Give Them An Argument

Ben Burgis talks about his Jacobin article "Democrats are Screwing Up the Shutdown" and subsequent developments.

Read the article:

https://jacobin.com/2025/10/democrats-shutdown-health-care-bernie-aoc

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Become a GTAA Patron and receive numerous benefits ranging from patron-exclusive postgames every Monday night to our undying love and gratitude for helping us keep this thing going:

patreon.com/benburgis

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benburgis.substack.com

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It's Friday! Let's end the week with something fun and watch Zohran sparring with the ladies on The View about Palestine, electability, and more.

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Become a GTAA Patron and receive numerous benefits ranging from patron-exclusive postgames every Monday night to our undying love and gratitude for helping us keep this thing going:

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That's the claim made by Neil Vallelly in a shockingly poorly-informed article for Jacobin (reviewing Christopher Schuringa's book "A Social History of Analytical Philosophy"). Jacobin editor Nick French defended analytic philosophy in a counterpoint review of the same book ("Is Analytic Philosophy a Class Ideology?") published the same day. In this episode, Ben Burgis argues in this episode that French is correct but that the whole exchange suffers from ignoring the overlap between analytic philosophy and Marxism. Jacobin readers should be hearing about the (considerable!) contributions of analytical Marxist thinkers.

Read the Vallelly article:

https://jacobin.com/2025/09/analytic-philosophy-history-hume-rawls

Read the French article:

https://jacobin.com/2025/09/analytic-philosophy-history-hume-rawls

Read Matt McManus's review of the same book on Ben's Substack:

https://benburgis.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-christoph-schuringas

Follow Ben on Twitter: @BenBurgis

Follow GTAA on Twitter: @Gtaa_Show

Become a GTAA Patron and receive numerous benefits ranging from patron-exclusive postgames every Monday night to our undying love and gratitude for helping us keep this thing going:

patreon.com/benburgis

Read the weekly philosophy Substack:

benburgis.substack.com

Visit benburgis.com

Trump's new national security directive classifies all of the following as indicators of incipient political violence that need to be investigated and disrupted before they come to fruition:

• anti-Americanism,
• anti-capitalism,
• anti-Christianity,
• support for the overthrow of the United States Government,
• extremism on migration,
• extremism on race,
• extremism on gender
• hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family,
• hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and
• hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.

Beyond making the obvious point that this is almost cartoonishly authoritarian, Ben discusses the way this exactly reverses the real relationship between political violence and structural analysis.

Follow Ben on Twitter: @BenBurgis

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Become a GTAA Patron and receive numerous benefits ranging from patron-exclusive postgames every Monday night to our undying love and gratitude for helping us keep this thing going:

patreon.com/benburgis

Read the weekly philosophy Substack:

benburgis.substack.com

Visit benburgis.com

Ben Burgis addresses the controversy about the article he and Meagan Day wrote about political violence and free speech after the Charlie Kirk assassination, all of the ways the most tedious and unhelpful people on the Left found to miss the point, and the broader perils of this moment.

Read the original article:

https://jacobin.com/2025/09/charlie-kirk-murder-political-violence

Follow Meagan on Twitter: @meagankday

Follow Ben on Twitter: @BenBurgis

Follow GTAA on Twitter: @Gtaa_Show

Become a GTAA Patron and receive numerous benefits ranging from patron-exclusive postgames every Monday night to our undying love and gratitude for helping us keep this thing going:

patreon.com/benburgis

Read the weekly philosophy Substack:

benburgis.substack.com

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We're back! This last weekend, Ben Burgis was at an international conference of socialist, communist, and labor parties in Mexico City hosted by the Partido del Trabajo (the smallest but furthest left of the three parties in Claudia Sheinbaum's coalition). He introduced Richard Wolff to the assembled delegates, and Wolff have a barn burner of a talk outlining just what's happened to American society in the last few decades. We share the video + Ben gives some background on the conference and gets into what the new season of GTAA this kicks off is going to look like.

Follow Richard Wolff on Twitter: @profwolff

Follow Ben on Twitter: @BenBurgis

Follow GTAA on Twitter: @Gtaa_Show

Become a GTAA Patron and receive numerous benefits ranging from patron-exclusive postgames every Monday night to our undying love and gratitude for helping us keep this thing going:

patreon.com/benburgis

Read the weekly philosophy Substack:

benburgis.substack.com

Visit benburgis.com

After a four-year run on the show, Producer Jake is saying goodbye. (Although presumably he'll be saying "hello" again on some future episodes as a guest.) One of his predecessors, Producer Cale, joins us to see the lad off. Jay Zeroni, who's never been a GTAA producer but is still a good guy, joins us in the postgame for patrons. We're having some fun with our Season 7 finale before we take a break (at least from full episodes) for a couple weeks, and then we'll be back with some big format changes. Maybe we'll talk about some of that tonight!

Meanwhile, if you live in or near Los Angeles, come out this Saturday to see Ben Burgis and Meagan Day chat with Danish parliamentarian (and leader of the Red-Green Alliance party) Pelle Dragsted about his book "Nordic Socialism." That's going to be Saturday, August 16th at 6 PM at the Village Well bookstore in Culver City, followed by drinks nearby afterward.

Finally, not one but TWO new Capital classes will be starting on Labor Day weekend on the GTAA patreon. A new Capital Vol. 1 class (this time much slower, only a section a week instead of full chapters) will be starting on Saturday, August 30th and the long-promised Capital Vol. 2 class will be starting on Sunday, August 31st. Head over to patreon.com/benburgis if you want to sign up for either of those (or for the "GTAA University" tier where you get both at once).

Follow Ben on Twitter: @BenBurgis

Follow GTAA on Twitter: @Gtaa_Show

Become a GTAA Patron and receive numerous benefits ranging from patron-exclusive postgames every Monday night to our undying love and gratitude for helping us keep this thing going:

patreon.com/benburgis

Read the weekly philosophy Substack:

benburgis.substack.com

Visit benburgis.com

Jacobin writer and editor Meagan Day joins us to talk about what reactionary "tradwife" influencers are latching onto, and how social democracy can actually help families in a way that ugly anti-feminist culture war can't. Before that, Ben does an Opening Argument on what the Epstein scandal says about our late capitalist hellscape. (No postgame tonight, sorry!)

Read Ben's Epstein Files article:

https://jacobin.com/2025/08/epstein-scandal-trump-clinton-bipartisanship

Read Meagan's article "The Norwegian Route out of Tradwife Hell":

https://jacobin.com/2025/04/norway-trad-pappaperm-paternity-leave

Follow Meagan on Twitter: @meagankday

Follow Ben on Twitter: @BenBurgis

Follow GTAA on Twitter: @Gtaa_Show

Become a GTAA Patron and receive numerous benefits ranging from patron-exclusive postgames every Monday night to our undying love and gratitude for helping us keep this thing going:

patreon.com/benburgis

Read the weekly philosophy Substack:

benburgis.substack.com

Visit benburgis.co

The crossover event the world has eagerly awaited is here (OK, well, some of us are excited)--Matt McManus and Stormin' Norman Finkelstein on the same podcast episode. As it turns out, they share an interest in John Stuart Mill, so we thought it might be interesting to explore that. Before that, Ben does an Opening Argument on Bret Stephens's absurd genocide denialism.

Watch Norm deliver a lecture on Mill to the Communist Party of Great Britain:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt3WmzLM5G0

Read Matt on Mill's liberal socialism in Jacobin:

https://jacobin.com/2021/05/john-stewart-js-mill-liberal-socialism-locke-madison

Follow Matt on Twitter: @MattPolProf

Follow Ben on Twitter: @BenBurgis

Follow GTAA on Twitter: @Gtaa_Show

Become a GTAA Patron and receive numerous benefits ranging from patron-exclusive postgames every Monday night to our undying love and gratitude for helping us keep this thing going:

patreon.com/benburgis

Read the weekly philosophy Substack:

benburgis.substack.com

Visit benburgis.co

Nicholas Vrousalis, author of "Exploitation as Domination: What Makes Capitalism Unjust" joins Ben Burgis to talk about his book, how to rigorously think about capitalist exploitation, what it was like to work with G.A. Cohen in grad school, and more. Before that, Ben does an Opening Argument about the bizarro arguments of pro-Trump libertarians. In the postgame for patrons, Ryan Zickgraf joins us for a dramatic reading of Sophie Lewis's thoughts about the sex with octopuses.

Order Nicholas's book:

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/exploitation-as-domination-9780192867698

Follow Ryan on Twitter: @ryan_zickgraf

Follow Ben on Twitter: @BenBurgis

Follow GTAA on Twitter: @Gtaa_Show

Become a GTAA Patron and receive numerous benefits ranging from patron-exclusive postgames every Monday night to our undying love and gratitude for helping us keep this thing going:

patreon.com/benburgis

Read the weekly philosophy Substack:

benburgis.substack.com

Visit benburgis.com