A 'Society Without Capitalism' | Interesting Times with Ross Douthat

I call myself a democratic socialist because I actually believe in this more radical vision of a society without capitalism.

Thanks for having me, Ross.

Well, I'm going to zoom out. And unfortunately, if you ask a Marxist what the weather is outside, they'll start talking to you about the Neolithic revolution.

I'll go back just 160 or so years. The first modern left, if you think about it, was the abolitionist movement. It was the radical Republicans. It was the labor Republicans. If you look at that transformation in the U.S., our world today, compared to our world then, it's hard to say that the left hasn't radically transformed societies across the capitalist world. We live in a society where half the federal budget is spent on social insurance programs. So in a certain sense, the left is sometimes so pessimistic about the outlook for the future and so rightly outraged about inequalities today, I think we underestimate the scope and the extent to which the societies we live in today have been profoundly shaped by various iterations of the left.

We are not living in the worst of all possible worlds, and in my mind, I think the left, including in America, deserves a lot of credit for that. And obviously, I joined the Democratic Socialists of America when I was 17 years old. I joined a very long time ago. At the time, the organization just had 5,000 people. Today it has over 120,000 members. As you said, Zohran Mamdani, who isn't even just a nominal member but a grassroots activist of the organization, is the mayor of New York City. By many accounts, it's not been a disaster.

Still early days, still room for disasters. But I think he's governing with a level of confidence, with a level of competence that has surprised some of his critics. And so, obviously, this is an exciting time to be a leftist in the U.S.

Well, I think as long as there is inequality in a society, as long as you have a class society that divides people into people who own and people who have to work for them, there is going to be some egalitarian response to it. And you could then say that capitalism is the best of all possible worlds. There's no better system. But I think even defenders of capitalism would say it is based on certain degrees of inequalities. Now, I think there has been something unique going on in the US, which is a discrediting of the various political establishments of left and right alike, or liberal and conservative alike, that have given rise to unruly populisms of left and right. It's given rise to Donald Trump. It's also given rise to people who really want Medicare for all, but also are angry about just everything, rightly or wrongly, that the Democratic Party establishment represents. And I think this moment really sparked with both Occupy and then of course, took the Occupy Wall Street in 2011.

Sorry, yeah, actually it was 2011.

Even further back in time. And of course, also it crystallized itself in an electoral form with the candidacies of Bernie Sanders. And I think this sense of disgruntlement, this sense that the best days of the US are behind us, that I'm not going to have a better life than my parents. This pessimism has manifested itself in different forms. And Trumpism is one response in this. Democratic socialism is crystallized by figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is part of it, too.

Programmatically, I think it's overwhelmingly about these economic issues. If you look at a figure like Bernie, if you look at Zohran, he's talking about the cost of housing, he's talking about health, he's talking about all these other bread and butter demands where the actual anger and support comes from, I think is more diffuse. I think there are a lot of people who feel fed up, who feel like they want a different politics, a politics of hope. And I think in some cases, their perception of where their lives are going are a little bit different than the reality of where their lives are going.

So when people look at, for example, income levels of certain people that are voting for candidates of the left, I think they could rightly point out that, OK, these people in a comparative standpoint are not necessarily the most oppressed. In many cases, they're earning raises at higher than the level of inflation, but they still feel like they're being squeezed. And what I would point to is the cost of a few headline goods like housing. Beyond that, what I would say is that a lot of people have been drawn to ideas of the left for purely normative reasons. I did not come from a particularly affluent background or anything like that, but I was drawn to the ideas of the left when I was in high school, when I had a part-time job at a Key Foods grocery store. But I was politicized not by my experience of being exploited and the key fluid proletarianized — I was not that, because in fact, I was so ineffective at my job, I'm almost positive I was producing no surplus labor. But I was politicized in the library books, reading books by people like Irving Howe, by Michael Harrington. And Harrington, just for those who don't know, was a key socialist intellectual, mid-century 50s and 60s America. Not a kind of Communist Vanguard trying to bring about violent revolution. He was part of the organic establishment to the left of social democracy, people who just wanted to make capitalism a little bit more humane, but also you could say to the right of a certain Leninism. So actually defining to the right of Joseph Stalin, of course, as we should all aspire to be. But I think that the gap between what I thought society could be, given its abundant riches, and what it was, is what politicized me. And I think there are a layer of people who both feel economic security day to day or feel frustrations, but are primarily driven by these sorts of normative, philosophical, utopian ideas. And I don't see a huge contradiction there. I just think we should be aware of the fact that we still don't have the deep level of rootedness that other redistributionist movements in the past have had, let's say, the New Deal coalition in the US from the 30s to the 70s. And as long as we're aware that our goal is to get deeper roots fundamentally by all layers of the working class, then I think we're moving in the right direction.

Well, for one thing, and I mean this earnestly, as far as I can tell, American socialists are way more liberal than they themselves think, and that they truly do believe in pluralism and multi-party democracy in certain places the state should not go. There's been a reconciliation of liberalism and socialism.

I think that if we believe in a bill of rights, socialism...

There's an immediate set of demands that you could call us attempting to bring about doses of socialism within capitalism. So this comes at the realm of decommodification of certain goods, providing them as social rights instead of them being dependent on your ability to pay. Healthcare in America is partially decommodified. If you're elderly, if you're very poor, if you're a child, you're going to have guaranteed access to health. We want to see that extended. Same thing with things like Social Security and certain other benefits.

I also would go further and say that even within capitalism, in the here and now, there's sectors of the economy that I would like to see greater state control of. In the old language of the left, we would call it the commanding heights of the economy. But even things like rail and things like that, I think there are benefits to selective nationalization, particularly of natural monopolies. But beyond that vision right there of socialism within capitalism could be true of a lot of social democrats. So the question is always, now, why would you go about calling yourself a democratic socialist? And for me, I call myself a democratic socialist because I actually believe in socialism beyond capitalism. I actually do believe in an economy built on the idea that workers should control their workplaces, and on this more radical vision of a society without capitalism, even if it still has a motor needed for investment and for efficiency gains and growth, and so on. So that vision is not going to be the vision of the National Democratic Party in 2028, presumably. But there is going to be a vision of the National Democratic Party in 2028. And if the faction that we're talking about here, and I think we can say it includes everyone from people who envision a world beyond capitalism to people who are just fellow travelers who want the Democratic Party to move to the left, if that group wins, so then the party becomes definitively pro-Medicare for all, definitively pro various other expansions of the welfare state.

I think that's a great immediate program to win over people. If you can't convince people to have an American national health service or a single-payer system like they have in other industrial countries, there's no way you're going to convince a majority of people that every cook can govern and everyone should own their workplaces. I think that would be a great and good enough place to start. You have to listen to people and listen to what their demands are. I'll give you one quick example. Dan Osborn running as an independent in Nebraska for Senate. One of his key demands is the right to repair. The idea that, if you have your John Deere tractor, you should be able to open that tractor up and do basic maintenance without voiding your warranty and not having to send it to some special service center. There's no socialist in America who's against that demand. But that's also not a demand that would naturally come to us, living where we're living in Queens and Brooklyn and whatever. I don't have a patch of grass in front of my apartment, much less room for a riding mower. But that comes out of being in a certain environment, talking to people, hearing their concerns. And I think a lot of the program of any party, the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, needs to come from dialogue with constituents and people you want to win over.

I think everyone can see across the political spectrum that there's a huge problem with housing construction in the US. So Zohran's policies, for example, in New York, is very heavily built around upzoning and making it easier for developers to build. And I think people agree with that. But beyond that, I think on the left, we point to successful examples around the world of public housing being done right. We think at least part of the construction needed needs to be public housing. We also need to maintain and expand existing units. I think that's the room for the state to step up and do more things. But I think these solutions, for example, that I'm mentioning are largely first and foremost on the supply side. Then beyond that, we do believe in certain stabilizations and other things. But rent stabilization, meaning rent control, which can be designed well, it could also be designed poorly. But you could imagine, for example, telling landlords, we're going to clear the way, we're going to allow you to create this big housing development. We're going to fight against the interests of local homeowners, and you build your big piece of housing. But after 30 years, after you have a reasonable return on investment, that unit is going to have some degree of rent stabilization, for instance. That, to me, is a perfectly common sense, economically coherent vision for housing. I know there's lots of talk on the left and in the Democratic Party about the debate over abundance, but fundamentally, any form of social democracy is grow, give. There needs to be a motor for economic investment. There needs to be profitability in order to have something to redistribute. The added component that I would say is an important part of a socialist agenda is making sure that there's strong unions and workplaces that can advocate for higher wages, even before the state gets involved with redistribution.

I think there's a host of different socialist positions. I lean more on the side of just seeing it as any other technology. Companies are going to invest in new technologies, the economy is going to change. We're going to need to adapt and figure out how to regulate it. Obviously, any changes that we do, any regulation we need to do, need to make sense in an international context too. Does it make sense to tank certain US companies if there's going to be other companies creating the same disruption that are coming from other parts of the world? But I think this gets to the level of policy where there's legitimate debates. I think the idea, which has been touted by figures as varied as Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon, of the US government owning a stake in major AI companies, it makes perfect sense too. But fundamentally, we have to respond to a dynamic economy in which there's always going to be new technologies, there's always going to be new wants and needs and new goods and services. And we need regulation that's able to be flexible and adapt with changes.

So I do think there's going to be productivity gains. I think our goal has to be to make sure that companies that are seeing increases in profit because these gains are forced to invest in expanding production and invest in the economy, and not just cut bigger checks and bigger dividends to shareholders, which obviously still have some economic effect, but is way more diffuse than those companies just expanding production.

First of all, well, I'm fairly confident — I could be wrong — that OpenAI, Anthropic will never be making huge amounts of profit, but I think their technology will enable other companies to make huge amounts of profits. What we want on the left is not just to increase your corporate tax, but we also want you to make sure that you are finding other avenues in the economy to take that surplus from and to invest in more jobs and meeting more and more needs. My only fear with the direction of the economy here is that more and more companies are just going to cut checks to shareholders, and we're not going to have the massive growth we had in the mid-century from new technologies.

One mechanism is actually stronger unions. I know this sounds counterintuitive, but stronger unions and forms of sectoral and centralized bargaining. So basically saying to companies now, you have to across the board, your competitors have to deal with the same wage floor. Now you have to deal with demands of paying autoworkers an extra five, ten, fifteen dollars an hour. What that will do, in reality, is it'll take the weakest companies in the field, it'll probably make them collapse. It would allow the companies in the middle of the field to survive and continue to find ways to innovate the level of labor techniques and labor-saving technology. And it would enable the companies at the top of the sectors, the benchmark producers, to be able to have some excess profits so that they could then invest to maintain their market share. That's just a classic example from social democracy of something that seems like it would tank the economy. Stronger unions actually being used to push the economy towards more productivity and more technology.

Exactly. It's still, I think, part of the logic behind even crude measures like the minimum wage. Part of that logic: let's not just sweat out labor, let's figure out a way to make companies more productive. I think those are all sorts of mechanisms. I'm just using those as examples that aren't just regulatory. It isn't just ex-post redistribution. I'm also for smart, common-sense regulations. And of course I'm obviously for redistribution. Socialism needs a tax base for a welfare state.

No, we're anti-capitalist. We want a world beyond capitalism. But in the short term, while we're within a capitalist economy, of course, we need firms that are profitable, that are providing employment, that are providing taxation. So I think to govern in the short term, as social democrats, we need profitable firms. But in the long term, I don't hide my desire that I think the economy should be socialized, even if I think in this socialized economy, there needs to be a role for markets and also a role for worker-controlled firms to be able to meet people's needs and provide new goods and services.

Well, I think markets existed before capitalism. Capitalism is a regime of property ownership that says that as an individual capitalist or as a corporation, we own this private property, and we use this private property to employ people and to produce goods and services. And in my vision of a just society, of a socialist society, that private property would be controlled by ordinary workers who would get their financing from public banks, who would still operate with hard budgets. They would still need to meet goods and services and meet their payroll obligations and things like that. But you don't have a class of people who, as individuals, control investment decisions.