The Dig: Mailbag! w/ Ben Mabie

0:00This episode of The Dig is brought to you by our listeners who support us at patreon.com and by University of California Press, publishers of the book The Shadow Court by Julie C. Suk. In this ambitious but pragmatic book, Julie Suk offers a novel solution to the problems plaguing our Supreme Court, a shadow court to undermine the Supreme Court's power, arresting, clear and truly original. The shadow court offers a hopeful and enduring solution for rescuing democracy in the United States. Find the shadow court at UCPress.edu. Welcome to The Dig, a podcast from Jack of the magazine. My name is Daniel Denver and I'm broadcasting from Providence, Rhode Island. Listeners, it is finally happening. Our first long

1:08awaited arguably long delayed mailbag episode. I know I started soliciting questions for this like a year ago. I'm sorry this podcast moves with extraordinary slowness. But here we are. It came out really well. I enjoyed so much hearing from you and answering your questions alongside Ben maybe one of the digs to senior advisors. If we didn't get to your question yet, we may very well get into it in the next mailbag and there will indeed be a next mailbag because this was fun and we shall do it again. Ben also posed some of his own questions to me. I think it was a really good discussion. And if you have a new question for us that you haven't asked yet and want us to potentially answer on a future mailbag episode, there is a link in the show notes for you to submit. Speaking of links in the show notes, please visit patreon.com slash the dig and make a monthly

2:11or annual contribution to keep the dig up and running strong. We're supported overwhelmingly from entirely voluntary listener contributions. That is unusual and so very cool. That's what allows us to put every single thing we do out paywall free. Plus we have excellent excellent swag. That's p-a-t-r-e-o-n.com slash the dig. Make a contribution now. Okay, here I go with Ben maybe. Ben is an organizer based in Brooklyn, a member of the editorial collective for Long Hall, a quarterly magazine of rank and file worker writing, and a senior advisor here on the dig. Ben is currently working with the dig and haymarket on a new series on how to think like a Marxist.

3:18Okay, you ready to get moving? Yeah, let's do it. All right, this is our first mailbag episode and I believe we started soliciting questions for this nearly a year ago. Sorry listeners. Things like new sun Tara get in the way, but your questions are pretty evergreen, so I think I think it's okay. Well, Dan before we get into it, how are you doing? Yeah, it's been wild trying to elect David Morales, the next mayor of Providence alongside a number of city council and state legislative candidates and it feels the data looks good, the vibes are great, but we just don't know on some level you're just flying blind into something like this and I won't we won't know for sure what's happening until it happens on election day September 9th. How many candidates are you guys running? I think I added up yesterday, don't hold me to this,

4:20but I believe it's roughly 16 and those are kind of different levels of involvement from an endorsement with a little support to people who are really caught are political project here who were throwing a lot to lot to lot at. That's that's that's really cool. And I think I've seen that you have not just been behind the scenes, you know, moving shaker politically and reclamored islands and state politics and city politics and Providence like you are now the object of attack ads yourself. Yeah, so mayor Brett Smiley, the tool of the real estate industry ultra-resinist mayor that we're trying to unseat who has endless money to spend on fear mongering redbaiting specter of defund police advertisements just released a TV ad will TV YouTube, Pulu, Riverview watch content you will encounter me at a Brooklyn fundraiser that I held for David that I think you were at along with many NYC DSA types where I you know said that electing David Morales

5:27would allow us to really try out a lot of cutting edge innovative policy to solve the core economic and social crises facing people everywhere and the way I phrase that was turning Providence into a laboratory for municipal socialism which is the which is the ad that we can cut in here maybe. We are going to have full control over Providence City government and David is going to turn Providence Rhode Island into a laboratory for municipal socialism. Zach, well congratulations. I'm looking forward to the Manhattan Institute's deep dive and to all of the content that Diggs produced every last decade or so. I really do pity the intern that's going to be forced to listen to how many hours did we estimate of total Diggs content since the beginning. I've lost track library of Alexandria. I'm going to have to say that Alyssa Badastone texted me yesterday saying that her mom who

6:30lives outside Providence has seen me three times. So if you're like and this is not just Providence is at the center of a media market that stretches far beyond it. So like Fall River, New Bedford, Massachusetts down to all of Rhode Island and I don't even know what else but yeah. Should we start with the first question? Yeah. Daniel, I love your show. I'm with you 100% politically which means that since I'm Cuban, the grandparents and my parents are turning over the grace back together. Hopefully I talk to them about that. Time in the future. But I it all started with important. People started pronouncing it important. And now it's instead of Latin America, Latin America, it's Latin America instead of Britain. Or British or Britain is Britain. Do you pronounce it like that too? So I don't think I'm what I'm doing. I think it's a speech in better than I think it's a slip. Thank you.

7:33Intellectual new way of pronouncing things that annoys the heck out of me as an ESL teacher because I have friends. I have my students listening to shows including yours. And they're asking me, how come people now? That way can I pronounce it? No, I don't want you to pronounce it. I'm Latin America. It's Latin America. So why do you do that? Why do you pronounce the T's in the middle of words like D's? And I know this is like nitpicking because I know how I sound. I know I'm nitpicking. But you know, I'm a nexer kind of like a cusp of X and boomer. So maybe that might be it. But I love your show. Please don't get offended by what I'm saying. But you do that. You're not the only one. Wow. Ronaldo Avila is deeply offended. No, I do pronounce words that way. Do you pronounce words that way? Do you know? I pronounce everything incorrectly. I think partly it's like a Bay Area thing where like all my vowels start to sound the same.

8:37After a long enough period of time and you know, it's a symptom of being an audio dick deck. You just don't know how words are actually supposed to be said. Isn't that auto-died act? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was a joke. Okay. So I don't know anything about this, but I looked, I did look it up and there was a letter to the editor of the Britannic Addictionary. And apparently this is just actually very common American English pronunciation where teas are pronounced to like, D's if they are in the middle of a word between vowels. But it actually isn't quite that teas are being pronounced by D's. It's actually a third sound being made that's called a tap or a flap. I am not going to get into more detail because I'm just like literally looking at a Britannica letter to the editor response right now, but it's a whole thing

9:38and either fortunately or perhaps unfortunately for our collar, it is quite common amongst American English speakers. Well, Dan, it does this question though, does beg the ultimate question of this whole male beg episode, which is how you arrived at your radio voice. Like the dig is known for two things. The length of the episode and the smooth styleings of your Terry Gross impersonation. How did you get there? And when did was this a long iterative process or did you and why did you decide to adopt it? I don't know how satisfactory or satisfying my answers going to be here, but if listeners go back to the early weeks, months, even years of the archives, I think they will hear me giving a far more awkward, nervous, stilted delivery. And so I think the core thing that's been driving me across these, you know, across the decade of doing the show has just been getting

10:45comfortable speaking from a place where my delivery feels and sounds natural. Though Emily Guntel's burger, a friend of mine, who was on the show for her amazing book on the clock a number of years ago, she insists always that my interpersonal speaking voice is so different from my podcast voice. I'm not quite sure. I think I'm a bit, I think the big difference is that I'm far more serious on the podcast, typically, whereas I am a lot more jolly, IRL. But I think, so I think it's more of like an affective difference rather than a delivery difference, maybe, but I'm sure I have limited self-awareness like any human, what do you think? There's only so much room to kind of like chuckles and belly laps when you're talking about like oil politics and Eastern Saudi Arabia. Yeah. I do think there's a slight difference. I wonder if I talk differently

11:45also with the Mike and Ferny. Hard to say, but I do know that it is, I think it is helpful. Like, you know, whenever you meet a friend that works at NPR, they all talk the same way. Even if they're not in front of the Mike, you can tell their cadence has changed a little bit. And at random moments, to put emphasis on the wrong part of the sentence. It is unnatural, but I do think it makes it easier to listen to because it's short circuiting some kind of expectation for speech. Yeah, I'm trying to speak in a way that sounds natural, but as in fact somewhat unnatural as you're suggesting, I'm trying to speak clearly. I know what my words to be jumbled. I tend to repeat concepts that I think listeners really need to get and I'll slow down certain sentences for emphasis or speed them up for a different sort of emphasis. And there's no real kind of concrete method behind that. But I feel like my feel for how to approach that has just become

12:51a lot more second nature over time. It works. I mean, I do actually want to get into like use some kind of like privilege here and ask you another question, which is sort of like a big meta question about the show and your own politics and ambitions behind the show. And like look, like we've talked about this before, like the dig is really more about a method than about like a narrow and bit of content. That's why you cover such a wide range of topics week by week on the show, whether it's like in a kind of a long deray of history in Indonesia or about the gig economy. And platform capitalism, whatever else. And you kind of really you dig deep, right? You cover many different layers of a social formation. And you also are attentive to what Ella Baker called Spadework and the kind of like everyday political work, which lays the ground for larger political leaps. But I do think you do have a couple of main interests that I think especially over the years that you've been doing the show in a kind of cumulative way. I've really been standing out to me

13:54and I wonder how self-conscious this is. You've got these are kind of theoretical preoccupations, their political ones too, right? So you've got on the one hand this attention to imperialism and colonialism as like kind of structuring principles of either the United States as a social formation, but also on the global conjuncture on the history of capitalism writ large. And that you know, it was about migration. That's about indigeneity. That's about channel slavery and it's laughter lives. But you also have this incredible attention to social democratic strategy as part of the kind of immediate advance for socialist politics. And I don't think this is an entirely novel combination of interests. And normally I think it's one without a coherent political logic, but it is somewhat rare for it to receive such sustained theoretical treatment as it doesn't the show, but it doesn't always receive it in an integrated fashion. So you know, it's not like these things are necessarily always in correspondence or conversation with one another. So I'm wondering if you see yourself reflected in that description and how you think about how

14:54these two twin-dintress are braided together or aren't? Yeah, I think it does reflect my own sort of political common sense about things which I think maybe kind of appears to dig, listen, or listen all the time as normal, but when you phrase it like that, sounds a bit unusual in the sense that unfortunately, at least in this country, the United States, but probably in others as well, I think we tend to associate a really firm, overriding commitment to anti-imperialist politics with a domestic politics that are, you know, to use maybe pejorative words ultra or far left or insurrectionary or whatever words you want to use to describe people who think that running people for office is at best woefully insufficient and at worst, capitulatory and disorganizing,

15:56even worse for someone that coming from that perspective, believing in running socialist on the Democratic Party ballot line, something I'm very comfortable with and committed to. But for me, there's really no tension there because I think that our core responsibility as socialists living in the heart of US Empire is to unwind US Empire and transition the world capital system into some sort of internationalist new economic and geopolitical order that facilitates a just redistribution of wealth across the board, the self-determination of people's everywhere, and just the right of everyone everywhere to live a good, dignified life without fear of a

17:01bomb dropping onto their house. And I think when I think through that responsibility, I don't see a switch called US imperialism that can be turned off if only I more straightantly denounce US imperialism. I think that we're required to think through taking power in the metropole in the core of the empire, in the core of the US capitalist system, which requires of the world capital system, which requires sophisticated socialist strategy. It requires a strategic assessment of the terrain on which we're operating from which we can develop a strategic plan to move across that terrain. And so the socialist mass politics program best exemplified by an organization like NYC DSA

18:09is to me, by far, very clearly the best way to move forward. It does not provide all of the answers. Of course, in fact, contains enormous contradictions, which any meaningful step forward does and would. And I would say the same about Abdul Sayed defeating Haley Stevens. That's an enormous blow to the Zionist lobby and to US empire, etc. So I appreciate you noticing that because those really are kind of my, the two things put together anti imperialism and left wing social democratic struggle do sort of under the banner of socialism do really kind of that is my politics. Well, I don't think it's actually that unique biographically. I think a lot of people of our broad generational kind of courts and even to think about like, you know, the leading symbolic

19:11lights electorally, you know, AOC describes her own politicalization kind of forged in kind of standing rock solidarity with struggles for indigenous sovereignty, Zoran, you know, accounts, you know, testifies the importance of founding students just in Palestine at Boating College and early campus activism around Palestine solidarity, which also framed his initial decision to to run around kind of extending Palestine solidarity into the kind of mainstream of the electoral discussion. And I think many listeners own personal biographies and itineraries will kind of speak to the way these, these kind of issues are braided. All of us practicing politics in the shadow of the long, we're on terror also, right? So that to me all makes sense. And I think they have been interweaving parts of this kind of broad cycle of struggle that we've had. I mean, we can often narrate things, occupy, Bernie to the DSA moment, but just as well, we could be talking about,

20:14you know, 2006 immigrant general strikes in LA and Chicago, we could be talking about the kind of like border struggles of the early 2010s that surrounded Occupy, we could talk about Trayvon Martin and Oscar Grant that book ended different moments of Occupy. And so you can, you can kind of tell a story, which is just as attentive to these questions of colonialism, imperialism, it's effects on kind of our local social formation in the broad. They kind of accompany the crescendo of democratic social activity rather than being, you know, not always perfectly aligned, not always identical to one another, but they are just as much, I think, a part of the political sequence that we're a part of. A third facet of my politics is around the need for for mass organization. And we're going to get into that later when we, I think, talk about a little more about my work in in Rhode Island. But I think that there's often, you know,

21:17within the socialist left doing a electoral work on the Democratic Party line is often pitted against things like tenant organizing, something I'm very committed to doing. I'm committed to searching out every way there is to organize masses of people into stable, durable institutions that can wage militant economic and political struggle. And I mean, that leads me to kind of turn this question on to you, because I think, I think in a way, we, we have distinct but kind of heavily overlapping politics that I would almost describe as more distinct in their emphases than distinct, than like divergent. And in a sense, we've, I mean, one way we've put it in private discussions before sort of like me coming from the, you know, so-called the kind of like right wing of the socialist movement and you coming from the far left of the communist movement. And you becoming much more kind of open to interested in enthusiastic about the electoral

22:23project. And me becoming increasingly convinced by this sort of small sea communist hypothesis that none of this important political work we're doing at the level of the state is going to really be able to push through the core contradictions in barriers or be durable without really molecularly reorganizing society at the, at the grassroots level. Yeah, I think it's good to well. I mean, like I, it's like always, you know, your politics are what you do rather than just a branding exercise. And what I spend a lot of my time doing is, is work. It was in the early parts of this last decade, really focused on doing tenant organizing where I live in central Brooklyn. And it's really been overwhelmingly the last few years focused on ongoing work and the labor movement. That's like a staff organizer I work on a magazine called Long Hall, which is like focused on leading the union from below from the grassroots from the shop floor and is long form inquiries and discussions with the rank and file about work process

23:29about how they want to struggle and fight. And to me, the primary political question of our conjuncture in this country, but also I think in most other places is how can we begin to rebuild, reconstruct and augment existing pockets of working class organization. And by that, we don't just mean large membership organizations that do not touch upon the everyday life of people. Because I don't think you'll actually rebuild it that way either. And not talking about resurrecting relatively hollow institutions, but how do you actually build the musculature of collective action that can be waged in the first person by workers all over. And to me, this is a precondition or as a necessary element of any number of strategic exigencies that might emerge for the left here or elsewhere. And I'm really interested in the debates about how you you go about doing that. And for me, it has a lot to do with the kind of like cultivation and a kind of federated way of the kind of leadership and initiative of people at the grassroots levels.

24:31And when you take that kind of vantage point, the some of the kind of like debates and questions which animate the like left wing of the socialist movement around questions about the ballot line, around questions of electoral discipline, I think don't disappear, but they diminish in their relative importance because actually class organization as much as it tactically can be augmented or supported by what's happening at the tip tops of the state, there's no automatic process between working class organization and an effective policy suite or an election. These things can exist in a dynamic circuit. There can be tactical support from the top of state office, but there's no automatic circuit that exists there. And we can get into you know, local or historical examples of how that seems to be true. But when you have that, it does like I think lead you to maybe less sectarian conclusions and more ecumenical ones. And these are about divisions of labor as much as anything else. I do think when you start to take a focus on the political, intellectual

25:37fighting capacities every day people, it does transform where you think the locusts of politics is actually taking place. So lead you to reevaluate a number of other issues. And I think that'll come out when we're talking about some of the questions listeners have posed us. But yeah, I think that like it does diminish. No, I feel less exercised when certain leading lights say certain things that I want them to say because why would I expect them to do anything else? They're under distinct pressures that our movements aren't. And the question more is how do we shift the ground beneath their feet rather than imagine we have to hold their feet to a fire which might not be that strong. Yeah, that's really well put. I guess one last thing I'd have before we move on in the next question is that a kind of like basic principle that I think animates both of us intellectually and politically and ideologically is listeners will know that we've done a lot of grom she and a lot of Stewart Hall and a basic premise of Stewart Hall's approach to Marxism

26:40is a Marxism without guarantees. So I think it's safe to say that neither of us believe there's some sort of like inherent logic to history that's unfolding or like a certain obvious thing that moment a leads to moment b Marxism at its best provides a robust political interpretive practice that allows us to strategically assess the world and strategically move forward. But we I don't I don't think I don't think we have a full roadmap we have to kind of design the roadmap as we're driving. Yeah, that's right. And like from those traditions we also get like an appreciation for the heterogeneity and diversity of the popular classes and it's kind of like non reduction into a kind of like populist subject that can just be summed up exclusively with reference to some base economic interests. But that like the work of bringing together different parts of the working

27:41class into a compositional subject is that's kind of like the whole work of our politics and that requires a lot of on that's that's with the strategy of agemony is supposed to to designate in some ways is how precisely do you do that. So I think it sets us that is I think another dimension in addition to like you know the show is really attentive to questions of ideology to culture it does not treat them just as a kind of like reflection of a changing base your show is more attentive than I think most of the suite on the left shows on the left about like changes the architects of capital and this show you do with the avenge more is off it's like a great example of your entry into these kind of debates but like the show is not reducible to it and you're just as interested in the kind of like relative autonomy of these different layers of the social formation and how they actually relate together. Why is what are the tactical practices that are enabling people to win elections. How is that related to the changing composition of our cities.

28:45How is that related to new patterns of economic development. It's not just one does not necessarily trigger all the others or explain all the others but their relationship to each other is precisely the thing that Marxism is endeavoring to explain and I think that's yeah that's a theoretical instinct that we share that also I think. Lens an ecumenical patina to how we both approach political questions to. Okay this is from Bob Curran and sorry to anyone if I miss pronounced any names. I'm curious about your preparation process with such a wide range of authors and academics on the show. Now do you approach research so you can ask thoughtful informed questions and provide the right context for listeners as someone who struggles to find the time to stay well informed. I love to hear about your process. Thanks so much Daniel. Good question. Two thoughts or one thought with two facets. I feel like my lack of professional and formal political formation

29:52are actually pretty decisive for why the show is the way it is and why I approach subjects, why I approach them and why I frame develop questions the way that I do. I'm you know first on the show interviews not exclusively academics but at least two thirds maybe three quarters. I had a pretty intensive academic undergrad experience at Reed College and I'm socially proximate and married to many academics I'm married to an academic I'm not pretending I'm distant from academia but I don't have professional academic training I don't have any sort of graduate education and I also related to that have not been sort of siloed and specialized into a particular discipline and within that discipline through the dissertation writing process like something like something extremely narrowly particular which is what academia generally does to the human mind as many brilliant human minds there are in academia and

30:55invite somebody to the show etc but I have not been subjected to that subject making process and so I don't really know a lot about academic methodology or about when I'm doing a history about history of graphical debates and obviously there are things lost through me lacking insight into those areas but it does allow me to pose a question from the perspective of an educated generalist which I think helps me ask questions that makes sense of material that's new to me until I start to look through it often most often makes sense of that material to to listeners and then relatedly you know I come out of the sort of like late 90s anti-clobalization then oughts anti-war left considering myself a socialist but was not part of any sort of party formation

31:58ever and really started more kind of co-hearing my socialism as a more robust ideology you know probably in the wake of Occupy even though I've considered myself a socialist since the late 90s and obviously there are things that I don't know because of that like certain detailed debates over the Russian revolution but I also think it allows me to approach questions in a rather kind of fresh ahead of rocks manner and then you know I think maybe the caller had more concrete questions about my prep in my insolence for those briefly I so I basically have two types of episodes on some more abstract level book episodes and non book episodes if it's a book episode it's basically a bounty book and I will read the book and I will take hideously chaotic

33:05notes in the margin oh yeah I destroy books and make them like like unreadable I know I destroy I destroy massive quantities of books every year and make them unreadable by anyone but myself and but that's how I have a conversation with the book and kind of begin to understand what the key themes of the book and what sort of key questions the book poses for me I try to kind of you know sometimes I will look at book reviews about the book or listen to the author doing another interview to try to get another level of understanding of where the books situated and then I'll go back through the book and take notes from my marginal chaos marginal note chaos and then I'll form them into questions then Ben sometimes Ben sometimes Ben sometimes the sometimes others will look at the questions make some proposed changes add some new questions

34:10and then I typically end up with far too many questions like far far too many I'll try to cut them down but still go into the interview with way too many questions and then I will it'll just become clear as I'm conducting the interviews which questions must be asked and which need to go yeah exactly it comes clear probably in the first 15 minutes yeah like oh yeah but I does that um what about the non book episodes like oh right approach like an interview with an organizer or like you know with some of the larger historical mini series that you've done so answer the one about an interview first like an interview with an organizer or a conjunctural analysis episode with multiple guests I will often basically I'll read anything that they've ridden that's relevant then I'll often pre-interview them like have an informal conversation where I'm taking notes and that will typically give me sufficient kind of kernels of questions and ideas and I expand from there then I'll share them with you share them with thea whoever and keep developing them from

35:15there and then also of course for all sorts of interviews I I write and ask questions on the fly in response to what the person says because I don't know what they're going to say for for these longer series like Thara and and Nusantara I basically ask my guests for for reading material and like the first thing I need for like Nusantara was just like a I forget the name of it so apologies to the author but uh you know bland 500 page 1200 to or something to to 2010 or whatever history of Indonesia I just need to like understand who what where when and then to get into more particular moments I'll read chapters and articles and other books even other entire books even to kind of fill in some analytical depth around what I'm interested most interested in in talking about

36:18can I ask like okay if you've been a guest on the dig before don't listen to this question Dan who has been your favorite guest or your favorite books that you've read oh god um I mean so if I'm just gonna name and you know a few a few people and this is non-exclusive so if you have been a guest and I don't mention you it doesn't mean you're not one of my favorite shows but these are just three that come to mind as like important and the digs history off the top ahead this is just off the top yeah this is off the top the dome I did not agonize over this for for days this is being asked to me right now I did not know he's gonna ask it um a Z's Rana and like starting with his two faces of American freedom which I'm tidden like 2016 or 17 or something like that early in the show it was one of the first it was it was a book that like fundamentally transformed how I think about the United States and history um and by basically putting forward to me the extremely compelling case that we need to

37:28think of all this bad stuff and all this good stuff as part of one dialectical process that's brought us to our present day it was one of the first shows in the early years of the dig that I remember people being like wow you know um and I also know that that show was important for Z's who's a good friend of mine in terms of like kind of repopularizing his book of years after it was published Mike Davis which who I first interviewed the late great Mike Davis who I first interviewed like in the very early weeks of the pandemic also did an amazing interview with him on prisoners of the American dream which I'm noticing a trend here um you know it is actually is exploring similar questions to Z's on certain levels and then a third and again this is non-exclusive and I'm just mentioning three I'll talk my head the episode I did with Kinga Yama and Taylor after Trump was uh elected the response I got to that from just so many listeners was

38:35this is precisely the analysis I needed right now and hammer and hope the black left wing magazine had had originally run the transcript of it because Kinga's involved in hammer and just recently a few days ago reposted some of the quotes from it just kind of making the case that they were remarkably pre-scient and I think I think they really were and really um uh yeah those three that yeah those are great episodes um what about you wow uh okay I really enjoyed and this is just the stuff that comes off the top of the dome one that I especially enjoyed was I mean the Mike Davis one I think is totally legendary and I think about it all the time especially the prisoners the American dream I mean that's the book I reach for all the time when I want to recommend any kind of effort to understand the U.S. as a social formation and his general kind of methodology of thinking about um class also is the kind of like accumulated detritus that come

39:42from victories and defeats that are never happening altogether all at once but happen in this kind of piecemeal or fractional fractional kind of way it's just it's a remarkable book and it has really shaped my thinking and burned many funny turns of rays um into my head I really have enjoyed working with the Michael Denning and the Michael Denning Gromshi episodes and Stuart Hall policing the crisis episodes legendary episodes so good I mean I learned so much in prepping for them and listening to them um and the I really love the Stuart Hall episode that we did out of it kind of an insured Stuart Hall's thought which is like a fun experiment for us and like writing something scripted for the dig and I think like the last tranche is like the different conjunctural episodes you've done with thea with omna with Gabe um with Aziz with Ruth Wilson Gilmore with Robin DG Kelly

40:43Asla Bali Asla Bali yeah like and those have been to me like what I love about the episodes is just like the range of political events that are covered an effort to kind of like in real time provide an integrated analysis of how they might relate to one another but it's cool also because you get a sense of the different styles and habits of thought of the different thinkers on the show involved because they don't all they aren't they're not all identical to one another they're not all the same and you can kind of see that being teased out in in real time without it also per like without it like tending towards people taking antagonistic positions to each other you kind of get it you can make the outlines of a broader front uh through the kind of different multi vocal points of emphasis or whatever that that people might have I love this yeah and me too that's why I keep doing them um and listeners seem to agree I I think you know we've mentioned obviously Thara like Abid was has become such a core part of this project it's the most you know arguably

41:46the most important thing this podcast has ever done or will do new santara all of my guests for that were absolutely stellar and really you know for those kind of series their co the guest is not just a guest there a co kind of creator it's a really it's demanding a lot of their time and intelligence I would also add you know we had a very early interview with Femi Taiwo after he first wrote the sort of deference politics um article I forget for what publications was for philosophy publication I believe well before is a book um and that hit kind of the debate over identity politics very hard I think at the moment that it was made one to Cooper's um been amazing but the family values episode like that I think really like kind of blue people's minds similar I'd say when like the Wendy Brown in the ruins of neoliberalism episode the one cheated with Quince LeBody and

42:48Quince also been a very important important guests in the archives we're getting dangerously close to doing the thing like we're starting like name these are like name I know it's like complete completism it's a it's a it's a completist podcast and this is a question that risks uh provoking my completist uh energies okay let's uh let's hit up Solomon I agreed with Tim Herschel Burns's recent jacket in piece titled the left needs his own foreign policy where he argues that while the left has developed strong imperious and i imperialist bonafides are leading candidates do not articulate developed positions on other key international issues including trade how if at all to steer the world order and foreign aid taking each intern trade does the current left insurgent movement agree with the anti globalization movement of the 90s uh and the Trump administration that tariffs and other trade protections will help us workers long term

43:49steering the world order to what extent should the us take responsibility for steering the world and without use of armed force what mechanism should we rely on to do so sanctions coordinated boycats strengthening international governance institutions like the UN and ICC foreign aid our candidates have largely justified cutting military aid to Israel and other countries by asking why are we spending tax dollars on bombs when the working class is struggling here however within that frame can the left insurgent justify spending money on foreign aid and climate infrastructure to develop in countries around the world to me these are key pillars of what leftist us global leadership would look like stepping back do you think these are real tensions for the us left as we seek to lead the country in the world why do our candidates not talk about them and what other way through ways through these questions should we take that uh take that piece by piece this is a great and the spirit of a dig question multi-part situation uh yeah what do you start okay so yeah

44:56on the question of our kind of leaders on the left not articulating a positive alternate vision for the world I think that's definitely true and I think there are probably historical reasons that that's the case since the fall of the USSR and the defeat of the of third world revolution we've really lost the capacity as a left to articulate an alternate vision for what the world should look like and so I'm thinking back to my youth protesting the Iraq war and it was very clear that we were against the invasion of Iraq and prior to that the against the invasion of Afghanistan though that was a very small protest movement compared to the much larger movement against the Iraq war but in both cases there was a clear need to an urgency in opposing the war but there

46:04wasn't for example to put it bluntly a call for solidarity with the Taliban or with Saddam Hussein's regime and that is a sharp marks a sharp distinction from the war in Vietnam or the wars in Reagan's dirty wars in Central America and we could cite dozens probably of examples like this where the US left had a clear position of being you know I'm generalizing here the US left already always has a number of different positions but but substantial portions of the US left had a clear position of opposition to the US war in Vietnam and solidarity with the Vietnamese revolution in the NLF opposition to Reagan's dirty wars in Central America but solidarity with the Sanadista revolution with the FMLN in El Salvador with the various guerrilla forces in Guatemala and honestly like biographically speaking this is one

47:07reason why in my college years in the first half of the the the odds I was initially um you know I was I was very I was very involved with the anti-Iraq war movement but I found myself gravitating towards Latin American solidarity during the pink tide because there was still the a sort of like mechanism for more kind of like classical left wing solidarity relationships of solidarity there you have like left wing governments buoyed by popular movements by labor unions and organized campacinos and indigenous movements um so yeah I think I think um I think we do need that's a historical explanation for why we haven't had a positive alternate vision which you know doesn't mean we don't still need one we actually really really do we need to not just know what we're against but what we're for and we need a we need a vision for a entirely new world order or

48:13something perhaps that echoes the new international economic order proposed by decolonizing nations of the global south a what you know like half century ago yeah I mean I think your answer touches on a number of important points and and I think one thing that I really agree with there is that our capacity to develop a kind of really robust international to compose international some more deeply into a domestic US left depends a great deal on the robustness of our practice of anti imperialist solidarity international solidarity like within the grassroots of our movement that like the I think as you put it like the historical ability to develop and articulated international politics in new ways the world might be made remade was predicated on a density of cross border solidarity ties syncopated practices of common struggle and that is one of the

49:20dimensions when addition to maybe like more than just intellectual projects of international solidarity this kind of cross border discrete cooperation is precisely the thing which is most infebold and there are many reasons for that around criminalization of the kind of defeat historically of the old institutional bears of the left whatever but like I think for me is I do agree you know like the left should really figure out at the level of foreign policy what how it's relating to a kind of changing geopolitical scene but I do think internationalism really shouldn't be reduced to foreign policy and then I think more like for me the the largest tasks of our day whether or not we think there's a socialist government waiting in the wings in the short and medium term in the US is like thinking again about how you start to develop these kind of capacities for international effective internationalism here in our movements and

50:21a couple of examples come to mind you know the Palestine strike that happened in the University of California maybe we can send a link out to a piece in the show notes about that or the union of pinnacle tenants which was like zoron the first thing you went to after his inauguration was attending this meeting of tenants that were organizing against their landlord which had gone bankrupt and fighting for municipalization and democratic control of their housing actually began as a Palestine solidarity project and crown heights ten union because the landlord was investing a lot of the surplus that should have been going into fixing the buildings into the Israeli stock exchange and I think we really need to study from like people like Peter Cole or David Wellman who document the kind of everyday practices of working class people to think about having put their hand in the levers of struggle against apartheid or imperialism abroad and the longshoreman on the west coast have a really rich store of those experiences David Wellman in particular documents not only how in 1984 a bunch of everyday longshoreman decided they weren't going to refuse they're

51:25going to refuse to load a marunload South African cargo even after their initial showdown was defeated they continue to find creative ways to like refuse to load and unload that work and that was part of the accumulating pressure that actually shifted state policy despite the fact there was nowhere near socialists at the tip top of state office in 1980s America and so I think we have to think again where is the broader imperial trench works of that define us foreign power projection and where the place is where the levers we actually have available to us even before or without the entry into government that might not be coming in the short term maybe the last thing I'll say and Dan I'm curious we think about this is like I have trouble I think that I understand Solomon's distinction here which I think we I think when Solomon is saying we need to not just talk about our anti imperial bonafides but develop other issues I what I think that means a part is about like militarism US military aid US military archipelago but other issues and I think the issues of

52:27trade how to steer the world order foreign aid are not inseparable from questions of imperialism and these are other ways the US tries to organize either through bilateral forms of coercive pressure or through the kind of creation of a kind of broader apparatus to project its own to organize a system of surrounded zone hegemony these are in other instances of imperialism even if they're not happening at the barrel of the gun so immediately right I mean it's interesting the the recent discourse around geo economics both reflects a real shift in the people controlling the levers of state craft self consciously understanding the relationship between economic power across the globe and military power and seeing it kind of as one field in a way that was posed as as distinct during the neoliberal era but that doesn't mean that the neoliberal liberal air did not

53:31neoliberal era did not have a geo economics core to its own strategy for power how do you think about this question about trade so yeah so the the question is sort of like do we does the current left insurgent movement agree with the anti globalization within 90s in the Trump administration that tariffs and other trade protections will help US workers long term I don't think I think probably the left doesn't have like a real coherent answer to this question right now but I will say that the 1990s movement was not simply protectionist the 1990s movement which I am not an expert in though I did was a participant an active participant the 1990s movement brought together an internationalist left with deep connections with workers peasant and indigenous movement and environmental activists from all over the world and that put forward

54:34a at least the idea or the concept of something like a new economic order they didn't call it that but but a and that there was at least a demand for a new economic order organized around fair trade rather than free trade and so what was articulated there was not merely protection of US workers at the expense of of workers elsewhere that said that was that probably does fairly describe the perspective of sections of organized labor who were part of the anti free trade movement in the 90s yeah I think it's right I mean like I I'm not an expert on this stuff by any stretch but my thinking on the kind of perspective place of tariffs inside this kind of recomposing new you know working class or left and surgeon politics is country it was a lot to the thinking of my buddy Andrew L. Rod at phenomenal worlds or Luis Phyllis Leon who is a staffer at

55:38labor notes and Luis has written some really good essays in the American prospect that are pre alter globalization look instead back to the 1960s and 70s but also like he's trying to he wrote these articles in the wake of Sean Faines discussion who's the president of the United Auto workers discussion of like maybe there is some strategic or tactical support for certain trump tariffs that might help protect American jobs and the weasel talks about this earlier history as an effort to kind of like talk about an alternative path that labor can take by basically on the alternative path labor did take in the mid parts of the 20th century so he tells a story about like these French general motors workers these parts makers and when they went on strike German workers put down their tools and refused to pick up the work that they did and it was re when it was re-routed to their plan and they developed a common cross border strike fund and that same year German workers did that again when British auto workers went on strike and would have undermined the leverage of their union siblings so he describes these instances of coordination they weren't just spontaneous

56:42they were facilitated by a series of multinational union agreements that was aimed at forcing their common employer to distribute work amongst subsidiaries in different countries pretty fairly so you know you said quote this pointed to an international vision of economic development and job creation it was he says about solidarity not competition for scarce jobs it wasn't about the price of labor abroad but telling a multinational corporation to fairly distribute jobs and it was enforced not through the substitution of a government which then has incentives to be zero sum about jobs across places but instead was enforced through shop floor strike action and solidarity and you know for Louise he said this is explicitly understood as an alternative to the toolkit of tariffs that are now being resurrected to fight against plant closures and it was kind of with the lower ed of the labor movement and defeat of some of those kind of like pockets of its most robust sites of accumulated strength that the tariff kind of stick seemed more appealing but he says

57:43not a tool which is actually going to develop the musculature of international solidarity and cross-border coordination that's necessary like I don't know like I probably I do agree with Sean Fain like if we do have a president that's going to renegotiate the US-Mexico Canada agreement of 2018 there should probably be a manufacturing like minimum wage there like let's stop the race to the bottom for wages and you know North America but still the best thing that could happen probably short-term for North American manufacturing workers is the rank of file rebellion of tens of thousands of McEla door workers on the US-Mexican border that are struggling to build fighting democratic unions out of the legacy of kind of the kind of zombie corporatism that predominates labor relations and that labor struggle has been facilitated by Trump's first renegotiation of of NAFTA yeah that's a real talk about contradictions um yeah so let's do the uh the last part of

58:43the question which is um to what extent should the US take responsibility for steering the world and without use of armed force what mechanism should we rely on to do so sanctions coordinated boycotts strengthening international governance institutions like the UN and ICC um we just two brief thoughts on this one I do think we need to strengthen international multilateral institutions like the UN I'm skeptical of sort of this any sort of like fantasy that an organization like the UN can can be a fully democratic global body that that eclipses the logic of might makes right that actually governs the world but I believe that strengthening organizations like the UN can can curb and curtail the logic that powerful nations can do what they like in weak ones just you know suffer what they what they must and then the

59:49second thing I would say is like the entire arms control infrastructure of arms control treaties that saved the world from nuclear armageddon during the Cold War are basically it in total tatters and we're back in a full-blown nuclear arms race between you know the traditional nuclear powers new countries entering the nuclear club all the time countless more attempting to get in I think that like multilateral treaties for arms control are like urgently urgently necessary whether we're talking out small from small arms to nuclear weapons like there needs to it needs to once again be a global priority that countries work together to make agreements to develop produce and maintain

1:00:58fewer weapons particularly the ones that can kill just giant numbers of people and we need similar sorts of binding negotiations obviously around around climate and I think that beyond multilateral institutions like the UN and this is something Jake Warner talks a lot about that I think is really interesting I mean there needs to be a basic orientation of a progressive US foreign policy would be a partnership with China to facilitate global peace and adjust energy transition yeah that seems right I mean I will just put on the hat and say I do think the US should not be imagining itself as a world leader and we mean like look anti-puralism means decreasing the capacity of one state to govern a hierarchical chain of other states and social for me it's in a vertical and coercive way it is anti-democratic it's severely

1:02:02malignant on life outcomes it produces political cultures that is not hospitable to work in class power here that's malignant effects on the construction of work in class interests it pretty still search the barbed offerings we're familiar with and it just it's it's bad abroad in ways that probably don't need to be detailed so I do think we should be eroding the US military archipelago one of the better outcomes or political events probably to happen in the last year it's been terrible the war but it's it's I think a real benefit that so many US military installations across West Asia have been devastated that is a positive outcome for the region and the world I think it's an I think that the like people can listen to my six part Iran series if they want you know to be reminded that I'm like a vociferous critic of the Iranian regime domestically but in terms of Iran's role geopolitically it is the most incredible asymmetric strategic victory that we've ever like I don't know I'm not a military history guy but I

1:03:07and I do think I mean I bring it up just to say it's like I um I don't I think like it would be it should be an all-mark demand of I hope any national movement that are democratic socialists and foreign policies running on is to is to kind of like really dramatically diminish the US yes I mean it's going to be framed in a million ways there are powers and ability to do so we're going to be challenged in curtailed I mean you know again powers and reside only in the tip top of the White House or the executive but like that should be a key demand and task for our movements because I think it lays the ground both for a kind of more cooperative world order but also because right now it's not like our military archipelago is it's not putting a wet blanket on militarism elsewhere it's it's also the re militarization of Europe and the race which is taking place all across the Gulf and everything else so it's it's it's it's been disastrous I think globally at the level of climate at the level of where human resources are being put and in terms of just like

1:04:08violent outcomes on people's lives and I think we should ever we can't to scale it back yeah I mean I think like looking at the future of US global military imperial power on the one hand we're going to see it being increasingly pushed back by either the growing military strength of other powers like China the asymmetric strategic victories of of countries like Iran and the broader access like the the the the houthis who are able to exploit the contradictions of the overextension of American imperial power and in the contradictions of many other things like the like the entire global economy and and with the entire global petrocapitalist global economy but on the other hand if we were to have a socialist president take office right now I do think that we have to think about the transition from US imperialism to a

1:05:14different kind of order the same way we think about a transition from capitalism to socialism which is as a transition even the president even the most ideologically sympathetic president imaginable which is probably not the president the best case president we're going to elect any time in the next few years is not going to have a but it like a switch to flip US imperialism on or off and the question is how to orchestrate the the winding down of power in a way in the of the of the US power globally in a way that facilitates more equitable relationships of international solidarity and cooperation while maintaining enough domestic legitimacy within the United States to keep that process going this all happening while countries like Iran aren't trying to wind down US imperial power but rightfully smash it in their backyard and I think those those are just things that are going to be happening in the best case scenario simultaneously but in various forms of tension and contradiction

1:06:22that sounds like all work right right it's not a matter of juridical decision yeah suddenly choose to adopt a monetary policy that's not predicated on the preponderance of the US dollar these are kind of long run processes that have many many people upholding them yeah and like we think about non reformist reforms domestically what are what are the non reformist reforms to US imperialism I mean easy ones are like cut off Israel like immediately you know like that's an immediate one but the other ones it's actually an interesting exercise to think about like what a road map to this would look like if we had state power in the United States this is Sarah Jeffy and you are listening to the dig with Daniel Denver my favorite podcast for thoughtful discussions on the US left and beyond and you can support it on patreon.com this episode of the dig is brought to you by our listeners who support us at patreon.com and by University of California Press publishers of the book disability

1:07:29revolution by Robert McRure what do revolutionary disability politics look like today disability revolution is a short timely overview of disability justice showing how we get past limiting single issue approaches to an inclusive movement that builds solidarity across difference find disability revolution at ucpress.edu should we do the next one all right this is from I think the name is pronounced Gene Cochrane here we go hi Dan this is Gene from Chicago I'm wondering what approach you think municipal socialists should take to economic development in the private sector following Zeron's win in New York there's been a lot of attention to public sector investment and what that means for socialism at the municipal level but when I look around at state and local governments around the country it seems to me that so many of them are dependent on private sector investment to fund the infrastructure that we need

1:08:32and what remains of our local social safety nets whether that's directly through corporate tax in the bond market or indirectly through sales tax and property tax seems like everyone agrees that we should restructure state and local governments in a long term to be less dependent on these revenue sources but in the immediate term I wonder what we should do like should we ignore private sector economic development entirely or is there a municipal socialist vision of development in the private sector that could fund the infrastructure and the programs that we need without resorting to or raise to the bottom through regressive tax incentives and tax breaks anyway thank you and the team so much for the work that you do on the day and I'm excited to hear you think Gene Gene is setting up actually your opponent in Rhode Island Dan for you to elaborate on the the socialist experiment yeah this is why we need the laboratory because it's there are huge constraints and contradictions on the project of municipal socialism a socialist mayor exists within a context of

1:09:41typically a non socialist governor non socialist congress non socialist president and most importantly of all they they exist within capitalism and one city exists where it does within the geographic boundaries of that city that's where a mayor exercises there they're they're they're limited sovereignty whereas capital can move anywhere move to the suburbs which was a big part of the story of the mid and late 20th century it can move to from the north to the south and it can move overseas so there's a huge asymmetry asymmetry and mobility between the scales at which capital and municipal government are operating and partly because of that cities have had to figure out

1:10:42growth models and the growth model that we've landed upon since the onset of deindustrialization has been endlessly forever appreciating property values and that is what is causing the affordability crisis in cities the housing crisis and it's also through property tax revenue what funds municipal government so this is something I'd be talking about with Sam Stein soon because it is a real real contradictory dynamic for municipal socialist mayor city councils and and movements because we need revenue to do socialist social programs to give every child child care to build everyone a home but we also need to curb and ultimately destroy the power of the very economic system that

1:11:48is currently generating that revenue and I think that social housing is one of the best ways into navigating this contradiction because with a social through an intelligently designed social housing program the public sector itself can operate in an entrepreneurial manner in the real estate sector buying up land buying up housing and then decommodifying it it doesn't figure out the ultimate urban growth model question and that question I don't think can be ultimately decided without winning federal power and the the context the within which municipal socialist will be operating even under a just kind of like bi-denomics liberal presidency would be decisively better than under the current conditions of republican austerity just like opening the fiscal massively expanding

1:12:54the fiscal capacity for municipal socialism which would require federal power I think would be a a game changer and then the last thing I'll say is like stepping back like more broadly these are not contradictions of municipal socialism but contradictions of trying to make socialism happen in one country of social of of of of doing socialism in a context of a world capitalist system and I mean those are that question gets to some of the most like some of the thorniest like like strategic programmatic questions what do you what do you think well I'm curious I actually wanted to hear you say a little bit more about the relationship between federal stimulus and local experiments so maybe we can come back to that but I mean I agree with you these these there aren't easy answers here and generating revenue through bonds so which is typically considered to be the you know again like even the fiscal powers even the tax raising powers on you know kind of like these local levels of government

1:13:54especially in New York but anywhere are really heavily curtailed and the reliance on the bond market creates all sorts of perverse incentives so even when we you know I kind of cut my teeth as in kind of student organizer at the university California and we all read faculty and rebob mixtures pretty remarkable research organized under the heading of like they pledge your tuition which like described like the kind of perverse incentives for even when you're trying to open up alternative streams of revenue in the form of bonds lead public institutions then to have to try to preserve their ability to keep those revenue streams open so they can pay back but like you know the debt when people want to sell the bond but also to retain the rating of the bond that makes it a valuable financial asset that stops people from selling it off and encourages people to buy it more in the case of the university California the largest employer in California that meant that they were pledging tuition for students as collateral to the bonds should the university not be able to

1:14:57to buy it back and it also meant that they had an incentive to continue to raise the price of tuition periodically to demonstrate and perform for the market that they had the capacity to generate more revenue if necessary it also incentivize them to not spend money on teacher salaries or instructional aids or more resources for students to expand the research capacities of the hospitals or labs that were often attached to it but instead to just build more buildings you know add items to a balance sheet that that could be barred against later in case of again a catastrophic situation where they had to buy back a lot of those bonds and that I think frames a lot of the difficulties that you're faced at the local level I think really well I do think we should think hard about this stuff I mean like this is not the first time that progressives even some self-described socialist have started to arrive in municipal power and to me I think we need to spend much more time studying

1:15:59the national black political convention of Gary and Diana in early 1972. Can you guys next book I believe? I cannot wait for this book I mean neither. Because I there's so much more I need to learn about it but what I understand is that it's a similar situation right you've got on the backs of robust street-based social movements people entering into political power where it is most readily available which is often in cities where these movements have been concentrated at a certain level that they are writing similar headwinds of rapidly changing urban demography in our instance this has to do with younger college age college educated people stamped by social movements concentrating in places where there are jobs for them in the cities and new immigrant groups both of which are dislocated variously from local democratic political machines that don't represent them but kind of in zombie form might have hold over certain neighborhoods that they live in and that's at a similar situation that allowed the movement to step into the breach in the 1970s same for us today but those efforts to transform exact to transformative program at a municipal level a lot of them

1:17:03really faltered and a lot of them ended into you know presiding over kind of pivot to policing as the main municipal strategy for social reproduction they in many cases oversaw tremendous austerity not due to a lack of ideological commitment on the part of some of these elected officials but you know when you're that far down on the rungs of american federalism your toolkit is quite limited so i do think we need to think about these offices at a local level to be focused less on what they can deliver in the short term and probably more about how it can be a platform for a larger struggle at the places where there is more power readily available whether that's again thought of in terms of like in the trenches of day to day organizing or if that's thought of in terms of like a constant campaigning for some sort of federal level and there's challenges to doing that too from some of the cities where we're winning you know zora and can't run the york is compositionally distinct the organizational ecology here is not reflected in say southeaerolina um but there are some things

1:18:09which do seem to be true somewhat nationally and i think it's like that kind of compositional bases for a lot of what the democratic socialist thing is right now electorally which is like this young college educated social movement stamped thing of jen zine millenials alongside these new immigrant groups i think of the first second generation latino voters which powered bernie throughout the south west the united states with low levels of identification with the democratic party this is sort of what is the nascent national alliance the question is how far can that alliance carry you how can we use uh some of the success we have at the municipal level to consolidate that constituency and projected out federally i think those are the big questions for the movement i don't have any answers about how to develop private sector stuff i i won't get it down my own taxes let alone starting i i i think it's really instructive to look back to the kind of rise of black urban political power in the 1960s 70s and 80s in the us

1:19:13ways in which the victory became a a puric one in many in many senses because on the one hand you had the great migration and just a lot more black people in northern cities and you had black political movements making those black people an organized political force in those cities and at the same time fewer white people because of white flight suburbanization subsidized by the federal government and that dynamic allowed for organized black people to take power in cities like Detroit and Philadelphia and Atlanta and yet at the same time the very conditions that were propelling the black urban political movement forward as described famously by the corner commission were the suburbs being a white noose around the black city and it was that white noose around the black city created by the suburbanization of white people but like more importantly capital you know it's like oh guess what this tax base that was in Detroit is now in the suburbs this

1:20:15tax base that wasn't Philly is now in the suburbs it is outside of your control you are actually your political power is actually the political responsibility for providing social services to poor people without the power to tax and redistribute the wealth because we've moved that wealth elsewhere outside of your jurisdiction and that is instructive because it speaks as it speaks to broader problems and dynamics it speaks to the the problem that the left has in Greece where bondholders and government lenders the trica etc threatened to crash the Greek economy if they pursue a social democratic road out of their crisis it is what Brazil faces when it tries when it depends upon agribusiness to generate the revenues that they need to

1:21:20tax to redistribute to their base as part of their social democratic program but that same agribusiness power is also the material basis for the fascist reaction against the PT's very political project it echoes the amazing work by Kim Phillips fine who I interviewed about her this book Fear City it is what you know allowed capital to bring New York's social democracy to its knees and usher in the transition to brutal transition to neoliberalism and to the acid appreciation based urban economic engine that we started this they answered this question by talking about and you know the I guess the the most basic answer to this problem short of a full transition to socialism is it's just the question of the capacity and power for capital discipline like China has

1:22:24lots of economic problems to figure out but the the the Chinese state tells investment where to go not the other way around and getting that in order is the prerequisite it doesn't make social as a full socialism or communism happen but it's the prerequisite to getting like anything we want done is capital discipline and it's not it's like a problem which again like a lot of the I mean you know I think the Syriza and PT examples and illustrated I think are really important too because the historic position sometimes or a common reflex on the left is to hear those kind of dilemmas and say okay well then you crash through and you kind of initiate a revolutionary transition but I think you'll find especially for small this is true especially for smaller countries in the same way it would be true of happening at one city that often they are integrated they aren't autarkic kind of economic units they are fiercely dependent with the other world they are fiercely

1:23:25integrated into global circuits of capitalism and depend upon those circuits for their survival and what it means the transition at some level even if you you know have are able to discipline capital domestically you still might find yourself dependent upon the global capitalist market even immediately outside of your borders and so it raises questions of a protracted period of transition that I think we need to really wrap our heads around and what that means is we at the same time we have to like think of as the initial kind of question says is like how are you going to navigate kind of need for revenue and relate to your local capital class how are you going to begin as you said Dan to begin to exercise some coercive or disciplining pressure on local capital you also need to think about how are we planning for conflict you know our role in tasking government might be again how do we cultivate the sort of movements the sort of powers that might be able to effectively discipline capital in addition to just thinking about how are we going to be delivering for

1:24:26for a constituency because the the ladder I think is going to be it's going to be limited in the short term all right so let's do do do do is that Beth okay hi the dig I am not a guy and I have a question which is that I love theory economic theory Marxist theory and thinking about sort of like the deep structures of how capitalism works and it always makes me wonder you know production values stuff like that it always makes me wonder what would be the deep structures of how a socialist economy would work how would decisions be made how would resources be allocated in a more democratic way and I'm curious if you have recommendations for books or resources to look to both maybe on the history of actually existing socialist economies and he extent that does exist in a capitalist world

1:25:33system or people who are thinking about the future and what things could look like yeah love the work you do thank you I am going to leave most of this question for Ben I think maybe because of my in veteran realism slash reformism or whatever it is my my it's not my lack of desire to live under communism it's just the sense that it's really far off that I'm very focused on the kind of more proximate next moves in the non reformist reform sequence then kind of the best ultimate state that said I do think I both think that there's a real value in utopian thinking and I think there is very kind of concrete programmatic value in not so much utopian thinking but like programmatic

1:26:42thinking about like precisely how do we want the economic and political system to work ideally so that if we do get there we can put it in place and also knowing what we want ideally helps us design what we want intermediarily if that is a word I'll say just a few things about my instincts on this but again I don't have I feel out of my depth generally in this discussion but I think we'll be doing some more interviews around this and I think Ben will talk about some of the the the books that we might have people on the show to discuss so this is something I think increasingly on people's minds as we do as the socialist left in the United States begin to exercise more state power but I'll yeah so I'll say a couple things one I tend to believe that markets are a fundamental part of economic life it's hard for me to imagine even if we've socialized

1:27:43the means of production they're not being mechanisms for market exchange markets predate capitalism and could certainly post date them I think second I do think that thinking back to Salvadori and his Chileans I think was called Cybersen the kind of cybernetic mapping and planning of the economy I do think that technological advances do make a lot more planning possible so when I say that I think that kind of markets are with us even if when and if we transition beyond capitalism I also very much think that a lot of things can be planned and should be planned democratically yeah I mean it's actually funny like dandas this stuff runs against my foot instincts too I don't like prognostications about the future I don't like my politics to

1:28:45cash out in some far flung you know later day to come I like it thinking about even we think about like social movements like thinking about the efficacy of the here and now and you know I call myself a communist it's also part of it it's about you know a refusal of a long term imagination of attrition it's not about the slow accumulation of forces it's about the kind of efficacy of everyday people whether or not we're in government is how I think about a lot of these things and but you know like you it's these are questions which are it's so interesting that actually so many of the questions that we've gotten in the mailbag are variations on this right it's like what do socials look like what do socials form policy B and that does seem both like our reluctance to answer those questions and the interest from listeners is probably symptomatic as something about our conjuncture which is like also the entry of more and more socialists into different levels of US government and a desire to both like at the level of political communication articulate

1:29:51the larger vision but also a desire to differentiate ourselves from just progressive democrats and even like kind of like a sepia tone nostalgia for returning to a welfare state so of the 20th century but like what actually gets at the content of socialism I don't remember if I said this earlier when we're doing the foreign policy question you know like programs right there is you know someone wants to put it programs are experiments right they're about creating new alliances and new lines of force and I think it's just as true for any of the recipes or you know a cook shops the future that we're thinking about now I've been thinking a lot about this passage from Rob and DJ Kelly's hammer and hoe that we've talked about I think already on this episode where he kind of is you know recounting the story of organizing a massive steel mill and workers are getting together and are having trouble mapping exactly where leverage exists in the plant and might they understand like the nature of their work and how it connects to the next couple of steps in production and the

1:30:54steps that preceded it but they weren't able to intuitively grasp because of how complex the division of labor was in a particular plant like what else like how it actually fit together and it required them coming together and talking about it with one another to actually grasp where the leverage might exist but also you know begin to imagine how that work process might be organized differently in a democratic and a fair and more sustainable and a more egalitarian sort of fashion and that was a single plant right and so for me it's hard I feel like we do need to always with these questions adopt some degree of humility which is the reality that a real revolutionary process where a transition is being worked out it's going to happen through the intensive deliberation of millions of people it will emerge much less like Athena from the head of Zeus no matter we've got some really brilliant and ambitious comrades some very productive imaginations I think they're really worth studying but like they are themselves proposals for millions of people to chew on and

1:31:55make sense of and figure out how to implement and you brought up the Chilean example this is the paradigmatic case of how democratic socialism might begin to inaugurate this question of anti-capitalist transition and even there if you watch battle for Chile if you read a book like Weaver's Revolution or Beyond the Vanguard or the debates that Rassana Rassanda or Ralph Miliband or others are getting around Regis De Bray around the revolutionary process that was like being inaugurated there you'll see that like it was this thing which catalyzed and opened up space for all sorts of everyday people to talk about how their own lives would be organized differently whether that was like a kind of like new land encampment on the periphery in the northern part of the country or in the factories where workers in and out of union delegations were talking about how production might be organized differently in the context of scarce resources coming in it's like that's actually where the stuff of transition works itself out is has to do in that kind of like as you put it that kind of like molecular level of everyday people turning towards one another and transforming themselves in the

1:32:58process so transition then if you take this on if you take that idea seriously transitions like not a process which is only kickstarted once you're in government or it's not just some far-flung policy suite waiting in the wings that you then just download or copy and paste into the conjuncture it's kind of being already elaborated in some small form in the struggles taking place today especially when popular struggles touch upon investment decisions like the pinnacle tenant union fight did or shape state policy like the wildcat teacher strikes did like in west Virginia or when workers sees control or stamp productive relations and workplace in their firms which happen every day they are small and so far as they are isolated and they are federated they're not happening altogether all at once but they always necessarily will be in the context of much larger social transition but they nevertheless you know they I think can be alive in active bases to think about what the alternatives might be whether you know that alternative to the barbarism of few people ruling on behalf of many so I I really do think this question transition always has to be

1:34:01thought of as a process that's not reducible to government nor waste for its everyday like nor waits for it to command it's kind of always happening beneath the surface and of course at every day struggle and that's the starting point always too much larger political opportunities that that might come but that is probably deeply unsatisfactory and so here's the real answer now that's my throat clearing okay there are a couple of books that I think are coming out or have come out recently or essays that have come out that actually probably are what you're looking for and one is from Mike McCarthy one is from Boscarsson Karin Mike Begs another Schmaren Benarnov and then Katrina Forster all friends and guests of the pod future and past so Mike McCarthy's master's tools came out from Versa a couple of years ago Mike outlines a project of what he calls sortition based financial institutions now Mike I believe begins with the difficulty of disciplining capital for left governments and the kind of malignant effects that finance generally has on the

1:35:02organization of our economy you know something we talked about frequently on this episode and he says okay we have a sortition based based financial institutions we might be able to produce a more democratic alternative so a sortition needs thinking of random selection and this is a practice that existed in ancient Greece that Eric Owen Wright takes up is a different way that economic institutions might be organized and he imagines these sortitioner random selection based institutions might be able to democratize and socialize the investment function within capitalist economies and chart a new course like funding massive expenditures in the housing grain transition whatever other kinds of built infrastructure and human capacity we might elect to develop there's also a new book coming out I think relatively soon this is Boscarsson Karin Mike Begs of this book and I think Benarnov yes the blueprint that's right the blueprint and so they've got this idea for democratic and state ownership of natural monopolies sort of like what you said down right there's a place for planning and a place for state ownership of natural monopolies but they also think that needs to be

1:36:04supplemented by internally democratic and cooperatively managed publicly financed but operationally independent profit seeking firms competing on markets for one another so this is unique vision for market socialism that's distinctive from central planning but also from social democracy and they are outlining their blueprint in that book so Aaron Benarnov who is has been a guest in the show talking about the future of work he was a long time editor endnotes journal someone I've known since I was a teenager he is at the start of a massive project which tackles similar problems like how do we allocate resources questions of democracy questions of post capitalist transition from another angle so he's written a bunch of essays two essays in the new left review and a massive policy paper for autonomy think tank based on the UK where he outlines what he calls like a framework or institutions for a multi-dimensional or multi-critereal economy so his line is that okay like capitalism has one criteria which determines whether or not

1:37:04a to worthwhile investment decision then that's to do with like efficiency or uh yeah really efficiency and he says okay this one-dimensional optimization is obviously limiting in terms of the kinds of human flourishing I can provide for so what would it mean to develop institutions that can balance between efficiency security freedom community autonomy sustainability through intensive democratic deliberations so his work also begins from a starting point let the left often considers basic redistribution to be its primary task when interest state power and at least questions to democracy to the side and those are actually brittle bases to begin to inaugurate a period of transition for so to leave lasting or durable transformations execute real transition the question of democracy but also socializing the investment function might be paramount so you'll notice a theme that's kind of coming across some of these things here everyone's talking about socializing finance or credit or the investment function something like that and then leaving space for market or democratic

1:38:05forms of participation and then I think there's someone whose work is like in a slightly different key is I understand it but I think as worth mentioning in the same kind of suite here and that's Katrina Forester's work some of it is still forthcoming and it works from a different angle you know she begins with what Stuart White calls sectoral communism uh free at the point of use social services subjected to community control bisector so again maybe the most ambitious less coercive most uh expansive forms of welfare let's say in the form of health care right and for her the questions how our movements might be both in the state you know making use of the state's resources but also against the state like fighting against the kind of vertical relations command or discipline that historic forms of welfare have been accompanied by uh and she imagines this question about this in and against the state move as part of a proactive period of transition that requires example use of the state's resources and but also has an indispensable dimension of cultivating

1:39:09oppositional forms of sociality to counteract capitalist social relations that are embedded within the state even in its most expansive welfare schemes so again like there's an interesting it's I think interesting at these different examples that have all emerged the last couple of years are also focused on these questions of democracies some of them are really blueprints right like this is what it can look like some of these are much more like these are strategic orientations to how we might get there because again even the content of socialism has been historically variable and fought and over skirmished over it's like has historically designated not the end goal but the name for a period of protracted transition between the survival of the capitalist world that we're living in and the outlines of a new day um I think like actually brand-couple and discussion with one another would make for a great dig episode because where they have convergence where they disagree I think would be really cool to draw out yeah I mean would be very cool and listeners can probably expect

1:40:15something along those lines at some point listeners also just heard the kind of incredible synoptic power that Ben brings to thinking about anything and everything which they're hearing now in this discussion but that also more quietly helps the whole show for many years now be be what it's become Ben can you just to close out this discussion for today and listeners we will get to now that we've broken the seal we will be doing more mailbag episodes if you have a pending question even if it's from like a year ago it'll still likely get answered in a future mailbag episode do not fear the dig moves uh dig moves slowly and extensively as as as you know but Ben to close out can you I mean you're one of my the people I most like to to think with in the the world and I think it's pretty

1:41:21should be pretty clear to listeners by this point why that is can you tell me a little bit about how you go about kind of like studying and and thinking and uh because you just know about such a wide range of things I don't even know where you begin or begin I feel the same way about you I'll say to you it's like Dan like working on this show is like a real source of pride and a real highlight of my intellectual life and it is um like it it's fun on multiple levels one it's fun because it forces us to you know like we all have our own pet interest mine feel increasingly contancurus and idiosyncratic with each passing day I can only take so many more books in this in my room that are called like workers in America like in then like a two year period of time like and that's that's unfortunately what I'm tending to read more and more of for better for whereas as the

1:42:23years go on so like I love this shows like real capacious sense of like what is worth studying and worth part being part of the intellectual political culture of the left and it's something which like feeds and stimulates me uh there've been year like in recent years when I've done more like staff organizing for a living it's like so good to have a chance to kind of like lift my head up and force me to read and think about some of these things and it's also like really nice to be in conversation with you because we come from such distinctive political places and traditions it's like fun developing shared intuitions together over the course of working with one another but like it's just like you um you are a coherent and very realized political person and it's I really appreciate like kind of engaging with that and encountering that coming from sometimes a different place I think it really um forces me to always like rethink you know what I'm doing and what I how I move through the world I like you I'm a professional dilletant Dan I don't have

1:43:28an advanced degree I uh you know I I should double check my transcripts and figure out if I've got a primary degree and I like you I think like there's like two things that probably allow us to like tap into help prepare the grant for the episode one is like just like try to read everything all the time and um you do that by um taking too long to go to the dentist or calling back your brother or uh you know like you do it uh by procrastinating on other things you should be doing whether work or not and then secondly like I try like you I think to just talk to as many people on the left as possible and like talk across the tendencies that normally exist and figure out with their reading and thinking about and I think that's really helpful I feel lucky that like I went to school at UC Santa Cruz when I did like I arrived there like right as Occupy was starting and so there was a really um fertile kind of like scene for people in town undergrad graduate students

1:44:31professors hanging out doing reading together talking with one another organizing seminars debating out assemblies together and it was a creative environment that allowed me to I think I like a bunch of people like a sawdhater most of all use like a long time was a good dig guest um around his book Mistake and Identity um who was like my teacher in in mentor he um he I think like really was part of creating a bigger political culture where you could study the stuff outside of an academic terrain but as like ideas that were imminent to movements of people trying to change the world that it gave an easy pathway into what might seem like an arcane question was always only a step or two away from another strategic dilemma and I think having that approach means that like every seemingly eccentric or rarefied subject is always like not far away if you're doing organizing because it's like only one or two steps removed from the questions you're wrestling with right now well we'll leave it there thanks Ben and we'll uh pick up the mailbag in not too long so

1:45:40please send in new questions and if you've already sent in a question we will most likely be returning to it that was me Dan Denver and Ben maybe Ben is an organizer based in Brooklyn and a member of the editorial collective for Long Hall a quarterly magazine of rank and file work writing he's also a senior advisor here on the dig where he's working with Hey market on a new series on how to think like a Marxist do you have questions that you want us to answer in our next mailbag I swear there will indeed be a next mailbag and it won't be a year from now submit a question the link to do so is in the show notes thank you for listening to the dig from Jack in magazine as Marx once said after noting that communism is for us not a state of affairs

1:46:41which is to be established an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself we call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things the conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence while other podcasts have only interpreted the world in various ways our point is to change it we're posting episodes most weeks the dig was produced by Alex Lewis our associate producer is Jackson Roach music by Jeffrey Brodsky our operations manager is Sylvia Atwood our senior advisors are theoreal Francois and to the bed maybe check out our vast archives and newsletters at the digradio.com follow us on twitter and also blue sky and instagram at the dig radio and do find us wherever you get podcasts and subscribe to this podcast if it's an iTunes Spotify wherever please rate and review us positively those reviews hope introduce us to your listeners but what really and truly does that is you telling people you know to check

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