[Transcript] The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism with Matt McManus

A conversation on liberalism, socialism, revolution, and more.

This is an interview with author Matt McManus about his new book, The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism. You can listen to the original audio format, here.

The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism with Matt McManus

You can grab your copy here. As always, let me know who you’d like me to interview next.

In Solidarity — Joe

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Joe Mayall: All right, welcome back to the JoeWrote Podcast. I'm here today with Matt McManus. Matt has a book coming out called The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism. Matt, thanks for joining us.

Matt McManus: Yeah, anytime. Thanks for having me. I mean, I know Thanksgiving is next week, so most people are kind of tired of talking about politics, so it's nice to be here.

JM: Yeah, absolutely. Everybody's saving up for the classic Thanksgiving table argument. I'm not going home this year, so I'll avoid that, but gotta get my fix in elsewhere, right? So if you could give us a brief introduction. Who are you? What is your political background, your educational background? Yeah.

MM: Sure. Well, I grew up in and around Ottawa, Ontario, mostly in, it was much a time small town. Now it's kind of a suburb called Stittsville. I finished my undergrad at Carleton University, then did my LM in international human rights law at the National University of Ireland and then my PhD at York University. And right now I teach at the University of Michigan in the city of Ann Arbor, maybe about like 45 minutes away from Detroit.

JM: okay, cool. What was school in Ireland like? That must have been fun.

MM: I had a great time. mean, beyond the fact that I, you know, I got my degree, the proudest thing I did there was I won a Guinness chugging competition that really impressed all my Irish roommates. Although I will say that at the end of it, I found out the prize was another Guinness. And at that point, I really just had no desire for that.

JM: Yeah, I've, yeah, I mean, Guinness Jugging Competition in Ireland, that's how you win the respect of the people, you know? It's funny you mentioned that, and I might add a question. I've always been a fan of Irish socialism, like going back to the Easter Rising revolutionaries, James Connolly, I found that they are vastly overlooked socialist thinkers. So I'd be curious to pick your brain on that later on. But let's start with, you know,

MM: They were pretty impressed though.

JM: Let’s start with the title of your book. The political theory of liberal socialism. Most people think of liberalism and socialism as somewhat at odds, right? In the American context, we have liberals. The term usually refers to the centrist Democrats, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, those type of people. While socialists invoke someone closer to Bernie Sanders. Could you kind of share your definition with these terms and explain why you think they are compatible?

MM: Yeah, absolutely. Well, one of the things that I'm going to do that's a little bit academic-y is point out that the terms liberalism and socialism are both eminently contestable, right? One of the things that I point out in the book is that really it makes a lot more sense to talk about liberalisms and socialisms, plural. And once we recognize that, we can see that there are some versions of liberalism that are incompatible with socialism, some versions of socialism that are incompatible with liberalism. But my book is about, of course, liberal socialism, which is a kind of intellectual tradition, as I understand it, of thinkers, philosophers, activists who did think that the two could go together, indeed often argued that they should, or even that they necessitated one another. So my brief definition of liberal socialism is that liberal socialists are committed to the democratization of the economy through liberal parliamentary institutions, while retaining respect for liberal rights or even wanting to expand liberal rights, with of course the big qualification that liberal socialists are not committed to an expansive right to private property since they associate that with the possibility of forms of economic domination and political domination emerging. So while all liberal socialists support a right to personal property, your home, your car, your laptop, your PS5, whatever it happens to be, they'd say that the commanding heights of the economy or the means of production should be owned and organized democratically. Although what that means in practice, all liberal socialists disagree a little bit on that.

JM: Yeah, we'll get to that. I really appreciate you, your idea of there's multiple versions of socialism and liberalism. really, it's a pet peeve of mine when people, whether they be leftists or not, point to like one flaw in a socialist project and say like, well, they're not socialist because they didn't do X, right? Which I think is not really, it's essentially the no true Scotsman fallacy, like played out forever.

So I think that's an important frame that I really like and will use going forward. The other thing I wanted to ask you is what inspired you to write this book now? You know, of course you started writing before the second election of Donald Trump. I'm sure you started writing a year ago, years ago. But why did you think, you know, 2022, 2023, whenever you were writing it was a good time to bring back the ideas of liberal socialism?

MM: Sure, well guess there are three main reasons. The first one is most of my time I actually end up writing on the political right. Whether it's about postmodern conservatism or right-wing intellectuals. And there's this kind of reactive, instinctive online rightist who will say things like, liberalism and socialism, they're all the same. know, basically anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan is a pink okami that needs to be eliminated. I'm not really talking about those figures. What I'm referring to instead is the fact that

There's a kind of sequence of really impressive right wing figures who I became very familiar with in the course of my research. People like Nietzsche and Heidegger who always would stress that there's a deep elective affinity and kind of genealogical history between liberalism and socialism. Heidegger probably made this most expressed in books like Introduction to Metaphysics where he castigated capitalism and socialism or liberalism and socialism depending on how it's translated as and I quote, metaphysically the same. You know, they're both

Enlightenment, humanist doctrines committed to equality of a certain sort. And really a lot of the debates between liberalism and socialism or capitalism and socialism, according to Heidegger, mostly technical debates, right? How do we build better iPads and how do we distribute iPads in a way that'll be more conducive to human flourishing? And of course, all these right-wing thinkers rejected liberalism and socialism both, right? They thought that precisely because they were species of the same kind of rot, they all both need to be pulled out at the same time. But without a doubt, I was influenced by this outlook.

The second big thing that really inspired me to write this was I've always thought that there was a certain committment to liberal principles lurking beneath even the most hardened tankie, to put it bluntly. know, whenever I would hang out with my comrades at a dinner party or when we drinking at the bar or when we were getting coffee or whatever it happens to be, you know, they would always say the things that we all did, know, liberalism, can't count on them. Liberals are going to sell people out.

MM: But if you actually were to get into a granular conversation with them and I'd ask them questions like, do you not believe in things like freedom of expression? Do you not believe in things like religious toleration? Do you not believe in things like multiculturalism? Do you not believe in things like freedom of assembly or the right to vote? They would always invariably say, of course, we believe in all of those things. If anything, we don't really think they're safe with normie liberals because they'll sell them out for a buck like they always do. And one of my goals in the book was just to

make this commitment a lot more explicit than it had been made before. Because I do think there are good reasons for socialists to be committed to things like freedom of assembly, the right to vote, et cetera, et cetera. And we often don't understand why. And I my book provides least a little bit of clarity on that. And then I suppose the last reason I wrote the book was precisely because of geopolitical events, right? We're well past the period that was once called the end of history now, where there was this expectation that

So kind of neoliberalism would be the only ideological game in town, a few aberrations here and there. And it's very clear, certainly to me, that right wing populism, if not ascendant, at least is gaining a lot of ground in countries that many people once thought were safe havens for liberal democracy. And I find that deeply disturbing if you think about what a lot of these right populists promise to do or do in practice, right? I think about people like Victor Orban, rolling back democracy in the name of illiberal democracy, but invariably, you know, the illiberal bit swallows the democratic bit. Or think about Donald Trump and his promise to deport millions, if not tens of millions of people, which would cripple the US economy, not to mention be a humanitarian crisis. Yara Bolsonaro, right, trying to forcibly overthrow an elected government. These things are very, very worrying. And I absolutely concede to any left critic that part of the reason for the popularity of right populism is precisely that neoliberalism was not a very hopeful doctrine and offered very few reasons for people to buy into it. So to invoke Sam Moyn in his book, Liberalism Against Itself, I think that liberalism deserves to be in crisis in some senses because liberals lost touch with the kind of liberatory, egalitarian, and indeed revolutionary aspects of their heritage that are so central to making it appealing to ordinary people. And I really think that we need to recover a lot of those energies.

To make the case for liberalism to everyday citizens again, our fellow citizens I should say, and I think that liberal socialism is a liberalism of hope and optimism and if anyone were to read my book I hope that they would take that affect away from it.

JM: That's a very interesting answer. There's a lot I want to dive into there. I've always found it on, to reinforce your point, very interesting that the two groups I find most concerned about reproductive freedom in the United States are like very staunch leftists. And also, of course, you know, the democratic party runs on that all the time. And as you said, people do rightfully point out Democrats aren't as productive on protecting, reproductive freedom as we might hope, but they are, at least in their rhetoric, like very close to socialists on your body is your right and the government should not have an ability to take that away from you. And I think that does extend to freedom of speech, freedom of expression, all those types of things. I'd like to ask you, you mentioned kind of the right wingers and their views of liberalism and I've noticed a trend among right-wingers lately who don't really want to identify as a conservative, so they call themselves a classical liberal, right? They try to say like, I'm in the John Locke style of thought in which, you know, it's essentially a libertarian philosophy, in my opinion, as we would understand it now. Do you see that as a deviation from liberalism? Do you see that as like a, I don't know, kind of a misinterpretation, or do you think that's another way that liberalism could be interpreted, along with liberal socialism?

MM: No, without a doubt, it's another way that liberalism can be understood, right? As I mentioned, liberalism is a very large family. But to go back to your Thanksgiving example, just because you're members of the same family doesn't necessarily mean that you have a lot in coMM:on. Actually, it's very often when you encounter your family in moments like Thanksgiving, where you start to wonder how the fuck are we related? Really, right? Just I can't see it because nothing about you makes sense to me. So.

What many people call classical liberalism is what I term following C. B. McPherson, possessive individualism in the book. And it's without a doubt a legitimate liberal school of thought, although rather like that family member you can't stand, one that is very much not to my taste. So there's a lot that I have to say about this, but the way that McPherson and myself characterize classical liberalism, possessive individualism, is it's based on this atomistic anthropology that holds that for the most part, human beings are self-interested competitive and driven to pursue their own insular needs. Aligned with this is a commitment to what I call an acquisitive ethic. Basically the idea that through competition with other persons and through our own efforts, of course, the end goal of life is to maximize our utility. And the best way to do that is to acquire as much stuff as possible. Right? You know, I have a pretty shitty TV right now, if I'm being honest with you. But if I got a better TV, you know, a 3D TV maybe, then I'll be a lot happier.

But then after I get the 3D TV, if I can make a little bit more money, then I'll be like, Jesus, you know, I should get a home theater. Things will be even better if I get that. And I criticize this possessive individualist anthropology and ethic as being fundamentally a misunderstanding of who we are as human beings. So we can get into what liberal socialism stands for a little bit later if you want, and how its principles differ from those of possessive individualism. Needless to say, liberal socialists share with all liberals this commitment to equality for all, freedom for all, and indeed solidarity for all. But they understand what is entailed by that in a very different way than possessive or classical liberals.

JM: That makes sense, yeah. I'm more familiar with the Pierce Morgans and Dave Rubins who you can kind of tell are really saying they're classical liberals to just avoid the term that they're a right-winger, but I do know that that's much deeper thought. I've read some national review writers who use that term to identify themselves and stuff, so very interesting.

MM: Well, if I could just take a shameless plug at a diamond Dave there. the other day I heard him round nosing with Ron DeSantis, right? and he was talking about how he likes to identify as a classical liberal and a libertarian, and he usually adopts a kind of live and let live attitude. but he proves that Florida is still not legalizing marijuana because he doesn't want Florida to wind up looking like New York where there's people reeking a pot on every corner.

MM: And I'm like, Jesus Christ, David, what kind of libertarian are you where you cannot abide the idea that people would smoke a joint near you at this point, just because you're bothered by the smell, right? Doesn't exactly seem a don't tread on me kind of attitude, right?

JM: That's always been the one thing.

Yeah, weed has always been the thing that libertarians point to as their quote unquote anti-government bona fides. They always sort of drift right into the conservatives on abortion. I've never really seen much anti-mass incarceration from them, but they always point to weed. That's like the layup for libertarians. How do you fumble on that one?

MM: Yeah, exactly. That's kind like the minimal threshold that you should be able to jump over if you all want to identify as a classical liberal libertarian. You don't even say you need to like you don't even just say I like people smoking weed. You can very well say like, I don't want fucking people to smoke weed near me. But at the very least, you can say people shouldn't be thrown in jail for doing what grandma did back in the day when she was token up at Woodstock.

JM: Yeah, I'm starting to think this Dave Rubin guy isn't being totally honest with us.

MM: Yeah, anyway, total segue, but I read two of Dave Rubin's books and reviewed both of them and I've endured a lot of pain having done so, so I feel like I'm entitled to little spite on that basis.

JM: That was actually the first thing I gave away to my premium subscribers was I read his book, if you can call it that. I think it was called like, Don't Burn This Book or something like that. Is that right? Yeah, it was, it reminded me a lot of like one time I started, I went to a beach and drank and I was like hung over on the beach, like three hours laying in the sun and my brain was like melted over. That's a lot what that book felt like. And I'm just worried about people who buy and read that for fun.

MM: Yeah, I remember he had that joke about how he would never get genital surgery, but if he were, he would have it were to do so. He'd have a massive vagina. I was just like, God, like I had to look at that twice to be like, did I actually fucking read that? Maybe I'm still fucking, you know, just buzzing from some trip I took like back in undergrad or something. And all of sudden I'm having a relapse or something, because now I'm thinking about what Dave Rubin's vagina would be like. Great.

JM: Yeah, I must have blanked that out because I don't know. I can't believe that got past. Yeah, now I'm definitely never gonna remember that. Cool, returning us back to the more serious topics. Could you kind of explain how you see Marxism either being compatible or incompatible with liberal socialism? Do you think that those two ideologies are at odd? Do you think that they can work together? What's your take on

MM: I'm sorry it's back in your head.

MM: Well, my book, I argue that Marx clearly isn't a liberal socialist, right? In fact, he offers some potent criticisms of people who look and talk an awful lot like liberal socialists over the course of his long oeuvre. Now, saying that, I say that Marx's position on liberalism is much more complicated than simple rejection. So Marx, as you know, is a dialectical and historical thinker. He never just condemns a given ideology by saying that it's wrong or it's false. He always always tries to understand the historical necessity of whatever ideology he's talking about and indeed the economic mode of production that's at the base of that ideology. And he'll also point out how there are emancipatory and liberatory qualities to it. So with regard to liberalism, Marx was emphatic that the bourgeois societies that are emerging in the 19th century, which is usually his term for liberal societies, were without a doubt the most egalitarian, emancipatory, productive, and happiest that had ever been. He was very much kind of enlightenment optimist in that sense. And when he offered criticisms of things like the rights of man, for example, embodied in French Revolutionary principles, it was never to say that the rights of man were useless or not worth fighting for, because Marx really agitated quite hard over the course of his career for things like universal suffrage, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, especially for workers, et cetera. It's just that he thought quite correctly in my view, that many of the rights guaranteed by liberal societies wouldn't be fully actuated under capitalist conditions. They can only be fully actuated in a much more egalitarian, a much more participatory kind of society. And as late as the critique of the Gotha program, which is one of his last works, last major work, let's just say, Marx is actually quite critical of some branches of utopian socialism who basically adopted this millenarian revolutionary attitude saying,

After the revolution, we're just going have an entirely different society. Marx insisted, no, no, listen, if we're going to be good historical empiricists, sorry, materialists, we need to recognize that any new society that emerges even after a potential revolution is going to be stamped by many features of the old. That means many parts of bourgeois rights, and I would add probably bourgeois institutions as well, are going to persist into a new socialist society for an indefinite period of time. And Marx never actually says how long.

MM: indefinite period of time is going to be. Generally, he hypothesizes in his own way, quite speculatively, that at some point the economy will become so super abundant that we can transcend the limitations of liberalism and move towards a society where everyone advances under the banners of from each according to his ability to each according to his needs, what's sometimes called full coMM:unism. But, know, I take this to be a sign that along with his lifetime agitation for things, again, like universal suffrage, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, that Marx had an appreciation for many aspects of the liberal tradition, even if he didn't think it was going to be the last word in terms of the best kind of society that human beings should aspire to. Now in my book, I offer some criticisms of Marx's own vision of what the best kind of society would look like from a liberal socialist standpoint, because I don't think that we should just axiomatically assume that Marx is right about everything, particularly what kind of society is fit to replace liberalism. But just to kind of round out the conversation, I also think that he fires back by pointing out that there are some problems with liberal socialism as well. He wouldn't call it that, but he took aim at people, say, John Stuart Mill. One problem is that it's very rare that you see liberal socialist thinkers understand capitalism as a global system. They almost always focus at the nation state level. And where they do understand capitalism as a global system, they typically are apologists for it, like John Stuart Mill, for instance, was when it came to things like British imperialism. Secondly, Marx and many Marxists have pointed out that liberal theories of power are woefully deficient in a lot of respects, because while many liberals are appreciative of the dangers of state power, excessive state power, and increasingly, I should say, are concerned about the forms of direct domination that occur within the economy, particularly within economic firms, they have a very thin understanding of things like ideology, hegemony, the mute compulsion that emerges from reified social institutions that people persist in engendering but then feel dominated by. So all of that I think is stuff that liberal socialists need to understand and need to incorporate into their modes of thinking about things if they're going to avoid falling into some of the pitfalls that they have in the past.

JM: Makes sense. I tend to agree with you there. I'm curious if you have an answer to that of liberal socialists have, let's just call it capitalist state power. If there's something that, do you think you have an antidote for that from the liberalist addiction or is it more a work in progress, I guess I would ask.

MM: It's definitely a work in progress. do have a partial answer. So in my book, earlier book, How to Guide to Cosmopolitan Socialism, I actually take some inspiration from the neoliberals of all people, where I point out that in the mid 20th century, many of the neoliberals understood, probably quite rightly, that the nation state was no longer a sufficient vehicle for the spread of capitalism, not least because the nation state was extremely vulnerable to being captured by democratic majorities that had deeply anti-capitalist sentiments. So what was necessary was the construction of international institutions that would make the world safe for capital and bluntly to discipline countries that weren't willing to get with the program. Think about things like, for instance, the Washington Consensus or the exercise of American imperialism or the various different kinds of economic readjustments that institutions like the World Bank or the IMF basically compelled smaller developing economies to undertake in order to bring them into line with the neoliberal project. So I say obviously we don't want any of that, right? But I think that if we were going to make the world safe for something like a liberal socialist or democratic socialist project, very clearly we would need to build international institutions that would make the world safe for those forms of socioeconomic and political organization. Now what those institutions would look like, I really don't know. That's where I kind of draw a blank, right? But I think we've clearly moved beyond a period in history where you can just make adjustments at the nation state level or at the state level and expect to be insulated for many consequences because the broader world is just out there and isn't going to intervene with what you do. It's just not, you know, the 18th century any longer. that's, excuse me, not going to happen.

JM: Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. I'm from New England, so I would ski near Bretton Woods all the time. And of course, the Bretton Woods Conference was the fostering of the IMF, if I'm not mistaken. And so that was always like front and center for me of thinking of like, you I think sometimes people focus too much, like you said, on the contemporary nation state as if they exist on their own and are not constantly being

JM: pushed and pulled by global forces. Hopefully we get another book from you in the future outlining your thoughts on that, because I'm very interested in that question and I agree. Just from my personal belief, I do think typical, more Marxist, even Leninists have better answers to those problems. I think there's much criticism to point at those projects as well. So I'm not sure we've found the perfect answer yet, in my opinion.

MM: No, I agree.

JM: Yeah. One person I've heard you talk a lot about is Thomas Paine, the founding father who's probably recognizable to most Americans. I'm curious about another labor-oriented American politician. Did you come across Abraham Lincoln at all in your work? Would you consider him to be a, I've heard him called a quasi-Marxist, a proto-socialist, a bunch of different things. Would you, do you think any of those labels fit him?

MM: No, although of course, like a lot of people, I'm a deep admirer of Abraham Lincoln, rather like Marx was an admirer of Abraham Lincoln. He sent him a letter on behalf of the International Working Men's Association congratulating him on his re-election. And as many people know, Marx was not very fond of most real existing politicians. So for him to take the time to do that does indicate a rare level of respect and appreciation on Marx's point. What Lincoln was usually committed to what's sometimes referred to as property-owning democracy, which is an idea that has roots quite far back in the American tradition. can think about somebody like, Thomas Jefferson, for example. So the basic idea is that private property should still exist, but there should be relatively few inequalities in private property, because there's this understanding that stark inequalities in property will lead to stark inequalities in statuspolitical power, and that's not compatible with the Republican system of government. So Lincoln famously railed against what we might call the wage labor relationship, which is why he did have some sympathy for what we might call proto-socialist ideas or socialist adjacent ideas, because he thought that a wage labor relationship was inherently servile. You're not working for yourself. You're working for another person. And he projected quite problematically in some ways, that precisely because America was such an expansive continent, eventually, yeah, people might be wage laborers for a while, but they would eventually take what they had earned, move westward, set up a farm or a small business for themselves, become independent that way. And that would be the ideal kind of Republican CoMM:onwealth that the United States would become. Now I say problematically, of course, because it doesn't really take into account the fact that there were indigenous people living in many of those lands who had very strong feelings, let's put it that way. All these people just coming to set up towns and blacksmiths and little farms in their territory. But I have problems with this more theoretical idea of property owning democracy, even though I certainly am more sympathetic to it than the kind of existence system that we'd have now. And there's a nice kind of Republican quality to it that makes it perennially attractive and a kind of nostalgic thing.

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JM: That's interesting. I went back and reread his, I think it was his, what we now call the state of the union, but the first address to Congress in the middle of the civil war. he doesn't mention slavery at all, which I think is very interesting. And he talks more about the relationship between capital and labor, but he does say, I think at one point, capital has certain rights that should be protected specifically like its rights to some form of profit.

Hearing you talk, am I correct in assuming that you think that's the definition between a liberal socialist and let's just call them a liberal, that there should not be that private ownership, let's call it of the means of production. I think you used the term the coMM:anding heights of the economy. Is that where you draw the line? Yeah.

MM: Well, it's actually quite a complicated question amongst liberal socialist thinkers. The reason being that all liberal socialist thinkers go from John Sirtmull through people like Chantal Mouffe, Carlo Rosselli disagree with the idea of constructing a coMM:and economy, right? Or even, you know, fully planned economy of the sort that you saw at the Soviet Union. They resist it both for economic reasons because they don't think it'll be particularly efficient and for moral reasons, because they're concerned about the infringements of personal liberty that would emerge with the total elimination of markets. So what liberal socialists usually propose is democratic management of the economy. Although what form this is going to take really differs from thinker to thinker. Just to give two examples, John Stuart Mill, especially in later editions of the Principles of Political Economy, called for basically the elimination of the capitalist class. He said, for the most part,

Capitalists don't serve any particularly meaningful function in the economy. Yeah, they have a little bit of technical know-how, but nothing that the workers can't bring to bear for themselves. And he was also kind of Qual Lincoln, deeply contemptuous of the servile relationships that emerged in the workplace. Mill would say things like, look, liberal thinkers constantly chastise the aristocracy for inducing the servile relationship politically. But so few liberal thinkers seem to recognise that exactly the same thing emerges in the workplace where you go and you have to kiss ass to your boss and treat him like everything he says is gold. And this kind of survival relationship of subordination was something that he thought liberals should have no truck with. So what Mill wanted was a society where the economy was defined by cooperatives or workplace democracy, where workers would manage firms directly. Now there would still be markets, right? These firms would compete with one another. He thought that was necessary in order to propel things like innovation.

And so consequently, there would still be profits. And he thought this would be more equitably distributed amongst the workers and that the workers might actually be incentivized to work harder precisely because they're laboring for themselves as a cooperative rather than laboring for the capitalists who's going to expropriate a lot of what it is that they produce. Now, I would argue that this is clearly a form of socialism the way that Mill understood it be a kind of socialism. He identified as a socialist in his autobiography because there's no capitalists, right? The means of production are literally owned by the workers in this case.

MM: But, you know, there's still be a kind of market system that plays a vital role in that economy. So many people characterize it as kind of market socialism, to use the Eric Olin white term. Then, you know, another thing that we can point to is somebody like John Rawls, for example, right? So John Rawls in Justice is Fairness, his every statement pointed out that a liberal socialist economy would be one where there would be far more equality in terms of people's political rights.

But he never really sketched out in great detail what it would look like beyond that. But if you look at his lectures on the history of political philosophy, particularly the lectures on Marx, he actually offers us a little schema of what things would look like. And he says, look, in a liberal socialist economy, there would still clearly be personal property, right? You know, in your home, your car, your Xbox again, know, whatever it happens to be. And there would still be liberal parliamentary institutions.

But he's also committed to this idea of a combination of workplace democracy, potential nationalization of some industries, and of course the government playing a role in regulating or investing in the economy in order to produce beneficent outcomes. So we would have a bit more of a kind of mixed system, once more without capitalists, but you know there'd be a role for worker owned firms, there'd be a role for you know just nationalized industries, there'd be a role for government intervention like intervention something that looks a lot more like a of a mixed socialist economy than you know we see in these kind of very pure architectonic visions. So those are different visions of what liberal socialism would look like. I happen to think that the Rawlsian view is probably more realistic, right? For the simple reason that I don't think you're ever going to have economies certainly in the 21st century that's characterized by just one mode of organizing virtually everything. But you know people have disagreements about this, then I'd be certainly interested in hearing.

JM: Yeah, I generally agree with you. I've always been puzzled by the claim that socialism is when the government plans the economy. Like I operate under the definition that socialism is the collective ownership of the means of production, right? And as you said, that involves everything from workplace democracy to certain aspects of nationalization. I wrote a book that's in progress where kind of argues that those two can go very hand in hand, right? The government could nationalize the energy or medical industry and

In my opinion would have not a real problem, what we would call, like, as you said, a coMM:and economy distributing those resources because one, they're heavily involved in it already, right? They do have roles in that. And two, it's relatively easy to plan how much fuel a state needs through consumers, both for their cars, their planes, et cetera. But then of course, if you get down to the federal government is going to plan what type of coffee we have, that's where you run into problems that think some of the more strict socialist projects have had. Maybe you can answer this for me. I'm not sure where that came from. I'm not the guy who's going to sit here and tell you I've read every word of Marx, but I've never, I've read a lot and I've never encountered anything that says, know, socialism is when the government tells you how many calories you get every day. Do you have any idea where that sentiment comes from? Because it's often puzzled me and no one's been able to give me a good answer.

MM: Yeah, I don't think you'd find any indication of that in Marx, right? Actually, when Marx was criticized for purporting that the state should essentially own everything, one of his classic rejoinders was, yeah, but actually the workers right now own almost nothing, right? 95 % of the meaningful property in society is owned by the capitalist class. Now, the intimation you can make from that is Marx is suggesting that the kind of meaningful property that communists or socialists want to reorganize as in things like workers houses, or farms, know, your TV, you know, the couple beers that you have in your refrigerator or something. Again, it's the coMM:anding heights of the economy, or the means of production that enables some people to exercise vast forms of economic dominion over millions of others and sometimes in some circumstances, right. Now to be clear, Marx was never in the business of writing recipe books for the cook shops of the future, as we sometimes put it.

And this is, think, proven a problem because it means that people extrapolate certain views from his work that he himself probably would not have had on the basis of an offhand coMM:ent here on the basis of what later thinkers like say Lenin extrapolated from Marx. So this is why I really think it's important to go back to the primary text, learn and understand them as carefully as possible because Marx is a very rich thinker, right?

And what was really remarkable about him, certainly for me, is that he was always changing his mind on things, right? He was one of the least dogmatic major thinkers really in the history of Western thought. Certainly if you see, you know, his early writings, you compare them with capital and you see the transition that's occurring, it's quite startling how different his approach to certain problems can be, right? And so I think if we're going to talk about what Marx himself believed, we always need to ask ourselves, well, okay.

Is that what Marx himself believed or is that what later people argued on his behalf? And also is that what his he would have believed in a mature sense or is this just some offhand coMM:ent that he kind of threw away here and there that we really shouldn't take all that seriously.

JM: Yeah, I've seen so many Marxists or even Marxist adjacent socialists argue about what Marx thought and they both are citing works that were like 20 years apart and, you know, Marx thought different things at different times like anyone else. But I have always been drawn to that by him. I can't remember if it was him or Engels that said, I think wrote, you know, our work is not dogma, it's a prescription for action. And I think that's really what stuck with me for a long time of like,

JM: We should not be binded to this by any sense of the text. We should use it as inspiration. And I think that probably applies to every human being, socialist and non-socialist alike.

MM: Yeah, without a doubt, right? I mean, what's the point in being materialist if you're going to have these rigid ideological or conceptual categories that you aren't going to change and that you're just going to apply to every circumstance that you find, right? I mean, one of the remarkable things about Marx's methodology is precisely that he points out in the Guindrisa, right? That the bourgeois political economists were absolutely right to always start with the datum of the real world, right? To move from the concrete, right? And only then do you move to conceptual analysis and eventually, hopefully, you get to the concrete and thought, right? But if your goal is, as a Marxist, is just to take the theory and apply it without ever adjusting the theory in relation to material practice, then I just don't really know what kind of Marxist you are. Certainly not one that I'm familiar with.

JM: Yeah, I wouldn't consider you much of a dialectical materialist either, but we'll put. One thing I heard you say in a different interview was, think, correct me if I'm wrong, I don't want to speak for you. The closest thing you had come across that was representative or at least emblematic of liberal socialism is the Nordic, they're called social democracies, let's just call them countries for right now. And I've often heard people say, these aren't,

JM: There's no real socialism in the Nordic countries. They're not, let's say revolutionary or militant enough or anything like that. In my opinion, when you look into something like Norway's government pension fund, which is kind of misnamed, it's actually they're like sovereign oil wealth fund. You know, I see socialism. see means of production, the oil controlled by a democratically elected government. What would you say to someone who

JM: Well, one, guess I'll ask, am I correct in assuming that is what you think liberal socialism should look like? And then what would you say to someone who says like, you know, socialism has for some reason has to come about violently. There has to be an armed revolution, something like

MM: Yeah, it's a great question. So, Curie follows Scott Sahan, the logician, in pointing out that, again, and this is a point that any materialist should take seriously, there's no such thing as pure socialism or pure capitalism, right? These are both ideal, typical categories, and virtually every economy in the world that we can think of operates somewhere on a continuum between them. Or you might even add new categories, right? So, you know, the United States is, by most definitions, a capitalist country.

But there still things like Medicare, Medicaid, social insurance, at least until Vivek Rameswamy and Elon Musk get to them. enjoy them while they're here. And by contrast, without a doubt, the Nordic countries still have capitalists, still have markets, still have reforms of exploitation that I don't agree with. But I agree with Sahan that when we understand the difference between capitalism, socialism, more as a continuum than an either or.

JM: Knock on wood. Yeah.

MM: then it's very clear that those countries are far more socialist than the United States in almost any meaningful respects and far more socialist even than my own country in many ways, Canada, right? And there are many people throughout history who have characterized what appears in Scandinavia as a say or should put it, the kind of Scandinavian variant of socialism or to use the words of the iconic Swedish prime minister Olaf Palm, he once pointed out that Norway, or sorry, Sweden had moved further on the road to socialism than most of the countries that call them socialists. So what I really admire about these models is that they were able to do a few things, I think, very successfully. First off, they have extraordinarily high union density, not quite as robust as during the heyday of socialist democracy. But still, if you look at Sweden, right, 68 to 70 percent unionization rates is astonishing from an American or Canadian perspective. I mean, when was the last time you even knew somebody who wasn't in education field or in the auto industry who was in a union? 60, 70 percent. Incredible. Secondly, they were extraordinarily good at creating solidaristic programs that required everyone to kind of cooperate and buy into everyone else's well-being. And this is what I think, one of the things that I think the conservative critics of the Scandinavian variant of socialism get wrong. So they often say, well, maybe that's something that would be nice, but these are high trust societies that are relatively homogeneous. And that's why you can introduce something like the Scandinavian variant of socialism. Actually, if you look at Scandinavian history, particularly Sweden and Norway, these are countries that were riven by class conflict and enormously unequal through the 19th and the 20th century. mean, Finland had a civil war that rocked it for a long period of time, right? So they get the kind of order of causality backwards. Actually, what's sometimes called the great compromise that was enacted between capital, state, and labor was the basis for founding social democracy and a social democracy that helped produce the high levels of trust that we have right now, right? So they weren't able to become social democratic or socialist because of high trust. It's because they were social democratic or socialist that high trust started to emerge, right?

MM: And it's partly because again, this idea of everyone having to buy into the welfare of everyone else by providing certain resources through their own efforts that everyone would share. So I think that's a really strong idea. Lastly, right, there were some attempts made, particularly during the 1970s, to go even beyond the Scandinavian variant of socialism. And of course, I would endorse these as a liberal socialist who would be on the kind of left wing of that spectrum. A good example of this was the Meidner Plan proposed by, the iconic, Swedish economist. and what he suggested was, look, we can actually achieve full worker ownership of the means of production, without the need for a revolution. we already have high rates of unionization. so what we're going to do is say that, first large companies, over a period of time, stock in those companies will be accrued by labor unions, eventually to the point where these labor unions will have 51 % of the shares in the companies that they work on. Ba-da-bing, ba-da-boo, now the workers own the means of production. And I think this was a really innovative plan. It had an enormous amount of potential. Unfortunately, it never got off the ground in the way that Minder and Palm, for example, anticipated it might. And there are a bunch of different reasons to that related back to the rise of things like neoliberalism the fact that capital launched just a ferocious counteroffensive against the mere idea of something like the modern plan being implemented. But this is just to show that I think there were unexploited potentials in the Scandinavian variant of socialism that anyone who wants to push the model more radically could explore. But I still think that if we're looking for a baseline for what should be achieved in the United States or Canada for that MM:er, saying things like, look, we should have something that looks a lot like the most flourishing set of societies that the world has ever conceived. think that would be pretty good.

JM: That's very interesting what you said about the trust being a product of the social democracy. Because I've heard so many times people give what, I almost said vaguely racist, but it's kind of explicitly racist where they're like, yeah, well, those are societies of all white people. And I've kind of looked at them like, what are you talking about? Like that has nothing to do with it. But I've never heard it put that the social democracy and everyone having their fate somewhat linked is the reason that it-

MM: it's always explicitly racist.

JM: It breeds trust, right? And that's very interesting because, the few column social democratic, mentioned Medicare, Medicaid, like those are the programs that everyone in America loves. I think they pull it like 80, 85 % approval, something like that. Higher for people who actually use them. I used to sell Medicare insurance, so I have a weird knowledge of like, of that dynamic.

JM: But they do, whether they realize it or not, they believe in like the collective responsibility, right? Like I know people my age who are like worried that they're not going to be able to get social security when they're older. And I know people who are old who, you know, encourage everyone else to pay into social security so that they can reap the benefits. And I don't use this word negatively, but they are entitled to that. They did their job of paying in and now it's time to reap the rewards.

JM: So I think that's like a really good example of how that collective trust can be bred. But at the same time, as long as you said, as long as our new oligarchal overlords don't come in and cut everything down before we get a chance to benefit from it.

MM: Yeah, absolutely. And I'm very worried about that, I should say, right? If you look at what Vivek Ramaswamy was proposing as a model on Twitter the other day, not that you should take Twitter too seriously, but he was suggesting that Javier Malé was somebody that they were looking to as a kind of inspiration for the cuts that they want to enact, these deep cuts. Now, Javier Malé, since taking office, has helped induce recession in Argentina. The poverty rate has risen over 50%, which is staggering if you think about it, right? 50 % of the population is poor. Hard to even fathom a world like that, right? So if there's a country that we should be modeling ourselves off of, and certainly not Javier and malaise, Argentina. And it's kind of baffling to me that people want to emulate that when, to go back to my earlier point, there's a successful model that is high trust, extremely prosperous. And we've now run the experiment for 80 years in some circumstances. And that's been the case throughout them. And I understand that there are problems with the Nordic or Scandinavian variant of socialism or social democracy. lot of it depended upon super exploitation of the third world. Obviously, there's problems with things like the sovereign wealth front being fueled by oil revenue from an environmental perspective. But I always like to say, you know, why start with hypothetical model? That is purely abstract and has no grounding in the real world when we can start with a model that has already demonstrated that is extremely productive and generative and then see if we can improve upon it, especially when if we were to implement it in a country like the United States, simply for reasons of economy of scale, it could probably be done more cheaply, easily, and quickly than what they were able to do there.

JM: Yeah, that's interesting. Before I move on to my last question, I want to offer or hear your thoughts on something else. I'm a big believer in that if America will achieve socialism or even Canada, it will be through something closer to the Norwegian model through a legislative practice simply because I do read a lot of Lenin. I think his works on how to achieve power are some of the best that are ever written.

That's not to say I agree with everything or think anybody's perfect, but I think he laid out, I can't remember the name of the paper, but he laid out the revolutionary conditions. The powers that be cannot continue to govern and the underclass is no longer able, willing to be governed. And I don't see those conditions rising in the United States anytime soon. So I do think that people on the left need to be more open to something closer to a Nordic path to power.

But I wanted to ask you like what do you think of the the current Chinese project to socialism? You know in my opinion at this point I Consider China state state capitalist entity. I think the the last party Congress said they'll hope to be at socialism by 2050 my Personal preference on them is like we can wait and see I know that the Chinese government is Like you said not perfect has committed crimes

Yeah, what do you think about them? Do you think that is another viable socialist project? How should people in what's called Western leftists view the Chinese project?

MM: Well, naturally as a liberal, I'm deeply wary about the lack of things like political rights and liberal rights in the Chinese state, because I do think that people are entitled to have a say in how they are governed. Indeed, I think that one of the biggest problems with liberal democracy is that people have too little say in how they are governed, particularly in the workplace. Now, saying that, there is no denying that the Chinese government, particularly post 1970s, has implemented programs that have lifted millions of people out of poverty, tens of millions, who could not but applaud something like that, or at least find it coMM:endable. However, right, if you think about the way that that was done, I think it's very difficult to call that socialist in any meaningful sense, precisely because the workers don't have very much to say in how that's carried out. If you look at things in the Schengen zones in particular, The Chinese state has been very hostile to unionization and labor organizing. And I think that any socialism that is not about empowering workers or marginalized people can't meaningfully be called a form of socialism, even if it is unknowingly true that the Chinese state has accomplished some impressive things in terms of lifting people out of poverty and generating the material conditions for the protection of the world's second largest economy.

JM: Interesting, yeah. That kind of leads me into my last question. What do you see as like the path to power for liberal socialists, right? Like I know in the beginning you mentioned being more fond of liberal parliamentary systems. My pushback on that would be, unfortunately in the United States, I know this is different for you in Canada, we do not have a parliament. We have of course, you know, the American Electoral College legislator.

JM: Senatorial elections, which in my opinion are I don't even think you can pretend they're anything close to democratic. Maybe the House, but it's so gerrymandered that I think it's probably, you know, less democratic than more democratic. So what would you say to someone who, you know, really likes the ideas you're talking about, really likes the content of your book, plug for everyone to go buy it? How do we take these ideas off of the page and get them into, you know, our daily life?

MM: Well, I think that there are three main things to be said, right? I'll start with the first and most obvious one, which is we really need to reinvigorate the labor movement in the United States, right? Now, I do think that there are some promising signs that that might be occurring. If you look at union density in the US, it ticked up for the first time after COVID, after declining for decades, actually. There's widespread support for unions of the sort that you didn't see for a very long period of time.

And you also see some big wins, right, against companies like Starbucks, like Amazon. And these are not just big wins for the workers there, although of course they are, and I celebrate that solidaristically. They're big symbolic wins that demonstrate to workers elsewhere that it is possible to try to democratize the workplace, even though, of course, there are limitations to what unionization can do. So that would be the first thing I would say. And it's important to do that precisely because

When people think exclusively about politics in party terms, they miss the fact that, especially in the United States, it's the broader network of organizations, institutions that you call upon for political agitation that play an extraordinarily vital role in getting you into power. Now, the labor movement used to help the Democratic Party do that, but with the decline of the labor movement, post 1950, but really accelerating with Reagan, just doesn't have the same kind of influence that it used to which also means that the Democratic Party is less pro-labor or less embedded with labor than it used to be. So I think that that's a vital mission, which brings me to the second point, which is that there's this major debate, as you know, about whether or not the best way forward for social Democrats, democratic socialists, the broader left, is to try to transform the Democratic Party into a vehicle for more radical forms of progressive change or the best thing to do is to start a third party. Now, I think that there are serious challenges to both options. And that's where my own pessimism comes in, because neither them is particularly good, but we have to make do with what we're given. When it comes to changing the makeup of the Democratic Party, there's some reason for optimism. I mean, in the last Democratic primary, 2020, Bernie Sanders came quite close to initially before

MM: party elites organizing opposition to him. And of course, people voted against Bernie as well, right? We can't deny that. So we have more leg room to do when it comes to convincing people of the viability of our programs. But the fact that we got that close means that it is possible that we could try to run the same operation again, maybe with the younger candidate who's more in tune with what's going on right now and see a better result. Now.

One of the reasons I also suggest that this might be possible is, again, learning from the right. That's, course, exactly what Donald Trump and many in the MAGA movement did. They took a party that was recently hostile to the idea, at least initially, of a hard right populist running for office. But he just kind of bulldozed through them on the basis of his popularity. And we all know where that's wound up. So it'd be very difficult to do something like that in a democratic context, especially because we're not nearly as well resourced, even as the MAGA movement is.

But it's certainly not impossible, right? Now, the second option, of course, would be to start an independent socialist party, try to run in elections and popular socialist party, I should say, and try eventually to wheel power that way. Now, the big difficulty with that, as you know, is that the American system is enormously unforgiving of third parties, usually the best that you can hope for is to be something like a spoiler. Like say the Green Party was in the 2000 election or arguably Governor Wallace was in the 1968 election. And I do not particularly want a socialist party to just be a spoiler in election. I actually wanted to kind of meaningfully exercise power. So I think that in order for something like that to become viable, a few things are going to need to take place. One is the aforementioned, we're going to need to try to rebuild the labor movement.

Two, I don't think even if we start building a third party that we shouldn't direct some energies to try to move the Democratic party left. These are not mutually exclusive strategies. But three, we need to try to reform the contemporary American democratic system to make avenues to power more open to us. Now, there are possibilities there. A good example of this would be in Maine not too long ago, where they introduced things like ranked choice balloting.

MM: Now, rank choice balloting does not sound sexy. It does not sound like the basis for a kind of revolutionary change. rank choice balloting does mean that in the medium term, it is possible if you're a third party candidate that you might be able to acquire more votes than you would in a first past the post system, or least garner more recognizable support than you would in a first past the post system. And that eventually

You could start to use that as a vehicle for making your case for why people should elect you to local office and then state office and then moving forward from there. So that does not sound like the most, again, spectacular kind of change that's going to occur. But I do think those are the kinds of granular and technical alterations that people will need to make to how democracy operates at the local level to make it more democratic, right? If we're going to create an avenue for a third party or a socialist party to meaningfully start contesting elections and eventually winning power in the office to demonstrate that we can actually make life better for working people.

JM: I really like that. I really like the idea that these ideas are not mutually exclusive. Like every time I hear someone arguing about like, do we, you know, focus on the labor movement? Do we start our own party? I kind of want to pull my hair out because I don't see those as like mutually exclusive. I've never, you know, let's take the idea of like, if we had a more European style parliamentary system, you build your independent power and then, you know, in that system you would ostensibly win one or two seats and then you can form a coalition with the larger, let's call it centrist parties and win some of your, get some concessions from them. I think that's a good mindset for the American left to use in that, you know, let's build our own political power. And if the Democrats want to enter a coalition and actually like, you know, make promises in exchange for left support, like that's a, that's a perfectly viable strategy, as long as it doesn't, you know, detract from the independent power. And I really have to reiterate the stuff you said about, you know,

I think the stage we're at now is not going to be really exciting and the changes we're looking for. It's not going to be, I think everybody who reads Lenin reads the highest stage of imperialism, or sorry, the highest stage of capitalism, imperialism, and thinks they're going to storm the Duma and seize power. And I kind of see where we're at is more Lenin's writings on left-wing coMM:unism, where he's scolding the Dutch left, for thinking that they're on the verge of revolution when he's saying, you haven't even won any seats in parliament. What are you talking about? That's my end of the tangent, but I agree with your analysis there.

MM: Yeah, absolutely. mean, look, I've been in politics for a long time and sometimes politics is exciting, right? Elections are exciting. When you see a candidate that you worked for hard for for a long time when that's very exciting. When you see a candidate that you worked hard for lose. If you knew they were going to lose, that can be pretty crushing, right? But a lot of politics is getting coffee, knocking on doors, tweeting furiously and writing to try to make your case to things. But above all else, it is about building the kind of institutional avenues that are required for you to get to power and also making your case in a democracy at least to voters for why it is that you're going to make their life meaningful, meaningfully better, not in some distant utopian future, but within an electoral cycle. Right. And this is why when I say things like introducing rank balloting could change things. Sometimes people are like, what exactly are you talking about? But I'll often point out, look,

One of the reasons why the Republican Party is as successful as it is right now is because they appreciated things like gerrymandering. And obviously we don't want to do something similar because that's cheating and it's unprincipled, or at the very least, it's extremely dubious. But allowing people more democratic options so that we can create avenues for ourselves to pursue office. That is both more democratic and also in a Machiavellian sense, conducive to our ends. So there's good principled reasons to do it, good strategic reasons to do it.

And that's why I would hope that socialists would invest more time in thinking about how these granular changes might also might eventually open opportunities for us.

JM: That's well put. I think that's a perfect place to end it. MM:, where can people find your book?

MM: Yeah, I mean, if they feel bad, they can get it on Amazon. But if you want, can get it at the Rutledge website. I think ordering it takes about like a week or so, so it wouldn't be too long that it gets there. And I think there's 10 % off right now also, so good discount.

JM: Awesome, I'll put it in the show notes so everybody can go ahead and order that. And thank you again for your time. This was a great conversation, I learned a lot. I'm really excited to read your book and hopefully we'll have you back on in future.

MM: Yeah, of course. Thanks a lot, Joe. It's great talking to you.

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