I thought about calling Michael Brooks the night before he died. It had been almost a week and half since he’d reminded me that we were going to co-write an article about his vision of “cosmopolitan socialism.” I felt bad about not following up on that sooner, and I wanted to nail down a time for a writing session. I didn’t end up calling because it was getting late and I didn’t think there was any rush.

This is not that article for the simple reason that Michael isn’t here to do all the things he did when we co-wrote articles for Jacobin. He can’t dictate sentences to me over Skype, quibble with formulations I used in sentences I wrote, and say things like, “I don’t know, brother, let’s not go in that direction.”

I also don’t want to claim that anything I present here represents the final evolution of Michael’s thinking or conclusions he would have stuck to for the rest of his life. Michael had a restless mind. He was always reading new books, interviewing new thinkers, and synthesizing new perspectives in new ways. It would be foolish to predict where else all of that would have taken him if his life hadn’t been cut short this summer.