Bhaskar Sunkara: What is Democratic Socialism? | Doomscroll

It seemed like academia was filled with people who self-described as radicals, and it just meant nothing. They just voted for generic Democrats, but I guess they read a little Foucault on the weekend or something. Okay. Um, it was very hard to be a socialist because to be a socialist was to be pinned down to a certain tradition, especially if you're a Marxist, like a certain tradition, a certain set of thoughts, but also a certain, like, burden of history.

So I think we shouldn't take for granted that socialism can work, and we shouldn't take for granted that the only barriers to the enactment of socialism are political barriers. And I think for a lot of the 20th century and for the end of the 19th century, the left was able to say, if only we had a way to consciously plan the economy, if only we can overcome the resistance of capitalists, we'd be able to build a better world.

The experience of the 20th century was that actually a lot of the problems of reshaping and redesigning an economy were not possible to be easily overcome, at least through the traditional mechanisms of planning.

So what I wanted to do was to create a book that allowed leftists to kind of have the confidence that they had in the 1920s and 30s and 40s that another world was possible. And I wanted to, with my co-authors Mike Beggs and Ben Burgis, I wanted to have a book that I could explain to people in, you know, Brighton Beach, New York, who might have like left a really dysfunctional, you know, Soviet economy in the 1980s, that in fact there is models of socialism that are both at least as efficient as capitalism but also more egalitarian, and that you should actually want to live in a more egalitarian world no matter what you think your prospects are for the future.

So I think to be a socialist today is to still believe in a society without exploitation and without domination. So fundamentally, to be a socialist today is to be an egalitarian. And I think this is where we could debate with people because I think we live in a society where 99% of people share broad egalitarian principles, even more than 99%. I think probably Donald Trump, who I think is one of the most odious human beings on the planet, and more and more maybe as I get older, I find part of his odiousness just his like blatant corruption, the way he speaks, whatever. I'm kind of becoming like a resistance liberal mom in my critique of Trump is kind of less structural and more like this guy is gross. So my whole pitch here is to kind of like sell this idea as something as an, you know, alternative identity to being a resistance lib. So you're doing me a huge favor right now. Thank you.

But you know, I think that even Trump would probably say certain extreme forms of domination and hierarchy and exploitation are unacceptable. I don't believe Donald Trump wants to reinstate slavery. And this might sound like such a banal, common-sense point, but if you look at the way human societies have been structured since the beginning of class society with the Neolithic revolution 11, 12,000 years ago — someone please fact-check me in the —

But since then, how many of these class societies that have been created have been slave societies? Like a lot of them through a lot of human history. There's a high percentage of us whose ancestors were subject to slavery of one type or another. And of course in the US we had the most extreme form of racialized slavery. So to say today that the most far-right president in modern American history is not for certain types of exploitation and domination, I think is a measure of the left's success. The left helped lead a revolution against slavery through the abolitionist movement, through the radical Republicans, through egalitarian movements that helped tens of thousands of enslaved people escape to Union lines and in many cases take up arms against the planter class.

And this debate is a lot easier for us to conduct as egalitarians if we're able to say that there's an alternative to wage labor, right? And obviously part of the book, or the entirety of the book, is about saying that there is an alternative to wage labor, and this alternative is economic democracy in our workplaces, socializing the economy but maintaining the market as a coordinating mechanism to ensure that people's preferences are still expressed and that we could coordinate the vast amount of human activity across a very complex division of labor. The audience is going to have to buckle in because we're going to —

So I think that the American right is becoming more and more illiberal. If you look at the cynical attempts to deprive people of voting rights because it'll serve their political, you know, purposes, especially attempts to do this that kind of lead to racialized outcomes, like you're seeing with some of these efforts to roll back the Voting Rights Act and things like that, certainly that's illiberal. If you think about the attempts to take people out of the polity who have long been established as members of the polity, like the attacks on birthright citizenship — I actually had events in 2016, 2017 where I used the example of birthright citizenship in the context of talking to Europeans, but explaining why, you know, Trump certainly isn't a fascist. In fact, he's to the left on certain issues because he had some lines about birthright citizenship at the time than a lot of his peers in the European right. But of course, this iteration of Trump, this version is even rolling back those rights. I would have assumed that 90-plus percent of the right in the US would have accepted my right to be an American and a member of the polity because I was born here and my parents moved around, I think like 11, 12 months before I was born, but now I'm not so certain. I don't think there's a parallel development among American liberals. And I think there is the possibility of us winning over a lot of people in the center by asserting certain values that I think are popular values, like we all deserve to vote, we all deserve a fair share, we all deserve to participate in our societies. I think we can really undermine and isolate the illiberal right on that basis. That's in part why I think it's important for us to assert that the socialist left, the far left, is in fact far more liberal than people give us credit for in this country, which wasn't always the case for all iterations of the left in the past.

The Enlightenment was, I think, one of the great triumphs of human civilization. I think it laid the foundation for every single progressive advance afterwards. When we think of the Enlightenment and the Enlightenment Revolutions, we're not just talking about the French Revolution. We're also talking about the people who took so seriously the claims of liberty, of equality, of fraternity of the French Revolution, the enslaved of Haiti that rose up to try to enact those things because they saw themselves as men and women just as the French were men and women. So I think we shouldn't be so cynical about universalism. We shouldn't be so cynical about ideas that in many cases first had their emergence in Europe because in many cases we're playing into the hands of racists or other people who think that, oh, different cultures want different things. I mean, I think that's fundamentally ridiculous. All people want security for themselves, for their families. They want a better life. They want a degree of freedom. Our goal on the left is to convince them that their pursuit of autonomy and freedom and dignity is positive-sum with other people's pursuits of autonomy, freedom and dignity and doesn't require, you know, trampling on the rights of others. I won't bother trying to directly translate it, but there's the United Front song of the German left has a line, I guess very loosely translates to, 'The worker wants no master over him and no servant underfoot.' And I think that should be our message to people of the good life, you know, kind of. And I think a lot of these insights first emerged in the parts of the world that were the most developed at the time, but since then have been universalized to such an extreme degree that I don't say this necessarily a good thing or a bad thing, but it's I think objective fact that most socialists throughout history, by the vast majority, have been non-white. They've been racialized people in Asia, in Africa, and elsewhere.

Yeah, we tried that a few times. Yes. Yes, there were some problems, because there were some difficulties. Marx had this line that you're invoking, 'recipes for the cookshops of the future,' when he was talking about the utopian socialists of the 19th century that he encountered. They would often say, 'If we want to construct socialism, all we have to do is get two to 300 people, move them off to some commune, and set up a model society that would attract more people and also just outcompete sort of other societies to show that the wave of the future was collectivist.' Sure. Sure. And Marx is someone who spent most of his life not dreaming of socialism but actually examining the inner workings of capitalism, just thought this was ridiculous, the utopian socialists of the past. So instead what Marx did was he studied the mechanisms of capitalism and he also tried to look for an eye towards how it might undermine itself. So he was trying to examine the sort of way out. But generations of socialists thought that once the political difficulty of organizing these workers and bringing about some sort of revolution was done, the actual mechanics of how to run the economy would be relatively easy. This was true not just of the most revolutionary parts of the left but even the pragmatic people who would go on to run kind of German social democracy after World War I kind of thought this is pretty easy, let's set up a nationalization commission to figure out how this will work. In reality it turned out to be an incredibly difficult task. And through the series of improvisations on how to make a socialist economy or consciously planned economy work, that was in part how the Russian system evolved and developed and became synonymous with socialism. So if we don't think that's a good model, if we don't think the various offshoots of that system that tried to mix and match and make a few changes was a great model, but if we're also desiring for something more than the system of social democracy that was created, then, you know, I think we need a plan. And in part this is because in this era everybody wants to say there is no alternative, who opposes socialism, and what better rhetorical response to give confidence to the existing socialist movement or young people interested in these ideas, say, yeah, there is this alternative, we do know what went wrong, we have studied enough of the existing economy. I would think that's the main task, and it's something that Marx in the 19th century, you know, rightly wasn't too concerned about. He just was concerned with not making socialism the domain of these like eccentric, I guess we call them the proto-Mc types who want to create their own little communes.

The Swedish Social Democrats also didn't have a plan when they took over their economy in the 1930s. What they ended up devising was a way to create a capitalist economy, but a capitalist economy that was dominated by the interests of workers. So it rested primarily not on the state, but on the state facilitating the power of a massive trade union federation that represented almost the entirety of the economy, the LO. And this trade union federation, the LO, would bargain with employers in a centralized fashion. All of, let's say, the auto manufacturers — let's say there was three main producers in the auto manufacturers. Let's say Ford, GM, and Chrysler are the three producers. The Swedish social democratic model would look at the fact that, let's say, GM was the most efficient producer, Ford was in the middle, Chrysler was the weakest, and they would say, 'We need to figure out what wage level to collectively set our demands at.' Okay? And if we set it at Chrysler, then workers at Ford and GM are leaving money on the table, and you're just kind of rewarding inefficiency, like a lot of models of sort of populism that just subsidizes domestic capital even if it's inefficient does. They didn't want to create kind of Swedish Peronism. They were aiming at something different. So instead they would aim their demands at this sort of middle producer, Ford, and they would say all these three auto manufacturers need to pay at the level that Ford can afford, which meant that Chrysler would be pushed out of business if it didn't innovate or find a way to kind of raise up the floor to Ford's level. It would also mean that GM would have excess profits accrued. But the job of the state, and not the trade union federation, was to make sure that GM was productively investing these profits into expanding. And also that the other producers in kind of this chase of productivity were doing things like even investing in labor-saving technology. Then obviously some workers would be displaced or need to be moved around between the contracting and expanding firms and also between sectors. And this is where the state stepped in with active labor market policies and things like this. But in the end you took a backwards economy over the course of decades of this and you turned it into an incredibly efficient economy. And what was the mechanism? It was the extremely high wage demands of workers. It was the very thing that a lot of libertarians say would tank businesses. But our response isn't that, 'Oh, it's all a lie. It's all a myth. McDonald's can afford to pay everyone $50 an hour and $60 an hour because, you know, money is a social construct or whatever.' Our reality has to say, sure, there's going to be firm failure, but we're going to harness that as a good thing because we don't want inefficient firms sticking around. We don't want to waste people's time and labor kind of doing more work for less, but we're going to create a mechanism to steer the economy in the right direction. We're going to combine that with all sorts of other, you know, innovative things at the macroeconomic level like the Swedes do. That's been the reality of left-wing governance in what became the center-left, but had this sort of common roots on the far left. So you could call this kind of socialism within capitalism, which has been a stunning success. The first six months, by the way, of socialist governance in New York has been a stunning success, I would say.

So that's that experience. The question is what about the other form of socialism? One is socialism after capitalism, which is completely untested, and the other is kind of a socialism outside capitalism, which is what the Soviet Union and these other states were treating socialism as a developmental tool to catch up to the West.

That obviously failed. So I think the true record of socialism, of its various iterations, is more of a mixed bag, and the same can be said of capitalist development. But I think we should take seriously, you know, structural constraints on economies and the fact that, you know, it's not just all fake. You know, you can't just, you know, print money infinitely without creating an inflationary spiral. You can't just, you know —

Yeah, I don't mean — yeah, sure, MMT is one example that was more slighted.

I was trying to insult Peronism, but you know, sure, MMT. If MMT is, I think, a modern example of that, at best you could say makes more sense given the extremely unusual particularities of the US currency and economy and is not really a generally applicable, you know, thing. A lot of his insights.

So, von Mises, of course, is the arch kind of liberal economist, and we should remember that the Soviet Union's creation was something that shook the entire world, not just the far left, and it took theoretical debates and brought them into practice as far as like, is socialism possible? How could this planned economy work? There was a lot of very talented — Lange was one of them, but there was lots of talented economists who were socialists and had to try to reconcile with these ideas. For von Mises, socialism was impossible for primarily reasons of calculation. An economy, even an economy back then, especially today, is almost infinitely complex in its amount of variables between inputs and outputs and all the different labor that's being coordinated. There's numbers that, you know, the Soviet Union was running, you know, 40,000 construction firms, you know, like over a million small retail shops, tons of other factories, all of which included raw materials. So the number of variables involved at the Soviet economy, and even like the 30s and 40s, like ran into the billions. Then if you take all these variables and you stretch it across like a time horizon, you're potentially talking about like trillions of different variables. So this led to, I think, the common understanding among a lot of people that sophisticated planning on this level, this sort of direct command, was impossible. And the response from a lot of the socialists at the time that accepted some of those premises was that we could in fact make this work if we use shadow prices. If in fact we like simulated —

A shadow price is essentially a way to simulate what something would cost if we were doing everything in a traditional market mechanism, even if it was just a plan, the planner was still the one moving things around.

In reality, I think the liberals had the right of most of these arguments in that the Soviet Union never really was able to solve the coordinating issues with its economy. And as economies got more and more complex, the Soviet Union went from a society that obviously — forget, I don't mean this like libly, but forget the human costs and whatever else of forced collectivization and the rest — but you could say that in the 30s, in the 40s, the Soviet Union was able to catch up to some degree with the West through very crude and brutal measures when it built heavy industry. But then when you go from heavy industry to producing more consumer goods and consumer goods of more variations, the problems with the system just got harder and harder to manage. And even in the period of the 1930s when the Soviet Union was seemingly converting to a purely command-based economy with no inputs for markets, there was also lots of these hidden markets in terms of factory managers seeing, 'I don't have enough screws so I can't make, you know, T-34 tanks. So instead I need to kind of barter with another factory that might be hoarding extra screws because they need some other steel part.' And the only reason why they were hoarding this part is because they knew they needed to trade it at some point. During the worst of forced collectivizations and the famines of the 20s and 30s, the 20s during the War Communism period when there was a very aggressive attempt to abolish markets completely by the Bolsheviks, amid a context of civil war and generalized, you know, scarcity, and later on the famines of the 1930s, there's strong arguments that the famines would have been much worse if not for the fact that ordinary peasants were doing the thing the Soviet authorities wanted to kill them for: hoarding and kind of like selling and engaging in an informal black market. You know, the black market actually kind of kept more Russians and other kind of Soviet people alive during that period.

So you go through all these experiments of the most intelligent people of the world trying to make planning at this, you know, intricate level work, including the greatest mathematicians on the planet who are, you know, inventing things that became the basis of like linear programming because they're trying to kind of solve this impossible problem. And the question has to come back to the level of like, what's the point of this all? You know, what at the egalitarian level is being served by having a system that doesn't have markets? So part of the argument by socialists in the 19th century was that markets were a great source of inefficiency and conscious rational planning could lead to a more robust and efficient economy. But once that illusion is gone by the 30s and 40s, kind of what was the point? And the conclusion I've come to is essentially there was no point in that sort of fine-grain planning of every single good and service in the economy.

I would say that to some extent that is a discredit to the planners of Gosplan, and that, you know, the Soviet Union lasted as long as it did in this system because it had the most brilliant, you know, people on the planet planning, literally inventing new forms of mathematics to make this work. Big firms, just like states, do have to do some sort of level of internal planning, but they're doing planning periodically with reference to prices that exist in an economy where prices are driven by consumer demand and the scarcity of goods. That external prices allow them to plan. A whole order of magnitude more difficult, or I would actually argue impossible, to plan in the absence of those things. So I think it's sort of — there's a categorical distinction between what Amazon's doing and what like a fully planned economy would have to do. I think there are certain sectors that you can fully plan. So the National Health Service in Britain —