Bhaskar Sunkara Thinks the Market Has a Place Under Socialism | Odd Lots

Markets are great. I think they're an objective good. And the socialist problem with markets boils down to one: the uneven distribution of income, which means if we are voting with our dollars, then, you know, someone else has a lot more dollars than me and they're going to skew the economy towards luxury goods. And yes, there is a trickle-down effect from that spending on luxury goods, but it's less useful than an economy rooted towards where the median person is. So they have that criticism. They also have the criticism that the things that we're consuming in markets are produced under conditions of exploitation. Okay. And this is obviously a normative argument, to use this word, exploitation. Like, junior analyst at a bank or junior analyst at a bank are absolutely exploited. Paralegals at law firms are exploited. Mid-levels, you know, partners, I imagine, like you're a true dream of... they've gone through the exploitation to become partner. Exactly.

You know, I was in Greece during the 2012 election, and so the way the election worked is one of the things is that in the main square in the center of Athens, every party that's running gets a tent where they hand out fliers and also, like, sometimes like beer or water bottles, etc. And then there was the main parties and then these small parties, and do some of them have bigger tents than others? They do. That was a joke. Yeah, but it's true. But also, you know, it's just like domain. When I was there in 2012, the series of the banned Socialist Party or the Left Party, they had a tent, and then there was a communist tent. And then there were two other communist tents, and they were right across the street from each other. They both had, like, the hammer and sickle on their logo. And I was like, what's the deal? Like, why are you, like, not... And they're like, well, that's the internationalist Communist Party, and we're the ones who don't want to. So like, so what are you saying? There's different flavors of socialism.

Absolutely. What does even left politics mean is a fight in itself, regardless of then the broader fight about whether the left will gain influence in the Democratic Party and then perhaps the United States.

Thanks for having me.

I think the argument is broadly to egalitarians, so it doesn't necessarily have to be socialist. But I remember I first became interested in socialist ideas when I was 14 years old or so, in many such cases, but now they don't follow through. Right. I'm very stubborn. Yeah. I kept my commitments. Took me until I was 17 to join the Democratic Socialists of America. But my first question was, wouldn't this just lead to bread lines? And the response I got when I sought out socialists was often really bad responses. It was, isn't it better that there is, you know, a line for bread than no bread at all, which is like a plausible answer if you're living in China in the 1930s, you're living in, you know, but not in the wealthiest societies known to man. And, you know, I really needed convincing. And it took me actually encountering other models of socialism, mostly market socialist models, to be like, okay, this could in fact work. And I think a lot of socialists just say we start with our critique at the present, and we start with our demands, and our immediate demands are demands that a lot of people who are liberals or even moderates might find agreeable, like, let's say we should have a single-payer health insurance like they have in much of Europe or things like that. But to me, when the left was at its strongest in the 1930s, later on in the 60s and 70s, we had a model to look for, and we now know that the model was pretty bad. We now know the Soviet economy wasn't really working in the 1930s, and we now know the depth of the authoritarianism, but the communists could point to that. In the 60s and 70s, there were people on campus that could point to what was going on in Cuba, and they could join the Venceremos Brigade. And in a way, I thought it was necessary now, and my co-authors did as well, to really dive into the argument of is socialism technically possible? And then we can debate whether or not it's desirable. So I think you have to be an egalitarian to get that far with me. Yeah. But if you are, I think you should be confident that there is a different model than capitalism.

Well, I think to start with, you could say that we're taking a look at what already exists in the real world, and we're trying to create a coherent model around it. So we know that today's capitalism is a lot different than the capitalism of the 19th century. I think it was Ezra Klein who had the line that the United States is an insurance company with a military, which I think whether he knows it or not, was a play on the line about the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is like, you know, a gas station with a military or something. That was a common refrain in the 80s. So we know that there can be extensive welfare states. There can be certain guarantees. We know that there's tools of demand management that you don't have to be a socialist to, you know, believe in. We know that there's this huge role for the state. We also know from experience that labor-managed firms actually work in practice. So there's all sorts of reasons why people wouldn't want to start or participate in a labor firm, in part it often requires putting in your own money. So you're putting in both your labor and your savings. All your eggs are in one basket. But we do know that once firms do start, so, for example, they work, that there's actually, yeah, there's plenty of models in which there's partner-based, yeah, yeah, based firms that exist and that they work. Mondragon, the Spanish cooperative that at one point was the fifth or sixth largest entity in Spain, is the example that I like to use. But now that I'm venturing further afield from the left to places like, you know, the Bloomberg offices, I might pull that one out of my hat too. But we know that those two work. So how can they work together? Can you have, in fact, a sphere for commodity production where consumer goods and services are produced, run by cooperatives? And can you still have an expansive public sector? And we already have public banks, from small public banks to development banks, which serve a different purpose, and can you connect the three together into a system that is more egalitarian than capitalism, but is at least reasonably close to its efficiency? I would argue more efficient, but let's say reasonably close to its efficiency.