The self-destructive implosion of capitalism has revived interest in liberal socialism, a tradition that promises to marry egalitarian reform with the institutional frameworks of liberal democracy. A good example of this interest is the post-2008 resurgence of Keynesian economics. In Keynes’s own historical schema, liberalism’s future lay in the capacity of the state to guide markets toward social stability and justice without abolishing private enterprise. His concept of a “third era”–the period of stabilization–anticipated a form of regulated capitalism sustained by collective coordination through governmental, corporate, and union mechanisms. The 2008 global financial crisis exposed the structural fragility of neoliberal deregulation, compelling even ardent market advocates to endorse state intervention.

This moment thus reopened the political hope for stabilization that Keynes had earlier articulated: a mixed economy in which public authority reins in capitalistic excesses while preserving individual enterprise. The widespread appeal of Keynesian ideas in the aftermath of the crisis–from the advocacy of fiscal stimulus to popular calls for a “new New Deal”–revealed a longing for a morally infused economic order that could reconcile efficiency with equity. The tenor of this resurgence was neither revolutionary nor nostalgic, but reformist, seeking to humanize capitalism through planning, redistribution, and public investment. In this sense, post-2008 Keynesianism reflected a renewed faith in liberal socialism as the middle ground between the coercive extremes of state collectivism and the destructive anarchy of market fundamentalism.

The appeal of liberal socialism lies in presenting socialism without rupture, as a steady extension of moral and political principles already latent in liberal modernity. Michael Walzer, for instance, conceives liberal socialism as the inner realization of liberalism’s own moral and procedural logic rather than a historical or theoretical rupture from it. The “liberal” in liberal socialism, he writes, “means that socialism can only be achieved with the consent of the people; it must be fought for democratically,” and further that “there will be room for socialists to disagree among themselves… within a liberal-democratic framework.” By grounding socialism in the liberal virtues of pluralism, consent, and self-limitation, Walzer presents it as a continuation of the liberal project rather than its negation.

Matt McManus stands as one of the most articulate contemporary defenders of the liberal socialist orientation, advancing a vision of “cosmopolitan socialism” grounded in the axiom of human equality and the cultivation of human flourishing. Yet this vision comes at a price. By translating socialism into the realization of a moral essence, McManus reduces history to a teleological unfolding and sidelines the concrete antagonisms of capital, empire, and counter-revolution. What emerges is less a strategy for emancipation than a secularized theology of progress, where the defeats and reversals of the past appear as temporary distortions rather than as revelations of the project’s inner limits. The task, then, is to examine how this humanist framework forecloses political strategy and why a materialist approach attentive to coercion, crisis, and class struggle is indispensable for thinking about socialism today.

Hegelian Influence

McManus’ reflections contain a deep contradiction between what he concedes and what he valorizes. He admits that welfare-state projects in the North were “fragile and insufficient,”^[1] and “in no small part dependent on the super-exploitation of the developing world.”^[2] Taking a retrospective view, he asserts that the “welfarist efforts to humanize capitalism left many disparities of power intact, leaving the door open for the neoliberal turn of the 1970s-80s and then the reactionary backlash of the 2010s.”^[3] This statement accepts that fragility and insufficiency part of the very design of welfarism. The reforms were reversible because they left untouched the structural domination of capital and their achievements could be rolled back once global accumulation shifted. At this level of reasoning, McManus recognizes that the welfare state carried within itself the seeds of its undoing.

Yet McManus still insists on treating Northern welfarism as a model of “tangible” socialist success, framing it as “chiefly responsible for constructing the freest and most prosperous societies the world has yet seen.”^[4] How does this shift take place? Through an appeal to a Hegelian logic of continuity. He shifts from fragility as constitutive to fragility as incidental, claiming that “a sufficient quantity of major reforms could lead over time to a qualitative transformation.”^[5] The invocation of the Hegelian lesson–that “sufficiently granular transitions can aggregate to the point where a qualitative shift in the nature of our social forms can occur”^[6]–serves here as a way of bracketing the very reversibility just conceded. Instead of treating reversibility as the truth of the project, McManus subsumes it into a narrative of gradual advance, where even the insufficiencies become stepping-stones toward a “more totalizing view.”^[7] In this Hegelian framing, Northern welfarism becomes the emblem of an essence, an ideal form of liberal socialism that history never fully corrupts but only delays or distorts. The defeats of the 1970s and 80s appear as extrinsic accidents, not as revelations of the project’s inner limits. History, with all its reversals and counter-revolutions, is reduced to a series of obstacles blocking the realization of an essence that supposedly endures untouched. Thus, welfarism is mystified into a transhistorical model, its fragility transfigured into the mere appearance of weakness within an essence destined for eventual fulfillment.

The philosophical positing of an essence is directly linked to the Hegelian idea of quantitative accumulation gradually transforming into quality. Writing about the Badiou-Hegel debate on infinity, philosopher Tzuchien Tho focuses on how Hegel diagnoses the “bad infinite” of mathematics: an indefinite progression of quantity, endlessly divisible or extensible, that remains trapped in its own negation of the finite.^[8] The bad infinite is only the negation of the finite, due to which it never attains an affirmative status, never stabilizes into a determinate unity. The bad infinite is “bad” because it resists closure, an image of discontinuity in which the finite refuses reconciliation.

Hegel’s response is to posit a “good infinite” that sublates this endless progression into a self-relating dynamic unity. The bad infinite of quantitative progression is thus incorporated into a higher order movement, where the finite negates itself and in so doing discovers its true infinity as self-relation. In this move, the apparent discontinuity of the quantitative series, its resistance to exhaustion, is dissolved by being subsumed within a dialectical process that converts negation into self-determination.

This is why Tho stresses that the “finite is not sublated by the infinite as by a power existing outside it; on the contrary, its infinity consists in sublating its own self.”^[9] The discontinuous excess of the real, expressed in the interminable divisibility of the continuum, is thus redescribed as an immanent feature of the finite, destined to reveal the higher necessity of the good infinite. Quantity’s indefinite instability becomes the very proof of its destined transformation into quality.

By framing the bad infinite as deficient, Hegel introduces from the outset a teleological standard according to which the indefinite must culminate in unity. The correlation of determination and unity, where the indefinite is deemed lacking precisely because it fails to ground itself in conceptual totality, suppresses the possibility that discontinuity might have its own ontological weight. The dialectical dynamization functions here as a transcendental solution: it imposes a unity external to the phenomena themselves, retroactively assigning them a purposive trajectory.

The resistance of the real, the sheer interminability of division or the opacity of discontinuity, is neutralized by being recoded as a moment in a teleological sequence. What appears as rupture or excess is preemptively integrated into a dialectical dynamism that guarantees resolution, or conceptual reflexivity. Sociologist Nathan Coombs says that this Hegelian thesis of quantity transforming into quality only works because Hegel restricts his mathematical material to ratios of integers.^[10] When Hegel equates a ratio of whole numbers (e.g. 1/4) with an infinite decimal expansion on the other side of the equation (0.25…), it looks like he is integrating the problem of irrationals into his dialectical system. But in fact, as Coombs stresses, Hegel’s Logic leaves irrationals outside the frame. For Hegel, the “infinite” series on the right-hand side is still tethered to a determinate ratio of integers on the left. This allows him to dialecticize infinity, transforming what would otherwise be a “spurious” infinite regress into a rationally contained relation, without confronting the discontinuity introduced by irrational magnitudes. The decimal expansions of irrational numbers are infinite, non-repeating, and structurally unanchored in integer ratios. The Pythagorean shock at √2 already dramatized this: the diagonal of a unit square cannot be expressed as any rational relation between integers.

This introduces discontinuity into mathematics because it forces a rupture in the seemingly smooth order of number: what looked like a seamless rational continuum turns out to be riddled with magnitudes that refuse ratio. The philosophical cost of suppressing these disorderly magnitudes, Coombs argues, is high. By excluding irrationals, Hegel’s version of the infinite remains a rational infinite, confined to a subset of the real numbers. What looks like a resolution of discontinuity, the passage from quantity into quality as if no break remained, is actually achieved by bracketing out the very kinds of magnitudes that force mathematics to reckon with genuine discontinuities. Hegel’s “good infinite,” therefore, is possible only because the troubling presence of irrationals has been suppressed.

This makes his achievement appear less as a forward step toward the developments in mathematics later associated with Cantor, and more a philosophical domestication of infinity that depends on closure around the rationals. Cantor, by contrast, turns precisely to the irrationals to ground his conception of the actual infinite and the pluralization of infinities. For Cantor, the infinite of the rationals is a “bad infinity,” a veiled extension of the finite, whereas the irrationals are the key to the higher-order, properly actual infinite. From this perspective, Hegel’s dialectical continuity is revealed as a kind of evasion: the leap from quantity to quality works only because the mathematics Hegel accepts is shorn of the disruptive cases where discontinuity is unavoidable.

The avoidance of discontinuity is evident in McManus’ metaphor of shipbuilding. He suggests that the social-democratic ship that “took us to the moon” (i.e. the welfare state) can serve as a model for building a socialist ship to “take us to Mars.”^[11] However, a ship designed for the moon cannot simply be adjusted and reused for a journey to Mars. The conditions of the two voyages are entirely different. Reaching Mars requires new solutions for propulsion, shielding against cosmic radiation, and sustaining human life for over a year. It also demands technologies for entry and landing in an atmosphere unlike either Earth’s or the moon’s. The Apollo ships provided none of these answers. They solved a very specific problem that cannot be stretched into a solution for Mars.

Take radiation shielding as an example. Apollo astronauts spent only about a week outside Earth’s magnetic protection, and thin aluminum hulls were enough. A Mars mission would expose astronauts to dangerous radiation for months at a time, so an entirely new system must be invented. Or take life-support: Apollo carried supplies for a short trip, but Mars requires recycling systems that can sustain human life for years. Even the act of landing is different: parachutes worked on Earth, rockets on the moon, but Mars’ thin atmosphere requires new, unprecedented technologies like sky cranes or inflatable decelerators. In all these respects, the Apollo designs are of almost no direct use.

This shows that the moon ship matters historically but not as a constitutive model. It proves that space travel is possible and it testifies to a past success, but it does not provide a living framework for building the Mars ship. The real work for Mars depends on breaks, ruptures, and inventions that go beyond what Apollo could ever offer. If in science progress rests on discontinuities rather than the smooth extension of past designs, politics depends on the same rupture. The compromises that made welfare states possible (e.g. compromises with capital, reliance on imperial extraction, containment of militant labor) cannot be retooled into a pathway toward socialism. At most, they show that under very specific global and historical conditions, temporary gains could be made. But they offer no model to be carried forward. Like the moon ship, welfare states possess historical relevance, not universalizable relevance for the struggles ahead.

Humanism

It is now clear that the conversion of Northern welfarism into an essence untarnished by history works only because McManus ignores the real discontinuity (continued imperialist and capitalist social relations) on which it is based. The construction of a politico-philosophical essence is part of his broader theoretical humanism, which posits human flourishing as the ultimate horizon of political and social life. His statement that “liberal socialists are normative individualists, in holding that the well-being of concrete individuals should be the ultimate end of society,”^[12] establishes the anthropological premise of his argument. Human beings are imagined as bearers of powers and capabilities whose full development provides the measure of justice. Political institutions, in this view, are judged according to the degree to which they allow these latent capacities to be realized. This mode of theorizing proceeds by stipulating human flourishing as a pre-given telos. In doing so, it shifts socialism away from an immanent critique of historically specific forms of domination toward a transhistorical anthropology in which politics becomes the art of institutionalizing an already intelligible essence of the human.

This humanist orientation becomes explicit in McManus’s reliance on Aristotelian language of powers and capabilities. He writes that “far more important for pursuing a qualitatively good life is the development of their human powers or capabilities. This has a clear Aristotelian ring to it.”^[13] By invoking Aristotle, J.S. Mill, and later Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, McManus situates liberal socialism squarely within a normative philosophical tradition that defines the political task as cultivating the capacities of human beings. The problem of alienation, in this register, is interpreted less as the outcome of determinate class relations than as a distortion of human potential. The task of socialism is therefore conceived in moral-anthropological terms: to create institutional conditions that enable individuals to lead “good lives.” The result is a framework in which socialism appears less as the historical overcoming of capital than as the perfection of liberal humanist ideals.

Nowhere is this clearer than in his rejection of the “extractive or acquisitive ethic characteristic of classical liberalism.”^[14] For McManus, the ethic of accumulation distorts the cooperative and relational dimensions of human life. The remedy for this is that “[i]nstitutions need to be designed or reformed in ways that facilitate the development of human powers or capacities,” so that we can “pursue non-alienated and non-competitive relations.”^[15] Yet once again, the argument remains tethered to an anthropological constant: the problem with extractive individualism is that it distorts the conditions under which human beings can actualize their powers. The critique thus stays within the orbit of humanism, positing a pre-set image of cooperative and relational humanity that institutions must recover. It does not theorize alienation as the product of historically specific relations of production, but as a moral aberration from human potential.

The extension of humanist principles into the family and economy reflects the same orientation. McManus asserts that “ultimately, the core argument for extending liberal democratic principles to the family and economy is a moral rather than a strictly economic one.”^[16] This reveals how politics, for him, is predetermined by a moral telos. The problem with this approach becomes clear if we consider the discourse of “male loneliness.” This discourse begins from the assumption that men and women alike possess an abstract human need for emotional connection that patriarchy suppresses. On this view, the cure is not confrontation with patriarchal power but sympathetic rapport with men, allowing them to express vulnerability without destabilizing their identity.

This logic mirrors McManus’ framework: first a universal human essence is posited, then social relations are seen as distortions of that essence, and finally politics becomes the task of recovery. Yet this chain collapses under scrutiny. There is no untainted human condition of equal emotional needs; from the outset, individuals are formed within hierarchies of class and gender. As philosopher Kate Manne observes, dominant agents are “mired in certain kinds of delusions about their own social positions.”^[17] Men within patriarchy do not simply lack connection; their very conception of connection is shaped by power. Genuine transformation cannot come from appeals to a shared human essence but from feminist struggle that dismantles the structures of masculinity and centers women's experience.

This example illustrates the larger flaw of liberal socialism: by positing human flourishing as an invariant moral essence, it reduces alienation to a deviation from what is already given. McManus’ moralism leaves politics at the level of institutional design, while historical materialism insists that freedom emerges only retrospectively, through struggles that destroy existing relations and create new conditions. The moral enlightenment of men can only come retrospectively through the positing of the feminist standpoint, which enables men to relate themselves critically vis-à-vis the patriarchy. Masculinity can be felt as oppressive, can be relegated as a relic of the past, only if we have a new feminist present where the struggle of women constantly destroys the integrity of male privilege. Marx generalized this point as a theoretical principle when he wrote that “the anatomy of the human is the key to the anatomy of the ape.”^[18] The present moment, as the product of the unfolding of past events, allows us to comprehend the level of freedom that we enjoy. Any narrative of freedom is rooted in the linking together of different historical moments. Only through this interlinkage, this series of concrete social relations, can we build standards of freedom. Freedom is an immanent product of history, not a transcendental essence that is waiting to be realized.

Insofar as MacManus ignores the immanence of freedom, he believes that the end of politics is already given in human essence (flourishing, non-alienated life, non-domination). The task of political theory is to chart how incremental improvements in living standards, workplace safety, and labor organization can aggregate into a qualitative transformation. When McManus cites the Hegelian lesson of quantity changing into quality, he effectively reasserts a humanist teleology: history unfolds as the gradual realization of human potential, with contingency functioning only as the friction to be overcome along the way.

Althusser helps us see the precise theoretical danger of this move. For Hegel, “the ‘circumstances’ or ‘conditions’ are ultimately no more than phenomena and therefore evanescent,” mere givens to be sublated by Spirit’s inner necessity.^[19] McManus repeats this by relegating imperialism to the status of a contingent background. He admits that Nordic social democracy was “in no small part dependent on the super-exploitation of the developing world,” yet this appears in his framework as an accident of history rather than as a structural condition of existence. Imperialism is acknowledged, but only to be set aside, just as Hegel treats geography or climate as incidental material to be aufgehoben in Spirit. In Althusser’s terms, McManus’s dialectic “rejects both the structured complex whole and its conditions of existence by its prior assumption of a pure, simple interiority.”^[20] The pure interiority here is human flourishing itself, which dictates the direction of history regardless of the determinate conditions of global capitalism.

The result is a Hegelian-humanist political theory in which contradiction is never truly overdetermined. For McManus, welfare reforms and labor struggles appear as moments in a cumulative process that, in sufficient quantity, will yield socialism. Yet this complexity is only “the complexity of a cumulative internalization which is only apparently an overdetermination,” as Althusser says of Hegel.^[21] External determinations–imperial dependency, class struggle across uneven geographies, the coercive functions of the capitalist state–never enter as real, decentered conditions shaping the trajectory of reform. Instead, they appear as setbacks, interruptions, or temporary contingencies. McManus can therefore maintain a faith that history bends toward human flourishing, provided that reform accumulates.

The Question of Strategy

A Marxist perspective insists otherwise. The “conditions of existence” of Northern welfare states were not accidents but “a real absolute, the given-ever-pre-givenness of the existence of the complex whole which reflects them inside its own structure.” In his book Beyond Liberalism, economist Prabhat Patnaik notes that the replacement of post-WWII dirigisme by neoliberal globalization “was not an accidental phenomenon; it arose from the fact that postwar dirigisme had run into severe dysfunctionality, at the root of which was the conflict between what the [capitalist] system needs in its spontaneity… and what pervasive state intervention had secured both at home and abroad.”^[22] Two points are to be noted about the “golden age” of capitalism. First, in the United States, the high employment rates characteristic of this period were sustained by “military Keynesianism.”^[23] This refers to the high military expenditures that the US undertook for its newfound role as the leader of the capitalist world battling against communism and national liberation movements. In Europe, a strengthened working class was unwilling to return to prewar conditions of unemployment and poverty. The proximity of the Soviet Union amplified pressures on ruling classes to undertake state intervention. State measures redistributed income in a manner that maintained high aggregate demand, fueling investment, productivity growth, and wage gains.^[24] As a result, unemployment remained historically low and worker living standards improved significantly, giving rise to the perception that capitalism had entered a qualitatively new “golden age.”

Second, postcolonial regimes undertook expansive land-augmenting investments in irrigation, infrastructure, and agricultural modernization.^[25] These measures expanded the supply of primary commodities. Simultaneously, in their drive for industrialization, these states competed for export markets, creating competition among Third World primary producers that kept commodity prices low. For a hegemonic currency to function as the world’s wealth medium, commodity prices must remain steady in its terms and global demand must be managed so that inflationary pressures do not erode money’s store-of-value function. During colonial rule, the management of such pressures took place through the direction imposition of income deflation, which itself was expressed in two ways: “deindustrialization of the colonial economy that resulted from the sale of metropolitan goods, and the ‘drain of surplus’ from the colonial economy through the taxation system.”^[26] In the postwar world order, land-augmentation measures and statist industrialization contributed to the lowering of primary commodity prices, replacing the colonial method of income deflation.

It was the very absence of a definite method of income deflation that accounts for the weakness of the “golden age.”^[27] By the late 1960s, supply constraints in primary commodities began to surface and the resulting rise in their prices generated inflationary pressures within the metropolitan economies. This inflation was magnified by the vast pools of finance that had accumulated during the long boom, making the stabilization of money values increasingly fragile. Under colonialism, such pressures had been managed through coercive income deflation in the periphery. After decolonization, however, these instruments were no longer available. The temporary substitutes that had kept commodity prices low–land-augmenting investments in agriculture and intense export competition among postcolonial states–could not endure indefinitely. Once these substitutes eroded, the system lost its capacity to contain inflation without a crisis. This is why the “golden age” proved unsustainable: its prosperity rested on conjunctural and historically specific conditions, and when those conditions dissolved, inflation, financial concentration, and global instability undermined the very foundations of the postwar order.

Patnaik shows that the very structural logic that made postwar dirigisme possible has been transformed under contemporary globalization.^[28] Any attempt to revive postwar-style dirigisme faces two insurmountable obstacles: first, globalized finance, anchored in the corporate-financial oligarchies of advanced economies, will resist measures that could undermine its hegemony; second, unilateral attempts at dirigiste revival by any single state would provoke capital flight and precipitate crisis. This analysis indicates that to universalize the Nordic model, as McManus suggests, without theorizing the strategic significance of imperialism as constitutive to politics, is to lapse back into humanist teleology: the presumption that what matters is the moral end of human flourishing, with structural determinations relegated to the status of historical contingencies.

The foreclosure of the question of strategy is evident in McManus’ conceptualization of “cosmopolitan socialism.” McManus organizes his project of “cosmopolitan socialism” around what he calls a “foundational” recognition: “[c]oncluding that each human life is of equal moral worth is foundational to the cosmopolitan socialist project.”^[28] This affirmation of moral equality functions as the decisive axiom. From it flows the insistence that “we should indeed be cosmopolitans,” that “each human life has equal worth means all human lives have equal worth, including those which we may never see.”^[29] McManus therefore grounds his vision of institutional reform, global solidarity, and redistribution on the ontological priority of a human essence waiting for realization.

Yet this formulation sidesteps the terrain of antagonism. By translating political struggle into the gradual unfolding of moral recognition, McManus systematically avoids engaging the central strategic problem: how socialism can emerge in a global system where coercion, counter-revolution, and imperial power structure the field of possibility. When he claims that the “ambitions of cosmopolitan socialists should be to either govern or steer” international institutions like the UN, ICC, and WTO “in a more radical direction,” he treats these institutions as imperfect but neutralizable instruments.^[30] Their actual constitution through imperial power, US hegemony, and structural adjustment is acknowledged only as background distortion.

The historical record, however, shows that attempts to institutionalize socialism have encountered a repertoire of violence, capital discipline, and military domination. McManus’ text contains gestures to this terrain but quickly subsumes them into moral exhortation. He admits that “powerful conservative states will resist efforts to build the kind of movements described every step of the way; including through violence, as the long history of American imperialism in Latin America testifies to,”^[31] yet this acknowledgment is immediately neutralized by a turn to technocratic remedies: “[o]ne way to inhibit this will be to impose regulatory restrictions on the sources of funding and influence that fuel the political right.”^[32] The immense apparatus of coercive violence is here reduced to the problem of campaign finance regulation and monopoly control, as if imperial counter-revolution were reducible to domestic corruption.

This points to a deeper conceptual displacement. By positing the equal worth of persons as essence, McManus constructs a politics of moral persuasion rather than antagonistic struggle. The neoliberal order is explained as a “coordinated and global assault,” but the lesson he draws is that “we should take a page from the neoliberal playbook” by “insulating” socialist reforms within international law.^[33] What disappears here is the fact that neoliberal ascendancy succeeded through coercion, repression, and class violence as much as through normative persuasion. To transpose this history into a moral register is to foreclose the real question of strategy: how to build the organizational and counter-coercive capacities necessary to confront capital flight, imperial violence, and military repression.

In this sense, McManus’ liberal socialism actively blocks strategic thought. By treating socialism as the realization of an already-given moral essence–“each individual life has a sacred dignity regardless of where we begin or the mistakes and failures we all make”^[34]–politics is displaced into an eschatological horizon. History becomes the arena in which this truth is gradually institutionalized, with resistance treated as contingent distortion rather than structural antagonism. The coercive realities of capital and empire are acknowledged only in passing, never as determinants requiring concrete strategic innovations. Thus, the very axiom of moral equality functions to foreclose politics as strategy, turning cosmopolitan socialism into a secularized moral theology rather than a project of antagonistic struggle.

Patnaik’s reflections on delinking provide a striking counterpoint to the abstract, moralized framing of “cosmopolitan socialism” found in McManus. Where McManus grounds his vision in the axiom of moral equality of persons, thereby bypassing the terrain of coercion, Patnaik insists on foregrounding the strategic dimension of political economy: the transitional crises, the retaliatory mechanisms of imperialism, and the class forces that shape the viability of any project of autonomy. His analysis demonstrates an acute attentiveness to the means through which an emancipatory break might actually unfold, rather than assuming its conditions in advance.

Patnaik begins by emphasizing that the “most serious constraint on delinking is the transitional pain it brings,” a pain felt most acutely by those “sections of the population whose long-term interest lies in delinking.”^[35] Unlike McManus’ emphasis on securing socialism through the normative legitimacy of international law, Patnaik stresses that structural constraints operate immediately, producing financial crises that can derail attempts at autonomy even before they take root. He underlines how the outflow, or even the anticipation of outflow, of finance capital can plunge a country into turmoil. Even with strict capital controls, the cessation of inflows “will certainly lead to a cessation of capital inflows, which will then make the balance of payments unsustainable, requiring import controls.”^[36] This problem, he insists, is political, since such controls reduce domestic absorption, particularly consumption, which in turn “impinge particularly on the poor, the very segment in whose interest delinking is being undertaken.”^[37] Globalization has the “backing of major advanced country governments,” who enforce its imperatives through sanctions.^[38] Countries attempting to delink “immediately incur the wrath of the advanced country governments,” which undermines even the most carefully planned import substitution strategies.^[39] Here, Patnaik grounds antagonism in concrete relations of coercion–military, financial, and geopolitical–whereas McManus reduces antagonism to a conceptual or historical residue that moral equality would eventually supersede.

The transitional hardships and sanctions “soon [cause the government to] lose even such support from its own base as might have helped it to face up to its opponents.”^[40] Far from positing an immediate and universal “cosmopolitan solidarity,” Patnaik foregrounds the fragility of working-class support under conditions of crisis and repression. His focus on transitional contradictions makes clear that emancipatory politics cannot rely on ethical axioms alone.

Finally, Patnaik’s attention to alternative institutional arrangements, such as BRICS currency frameworks and China’s oil trade agreements, demonstrates a concrete strategic orientation toward reducing transitional pain.^[41] By invoking the example of bilateral trade under the Soviet Union, he shows that new institutional arrangements are indispensable for cushioning the blow of delinking. “Having an alternative trading and currency arrangement… can reduce this transitional pain,”^[42] he writes, underscoring that breakthroughs depend on the creation of material infrastructures of support, rather than on appeals to moral axioms.

If we are to deal with a world shaped by intensifying capitalist crises and repression, it is imperative that we start thinking in terms of political strategy rather than seek comfort in the humanist abstractions of liberal socialism.

1. Matt McManus, “Defending Bhaskar Sunkara,” Sublation Media, July 31, 2022, https://sublationmedia.com/defending-bhaskar-sunkara/.

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2. Matt McManus, The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism (Routledge, 2025), 5.

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3. Matt McManus, “Revisiting Tony Smith’s 'Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism',” LiberalCurrents, May 16, 2023, https://www.liberalcurrents.com/revisiting-tony-smiths-beyond-liberal-egalitarianism/.

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4. McManus, “Defending Bhaskar Sunkara.”

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5. McManus, “Revisiting Tony Smith’s 'Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism'.”

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6. McManus, The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism, 116.

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7. Ibid.

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8. Tzuchien Tho, “The Good, the Bad, and the Indeterminate: Hegel and Badiou on the Dialectics of the Infinite,” in Badiou and Hegel: Infinity, Dialectics, Subjectivity, ed. Jim Vernon and Antonio Calcagno (Lexington Books, 2015), 38, 39.

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9. Hegel, cited in Tho, “The Good, the Bad, and the Indeterminate,” 39.

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10. Nathan Coombs, History and Event: From Marxism to Contemporary French Theory (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 34-26.

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11. Matt McManus, “Closer Than Mars,” Damage, June 4, 2024, https://damagemag.com/2025/06/04/closer-than-mars/.

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12. McManus, The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism, 18.

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13. Ibid, 19.

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14. Ibid.

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15. Ibid.

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16. Ibid, 21.

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17. Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford University Press, 2018), 157.

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18. For the philosophical relevance of this statement, see: Ray Brassier, “Strange Sameness: Hegel, Marx, and the Logic of Estrangement,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 25, no. 1 (2019), https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0969725X.2019.1568737.

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19. Louis Althusser, For Marx (The Penguin Press, 1969), 208.

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20. Ibid.

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21. Ibid, 101.

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22. Prabhat Patnaik, “The Struggle for Individual Freedom,” in Beyond Liberalism (Columbia University Press, 2024).

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23. Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History and the Present (Monthly Review Press, 2021), 89.

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24. Ibid, 89, 90.

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25. Ibid, 91.

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26. Ibid, 87.

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27. Ibid, 92-94.

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28. Patnaik, “The Struggle for Individual Freedom.”

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29. Matt McManus, “What Would a Cosmopolitan Socialism Look Like?,” in A How To Guide to Cosmopolitan Socialism: A Tribute to Michael Brooks (Zero Books, 2023).

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30. Ibid.

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31. Ibid.

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32. Ibid.

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33. Ibid.

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34. Ibid.

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35. Ibid.

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36. Patnaik, “Freedom in the Era of Globalization,” in Beyond Liberalism.

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37. Ibid.

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38. Ibid.

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39. Ibid.

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40. Ibid.

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41. Prabhat Patnaik, “Economic Response to US Imperialism,” Peoples Democracy, January 19, 2025, https://peoplesdemocracy.in/2025/0119_pd/economic-response-us-imperialism.

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42. Ibid.

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