let me frame this in a kind of obvious way both of you come from different generations kind of place yourselves in terms of the left in terms of your growing awareness in terms of the work you've done in the work you do from where you come from and how these two different generations came together in your dialogue ok so i'm a lot older than basque have to start  t yeah i'm really sixty eight and my radical political activists career begins in the city of baltimore where i grew up in a jim crow legally segregated city and so the struggle for desegregation was the formative experience of my youth it was my own political awakening and when i was in junior high and high school and i followed a path that was very common in my generation graduating without leaving anything behind from civil rights to anti vietnam war an empire and soon as you know like everyone else discovered feminism so on and so forth and i was saying to philip in the car that i don't actually think any of my fundamental ideas have changed very much since those days i struggled in various activist groups in new york city doing full time political work especially around housing tenants rights and rent strikes of this kind of stuff and eventually decide to go to graduate school i had to sort of face the realisation that this revolution was not going to happen so quickly and then i mean a sort of longer range game plan and i became a whole also fur i struggled in graduate school and in my professional life i have to say that now i'm feeling very young again because i think we are in a moment of tremendous turmoil and opportunity and i'm seeing people all around me suddenly interested in socialism and in marxism and in socialist feminism and eco marxism and all of this stuff extended form that i have done in like forty years and boy did it feel good to really say what you think you know and you know of course i've done op ed pieces here and there but  i got the chance to go to college for most of my older siblings didn't get the chance to go to college so i saw how much of life were kind of just accidents of birth and it's pretty hard not to see the way in which having access to good public goods the privileges that come with having an american passport one million other things you know played played a role and i guess i was just a strong defender of the welfare state and from that point i had developed kind of an other places where property taxes fuel fuel public goods you know my parents were close enough to read for two years kind of little loophole around that but but i saw that the anti war movement so there was a sort of part of it coup anyway it was a that was a reference the tom cruise movie from about twelve years ago and figured out connect with the kids so yeah it was it was kind of random what i was trying to do with jack levin was to take these democratic socialist moved in this country we were defeated and hopefully just temporary we weren't wrong and that was one of the one of the key purposes and my mind this was a project renovation of the better but part of that conservatism of you know low expectations was the left in the united states so many of the infrastructures not just intellectually but even our unions our political organizations all these things were just completely shattered we were a completely deep politicized movement deep politicized country and i think things are opening up both in terrifying ways on the right but also now make these things relevant once again and accessible to people so one of the things that fascinated me about this partnership was it brings together two aspects of  two aspects that are separate often theory and practice one associates nancy with well obviously feminist theory but critical theory which was essentially where sort of western marxist intellect went for about thirty years and perhaps in some people's mind maybe too long someone once came to read may thing and said why does everybody here talk about m c m prime instead of you know and so there's that attitude and basque are to a certain degree particularly in the in your instructions to writers for your popular for jacobin and also for your notion of how an ideal socialist meet in should take place is th should walk in off the street and there should be nothing that turns them off and it's something that they can understand or says this is not for you or this is a part of coterie or i have to learn to say praxis instead of practice you know to be part of this discussion and yet and yet and yet if you look at the program of read may you can see that it clearly divides between some of them that are very very are obviously going to draw a larger public and some other ones usually under the title of the of that will talk about or the immediate process of production or something like that which sounds like inside baseball events and yet there's this notion that cain says is that every have this incredible resource it's been such a beacon you know for all sorts of young people and others who you know are really finding their way to the left history to left thinking to left politics so i say bravo and i mean that truly i guess you know again maybe the because of this a question of the long decades that i've lived through i actually think that we really need to think historically about the theory of practice relationship i evoked before the sixty's and the thing that was so in livening then for me was how easy it was to go back and forth between theory and practice everyone was in a reading group everyone was in the streets in a consciousness raising group etc etc and ideas flowed very very easily between you know between people who were writing and people who were marching and sometimes they were the same people and sometimes not between academia even and then the sort of intervening decades for me were decades i don't want to use a word retreat exactly but yeah i mean i was really doing mainly theoretical and academic were and that's what i could do and could contribute and especially in that period but these things i mean when i think that the word that i really want to use in this might not sure if we're agreeing or not i mean to me there are there is normal times and there crisis times and and they're completely different in terms of the tempo of learning and development and they're completely different in terms of the relation between theory and practice so i lived through one crisis moment in which there was a speed up of how fast people learned to think differently and how quickly ideas spread and how there wasn't this intimidation of theory because everybody was making theory out of their their lives then there was the time when you know everything you know kind of got normalized and all sorts of people you know still cared passionately about certain causes and ideals but you know let's say  ways of getting into institutions where these ideas could not retain their radical spark so people were you know professional caucuses here or there or  whatever and and i really do think that we are living in a moment a very deep crisis i don't just mean an objective system crisis which is the case but a lived experience of crisis and therefore of the absolute necessity to to put aside the old common sense and to try out new ways of thinking and to have in there for people to go to that's so fantastic and i feel that the theoretical work that i do now i'm finding that it's speaks to much  broader publics then it used to it might be that with age i've sort of gotten past whatever anxieties i had about having to sound smart and so i'm willing to just talk in a much more you know colloquial way in my writing and so on but i think this is a moment where the theory practice thing is shifting and i'm less worried about that  years years that passed for nothing really happens and yeah i'm not sure what error we we're living in i think we're living in and an era where there is this crisis of the neoliberal model but more importantly there's this looming reasons to be afraid of trump ism especially if we continue to put up people like hillary clinton or joe biden against against trump and that maybe trump is so odious that people won't vote for him in particular but are we really  repeating right populism if we're not proposing actual alternatives to it but it does seem like we're gaining ground something like seventy percent of americans now support medicare for all including close to a majority of republicans even there's widespread support for the jobs guarantee in poor states  relief but we have this looming crisis of climate change which is going to speed things up even more but in a way the probably benefits are right because we benefit from the idea that there's enough to go around that in fact we're living in th wealthy abundant societies and people are working hard to contribute to these societies and they deserve more you know nobody has the common refrain kind of nobody deserves to live being in poverty of if they're working a full time job nobody deserves to be homeless they can apartments in these luxury constructions you know going up this is a common sense but the common sense doesn't hold that people feel like that there's a scarcity and these flows scarcity you know the idea that there isn't enough to go around the idea that it's a zero sum game and that people coming here to work and live in contribute to society are in fact taking away from the society but what happens when there's one hundred million refugees from bangladesh flooding into central central india into other poorer poor areas if you have hindu nationalism in india now what would be the result there so i think that i both very optimistic given the short term but i feel like if we lose this moment we might look back and if we do fail pachter climate change we won't look back at this moment the way that past generations look back and i had to be so i provoke but look back at the  me it's can we take advantage of this opportunity because i think the real speed up will happen if we fail and i both i vacillate between excessively optimistic and excessively pessimistic so the name so how do you pronounce it ok you talked about good sense and common sense for example she talks about the fact that we need to try to find the good sense and common sense in other words take the stories that people always believe but try to subtract the ones that are idiotic like you don't you're not successful you didn't deserve it because you know you didn't work hard enough or whatever and find out what they already believe and extend that into making a new narrative that can become hedger monic what do you see as the good sense in what people already believe that can be woven into a kind of a new story that that has some that can at least contest the story that government is not the problem is the problem not the solution the taxes are taking and so forth you know so i mean st of all i want to just say something about this interregnum idea this is  very much the way i think about history i think about history as basically having or let's say the history of capitalism i think of the history of capitalism as a succession of different forms of capitalism all of which are facing these deep seated underlying tensions and contradictions that are are absolutely built in and inherent in any form of capitalism and these these periods in which a form of capitalism sort of stabilizes more or less and manages to diffuse or at least soften the contradictions that are there and but these periods are i think that these are periods of tremendous volatility in which people don't want to any longer believe the reigning common sense so this statistic that are just quoted about mississippi seventy percent of the people want to a jobs a guaranteed job program this is a kind of a breakthrough let's say of an earlier common sense in which the people believe that if you know if somebody didn't have a job it was because there was something wrong with them they were too lazy they were too uppity they were too you know grest b and not content to take the very low bad conditions that they i think that nobody believes in trickle down anymore nobody believes that the rich are jeff b gets the better off we're all going to be nobody believes  the sort of free trade ideology that of course has nothing to do with actual fair trade i think there has been a breakdown in commonsense and basically what comes through is the ability which is very rare in american history to start to think structurally to start to think no it's not my fault that i'm not making it and i also think that you see moments where things that people know and have probably known for a long time find a way of per is the word rigged it's such a simple word it's the system is rigged the economic system is rigged the political system is rigged everybody knew that somewhere deep down but it's like you know the suddenly someone says the emperor doesn't have clothes and so i think there must be a lot of this kind of good sense there what happens in the kind of period we're in now which is an interregnum is that things like that can be said and they get uptake now because as i say trump found that word very useful for his own purposes and  fake news was another one that he turned around masterfully you know there's no guarantee about what happens whether that little crystal of good sense i think we're in a moment in which people are really looking for a new way to think and new way to understand the old formulae don't work and they're looking for new when he's talking change talk and they'll vote in two thousand and sixteen for bernie and then they'll vote in the presidential in the general election for trump or if they're in france they'll vote in round one for of the far left and then live penn from the national front all of this kind of stuff they'll they'll vote for braggs it and then you know support corben so this is a people it's a time of tremendous tom oil this is an opportunity and i here i want to underline an agreement with letting the hunger for change be you know satisfied by that right that's the only thing that can quench that thirst but what brought that thirst about the whole tightening the screw further and leading to more trumps worse trumps etc etc so this is not a moment to scurry and try to seek protection behind the skirts of of liberals who claim to be the protectors but are really the predators it's a moment to really go to the left so i'll give you a lead in here n says people are hungering for something new so your job and jack is to persuade them that socialism is something new and not something that didn't work that's cadaverous in its own way how do you do that think the core of our our popular message to people is that it's not your fault and that's a very powerful and simple message americans have been taught that all the problems facing them are the result of some sort of personal failing know i think telling people that listen you're doing the best you can you're following the rules you're working hard you're trying to look after yourself and your family you're trying to do good things and civic life look what happens after hurricane  what happens after every disaster the people donating blood the people donating their money other people who who don't benefit from tax write offs so to tell people that in fact generally virtuous and you're doing what you would you can and the reason why  you're getting behind you're still failing is because there are people benefiting from the pick area should the situation you're in and those people and the language of sanders is millionaires and billionaires and not minorities and and in fact we could take on these people and fine social solutions to many of the problems that you're facing we can't solve all your problems we can't solve your your heartbreak at some level you know we can't but we can make sure that you can see a doctor without without worry can make sure that you have these certain things so i think the people saying it's not your fault will always have an easier and easier case and the people saying that you know this is some sort of individual failing and it's not just among liberals it's also among a lot of conservatives especially some of these anti trump conservatives that have you read national review and the way reviews of hillbilly elegy and these other books in national review or even help billy elliot south you see that kind of hate this directed at you know white poor and working class people to a lot of the cultural poverty tropes that were perfect in a still are constantly against black americans are now also being used  some of the most invested in devastated predominately white you know working class areas in this in this country so i think our message is it's not your fault in our message to you to our audience which which isn't  fact we can replace the system as a whole and govern society on a different basis with a different logic i think that's maybe a struggle for for the decades to come but you know core a message has to be simple  enough and repetitive and that's been the glory of a lot of what we've seen with the support for sanders is that he's been saying the same damn thing since one thousand and seventy he is the most simplistic vocabulary of any presidential candidate more simplistic than trump it's repetitive right so let's talk about let's talk about the idea of destroying destroying the notion of meritocracy which is like a fundamental it's in every one of sermons you can believe that the system is rigged but not even question why for example basic rights of shelter or or food should be should be subject to competition where the winner even if they start at the same starting line get to the other ones don't but somehow that's sunk in very very deeply because of forty years of neoliberal rationality where the notion of competition all the way down is supposed to bring out the best in everything there is a book which you probably all know by jennifer silva called coming up short where she basically interviews  e children of working class families all of whom lost their good stable jobs at auto companies or manufacturing jobs and who haven't been able to make a go of it and yet they all blame exception they didn't they weren't paying attention in class they didn't take enough when they got home they didn't take enough skilled type courses to make them better for the employment market you know and or they took opioids or whatever you know and it's very very hard to even get out of that how do we how do we keep six meritocracy forever and and take it away from the take competition away from things that shouldn't be competed for but should just be given should be gifts well st i'm really glad you brought up meritocracy because that's the other side of the self blame it's that those who who end up unemployed or poor  lack that merit and the other side of that is that those who are in the corporate boardroom deserve it right because they are the meritorious ones unfortunately meritocracy i think became the sort of view of what equality meant for most of the what we you know the of a social movements or at least the mainstream currents of the social movements in this country and i'm thinking of liberal feminism and liberal anti racism and the sort of conventional centrist wing of the q movements and so on i think that we somehow lost our sense of what actual social equality means and what it requires and and i think that you know it's good enough if women of the professional managerial class can achieve the same positions and pay as the men of their own class that's sort of basically this degeneration and this has to do with the long standing culture of individual ism and voluntourism of the united states which is i think we're a bit extreme compared to many other countries for whom the experience of thinking structurally rather then you either deserve or you don't you're deserving or undeserving it comes it comes easier in other places so i  definitely think that whatever socialism means and it's obviously a contested term and i don't think we can fall back on received understandings of it i think we have to invent versions of it that are eco socialist and feminists oceanus and so on and so forth but whatever it means it certainly means that any a very substantial set of goods that are use falle use that satisfy people's basic needs cannot be commodities they cannot be things that we have to have cash income to pay for so i'm talking about an enormous expansion of what of public goods in terms of housing in terms of food in terms of transportation  in terms of you know education health care shelter all of these things that are you know the sort of fundamental baseline of what you need to live a decent life i believe they should all be completely commodified i don't think we should have private schools that people can pay for and opt out i'm i'm going to go very far and not worry about the quote unquote restraint on liberty  we don't allow people to buy things that are better than what other people get maybe we should start by asking our legislators and presidents that their kids have to attend public schools that they have to have the same health care thanks all the why this individual is in the us i think has less to do with our deep deep history of the us is a set or all these other things that has more to do with the recent history of just not having a strong labor movement not having a strong left wing political parties so in other words we haven't actually presented people with elective solutions a collective kind of action is a viable choice so of course the way they're going to survive is by individual gumption initiative whatever else asking your friends and family for support if you're in a area with very high unemployment and you find that the your hours you're kind of your job by one rd you  know are you going to go meet up with your coworkers and try to go on strike no you're probably just me grateful you have a job and you're going to maybe drive a nuber or a lift and your extra few hours and you might ask your friends and family for support i think a lot of the goal of the left is creating the infrastructures rebuilding the labor movement creating these civic spaces that can actually make collective solutions a more viable choice i have  oh you know the confusion thing is really propelling the chinese people forward the indians out some confucianism so i think i think like a lot of these ideologies a lot of these things are quite and we shouldn't underestimate the role of  of freedom i think freedom is at the core of the social ideal but the freedom that we want isn't a freedom to exploit others we don't want a society in which successes centrally behaving like a sociopath and and making profits by any means necessary and whatever else we want the notion of freedom that there's a there's a german there if their famous labor anthem the united front song which is like their version of us and no servants underfoot and i think that's the core of a social ideal we want freedom we want to convert me we want that basis for that freedom and autonomy but it's not freedom to exploit others freedom from exploitation and that's that's that's  legitimation crisis in the sixty's because of course it didn't seem that there were any problems with accumulation now for seeing what would happen in two thousand and eight or even before that but one can ask the question how we now we've talked about how the hedge story is sort of dissolved nobody believes these things and anymore but what if legitimation has ceased being so important as it was for capitalism in the golden age what if the instruments of repression have become so powerful now in terms of the way there's a kind of a global counter insurgency against any political movement that starts to democratically occupy the streets and what if the people who used to grant some kind of crumbs so that at least capitalism would be accepted by many people are now thinking about flying t mars or moving to new zealand behind gated compounds what is going to stop us from dissolving into some kind of neil suit alyson where the rich just leave us behind not even trying so legitimate or make the system were and living as outside elysium in the kind of precarious places and hot zones of the world trying to fend for ourselves that's the bleak vision they'll give us a hopeful one so st of all i mean just on this issue about legitimation you know what this was really talking about social democratic capitalism or state managed capitalism in which states were taking on new expanded responsibilities for keeping avoiding dangerous boom bust cycles and and and for also keeping the working class giving it a stake in the system for you know co opting revolution so  it's because governments were expected to do more that governments needed legitimation and then the question is if they're what they're doing didn't work then people throw them out now the interesting thing about our form of capitalism neo liberalism in this is a question do people still expect more from their governments or have they bought the story that the market is that is the way to go i mean environmentalism lots of people think up where we just need carbon trading we don't need like carbon taxes are these coercive things that governments do so we have a different problem then it's then legitimat legitimation can become a problem if people already expect more from government and then it doesn't deliver but if we've gotten to the point where lots of people just don't even have the the memory the historical memory of having those expectations then we're in a different ballgame and i think the scenario that you described is an absolutely possible scenario i think that if there is i mean let me let me put it this way i could see three possible scenarios developing one is that is that is yours and that is a just some kind of truly  regressive deeply violent repressive you know yeah you can call it barbaric feudal whatever that that is a real possibility there's no question another possibility and this i'm really agnostic about is whether capitalism is capable of reinventing itself in some new way that at least provisionally for a number of decades you know puts itself together again as it did in the one thousand nine hundred and thirty s are in the post war period new deal is there some new thing that they can dream up and i have to say that  you can't give a fast answer to that question because capitalism has proved tremendously creative in its history it has reinvented itself time and again  it solves one problem and of course then it it brings up out another one and then somehow miraculously it seems to solve that problem this doesn't help the people on the short end of the stick but it actually keeps things going so i can't rule that out the rd possibility though is the one that that we want and that is a genuinely post capitalist or socialist society and i think i might have a slightly different time frame in mind than bhaskar does i i think that because i think we are in what historians would call a general crisis it's not just an economic crisis not just a legitimation crisis not just an ecological but it's a sense in which the whole social order is unraveling and all of these various forms of crisis  converge and over determine one another so i think if there is going to be a transition to socialism that it's not going to be something that goes slowly by gradually winning more and more people over the next fifty years or something i think we've got a window now of i don't know you know looks can fester for a long time before they get resolved but i sort of feel that you know it's not a a long window i'm looking for a genuinely revolutionary situation to develop i think no one can predict this but  i think that we're talking about seizing control over the social surplus that capital is constantly praising itself or generating even marx praised it for generating i think we're talking about a really redesigned relationship to nature a redesigned relationship between economic production and social reproduction a read i think we're talking about deeply extending we mean by democracy and getting it out of some little thing called the political sphere where you know all sorts of major questions are already off the agenda and so this is a a major revision of  the basic shape of the social order and i don't want to wait and see if capitalism can figure out some solution because the barbarianism threat is real optimistic you know part is just we are living in a world that has been it's not the worst of all possible worlds it's been and it's been influenced by self conscious interests and the movements in the interest of the vast majority and that's because the labor movement there's been profound limits that have been placed on the ability of capitalism to exploit when the labor is st formed you had labor you had no restrictions are that they didn't exist we are living in societies have been fundamentally humanize by the efforts of the labor movement by the efforts of communist socialist and social democratic parties by the effort  in mind now i think all the changes the new dynamics of capitalism that arose in the post war period even with with these these other programs that the new deal they emerged because of the th reat that came from labor and because of the south conscious organizing of labor in some cases the welfare state wasn't constructed by capitalism was constructed in spite of the resistance of capitalism by social democratic parties and other cases just the influence of left movements changed the way ruling parties operated so whereas before the german ruling class used to govern with with monarchs and with with you know generals by the post war period the german r class was was under pressure christian democrats they were they were kind of centrist skirt trying to create a welfare state and whatnot so i think if there is going to be a reinvention of capital the capital is going to be able to   vote and i think what we found when you look at the history of working class politics is that people don't get more radical when things get worse people get more radical and they see some some gains you know you need to reject the vultures of socialism the idea that we just need to wait for a collapse in fact i think when people get something like medicare for all start asking why are these other necessities d commodified i think i think that will be the starting point if we can't fight for something and when something like medicare for all we can and put broader questions of worker ownership and things like that on the table so i think there's plenty of reasons to be optimistic about the capacity of people to unite together to fight for something better but we have to keep in mind that the reason why capitalism is so stable is because all of us are embedded in this system and we all need capital capital needs us but we need capital too and it's a dependency but it's an asymmetrical dependency all of you need your jobs more than your individual boss needs your individual labor that's why we need to band together collectively to figure out how can we collectively withdraw our labor power how can we collectively create disruptions so it becomes more rational for capital to agree to environmental legislation because it's a lot better have you know a carbon tax than to have you know production halted and disruptions on the street and whatever whatever else but i i do i guess the thing that i cling to is less the old marxist belief in the inevitability of change moving in our direction and so on but i cling to the idea of people being inherently rational at the very least not the very least people do not choose routes that will endanger themselves in their or their loved one we know when we're explo and we know we're oppressed and when given a better option will always choose that option when you have you know in the in the sixty's and seventy's when when there was for the st time ma s female participation in the labor force and women were given access to two strong jobs and economic security at least relative to what was there in the past you have an increase in divorce rates that wasn't  just the influence of feminism just the influence of leftist ideology it was booked people now have the ability to leave bad situations and they now have the independence to do so i imagine we might see the same thing if there was medicare for all people who are tied to their spouse