I'm sure your viewers are aware, but we're talking about a school of self-professed Marxist thought. I think there's a big question to be asked of how Marxists some of the analytical Marxists have been historically. But this school of thought that says that Marxism doesn't have its own distinctive method to the extent that it has a distinctive method, it's a bad one, it's the mysticism of the dialectic. And so, therefore, what we really need to do is take Marx's conclusions and marry them to this analytic method which denies, in particular, the truth of, denies the idea of methodological holism, so it tends to treat things as discrete, individual objects but not look at all of being as part of one interrelated unity. It thinks that that is, you know, mystical nonsense, I guess, and also rejects dialectics, the idea that historical transformation is driven by conflict between opposing forces. You know, I think, if you reject both of those things, you no longer talk about Marxism anymore.
Speaker 2:But you know, analytical Marxism has this kind of contradictory role because, on the one hand, I think, figures in that tradition sort of piled on and said, yeah, there's nothing useful to get out of Marx's method and his way of understanding the world. At the same time, you know, they have sort of sustained the idea that there's something to be salvaged from Marx, and even that thought is controversial, right, and so it's useful to have a tradition that maintains it. But you know, I look at, marxism is so influential to the extent that English-speaking philosophers have any understanding of Marx, and it's wrong. And so that you know, and I think, and in particular it's wrong about Marx's method and the book is. I mean, there's a way in which the books one of the books most significant interventions is precisely to defend Marxist method and to say there's dialectics is needed in order to understand the contradictions and conflicts of the world.
Speaker 1:Yeah, as a person who's educated in both literary studies and philosophy, I can tell you that there are different forms of Marxism that are popular in both, but what they both share is that they're not dialectical. Altsysterianism is popular in literary studies for reasons that I don't entirely understand, and probably because of dominance of French theory. And then when I was in philosophy, analytic Marxism was pretty much taken to be the only justifiable form of Marxism, and I kind of believed that for a little while myself, until I started looking at what they snuck back in. So I was like wait, why are we talking about equilibrium as more scientific, like? Like, if you really logically follow through the implications of, of, uh, neoclassical equilibrium theory, it requires the abolition of time to be true. Um, uh, so it's.
Speaker 1:It's one of those things that that I found really fascinating and your book speaks to. But I don't think today most people realize how much influence analytical marxism still has, because they were one of the big groups of people who would say I mean that this was one of JA Cohen's claims like Marxism has norms, marx is basically lying about that, but the norms are good, you know that's basically JA Cohen's claim, and your book got me to think in some ways Marx is having his cake and eating it too, but he does realize he has norms in some sense.
Speaker 1:what he's aiming at, morality seems to be I mean the two forms, the two forms of explicit morality we seem to be dealing with is left Kantianism and and utilitarianism, and then like Malthusianism, but that's not really left wing at all.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Why do you think it's important to understand these contestations between different moral theories that were around the socialist movement when Marx was running?
Speaker 2:Yeah, they're perennial, I mean they persist. Especially, I think, especially the debate between people who think that Marx has a theory that offers us the resources to think normatively, to think ethically, and folks who think it doesn't, but that it needs one and that therefore let's graft some Kantianism onto it. That's a live and continuing debate. Debate, and with utilitarianism, utilitarianism is sort of the moral lingua franca of all sorts of international institutions in particular, and so even when these views are not announced as Kantianism, utilitarianism, they're the air that we breathe, they're the water we swim in. They're traded all the time as ethical justifications for doing this rather than that. So, just on its face, as theoretical debates, they remain very live.
Speaker 2:But also one of the things that I say, especially with respect to Kantianism, but one of the things I say in the book, is that it's not an innocent question whether we should be Kantians, for example, because if we should be Kantians, then I think that that actually means that also.
Speaker 2:I mean and Kantians think this too right that it means all sorts of things that Marx recommends that we do like, seize the means of production, are morally forbidden because they're not ways that human beings would or should interact with one another if they were in a fully developed society where everybody respected one another as an end and not a mere means, and so on and so forth. So there's agreement that, yeah, it would be great if people treated one another like that, but we're not there. So what do we do? And the Kantian answer is pretend you're there, right, act as though you are. And then the Marxist answer is let's try to get there, which might include means that don't necessarily prefigure the ends exactly, and so that's a debate that goes on all the time. It's a debate that Marxists have with anarchists as well as with liberals, and it's extremely meaningful for political decisions and for our reasoning about how it is that we might actually bring about the kind of world that we want to be in.
Speaker 1:Right, I mean, I think you know one of the things about modern ethical ideology is the dominant liberal ethical thing is some kind of hybrid monster between utilitarianism and Kantianism in walls. That's right, it's like okay. So the answer in the 20th century was to take these two things that even a lot of ethicists who are not Marxist agree don't really work and combine them together into one super ideology.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but that's right, and that's exactly right, and it speaks to a kind of unprincipled eclecticism. Right, because what's actually being sought after are post hoc justifications for capitalist exploitation. That's what we're really dealing with. And so then the question is how do we expose that? Now, not always there's lots of sincere content. I'm a philosopher, so you know, and you are, you are too. So, so, like we know lots of sincere content, right, but when those kinds of explanations are put forward in the political sphere, you know they don't mean it. It's all post hoc nonsense.
Speaker 1:Right, I mean human rights is infamous, for if you study it for like, okay, so like, the UN gives us this really broad notion of genocide, let's be super selective of when we actually invoke it because it is so broad. I mean technically, cultural destruction doesn't mean it, but but it sometimes does. I mean, like the other thing, if you actually read the charter new in about the definition of genocide, it's like this has souls like riddled through it, um, uh, and I bring that up because you know the other thing that happens a lot is in ways that I do think even kant or Bentham or Mill would be a little bit horrified by. Legal rights and abstract moral rights are in our political discourse, like used interchangeably, and sometimes even leftists do this and I'm like no, that's a bad framework because you know who wrote the legal rights and why would they do that.
Speaker 1:One of the things I find interesting about Marxism that I do find very liberatory and it's not the only school of thinking that does this school of thinking that does this I mean nichianism to some degree does this too but is to say that there is a history and a usage to these ideas like, um, freedom has a history and and it's not just an ideological, genealogical one, it's also a developmental one, like simultaneously, and there's a, there's a tension there and I think without dialectical thinking you can't get to that tension like you can't really um access what the tension is when you're talking about the genealogical or ideological development of an, of a virtue concept or a norm concept or norm and the um and the, the way that norm can be used to justify modes of production and social reproduction.
Speaker 1:Um, that marx does see the tension there like he doesn't. Like when you read like a critique of the girtha program, he is not trying to throw away the idea of freedom because it's limited by bourgeois notions of freedom, but he's like pointing out that, like the bourgeois notion of freedom is both clarifying and mystifying.
Speaker 1:Like it has actually moved something forward, but also it's limited.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's exactly right.
Speaker 1:Reading your book I also noticed I mentioned Althusser, because that was really dominant in the literary studies, end of things, and it's also fairly popular amongst Marxists today. Um, and you talk about that. The Althusserian notion of ideology is even posited by Althusser as not Marxist. But a lot of people go back and be like, well, althusser is just figuring out what Marx really meant.
Speaker 2:And it's interesting because you pretty much cite in your book where Althusser is explicit that he's not claiming that much side in your book where Althusser is explicit that he's not claiming yeah, yeah, yeah, it was interesting, I mean that that sort of emerged in part out of a discourse with a reviewer, actually who who said, oh, but Althusser thinks that this is Marxist theory of ideology.
Speaker 2:And I was like, no, althusser is like extremely explicit that he understands that it isn't Because he thinks that, I mean he thinks Marx's own concept of lapse and that Marx understands ideology as you know, ideas without history, right, and and it's just and so therefore he's going to supplant this whole notion of interpolation and so on, and but but he's not even on it on his own account, attempting to render Marxist concept into those terms. Yeah, it's fascinating. I mean, with the analytical Marxist, you get something like this too, where you know I think it's in a footnote, but I cite GE Cohen saying, yeah, this probably wasn't that Marxist, like probably that's not actually any version of Marxism, you know. So you see these figures at times you know being quite explicit that this is a break with Marxism at a pretty fundamental level.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think it's important to realize that, because I do think, you know, even if you're a good marxist, you probably encountered academic philosophers who, even if you're, you know, one of those people who's only in, you know, instigation to marxism is sectarian marxism. There's probably an academic behind the sex somewhere. Um, just I like to point that out.
Speaker 2:I'm like usually there's a professor in the background somewhere to blame, um, and yeah, um, I mean part, I so like part of what animates the book is is also a theme that comes up in a paper that I wrote a couple years ago. I wrote this paper. What Could it Mean to Say? Capitalism Causes Sexism and Racism. And you know, even though that one is about identity-based oppression specifically and this book is about ethics generally, you know the through line is that if you understand Marxism as a kind of class only theory, then you don't understand it, you're wrong and Marx himself doesn't frame.
Speaker 2:The materialist conception of history is precisely supposed to be a theory of human beings and their existence. Right, not just class. Now, class is the lens. Right, it's the fact of the emergence of the working class that makes it possible to see that class society can be abolished. That makes it possible to see the centrality of labor and what Marx calls human self-changing to human history. So it's a class-based theory in the sense that it's only possible to develop the theory at a certain point of the development of class society, that that gives us an insight into how all the rest of class society has functioned and about the necessity of doing away with class society, but the idea that somehow all Marx can tell us about is factory workers, and only when they're on the floor, right? Not when they're at home. It's just not correct, it's just wrong.
Speaker 2:And the concept that I see as being most central for Marx is the concept of labor. And now the centrality of that concept is revealed through a class analysis, right through looking at the conditions of the working class. But what we find is that it's labor, it is the activity of human beings producing their own history. And if you don't, if you don't, if you aren't able to understand that ongoing historical production and self-changing of human beings of themselves, then all sorts of contradictions that emerge over the course of that history, you're going to, you're going to end up undialectically saying well, it's either this or it's that. Either this is happening or that's happening.
Speaker 2:So with the case of the bourgeoisie right, as you just mentioned Marx's comments in the Critique of the Godot program, you know where the analysis is. Listen, this idea of rights can take us so far, but also, at a certain point, it's a break, it's a hindrance, and that sort of transition from being something that advances human history to being something that ultimately is a kind of theoretical structure that is no longer of use to us, has to be understood as something that unfolds over the course of time. But if you don't have that dimension of history, then you're not able to explain how the very same thing can have one character at one moment and a different character at another, both of which reveal something essential about what that thing is, in this case a right.
Speaker 1:Right, one of your moves that I think is interesting. I think you and this was mentioned on the Moral Minority podcast as well you kind of intuit or in some ways prove now maybe intuit is the wrong word that Alastair McIntyre wasn't entirely wrong, that there's an Aristotelianism in Marx to some degree, but that what makes it different from classical Aristotelianism is the essence is a process. It's a very broad process. It's, it is labor.
Speaker 1:Now, to be fair to aristotle, aristotle also thought the essence of mankind was a process, because reasoning is a process that's true, yeah but which I've always felt weird, because people like talk about essences in aristotle like they're static, I'm like, but how is reasoning a static anyway?
Speaker 1:Um, uh, but the labor is, you know, and you see this even in marxist anthropology, you know, and uh, ingalls develops this in dialectics of nature, sometimes scientifically a little bit questionably, but, um, but not entirely wrong that there's that social labor, broadly construed, is seeming to drive probably most mammalian evolution, but definitely human evolution, and thus there is some relationship to human trans-historical normativity that is also limited, because this process is a process that happens in history. We can't see it ever in total abstraction, right, like I mean, and I think interestingly, marx talks about this in the 44 market, but even about, like dogs, like it's hard to know what a dog nature is, because outside of you know, know the society in which dogs are in, because we encounter them acting in the social norms that they wear little neckerchiefs and right yeah you know, and that ended up scientifically being actually a really important observation, because he's about 150 years before we realized that those wolf studies were bullshit, because they were only done on captive wolves and wolves in the wild don't act the same way.
Speaker 2:Right, that's right. All the like alpha stuff. I mean.
Speaker 1:not everybody has gotten the memo but yeah, so you know the kind of seemingly paradoxical claim, but it's really a dialectical claim that there is a human nature, but it is not static. And since it is not static, we can't freeze it and abstractify it and say, like, human nature is love, without saying okay, like, but what is that in this instance?
Speaker 1:in this context, et cetera, et cetera. And I liked I mean you know I liked that in your book. I think there's a few other thinkers who've talked about that but it actually does get ignored and marks, yes, a lot.
Speaker 2:Yes, you know it's incredible, yeah, yeah. No, it's incredible how much it does get ignored. Because, you know, it's just not uncommon in my experience to have people say like well, but human beings aren't like that. Or human beings are not like what Marx thinks they are. And now what Marx thinks they are are extremely plastic and dynamic. Now, that's an empirical claim. He could be wrong, you know, or maybe he, maybe it turns out.
Speaker 2:Human beings generally are not so dynamic in their behavior that they would ever be able to cooperate with one another in a communist society. That sure remains to be seen. But there's lots of evidence that human beings are extremely diverse and dynamic in their ways of behaving towards one another. Just look around, look around the world. You don't even have to do history yet, just get on a plane, you know, and look. And then when you start looking at human beings historically, it's like forget about it. You know they're extremely diverse in their behavior and and habits and tastes and tendencies and ways of treating one another.
Speaker 2:But that's not usually what people mean when they say, oh, marx is wrong about human nature. They think that Marx somehow is committed to the view that human beings are like essentially moral right that they're essentially altruistic, and actually Marx is not committed to that view at all. The view is that we can transform ourselves so that we have more pro-social ways of interacting with one another, and that that would require the material circumstances that support that kind of behavior. Because Marx himself thinks that if it is true that we're somehow condemned to conditions of scarcity, then we shouldn't expect to see human beings behaving the way that they might in conditions of abundance, where people could actually have their needs met.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So another thing that you would say as part of the ethical vision is something that Althusser tries to get rid of, which is alienation. Althusser doesn't like it because he sees it as not scientific enough, although I've always found it interesting, because he also, like, wants to save ideology, and his break on when we talk about alienation is also the break of when we use ideology.
Speaker 1:That much it's true it's true yeah, um, but you know everyone's got their contradictions, I guess. I do think it's important to realize to me that I went through Marx once and tried to figure out all the notions of alienation that are in there. And there's the obvious ones, there's commodity fetishism, but there's also stuff that people ignore sometimes, like. Marx talks about four kinds of alienation by my count, maybe even more in the earlier manuscripts, and one thing that he talks about that I do think we have to deal with ethically is the tendency to have to try to like why is consciousness and class consciousness important? Like why is consciousness and class consciousness important? And it's because alienation also pits the laborer against the laborer and leads to what is essentially reasonable antisociality between workers.
Speaker 2:And you know people will ignore that because they're like well, marx thinks workers will just automatically get along, and I'm like, no, he doesn't, he does not, he does not think it is automatic at all.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, and part of that is also having having like a undialectical way of seeing the world and then imposing that onto Marx, because what happens is oftentimes, if people are willing to take his materialism seriously, then they kind of overshoot it and turn them into some kind of mechanist, and so then the view would be something like you know, oh, you, just you seize the means of production, and then everybody's holding hands, and no, and actually, and actually Marx is explicit about this also in the Critique of the Gota program, you know when he's when he's talking about the case of right and he says that an immediately post-revolutionary society would still have the birthmark of the society, that it is a product of right, it can't be anything else than the product of capitalism, and therefore there'd be tons of work left to be done. I mean, marx is actually like completely explicit about this and still, you know, his interpreters often sort of caricature him as this mechanist interpreters often sort of caricature him as this mechanist.
Speaker 1:Yeah well, I wanted to get to you because the mechanist I mean, to be fair to his interpreters. It's not just the obvious bourgeois that have done that. I mean, at periods of the Soviet Union and certain times in China, they have also adopted the same like modes of development mechanistic. Adopted the same like modes of development mechanistic, almost whiggish view of history, like once we hit this mode of development, this is just gonna automatically happen. I don't even know. I don't know how you square that remarks. I don't even know how you square that with linen yeah, but I think that's just a species.
Speaker 2:I mean stalinism, I think it's a species of this problem I'm naming you know. It's like, yeah, we believe in the materialism and then you're a mechanist.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, I remember a person who I consider a comrade and kind of a friend but one time accused me of being a bad materialist and that I was too Furebakian and I didn't understand what they meant. But I now do, and I think it's interesting because you can get to that mistake in multiple ways. I've pointed out the people that like high you know, high forties, war, communism and GA Cohen actually sound a lot alike in their developmental theories.
Speaker 2:Which I think is probably not an accident, you know. I mean, there's some influence there.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, I do think that it is. It has always found me weird that the anti-Soviet Marxists were also people who, like, deliberately picked up Soviet Marxology in some ways ways. But, um, uh, I, I do think that it's interesting to see, because I have seen people struggle with this for a long time. I recently went back and read a bunch of uh, marx criticism from the 60s and 70s, like guldner and a lot of those people, uh and like the tension they would talk about, the tension between critical and scientific marxism, which I'm like, yeah, it's there, but like, if you look at the dialectical stuff that marx is talking about, it should be obvious that, like marx thinks that that tension is inevitable in some ways and that you kind of have to work through it. Um, because, yeah, you said this in another interview and in your book, but maybe we should tease it out Marx does believe in human agency, but he thinks that human agency is historically situated and limited and as forces develop, largely by accident.
Speaker 1:No one's thinking this through, but it's just that by accident you occasionally find something that's more efficient which also gives you more freedom. There is a way in which more freedom is possible. We don't really want to go back. People like, oh, marxist lapsarian, I'm like, yeah, but we don't want to go back to primitive communism. Exactly, you starve. If there's a if, if there's a bad crop year, or you're in just not even a bad crop year because we're pre, we're actually before even agriculture you starve if you like there's bad right, I mean the.
Speaker 2:yeah, like I say in the book, that a lot of the attempts to make sense or to understand Marx's views on freedom and determinism are totally hamstrung by the rigidity with which we treat these categories and with the expectation that once we solve, the answer of what is the relationship between freedom and determinism for human beings is one way that those two categories relate to one another, which is valid for all human beings across all time, which is just good, which is like, and that is like assimilating it to a kind of law of physics or something which I can understand, because the whole problem of freedom and determinism comes from physics.
Speaker 2:It's largely the sort of challenge that physics and the law-like character of nature presents to the idea of human beings being able to intervene agentially and spontaneously and have their own kind of unique contribution to their own behavior. But you know what happens if we treat this as a relationship that emerges itself historically out of human beings' actions, if we understand it as something that is best informed by an understanding of the social history of human beings, increasing their capacity to transform their environment and to have a larger and larger range of behaviors among which they can choose. All of that, I think, among which they can choose. All of that, I think, helps us to understand this relationship between freedom, the freedom of a self-creating, self-expressing, self-realizing human agent, you know, in the context of the determinism of both the natural world and the historical laws that emerge out of our own behavior, but often unconsciously right, and that we could become conscious of and reclaim as our own powers.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one theme in your book that comes up multiple times is something that Lukács points out about Marx that Marx doesn't really think that you can cleanly separate out the categories of social being and natural being, and that shows up in what we talked about above. But it also has some other implications, like this idea that Marx is just Prometheanism about the, the conquering of nature through, through the social Well. That doesn't actually make that much sense If you believe the, that social being and natural being are like interrelated in a way that you can't even totally separate them out. And I was you touch on something that it doesn't get commented on a lot, but I actually do think it's this kind of strange tie between ethics and physics that Marx's initial doctoral dissertation was a Hegelian reading of the differences between you know Democritus and Epicurus, and that distinction is actually important for understanding what Marx means by materialism, which is not to say he's an Epicurean.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:You can't really go back and be an epicurean because exactly, yeah right, you can't, you can't really go back and be an epicurean like we don't live in that world, um, but there is that he is looking at that as a way to understand the tension in physics that is coming up. You know, abstractly andly, and you know, you know pre-medieval, even philosophy. Would you like to talk about, about how that informs this tension a little bit?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and thank you so much for pointing out that, yeah, I'm not saying he's an epicurean, you know, and I think it's so important that people are clear on that, because what I say and I think it's so important that people are clear on that because what I say in the book is that the interest I take in Marx's dissertation for this question about freedom and determinism is as a kind of circumstantial evidence and the debate is about, well, it's precisely about this question of determinism, and Marx is attracted to Epicurus's view that sort of knowing the state of the world at time t plus the laws of physics is not enough to actually tell you what the state of the world at time t plus the laws of physics is not enough to actually tell you what the state of the world at time t plus two is, because there's a swerve, right. So Epicurus says that the atom itself has this indeterminate movement that can't be predicted in advance. The parameters, like the sort of range of ways that that movement might actually play out, is circumscribed by the state of the world beforehand, by the laws of physics. It can only swerve, but so far, but there is that indeterminacy.
Speaker 2:Now that on itself would not, that doesn't give us human freedom right, but what it does is it shows us that as early as the time that he wrote his dissertation he was thinking about the possibility of a materialism that allowed for some indeterminacy. That's what it tells us, and so the circumstantial evidence it presents is that it would be, I think, sort of weird if he was interested in that early on, continued to write in ways that I think make it clear that he's thinking about human freedom and human emancipation and our ability to produce our own lives, and so on. It would be strange if actually it turns out that Marx himself is a mechanistic, strict determinist who doesn't believe in any capacity of human beings to meaningfully intervene in the course of history. It would just be sort of odd, and the fact that he's interested in this question so early I think contributes to the oddness of that claim.
Speaker 1:Well, one of the things I've always thought about, like the normative ethical relationship here, is if it was automatic unless you see yourself as having to somehow specifically enact politics as part of this automatic process which Marx never says he does, then you're, why do you need a political like? Like Bernstein's assumptions in some ways actually do make sense if you assume that it's automatic, like, oh, it's automatic, and then also we need some new set of ethical norms to guide us through this automatic development, which again doesn't really make sense. If I actually take determinism that far, but I get, I can kind of see where Bernstein's coming from here. If you assume total automaticity, and so it does seem like the ethical and normative does have to be a claim. If you're not claiming that, Well it. Basically, if Marx is not Steven Pinker, Like things are just going to get better.
Speaker 1:And development of productive forces means that communism is going to happen and we don't really have to do anything.
Speaker 2:Just let the productive forces cook. It's all taken care of.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, yeah. It's very weird to me Because, I mean, marx would have to be so deeply irrational and also frivolous with his own life if he thought that this was all just going to work out on its own schedule without anybody doing anything, without any need to intervene at the level of consciousness. What was all that time in the museum for? Like, why sit around in a library writing this stuff? It's just clear that he didn't think that. Now, the only real question is whether he was coherent in not thinking that way, but that he absolutely thought it mattered what human beings do. It's wild to me and I think it's a great example of, I mean, one of the like. Honestly, I mean, here's the thing the school of thought that is most influential in the academy's reception of Marx is like the CIA. Yeah, is like straight up.
Speaker 2:Like that's what's actually done the most to influence the reception of Marx. Because I mean, there's some of these things, lots of these things you could have legitimate disagreement about, are so bizarre that it's hard to imagine they would have taken hold as popular ways of thinking about Marx were it not just for the legacy and ongoing work of explicit anti-communism. There's just no way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I have often thought about that.
Speaker 1:This brings me to one of your more important chapters and that's this idea, and it's an idea that a lot of Marxists believe, that I do not understand why they believe that Marx does not care about individuality because he says stuff like, well, history is made in aggregates.
Speaker 1:He does say stuff like what history is made in aggregates, like he does say stuff like that, but but, um, his concepts of freedom and why classless society matters is not because he wants us to return to some like proto-consciousness, borg state, where we just act as a collective entity. And you get the idea that a lot of people have been taught, for a variety of reasons, by a variety of different governments, if I'm quite honest, that that is what Marx thinks. It's just like social collectivity is the only goal and that's why we believe in communism. And I'm like I've always read that and you know, as a person who, you know, I read Hegel before I read Marx and I was like, well, he doesn't believe that. Hegel also thinks like total individuality is kind of impossible without collectivity and vice versa. So why would Marx take this very frankly stupid division between collective and individual that libertarians believe and just pick the other side, right yeah.
Speaker 2:But you know it's some.
Speaker 1:Oh no, go ahead, sorry. No, I was about to ask you to do that. Can you go into that like why is that attractive even to some marxists?
Speaker 2:like, yeah, I mean, I think, um, I think one big piece of it you've already actually your question contains is is the um, the absence of a tradition of dialectics right, because the fact that you read Hegel? I had also read Hegel before I started reading Marx closely, but that's unusual, it's very unusual and it's especially unusual. I was trained as an analytic philosopher, which is in many ways a reaction to Hegel.
Speaker 1:It's a bunch of people. Yeah, it's the anti-Hegel.
Speaker 2:And so then, if you imagine encountering Marx, and you yourself are steeped in the tradition that regards any kind of contradiction as a sign of lack of clarity or of lack of understanding or lack of precision, then once you notice that Marx is not just talking about individualism in the way that capitalists mean it, well, there's only one option left he's got to be a collectivist, he's got to be just an unmitigated you know Borg groupthink collectivist, because that's the other position. The idea that he might think that there's an important interrelationship there doesn't occur. And especially, you know the thing that I think is really difficult for even some Marxists to understand, but especially egoistic, irrational, selfish egoism, and also that it does a terrible job of promoting human individuality. And people find those finding those two prongs on the same fork people find very confusing, difficult to understand, without also having an ideology critique of what individuality is as a concept in its capitalist form, in its bourgeois rendering, because people think an individual well, that's, you know, we're talking about me and you, the individual persons. But that's not what is defended in capitalism. I mean, the individual persons are allowed to die. Like talk about defending the individual and defending individuality. Capitalism produces the death of millions of individuals unnecessarily and yet flies the flag individuals, individuals, right. And so it's a combination of not being able to think in terms of conflict and contradiction, but also in terms of not being able to think as a materialist rather than as an idealist. Because as an idealist I can hear bourgeois ideology say individual, individual all day and say man, nobody respects individuals more than these people. But then as a materialist I can see that they don't give a damn about the actual individuals who exist.
Speaker 2:And Marx, as he and Engels tell us at the beginning of the critique of the German ideology, their premise is not abstract principles. Their premise is what's going on with actual individual human beings on the ground, what's happening to them? And the answer is that they're dying, they're starving, they're being denied healthcare, they're having every horror visited upon them that possibly could be. And the other thing to say about the fact that historical development and change can largely be understood as the history of groups, and those groups in particular are classes. You know, he's just describing what's going on, he's not saying it's good and should go on that way. It's part of the critique. Right is the fact that human beings under capitalism largely will tend to behave in ways that are dictated by their class.
Speaker 2:I mean, we're told that in a sculptory register all the time, like this guy, the United Healthcare CEO, brian Thompson, where we see all these like mainstream media defenses of him. Well, that man's just doing his job, he is a CEO, he has a company. Of course he has to do this than the other. Of course you have to die so you can make profits. That's just the way this works. Yeah, we know, we think it sucks, you know.
Speaker 2:But it's like, on the one hand, when the time comes to offer it as a justification and an excuse, we will hear well, you know, he's just a capitalist. That's how capitalists act, it's normal, you know. But then when Marx says a capitalist, that's how capitalists act, it's normal. But then when Marx says, yeah, because of their role in a capitalist system, here is how we can expect these people to behave All of a sudden he's a collectivist, he doesn't believe in individuality. No, he's a realist, he sees what's going on. But the hope is to abolish that state of affairs so that people do not act as avatars of an economic class and we really do have a flourishing of real individual behavior, desire, interaction and so on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for me there's a couple of points when you mention in your book. There's another one that I always think about in the manifesto, where he talks about proletarianization, and first it's like people who fall into the proletariat for reasons beyond their control, they're going to be on the other side.
Speaker 1:But then he also talks about proletarianization. As people, even from the bourgeois class, who look at the situation and go well, I choose to be with them because that's where his story is going. His friendship with Ingalls kind of means that he has to figure that out going.
Speaker 1:You know his friendship with ingles kind of means that he has to figure that out. But also like, like the idea when people like, well, marx only thinks that your class will produce you, and like, marx doesn't think that that's true for every individual, he thinks it's true for the class, like, yes, we can predict what people in the class will do. But Marx totally realizes class traitors exist in all kinds of societies, for all kinds of reasons. Um, and it's not as automatic as all of that, and I think it's uh, it's important, and you quote this. This is from the Grandresa, but and I'm not going to quote the whole thing, it's a long quote, but I think, uh, he's playing off of um, off of Aristotle here, um, but the man isoon, politikon, which is an Aristotelian phrase. You know, social animal, basically, we might say, you know, people might translate as political animal, but an animal that can only isolate itself, only within society. So we can only be individuals in some ways when we have society protect us and in a way we all know capitalists know that.
Speaker 1:Like you know, he goes on to say production by an isolated individual outside of society is something rare. It might occur when a civilized person automatically and dramatically in possession of social forms is accidentally cast into the wilderness, like if you own property and you lose your job, you might be able to subsistently farm. You know it's possible, but there's no way we're sustaining a society off that. And also you have to admit that the fact that you have a farm to subsist on is actually the property of social labor, social ownership and reappropriation and expropriation anyway.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:And then he goes on and I, like this is something that I've always found, like you know, as a person who also studied anthropology. This is a key insight in apologies come to later is just as preposterous as the development of language without individuals who live together and speak to one another. So, like your individuality is like yeah, it's even linguistically inscribed, Right, but you didn't learn the language from babbling to yourself. That's literally impossible. It doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So it's just this key insight that makes a lot of this come out. And I think this is interesting when you point out that this is part of why there's this like not return to Aristotle, because again, when I say Marxist and Aristotelian, that's not precisely correct, but that in Aristotle there is an answer already to this idea that you can just separate, uh, descriptions and norms, um, uh, and anyone who's ever dealt with empiricist has to deal with the fact that you can just point out with them even post-modernists do this that like, hey, the way you're describing your descriptions of pure factuality have norms in them already right, yeah um, like, even how you're breaking this down is a normative choice, and you know the steven painters of the world hate that.
Speaker 2:But yeah, and I, and this is, this is one of the I mean, I think that's one of the major themes of the book, because, because, to the extent that Marx has something to say about ethics and he does at a great length actually, I mean sorry, this is a sort of tangent, but you know, one of the things that really moved me to do this work and to pursue this project is that, you know, we're sort of told oh yeah, marx doesn't have anything to say about ethics. But the same people that write the books saying Marx has nothing to say about ethics, they never find the time to tell you about the hundreds of pages throughout Marx's writings where he's directly, explicitly engaging with various ethical theories. And I just thought, you know, wouldn't it be good if we like ask ourselves, like, why does he spend so much time critiquing ethical egoism and what is that critique? I think a big part of the challenge for readers today to understand the ethical contours of Marx's work is we are so convinced about this distinction between facts and values that if his project is scientific which means it's empirical, it's descriptive, it's saying something about what the world is then it somehow can't also be normative. But that is totally alien from Marx's own way of viewing these things and, as you note, that comes in large part from the Aristotelian tradition, from Aristotle through Hegel and then Marx, with lots of important figures in between right.
Speaker 2:And you know, I think that for Marx, the idea that there's would be this kind of division, that you can't look at the world as it is and see that human beings intervene into their natural and social environment in a way that already embeds norms, and the norm is ultimately quite, I mean, the most important norm, I argue, is simply the norm of human survival. You know that human beings are doing everything they can think of not to die, and so what can we do with that right? And it turns out that that is actually a pretty thick norm and that there's lots of things that rules out, like, for example, the continuation of this destructive system that has us all barreling closer and closer towards extermination. You know, we see what's going on in Gaza. You know what has been going on in Gaza for the past year, but also you know much longer than that.
Speaker 2:But also, like when we think about what's happening there, you know that's the future, that is the plan, that is what capitalism has to offer to anybody that stands in the way of imperialist ventures, anybody who's deemed disposable and not necessary. That's the future, and so if you're one of you know, if you're like me, a human being seeking to survive and not die, you know, and who would like for the human species as a whole to continue, for our history to go on, that's that's, that's an, that's an norm, that's a norm that's inherent right in our way of interacting with the world and of of interact with one another and of and of organizing our lives. And, and that's what Marx is taking up as that is, the goal of communism is simply to promote human well-being, flourishing and our existence.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, it's really important. I I think that one scientific claim is actually tied into this normative claim about survival, and that is um the claim about the problem of abstract accumulation and use values, because abstract accumulation at first helps you develop all kinds of things for use values and that's why capitalism is an entirely you know, it's not entirely bad. It's not like we should just date in feudal society or whatever, um, although occasionally you meet communists you think so, but anyway, um, uh, we're gonna talk about that um the, the, the.
Speaker 1:The issue, though, is that there is very much a sense that this becomes its own driving force, that like and I think you really see it now in a way that it wasn't as obvious maybe when marx was writing when you're not even sure you can valorize so it, you know it might be some farce, fictitious capital, because when you go to sell it it doesn't actually have any value.
Speaker 1:But, like, why are we playing all these stupid stock market games if abstract value hasn't totally deconnected itself from use value?
Speaker 1:Even for the bourgeoisie, not just for the proletariat, not just for the peasantry or the other, you know, marginalized and oppressed classes, even for the bourgeoisie, we have decoupled this from use values at all, and it's like driving things in a way that is no longer particularly human, and I think marxist innovation as opposed to certain other kinds of uh, you know, ethical thinkers who may have been like capitalist moralists who said, oh, we need to tame the excesses of capital, or whatever you know marxist innovation is like, but the way you've set this up, this is going to always happen like, this is not, this is not. You might not have intended it, but this is, this is systemically what you're going to do. You might mitigate against it for a little while, but it's not going to stick and I think that's important to realize that. That's one of these norm description coalitions that he's talking about. It's not just that the capitalists are greedy. There might be individual capitalists who aren't particularly greedy, actually.
Speaker 1:But they're probably not going to win for very long, and so there's going to be less and less of them over time. It's not even about individual morality like that, nor claiming that bourgeois people don't have it. It's just these are the incentive structures, this is what it's likely to do. You might have people to buck that, but overall they're probably not going to be the people in charge very long, because the people who play the game are going to succeed in this system. And yeah, in charge very long because the people who play the game are going to succeed in this system. And uh, and yeah, it did unlock some things that we could use to make communism with productive forces that we've never seen before. But like, it'll also, if you're not careful, destroy the planet, and I do think marx was aware of that. Like absolutely.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've had a couple conversations lately where people have said to be like, oh, but mar Marx wasn't thinking about the possibility of extinction. I'm like, but he said he was, you know, like he, like he talks about the, the, the, the capitalists involved in the stock jobbing swindle. Who says après moi, the delusion, the face of the coming depopulation of the earth. Those are Marxist exact words. I mean, it seems to me that he's very aware that this is a real potential problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean for all that. He, you know, talks about the power of industrial industry and that's all there. But you also, you know, in Capital, Volume 1 and 2, he's also talking about, like the complete destruction of the English countryside, the standardization of production, I mean the way it messes up metabolism of the earth, which, yeah, that might be a metaphor, but he didn't believe it was. Yeah, right.
Speaker 1:Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I mean I do think you know this, dialectics affects a lot of things. Like you know, the big debates right now between growth and degrowth. Marxists.
Speaker 2:I'm slightly more on the growth side.
Speaker 1:But I've actually said the whole debate. The whole debate feels to me like a dialectical, like, like a mistake, cause I'm like, well, you know, part of the reason why you do all this development is under capitalism, dead labor is a problem because you can't profit from it. And like you're like, oh, that sounds super abstract. And I'm like, but think about it, like, if I have I don't know a lamp, I have one right here that I'm home, and that lamp is made the last 200 years. I don't have to buy it again. Right, that's a profitability problem.
Speaker 1:Like, like, we know that planned obsolescence is part of capital. Well, why, you know it's because dead labor, you know it's a problem. And you're like, well, why do you call it dead labor? Because, like, well, someone made this a long time ago. They may not even be a lot. Right, Like, you know, I have. I definitely have things that are in my possession that were made by people who did stuff 200 years ago. And like, they're dead, their stuff is not. That's what we mean by dead labor, it's just stuff that that people did a long time ago. Well, that actually is a problem for capitalists, because it means you don't need to buy stuff.
Speaker 2:Like, it's really it's.
Speaker 1:I don't know why people I get that the language marx uses sometimes to describe this in more scientific he hegelian terms is a little bit alienating people, but it's like really not that hard once you realize what he's actually referring to right um and that matters for stuff like eco-socialism, because we can be like okay, well, if we do all this building up a productive forces, we can actually then protect nature, because we're not having to do it over and over again. Right, that's not what we're designing it for.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like yeah, I'm all about know producing more efficiently and more sustainably, but I'm just not convinced that the situation is such that people need to be willing to. I just don't think that, like scarcity is actually where we're at. I mean, I think a lot of the production that we engage in as a species is pointless for reasons like what you're naming allows people to have better and more comfortable lives without having to sort of sell everybody on. I'm not even sure like what. Like I just don't think that. I just worry that I worry about like what we might call sort of just like socializing scarcity, right, or socializing like. And I mean, if it turns out that we can't actually provide for everyone, we absolutely have a big problem and that's an empirical question. But I'm just not convinced that we couldn't organize our production activity in such a way that people are able to live quite well, but without the extreme degree of waste that we engage in now.
Speaker 1:Of waste that we engage in now. Yeah Well, I think about it. For example, like my example and this is both an ethical and a scientific problem like, let's just say, llm-based quote, artificial intelligence. Yeah, it sucks already, but like I'm not a Luddite in the fact that I think it had to suck, um uh, it's inefficient, it. It eats up too much power for what you get.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But if we weren't designing it for, in this case, pseudo profits, not even real profits, it's just like an investment. Um, we could do wonders with that to free up people for more productive labor and probably start, you know, a socialist society would immediately start holding that to make it like not eat up a bunch of power hidden on the back end that people don't realize like we would like. There's no way we'd allow that. It's a waste. That's a waste of labor resources. We have to get the energy and produce that. And like, uh, when you don't care about that because you're a capitalist, you're not even thinking about like the back end of of what produces the power that you're using, because that still requires a bunch of downstream labor that people just don't see.
Speaker 1:And if you're not thinking about it, even as a worker, but who's encountering it as a consumer and doesn't even know, you know the long supply chain of labor that is involved in that, we'd make different decisions about it and it would probably suck a lot less and use a lot less resources. But given the incentives that we live in, like it's it. But given the incentives that we live in, you know, and you make this point like when people talk about. Oh well, the workers. They act like capitalists and I'm like but you know, and you made this point too, but I'm like they live in a capitalist world. They're not even being irrational, right, right, like that's not an irrational choice to act like capitalist when you live in a capital like it's, you know all the workers think they want to be a millionaires and I'm like, yeah, but what is it that they have not Right, that's smart.
Speaker 1:I also would not mind being a millionaire. Yeah, what?
Speaker 2:we want is so. What we want is a world where you don't have to, uh, do that in order to just have your basic needs met, but and oftentimes this is cited as examples of why it is that human beings could never live together in a socially cohesive, uh, communist society. And it's like you're, but you're sort of um, extrapolating and and abstracting from problems that exist under capitalism and the perfectly rational responses that people have to those problems. We want to do away with the problems, not just create saints who will sit there and starve quietly and peacefully without bothering anyone. That's not the idea. And why should the fact that people don't do that, that they respond to difficult circumstances by trying to survive in them, you know why should that be surprising?
Speaker 1:yeah, it's it. Yeah, it's like when every libertarian goes well, you, but you sell your stuff on the market and I'm like because yeah am I going to do?
Speaker 2:I'd like to pay my rent right, like, like uh I mean, I'd prefer not to pay rent, but here we are. You know, it's got to get paid.
Speaker 1:It would be great if I just had a domicile and it was taken care of. But you know, and yeah, and people will go like, oh, but memetic, competition or memetic. And I'm like Marx doesn't even say that that won't exist under communism. He never says that like, he just says that like there's not a whole lot of incentives and if everyone's socially deciding together what's best for every individual because they live in a society where they kind of have to make that decision for for everybody collectively, then they're just not going to do certain things. It doesn't mean that like we probably won't collect individual shiny shit or something. I don't know. I don't know what people expect, but, um, I guess maybe this idea of like drab, mere subsistence, but as I point out that like that wasn't even really true for the soviet union- Right, yeah.
Speaker 1:Like it only was when things got like. That happened in the Soviet Union when things were bad, right, right, it wasn't like the norm, like and the other thing that I think that Marxists can say and yeah, we do have to use some anarchistic anthropology to talk about this and we're not saying we want to go back to this, but we're like humans lived with relatively low class until about 7,000, 8,000 years ago probably. I mean, it's just, and we've been around for hundreds of thousands of years, like what we're naturalizing now is actually the weirder thing One blip yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean capitalism is particularly not. I mean like, even if you date it the absolute earliest, you can probably date realistically, unless you're a weirdo who thinks it's like transhistorically there every time there's a market.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Is, which admittedly libertarians do, but is what the 12th century and usually that's obscenely early Right Like? Usually it's more like the 15th century, and usually that's obscenely early. Usually it's more like the 15th. So you're dealing with something that's not even a millennial old and we're a species, that's you know, but we're destined to do it.
Speaker 2:It can't be any other way. It's just very unlikely yeah.
Speaker 1:I know. But I also think Marx is a good corrective to Graeber's Dawn of Everything, which I understand. What Dawn of Everything is trying to correct? I don't want to sound like it's not of value, but it's not just about thinking. It's about thinking and then what we can actually build and how we build it. And Graeber may actually agree with that, but you wouldn't necessarily get that from that book. Like, what are the incentive structures that you put in place? How do you get people to? And that does require norms.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that question of incentive is really important, especially, you know, as it relates to the ethical conversation, because I think oftentimes critics of reading Marx as a thinker with an ethical content, but the project is somehow just develop Marxist norms and then inform everybody that that's how they should be acting, and then the communism will just appear. But that's not it at all. And that question of motivation is really important, of motivation is really important, and for Marx, I mean. I think this is why we get Marx saying that the communists do not preach morality, which they don't. And it's because the motivation is that this is in the interest of working people, that the majority of people on the planet. It is in their interest to seek to have more control over their lives, more control over their work, over their workplace, decision-making power, over what gets made, more access to the resources that come about as a result of their labor. This is all directly in working people's interest. And so when we think about incentives, the incentive is simply this is going to allow you to put more food on your plate at home, you know, more food on the table for your family. It's going to allow you to defend yourself when the boss is announcing layoffs it's going.
Speaker 2:You could just like help people understand what is already true from the perspective of their experience. You know, just kind of have that conversation and this is one of the reasons why, you know, I start the book and in my preface I end by saying that. But the blessing of my book is that you are right. You're right, you know, and I hope that because I hope for my book to be in the hands of working people who think something is awry, something is wrong and it's ethically wrong, and it's ethically wrong that their kids can't get health care and that they have to live in fear of being fired. Because, god help them, you know, they'll be cast into poverty and homelessness, you know, and if you think that that's messed up, you're right, because I, you know, I take it that my role and I think that I personally think the proper role of moral philosophy is, that is, to help give shape and clarity and argumentative structure to what people already are seeing is true, namely that capitalism is totally incompatible with human survival, and that's it.
Speaker 1:Right. Yeah, I think that's a crucial point and I think the other implication is, yeah, maybe feudalism doesn't eat up as much resources, whatever we mean by feudalism. I want to get into the academic debates about that, but also we don't really want to get into the academic debates about that, but also we don't really want to go back to it either. We're not saying we should go back to some prior social norm.
Speaker 1:That also kind of sucked because, capitalism is eating up the planet and I think that's an important distinction and I also think it cochoately shows up across I. You know people. You know you'll hear social democrats and I'm sometimes meeting them, but they're not wrong about this. Like you go to red states and you pull the average, you know conservative, uh quote worker or even petite bourgeois person really is about half and half um, and you're like well, they have a lot of socialistic views and I'm like no shit, they do because it's in their interest too. They understand that, like private head church sucks um, uh. But what do they have on offer to deal with? That is, either the get rich or increasingly buy into conspiracy theories, because like they realize something's wrong.
Speaker 1:They live in the same world we do they're not stupid.
Speaker 2:They got the same bills you and me got.
Speaker 1:You know, yeah, and if anyone who is gaslighting them a lot of times it's liberals saying, oh, this is just ideology, that they think the economy's bad, or I mean that stuff has been crazy the last couple of years, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:No, it's the fact that we have a Republican Party that's saying make America great again, and then we have a Democratic Party whose counter is well, america's already great. And neither of those speaks to anybody's reality, really. But at least the make America great again message suggests that there might be something better in the future than this bullshit you're dealing with now. And as long as those are the two most prominent messages that there's something better coming or that this is as good as it gets we cannot be surprised that lots of people would rather throw their chips in with the guy who's promising he's going to make things great. I just don't think it's. I just don't think it's that weird or that surprising. And then you add that this is a racist ass country and of course people are happy to go with, you know, with Trump. But to say that just the racism is the only explanation and that these other things don't play a role, I think is it's letting. It's letting Democrats and bourgeois liberals off the hook to just an absolutely ridiculous degree.
Speaker 1:Right, I mean, I'll talk about the. We promise to fix things. Oh well, we can't. Therefore, just you should let us rule more as a weird argument. But also, you know, I agree. Like when people say Trump won because of racism, I'm like well sure.
Speaker 2:Right, it's a huge role. Yeah, absolutely, but it's not exhaustive.
Speaker 1:Honestly. My response to that is there's been the same base level racism in America most of my life. It's gotten a little better, a little better, it's basically there. We don't always have Trump, so it's weird. A little better, a little better, but like it's basically there. Uh, we don't always have trumps, so it's weird to me that you explain it. You buy a thing that's like pretty stable.
Speaker 1:Do you think the 1980s was a bastion of anti-racism? Right, like are the 1990s? I don't. Where are you from? Like, right, you know, if you're under 25, I can get why you might believe that, but if you're our age and you say that I'm like you just have to naturalize and forget your childhood. It's just so. To me it's like well, that, yeah sure that that explains like a good portion of the of the white vote, but it doesn't explain. Well, okay, people are trying to say it explains the white vote, but it doesn't explain. Well, okay, people are trying to say it explains the Latino vote, but I don't really see that it doesn't explain black men, for example, maybe misogyny, does you know?
Speaker 1:but all those things also can't be read, as you know, unless you're also, weirdly, a racist that think that black men are just inherently misogynistic.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Which lots of people do.
Speaker 2:Lots of people will openly, you know, say like, oh, there's just something inherent about black men. I don't know they're really dangerous, but I'm not a racist. But I'm not a racist. It's just like it's incredible. But yeah, I mean what bothers me about?
Speaker 2:Well, lots of trying to exonerate the politics of Trump voters and so on, and no, I'm trying to explain them, I'm trying to understand what is going on. And we just don't know. And we just don't know, we don't know what would happen if you had a. We just can't, we can't say like, oh, it doesn't matter what the Democrats said, these people would have voted Trump. We don't know that. What we do know is that the Democrats lost a lot of people that voted for them in previous elections, and we have to ask why that is. And, of course, race and gender play a role. America is very sexist. America is very racist. Of course, these things play a huge role, but so does the fact that people are suffering. And if you send the message message, well, everything's going to stay exactly the same like it is now, and nobody want to hear that. Nobody wants to hear it. Nobody wants to hear that. You can't be surprised that people stay their ass at home when you're telling them I'm gonna do everything, the same as the last guy I also think I mean it's weirdly american, americanly provincial, to do that too, because I'm always pointing out like this stuff is happening outside of the united states like, not just even in like white western societies, it's happening in
Speaker 1:a lot of different places. You kind of have to explain why it looks the same in so many different places right now, because you know people don't seem to believe the, the mitigators of capitalism anymore, as you know. You know, actually, I say this often to my social democratic friends and God bless them. Like I consider them comrades and allies. But they're like well, why does the working class vote against this interest? Every now and then you'll hear them say that and I'm just like like when have you delivered what you said you were going to promise? So until you do that, like well, how are they voting against their interest because you didn't deliver it anyway?
Speaker 2:like like it's voting in there and, like people are surprised that so many trump supporters are now turning around and saying, yeah, we hate private health insurance too, and you know, and, and I'm like, but did they have an option to vote for a single payer? Was that? Did I miss that, Cause I might've voted for it, my damn, you know. But it's like. But it's like. Where is the option to vote in your interest? The whole purpose of this electoral circus in this country is to absolutely rule out that everyday, regular working people have no opportunity whatsoever to shape the direction of this country's governmental policy, and so when people say, well, you know they voted against their interests, I really don't know what they mean by that, because what was the other option? Not one that actually represents their interests. Neither do Right, it's.
Speaker 1:You know, I think about Mike Davis' observation that, like, like the United States in particular, it's bad. It's not that we have a low border turnout relative to other things. We, except for societies that mandate voter turnout, we actually kind of don't. We have low working class voter turnout, like and why? Well, like you know, I, this was actually a a moment of awakening for me, like ethically and politically, but this was actually during the one time I've ever worked for the democrats in any formal capacity in my life. Um, and I worked, I'm involuntary, uh, I was involved in the mike gravell campaign. When that folded, I got behind Obama, cause you know where else you're going to go and he's hoping change your shit, right. And I was in Georgia at the time. So I was going out and canvassing in a lot of black neighborhoods and the trailer parks and I remember this people saying like but what are they going to do for me?
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Like and I'd be like no-transcript. They want but they might, might things better. But when asked, I can't really tell them how. I can just say, well, they're not going to make things worse and that's like, but that's a bad, not super motivating for people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I will say.
Speaker 1:another thing I get from your book and this is one thing that I do push back on some Marxists about is maybe we should be willing to talk about stuff like workers' dignity and individuality more. Yeah, I remember in the debates about Allende in Chile there was a lot of like both Marxist-Leninist and even some other kinds of Marxists to put back on Allende's use of workers' dignity as like too, conceding to Catholics and this, that and the other, but it really worked Like it was a motivating factor Turns out, people value their dignity.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's interesting because, yeah, I mean I'll confess that when, like the like dignity in particular, I bristle a little because it sounds, it sounds so kantian and it sounds so christian to me, you know, but, um, but that's like in, that's what my philosopher had on. You know, in, in everyday, like basic, everybody who talks about dignity is is not talking about, is not actually positing a claim about, the relationship of the immortal soul to the will of God. Okay, like most people, when they talk about dignity, they just mean treat me like a damn person and not a cog in the sheet, not a tool for you to use and throw away, and I think that's exactly right. I mean we, yeah, I just think it's really a shame to sort of seed that ground of appealing to a basic want that people have, which is to be seen and to exist in the world in their own fullness. You know to be like.
Speaker 2:I used to work at a Catholic university I was before I met George Washington University now, and before that I taught for several years at St Joseph's University in Philadelphia University in Philadelphia, and one of the part of the mission statement there was that students should be interacted with according to the principle of cura personalis, which means you care for the whole person. So, when a student comes into the class, you interact with them, not just as you know somebody who paid their tuition and came in and now you're going to dispense some info and give them a grade, but understand that they are a human being. You know, and you should be interacting with them as one human being to another right and seeing them in their fullness. Well, there's nothing wrong with that. That's a great idea, you know, and it's something that you know is transmitted in that context, you know, through the again, this kind of like Aristotelian Catholicism, you know, in that case, but it's also, it's absolutely right, you know, we do need to see people in their fullness as human beings and give people the opportunity to express themselves and in the, in their fullness. And that is something that people are denied, you know. They're denied all the time and more and in more and more areas of life.
Speaker 2:I mean this also occurs to me with the rise in trad wife content and, you know, like this and like this kind of and even the light, and also in its own way, this sort of like MRA, like Andrew Tate, like sort of influencer kind of stuff, this reifying of gender to the point where, even in your closest intimate interpersonal relationships with other human beings, there's all this social scripting and instrumentality and the idea that you would relate to the person you're sleeping with or even the person you're married to in out of a, from a place of authenticity you know where they might like find out, like what you're really like and what you really enjoy and what your dreams are, and the idea that this should all be contained and stifled so that you can perform the role of the trad wife, right?
Speaker 2:I mean the fact that there's this reemergence of what we've already seen with the 1950s and the stifling of both men and women, you know, in their domestic personal relationships. It's very concerning to see that rise again, because it's so indicative of an overall political stifling of this basic hunger for dignity as an individual person, as a specific human being, that somebody would have to get to know in order to be married to them, for example.
Speaker 1:Uh yeah, well, yeah, I mean, I think this is something about like the end of your book talks about this and maybe this is a good place to deal with. Like Marx doesn't promise to deliver, although sometimes later Marxists do. I will say that, like when we say this, this like Marx says we don't need a new morality for, for communism. Basically, like because it, because you know, we're grounding these norms in something that's so self-evident that we don't have to really propagate it very much. Basically, I will say not all communists have historically agreed with that, whether they realize it or not.
Speaker 1:I do remember, you know, particularly in the forties and fifties, new Soviet man, new new morality, et cetera, et cetera. But I do think there's an interesting, you know, I would see this almost as like uh, because the left has not realized certain things, we've allowed things to get really, really decadent. Uh, and the commodification of individuals as individual brands leads to this weird resurgence of both, like very facile sexual freedom, aka the sexual freedom of OnlyFans and also Bradwives. Like, as a response to that, and I think you're right, you've seen this return of the 1950s, but even more so, what makes this one so wild and interesting I was talking to weirdly. I was talking to a buddhist group about this yesterday but um is that you're dealing with people who have this image of the 50s that is completely decontextualized from both the social institutions and the trauma of World War II that you have to deal with when you're talking about the 50s, about why it was the way it was, but they want that back because it's totally foreign to them.
Speaker 1:So you have this nascent, emergent Christian nationalism from people who are two generations out from being churched, this nascent, emergent Christian nationalism from people who are two generations out from being churched, like and I find that interesting, and I do think you know people like oh, the how is that a capitalist problem? Like well, you're selling people images of stuff that totally decontextualized from anything and you know they're stifling people into these like very bizarre corners. But they're also doing it because, like it's a way to seem like you have a consistent sense of self and identity in this market where all these other institutions have already been effectively liquidated. So I do think, and I mean you know I have a lot of people in my world who's like, well, talk about I mean, and I mean like good, even dialectical communists.
Speaker 1:Like well, talk about Marx and ethics is a mistake and I'm like you got to have an answer to that Right and I think it's already there. Like I do think we have an answer to it, I don't think we have to invent it or invent a new communist ethics. It's already there, it's there. But if you don't see it as having some ethical norms, I don't think the average person is going to recognize that at all.
Speaker 2:So yeah, and it's interesting, you know, when I talk about my work to people who are not in the academy, to you know people, friends of mine, who you know, whatever, they're just not in the academy um, there's always a moment of doesn't marx obviously? Like, that's what they say. They're like marx, doesn't marx obviously. How? Like? What do they? What do you mean? There's people that think he doesn't have an ethics. I'm like, well, they think that and they just look at me like that's insane. That's insane because, uh, because they recognize correctly, you know, they recognize correctly and immediately that obviously this is ethical. It has to do with human beings, how they should live together, what kinds of conditions are suitable or not suitable for beings such as ourselves. That's ethical, you know, and I mean I.
Speaker 2:But the point that you raised about influencer culture is really interesting because, you're right, there's this, you know, and I'm, I'm quite I'm supportive of, of, of sex workers and of sex work. I mean, that's where my politics lie. But, uh, I've never been on, only fans, so I don't know anything about, like the particular platform. But I agree that there is this weird contradiction of the um, of like personalities, you know, but then influencers like famously all kind of look the same right right you know, there's an e-girl aesthetic, right?
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah so it's this weird contrast of like the prolific. I mean, it's kind of a big part of what's sad about is that you can see the promise, the proliferation of like, what could be the proliferation of a huge like boom of very distinct and individual ways of interacting with audiences and giving information. And we do see some of that. You know, I watch a ton of YouTube myself. So, like, we do see some of that, but not nearly as much as you would think we should. You know, given the availability of this, of like, the software, of good recording equipment, you know, and so on. But we are, it's the algorithm, right? You know like, and that's whether it's OnlyFans or Instagram or YouTube.
Speaker 2:You know it's the, it's the algorithm. And what do we mean by the algorithm? We're talking about capitalism. We're talking about the emergent law-like requirement that if you want to make money producing your content, well, here's what you got to do. And unfortunately, people do need to make money producing their content because they got bills to pay. So what would our creativity look like if it were unshackled from those kinds of external constraints on it?
Speaker 1:Right, I think a lot about this, not because I care about demonizing sex work. I think that's actually totally the wrong way to go about it. I think a lot about it because I think about, like, I know tons of creators and I'm a teacher I'm not a professor anymore, I've been in the past but I'm just a normal high school teacher and I move in a lot of different social circles. So I like no escorts and stuff. So it's just, it's something that I see that I'm like.
Speaker 1:Well, people might choose that work over certain other kinds of work, but the idea that because I choose that work, that it doesn't have any effect on them is is bizarre. And why would they choose that? And what's the what's the incentive system for that particular form of alienated human interaction? And I think one of the things about only fan that is different from like traditional porn but closer to like traditional sex work, um, is that there's all this selling of a personal interaction and like the girlfriend experience particularly honestly. The experience, particularly honestly. The stats kind of back this up between blue-collar working class and I'm being specific about what sections of the working class men who are increasingly not in families and do not.
Speaker 1:it's not that they don't just have partners, they don't have friends, like there's stats about like one, like one fourth of people who liberals identify as working class. So I would say blue collar working class, because I don't think. That's the only thing. I don't think a degree right. Working class.
Speaker 1:But the blue collar working class men are in a real bad way. But I also see how that gets picked up, like so I see how that gets picked up by both liberals and conservatives as a way to perpetuate other social norms. Because, like, well, what about women? Well, women still lived in a very fucked up society. Like it's not, like sexism has gone away, or even like particular instantiations of weird sexism. Like one of the things that I've noted in the past is like, well, you know, higher education is increasingly female, just because who's going into?
Speaker 1:it, and yet and yet it has one of the largest pay gaps, right? Isn't that something? So you know, just. And also, like now, that it's's mostly women. I have noticed that it's becoming a lot less important socially. I just want to point that out. Um, uh, so I mean, I'm not, I don't think that's why exactly, but there is a dialectic it's probably not a total accident, yeah right it's not an accident and and it's like oh, it just, it just happened.
Speaker 1:And I think we have to look at that. And I do find a lot of the people on the Marxist scientific scale. They don't look at that kind of stuff. They just don't Like it's not. They're not looking at all these various contradictions in society. And I do think it is about dialectics in some ways. Even though some of these people would say that they're good dialecticians, they're not all you know, all two Syrians are, but they're not looking at like the whole array of perverse incentives. I mean, you get that, even with like the kind of really weird Marxists who like capitalism is good, it develops all these things, and I'm like, well, yeah, but that's, it's also terrible, like often for the same reasons. Right, and if you don't have dialectics, I don't think you can see that at all.
Speaker 2:If you're not able to see the internally contradictory character of a thing, then what are you doing? That's the sort of bread and butter of Marxist analysis. I think I'll have to leave you soon.
Speaker 1:I'm going to wrap this up, we've been going on for two hours. It's been a great discussion Anything you'd like to put.
Speaker 2:No, I mean, one of the things that we've sort of touched on a little bit is because you pointed out that I'm not saying that there's a sort of new morality that needs to be formally propagated in a communist society. And I think this is the element of historicity in Marx that sometimes can go missing, because I think that what I argue is that Marx thinks that it's possible for human beings to also transform our ways of interacting with one another so that we have a kind of more highly developed. One of the things, one of the most violent things that capitalism does to us, is our alienation from one another, which produces our incapacity to really to practice cura personalis, right To really see one another as a full and separate and distinct human being. You know with needs, you know with requirements, with interests, with aims for the future, and part of what Marx thinks is that morality is also itself a symptom of our inability to relate to one another that way and to require that. I translate the person in front of me into some third term. You know, whatever that is, utility, god's law, right, you name it. Instead of seeing wait, that is a human being who requires something in order for them to flourish.
Speaker 2:Let me just respond to that fact. You know, in a very immediate and spontaneous way. I may not know exactly what to do, I may need to do more science or ask questions or you know but the idea that I should respond is for barks. I think the idea is that we produce human beings who have that kind of response to one another, and I think that's possible. I think we see glimpses of it even now. People respond to their children that way often, not always. Sometimes they're sometimes we've talked about social media Sometimes they think of them as little money makers, but often right. People just see their child needs something and that's all they need to know. You know. And so they just like you know. How could we have a world where we treat everybody like that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, all right. Thank you so much for your time and.
Speaker 2:I think thank you Great. Thank you so much. Bye.
