It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. With us now, the influential socialist writer, editor, publisher, and DSA member, Bhaskar Sunkara, who now runs two leading magazines, an academic journal, and we could say has two new books. He is president of The Nation magazine, founder and editor of Jacobin, and publisher of Catalyst, a journal of theory and strategy. There's a reissue with new material of his 2019 book, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality, and he is co-author of a new one called The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World. The first book is largely a deep dive into the successes but ultimately false starts, as he describes them, of 20th-century socialism. The second, well, maybe we should call it a kind of Project 2029. Bhaskar, congratulations on the books and welcome to WNYC.
Thanks for having me. I think of it more like a Project 2049, but in [laughter] in that direction.
Long-term planning. Let's start with The Socialist Manifesto, though, which I'm sure was a purposeful reference to Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto. Why did you use that frame for your title?
You know, I had an answer that I gave to people when they asked me that question in 2019, but because I have so much respect for your program, I'm going to give you the true answer, which is it was, I think, dreamed up by a publisher and a marketing team. I originally wanted to title my book Socialism in Our Time, but like a good publisher with a good marketing sense, I knew that they were right and I was wrong. But ultimately, I think the book engages really critically with a lot of the history of socialism in the 20th century, engages with a lot of kind of the past, present, and future of the movement. There's a little bit of the book, maybe a chapter, that you could call like a rousing manifesto, but rereading this book while putting together the new edition of it, I was surprised about how sort of maudlin and depressive so much of the prose is. You know, I think in an introspective, interesting way, considering that I wrote it when I was in my 20s, I think I was channeling my inner Irving Howe.
Well, I guess regarding the title, there's a sidebar article to be written someday on marketing socialism. But you know, Donald Trump and others like to conflate socialism and communism as much as they can in the public mind with the rise of popular DSA candidates. I don't have to tell you that. Where would you start to describe the biggest differences between Marx's Communist Manifesto and your socialist one, to the degree that it is a manifesto, or just the difference between communism as Trump hopes people hear it and socialism as you mean it?
Yeah, I think that it's worth acknowledging that there's a common ancestor that all these different forms of socialism have, and that ancestor is the movements of the Second International, this big grouping of parties and associations that formed the workers' movement of the late 19th century. And these movements tried to put into practice the vision of Marx, a vision of a society run and controlled by workers. After World War I, though, this movement split into a more revolutionary wing, the communist wing, and a more reformist wing, the social democratic wing. And through a million different permutations, the wing that I'm a part of, the democratic socialist wing, kind of took articulation, and that we seek to use democratic means to do more than just introduce doses of socialism within capitalism, like social democracy does. We still aspire, like the communists do, for a socialism after capitalism, but we're deeply committed to both democratic means, but also a sort of reconciliation of, you could say, liberalism and socialism. And by liberalism, I mean that we believe that there's certain spheres that the state should simply stay out of. We believe that there's certain unalienable rights, and that we ultimately need to reconcile our demands for equality with the demands of individuals for autonomy. So I think, to some degree, even though I'm sure a lot of democratic socialists would disagree, that to be a democratic socialist is ultimately to reconcile the best of liberalism with the best of a more revolutionary socialist tradition.
And I think you've called it Bill of Rights socialism, right? Yes. But what people who fear socialism fear to some degree is that in the Soviet model as it was applied, socialism was not compatible with democracy. That was true in Cuba and some other Latin American socialist countries, too. I think you'd say for people who didn't grow up during the Cold War, it's obviously not as salient as it is today, looking at the popularity of the word socialism or, you know, the lack of fear associated with it among younger people. But still, that history is the source of a lot of fear and ongoing fear-mongering about socialism today. But why do you think that happened, that it wound up leading or being coupled with authoritarian regimes? Because the critics will say, 'Well, it may not start out that way, but if you're going to enforce all of these redistributionist things, then the government's going to have to take away your rights.'
Yeah. I think ultimately, if you look at the Soviet example, if you look at the Chinese example, these are countries coming out of very, very deep reactionary authoritarian regimes. They didn't have the same tradition of a democratic civil society. They didn't have the same tradition of democratic politics. They had the seizure of power through armed conflict and through sort of mass mobilizations and armed conflicts, and they were immediately thrust into a condition of scarcity that led them to take what the best of them thought were temporary measures. But ultimately, these governments ended up making a virtue out of necessity and propelling forward into, you know, deeply, deeply destructive forms of authoritarianism. And ultimately, democratic socialists were among their victims. You know, I'm from a tradition of American Menshevism that I imagine would have been on the side of, you know, Martov and the Mensheviks in Russia and, you know, other progressive, you know, forces in China. So, you know, but I understand the concern, but the counter that I would give to people is that there was another party, the Swedish Socialist Workers' Party. We call them the Swedish Social Democrats in English, but the direct translation of their name is the Swedish Workers' Party. They emerged out of the same grouping of Second International parties in the late 19th century. They organized in a very, you know, violent and authoritarian country, not what we think of Sweden today, but what it was before. And they actually had to fight for workers not to just get the right to have a union like we fought for in the late 19th and early 20th century, but they had to fight for even basic universal, you know, suffrage. Of course, you know, we had to fight for suffrage for women, for Black Americans and others, but they had to fight for even universal male suffrage. And this party, from this background of militant organizing and struggle from below, ended up winning elections and taking power in the 1930s. And they ruled almost uninterrupted for over 50 years until 1976. And then they lost an election in 1976. And guess what? They left power peacefully. And they won another election again in the 1980s. And they took and transformed a country that was known as being highly unequal, highly violent, highly unstable, and turned it into the country that produced all sorts of, you know, social democratic marvels in terms of its massive welfare state, produced great cultural products like ABBA, you know, if you're into that. And that was another soul of socialism that emerged out of the same movement. So when I think about what went wrong in the Soviet example, I think that it's hard to blame today's democratic socialists because we do share the same common ancestor, the same grouping of parties in the late 19th century, but we've long diverged from that, you know, tradition, and we were in very, very different circumstances to begin with.
I'm glad you brought up Sweden because I was very interested in your characterization of Sweden as maybe the most livable country in human history. But even about there, you say now they're just a fading bulwark against the far right with little more than a quarter of the electorate behind it. So what do you think happened if they were so successful at making it maybe the most livable country in human history?
Well, I think it's worth noting that despite the erosion of the welfare state, so many of these social democratic or even progressive achievements have been enshrined, even in the US where we never had a full-blown social democratic government or really a mass movement that was able to take power. When you think about something like Social Security, the amount of state support that's still offered, I think it's something that shocks even many socialists, like to think of the US as spending the vast majority of its federal budget on the military when in fact we spend, you know, half of our federal budget on Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, and other programs like that. So the rollback hasn't been absolute in our humanizing of capitalism. But what happened in Sweden was ultimately the economic climate changed in the '70s and '80s, and it became harder to sustain and expand the welfare state at a structural level. It was the welfare state at some point makes so many inroads in the profits of capitalists that a lot of these capitalists say, you know what, we're just not going to bother investing if our workers are demanding more and more power on the shop floor, if we feel like we're not getting enough profit, and that in turn makes the social democratic government itself turn around and say, okay, we need to restore the conditions for profitability of these firms, which is all well and good. Obviously, in a capitalist economy, you're dependent on successful firms creating employment, but this sort of turn ends up undermining your own political base, and you saw it all across the world. You saw it to some degree in the erosion of the New Deal coalition here in the US. You've seen it in the UK where a lot of areas in the north of England and in the Midlands that were historically voting for the Labour Party are now turning towards Reform and other parties of the right. So I think this is a common story, and this is why ultimately I remain a democratic socialist that aspires to a model of socialism that goes beyond capitalism, beyond social democracy, because I think it was perfectly rational to make those retreats and to do these things that angered so much of your base, and this is sort of the bind, the dilemma of social democracy that I don't think we should moralize, but I think we should understand.
Fascinating. Listeners, we can take your questions for Bhaskar Sunkara in connection with the reissue of his 2019 book, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality, or his new one, The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World, or in connection with his leadership at Jacobin, The Nation, and the journal Catalyst. 212-433-WNYC. Our text feed isn't working today, so if you want to talk to Bhaskar Sunkara, call us 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Let's move from talking mostly about your book, The Socialist Manifesto, to moving to talking mostly about The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World. You know, on the Wikipedia page about you, there's a line that condenses some of your economic views like this: 'He believes that workers should control firms and private property, compete in markets, which he says are not inherently capitalist, and receive financing from public banks.' All accurate mini-summary worth expanding on because people might be interested in hearing, wait, you believe in private property or markets are not inherently capitalist? But I did get that from Wikipedia. So is it true?
That Wikipedia entry is absolutely accurate, and this tells you something, I think, about the strengths of Wikipedia and, you know, a common volunteer endeavor. But ultimately, when I think about the goals of socialism, the first half of the goals that I have is simply as an egalitarian, I believe that the necessities of a good life, you know, are access to housing, education, healthcare, all that should be guaranteed just by virtue of being born. So then you could stop there and say, okay, isn't this just an extreme version of welfare state capitalism? And I would say yes, it has a lot of, you know, similarities, my vision of the sort of guarantees that we should have in society, but I go further than that and say that in the workplace itself, people deserve not just the power of exit, the ability to say, hey, I don't like my boss, I don't like my job, I'm going to go try to find another job. They deserve voice in the workplace itself. They deserve to make decisions in their workplaces, to be equity sort of partners in their workplaces and get a share of profits and contribute in all sorts of ways. And obviously, you know, we need a division of labor in a complex society, but I think there's plenty of models of worker cooperatives that we could take and examine and say these worker cooperatives, these labor-managed firms, are in most instances just as productive as capitalist firms and they lead to higher levels of people's satisfaction with their jobs. They, I think, could be the basis of a different sort of society. I think getting into sort of other problems of how to coordinate an economy based largely on worker cooperatives gets to the point of public banking and the need for finance to support these cooperatives and rewards for entrepreneurial risk. But when I think about the sort of society which I'm proposing, a society without capitalists, with workers controlling their own production, a society where the basics of a good life is guaranteed to all, to me, that's good enough as at the very least a first step to socialism in my view. That's pretty close to a final view of a socialist society. And that does involve using the market as a coordinating mechanism. That does involve markets in a way that used to make socialists uncomfortable, especially the previous generation of socialists. But I would say to anyone who has those sort of qualms about the use of markets: our main problem with markets is that, one, the distribution of income in today's society is so uneven that if you're voting with your dollars, market preferences tend to tilt towards people who have money to spend on luxury goods and things like that. In a more egalitarian society, there'd be a more equal distribution of income, so that problem would be resolved. And secondly, the problem with markets that a lot of people have is that the cost of competition is almost always, in a totally unfettered laissez-faire society, success or destitution, you know, for workers. I imagine a society in which there's a soft cushion of a welfare state, in which there's certain guarantees that makes the stakes of competition different, while still incentivizing producers to create goods and services that people want, and still allows consumers to indicate their desires by their preferences in the market economy.
