Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. Before I get to today's guest, I want to say a few words about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. It should go without saying that killing someone because of their political beliefs, even if you find those beliefs to be evil, is never justified. And if you had posed that question in the abstract a few days ago, most Americans, I think, would have agreed. But something was revealed on social media when Kirk was killed, something very ugly, which is that a disturbing number of people disagree. A disturbing number of Americans celebrated his death, especially on left-wing spaces like Bluesky.
To be clear, I have no doubt that if the politics of this assassination were reversed, if someone revered on the left were killed, then we'd be seeing the worst elements of the right celebrating as well. It may be that the propensity to violence is equal on both sides at this moment, or it may be that the left is worse than the right right now. I would need to see data to actually answer that question. But what's clear is that the norm against political violence of all kinds is on thin ice. We shouldn't be too alarmist, though. We saw more assassinations in the 1960s than we do today. We saw more political violence in the 1970s than we see today, and the country survived that era. But neither should we be complacent.
When I was researching my book, The End of Race Politics, I read pretty much everything Martin Luther King ever wrote and said, and what struck me is just how much energy Dr. King had to spend persuading people to be nonviolent. He wasn't like, 'We want equal rights, but we should do it nonviolently.' It was a lot more like, here's a 10, 15-minute speech laying out the affirmative philosophical case for why nonviolence is the best way to get what we want. And he gave that speech over and over and over again because it wasn't obvious. He argued that people assume your means are the same as your ends. So if your means are violent, they'll assume your ends are violent and they'll reject your whole policy program. I think he was right about that.
Over the next week or so, you will see many people condemn violence. I agree with them, of course, but you will see fewer people make the affirmative case for nonviolence. Today, me and my guest are going to model how to disagree nonviolently because my guest is Bhaskar Sunkara. Bhaskar was the founding editor of Jacobin magazine and now the president of The Nation magazine. He is a proud democratic socialist. In fact, he was the vice chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. Hint: I am not a socialist. He's also the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality. In this episode, we talk about the practicality of democratic socialism. We talk about rent control. We talk about the affordability crisis in American cities. We discuss the limits of the populist left. And of course we discuss Zohran Mamdani. So without further ado, Bhaskar Sunkara.
Bhaskar, thanks so much for coming on my show.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
So before we get into some of our points of agreement and probable disagreement, I want to give my audience a sense of who are you? How did you come to be a founding editor of Jacobin and now you're at The Nation as well? So give a little bit of your origin story for people.
Yeah, I became a socialist at a very young age. I just turned 36 and I became a socialist when I was 17. So it's been not only all of my adult life, but you know, more than half of my life itself I've been on the socialist left. And it was kind of from that ideological route that I first became interested in exploring ideas and magazines and things like that. And I started Jacobin almost exactly 15 years ago, initially as an online magazine for about two months, and then after that we launched into print. And I recently took over — not recently, actually three years ago — I took over as president of The Nation magazine. So I've kind of become by accident a specialist in magazine publishing, particularly print magazine publishing, but it was never really my intent. My intent was just to pursue politics through writing and debating.
And I read your New York Times profile in preparation for this. And I think we have in common that our original dreams were to be basketball players and we were backed into political writing as a result of genetic bad luck. It's tough. I'm 56 and I really — I play pickup once or twice a week and I really should play as a point guard, but I want to play as a shooting guard. I want to come off screens and pop and like Steph Curry. It's really tough. I don't have the handles like Steph Curry. I want to play like Klay Thompson. And I get blocked a lot. So, it's tough, but you know, I persevere.
Well, that says something about your character.
So do you describe yourself as a socialist or a democratic socialist? And is that difference meaningful to you?
Yeah, I describe myself as a democratic socialist. And I think the distinction is kind of like squares and rectangles, right? Where all squares are rectangles, if I remember that one right, not all rectangles are squares. So I think that the true meaning of being a socialist is to be against not only forms of economic inequality and pursue more democracy in the economic realm, but also to pursue it in the political realm. And I think there's a certain type of socialists who do the sort of no true Scotsman thing saying, oh well, all socialists are democratic socialists, otherwise they're not real socialists. But I think given the history of the 20th century and given the various forms that socialism has taken, including very dark and authoritarian forms, it's important to distinguish and foreground the front and say first and foremost I'm a democrat, and it's because of my belief in democracy and because of my egalitarianism that I'm also a socialist.
Right. Do you find anything to admire in Marx's legacy or in Marx's scholarship? Because, you know, like if you open an Econ 101 textbook at your average university, you're not really going to find a trace that a guy named Karl Marx was all that important or even existed. Whereas you'll be able to draw a pretty clear link from what you're reading to say Adam Smith or to economists, you know, more closer to us in time, George Stigler and stuff like this. You won't find Marxian theory in the economic consensus.
Well, I consider myself a Marxist. And for me, Marxism is a framework that helps me understand pertinent things about the world. I'm more than happy to say that I would drop that framework if I no longer found it useful. Whereas to me being a democratic socialist is a moral and ethical commitment. So that kind of forms my normative core. So that I think I'll stick with until the day that I die. Marxism, I find utility in it. I think, you know, Marxism continues to inform the bedrock of sociology and history and philosophy and many other different spheres. In econ departments it depends, you know, we used to have departments called departments of political economy where Marx would play a bigger role than modern econ today. But I would say that Marx set about to write a critique of political economy. So he was drawing on the tools of classical economy. This is where kind of the labor theory of value and other things that Marx is using. He wasn't so much developing his own freestanding system of economics. So I think it's perfectly compatible to be a Marxist and to use the tools of modern economics to understand something. You know, you could be a Marxist and a marginalist in my mind.
So when you say the labor theory of value, what do you find to be true or useful in that idea?
Well, I think it's less true. I don't subscribe to labor theory of value. I think it's more useful as a framework to understand something normative, which is the Marxist critique of exploitation. So the idea, for instance, that workers produce because they have no alternative under capitalism for a capitalist, and this capitalist who owns a means of production extracts labor from a worker who enters into this contract with the capitalist, but it's an asymmetrical kind of bond because the worker is presented with a worker-starved choice and the capitalist has other options of other workers that they could employ. And I think the idea that workers are not paid the full fruits of their labor and, you know, that Marxist conception of surplus value being produced by workers, I think is tied to the labor theory of value, and that Marxist concept of exploitation I think has value at the normative level, whereas I don't think it's a particularly sound way to analyze the economy as a whole.
But how do you separate the two? Because it seems to me if the labor theory of value isn't true descriptively, which I'm pretty sure it isn't, then how could it then be true normatively? Because its value normatively rests on the claim that it is a true description roughly of how firms operate.
Yeah, I think it is true that workers are not paid the full fruits of their labor. I think what often Marxists miss is that capital contributes a lot to production in and of itself. Not just by virtue of ownership, but also the capitalist, for example, contributes entrepreneurially. They take entrepreneurial risk to set up new firms, which of course has value. Most capitalists also produce managerial labor and supervision and play a role evolving production processes to create more efficiency. So it's not necessarily a zero-sum relationship in the way that I think a certain reading of Marxism would make people think of the relationship between capital and labor in that sense as zero-sum. Where I would go further though is I think that labor can play the role that capital plays through the creation of cooperative firms and through other means of, even if we're still operating within market economies, labor could potentially find avenues of socialized finance like through a public banking system, through self-finance from cooperative firms, and also can elect management and make sure there's some sort of democratic say over management priorities with the goal of still maximizing, you know, firm profits. So in other words, I think labor can replicate the role of capital. Capital, I think, is still dependent on labor, and that's I think very much tied with a Marxist conception of this inherent antagonism between capital and labor, which I don't think is necessarily present in a lot of mainstream economics that think of labor as just one of many factors of production.
So in theory, I could see how a co-op might assume the role of managing a firm, but could it replace the capitalist role in creating a firm as entrepreneurs without simply being entrepreneurs, without simply being capitalists?
Yeah, I think this is actually where the question of entrepreneurial risk is, I think, a really important one. So, we can imagine taking existing firms that already exist on a profitable basis and converting them to co-ops. And maybe you would even concede that it's possible that these firms, especially if they were subject to the same market forces, could be as efficient or potentially even more efficient. If you concede that maybe there would be less resources devoted to certain aspects of managerial supervision if workers themselves were motivated by getting not just a base salary but also a dividend, you know, if they were also owners of the production. But the question of the creation of new firms is something I think democratic socialists have to grapple with. So it could be, for instance, that you have a model that says that the first group of workers who get funding and have an idea and bring their pitch deck, let's say, in a fully socialized economy to one of many competing public banks and say, 'We want — here's our business plan. We want capital to start this up,' get the chance to draft an initial operating agreement that gives them more resources than other workers, allows them to basically say, 'Okay, we're going to run it this way. We're going to get x amount of the proceeds. We're going to have this amount of essentially sweat equity, but then over time it becomes a more socialized firm.' So I think the actual mechanism would depend, but I do firmly believe that you need to incentivize people more than morally, incentivize them materially to take risks and create new things.
So under that model, my question would then be the public banks: what is their incentive to allocate capital efficiently? Do they make more money if they make better choices, better bets on better horses, as it were?
Yeah, I think that their goal will be to maximize returns within a certain risk profile. So you could imagine, for instance, some banks being structurally encouraged to be more conservative, other banks serving a role that might be more related to the public bank. So right now we have different forms of public banking. We have public banks like the North Dakota public bank. We also have developmental banks that fund state infrastructure projects and things like that. But I think in many ways I start as a socialist from the perspective of I want to create a more egalitarian world five minutes from now. I don't want to depend on any sort of leaps in consciousness or any changes in human behavior. I want to take people as they are. I want to take things that work, like the current market structures that I think work fairly well, allowing for market failures in certain areas where it doesn't work well, but in general works well for the creation of commodities, and I want to figure out a way to make them more democratic and egalitarian, not only with ex post redistribution but also before the fact. I want to — again, at a normative level you might disagree with this goal, but I believe that firms should be more democratic in their structure and also more egalitarian in the distribution of wages before the fact as well.
Yeah, I guess my big picture goal when I think about economics and human progress is that poverty is really bad, and that whichever system reliably gets rid of poverty the quickest is the one I favor, which is why I like capitalism, because I've seen it — the evidence is pretty clear that the introduction of market economies, you know, in all the natural experiments that have taken place, whether it's East Germany, West Germany, China, Taiwan on China in the 1970s when the Xiaogang village experiments start, it's just there's an overwhelming amount of evidence that free markets directly precede abundance and the end of famines and the reduction in true capital-P poverty of a kind that is really the center of my moral bullseye. And this is where I get off the boat when the desire to reduce inequality becomes more important than the desire to reduce poverty per se.
Well, I think a system like what I'm describing wouldn't necessarily lead to less dynamic economic growth. I am a market socialist. I don't want to spend a lot of time defending systems that — you know, market socialism really emerged in critique of, right, or even democratic socialism at a political level emerged in critique of. People forget that the word Stalinism, for example, first emerged out of the critique of democratic socialists and Trotsky and other revolutionary socialists that were critical of Stalinism. In the same way, market socialism emerged out of looking at the failures of central planning. A lot of the words we even use to describe why central planning doesn't work originated from people who at least at the time considered themselves market socialists. So when we talk about soft budget constraints and all these other things, this actually emerged out of the critiques of market socialists. I would say that the narrative that you paint of the 20th century should be complicated a little. I don't disagree in the broad strokes, but it should be complicated to say that, for example, Russia was — or the Soviet Union was not necessarily on the developmental trajectory that it hit by default if there wasn't a revolution, that in fact, for all the political maladies that came with it, the introduction of central planning helped Russia catch up and it worked to a certain point. In the same way, China's developmental trajectory is stronger than India's developmental trajectory, which certainly wasn't a pure free market, it was kind of the worst of both worlds in many ways, but the Chinese investments in health and certain other infrastructure — health and education infrastructure investment helped pave the way to an opening, and an opening that was very state-directed at a certain level. So in the same way you could look at regimes on the right like in South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore that used a very heavy state hand and really used a lot of planning mechanisms and combined that with targeted liberalization to accomplish growth. But I think you are right in the sense that a lot of this growth and progress happened with an eye towards expanding markets and having a certain important role for markets, but it's been a combination of state and planning.
So then I'm struggling a little bit to say what's the core difference between, say, your model of having like public banks deciding whether and how much to invest in new firms that are like owned by co-ops. What is the difference in terms of the incentives and constraints for those banks compared to just a venture capital firm today doing that same task?
I think there's not that much difference between the two. I think that part of the reason why the banks are public — not to get too much into the weeds of my conception of a fully socialist economy — would be because, you know, they have to be shared custodians of the public wealth. Because in a fully socialized economy, you might have all sorts of differences just by virtue of the chance of, let's say, you're involved in a firm that owns an oil rig, whereas I'm involved in a firm that produces child care, for instance. I'm in a very labor-intensive field, you're in a very capital-intensive field. You might have, without some sort of shared ownership between the cooperative and the public, and in this case a public bank as custodian, you might have some inherent inequities that's counterproductive, distorts the labor market. So even if you don't care about inequity in and of itself, the fact that it might be distorting to the labor market because everyone would be vying for the most capital-intensive job in this sort of economy.
Do you support what Trump is doing right now, saying he wants the federal government to hold like a 10% stake in Intel? Because at some level this seems to be exactly what you're advocating, or, you know, a cousin of it at minimum, right?
I would say that I'll give one thing to Trump's credit. I believe that in the first Trump administration, he put back on the table a lot of the tools of industrial policy, including tariffs and other things. In my view, he didn't do a lot good with those tools. A lot of his goals were counterproductive. A lot of the ways in which he used the state power were just mediocre. I think the Biden administration did a much better job with the CHIPS Act and other things in wielding industrial policy to the overall benefit of the US economy as a whole. Now with the Trump administration, I think it's utterly counterproductive, a lot of the things he's doing. I think it's creating a very unpredictable environment for capital, not knowing, you know, the tariff rates, not knowing what's going to happen next, not knowing how the state is going to intervene. So for me it's not necessarily more or less state intervention is a good thing. A lot has to do with predictability and other things, and I think Trump's mercurial nature is quite bad for the US. And I would say that governments on the right have used a lot of these tools successfully. They've done it in — I mentioned Taiwan, I mentioned South Korea, a lot of these governments did it under right-wing military dictatorships, you know, regimes I of course do not support. Governments broadly on the left used a lot of these tools again under authoritarian regimes like in China that I don't support at that level, but I think used a lot of these tools successfully. On the other hand, there's been governments on the left closer to the democratic socialist tradition like in the Nordic countries that really built their economy on the basis of free trade and being very selective with using certain tools like tariffs and protectionism. So for me, I don't actually think there's necessarily a moral good in protecting certain groups of capitalists and exposing certain other groups of capitalists to market pressures. I think that it's kind of an either-or instance. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad. Broadly, I think the Biden administration did a better job wielding those tools than Trump has thus far.
How do you feel about billionaires?
Well, I think that for me the primary problem with capitalism is less distributional — well, I would say it is distributional in the sense that I think there are certain minimum necessities of a good life that people don't have access to right now. So I think, for example, we do need mass redistribution to make sure that people have greater opportunity to educate themselves, greater access to housing, healthcare and the basics and so on. But to me a lot of the inherent inequalities in capitalism relates to power, including power at the point of production. So to me, there's not a huge difference between the power that a worker feels at the point of production if their boss runs a few car dealerships and only takes home, you know, 700 grand a year versus if their boss is Steve Ballmer or something like that, you know, and is a billionaire, you know, there's not a huge difference to them.
Should that soften what a democratic socialist feels towards billionaires or harden what they feel towards the car dealership owner?
Well, I think that it's primarily thinking about these relationships in terms of power rather than in some sort of arbitrary number. I think a critique of billionaires is sometimes really useful at a populist level, at the level of communicating to people the problems with inequity or just the readiness and chance that goes into the creation of some fortunes. Of course, that could be useful if your goal is to create a society with more equality of opportunity and more equality of results too. But if you're asking it at an intellectual level whether, you know, I think that as a primary goal, as a policy, there should be the abolition of billionaires, I would say I think that would be an aftereffect of other things I advocate for rather than kind of a primary goal.
So it would result from your favored policies but it wouldn't be something you pursue directly.
So my problem with anti-billionaire rhetoric, it seems to me like to make a cartoon analogy: if my theory of how the world works were that like wolves make places really bad to live, and then I go out and I do my research and I see actually all the places where the wolves are are actually the best places to live, this is kind of a problem with my theory. Perhaps the world doesn't quite work as I think it does. So if you look, if billionaires really were the problem — you're not arguing this, but many people in your camp do — billionaires are stealing money. There are many ways you can cash out that claim, but basically they're the reason that people around them are poor. They're taking too much, not giving enough. But then you notice that all the countries with the most billionaires, America being one, are the same countries where the world's poor are banging on the doors to get in. This is a problem with my model of how economies work. As a matter of fact, it tends to be the economies where it's easiest to become a billionaire. Some exceptions to that obviously. I mean, if you become a billionaire, you know, running drugs in Mexico, that's actually bad for the total economy. It reduces investment. But if you become a billionaire under a set of rules that is broadly not totally corrupt, the types of places where it's easier to do that are also the types of places where it's easier to be a poor person, to begin as a poor person and end middle class, for lack of a better term. So to me, the whole socialist critique of billionaires, it seems to just totally misconceive how economics works.
Well, I would say there's a socialist critique of capitalists rooted in some of these power relations, and then there's a broader populist critique of billionaires, if that makes sense. And sometimes I think socialists like myself will adopt certain arguments in pursuit of making some points or pursuing an agenda within capitalism, like more redistribution within capitalism, that is slightly different than our intellectual objection. But I would say that capitalists and workers are dependent on each other. I think it's an asymmetrical dependency. I think it's built with all sorts of inequities, but there's a belief that I was actually inculcated at the very beginning when I was becoming a Marxist. And it's somewhat apocryphal. This is ascribed to a million different people like Fredric Jameson and others, but I don't actually think he said it, but it goes like: the only thing worse than being exploited by capital in capitalism is not being exploited by capital. And I think in many ways that's been a lot of the truth of the 20th century and 21st century, that, you know, I conceive of a world after capitalism, but I don't want to get trapped in a middle ground where we make it — we're still within capitalism, we make it impossible for capitalists to actually accumulate wealth and actually guide production, because then we're in the worst of both worlds. We're not far enough for socialism, but we've also kind of made it so that the current system doesn't work, and then we just have immiseration of everyone.
So in your model, how do we get to the world beyond capitalism without going through that destructive valley of worst of both worlds?
So I think we could look at social democracy in the 20th century and even today the remnants of social democratic states in the Nordic countries and say it might not be your preferred model of capitalism. You might argue, for example, that Norway would be better off by 0.5% of GDP growth per year if they were pursuing another developmental model — probably would. But you could argue that, but clearly it works at some level. You know, the economy is still humming, they're decent places to live, they can fund a welfare state, and even if there's an opportunity cost by certain decisions that Norway has made distributionally and otherwise, and we'll probably be on other sides of whether these decisions were good decisions, it works. And in the 20th century I think we have lots of models of social democracies figuring out alternative growth models that have worked, for example by saying, okay, we're still — In Sweden, for instance, in the mid-century, they decided that they were going to build their system, and this was a socialist labor union, the LO, backed by a socialist party, the SAP, decided they had a growth model in mind, the Rehn-Meidner model. And this growth model would be based primarily on the lever of not necessarily state intervention. Actually at its peak, Sweden's economy only had around 11% of its economy nationalized, which was less than some countries like France in the post-war period or the UK, but its lever would be centralized wage bargaining. So let's say you're in a sector with three different firms, and I'll just make up names, auto firms — actually I'll say Chrysler, Ford, and GM. Let's pretend in this example that Chrysler is the least efficient producer, Ford is the middle producer, and GM is the most efficient producer. Of course, anyone who's ever tried to buy an American car would know these are kind of ridiculous examples. But the LO union would set a wage, would bargain for a wage for the whole sector, but they wouldn't bargain for the wage at the level that Chrysler at the bottom could afford. They would decide to bargain for a wage that the middle producer, Ford in this example, could afford to make. So if they were doing enterprise bargaining alone, then the GM workers would advocate for a higher wage, and the Chrysler workers, afraid of their firm getting out of business, would advocate for less of a wage. But instead they did in the middle. So what that did was it encouraged the Chryslers of the world to go out of business because they couldn't afford the wages, but also it allowed the GMs of the world to use the excess profits to expand production. And obviously the state had a big role with active labor market policies to take the displaced Chrysler workers and bring them into expanding sectors or absorb them elsewhere in the economy. All this is a very long way of saying that they had this goal of high wages, you know, a strong trade union-led plan, but they tied it with a growth model that made logical sense and actually created an economy that encouraged capital-intensive investment and encouraged a lot of the success story that we associate with the Nordics.
So I think that the social democrats of today, your AOCs of the world, your Bernies of the world, need to come up with a plan, a credible plan for not just redistributing things and saying socialism means more free stuff, but actually a growth model. Actually saying here's our plan, here's how we're going to make the economy more wealthy and also more equal at the same time. And people like you will still disagree when you'll say actually there's this opportunity cost and there's a better developmental trajectory we could be on, but they'll at least have a coherent plan, whereas I think the problem with a lot of people who self-describe as democratic socialists today or social democrats or just as liberals or progressives, they often talk about the free stuff they want — I agree with them on all these things, I believe in a bigger welfare state for the record — but they don't often tie it with a coherent developmental plan.
So the hypothetical article you sketch with Chrysler, Ford and GM — isn't there a critique of that which says, okay, I watched the whole movie, at the beginning of the movie there were three companies controlling this sector, now there's two, right? So first of all there's a market control monopoly problem that's gone in the wrong direction. And then secondly, given how regulated this sector is, how much harder is it in this Norway hypothetical for a new car company to even enter? Because regulation, as we know, always favors the incumbents.
So it's not necessarily highly regulated. In fact, it might actually be less regulated in many ways than the US system. It does have high labor costs and that's a barrier to entry, but there's always rooms around it. There's always different roads that a company can take through, like having a new specialized technique or having some sort of way to enter. I mean, this actually ironically gets me on maybe —
But at the margin, it just makes it more attractive to start your new car company in any other country that's not Norway, like at the margin, right, if it has higher labor costs. And so if you do this throughout the economy, you disincentivize at the margin innovation, and that has a long-term consequence too.
So I think that often when we're talking about things at the abstract level, it becomes hard when we drill down to particulars just because, you know, if a theory could explain everything, then it wouldn't be a theory, right? So I do think that there's other aspects to these economies that might entice certain capitalists, like having a very highly skilled, highly educated workforce, having the existing infrastructure of this, you know, highly automated production, having maybe cheap energy or lots of other things that go along with putting a focus on manufacturing. And obviously this is an example I drew from the 20th century. It'll have to adapt to the new industries that are emerging in the 21st century. But I don't want to actually sound like maybe too much of a libertarian, but I do think that sometimes we overstate how natural monopolies are in some of these sectors. Like I actually think there will always be avenues for new entrants short of collusion between capitalists in terms of cartels or state involvement. So, you know, there is room in my mind for antitrust and things like that, but I think sometimes we overstate and overuse monopoly. But it is true that in many of these cases the socialist economic model or the economic model pushed by socialists, even if it was just doses of socialism within capitalism, actually led to greater firm concentration. And the LO trade unionists would actually say that was a good thing because it fit their model, and I think in many ways a good thing for them, but also a good thing for the economy as a whole, and that there are benefits to scale. It obviously depends on what sector, what situation, but, you know, it's not necessarily a bad thing, for example, when you have big investments to make in 5G infrastructure to have, you know, a bigger company able to make that investment rather than a smaller one. I mean, these are all particulars we would have to look through every single case to see whether or not state action to break up monopolies are a good idea or a bad idea.
I don't disagree, but the benefits to scale, that's an observation that there's also benefits to scale when companies scale up in a competitive market without regulation that favors incumbents.
But this isn't a regulation though, so much as this is the nature of the labor market raising the costs. But this is the nature of the labor market as a result of centralized wage bargaining. So it's a little bit different than regulations because the floor is created by the bargaining power of those workers, and presumably if the firms were less profitable, the workers would have less bargaining power and the floor would lower. So it's a little bit more elastic than just saying, for example, there's a minimum wage of $30. Actually, ironically, European social democrats, particularly in the Nordics, have always been opponents of state-led minimum wages for a variety of reasons. Actually go a little bit beyond my expertise, but it's an interesting nugget.
How do you feel about unions?
