“I insist”, continued the Conventionist G. “You mentioned Louis XVII. Let’s understand each other. Are we weeping for ALL the innocents, ALL the martyrs, ALL the children, the ones from down below just like the ones from on high? Because I am. But now then, as I said, in that case we have to go back BEFORE 1793, and our tears must start BEFORE Louis XVII. And then I will weep with you for the children of kings, provided you will weep with me for the children of the common people.

“Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in Heaven.” (Matthew 6:1) Are you a “good landlord”? Do you refrain from constantly raising your rents as high as the market will bear? Attend to problems promptly? Refrain from meddling in your tenant’s personal lives, or using your eviction power to intimidate them into having your way with them however you please?

Dialectical and historical materialism are great tools for understanding the world. They are helpful at arriving at plausible explanations for events because they depend on a minimal number of ad hoc hypotheses. The more hypotheses an explanation depends on introducing, the more fragile it becomes, and the greater the odds of it being inaccurate. Based on simple probabilities, if your explanation depends on N different hypotheses, and the probability of each hypothesis being correct is 50%, then the probability of your explanation as a whole being accurate is now only 1/2^N, which rapidly becomes vanishingly unlikely, as N increases.

I hear critics of Bernie Sanders often complain about his unwillingness to sufficiently stridently denounce “corruption” among his opponents. Obviously this was a notable complaint against his conduct of his primary campaign against Joe Biden. But it has also come up in the context of Senators Manchin and Sinema and their sublimely obstinate obstruction against Biden’s “Build Back Better” bill. Bernie’s own temperament of being “classy” and avoiding personal attacks, in favor of appealing to reason and the greater good, is certainly a factor.

Essentially all apologies for capitalism boil down sooner or later to one species or another of “trolley problems”. (“Trolley problems” are a peculiar type of moral or ethical thought experiments in which one is called upon to embrace or justify a “solution” to a moral dilemma that optimizes outcomes in some way (minimizing harm or death to the greatest number, or maximizing the well being of the greatest number), while willingly suffering the intentional infliction of an immediate harm to a smaller number, in particular, a harm which shocks the “naïve” conscience.

My hypothesis: essentially all capitalist wage labor is inherently extremely heedless and wasteful. Even if for no other reason than that the wage laborers, who sell their labor power, are under the dictate of their bosses, and are not at leave to exercise wider discretion about how they perform their labor, under pains of being fired. Accordingly, they are not going to be magically using their own judgement and somehow “optimizing” their performance to protect essentially any important values external to the end product itself (whether relating to the health of others, or the environment, or even basic neighborliness), if they are not under detailed and explicit instructions to do so.

If you were a billionaire who liked cops, primarily because they never give YOU grief, but DO give your low wage workers – who might, say, be inclined to organize and bargain with you, or bring actions against you for wage theft, or sexual harrassment, or other illegal workplace practices – a LOT of grief, what would you do about a “progressive prosecutor”, who sincerely believes in the principle of “equal justice under law”, and the precept that it would be better to risk letting a hundred guilty men go free than to take the life and freedom of a single innocent one?

One time, i was getting off a train platform with my hands full, juggling some groceries i had bought, along with a backpack with a broken strap. A bunch of transit cops were doing fare inspections. One of them forced me to put me all my stuff down and dig out my ticket. Then, before I even got off the platform, a couple more accosted me again, and again, demanding to see the same ticket the earlier cop did!

“Left vs right” as an enduring, dominant political metaphor is undoubtedly a gross reduction and simplification of reality that occasions endless confusion. But while I am sympathetic to such reservations, nevertheless, I have not yet seen a way to entirely supersede it. In fact, one of the best giveaways about someone’s intentions often consists of claims that they aim to “move beyond left-vs-right”. And, if one sympathizes more with the “left” side of the metaphor, those intentions are probably bad news.

· We’re in this crazy sort of situation, where Rosa Luxemburg’s prophetic motto, “socialism or barbarism”, has gone from being a literary shorthand to a literal historical crossroads. Where the necessity of large scale coordination and planned intervention in a globalized economy has become an urgent, blindingly obvious necessity for human survival. Blindingly obvious, that is, for people with even a passing acquaintance with the facts. (Of course, not everybody possesses that.