In the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx makes a point that has haunted my brain ever since I first read it:
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an nightmare on the brains of the living. Marx, 1852
In my head this condenses down into a form that emphasizes the tension between agency and structure:
People make choices, but not under circumstances of their choosing.
This tension -- and in turn, our uncertainty about the relative roles played by individual choice and structural determination -- haunts political thinking across the political spectrum. And, as we’ll argue in the first chapter, tackling this tension head-on seems to almost require the use of game theory, from the social sciences.
Yapping about game theory and its formal social-scientific/mathematical concepts, however, is basically a one-way ticket to rejection on the left (despite, for example, Marx’s and Bakunin’s love for mathematics). As it stands, at best it is called “irrelevant”, and at worst it makes everyone more confused and mentally fatigued than before[1].
Nonetheless, this book is written with the conviction that there are certain people for whom this way of thinking can really “click”, and can provide a framework for thinking through some of the toughest decisions and strategic dilemmas that we face in our political organizing work[2].
At a broad level, these concepts can be classified into three interconnected “modes of thinking” through these problems:
Strategic: How can we think through our enemy’s potential responses to come up with an optimal course of action?,
Probabilistic: How can we assign and compare degrees of belief in the likelihood of these potential responses?, and
Economic: How can we incorporate the costs and benefits of these actions into our strategic and probabilistic thinking, to better understand what is and isn’t feasible[3]?
So I started putting the sections of this thing together so that I could send my written-out explanations to folks rather than ranting about them at some action or post-meeting bar... And now it’s a book! The concepts in here are variously rooted in pure math, applied math, probability, statistics, and economics, hence I just chose “reasoning” for the title.
Which points to one of the advantages of democratic decision-making (which we’ll talk about at length!): the group or committee can collectively decide to smile and nod and move on to something they believe will be more fruitful to discuss, given the matter at hand!
And, to be fair, this book was commissioned precisely by a group of people who found this approach helpful...
“Infeasibility” is often weaponized against proposals of the left, so I want to clarify my use of this term here in a guarded sense: We can use economic thinking to better understand what is and isn’t currently feasible, then we can switch to the earlier-mentioned strategic thinking to determine how we might go about making our proposals feasible.
- Marx, K. (1852). The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Die Revolution.