Give Them An Argument

Give Them An Argument is a YouTube show and podcast hosted by Ben Burgis, who teaches philosophy, writes for Jacobin, and runs the show on a simple demand: if you hold a position, argue for it. The title is the thesis. Episodes are streamed live and Burgis works the room as he goes, greeting viewers in the chat, reading comments aloud and answering them on the spot. Each stream ends the same way, with a preview of the next topic and a three-word sign-off: 'Left is best.'

The range of material is unusual for a show that is at times just the host and a live chat. On the theory end, an episode titled 'Are Service Workers and Public Sector Employees Part of the Proletariat?' works through Capital Volume 2, which Burgis freely admits is the dry one, and argues with Ernest Mandel's reading of productive and unproductive labour. On the polemic end, an episode on the book Elite Capture picks at its definition of an elite, which Burgis notes stretches far enough to include anyone with a large Twitter following, and argues that the stretch makes the book's original point disappear. Then there are the reaction episodes. One plays Ana Kasparian's appearance on Bill Maher's Club Random and takes apart the narrative about Palestinians that Burgis says has sat unchanged in Maher's head since the seventies. Another, 'Fuentes is a Symptom', opens with an apology for making viewers listen to Nick Fuentes at all, then argues that conservatives who object only to the antisemitism, while talking about every other group the same way, will sound hypocritical to exactly the young men Fuentes is pulling in.

The register is conversational and frequently self-mocking. Burgis and his recurring guest Matt McManus, a political science professor at Spelman College, open one episode by joking that McManus is broadcasting CIA propaganda from a basement in Langley, then settle into a citation-by-citation check of a book that, as Burgis says, nobody would be discussing had it not made such a splash. Their joint episodes carry titles like 'Western Marxism Through the Looking Glass' and 'Matt McManus Read Nick Land So You Don't Have To', which give a fair sense of the service on offer. Burgis is not gentle with his targets. Maher is called ludicrous outright. But the mockery is the warm-up, not the argument. The argument is that quoting a source out of context, or defining a term so broadly that it explains nothing, is a failure you can point to on the page, and Burgis points to it.

What a listener gets is a left commentary show that treats books and clips as things to be tested rather than cheered or booed, including arguments from its own side. It suits someone who wants a Marxist reading of the service economy on one stream and a takedown of a talk-show host on another, delivered by a host who plainly enjoys the fight. A good first episode is the one on Elite Capture: Burgis is solo, the subject is a single book, and the method is on full display.