“Thank you for bringing back the joy,” Tim Walz grinned at Kamala Harris during their first joint rally back in August 2024. It was a theme he returned to often in the weeks that followed. At the DNC it was the crowd themselves who needed to be thanked for “bringing the joy to the fight”; later we learned that while Trump had “tried to steal the joy from this country,” Harris was giving us “a politics of joy.”

This didn’t turn out well, needless to say, and it was world-class cringe even at the time, partly because Walz was clearly trying to vaunt his own folksy jolliness but also because a moment’s thought would have revealed that a campaign whose main strategy was to mobilize anxieties—“we are not going back”—was anything but joyful. That said, I’ve come to think Walz was onto something. As many observed at the time, a stronger candidate than Harris might have approached interviews and town halls as opportunities to persuade rather than minefields to traverse. Joyful openness of that kind would obviously require confidence and charisma, along with empathy and intelligence and steadfast faith in the democratic process. But to truly relish politics as an opportunity to persuade, you also need to have a worldview you want to convey. And that’s where Walz’s thought gets interesting, it seems to me—because worldviews are not created equal when it comes to the psychic energies they appeal to and evoke. Some political philosophies are more joyful than others.

Take the “moderation” beloved of American Democrats. No doubt there are centrists—Harris among them—for whom careerist calculation is all there is. But contrary to public opinion there are also many who have thoughts of their own. The defining characteristic of these people’s political philosophy is the imperative to balance competing considerations. This is perfectly reasonable and admirable in its own way, but psychologically speaking it is bound to come across as responsible and dutiful rather than enlivening or exuberant. It offers no erotic appeal, where that refers to the Greek concept of erōs, the kind of desire, verging on madness, that pulls us beyond ourselves. There are political contexts in which that won’t matter: sometimes the electorate will want a safe pair of hands. But it’s hard to imagine a philosophy of moderation generating the energy to engage our deepest passions or to drive any kind of social movement, and in today’s attentional environment that is probably a weakness.

The story on the right is more complicated, given the hodgepodge of competing and cross-cutting tendencies. The reactionary ambition of reversing social and cultural change, for example, will inevitably be associated with emotions like anger and nostalgia, whereas logically speaking the small-c conservative idea of delighting in the present and finding value in tradition ought to have something intrinsically joyful about it. But if we’re looking for right-wing political exuberance today, the best place to find it must surely be in the anarcho-capitalist science-fiction reveries of self-described techno-optimists like Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, who claim to believe that unleashing the will to power of tech elites will permit the human species, or at least its most advanced representatives, to exchange earthly existence for interplanetary immortality.

I find these sub-Nietzschean fantasies terrifying, but at the same time I don’t know if they can be simply dismissed. The rise of artificial intelligence and advanced robotics certainly does shift the horizon for humanity, and this ought to affect our politics. In orienting us toward the prospect of a radically better future, techno-optimism reminds us that humans are beings that need to strive and strain for self-transcendence. And that raises an important question for those of us on the left: Where would we locate our own political erōs?

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What I’m about to say is going to seem like a bad joke: the trouble with the left is its egalitarianism. If the left is essentially constituted by its concern with equality, whether social, political or economic, then for the left to give up its egalitarianism would be for it to become the right. In which case I’ve just said that the trouble with the left is that it’s not the right—which is the kind of statement that might make your annoying uncle guffaw but otherwise illuminates little. My point, though, is that the left has a problem with the way it understands its egalitarianism. It’s true that a political movement cannot count as left-wing unless it respects the fundamental equality of all human beings. But it does not follow that the primary goal of left-wing movements must always be to make things more equal.

I don’t mean to resurrect the old straw man according to which egalitarians think everything and everyone should be the same, or that everything should be mindlessly leveled down in the name of equality. Nor do I mean to endorse the mad idea, which seems to have become dogma in some activist circles, that equality should be shelved in favor of equity, since equality is like giving each person the same size box to stand on no matter how tall they are whereas equity allows us to give them what they need to succeed. Inequity is inequality, or, to put it the other way around, to treat equality as your end is always going to involve aiming at some form of justice (or fairness or equity) that allows for different treatment of different cases, as John Rawls’s famous theory of justice does.

What I mean to say is that whatever your preferred theory of justice may be, the achievement of justice can only ever be a negative or corrective ambition as opposed to a positive or creative one. Just as peace is the name we give to the absence of war, so justice is the name we give to the absence of injustice.

The essential negativity of this goal ramifies through the politics of all who adopt it. When I close my eyes and picture Bernie Sanders, for example, I see him jabbing his finger to the rhythm of “I’m sick and tired of hearing…” Which is to say that he’s complaining. Granted, this has a lot to do with the peculiarities of Bernie’s Old Testament persona—but at the same time there’s a natural fit between Sanders and the ideas he espouses. If you think about it, movements organized around the rectification of inequality are necessarily going to spend most of their time railing against the way things are. Their leaders and operatives and intellectuals are likely to be less happy than the average person, insofar as their choice of occupation suggests they are unusually attuned to, and bothered by, the fact that life is not fair. And much of their work will consist in attempting to spread that unhappiness to others.

This constitutive propensity to radiate negativity represents a deep problem for the left. Reducing inequality in any durable way will require transforming institutions, which in turn requires a form of joint action that continually draws in new participants across time and space. Morale matters on such a long march, and it’s a short step from unhappiness to despair.

But that is not all. For insofar as activists understand their own unhappiness as a rational response to the world, they must necessarily consider its obverse, being reconciled to present conditions, as a form of intellectual or moral failure. This plays into the atmosphere of censoriousness and one-upmanship for which leftist movements are notorious, in which everything is always worse than you think and any contentment is viewed with suspicion.

Worse still, it suggests a hierarchy of virtue according to which the activist is superior to the average person. The classic way out of this is to blame the “false consciousness” engendered by a distorted media environment, but since the activist credits themselves with being able to see through the distortion the implication ends up being the same.

Put together, these various psychological tendencies—toward despair, censoriousness and contempt—are profoundly counterproductive for the egalitarian left, as George Orwell pointed out back in 1937:

it is not strictly fair to judge a movement by its adherents; but the point is that people invariably do so, and that the popular conception of Socialism is coloured by the conception of a Socialist as a dull or disagreeable person. “Socialism” is pictured as a state of affairs in which our more vocal Socialists would feel thoroughly at home. This does great harm to the cause. The ordinary man may not flinch from a dictatorship of the proletariat, if you offer it tactfully; offer him a dictatorship of the prigs, and he gets ready to fight.

If the left is to pull people toward it, it needs to orient itself around a worldview that provides positive, erōs-inducing energy. And the only way to do that, I want to suggest, is to offer a vision of the good life that goes beyond the pursuit of equality.

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In some ways this ought to be a natural step. For if justice were our only collective ambition, in a perfectly just society our only shared goal would be to maintain the status quo. But suppose we had magically achieved a “just distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation,” to use the Rawlsian jargon. Would we necessarily have a good society, or might something still be missing? It seems obvious that a society could be perfectly just without its members fully flourishing, that it would be better if its members did flourish, and that we would therefore have good reason to work together toward that end. As Rawls himself accepts, this shows that “the principles of justice are but a part” of a genuine social ideal. To fully develop such an ideal, we would need to say something about what human flourishing consists in. The trouble is that the way most leftists understand their egalitarianism makes it very hard for them to do that.

This is particularly clear in the liberal tradition. Liberal political philosophers don’t tend to discuss the good life since for the most part they believe the “basic structure of society” should remain neutral regarding different visions of it. There are different theories and arguments, but the most canonical is probably Rawls’s claim that some degree of neutrality follows from a commitment to respect one another as free and equal citizens. There is a standing question as to how it could ever be legitimate for such citizens to coerce one another, as political structures require them to. Rawls’s answer is that state coercion can only be legitimate if the basic structure of society can be justified using “public reasons,” which is to say in terms that do not presume the truth of one particular conception of the good life.

Rawls acknowledges, though, that the liberal state obviously cannot be neutral with respect to promoting core liberal values such as social justice or individual autonomy and hence that it must promote at least a partial conception of the good life. So liberalism is neutral to some extent, but not all the way. And that is because its neutrality is in the service of certain core values. The question, then, is why liberals don’t typically argue for the centrality of those liberal values to human flourishing, or, to put it another way, for the superiority of their own (partial) understanding of the good life as against rival accounts, such as the fundamentalist view that the good life consists in submission to God’s will or the Nietzschean view that the goal of society should be the flourishing of an elite. There are technicalities at work in the way Rawls presents his position, but at bottom his answer is that liberalism is a philosophy that aims to bring peace to a world riven by disputes, and full-throated arguments over the good life risk being invidious and divisive. As Robert Frost is supposed to have said, “A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.”

Socialists, by contrast, are theoretically opposed to liberal neutrality, which they take to be a cover story for capitalist domination, and they are usually comfortable with asserting the importance of meaningful work or free time or joint decision-making to the good life. In practice, however, their position often ends up being surprisingly similar to the liberal one, insofar as they tend to be unwilling to say anything substantive about what a socialist society would work toward through its democratic discussions, cooperative economy and free time. When pushed on this they sometimes cite Marx’s refusal to offer “recipes for the cookshops of the future,” the idea being that we cannot know what the post-capitalist future requires until we get there, at which point genuinely democratic assemblies will be able to decide such matters for themselves. This conflates two issues, though. It is true that social policy must always be tailored to specific circumstances; utopians like Fourier and Saint-Simon become unintentionally comic when they specify that we need forty of this and forty of that. But a philosophical account of the good life need not be so specific, and there is no reason to believe that democratic deliberation is the best way to arrive at one—not least because in any democratic assembly there is bound to be a large contingent of egalitarians who recoil at the prospect of arguing for their own vision of the good life. The reluctance of today’s socialists to discuss the good life might therefore be said to mask their underlying but unowned liberalism.

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The way out of this knot, I believe, is to conceive of equity and equality not as ends in themselves but rather as principles in the service of, and hence essentially subordinate to, a broader vision of the good life. To see what I mean, consider Zohran Mamdani’s much-lauded campaign to become mayor of New York. Mamdani is clearly an outstanding communicator, but those communication skills are bound up with his political intuition. By relentlessly focusing on memorable pocketbook policies, he conveyed an infectious confidence that we can come together to fix what is broken, and hence that a better world is possible. “Let us build a shining city for all,” as he put it in his victory speech. Critics view this as the phony joyfulness of the false-promise populist, and they may have a point. But what interests me about Mamdani and his ilk is the logic at work in their rhetoric. The politics of affordability frames the left as a practical and positive movement rather than a negative and moralistic one, yet it does so without abandoning a commitment to justice. It does call for the rich to pay their fair share, and it does oppose the very existence of billionaires—but its focus is on “a new age … of relentless improvement” that will be felt in the daily life of a taxi driver or a single mother, rather than on the statistical distribution of wealth. The point of making things affordable, in other words, is not primarily to rectify injustice but rather to bring about a better life for all.

This deceptively simple formula has two components. There is a positive end, namely “a better life,” and a regulative principle, namely “for all.” The positive end gives the content, which is fostering the good life; the regulative principle gives the form, which is respecting the fundamental equality of human beings. Verbally speaking this sounds a lot like Bernie Sanders’s powerful slogan “Medicare for All,” except that Sanders largely focuses on the form (distribution of health care to everyone as a human right) rather than the content (the tremendous good that health care brings in terms of human flourishing). If we lead with the content, by contrast, we are ipso facto in the business of portraying a world worth aspiring to. And that necessarily brings positive political energy—or as Walz would put it, a politics of joy.

That said, it’s easy for politicians to speak of “a better life” without committing themselves to anything much. Since most people’s lives would be significantly improved by having more goods and services available to them, whether through public or private means, it can seem pointlessly controversial to offer anything more specific about what makes a life go better or worse. But socialists are right to say that such neutrality favors capitalist interests. In the absence of any explicit alternative, the unspoken default position in Western society will inevitably derive from the consumer culture delivered to us by massive corporations. Think of the way Ruben Gallego speaks of the need for Democrats to respect voters’ aspirations for “a big-ass truck.” There probably is a place for big-ass trucks in leftist retail politics, if we’re being honest, but philosophically speaking the left must surely have something more ambitious to aspire to.

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For a model of how leftists can discuss the good life while retaining their egalitarian spirit, I propose we turn to a familiar source: Marx. In the wider culture Marx is generally associated with the most extreme forms of collectivism, and hence the kind of repressive herd morality whose political expression is necessarily negative. Equality-first forms of anti-capitalism do typically have a puritanical edge that involves condemning or repressing the individual desire for achievement, which in turn foments the cult of the Musk-style lone wolf and the politics that goes with it. But for Marx the whole point of collective ownership of the means of production was to allow individuals to develop themselves. This is clear enough in Capital, where Marx rails against the stunting and mutilating effects of the capitalist division of labor and suggests that under socialism the development of each worker’s “human powers” would be “an end in itself.” But the locus classicus is his early work, where he says that human emancipation will only be complete when “as an individual man, in his everyday life, in his work, and in his relationships, [man] has become a species-being.”

There is a lively and ongoing academic debate about how to understand the enigmatic and polyvalent term “species-being” (Gattungswesen) in Marx’s early writings, due to the unfortunate circumstance that Wesen can refer both to an essence (the being of such-and-such a species) and to an entity (a particular being within that species), while Gattung can refer to either species or genus, and, as if to complete the conspiracy of complication, each term is used in overlapping but competing ways by Feuerbach and Hegel, both of whom Marx borrowed from but disagreed with. Intricate Marxology being tedious to most, the notion of species-being might therefore seem unpromising as a potential lodestar for a more joyful left. But the core idea remains relatively simple and, I believe, attractive: there are certain capacities that it is fundamentally good for humans to develop and exercise.

Marx places most of his emphasis on the cooperative capacities, meaning our ability to act together for common ends, whether through economic life, in which we can make and do things for one another, or political life, in which we can debate and deliberate over what is right and good and collaborate to bring about change. When humans are deprived of the opportunity to act cooperatively, he suggests, we are unable to realize our “true nature” and are thereby deformed. Inverting this critique to expose the underlying ideal, the point becomes that there is something naturally joyous and fulfilling about cooperating with other people. One way to criticize capitalism, then, is to do so from the vantage point of those cooperative pleasures. But the argument works from the point of view of other capacities as well. Marx suggests that we have an intrinsic need for intellectual stimulation, for example, as well as aesthetic pleasure and artistic self-expression, and argues that capitalism leaves us intellectually, aesthetically and creatively stunted.

The ultimate implication of Marx’s focus on species-being is therefore that we need to reorient our concept of wealth and poverty: “The rich human being is simultaneously the human being in need of a totality of human life-activities—the man in whom his own realization exists as an inner necessity, as need.” A better life for all requires much more than resources, then. It requires developing a form of society in and through which we are each able to strain, both collectively and individually, to develop and even overcome ourselves.

Although the notion of developing and deploying our human capacities might seem initially too far removed from any concrete political project to be of any real use, on closer inspection it provides a useful framework for grasping and presenting traditional leftist priorities. Rather than offering policies such as universal childcare or health care in a spirit of complaint, as the distributional framework encourages us to, a left inspired by this aspect of Marx’s thought would offer them as part of an inspiring vision of the human wealth we could create by realizing everyone’s potential. Democratization of the workplace and the wider economy can likewise be presented as giving each person the opportunity to enjoy the process of deliberative reasoning and conscious teamwork, while activism can be understood as an occasion for self-transcendence. Public provision of adult education, creative arts, sporting facilities and national parks can then be justified not primarily as attempts to remedy this or that inequity, but rather as parts of a broader effort to make life more rewarding and more pleasurable for all.

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Orienting ourselves toward species-being could also help the left understand its place in the fight that seems likely to define the coming decades, over the spread of artificial intelligence. It’s easy for the left to just be negative about the arrival of AI, given its potential to cause mass unemployment and ecological catastrophe, not to mention the alliance between Donald Trump and the people who seem most excited about it. But if we want to compete with what I have called the “erotic” politics of techno-optimists like Thiel and Andreessen, today’s left must do more than simply lament AI; we must ask ourselves what a joyful, future-oriented politics of AI would look like—or, to put it another way, how AI might contribute to the good life for all.

There is a classic utopian vision, dating back to Marx and beyond, of communally owned technology liberating us from unnecessary tasks and unleashing an era of leisure and luxury in which life’s most pressing question becomes which of our personal projects to pursue—“fully automated luxury communism,” as the socialist critic Aaron Bastani calls it. Realistically, though, the most promising technology in AI and related fields such as robotics is likely to remain in the hands of massive profit-seeking corporations whose interests are hardly aligned with those of ordinary people. Since these corporations are making their fortunes by privatizing what is an intrinsically public inheritance, namely the past labors of scientists, writers and humans in general, the notion of collective ownership does need to be raised—but the truth is that nobody knows how to socialize the tech industry without inducing a political nightmare. Our best option may be to socialize a good portion of the profits, but given the international arms race over AI even that may be easier said than done.

A more immediately promising route for today’s left, I want to suggest, would be to pick up a different strand in Marx. Marx famously distinguished between a “class in itself” and a “class for itself.” A class in itself is a mass of people with “a common situation, common interests” that remains unaware of those shared interests. A class for itself is not just a mass of people in the same situation but a group that is constituted by its members’ recognition that they have structurally similar interests. It is only when a class in itself begins to recognize its common interests, and thereby becomes a class for itself, that it can consciously act together to advance them. Marx thought that the structure of capitalist exploitation means that the proletariat is in itself a “class against capital,” but that it would only become a genuine group agent as more and more unemployed or overworked proletarians began to congregate in densely packed inner cities and started to understand their common position with the aid of organizers and theorists.

Notice that there is a potential class that we all belong to, namely the human. Although humans spend a lot of time fighting and competing, we do have some shared interests—we still need the earth to continue existing, for example. We have no reason to notice those interests until they’re threatened by certain types of catastrophe, like the arrival of a pandemic, and even if we did notice them we might not act accordingly, given the difficulty of collective action—but to try to get us to do so would be a perfectly coherent aim for a political movement.

It seems to me that the advent of AI makes it essential to develop such a humanistic politics. Just as racist policies and practices force people to consider themselves as members of a certain race, and thereby give them certain interests in common, so LLMs, being trained to interact with us qua humans, predicting what we want to hear on the basis of generalizations regarding the entirety of surveyable humanity, will gradually make us all more aware of our membership of the human species. And we clearly do have shared interests vis-à-vis AI systems. These interests are registered in fantastical form through apocalyptic warnings that AI will eventually kill us all, but in a more down-to-earth key there can be no doubt that AI threatens to strip us of vital capacities, such as the ability to think for ourselves. We therefore have a shared interest, just as humans, in ensuring that AI is used to develop our capacities rather than to diminish them—and hence in developing institutions to protect and promote our species-being.

A vibrant contemporary left would articulate this humanistic standpoint both theoretically and practically. Whereas Silicon Valley and its ideologists will aim to maximize the reach of AI into every corner of society, a left guided by species-being would welcome technology when it enhances the activities that give meaning to our lives and raise the barricades when it threatens to replace them. On a case-by-case basis, it would consider the various ways in which new technology makes it easier or harder to take joy in the distinctive experience of being human, guided by Marx’s exhortation to “emancipate” our capacities for “seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, being aware, sensing, wanting, acting, loving.” The place of egalitarianism within this vision is simply to allow each person to experience and explore the various dimensions of human flourishing, new and old, for themselves. As Marx put it, “a higher form of society” would be one “whose basic principle is the full and free development of each individual.”

There is no hint of sectarian oppression in this collective project, no need for liberals to intervene with their peace-preserving shield of neutrality. Nor is there any need to close down the cookshops of the future, since although we can certainly speak of what Marx calls “human nature in general,” the really interesting questions concerning our capacities come when we start thinking about “human nature as it is modified by each historical epoch.” Living with any form of AI will change what it means to be human, and hence what it means for humans to flourish—living alongside generalized super-intelligence all the more so. What will surely remain throughout these changes, however, is our collective interest, just as members of the human species, in the prospect of finite, vulnerable, creative beings like us surviving and thriving in a world of machines, learning to find joy in developments now unknown. At a time when the left so often appears out of ideas and energy, that seems to me a future worth fighting for.

Art credit: Jakub Janovský, Swing, 2023. Concrete, iron swing and structure, concrete blocks. 200 × 347 × 340 cm. © Tomas Rasl for Trafo Gallery. Courtesy of the artist and Trafo Gallery.