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“Mosley presents a short tract with a lengthy title: Folding the Red into the Black; or, Developing a Viable Untopia for Human Survival in the 21st Century. Mosley’s coinage “untopia” indicates a practical departure from attempts to engineer a “perfect state of social harmony.” He never claims a perfect solution. The strategy throughout this plainspoken essay is to release the project of human survival from partisan baggage. Utopias contrived since the rise of industry have been socialist alternatives to capitalist reality, even as capitalist modernization has been sold globally with the same kind of starry-eyed ideals and force-fed militarism. The abstract ideas and “virtual” structures humans are violently subjected to are “derived from false notions of history and the subsequent confusion about who, and what, we are.” Both socialist and capitalist ideals threaten to dehumanize the global population – Mosley prefers the universal term “denizens” – by treating humans uniformly like drones in the first instance, and running most of them like mules in the latter. Therefore, the early sections of the book delve into Mosley’s conception of people. As a streetwise author of crime fiction, he has a certain authority to call upon in this area. But the key human insight around which he constructs his society derives from his own introspective nature as an artist: a society has to allow for the creativity of its denizens, and will be all the more successful and humane if it does.”

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“Government should subsidise a small set of basic foodstuffs, so that: ‘For the most basic amount of money, loose change someone could earn bringing in glass bottles for reclamation, any man or woman could feed themselves and their dependents.’ (The US government already spends billions of dollars a year on corn subsidies alone, he notes, so why not ‘alter the already existing system to benefit the living, breathing bodies that could use the sustenance’?)

Likewise, it should also provide basic public housing to which every citizen would have access for 10 percent of their salary, ‘no matter what that salary is’.

Such measures – almost unimaginably radical by current standards – would, Mosley believes, go a long way to eliminating many of capitalism’s evils.

On the capitalist side though, he also wants to continue to permit people to accumulate vast wealth (he advocates ‘a flat rate of taxation on every citizen’s income’, an idea more commonly associated with right-wing libertarians), and to protect the right of ‘[e]very person in America… to compete against the goliaths of big business’ (in reality, one suspects, the right to be crushed by the same).

He has little to say about how these changes could be brought about, though he rejects violence. ‘I believe that if violent revolution were necessary for the blossoming of a truly human system of governance… I would, albeit with a heavy heart, support violence on a twentieth-century scale’ he writes. However, ‘luckily for us, [such] action would be counter-productive’, as ‘violence buries its spear in the soul of history’, never-ending once initiated.”

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“Walter Mosley, author of the Easy Rawlins mysteries, proposes a “shotgun marriage” between capitalism and socialism.”

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“We have to recognize the failure of capitalism. We have to recognize the impossibility of socialism.”: WALTER MOSLEY talks to This Is Hell.

“We have to recognize what it is that we’re working for in the world, which is basically as good a life as we can get in this brief span that we have. And we have to recognize who we are in relation to these things – and not allow these incredible, large systems which govern us, but don’t care about us – to take over.”

Listen to the full interview on This Is Hell here.