Hume, in the Introduction to his Dialogues on Natural Religion, says that the dialogue form is particularly well-suited to the discussion of philosophical questions that are important but not capable of definitive resolution. Political questions are therefore perfect examples of problems that can best be explored through a dialogue mode of exploration. Of the class of political problems none are more important in the contemporary world than problems of moral and material equality. How they are solved decisively impacts the quality and richness of people’s lives, but, despite their practical significance, rigorous deductive arguments will not solve them. Valid deductive arguments can be constructed in support of diametrically opposed conclusions because all one needs to do to construct a valid argument is to follow the rules of inference from one’s premises. Politics, however, stems from differences about the truth of premises which in turn stem from substantively different assumptions about what is most valuable in life. if there is any argumentative solution to political problems then there must be confrontation between these opposed assumptions, and that is exactly what dialogue permits.

Nevertheless, most political philosophy, including my own contributions, is written as if all one needs to do to change people’s minds is show how cleanly one’s preferred conclusion follows from one’s own premises. When one writes a book one tries to achieve closure (even if one acknowledges that there is always more to say on an issue, the whole point of a book is to draw a circle of argument around at least one dimension of the problem). A dialogue, even a written transcription like the recently published discussion between Thomas Piketty and Michael Sandel, is a welcome departure from the typical academic treatment of political problems. Dialogue is alive and open in a way an academic book is not. People reason more loosely when they speak, and because they reason more loosely, there is space for the partner to interject, question, contest, and suggest alternative routes. There is also more space for the reader to both think along with and against the grain of the ideas that emerge in the back and forth.

Equality: What it is and Why it Matters is an edited transcript of a discussion between political economist Thomas Piketty and philosopher Michael Sandel hosted by The Paris School of Economics on May 20, 2024. Piketty’s reputation has been growing since his Capital in the Twenty-First Century re-grounded the increasingly abstract models of academic economics in the historical substance of human productive activity that had once been the province of classical political economy. Political economy was less about quantitative modelling and more about the values that govern the choices of alternative modes of producing and distributing the wealth created through productive labour. Piketty has consciously re-situated his work in that tradition.

Michael Sandel has been a central figure in American political philosophy for the past forty years. He initially made his name as a ‘communitarian’ critic of John Rawls, but I find the term ‘communitarian’ unfortunately vague. Sandel’s main argument, elaborated here in relation to contemporary problems of right-wing populism, is that questions of rights and distributive justice cannot be abstracted from questions about shared social purposes, values, and interpretations of the good. The philosophical need to give labels to positions ended up calling those sorts of argument “communitarian” in contrast to Rawls’ Kantian-liberal emphasis on a conception of individuals abstracted from concrete social and cultural traditions. My problem with the “communitarian’ label is that it cannot distinguish between radically different conceptions of the importance of communities. Fascists and communists, Burkean conservatives and Gadamerian phenomenologists, not to mention many liberals, would agree with that claim, but for different reasons, and with very different political implications. Applying the same generic term obscures these differences rather than capture– as a good definition should- the differentia specifica of a position. Sandel’s own position is best understood as an intervention into the specific problems of American liberalism. His primary concern as becomes evident here, is to situate the American debate about individual justice in the soil of American political history and traditions rather than abstract premises about what human beings in the abstract deserve.

The editors decided to break the flow of the conversation into nine topical divisions: a decision I wish they had not taken. The conversation has been skillfully edited to preserve the organic flow of the discussion from one topic into the next and I would have preferred that editors had trusted the reader to follow along and make their own analytic divisions. As I said above, the beauty of the dialogical form is the way it allows for a natural development between topics. Dialogue moves according to the logic of the participants’ interests, not abstract logical schemas. The book in only 119 small pages. Even readers with short attention spans would not have been overly taxed following the thread of ideas on their own, without the chapter divisions.

But I quibble. The discussion ranges over a number of topics related to the problems of moral and material equality, some even more salient now than when the conversation took place a year ago. Those who have followed Piketty’s development from Capital in the Twenty-First Century to A Brief History of Equality will note that he continues to move left from the rather tepid version of the Tobin Tax on international financial transactions that formed the bedrock of his practical reform proposals in his first book. He situates his argument historically, drawing hope from the long arc of historical development towards greater equality. Wealth inequality has increased since the 1990s’, but the long term political trend has been towards equality “This movement comes from social mobilization and strong, enormous political demand for equality of rights in access to what people perceive to be fundamental goods”(2) I would only add that the goods mentioned are not “perceived to be” fundamental human needs. They are fundamental human needs- life-requirements– and that is why they form the persistent basis of struggles against inequality.

Piketty then provides a robust defence of decommodification as the ultimate trajectory of the struggle for material equality. Piketty (echoing without referencing Marx) argues that inequality is a problem because it confers those with superior wealth control over the life and life-horizons of those who lack economic power. Economic power constitutes the basis of class power, and class power compromises the freedom and the dignity of those over whom it is exercised: they are reduced to the status of things, objects to be used. However, if basic life-necessities were not priced commodities then no one would need money to access them. If good lives are largely functions of need-based access to fundamental life-resources, class power would collapse and monetary inequality would cease to confer control over other people’s lives. “This is what decommodification is all about and has been historically. You take entire economic sectors out of the power of the profit motive.” (12) “If decommodification goes sufficiently far, it is clear that monetary inequality becomes almost irrelevant. So let’s assume that the economy is 99% decommodified. This will mean that 99% of goods and services, like education and health, are freely accessible.”(15) As Marx too argued, the goal of an egalitarian economy is to eliminate mathematical equality of income as a problem. When everyone has secure access to what they need, they have the all-purpose means of living the life they want to live. Self-development, not abstract equality, is the real value served by a material equal society.

Piketty takes care to distinguish his proposal from an expansion of the “welfare state.” Instead of the stigmatizing term “welfare state,” Piketty prefers “social state”(15-16). This term better captures the reason why unpriced provision of needed goods and services is just. “Welfare state” masks the reality that all wealth is produced through collective labour. Pikketty’s alternative “social state” captures this crucial economic reality masked by capitalist conceptions and structures of private property. Calling need-satisfaction the function of a welfare state makes it sounds as though something that is rightfully someone else’s is taken through taxation and given to others who have not worked for it; making re-distribution the function of a social state puts the focus on collective labour. Ruling class wealth is produced by the transformation of natural substances through collective labor into different forms with monetary value. That is the “social” in “socialism.” Without the labour of the whole of society monetary wealth would not exist. But the real value of the goods and services produced is not their money-value, but what John McMurtry calls their life-value. Decommodification is essentially the freeing of life-value from its money-form.

When one links that demand with his proposals concerning workers involvement in the governance of firms, the distance between his prescriptions for a social democratic revival and the most compelling Marxist models of a socialist economy (see for example Pat Devine’s Democracy and Economic Planning) continue to narrow. I am surprised that Piketty does not attract more positive attention on the Marxist left. I doubt that this book will change that fact, but it should.

Sandel’s major contributions concern the unique importance of equality of dignity and respect, what one could call moral equality, to good human lives. Sandel does not doubt the importance of material equality, but he argues that material equality alone cannot establish moral equality between all members of a complex national community. The discussion between Sandel and Piketty on this problem might remind some readers of the earlier debate between Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser on essentially the same issues. Sandel’s arguments take on a new salience in the American context still grappling with the fallout of Trump’s re-election. Sandel takes pains to distance himself from the “Trump-voters-are-deplorable” explanations for his victory. Instead, he provides a powerful vindication of the dignity of working class Trump voters and argues that they voted for Trump largely because of the Democratic Party since the Clinton era has treated their concerns with disdain.

Here Sandel’s major difference with Piketty becomes clear. He concurs with Piketty’s plans for decommodification but wants to explore another side of its value. Inequality not only affects our purchasing power, it affects different groups’ standing in the community. The struggle for equality is also about struggling for different interpretations of human values and purposes; decommodification is not only about ending the power of money over human life but also about restoring dignity to practices that are cheapened when commodified. Work and education, family life and friendship, national traditions and a sense of belonging to a community are not goods whose value can be captured in a price. Sandel chastises left globalists who embraced the free market in the 1990’s for forgetting about the difference between the intrinsic value of human creative activity and relationships. He thus maintains that the left needs to pose the question of “whether putting everything up for sale cheapens or corrupts or degrades the meaning of goods, beyond obstructing access for those who cannot afford them.” (19) The problem is not only access, but what people are accessing when they access life-requirements. When education, for example, is treated as just another consumer good, its vital contribution to self-and social development is lost.

Sandel believes that the nineteenth and early twentieth century American populist movement understood that equality is not only about monetary wealth but about contesting elite disdain for the contributions and ways of life of the working class. He wants to reactivate this dimension of the American populist tradition while Piketty remains more skeptical of its contemporary potential. Piketty acknowledges that contemporary populism in Europe and America has been fed by the economic damage done by free trade and argues that capital flows need to be regulated in the interests of reconnecting economic activity to the satisfaction of needs (34). Sandel takes the worry about the destructive impacts of globalization further: unless there is respect for working classes not only as human beings in the abstract (as in Kant) but as the concrete people that they are and the actual work that they do in distinct and culturally concrete contexts they will continue to feel alienated from ruling elites and seek recognition from the Trumps of the world.

Sandel is not a Trump apologist but he does note that Trump has succeeded not just by promising to return manufacturing industries to the Rust Belt: his Make American Great Again slogan resonates on political and cultural and not just economic levels. This side of the movement connects with the progressive side of the American populist tradition, which was “… about reclaiming power for the people from elites. … the populist strand, if it can be distinguished from the social democratic or democratic socialist strand, is less about redistribution than it is about reclaiming power, giving voice to the people …” (44) Trump is a false friend of this tradition, but the Democratic left has to understand the resonance that anti-cultural elite discourse has. Sandel suggests that figures like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have understood the importance of treating working class voters with respect and their strand of populism offers the best hope for the American left.

This discussion organically develops into a shared critique of meritocracy and the relative power of education to improve life-horizons. Much of the discussion about access to higher education takes on a new salience in light of Trump’s openly totalitarian assault on the independence of universities. Both Piketty and Sandel sharply criticise the social and pedagogical implications of privatized higher education and the quality gaps that it introduces between elite and public institutions. They discuss a number of alternative models of funding and access and raise questions about the governance and priorities served by private universities, especially in the United States. Neither could foresee that Trump would launch an al-out attack on educational institutions under the pretext of fighting anti-Semitism, but what stands out about the argument is that both in their own way suggest that the intellectual independence of university institutions is a good, but because they are social institutions, society they cannot claim absolute institutional autonomy. In a supreme irony, Sandel, referencing the argument of Daniel Markovitz, argues that revocation of Ivy League universities’ tax exempt status might be used as a threat to force them to change admission policies so as to make them more accessible to qualified working class students (59). Sandel does not of course argue that political power should be used to make universities fall in line with a partisan political agenda, but he does argue– rightly, in my view– that academic independence does not entail social independence. Universities, like all institutions, are creatures of social life in general, created and regulated by law to meet shared needs. If they become private fiefdoms serving the interests of the wealthiest members of society alone, then society has the right and duty to enact policies that remove barriers to access.

But there is another dimension to Sandel’s position which is more skeptical than Piketty about the overall value of higher education in a dignified human life. While he does not say so explicitly, the clear implication of Sandel’s defence of the diginty of working class lives and lifeways is that while higher education should be maximally open as a public good, it is not a necessary condition of a valuable and valued human life. The Clinton-era democrats were guilty of blaming working class victims of global political economic changes. Too often purportedly progressive voices hectored working class people for their lack of education rather than implementing just transition policies that would have replaced jobs that relocated to the Global South with new forms of meaningful work. “The problem,” they said in effect, “is not with the economic policies that we put in place. The problem is that you didn’t improve yourselves in the way that we told you to.” So it’s no wonder that many working people without university degrees were angry. Their anger was directed especially against mainstream centre-left parties that responded to inequality with what I call the “rhetoric of rising,” exhorting those left behind to better themselves by getting a degree. In a process that Piketty has also analysed and criticised, Sandel laments that formerly working class parties now “identified with the values, interests, and outlook, of the well-educated, credentialed, professional classes than with the working class. In that context, with no where else to turn, politically, “no wonder there was a backlash”( 51).

While Piketty still believes that expanding access to higher education remains an essential condition of reversing the trends towards material inequality, he agrees with Sandel that the future of the left depends upon its ability to craft a new vision of moral equality. The real threat today is not the size of people’s bank accounts in the abstract, it is the rapidly expanding gulf between social classes. Democracy cannot survive the splitting of society into separate worlds in which the majority clings to a disintegrating life raft of scraps of public services while the rich roam the world in search of speculative opportunities and pleasure. Piketty warns that “when the difference between bottom and the top is 1-50, 1-100, 1-200, then its not just money. Its really a question of dignity because it means you can buy the time of other people”(73). Time is money, but more deeply, time is life. The quality of the life of finite mortal beings is a function of the content of realized experience and activity. If your time is spent serving someone else’s goals as the object of their command then your own lifetime is permanently existentially impoverished. Inequality is not only economic, it is political– the oligarchic degradation of democracy. But the oligarchic degradation of democracy is not only political, it is existential: the negation of the freedom of the majority of people to live as subjects of their social self-conscious experience and activity by their reduction to the status of things.

Piketty believes that there solution to oligarchic drift must be international (83). Sandel, in keeping with his older belief that problems of distribution cannot be separated from questions of the good life and that questions of the good life remain relatively local, is more skeptical about the morally binding power of internationalist slogans. He urges the left to find new ways to appropriate “some of the most potent political sentiments, namely patriotism, community, and belonging” (101). I would have to side with Piketty: questions of national equality cannot be divorced from questions of international political economy, but more deeply, questions of human dignity touch on aspects of the self not reducible to distinct national and cultural traditions. Nevertheless, Sandel’s argument cannot be simply dismissed: human beings are not generic mannequins. So long as traditions, languages, and religions remain important to people, the left will go nowhere if it simply argues that the workers of the world have no country.

The dialogue ends as all dialogues do: aporetic and open to the future. Somehow solutions to the deepest political problems must reconcile different dimensions of values– material and moral equality– and reconcile opposites– local and national traditions with universal human life-requirements, values, and international solidarity. Philosophers alone in their studies might convince themselves that they can construct the principles that resolve the tensions once and for all, but that pride cannot survive the encounter with other minds. It may be in our nature to press on to agreement, as Hegel said, but discussion, debate, disagreement— dialogue– is an irreducible moment of the path towards unity. This short debate reminds us that philosophy is not a solitary pursuit but a collective striving towards answers that do not preexist the effort to work them out.

I have just returned from a trip to Ireland with my brother. A friend and former student who now lives in Dublin informed us over drinks that our visit had been preceded by “Make Ireland Great Again” anti-immigrant protests. We missed the protests, but waiting for a bus in Galway an old timer staggered up to us and, clearly mistaking us for locals, asked “Whataya think, boys, it’s a small country, there’s too many of them,” and went on to complain about how some monument to the scared heart of Jesus or something had been taken down to avoid offending Muslim sensibilities, and how Saudi Arabia would never close down a mosque were the Irish to move en masse to Saudi Arabia. I am sure he is correct on the later score, but I doubt that it was Muslim immigrants who demanded the removal of the statue: I would bet a pint and a shot of whiskey that it was good old-fashioned white Irish liberals that took that step pre-emptively.

But make anything great again protests do pose an important question: when was the ‘x’ that has now declined great? And who were the y’s that made the x great? Was Ireland great when it was exclusively for the Irish? But when was that? Before the 9th century Viking invasions? So does the greatness of Ireland then consist in sod huts and peat digging? While street signs and official announcements are made in Irish and English and sheep there were aplenty, there was also excellent internet service and our Irish for the Irish friend in Galway did not appear to have just finished work in a bog. I am no expert, but I think that the economy in Ireland in the EU is a little better then when my ancestors left during the Great Famine.

Traditionalists wherever they are found urge history against avant garde’s and cosmopolitans. But history, like water, is a universal solvent: a continuous process of movement and change upon which politically motivated human beings project symbolic demarcations and arbitrary boundaries. Who are the Irish? The descendants of ancient Celts? But who are the Celts? They were not Irish, but originated in Central Europe. Unlike Plato’s founding myth of his kallipolis, the gods did not plant the souls of the people of country’s in the soil of the nation to which they just happen to belong. Wind the historical clock back far enough and one finds that everyone came from somewhere else.

Bloc Quebecois leader Yves Bechand argued towards the end of the most recent Canadian election that Canada was an “artificial” country. His comment set of a firestorm of outrage amongst the nouveau nationalists aroused to impassioned defence of the dignity of maple syrup and beavers by the effect of Trump’s talk of making Canada the 51st state. Bechand was, of course, correct, but what he failed to note is that every country is artificial. Bechand meant that Canada is not an ethnically uniform nation like Quebec, and there precisely lies the problem with all ethno-nationalisms: they must affirm an essentially exclusionary and, at the limits, racist understanding of the “nation’ (pur laine Quebecois, Irish with no trace of Viking, or Norman, or English blood) which an actually historical understanding of human development reveals to be mythological. Buddy in Galway thought that my brother and I were Irish because we look “Irish” in the way that the daughter of a Somali immigrant actually born and schooled in Ireland and therefore actually Irish does not.

Looks are deceiving.

If the Quebecois nation is “natural” as opposed to the artificially constructed Canadian nation, what exactly is Bechand to say to the Mohawks or Cree who were in “la belle provence” long before it was a province (although I am sure that it was still “belle”). Or Quebecois of Moroccan ancestory? Or a recent immigrant from Congo (or even a McGill student from Toronto)? If the Quebecois nation is natural they can at best be guest residents but never full and equal members of the nation.

Class: can anyone name another nation where this sort of ethno-chauvinism is causing some rather serious problems?

The “natural” Quebecois nation is the legacy of colonial conquest that started not all that long ago, 1628, when Champlain founded a permanent French settlement at Tadoussac at the confluence of the St. Lawrence and Saguenay rivers. Therefore, if Quebec is natural, the actual pre-European history of the peoples who lived there for thousands of years must be, by Bechand’s logic, an artificial graft onto the Quebecois nation: a complete inversion of reality. If one thinks historically, the naturalness of the “Quebecois” identity is exposed as an ex post facto construct of the descendants of people who were not Quebecois, but French. And the French nation that today people in North American regard as an ethno-national whole only dates from 1789 and was the product of a state-led struggle against regional identities and languages.

And so it goes. Unless one’s family has lived in the Rift Valley of eastern African where modern human beings evolved for the past 3 million years, one is the descendant of people who at one time moved from somewhere else. And even if your people have never moved from the spot where Lucy once roamed, our earliest ancestors were not people at all, but pre-human primates. And pre-human primates were once mammallian quadrupeds, and mammalian quadrupeds were once fish, and fish were once prokaryotic cells, and prokaryotic cells were once self-replicating amino acids, and self-replicating amino acids were once heavy elements blasted through space by supernovae eruptions, and stars were once swirls of hydrogen gas, and swirls of hydrogen gas were once …. nothing, the quantum vacuum.

The politically involved person is apt to think at this point: the philosophical mind has become untethered from human reality. History cannot be understood on cosmic time-scales and requires symbolic attachment, rootedness, community, identity. I respond: I used to think that way, and part of me still does, but the persistence of hatred and violence in the world perhaps calls for a more radical revision of how human beings understand themselves and their societies. The environmental movement has been trying to dislodge anthropocentric perspectives for decades, but what is more anthropocentric than the belief that the whole evolution of the universe was steered by the goal of planting one group of people on one patch of ground and another group on another patch? When we consider such ideas from the higher-level perspective of the evolution of matter and energy they appear as they really are: ludicrous.

The clock really does wind back to time t-0 and nothingness. I am becoming more and more convinced that there cannot be any solution to the most pressing social problems– including especially the violence generated by ideas about the fixity and naturalness of ethno-national identities – unless political thinking– left and right– understands the implications of deeply historical thinking.

Deeply historical thinking sets human history in the context of the history of the universe. It is anti-anthropocentric and anti-ethno-centric but at the same time humanist. From my perspective humanism begins from honest contemplation of the realities of human life: it is an evolutionary accident, had initial conditions been different we would not be here; after a certain (hopefully long) period of time we will not be here; we have developed certain capacities for world-building which are constrained, ultimately, only by the laws of physics, and so must figure out what to do with them. The problem with past answers to the question of what we should do with our world-building powers is that different human groups have taken the question of the truth of their worldviews far too seriously. Absurdities like gods become grounds for mass killing; instead of sharing the resources we all need some groups consider themselves uniquely entitled to the fruits of the earth; instead of seeing the human genius underlying different ways of life some groups exalt themselves as uniquely cultured, intelligent, scientific, indeed, human.

How stupid this chauvinism is from even one hundred miles above the earth, where not a single human artifact can be seen and no border lines are visible. Who cares who invented borscht or hummus? They are foods to eat not artefacts to be fought over. The only question is whether they are well-made or not. Whomever can read a recipe can cook. I am not preaching Esperanto abstract uniformity. I preach the gospel of invention, creativity, novelty, and iconoclasm. Before traditions were traditions they were inventions. If the logic insisted upon by defenders of tradition and “cultural authenticity” were followed strictly there would be no traditions, cultures, or human beings. The traditionalist says: do thing the way they have always been done. But deeply historical thinking, winding the clock all the way back, proves that in the beginning nothing was done, and so, if we were to do things the way they have were done in the past, we would have to do nothing at all.

Seeing the stupidity of fetishizing traditions and worshiping an imaginary authenticity we should laugh, not in love and malice, as Nietzsche argued, but in love and friendship, as the once celebrated but now too-ignored Epicurus argued. All were welcome in his garden: women, slaves, all were friends. The only rule was that they were not to talk about politics, because they rightly understood that life is too short for bickering about who should decided how it should be lived. each should decide for themselves. The only real problem is need-satisfaction which, if approached from the standpoint of friendship, in the midst of natural abundance and a minimally disciplined understanding of real needs, is no problem at all. Take what you need and leave as much and as good for others, as Locke argued the law of nature enjoined.

But, my politically-engaged friend will argue, “your deeply historical view abstracts from the structure of conflicts that make friendship impossible. How can the Gazan be friend to the Israeli, the worker to the boss, the black man to the racist?” I answer: “By ceasing to think of themselves as “Gazan” “Israeli” “worker,” “boss” “black man” “racist.” “But that is too abstract!” my comrade rejoins. And then I remind him that my thought that we should address each other as “friend” simply extends the logic of revolutionary modes of address: French revolutionaries called each other “citizen” and communists “comrade” precisely because these names abstracted from the social differences the revolution was trying to overthrow. I simply radicalize this spirit of egalitarian friendship.

“But what about justice,” my political friend insists. Well, what about it? What does the victim demand, vengeance, or access to the means of living well? I say that vengeance is one thing and justice is something else. Justice is (as I put it in the previous post) getting what one deserves. Vengeance is punishing an enemy for the wrongs that they have done. Vengeance is irrational because when one side satisfies its demand for vengeance it gives the other side grounds for demanding the same, and a never ending cycle of violence is unleashed. Justice is not about punishment but ensuring that the victims get what they deserve: secure access to the resources that they need to live and live well. Justice promotes friendly relations between former enemies, vengeance locks people into hate-fueled cycles of violence.

Contrary to the slogan on the wall in Galway pictured above, I argue that people need to remember to forget rather than not forget to remember. The best thing about a painful yesterday is that it is over. If one broods on the pain one will never be free from it, no matter what the circumstances of one’s life are. As Ursula LeGuin said somewhere, “To oppose is to maintain.” Forget, move on, take what you need and make a contribution to the common wealth. What problem would these ways of living and relating not solve if everyone were to put them into practice? Life-enjoyment is possible only in the present and progress demands that we look forward.

The cry for justice is as old as recorded human thought. When people believe that they have been treated unfairly, they cry to their god or their comrades that justice must be served. In the most generic sense, justice exists when there is reciprocity between what the agent has done and the circumstances of their life. When circumstances are out of balance with the character and actions of the agents, then the cry of injustice is raised. The deep assumption that underlies the demand for justice that everyone should get what they deserve. This demand underlies the law of karma and the laws of the land; it informs ideas of the fairness of contracts and the legitimacy of democratic law-making.

Considered from a social perspective, justice in general takes on different concrete forms: criminal justice, economic justice, etc. Although theories differ, the sense of fairness at work in theories of social justice is easy enough to understand in terms of reciprocity between action and outcome. I follow the law, I should not be arrested; I upheld my side of the contract, I should get paid. But what about when there is no action on the part of the agent as the basis of the claim that they deserve something in return? Do human beings deserve anything simply in virtue of being born? If the answer is ‘yes,’ then I think we can talk meaningfully about “existential” justice.

I have been turning the idea of existential justice over in my head for years without really committing myself to trying to systematically unpack it. These reflections might be the beginning of a commitment to formally develop the idea, or they might be the end. In any case, they are offered here in the spirit of thinking out loud. But sometimes the thinking out loud is more important than rigorous argument. It can be the source of the intellectual energy of a philosophical idea that opens up a new perspective on an old problem.

Let us take a couple of concrete examples to begin the exploration of existential justice. Everyone will agree that there is such a thing as economic justice or criminal justice. Different political perspectives will provide different answers to what arrangement is actually just, but no one would agree that it is meaningless to ask what a defendant accused of a crime deserves or what a fair economic arrangement is. We might say that those charged with an offence deserve a fair trial and that those who work deserve to reap the fruit of their labours. In these concrete cases, ‘justice” is a function of interests generated by participation in a social institution. If there were no crime there would be no criminal justice system, and if we did not have to work on nature in order to produce the goods that we need and devise a means to distribute the products there would be no economic system and therefore no question about what economic agents deserve.

But since there are laws and we do have to produce and distribute the product of collective labour there are important questions about justice in these domains. But what would “existential” justice mean? If there is such a thing, then it would be the answer to the question of whether there is something human beings deserve simply in virtue of being born, i.e., coming into existence. I think that there is a meaningful answer to this question.

Since we do not choose to be born or to be the sort of organisms that we are, we come into the world requiring access to certain non-optional resources and goods. Thus, I think that it is meaningful to say that everyone born deserves to come into existence in social circumstances that ensure that their basic human life-requirements can be met. Those include the biologically obvious: nurture, shelter, clothing, but also the less physically quantifiable: care and love. Since we do not choose the identity that others will recognize us by I think one can also say that people deserve to be born into social and cultural contexts in which they will not suffer from belonging to a demonized and oppressed group. We are owed these things by the circumstances of life because no one chooses these life-requirements and they cannot, at least initially, satisfied them by their own individual efforts. Infants are not capable of working for the sake of satisfying their own needs or changing who they are. People who are born into situations of social collapse, war, systematic poverty and oppression against the group that they belong to are victims, I think, of existential injustice.

By calling it existential injustice I intend to put the stress on the circumstances and not the parents. Some people might reasonably argue that parents who conceive and give birth in war zones or racist regimes are causally responsible for the harms that their babies will suffer. But even if that response has some truth to it, it focuses on the parents and not the infant. Whatever the parents were doing or intending, once the infant exists it faces a set of problems it did not choose to face and cannot solve on its own: the very circumstances of its existence, therefor, are unjust. Whomever or whatever is causally responsible does not matter from the infant’s point of view. It emerges into a world that it cannot control but which poses serious threats to its present and future well-being. It does not deserve to suffer for social problems it had no role in creating. Everyone is therefore born, if this argument is correct, with a basic set of legitimate claims on life-protecting and health-promoting resources, institutions, and relationships. Any circumstances which systematically restrict access to these goods are existentially unjust.

Another way of putting that point would be to say that some social circumstances are inhuman because they impede the ability of parents or surrogates to care for the new life that is constantly coming into the world. There might be justice in punishing a criminal if they are guilty of a crime, but there can be no justification at all, ever, for imposing harms on infants who did not and could not choose to come into being. There can be no defence for existential injustice on grounds of political expediency or guilt on the part of the victim when the victims are one second old infants. They cannot be causally responsible for their emergence into existentially unjust, inhuman circumstances. Therefore, I conclude, every birth is a protest against existential injustice and a demand to transform the world so as to ensure that every child is born into a nurturing, caring, loving world,

Parents must of course think about the world into which they are bringing new humans, but if the human project is to continue then new people must be born. No group should be prevented or prevent themselves from bringing new life into the world because current conditions are existentially unjust. Birth is also a protest against inhuman conditions and hope in the problem solving capacities of human beings. Unless we want to voluntarily declare an end to the human project, agree to stop reproducing, and let ourselves peacefully die out, the solution to the inhuman conditions into which some people are born is to solve the problems, not to scold parents for bringing new life into the world. While the critters might be happy if human beings disappeared, our disappearance would risk allowing the only fully self-conscious beings in the universe to disappear thus cause a loss that might be a sort of existential injustice in its own right

In a sense, we are nature’s highest ‘creation.’ If there are other fully self-conscious beings in the universe, we have not discovered each other. If we go, we risk contributing to a universe in which there is no entity capable of fully valuing and honouring it. Only human beings, so far as we know, can value the universe aesthetically and scientifically and build higher unities of beauty and understanding through the creative work we alone are capable of doing. While it makes no sense to argue that we owe a debt to the Big Bang and blind evolutionary forces, we can impose an obligation on ourselves to work to solve our problems and keep going, not only for the sake of our individual and collective enjoyment, but also because our extinction would remove capacities which are perhaps so improbable that they have never fully evolved before and might never again.

If that argument seems a rather long way around to a banal political conclusion– do not allow inhuman, existentially unjust social situations to fester– consider it a means of expanding the circle of our care and concern beyond the little patch of earth each individual occupies from moment to moment. It is true that just as no individual is born deserving to suffer, so too no individual is born owing already existing people anything. Human beings are not born guilty in any sense. Neither the brutally oppressed nor the privileged chose the life they are born into. Everyone comes into the world with the same legitimate claim on sufficient resources for the purposes of living meaningful, valuable and valued lives. Each is also a being with the potential to develop into a social-self-conscious intelligence that can encompass the whole expanse of time and space in mind: to both feel and know themselves part of a greater reality; not a heaven beyond, but the real, physical heavens above. One can realize that and say: “great, now pass my beer.” Or one can realize that they just as well could have been born in a rubbish heap, hunted and despised, and conclude: there is nothing special about me other than the undeserved luck to be born in a safe environment, with people who did enough to care for me and a society that educated me to the point where I can comprehend my living connections to everything else.

From that recognition it does not follow that the fortunate individual owes every other individual a personal debt. What does follow, I suggest, is a general obligation to try to understand why the world is as it is and contribute to the progressive solution of the causes of existential injustice. The undeserved benefits of birth here rather than there should not rob anyone of the capacity to enjoy life. First, wallowing in guilt but otherwise doing nothing does not solve the problems, but even more deeply, everyone has just this one life to live. There is nothing wrong with enjoying the life that you did not choose to begin. At the same time, we are all in the world together, with senses and minds that bring us into contact with the circumstances of others’ lives. We cannot, reasonably, turn totally away from reality, but we are also not individually responsible for how reality came to be the way it is or for changing it. I do not think that Simone Weil, who starved herself to death because she could not bear the thought eating while others went hungry is an example of saintliness. However much one can learn from her otherwise, self-mortification to the point of death is not existential justice but moralistic irrationality.

Yet if we are born blameless we are not born without implicit responsibilities. As we develop we incur debts to those whose labour sustained us and the the natural world which supports all life. We cannot eat and claim that others are not harmed by starvation. We cannot enjoy the protections of law and deny that others equally need its protection. When we see situations which manifestly deny other’s access to what they need as social-self-conscious intelligences, our own intelligence must rebel. As Gandhi once wrote to Rabindranath Tagore “When war comes the poet must put down his lyre.” In other words, we have responsibilities to our time. No one is obligated to sacrifice every moment of their lives for the sake of others, but no one is free to completely ignore the realities of the world either. Existential injustice sensitizes us to the implications of the circumstances of birth. We do not choose to be born or where we are born, so the initial circumstances of life are not deserved. But as we mature we become aware of our surroundings, first in our immediate environment, and then outward in expanding circles. We cannot not be aware of our world (whether narrowly or broadly construed), but we can choose and work to ignore information.

No one is guilty for being born, but we are responsible, and therefore are guilty, for the choices we make to ignore the reality of existential injustice. We are parts of a world, not monadic worlds unto ourselves. We can wall ourselves off and be happy– ignorance is bliss- but no one is ignorant naturally, one must make themselves so. As the great neo-Confucian philosopher Wang Yang Ming wrote, if we open ourselves to it, we can recognize the humanity (jen) that connects all people (and all people to all animals and inanimate things). This recognition requires no special intelligence. “Even the mind of the small (uneducated) man is no different,” he says, “he himself makes it small.” Making our minds small, cultivated ignorance about what other people must somehow live through does, is culpable. When the war is over the poet can return to their beautiful harmonies, Gandhi adds, but when others are fighting one must join the cause.

But the problems of the world are vast and the powers of individuals small. But individuals do not live in the ‘world,’ they live in concrete times and places. We are not responsible for each other in the moralistic abstract. We are responsible for recognizing our shared humanity and acting in accordance with capacity. Those of us who live in democracies act responsibly by electing politicians who refuse to fan the flames of war, life-destructive violence, and environmental degradation. Those of us who think for a living must work to find the connections between whatever it is that interests us and the existence of the wider world that enables us to be active philosophically or scientifically. Everyone who becomes aware of what actually goes on in the world can at the very least state clearly what goes on, whether or not they have a full grasp of the causes and even if they do not (and no one does) have an immediately workable solution. And what goes on in the world is that some infants are in reality and through no fault of their own born on rubbish heaps, starved, and bombed, and killed.

I have made my career as a social philosopher, but the questions that drew me into philosophy– before I knew that I was being drawn into philosophy- were how and whether we can enjoy life if it has no ultimate, transcendent meaning. In recent years I have moved away from directly political-economic problems to address that problem explicitly from (what I regard, anyway) as a historical materialist perspective. I think that materialists above all have to provide an answer to the question of why life is worthwhile if it is a contingent emergent product of one possible evolutionary pathway that energy took and destined to die out, forever. And historical materialists, who are concerned not with the evolution of energy but the development of human institutions, should be concerned with the problem of meaning because if life is not meaningful, or no cogent answer can be supplied to the question of why it is meaningful if the universe of which it is a part is not, then it hardly makes sense to worry about what institutions organize human societies. If we are concerned with good lives then we must assume that life is worth living, but the answer to the question why it is worth living if death is permanent annihilation is not obvious.

Although they were submerged in my first four books and most of the papers I wrote and talks I gave over the first twenty years of my career, my existential concerns always coloured my thinking. Having said enough on the question of what is to be done (I do not mean that there is nothing more to say, but I have nothing more to contribute on that front) I have taken up the problem of meaning and life-value in my past few projects. The overarching concern with problems of meaning and life-value in a godless universe of light, heat, and mostly empty space led me back to Dostoevsky’s three masterpieces: The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov, and Crime and Punishment. My first encounters with these novels took place at intervals of roughly ten years: Crime and Punishment as teenager, The Possessed in my twenties, and The Brothers Karamazov in my thirties. After so many years almost all the details of the plots had faded, and along with them my appreciation of the literary value of the novels. What I retained was a general impression of the stories and the philosophical conflicts that Dostoevsky’s characters explore.

Since I was not re-reading them simply for the pleasure of reading but because I wanted to re-immerse myself in the philosophical struggles and contradictions the protagonists exemplify, there was a danger that I would read them too instrumentally. I rarely read philosophy for pleasure anymore, not only because most philosophers are uninteresting writers, but also because every time I open the hottest new thing I tend to think: new packaging, old ideas. I do not mean that in a dismissive way, but only that I have realized (as I think most philosophers do at a certain point) that we work on a very few fundamental problems, and there are only so many ways that one can try to solve them. There can be important variations on a theme and I certainly still learn from philosophical reading, but that exhilarating feeling I had when I was a student and young professor of an almost physical expansion of self when I read philosophy has long been absent from my research related reading. I only read philosophy these days when I am working on a project that forces me to look at what others have thought about it. I come to philosophical texts as foils or supports for my own argument. Consequently, I pay selective attention to the arguments and take from them what I need to question or help make my case. But when it comes to reading literature, one wants to be involved with the whole text and not simply whatever ideas the author is exploring.

But any danger that I that would read the novels too narrowly, too ‘philosophically,’ was dispelled as soon as opened The Possessed again. From its first page to the epilogue of Crime and Punishment that I just finished I delighted in the richly painted scenes, the often humorous counterpoint to the tragic narratives, and the often salacious undertones to the inner lives of Dostoevsky’s unforgettable characters.

Dostoevsky’s genius was to combine in the highest degree soaring philosophical insight into the most fundamental problems of mortality, purpose, and the value of human life in the absence of transcendent foundations and his ability to paint scenes and craft characters that draw the reader into their own internal logic of development. His cityscapes are evocative without wasting words, the dialogical interactions between characters seem natural and express the full range of human emotions and tensions, but the real power of the novels comes through in his unmatched power to capture the inner turmoil of his protagonist’s lives. Dostoevsky’s own convictions are not difficult to discover, but his greatness as an artist lies in his not allowing them to silence his protagonist’s attempt to live free of what they regard as illusions but Dostoevsky regarded as the highest truths. The dramatic tension of the novels centres on the ambivalence that drives the central characters Stavrogin, Ivan Karamazov, and Raskolnikov (especially the later two- Stavrogin and the other main characters in The Possessed are a bit more cardboard caricature’s of the nihilists that Dostoevsky wanted to expose and skewer).

Of all the characters Raskilonikov is, to my mind, the most finely drawn and tragic. He is naive, arrogant, unoriginal, vastly more brilliant in his own mind than in reality. But he is also receptive to the suffering of others. In a fit a empathy he gives his last 20 roubles to the widow of a man who was at best a drinking buddy, and eventually falls in love with (and is redeemed by) the man’s prostitute daughter, Sonya, who accompanies him to Siberia. He convinces himself that he is one of the great men morally permitted to kill in the service of loftier ends, but he is undone almost immediately by conscience, which debilitates him and makes him easy prey for the investigator of the murder that he committed. He pretends to be intellectually aloof but his main motivations are sentimental. He wants to be Napoleon but undoes any future career prospects by driving away his sister’s suitor because he knows he is exploiting her and threatening to kill another man who once tried to rape her when that man reappears in Petersburgh. Raskolnikov is not just a refutation of nihilism, he is a case study in self-deception, guilt and conscience, the undoing of youthful arrogance by the contradictions of life, and of devotion and love as well.

While Raskolnikov is the most finely drawn of Dostoevsky’s characters, Ivan Karamazov is the most philosophically compelling. In an unforgettable scene with his devout brother, Alyosha, Ivan articulates a breathtakingly powerful and beautiful vindication of life in a a meaningless universe. He not only demolishes the idea that life has to have some cosmic purpose to be enjoyed, he exposes the complicity of cosmic purposes with vicious indifference to existing human life. Best known for his notorious assertion that if there is no God then nothing is true and everything is permitted, his deeper commitments lead in the opposite direction: not towards indifference to life, but the embrace of its contingency, vulnerability, and simple pleasures: He tells Alyosha that he “loves life more than the meaning of it”(Dostoevsky, 1971, 252).  While reason suggests that there is no greater value in a long rather than a short life if both end in timeless oblivious, he rebels, as Camus insisted we should against the absurd, declaring that “I go on living in spite of logic.  Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky leaves as they grow in the spring” (Dostoevsky, 1971, 252).  But his argument reaches a crescendo when he convicts the believers in divine plans with an inhuman indifference to actual living beings: “If all should suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have children got to do with it?  It is beyond comprehension why they should suffer.  Why should they, too, furnish material to enrich the soil for the harmony of the future? … I renounce the higher harmony altogether.  It is not worth the tears of that one tortured child” (Dostoevsky, 1978, 268).  I have read no more perfect synthesis of poetry and philosophy.

The characters of The Possessed are less nuanced and riven by inner turmoil. As I noted above, Stavrogin, the protagonist of The Possessed is more caricatured than either Ivan Karamazov or Raskolnikov; more of an obvious reductio ad aburdem of the youthful nihilists of the 1860’s that Dostoevsky wanted to attack. The chapter which contains his ‘confession” included in some versions of the novel seems rather too convenient and unmotivated, unlike Raskolnikov’s eventual conversion, which has its roots in the empathetic and devoted side of his character. In general The Possessed is the most didactic of the three novels. but even though it takes no effort to grasp the argument that Dostoevsky wants to make against the nihilist and early socialist movements, there are also wonderfully humorous scenes. The meeting of the nihilist cell will reduce anyone who has been to any sort of student radical meeting to convulsions of laughter. And Kirilov, the other main nihilist figure who kills himself to prove that human beings are ultimately free (we are the power of life and death), is both mocked for the absurdity of his ideas and treated with tenderness. Kirilov mourns the murder of his traveling companion by Stavrogin and his plan, as idiotically self-undermining as it is, was conceived as self-sacrifice for the sake of all future humans who would be able to recognize the value of and enjoy life once freed from the metaphysical burden of worrying about eternal punishment.

Walter Kaufmann wrote that philosophy should be considered a minor subset of literature (Philosophy and Tragedy). I believe that he is correct, at least as regards existential and ethical philosophy. Philosophy is to literature as anatomy is to medicine: we treat trace the skeleton that supports life; the novelist and the poet (the best ones) follow the much messier paths of the full flesh and blood human beings who live the conflict between present and eternity, between desire and duty, between self and other. Philosophy raises the mind above the earth to consider the cogency of the principles by which life may be lived and evaluated; the novelist and poet stays on earth and brings to life the whole integrated and explosive inner life of people, with all their ambivalences, turmoil, self-undermining drives, and the seeing the better and doing the worse (Spinoza) of concrete living individuals and the contexts of their lives. Philosophy is world-analysis, but literature is world-creation.

A: What it is Like to be a Philosopher

Driving down 2nd Concession, Amherstburg,

Snow-dusted fields.

and whispy clouds

frame silos,

tractors and trucks,

and fading red barns.

August’s 12 foot corn stocks

have been cut down to stubble

that will not grow again

’till May.

If I could I would

drive down long County roads

looking for places to bring my telescope

when January night falls early,

or walk along the river,

or follow the plot of a novel,

or watch a movie,

or read the paper,

or listen to someone speak,

or see kids playing,

or buy a shirt,

or have a tea,

or look at a painting,

without my mind’s gravity

pulling in questions

about why people do as they do

and did as they did

and will be as they will be,

and what does this mean,

and what that;

could things be otherwise than they are

and if so, why, and if not,

why not

and how do I make my case

and unmake yours

one way or the other?

I have made my point enough

for one life.

But thoughts come when they want to come.

Driving down 2nd Concession, Amherstburg I think:

“Who conceded what to whom?”

Were all parties satisfied,

or were there recalcitrants

who– faces reddening and fists pounding–

shouted:

‘If we concede so much at the 2nd

how much more will be taken at the 3rd, 4th and 5th?!”‘

The door once opened, more thoughts rush in:

“”Concession” can’t mean ‘concession.’

Somewhere in a dusty

County museum

that not even school kids get dragged to anymore

there must be an archivist,

in a grey sweater, Andy Capp cap,

and maybe a pipe

who knows the difference between

a Side Road and a Concession,

who it was that numbered the drain ditches

and the names of the parties to the dispute over Disputed Road.”

But I won’t stop and ask him today.

If I must be cursed by Socrates’ daemon

to think before I feel

I can at least amuse myself with equivocation

and keep some questions open

for my own delectation.

B: Mill and Pigs

It takes energy

to refract every light wave of an idea

and subject it to the test

of evidence or reason,

coherence or correspondence,

and to ask how context

shapes the seeing and the seen

and to worry about how charitable I should be

when something stupid comes my way.

If I could I would

just let the ideas play in mind

and not worry which one wants to be a paper

and which one a book.

Every particle of the world

does not need to be doubled

in writing.

I am getting tired;

all I want to do is drive

down lonely roads

and look at Andromeda,

2 million light years away

not looking back.

I want to walk in the silence

of flat straight space,

breath in the lilacs of spring,

watch the ships in the river,

take a drink on the patio,

and close my eyes at night

without pondering, posing,

or wondering how to prove.

It takes energy to refract every light wave

of an idea;

I am tired;

I don’t want to argue any more.

Mill said: it is better to be Socrates unsatisfied

than to be a pig satisfied.

But did he ask the pig?

Maybe it has been this search for something

Higher

something absolutely True

that we believe in but pigs don’t

that has been the problem all along.

Socrates,

our patron saint,

taught tyrants

who knew what they knew

and were not afraid

to prove it,

not with elenchus and syllogism

but exile and death.

The truck and the abbatoir await us all:

Mill and pigs

Socrates and Critias

me and you.

(But who is “I”

and who “you”

not to mention

“We” and “they).”

There really is only this moment,

or rather, not:

when you think about it,

it has already slipped away

and gone forever.

But no worries:

there is another,

and another

and another

until there is not.

To be and let be,

that is the answer.

To be neither selfless nor selfish

but a self

appropriating the wealth

of the magnificent surfaces of the world

without removing them from the commons.

_____________

“Thoughts come when they want to come” is borrowed from Nietzsche, somewhere in Beyond Good and Evil.

“Better to be Socrates unsatisfied …” is asserted by J.S. Mill in Utilitarianism.

“Socrates taught tyrants…” alludes to Critias, one of the leaders of the Thirty Tyrants who overthrew the Athenian democracy after Athen’s defeat by Sparta in 405 BCE. He had been a student of Socrates.

Where is Christopher Rufo now when the university needs saving, not from left-wing professors with zero real social power but overt assaults from the American State? Or is Donald Trump really invested in the academic integrity of American universities? That must be the explanation behind his 400 million dollar cut to Columbia University imposed because of its purported failure to combat “anti-semitism.” One might be forgiven for worrying that the demand that the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department be subjected to “academic receivership for a minimum of five years” is an overtly totalitarian attack on the independence of academic institutions from the state. But I guess I am one of those left-wing professors who control everything, so what do I know?

So in order to alleviate my ignorance I ask again: where are the right-wing zealots who decry attacks on free speech on campus? Free speech is the genus, academic freedom is the species: who amongst the conservative crowd that brays regularly about how DEI and wokeness are destroying independence of mind is going to step up and denounce the naked use of state power to suppress critical thought? Or is the use of state power only wrong when it affects one’s own side? In which case, there are no longer political principles but only raw power. If there is only raw power then there is no problem with the suffocation of dissent say, by arresting and imprisoning Mahmoud Khalil, one of the organizers of the pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia. Rufo and his gang portray themselves as radicals bravely swimming against the stream, but their silence now shows them for what they really are: hypocritical worshippers at the altar of state power.

That is all we will hear from them: hypocritical cheerleading for the state whose power they supposedly want to keep out of the minds of people. The arrest of Khalil is alarming for a number of reasons– he did not engage in any criminal acts nor is he charged with any; he did not incite others to violence and he is not a member of any proscribed terrorist organization. What he did do was protest the overtly genocidal threats made by the Israeli government to kill or expel the entire population of Gaza, the actual killing of over 45 000 people, and the complete destruction of the infrastructure of life-support. In short, what he did was to use the First Amendment to the purposes for which it was written: to articulate political arguments, to voice objections, to lodge protest against grave injustice, to testify that war crimes and crimes against humanity had been committed, and to mobilise opposition to them by using his voice, not weapons. For these political acts he was arrested in front of his pregnant wife, threatened with the cancellation of his green card and deportation, and imprisoned.

Freedom of speech, just watch what you say, as Chuck D once rapped.

Time and again we are subjected to right-wing stunts like Qu’ran burning or wildly offensive jokes designed to enrage the wokies as object-lessons in the importance of free speech. Book burning in any form is anathema to free minds, and as for jokes, they need to be taken as jokes and laughed at or tolerated, as per one’s tastes. Chacun a son gout: if you don’t find them funny, don’t listen to the comic. Free speech gives people wide but not unlimited latitude to offend, but it is not fundamentally concerned with protecting a space for profane humour. Freedom of speech is not first and foremost an aesthetic principle, although it is that too (and sections of the left needs to heed the universal implications of the principle). Freedom of speech is first and foremost a political principle that protects public space for the free, i.e., not-state controlled- dissemination of political arguments, including arguments about the need to mobilise political movements, criticise existing governments and policies, and organize against them and in favour of alternative parties and priorities.

As Hannah Arendt might say, the right to free speech is an eminently political value. Politics is the use of the power of mind and argument to organise and direct collective energies towards the end of protecting and extending the space for democratic power. Where politics ends, coercion and violence begin. Lacking convincing arguments to refute the critique of Israeli tactics and strategy in the struggle against Palestinian self-determination, the Netanyahu government is on a global crusade to convince the governments of purported constitutional democracies to criminalise argument. They have found a willing executioner in the Trump administration.

Such attacks are not only attacks on a particular constitutional principle, they are direct attacks on democracy itself. Democracy is much more than parliamentary chatter. It involves at the deepest level collective control over the resources, goods, institutions, and relationships upon which need-satisfaction and the free-development of our affective, intellectual, creative, and relational capacities depend. As I have put the point in other works, genuine political democracy is possible only in democratic societies in which all major social institutions, including economic institutions, are collectively controlled and governed by majority decision following free deliberation amongst all parties affected by the decision. But parliamentary chatter– deliberation, in its highest form– is very much central to the practice of democracy. Consider any democratic institution, from the Athenian agora, to the Great Law of Peace, to early soviets, and even the American Senate– the world’s greatest deliberative body, purportedly– and you will find at its core open-ended talk. In principle, parties to political deliberations argue for as long as it takes to arrive at a mutually agreeable compromise. In practice material necessity imposes time limits. But time limits and decision by majority vote are distinct from ideological constraints on the content of allowable speech. Trump and his Heritage Foundation handlers are openly and explicitly threatening to destroy opponents rather than convince them through superior reasons. Trump goes so far as the argue that criticism of his policy in the media is illegal.

Funny conservative sense of heritage. Aren’t conservative the ones who regularly warn of liberal experiments with ‘social engineering?” If Khalil’s arguments are as egregiously bad as his captors think, or Trump’s policies so much better than his critics argue, they should be easy to refute in the one case and support in the other, no? And if America was once great, why was that? Slavery? Jim Crow? The Trail of Tears? No country worships its constitution like America. The hermeneutic effort expended, especially by conservatives, to discern the intentions of the “Founding Fathers” makes Talmudic scholars look lazy and superficial. Where is the Maimonides who can explain this to me, a perplexed philosopher who wants to know how respect for the Constitution, whose First Amendment reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” can be squared with the arrest– without criminal charge– of a protester exercising exactly the powers granted him by that amendment or to threaten the “free press” with criminal sanction for criticising the government of the day?

The student encampments were dramatic efforts to get the American government to listen to the voices of the dying people of Gaza. To claim that they are anti-Semitic is nonsense. Is opposition to Trump anti-Scottish American? Was opposition to Jim Crow anti-white? Here again we see the pernicious effects of the identity politics to which conservatives claim to be dead set opposed. The attack of the right to employ the freedom of speech to protect criticism of Israel or Trump is based upon the conflation of the state of Israel with Jewish identity and Trump’s policies with being American. If that is not identity politics, what is?

Of course, many, many stupid and naive things were said about “the resistance” and Hamas’s tactics in some of the demonstrations and encampments. Freedom of speech is the right to make good and bad arguments equally. The antidote to bad argument is better argument, not prison and deportation. Despite right-wing hyper-ventilation, the encampments were not violent: these were not Weather Underground fools who thought that burning ROTC buildings was going to hasten the anti-imperialist revolution. Keffiyehs are not Kalashnakovs. They were simply gatherings of engaged young people– many Jewish– exercising their right to freely express their opposition to the catastrophe unfolding before the eyes of the world. Again, some failed to properly understand Hamas’s cynical complicity in provoking the invasion, but youthful naivete is not criminal, and voicing abstract support for a liberation struggle is not equivalent to membership in a terrorist organization.

How quickly history unravels. In the 1990s Francis Fukuyama claimed that political history was over; liberal-democratic institutions represented the high point of the evolution of political rationality. They would inevitably sweep the world in the wake of the collapse of Stalinism. He appeared to be correct: the world was swept by liberal-democratic revolutions, but today those institutions have largely betrayed those who struggled for them. The betrayal was not caused by the ideas behind liberal democracy: rule of law, separation of powers, formal equality of all institutionalized in constitutional rights of citizenship, peaceful transfer of power. Those are all elements of any practically workable democratic society of any significant size. They are frames to be built upon, not rubbish to be cleared away. No, the ideas did not betray those who fought to build liberal-democratic societies, it was capitalism and the substantive powerlessness it imposes on the majority of people, a powerlessness manifest as monstrous and growing material inequality and the impotence of social democratic and liberal forces to protect people’s lives and livelihoods. That material damage has undermined the liberal-democratic state from within and created a legitimacy vacuum being filled in state after state by right-wing populist nationalists. Contrary to Hegel and Fukuyama, the Spirit does not move inexorably forward and the future, at least in the near term, looks a whole lot worse, politically, than the period that stirred Fukuyama’s hopes.

The Department of Government Efficiency, (DOGE) led by Elon the DOGE (Dangerous Oligarch Gutting Everything), is driven in part by the libertarian belief that there is no genuine public interest or public good, partly by capitalists’ interests in freeing business activity from any sort of oversight and regulation in the public interest, and partly by Trump and the MAGA movement’s antediluvian, anti-science worldview. Cuts to USAID that affect antiAIDS programs in South Africa, the threat to withdraw from the World Health Organization, forcing the CDC to cut back on global monitoring of disease threats, impeding the ability of American government scientists to freely communicate with other scientists around the world– arguably the most important intellectual condition for the advancement of human scientific knowledge– firing hundreds of climate scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), forbidding the public use of references to ‘climate change” in official government documents, and putting kooks like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and — even worse, former Professional Wrestling impressario Linda McMahon– in charge of the Departments of Health and Education respectively–can only be understood as attempts to construct a fantasy-reality in deep conflict with the material reality whose basic elements and forces and their connection to human life natural science studies. Since material reality never loses a conflict with human wishful thinking, I believe that the rest of the world should let the Trumpites try to return to the 18th century of mercantile economics, a world before the germ theory of disease, vaccinations, public health and education, knowledge of the mathematics of probability and the power of computer modelling. Let them have their red hats and delusions: we in the rest of the world should throw open our doors to American scientists and progressives and drain the MAGA swamp of people who do not want to be swamped by Category Five hurricanes or roasted in out of control wildfires.

I am not being facetious. Canada has to be proactive in transforming its economy in the face of American tariffs and one crucial place to start is with a massive investment in our universities. Canadian universities have been underfunded for decades (especially in Ontario). The unprecedented assault on scientific research currently underway in the United States is an opportunity to poach some of the best talent from American universities and create new synergies with on-going research in Canada. And not only in the natural sciences: technological development is going to cut into manufacturing employment over the medium to long term, Trump tariffs or not. The world is going to need artists and writers and commentators and critics and policy analysts: all contributions that the arts, social sciences, and humanities can make to the future. Culturally and geographically a move to Canada is far easier for American academics than a move to Europe. Crisis is a moment of opportunity: Canadian workers must absolutely be protected against job losses, but we also have to seize the moment and turn our economy in a different direction– not only away from integration with the American, but towards the future. A generational investment in our universities to attract top American talent is one key step in that direction.

There are precedents in our shared history for large scale movements of American’s north. Canada of course welcomed tens of thousands of American young people in the 60’s fleeing the risk of being sent to Viet Nam. Less well-known but perhaps more directly relevant to my proposal is the influx of American academics to fill positions as the higher education system here expanded rapidly in the 1960s to accommodate the Baby Boomers. Canadians are quick to point out to how so many of the world’s favourite American celebrities and singers are actually Canadian, but Americans who have moved here have enriched our cultural and intellectual life as well. Now is absolutely not the time to turn inward and wrap ourselves in Hudson’s Bay blankets of chauvinism; it is a time to both reach out and transform from within.

Investing in Universities alone is not going to solve the problem. Canadians are also going to have to contend with massive unemployment. If the tariffs persist, and the new tariffs promised and threatened on steel and aluminum and softwood lumber added, 1.5 million jobs could be lost, according to the Canadian Labour Congress. Trudeau and Ford and the other premiers might talk tough, but the economic facts of the matter suggest that Canada is not going to win an all out trade war with the United States. Retaliatory tariffs will bite in local regions of US economy, but overall the effect will be small, given that exports to Canada are a small fraction of overall US economy (about 1.3 % of GDP) whereas the value of Canadian exports to US (77 per cent of all Canadian exports) compromise around 25 % of Canadian GDP: an astounding level of vulnerability.

No Canadian government– no government, as a matter of fact– can simply accept an ally effectively ripping up a treaty (one demanded and signed by Donald Trump himself, in the case of the Canada-USA-Mexico trade agreement. I wonder if Trudeau pointed out to Trump that if the agreement is bad it is his fault, as it was negotiated under his watch)? That said, now is not the time for tough talk but creative transformation of the Canadian economy. Structural and qualitative transformations take time, but one short term policy that could be implemented right now is the long-debated but never implemented Guaranteed Basic Income (GBI). Versions of this policy have floated around for at least forty years but no government has implemented it in any systematic way. Now is the time! A GBI would allow for a planned reduction in average working hours per week which would, in turn, allow for the possibility of job sharing as a way of mitigating higher levels of unemployment and increasing the quality of life by making available more free time.

For example, a reduction of 25%, from a 40 to a 30 hour week, would allow more workers to be employed for less time while the GBI would make up for the wages lost in proportion to the reduced hours. If a firm employed 50 workers at 40 hrs/week that would amount to 2000 person hours of employment. If every worker worked only 30 hours a week the same firm could employ 66 workers for a total of 1980 person hours. The math is crude and the implementation would be more complicated, but the example, rough as it is, shows how jobs can be created by re-dividing labour time without expanding production.

Systematic investment in this sort of scheme could catalyze deeper social changes. The experienced value of more free time might break the cycle of addiction to ever higher levels of consumption of things whose rush wears off as soon as they have been taken out of the box. Breaking our understanding of what is enjoyable and worthwhile free from mindless concumerism would furthermore reduce the need for higher money wages (which are one dimension of inflationary spirals). Working less, demanding less, living and experiencing more we would all reduce our dependence, not just on American markets, but capitalism. In any case, something like this policy is going to be required; the Labour Congress warned that 1.5 million jobs could be lost because of the Trump tariffs, but another study warned that between 1.5 and 7.5 million Canadian jobs could be lost to automation.

We need to be clear that capitalism is the problem. Capitalism sets workers at odds with each other in a cut throat competition for scarce jobs. On one level it is lamentable to hear the United Auto Workers come out in support of Trump’s tariffs. On the other hand, what real choice do they have so long as workforces are divided along national lines while capital roams free? Free trade has damaged Canadian and American industrial bases, of that there can be no doubt. The primary functions of unions today is to protect their members’ jobs and secure job-creating investment. But the fact of the matter is that Mexican, American, Canadian, and, let’s be clear, Chinese workers all need their jobs. Remember what a worker is: someone who must sell their labour power to a capitalist because they have no other means of life. That shared material reality is the objective basis of shared interest across borders. But solidarity cannot be built overnight and the threat of mass job losses is real. While still working to build new bridges between workers across borders and against the capitalist class, immediate steps must be taken that both ward off disaster and slowly begin to transform capitalism from within in a democratic, life-valuable, cooperative and socialist direction.

______

And now, I need to take a break from Trump commentary. In an older post long ago I said that I am not a journalist and I do not want the blog to chase the news. I am worried that Trump is forcing me to break my vow. He has a unique ability to attract attention to himself. He is like a magpie, shrieking with excitement about every new shiny object he sees and making everyone around him stop and look. I need my attention span back. Henceforth, until he causes a genuine catastrophe or achieves something worth philosophical reflection, I will do my best to ignore him.

Whatever Trump ends up achieving (or more likely, not achieving) in his second term, he has made personality cults great again. Exhibit A: the shameless ass-kissing of acolytes whom he once viciously insulted– “Little” Marco Rubio comes to mind- gushing about how Trump is the only one who can reform government, cleanse America’s body of illegal immigrants and its soul of woke platitudes, bring about world peace, and restore American manufacturing dominance. But one month in, there have been no substantive achievements and his poll numbers are dropping: only 49 % of Americans approve of Trump’s performance. What will happen when his cuts start to hit home? Poor and white working class Americans can feel proud that Ivy League colleges which they will never attend can no long use race as a factor in admissions, but when their social security payments are chopped and Medicaid is reduced, they will not be able to blame Democrats or illegals. At that point– probably just as mid-term election season gets into high gear– Trump’s coalition may well start to unravel. Remember his signature promise from his first term: ending Obamacare. He did not end it because Congress realized that even his most rabid working class supporters in red states had learned that Obamacare, flawed as it may be, actually helped them meet their healthcare needs.

Trump would love an eighty foot bronze statue of himself on Wall Street, but through his first term and one month of his second he is more Wizard of Oz than Stalin: a sad old man madly pulling levers to sustain the illusion of fundamental change. But it is mostly theatre. Take for example his crackdown on illegal immigration. While the pace of deportations has increased, the raids seemed staged with future political commercial in mind that will remind voters that “Trump does what he says.” However, only one month in to the “biggest crackdown on illegal immigration ever” ICE officials are being re-assigned because of the slowing rate of removals. Slow or fast, there is no way that Trump will undermine the agricultural economy by targeting migrant labourers en masse. There are about 11 million undocumented migrants in America now, and in 2028 I predict there will be just about 11 million undocumented migrants in America.

His other signature piece– tariffs, have yet to be imposed, save on China, and then only at 10% rather than the 60% he promised. Inflation is creeping up and while that may not dissuade him from going forward with the broader suite of tariffs he has promised, the disruption to industrial supply chains that will cause will not leave American workers unscathed, at least in the short term. Auto executives have been sounding the alarm about the impact tariffs on Canadian and Mexican manufactured parts and American brands is evidence that the American ruling class remains split on Trump. Those splits are likely to get wider if Trump does proceed with his attempt to return to an essentially mercantilist global political economy with America at the centre. If enough workers start to hurt from disrupted supply chains, higher costs for consumer goods, prescription drugs, and the generalized chaos mass layoffs in the federal government are likely to cause, Trump’s Napoleonic period will be even briefer than the real one’s reign.

But the past week’s news cycle has been focused on Trump’s foreign policy, and here his goals, while contradictory, are not uniformly wrong. Trump is correct: the Ukraine war does need to end and it never should have started in the first place. He is also correct that it is not America’s job to protect the whole world– that argument has been a staple of Realist thinking since the end of the Cold war, not to mention a key plank of peace and anti-imperialist movements. His “plan” for Gaza, is abhorrent and needs no further critical comment, but the people of Gaza do need to live in peace and material security. The danger that Gazans face is less from his plan than from Israeli unwillingness to allow Gaza to be reconstructed. While still astoundingly callous and arrogant, he also sometimes says some surprising and welcome things: he has proposed nuclear talks with Russia and China to reduce stockpiles and there are reports that Secretary of Defense Hegseth has ordered a review of Pentagon spending that could lead to epochal reductions (32% over four years, if reports are true) in the military budget.

The Democrats pursued none of these laudable- in the abstract- foreign policy goals. At the same time, we are not witnessing a retreat of America from the global stage, but a re-configuration of the way in which American power is deployed. Despite liberal hand-wringing we are not seeing the decline of the ‘rules-based international order,” because there never was a “rules-based international order.” There was and is a power-based international order in which the most powerful nations wrote and re-wrote the rules to suit their interests. The rules were written differently in the Cold War, when the US and the Soviet Union had to take into account the existence of the other, then they shifted after 1991 to encourage, on the surface, more cooperation and multilateralism, and are now shifting again, as Trump re-positions American foreign policy under the assumption that America is the preponderant global power and needs to use its military and economic might to serve a different interpretation of its interests.

Trump’s gambit may fail, but it is not an incoherent stew of half-baked ideas as critics like to pretend. It is a return to a nationalist and realist foreign policy. But this shift is in keeping with the times. First the 2008 crisis and then Covid caused a return to some aspects of Keynesian economic stimulus and a hardening of borders that have not disappeared with the end of the pandemic. Right wing nationalist-populist ideologies are in the ascendant across the world– Trump is less disruptor-in-chief than a creature of the times. The nationalist re-trenchment across the globe proves– if further proof were needed- of the absurdity of the argument that an anonymous “Empire” of capital and digital flows had replaced American imperialism, as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt argued. American imperialism never went anywhere- ask Gazans and Ukrainians, who were killed by American bombs and pushed into war with Russia by a Democratic government stuck in Cold War thinking and a closely allied European security establishment haunted by nonsensical fantasies of Russian tanks rolling across the Donbass all the way to Normandy.

Trump is wrong that Zelensky started the war but he was used as a tool by the US and NATO in an overt and publicly acknowledged plan to degrade Russian power. Trump is correct that the war has become a World War one-like stalemate that needs to end. And he is also correct that Ukraine is in a much worse bargaining position and will most likely have to cede territory that it would not have had to ceded had either the Minsk 1 or Minsk 2 treatises been agreed to or Russia engaged in serious talks in December 2022 when a list of negotiating points were sent from Moscow to Washington, only to be arrogantly rebuffed. The Ukrainian people have paid the price.

Can Trump deliver peace, not only in Ukraine, but in the Middle East and globally? One cannot deny that Trump can shape the rhetorical field. He seemingly extemporizes shocking proposals which rarely come to pass, but get everyone’s attention and crack open formerly fixed positions. Trump knows that America still wields massive military and economic power and he is willing to threaten to use it to bend other nations to his agenda. But there are serious tensions and contradictions at work in the overall strategic picture that is emerging.

Looking carefully at the moves Trump has made or is threatening to make, it becomes clear that he is trying to rid himself of the Ukrainian and Middle Eastern entanglements the better to compete exclusively with China for manufacturing share but also for control over the world’s rare earth critical mineral supplies. Trump is not subtle: the cat does not need to get out of the bag because it was never in it. His envoy hands Zelensky a contract to sign over 500 billion dollars worth of rare earths and tells him to shut up and sign. Bad news for Denmark/Greenland, Canada, and perhaps Norway: Trump is proposing a new era of US-Russian Arctic co-operation (i.e., joint domination). None of this is motivated by Trump’s love of Putin, it is designed to weaken the alliance between Putin and Xi. But that is also the strategy’s main weakness.

However much Putin welcomes the feigned respect paid to him by Trump and Rubio, they are setting him on a collision course with the reality of Trump’s desire to hem in and weaken China. Russia is and will remain dependent on China as the major customer for his oil, natural gas, and minerals. European markets for oil and gas are not coming back, and Trump has no intention of helping them come back, because he wants to keep the European market open for American Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) deliveries. Trump also wants to use threatened tariffs as leverage to open up the Indian market for American LNG, which just happens to be another major purchaser of discounted Russian oil. Over the next few years these contradictions are going to amplify. How they will play out is not certain, but it is much more probable that the globe is heading towards a generational political-economic conflict. China cannot lose access to the American market and continue its manufacturing-led economic rise. Putin cannot lose access to the Chinese market for his oil, gas, and minerals. Trump cannot back down from his goal of re-patriating American manufacturing industries. While his commitment to shrinking the American global military footprint is long overdue, no one should mistake his agenda for a commitment to a project of comprehensive, life-valuable, positive social peace. He may well imagine that other countries will fall into line. The evidence from South Africa, Mexico, and even dangerously dependent countries like Canada is that they will not.

Canadian readers of my vintage will remember the Alberta-based bumper sticker campaign inspired by the demand made by an angry caller to a Calgary radio station to “let the Eastern bastards freeze in the dark.” His ire was inspired by Trudeau pere’s National Energy Program and the threat that it posed to provincial jurisdiction over Alberta’s oil and gas resources. Trump’s 25 % tariffs on all Canadian goods imported into the US (10% on oil and gas) imposed on February 1st and then suspended for 30 days has aroused Canadian anger across the country. Ontario premiere Doug Ford went the furthest, arguing that we should cut off electricity and energy supplies. Trudeau fils was not willing to take that dangerous step, at least in the first round of response, but he did announce an escalating series of counter-tariffs. Whether Trudeau’s willingness to offer a robust response, or whether his economic advisors were able to explain the implications of “integrated supply chain,” or whether Trump decided he could attain his ultimate economic goals (shifting investment from Canada and Mexico to the US) by slowly bleeding concessions from Canada and Mexico I cannot say at this point. But what is clear is that the complex set of dependencies that ties the Canadian economy to the American puts Canada in an extremely precarious position.

Political forces that were once against free trade when it was first negotiated in 1987, and then deepened and extended to Mexico in 1993 with the North American Free Trade Agreement, (renegotiated under the first Trump administration and re-christened the United States Mexico Canada Agreement), find themselves forced to defend it. Economic nationalists going back to Harold Innis have warned that the size differential between the Canadian and American economies meant that Canada will always need America more than America needs Canada. Abundant natural resources offer only limited leverage– if there is only one market for the resource (America), then threats to suspend exports are idle: the resource only has commercial value if it is sold, and if there is only an American buyer, then not selling will have even worse economic consequences than paying the tariff. In any case, critics of integration and free trade lost the argument, and now Canada faces its most serious economic problem since the 2008 global financial crisis.

The threat is real, in particular to the auto industry, situated in Southern Ontario. Windsor-Essex where I live could face economic obliteration. I am not exaggerating. Tens of thousands of workers in the assembly and engine plants and dozens of smaller tool and die, injection mold, and parts plants could lose their jobs. Parts go back and forth across the border multiple times. Do the math: if every time a part crosses into the US the manufacturer must pay a 25 % duty, the costs will be enormous. Experts predicted that the entire North American auto industry, dependent as it is on the integrated supply chain and just in time production, could grind to a halt in 7-10 days from the imposition of tariffs. While the fact that American auto workers would be laid off would be sure to get Trump’s attention, it would also get the attention of the owners of parts plants and future investors. Capitalists are risk averse: they will close plants on this side of the border and not make future investments if they are going to be exposed to tariffs. The industry will not disappear tomorrow (because plants cannot just be moved overnight), but overtime the plants will relocate to the US to avoid tariffs, or even the threat. That is Trump’s plan, and it may be starting to work already. Even though the tariffs have been suspended, a number of firms located in Canada have announced lay offs in anticipation that they will be applied in March. But even if they are not, Trump can keep them dangling like the sword of Damocles over Canadian heads.

Perhaps alone amongst nations, Canadian politicians take American political and economic aggression as a personal insult. They rhapsodize about what a good friend Canada has been to the US, what close allies we have been, how special and unique our connection is, how we share the world’s longest undefended border (but not any more, since Trudeau has agreed to further police and militarize it as part of the commitment he made to Trump to stave of the implementation of the tariffs). But they forget both Lord Palmerston and Pierre Eliot Trudeau, the first of whom argued that states have no permanent friends or enemies, but only interests, and the second who warned that when a mouse sleeps next to an elephant, it is always in danger of being crushed. One can disagree or even despise Trump’s tactics, but Trump is the President of the United States and has both the right and the power to impose whatever economic policies he and his advisors believe is in the interest of the United States.

Viewed from the standpoint of American capital, Trump’s politics are contradictory, which explains the mostly critical response from the business establishment. One must not forget that globalization was largely an American-capital driven process: the policy architecture that created the conditions for globalization was called the Washington Consensus. While the trade liberalization that made possible the re-location of manufacturing industries did not harm the bottom line of most industries– indeed, the whole point of relocation was to reduce labour costs and undermine the power of unions– it did gut many smaller American cities and create what is not affectionately known as the “Rust Belt. Some industries were also directly harmed by competition with lower priced Chinese imports– steel comes immediately to mind. All economic policy- and the neo-liberalism that underpinned globalization was a policy, not a distinct form of society– must be understood in terms of its function: to create the conditions for expanded capital accumulation. What we are clearly witnessing is the unravelling of neo-liberal globalization. States have been re-trenching behind stronger borders since 2008, and especially since COVID-19. Trump is part of a global wave of right-wing populist movements coming to power based upon dissatisfaction with the impotence of social democratic parties (in the US, the Democratic Party) in the face of global threats to working-class living standards. As is sadly too often the case, working class anger is directed downward- against immigrants, especially– rather than upward, against the ruling class. Nevertheless, the social and economic problems feeding right-wing populist movements are real.

Which brings us to the crucial, as always, question: what is to be done? And as soon as that question is posed one faces a problem– a paradox, really– that I have been wrestling with, without success, for many years: the short term damage caused by phase transitions between one form of global economic governance and another is real, suggesting that only fundamental, long-term, system transformation can solve the problems, but the short term pain that would be required to reach those long term goals would be at least as bad if not worse than trying to re-float the system, which impedes political mobilization in support of structural changes. Moreover, since structural alternatives are just textbook ideas, people understandably cling to whatever version of the system works for them– tariffs in the pre-free trade world, now free trade– because life requires certainty of need-satisfaction today and tomorrow. If the mortgage must be paid at the end of the month and groceries bought each week, workers are going to mobilize behind those forces that seem best able to secure the social conditions that allow them to do so. Most workers might not have much when compared to the ruling class, but they have a great deal more to lose than their chains.

But they do stay chained to a system whose periodic convulsions and internal transformation threaten their lives and livelihoods. How this paradox between the fact that these system convulsions threaten the very needs that keep people wed to the system is to be solved, I do not know. As is usually the case when an American threat to the Canadian economy begins to take hold, voices cry out that it is time to de-couple from the American economy. This time is no different. Left-nationalist voices have called for but a more self-reliant Canadian economy, voices further to the left have called not only for a more independent but also a democratic socialist economy These calls sound good in the abstract, and in the abstract their “necessity” can also be proven. But they float down from the (not absolutely, but relatively more secure) halls of academia. Making an argument in class to students is one thing, making it in the Penalty Box Lounge across Walker Road from the Windsor Assembly Plant (Canada’s largest manufacturing plant) to auto workers facing immediate job losses would be quite something else entirely.

Sam Gindin grasps the paradox better than most. A long-time leader in the CAW/UNIFOR before leaving for a career as an academic, Gindin understands the lived realty of Canadian workers’ vulnerability to changing American priorities. He is also correct to infer– but it is more like a logical inference than a political program– that the radical alternative- not just de-linking but socialist reconstruction of the Canadian economy, is the only practical alternative. Correct as an inference but not as a political project because neither Gindin nor anyone else could tell the workers’ affected how this economy can be built, how long it would take, how it would function, and how it would employ the manufacturing workers who would certainly lose their jobs as their factories shrank because they were no longer selling into the gigantic American market. Moreover, the crucial question of how a relatively small economy could become an independent bastion of democratic socialism is left unanswered. Serious solidarity between Canadian and American workers seems impossible to imagine right now. The only existing vehicles by which such solidarity could be constructed are unions whose primary function today is job protection, and Canadian workers are facing the problems that they are facing because Trump is selling his agenda as a job-creator. Should it prove to be a job killer– as he has been warned it will- a return to the status quo ante rather than a new era of collective working class struggle is far, far more likely.

Trump is deploying nostalgia for a supposed Golden Age to build an ideological bloc in support of his virulent nationalism. Despair can be tempered by the knowledge that the mandate that he claims for his wrecking-ball approach to governance is much smaller than he claims– only 1/3 of eligible voters cast their ballot for him. But the power vested in the Executive branch is allowing him almost free hand right now. Democrats have, predictably, adopted a ‘make lawyers rich again’ court-based strategy to try to slow him down. But what is needed — Gindin and others are correct– is a renewed democratic socialist project: one that begins from shared interests underlying distinct identities rather than the individual and abstract ‘stories’ and ‘journeys’ of those identities. From shared and universal need-satisfaction as the material condition of the unique and to a society which allows for- as J.S. Mill said beautifully in On Liberty— an open-ended set of “experiments in living,” that is the principle upon which a renewed struggle for a better world must be organized. But it is just a principle, a platitude, really, which can do nothing on its own but requires the force of millions of people working together to put it into practice.

Who will discover the rhetorical and political key to inspiring people to take the risk they will have to take to solve the structural problems that capitalism as such poses with real invention rather than ideological nostalgia?

Albert’s book is a timely read. Only one week into Trump’s second term he seems determined to enact policies that will exacerbate every problem that Albert examines: climate change, fossil fuel extraction, pandemic readiness, economic competition, international political tensions, and the future of armed violence. Trump, delusional in his emperor’s new clothes, appears to think that viruses and atmospheric chemistry obey Executive Orders and that the historical forces that have slowly but steadily eroded American power since the triumphant days at the end of the Cold War can be arrested because one-third of American voters cast their ballot for him. Material and historical reality will not be cheated by Trump’s arrogance, but he can expedite the most destructive implications of those forces by his reactionary policy. Whether the world proves up to the task of confronting and stopping him before the end of his term remains to be seen. But that he will exacerbate the contradictions of the international system is almost certain.

Albert argues that the world is in the midst of an intensifying polycrisis. The term was coined by former European Commission President Jean-Claude Junker to explain the political, economic, and cultural problems faced by the EU. Albert applies it globally, to the multiple intersecting crisis of what he calls the “world-earth” system. The polycrisis is a “nexus of entwined crises characterized by feedback loops, blurred boundaries, cascade effects, and in many cases mutual amplification.” (2) The global system is confronted with a series of problems of reproduction on multiple levels and scales, from the availability of energy sources, to the climate, unstable hydrological cycles, a food system challenged by scarce land and high emissions, the threat of new information technologies, intensifying political-economic conflicts, and new means of violence in the hands of state and non-state actors. “The planetary polycrisis can be understood as a protracted phase of critical transition and turbulence that is unfolding simultaneously across multiple sub-systems of the world-earth system– from political economy and finance to climate, biodiversity, energy, food, disease, global security, and identity.”(19) Each of these systems interact in ways that can either exacerbate degenerative or catalyze regenerative trends.

Albert situates himself in the tradition of the Club of Rome’s celebrated and vilified Limits to Growth report of 1974 (updated, 2004) (64-5). Against the tide of criticism that the report initially received, Albert argues that the quantitative futures modelling that the report pioneered is an essential part of ecological, social, political, and economic problem solving. While he notes that models are generic maps that cannot provide clairvoyant foresight, we need them in order to understand where the world might be going, and where we might best try to steer it. Albert is neither a technotopian nor a catastrophist: he has a political agenda but he does not let that agenda skew his reading of the data. He is confident that, in principle, human beings have the political and scientific intelligence and practical and technological know-how to solve the polycrisis, but he notes that even the best case scenarios will take decades to implement and that even our best efforts might not be sufficient to avoid the worst case scenario.

Albert begins by noting that there is an unfortunate gap between qualitative social criticism on one side and quantitative scientific modelling on the other. He argues that social scientists, Marxists, and philosophers need to pay much greater attention to problems studied by “the earth system sciences, energy studies, ecological economics,, and other fields that highlight the geophysical parameters that will constrain possible futures of capitalism.” (9) Albert is correct to single out for criticism in this regard utopian socialists like Aaron Bastani whose “fully automated luxury communism” completely ignores the constraints of material reality. The capacity to extrapolate technological fixes from existing capacities is one thing, but actually scaling those technologies up or realizing their idealized potentials is quite another. One can imagine that we can mine asteroids and genetically engineer future human beings with superhero powers, but the technoptopian imagination cannot prove that their fantasy solutions will work or guarantee that they will not create even worse problems.

Albert’s critique of technotopian hand-waving is welcome, as his much needed critique of the creeping idealism of much of the Left and the ambivalent or even anti-scientific attitude that underlies the argument that science is just one narrative amongst many and that objective, material reality is a social construction all the way down. When material reality confronts those same leftists with objective threats to life– a pandemic or anthropogenic climate change– suddenly material reality becomes relevant again. Social constructivist critics of science are thus forced into ad hoc cherry picking of results: climate science and vaccines good, the bio-medical science of sex and evolutionary theory bad. But the same evolutionary theory that explains the reality and importance of biological sex in the development of the large brains that can invent social constructivism underlies the research that led to mRNA vaccines that helped fight COVID. It is true that natural science cannot solve social problems– only changed social practices can do that. But it can– and Albert shows how– help us understand that any social system is going to have to contend with physical forces that social theory cannot deconstruct.

Albert thus aims to synthesis the power of quantitative modelling with the Marxist critique of capitalism to defend an eco-socialist future as the best– most ecologically sound and socially just– future system. But he is clear-eyed about the impediments to that future. The primary impediment is the political organization of a global movement capable of supplanting right-wing populist and technocratic defenders of capitalism. But even if an eco-socialist movement is politically successful it will still face the intersecting and interacting material problems caused by the planetary system. If population continues to grow in that eco-socialist future, for example, then economies will have to grow too. If economies and populations continue to grow then energy demand will continue to rise, food demand will rise, and neighbouring socialist communities could still find themselves in conflict over lands, resources, or water. Successful solutions to these problems do not follow from the fact of worker and community control over the means of production. Albert rightly criticizes Marxists for typically underplaying the challenges posed by material scarcity and unintended consequences of different technical fixes.(78-9)

The great merit of the book is that Albert handles the empirical and disciplinary complexity of the argument and presents the different scenarios he maps with enough detail and dynamism that the reader begins to see the complex interactions between the variables without getting lost in the particulars and losing the all important sense of direction that his mappings are supposed to provide. He imagines different scenarios but ensures that the reader can always identify the through line of argument, what he calls the “planetary problematic. “The planetary problematic is the nexus of intersecting problems that impels and constrains the self-organization of the world-earth system, creating a possibility space composed of not-yet actual trajectories, attractors, and bifurcations within them.” (94) I did find his use of technical terms from the the language of the mathematics of chaos and complexity theory (attractor, dissipative structure, etc.) clashed with the narrative organization of the argument. Unless one is going to provide actual mathematical models there is no reason to apply terms like “attractor” to possible forms of social stability. An attractor is an emergent equilibrium towards which a chaotic state tends. History does not spontaneously tend towards an equilibrium state: social solutions must be argued over, fought for, and imposed.

That said, I was nevertheless impressed at the lucidity of his presentation of the complex ways in which attempts to solve one problem can exacerbate problems in another dimension. The issue of complex interactions cannot be solved by simply asserting that society is a totality and that a change in social relations will by its nature solve everything. Albert rejects the Hegelian-Marxist notion of totality because it is simplistic. Instead he turns to the idea of an “assemblage.” The term derives from the work of Gilles Deleuze, but Albert adopts the interpretation of Miguel Delanda. (89) He uses it to express the fact that elements of a system “are not logically coherent networks of ideas and beliefs … but rather looser configurations that nonetheless tend to produce distinctive patterns of thinking and feeling.”(106). Each facet of the polycrisis has its own structure and exerts its own forces, but that structure and those forces are also effected by changes to other independent but connected variables. Thus, “we confront a predicament that is more than the sum of its parts– a multiplicity of intersecting crises that should be studied as holistically as possible in order to illuminate its possible futures.” (61)

Navigating the polycrisis is therefore fraught with unintended consequences. The secular stagnation of the economy might be overcome by a new technological breakthrough, but that breakthrough might endanger lives and civil liberties if it emerges from an unregulated AI industry. The food crisis can be solved by increasing production, but increasing production can exacerbate the extinction crisis by converting more land to agricultural use, depriving species of their habitats. Economic growth might exacerbate the ecological crisis, but economic contraction can strengthen right-wing forces and intensify geo-political conflict. Massive investment in renewable energy might accelerate ‘Green” growth” and reduce carbon levels, but it might also generate competitive scrambles for rare earth materials. By mapping these interactions carefully, Albert hopes to improve the quality of political struggle and public policy, all the while noting, with appropriate modesty, that the complexity of material reality exceeds even the most detailed mapping exercize.

A notable strength of the book is that Albert connects his political-economic and ecological analysis to the all-important existential dimension of life. Crises are periods of change and transition, but periods of change and transition are also periods of intense anxiety. Some can resolve their anxieties by working to solve the problems, but others (a plurality, at the moment, in the United States and Europe, at least), try to recover meaning by embracing, often violently, a nostalgic interpretation of the past. Albert understands that life needs purposes as well as calories, and that the absence of purpose can cause people to lash out against the forces that they fear are threatening old certainties. It is not simply irrationality, stupidity, or xenophobia that motivates so many people to embrace simplistic right-wing populist slogans. Underneath those movements lies real insecurity and vulnerability. “The Existential problematic refers to the problem of creating forms of collective meaning, identity, and belonging.” It receives “less attention,” Albert notes, but “it is nevertheless essential to include it” because the navigation of the polycrisis requires political action and political motivations are shaped by the existential problematic.(105-6) I agree that this problematic is the most difficult to solve, but I would add that an effective solution must go deeper than merely countering right-wing populism with a politically effective left-wing populist movement. Ultimately, a solution to the existential problematic requires a value system that affirms finite earthly life as the ultimate value. Albert’s argument could have benefited from more systematic attention to the nature of life as the ultimate value. His argument presupposes that principle but he does not examine the different forms of life-value or provide a criterion (such as the ‘primary axiom of value’ developed in the work of John McMurtry) to distinguish life-coherent from life-destructive existential dispositions and value-systems.

Albert’s most detailed analyses are reserved for the exploration of how different ways of resolving one dimension of the polycrisis might affect other dimensions under different social regimes. He first examines how different strategies of system-management and change might operate in the socio-ecological and political-military subsystems, asking how different policy regimes– business as usual, Green Keynesianism, and different varieties of eco-socialist transition– will handle problems thrown up by climate change, resource scarcity, food supply, energy mix, and existential crises. Each solution has political and military implications: trying to hang on to old patterns of fossil fuel driven economic growth will intensify competition between states and increase the likelihood of military conflicts over increasingly scarce resources. However, Albert is careful to note that not every version of eco-socialism entails harmonious and non-violent global relationships. Some versions could see eco-socialist societies try to wall themselves off from others, while frustrated activists might adopt uncompromising, violent means of struggle (which would likely be met with severe police and military repression). While some of his political-military scenarios resemble a dystopic science fiction movie, none are completely adventitious but all are grounded in existing political tendencies and technological possibilities.

The book concludes with seven global outcomes of the polycrisis. He does not assign probabilties to the seven possibilities but sketches the trajectories that would lead to system-breakdown, neo-feudalism, volatile techno-leviathan, stable techno-leviathan, ecomodernist socialism, fortress degrowth, or abolitionist ecosocialism (226, 228-235).

I will not reconstruct these scenarios in any detail but simply note the distinguishing features of each. System-breakdown would occur if the world continues to try to save fossil fuel driven capitalism. In that case collapse– “irreversible breakdown in the structures, relations, and feedbacks that previously reproduced a particular socio-economic system, resulting in a new equillibrium that is less “complex” (147) might prove unavoidable. Collapse would not necessarily mean human extinction — society could could eventually be reconstructed, as feudalism reconstructed organized social life after the collapse of the Roman Empire– but it cannot be ruled out, either.

The other trajectories that Albert charts are attempts to stave off collapse through varying degrees of social regulation and change which rely on various degrees of consent or coercion. Albert calls the second worst case “neo-feudalism.” Neo-feudalism would be a response to a near-collapse scenario in which various forms of collective agents try to seal themselves off from the most destructive effects of the crisis. The nation state form might break down into smaller constituencies, some managed by private corporate powers, but all bent on maintaining elite lifestyles for the ruling class. (229)

The next two scenarios: stable and volatile ‘techno-leviathan’ are closer to existing patterns of nationalist retrenchement behind more ruthlessly enforced borders. Trump 2.0 prefigures in some respects what techno-leviathan might look like. In both scenarios, new surveillance and military technologies are used to police and repress restive populations. Intensifying food, climate, and economic crises combined with political resistance to structural change lead ruling classes to adopt a Hobbesian solution to social conflict. States increase their monopoly on the means of violence in order to better stamp out dissent. In the stable scenario nation states are able to manage internal and external conflict and maintain economic growth (whose fruits are appropriated by the wealthy); in the volatile variant internal and external conflicts predominate. Although surveillance and population control technologies would manage dissent and resistance, a significant segment of the population might consent to increased repression if it meant they were able to maintain their high-levels of consumption.(229-232)

The final set of scenarios would require significant degrees of structural and normative transformation. While these are generally more hopeful, none but the final– abolitionist eco-socialism– are without political dangers. Albert calls the first more hopeful trajectory ecomodernist socialism. In this variant fossil fuels are gradually phased out and renewable energy and the continued growth of digital technologies drives on-going economic growth. Albert speculates (not unreasonably, given the levels of investment in renewable energy) that China could lead this development. He labels the second hopeful the scenario ‘fortress degrowth.’ In this case some states complete the energy transition and create a steady-state economy, but try to reserve the benefits of those transformations for their own citizens. Right-wing or even eco-fascist variants cannot be excluded (although he notes that most eco-socialists would refuse to call fortress de-growth eco-socialist if it tends in a politically repressive direction) (233-34).

The final scenario is the most utopian: a complete democratic eco-socialist society in which the different structures of oppression and violent domination are overcome, a cooperative international order is achieved, ecological pressure on the earth’s life-support systems is relaxed, technology is utilized to better satisfy human needs and free life-time from alienated labour. Albert again displays admirable restraint by not predicting that such a future is certain or even likely. Even if it is possible to achieve, he cautions– rightly– that romantic versions of “revolution or bust” politics will not advance the cause. If it comes about, it will only be through decades of gradual struggle that focuses on achieving certain mediating plateaus (Guaranteed Basic Income, freedom from fossil fuels, etc) which make the climb to the next peak concretely possible.

In the abolitionist eco-socialist society “serving life and reducing suffering is an end in itself.” (241) Here the need to cash out this platitude makes itself felt: what does it mean to serve life as an end in itself? Does it mean to strive to create as many life-forms as possible given finite carrying capacity of the earth? What happens when the demands of human life conflict with the demands of other life forms, as they presumably will given finite space in every imaginable social scenario? As for human life, what are the limits to individual self-realization, given the reality of other people’s interests and needs? If Albert is correct (and I think that he is) and progressive political struggles must think systematically about the future, then it follows by the same reasoning that they cannot rest content with slogans about the intrinsic value of life, but must also explicate what that means concretely, given the material, social, and existential realities of life on earth under all social configurations.

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