The Radical Liberals Are Coming!

 “A How-To Guide to Cosmopolitan Socialism – A Tribute to Michael Brooks” by Matthew McManus, 2023

If you don't know what 'cosmopolitan' socialism is or who Michael Brooks is, join the club.  There is a review of Brooks' book “Against the Web” on this blog down below.  The book is a product of podcasting polemics against right-wingers.  Among other things, Brooks was against hyper-woke capitalist nonsense, which he called 'militant particularism.'  He also used the phrase 'cosmopolitan socialism.’  The word “cosmopolitan” sounds suspiciously upscale in this context, even though the Greek root is “cosmos” meaning the world, universe or cosmos and 'polites' means the urban citizen.  Almost literally it means 'citizens of the world.'  It is another name for internationalism and I'm not sure why McManus or this group of DSA'ers favors it.  Too many Cosmos?

In spite of the title, three-quarters of the book is a history of internationalism among various writers and bits of history, usually in the context of attempts at international laws or ethics.  There is no 'how-to' in these pages.  The last quarter is ostensibly about how to try to apply internationalism in the present situation.  It's how to 'think globally ...while acting locally,' which is such a tired and limited cliché I'm sorry to even repeat it. “Cosmopolitan socialism ... seeks to empower and democratize many of the international institutions developed in partnership with liberal internationalists, while moving them in a progressive direction.”  That means the U.N., the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, the EU and others.  This looks like a social-democratic project similar to their plan to slowly take over the U.S. government, a Reverse Project 2025.

The Philosophers Speak

First the history.  McManus traces the idea of cosmopolitanism from the Greek philosopher Diogenes, the Roman Stoic Seneca and politician Cicero, the Buddhist Indian emperor Ashoka and the 'just war' theories of the Catholic philosopher St. Augustine.  All of them realized that a polity shouldn't be able to do anything it wanted in regards to outsiders, enemies and the rest, as all had a shared humanity. Toleration, compassion and dialog with 'outsiders' was preferred to butchery.  Augustine went further and tried to define a just war, as opposed to an unjust one.  This is the beginning of international law.  Whether all these people were hypocrites or not is not the issue, though McManus points out they failed to follow their own precepts at times. After all the Roman republic and empire both believed they were bringing civilization to the barbarians, an idea similar to early colonialists infused with Catholicism and Protestantism.  That was their ‘internationalism.’  Now we have 'humanitarian interventions' based on the same logic.

This cosmopolitanism is attempting to be humanist and universal, which McManus thinks leads it towards socialism … and liberalism.  He discusses the liberalism of Grotius, Hobbes and Locke.  Grotius fought for religious toleration and Hobbes insisted on a strong national state to restrain the population's 'nasty and brutish' lives.  Locke perfected the doctrine of 'possessive individualism,' i.e. protecting the property fruits of an individual's labor as the role for the state. All these liberals rationalized the development of capitalist society and the nation-state out of feudalism.  Immanuel Kant went a step further and denied that reason could ever understand the universe, 'God's will' or the meaning of existence.  Kant wrote in 1795 that Hobbesian states would still war against each other, moving the 'ware of all against all' up a notch.  Kant advocated republics, a federation of states and the elimination of armies and warfare for a 'perpetual peace.'  He backed refugee rights and became more critical of colonialism.  McManus christens this internationalism the beginnings of 'democratic peace theory' - whatever that is.

This method was not really followed until after World War II when Nuremberg, the U.N. and its various declarations, along with the world-wide anti-fascist struggle, the mass anti-colonial battles and socialist internationalism, broke the exclusive hold of the capitalist nation-state as the sole legal framework.  McManus cites the 1948 Genocide Convention; the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the 1960s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; the 1976 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. 

McManus recognizes that imperialism was the method used by some of these 'cosmopolitans.' The military side of this continues to this day – an invasion of Ukraine; a genocidal attack on Gaza and now Lebanon; a fueled conflict in Sudan; the repeated use of military attacks across national borders.  Libertarianism was another response.  It arose to combat state-led development in the 'third' world, the USSR and its allies, social-democratic welfare state practices in Europe and 'big government' in any country, especially world-wide.  Its first experiment was the bloody coup in Chile.  This developed into neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism, the twins of bourgeois international policy.  The international 'war on terror' and 'clash of civilizations' is still going on, but now has turtled back into regressive nationalism given war, immigration, environmental damage, pogroms and starvation. McManus calls this 'post-modern conservatism and nationalism.' International institutions have become the target again, and are oft ignored... much as the John Birch Society once crusaded against the 'One World Govt' of the U.N. The situation in Gaza is indicative, as is the undemocratic structure of the Security Council.  What are the prospects of 'cosmopolitanism' now?

U.N. Security Council - Veto This!

How To?

I'll repeat that McManus wants to gradually takeover international institutions as his key 'how to.'  He does not explain how that would be done. He also embraces Brooks' position against 'essentialism' – i.e. against hyper-identity politics and separate struggle perspectives which break the needed unity against capital.  In that vein McManus includes class as another identity, vociferously attacking those Marxists who think it heavily influences each identity's role in social and class life - so he gets to have it both ways.  Brooks' hero was Cornel West, a “Christian revolutionary intellectual,” who is now running as a candidate for president alone.

McManus repeatedly links 'radical liberals' and 'emergent socialists' as twins in his text, which reflects his social-democratic organizational outlook. J.S. Mill even gets to be called a “often-praiseworthy liberal socialist”!  In his summation McManus excoriates some Marxists for being too hostile to liberal ideology.  I guess the Marxists are waiting for the liberals to stop red-baiting and drop their anti-communism... which isn't going to happen. McManus sees that reform demands sometimes overlap between the Left and liberals, yet misses the class interest at bottom of each perspective. 'Radical' liberals may break from capital, but that is not the question here.

McManus criticizes some Marxists for being 'teleological Marxists' … without naming names or using quotes, failing to prove these people actually exist. (And 'teleological'? Could you come up with a more abstract nomenclature?) This analysis is part of 'eschewing elements of the Marxist tradition.'  Another thing to get rid of is 'class reductionism' - and again, no names, no quotes, nothing.  Another thing to 'chuck'?  “Marx's theory of history” which he interprets as guaranteeing a socialist outcome, a rather odd conclusion.  As if all Marxists were Karl Kautsky!  Another is vanguardism, i.e. probably Lenin's concept of a revolutionary party and not its butchered variants.  Again, no names, no quotes, nothing.  Another is some Marxists' dereliction of 'morality,' and his wish to return to 'equal moral worth' as a standard – as if being for the elimination of classes and social equality doesn't already guarantee that.  Here McManus just echoes Bernstein's attack on class struggle as key to socialism. He also wants to link to liberal Christians and the “spiritual side of human nature” - also left undefined.  Ah, our morals and theirs. Yet he reverts to political economy by wanting “global material conditions” to make it easier to recognize the equal worth of all humans.  I guess it's not all about identity.

McManus doesn't directly come out against other aspects of Marxism with more vague allegations, but he certainly could.  His conception quite clearly leads to the gradual conquest of the capitalist state, transforming it towards a gentle kind of semi-socialism.  The implication is that the whole world can slowly become Norway.  This has been the strategy of social-democracy since it began as a separate tendency in its bid to construct a capitalism with a human face.

McManus' unnamed targets are a large collection of world-wide Marxist intellectuals, academics and Marxist organizations who resist, or have resisted, reformism.  He ignores international Marxist groups and labor internationals that try to make labor internationalism concrete. He ignores the social gains of prior socialist revolutions. He doesn't even mention other international formations like the World Social Forum or the 'New International.'  His only focus is on existing trans-national institutions. Hence the need to rechristen internationalism, with its hint of Marxism, as cosmopolitanism. 

DSA here has a large stable of podcasters, writers, academics, publications and organizations.  McManus is part of this intellectual ecosystem. McManus himself has published on 'liberal socialism' and is a lecturer at the U of Michigan.  DSA has become a semi-acceptable form of pick-and-choose buffet Marxism, which allows them to get close to liberal ecosystems of power like the Democratic Party.  Given the conservatism and anti-communism embedded in U.S. culture and politics, this gives them breathing space and room to maneuver a bit. Within DSA there are working class and more radical tendencies, so there is that. I actually give plaudits to their efforts, along with Sanders, as they are clearing the way for even more radical forces.  The failed long march of their predecessor, DSOC, through the Democratic Party resulted in their host's turn to neo-liberalism.  Where will this long march end?  Certainly not with actual cosmopolitanism - perhaps only to increased drinking.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Against the Web” (Brooks); “Jacobin,” “Seventeen Contradictions of Capitalism” (Harvey); “Why the U.S. Will Never Be a Social-Democracy,” “The Democrats – A Critical History” (Selfa); “Bernie Sanders,” “The Panthers Can't Save Us Now” (Johnson).

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / September 27, 2024