To hear the full episode, become a patron at patrian.com slash netpanel pod.

So the interesting thing to me, right, is you have these people who are like, you know, many of them are like on the left.

They're studying this.

But then in trying to describe it and trying to like do something about it, they end up advocating for this system

that actually ends up reproducing many of the same problems

and then new problems through workman's comp.

And, you know, it sort of rationalizes this, you know,

process and depoliticizes it, which I feel like is a lot of the thing that confronts, like, people sort of on the left, so to speak, today is like there's this, this devil's candy of reformism, right?

And so I'm, like, curious about how that happens, or at the very least, how you think, or, you know, those people who are like, essentially, these are people who, like, read Marx, who, like, understood and, like, were at some point embroiled than, like, a more radical, like, critique of capitalism, how they get kind of bought off and ultimately help to construct

this system, which really does just allow employers to kind of intervene and, you know,

the profit motive is still there. You know, like how they get sort of bought into that system.

Yeah, totally. So, Chris Leesman is a, she's one of my, she's in my mind, one of the most sympathetic figures in the book.

Absolutely.

To me, and in a way, kind of a tragic figure.

Because, so Chris Leesman is a socialist and a lawyer and an early social scientist.

And she's a phenomenal intellectual.

And she's someone who is trying to make make trying to do some good in the world.

I mean, she's also a deep humanitarian. And, you know, I guess I would say, you know,

part of the way I wrote the book, I do think that workers comp is a qualified advance.

But I think the workers comp is still in place today. And this is sort of like a theoretical and political issue.

I didn't want to write a book that celebrates better because the better that's there is still

super fucked up.

...