for Tony Blair. Oh my god, this might actually be from Mandelson. Uh, but I'll say it anyway. I think it was a new Labour guy who said this, which is the platform of your party should fit on the back of your membership card.
Hello and welcome to UC3P, the forum. This is your host, Luqman Hakim Arif. In this episode of the forum, we will be speaking to Bhaskar Sunkara on current issues around the American socialist movement.
Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of The Nation magazine and the editorial director of Jacobin, a publication that he founded as an undergraduate in 2010. He is also the publisher of Book Forum, Catalyst, and the author of The Socialist Manifesto: A Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality. Sunkara is a former vice chair of the Democratic Socialists of America and is currently on the board of the Center for Working Class Politics. So, welcome, Bhaskar.
So, also joining me for this conversation is Zahir Kherani, also from UC3P, lead editor and MPP 2027, and guest today, a fellow MPP 2026.
So, without wasting any more time, because I know you've got a really busy schedule ahead of you before and after this. So, I guess just to get things started, I mean, you wrote a very interesting book that I know you're going through in your seminar, The Socialist Manifesto. This is a very strong title. Maybe just give us the really short summary of this book. I mean, what should we look forward to in it?
Yeah, I think The Socialist Manifesto covers the past, present, and hopefully future of the socialist movement. I think it tries to do a few things. One, it tries to lay out a vision of socialism after capitalism. So, kind of my vision goes beyond just a social democratic vision of building socialism within capitalism. But at the same time, it tries to not necessarily draw a strong dichotomy between the two, to show how different strains of the socialist movement were in fact interrelated. So, as a result, I try not to do the no true Scotsman thing, and I try to look critically at the Soviet experience, but see it as an outcropping, an outgrowth of the same common wellspring of the broad socialist movement that also gave us Swedish social democracy.
So, in a way, it was an accessible attempt to give not just young socialists, but just people in the US getting acquainted with democratic socialism, a historical sweep of what it meant, and also a little bit on strategy and kind of other thoughts on whether it has a future in the US going forward.
I guess when it comes to talking about socialism, and this was something we joked around a little bit earlier, is that there's always someone else who's more socialist. And I know the kind of critics, let's just say some choice words pointed towards you and Jacobin, and probably also your book. And then how do you counter those claims saying that, you know, this is just like a softer repackaging of capitalism to make it more palatable to wider working classes, that kind of thing?
Well, to begin with, there are many people within the socialist movement that are in fact more radical than me, and I think that's not necessarily a good thing to be as leftmost possible on every single issue. You know, I start from a normative starting point, which is I have a moral and ethical belief that we should live in a more equal society, and we should live in a society that diminishes inequalities of both wealth and power, and that we should also question hierarchies. Perhaps we will find some forms of inequalities are beneficial to society, those of us on the bottom of the income distribution. But in my mind, there's no excuse for the great extremes of both income, but more importantly power distributions that we have in our society today.
Yeah, speaking of sort of placing on a spectrum of socialism within parties within the US, obviously DSA, Democratic Socialists of America, has grown in prominence recently, crossing, you know, the 100,000 member mark, especially coincident with sort of the rise and the election of Zohran Mamdani in New York. Where do you think sort of the trajectory of the movement and DSA specifically diverges from, and then maybe converges with some of the electoral movements that have been happening over the past, you know, four or five years?
So, I joined the Democratic Socialists of America when I was 17 years old, and at the time we had maybe 5,000 members in good standing. And now we're over 100,000. And DSA does something that's very different than, you know, companies releasing earnings reports, in that they calculate your active membership as being lapsed like the day after your one-year anniversary. So you have to constantly renew. In a normal, like, subscription-based business, for instance, you would still be an active customer if you were a couple months lapsed, because maybe you'll renew. So I think the real number of active DSA members is possibly higher than 100,000.
Obviously, it's benefited greatly from having these national ambassadors for their ideas. So from Bernie Sanders, AOC, what makes Zohran Mamdani unique is that he's actually a DSA cadre, you know, he's an organizer. He would spend his nights and weekends doing work for DSA. That was the context in which many of us, you know, met and knew him. He still occasionally speaks to DSA members as, you know, nominally as an equal, you know, as someone who will stand in the line to speak and give his intervention and have the same allotted time as everyone else, and so on.
So, I guess the question is, what is the ultimate upside of DSA in a country like the US? Well, I think the DSA can become a core of organizers, union organizers, electoral organizers. They could be maybe a half million Americans who are socialists and are playing that role in their workplaces and their communities. I don't think DSA is a prototype for a mass party. I think there's certain things about our program, our rhetoric, and other things that seems like that would be a very difficult lift, you know, obviously in the United States.
So, I think that I personally don't encounter that a lot in the social movement. I think it's probably different on campuses or different, you know, environments and places, but I think more broadly, egalitarian movements and movements on the left need to be able to speak to people's hopes and aspirations and ambitions as well. So, for example, when you're organizing immigrants, it's quote-unquote easy to organize immigrants when they're just coming to the US and they're struggling with ICE and they're struggling with the conditions that all the wage workers in the US have to struggle for, but you have to at the same time be able to speak to their ambitions to, you know, normalize their life in the US and get a house, a car, and, you know, have extra money for disposable income and things like that.
And I think the immediate sort of socialist program of the US would increase the bucket for both, you know, our social wage in terms of the things we have access to like our health care and so on, but also increase our disposable income. And I think we have to be able to speak to aspiration.
And particularly as it relates to immigrant groups that are both aspirational but also have a set of values that I honestly think are good values. You know, my parents were immigrants to the US, came to the US just before I was born. Solid Democrats, probably self-described as liberals. My mom voted for Bernie in 2016. My dad voted for Clinton, I think, but told people to vote for Bernie because, you know, it'd reflect well on his son, you know.
But, you know, our household, like a lot of immigrant households, was a fairly, you know, by certain standards, like hierarchical and kind of strict household. You know, the goal was always to, you know, work hard to better kind of fulfill our part of the bargain of being immigrants in the US. And I think these sorts of ideas are actually very, very widespread, including among the Democratic Party base, much less Latino voters and others the left will need to win over going forward.
Even when we think about Black Americans. Black Americans are the most consistent voters by demographic for social democratic redistribution in the US. But also they tend to have more conservative views than a lot of Americans, including even the median American historically, before the Republican Party has gone off the rails again on gay marriage and other things. And we have to be able to, again, not agreeing or capitulating to all these ideas, but to be able to engage with people with different values and still try to find a way to bring them into a broader coalition for both progressive social goals but economic transformation.
Winning over your skeptics and opponents. How does that translate to actual governing? Like, I mean, what have you seen in terms of the outcomes of it when basically just how do you bridge the, how has the performance been between bridging rhetoric and actual government performance?
Well, I think the Democratic Socialists of America in New York City is a very unique organization in that it has 10, you know, well over 10,000 members in New York City alone, and the mayor of the city is a member. If you live in Astoria, Queens right now, certain parts of Astoria, Queens, your city councilor is a DSA member, your assembly person is a DSA member, your soon-to-be member of Congress, most likely based on the polls, will be a DSA member, your state senator is a DSA member, and your mayor is a DSA member, and your member of Congress, AOC, is a DSA member.
So, in those areas, obviously, there's various different tensions, but there is an emphasis on building, maintaining a base, and also not being isolated. So, for example, there are certain moments when the left needs to make alliances with the center to avoid isolation. And in those places, I'm actually worried in part about the dilution of what makes us as socialists distinct.
And this gets to thinking about new forms of participatory governance, or encouraging the creation of assemblies, or encouraging things like, let's say, when a company goes through a bankruptcy, perhaps workers deserve the right of first refusal, you know, and access to, you know, even, you know, SBA rate-style access to capital to restructure businesses, you know, with hard budget constraints and so on. I'm not proposing anything crazy, but these sorts of ideas as ways to change the axis about how, let's say, Zohran is doing, from is he at a moral level socialist enough to is he actually pursuing things that are different than Bill de Blasio or in Chicago or Brandon Johnson would be pursuing. Like what makes his form of governance as a socialist distinct.
And I think there is a bigger danger of a sort of bureaucratization and also instead of the creation of new identity, a kind of recourse on various forms of tribalism. And we know that it's important, of course, to figure out ways to reach people in different communities. You know, do your outreach in different language or do little campaigns like the, you know, Tios for Bernie sort of campaign and things like that all matter, but at the end of the day, you know, we're trying to create a new body politic, not doing machine, you know, politics.
