Lex Fridman Podcast: #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism

The following is a conversation with Bhaskar Sankara. He's a Democratic socialist, a political

writer, founding editor of Jacobin, president of the nation, former vice chair of the Democratic

Socialist of America, and the author of The Socialist Manifesto, The Case for Radical Politics

and an Era of Extreme Inequality. As a side note, let me say that this conversation with

Bhaskar Sankara, who's a brilliant socialist writer and philosopher, represents what I hope

to do with this podcast. I hope to talk to the left and the right, to the far left and the far

right, always with the goal of presenting and understanding both the strongest interpretation

of their ideas and valuable thought-provoking arguments against those ideas. Also, I hope to

understand the human being behind the ideas. I trust in your intelligence as the listener

to use the ideas you hear to help you learn, to think, to empathize, and to make up your own mind.

I will often fall short in pushing back too hard or not pushing back enough of not bringing up

topics I should have, of talking too much, of interrupting too much, or maybe sometimes in

the rare case is not enough, of being too silly on a serious topic or being too serious on a silly

topic. I'm trying to do my best and I will keep working my ass off to improve. In this way, I hope

to talk to prominent figures in the political space, even controversial ones, on both the left

and the right. For example, I hope to talk to Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,

to Ron DeSantis and Barack Obama, and of course many others across the political spectrum.

I sometimes hear accusations about me being controlled in some way by a government or an

intelligence agency like CIA, FSB, Mossad, or perhaps that I'm controlled in some way by the

very human desire for money, fame, power, access. All I have is my silly little words, but let me

give them to you. I'm not and will never be controlled by anyone. There's nothing in this world

that can break me and force me to sacrifice my integrity. People call me naive. I'm not naive.

I'm optimistic. And optimism isn't a passive state of being. It's a constant battle against

the world that wants to pull you into a downward spiral of cynicism. To me, optimism is freedom.

Freedom to think, to act, to build, to help. At times, in the face of impossible odds.

As I often do, please allow me to read a few lines from the poem If by Rajar Kipling.

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too.

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, or being lied about on dealing lies, or being hated,

don't give way to hating, and yet don't look too good or talk too wise.

Even this very poem is mocking my overromantic ridiculousness as I read it. The meta irony

is not lost on me, my friends. I'm a silly little kid trying to do a bit of good in this world.

Thank you for having my back through all of it. All of my mistakes. Thank you for the love.

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member of society, you know, reach for the stars, be the best version of yourself, but also just

enjoy it. I mean, it's a weird optimization problem that involves nutrition, that involves exercise.

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of your schedule of how you spend the minutes in your day. And then I think part of that process

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please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Bhaskar Sankara.

Let's start with a big, broad question. What is socialism? How do you like to define it?

How do you like to think about it? Well, there's so many socialists out there

and we can't seem to agree about anything. So my definition, I'm sure, is really just my definition.

But I think at the minimum, socialism is about making sure that the core necessities of life,

food, housing, education and so on are guaranteed to everyone just by virtue of being born so that

those people can reach their potential. And I think that's a minimum requirement of socialism.

Beyond that, I think socialism, especially democratic socialism, the type of socialism that I believe

in, is about taking democracy from just the political democratic realm and extending it

into economic and social spheres as well. So if we think that democracy is a good thing,

why do we allow our workplaces to be run in autocratic ways?

So economic, political, social, in all those realms, the ideas, the philosophical ideas

apply. What are, if you can put words to it, what are some philosophical ideas about human

beings that are at the core of this? I think at the core, it's the idea that we have intrinsic

value. We are individuals that have unequal talents, of course, we're individuals that

want different things. But this unique individualness can only truly come to light in a society

in which there are certain collective or social guarantees. So we could think, just like Stephen

J. Gould, the scientists and socialists used to say, about how many thousands of potential

Einstein's or Leonardo da Vinci's that died in sweatshops and on plantations and never got

the chance to cultivate what was unique and human about themselves and also never got a chance to

have families and impart what was special and important to them to future generations and

to posterity. My own grandmother was born in Trinidad and Tobago. She was illiterate

till her dying days in East Orange, New Jersey. She never had the chance to write down her memories

of her life in Trinidad as a young woman and what it meant. She, of course, had lots of children

and she was able to impart some stories to her children and grandchildren. But I often think

about what someone with her wit and intelligence could have done with a little bit more support.

But if all human beings have intrinsic value, you don't have to be an Einstein

for the application of some of the ideas that you're talking about. Is there a tension

or a trade-off between our human civilization, our society, helping the unlucky versus rewarding

the skillful and the hardworking? I think you could do both. There's always a balance between

the two. I think you could reward people who make innovations and who improve lives for everyone

through their innovations by giving them, let's say, even more consumption. Even that level of

inequality while still making sure that there's not people in poverty and suffering and while

making sure that, hey, we're going to give these people who want to work that extra 10 hours or

20 hours or want to apply their hard work some extra benefits, but that these benefits would be

not the extreme disparities that you have today. So at the core of socialism and maybe democratic

socialism, is that maybe a reallocation of wealth, reallocation of resources? I think it's wealth

and resources, yes, but it's also power. And I guess one way to think about this is some

thinkers on the right, like Hayek, they would say in their most generous moments talking about

socialists and socialism, they would say, socialist want to trade some of your freedom

for equality. And that's them trying to just accurately describe what socialism is trying to

do. The way that I would put it, it's a little bit different. Socialists are proposing a tradeoff,

but it's really a tradeoff between freedom and freedom. And by that, I mean, let's say you set

up a successful business and you set up a business right here in Austin, Texas, some sort of firm,

it's producing some widget or whatever and it's producing a good that people really want and

demand. But you have some competition, you decide to hire 20, 30 people to help you. You entered

into a free contract with these people who under capitalism, of course, we're not living in feudalism,

have the option to join any other firm, but they like you and they like this firm and they like

your offer and you're paying them, let's say $20 an hour for 40 hours of work per week. Now,

if the government comes along and says, okay, there's now a new minimum wage, minimum wage is $22

an hour. And also there's a maximum work week, 35 hour work week. And if you work someone over 35

hours, even if they agree, you have to pay them time and a half. Now, that, of course, is now an

abridgment of your freedom as an entrepreneur, your freedom to set certain terms of employment,

to engage in a contract with free people. But now your workers and other workers in the sector,

because if you did it unilaterally, you just get undercut by your competition. Now, these people

now have a few extra hours a week, they can do whatever they want with, they could watch more

NFL with it, they could spend more time with their friends or family or whatever else. And

they're still getting paid the same, if not better, because the wages also went up. So,

it's really a question often of tradeoffs between who's freedom and autonomy, are you going to

prioritize the freedom and autonomy of the entrepreneur or the capitalist in this case,

or the freedom and autonomy of ordinary workers. Now, you could create a society that swings

so far in the direction of prioritizing the freedom of one group or one class or whatever

else, compared to another, that you end up in some sort of tyranny. Now, if the state said,

you know, you Lex, you're a capitalist, so you don't get the right to vote, or we're going to take

away your private home or your ability to do things we think are intrinsic human rights. Now,

this would be tyranny, this would be an abridgement of your rights, but shaping your ability in the

economic sphere to be an economic actor is, I think, within the realm and scope of democratic

politics. Yeah, so those are the extremes you're referring to. And one perspective I like to take

on socialism versus capitalism is under each system, the extremes of each systems and the

moderate versions of each system. How can people take advantage of it? So it seems like no matter

what part of human nature is, whatever the rules, whatever the framework, whatever the system,

somebody's going to take advantage of it. And that's the kind of pragmatic look at it,

in practice, what actually happens. Also, the incentives and the human behavior,

what actually happens in practice under these systems. So if you have a higher and higher

minimum wage, and people watch more and more NFL, how does that change their actual behavior as a

productive member of society? And actually at the individual level, as somebody who could be an

Einstein, and chooses not to, because NFL is so awesome to watch. So like, is both how do people,

malicious people that want to take advantage? Maybe not malicious, but people that, like me,

are lazy and want to take advantage. And people that also I think like me, like I tend to believe

about myself that I have potential. And if I let my laziness naturally take over, which it often

does, I won't materialize the potential. So if you make life too easy for me, I feel like I

will never get anything done. Me personally, of course, there's a giant set of circumstances of

the unlucky and the overburden and so on. Okay. So how can people take advantage of each system,

socialism, capitalism? So for one thing, people are going to take advantage of systems, they're

going to find loopholes, they're going to find ways around, they're going to find ways to,

to at times, dominate and coerce others, even in systems meant to get rid of domination and

coercion. That's why we need to design our systems in such a way that, that it eliminates as many

of these things as possible. And also that's why we need democracy, we need freedom. So in a

Soviet system, for instance, you had the rise of this authoritarian bureaucracy that dominated,

of course, others in the name of socialism. Now, that system desperately could have used some

political democracy and some checks on what people were doing and some ability to reverse

their power, right? And as soon as, of course, little elements of democracy was brought to that

system, the system, you know, collapsed because there started to be outlets for, for dissent and

for dissatisfaction. So I think we can't design a priori, a perfect system. We need to be committed

to certain principles that allow systems to be perfected. And for me, that's the importance

of democracy. So even a few years ago, not to go on a tangent, but people were louding

Chinese authoritarianism and they're saying, China is building this efficient system,

the state runs so well, there's technocratic excellence, plus there's just productivity and

they're just working harder than Americans and whatever else. But look at in practice what

really happened with COVID, both the initial suppressing of information about what was happening

in Wuhan and the outbreak where many ordinary Chinese workers and doctors and others were

trying to get the word out and they were suppressed by Communist Party officials locally in Wuhan,

probably with the collusion naturally, nationally. And now with zero COVID policies and whatever

else. So I think that often we find that even though it seems like these are weak systems and

democracy makes us less competent technocratically and otherwise, I think it's kind of a necessity

for systems to grow and evolve to have that freedom in civil society. But as for individuals,

now, the first part of it is, yeah, I think people should be free to make their own choices.

You might have tremendous potential, but you might choose to spend it in leisure and leisure

doesn't only mean doing, you know, sitting around at home, drink a bunch of berries,

kind of wasting your life away that way. Leisure might mean spending more time with

their friends and family, building these sort of relationships that are gonna maybe not change

the world and some medicines, but we'll change the lives of the people around you and we'll

change your community for the better. I'm taking notes here because I, for me, leisure just meant

playing a lot of Skyrim. This whole family relationship that I'm gonna have to work on that.

I didn't realize that's also including leisure because I'm gonna have to reconsider my whole

life here. Anyway, leisure should mean civic activity too, right? I mean, there's that famous

book, The Robert Putnam One, Bowling Alone or whatever, which described it for now. I mean,

I was born in 1989. I like video and computer games, you know. So I definitely do that type

of leisure too, but I found a lot more richness in my life when in the last decade, a lot of my

leisure has returned to like going to the local bar for like the couple drinks I have a week

instead of doing it at home alone, watching TV or something, you know, because you get that random

conversation, that sense of a place and belonging. But I guess what's the undercurrent maybe of your

question was, now, if you have a system with lots of carrots, but not the whip of, hey,

you might be destitute, you might be unemployed, you might not be able to support yourself unless

you're working a certain amount, would we still be as productive? Would we still be able to generate

enough value for society? And I think that that's a question that is quite interesting. I think

that we're living in a society now with enough abundance that we could afford more people deciding

to opt out of the system, out of production, and that the carrots of staying in, you know, more

money for consumption, more ability to do cool things, more just social rewards that comes from

being successful or from providing, would be enough. But that's another thing that would have

to be balanced in a system. So if we're seeing mass unemployment by choice in a democratic

socialist system, then you might need to reconfigure the incentives. You might need to encourage

people to go back into production. But that's something that, again, you could do through

democracy and through good governance. You don't have to set the perfect blueprint in motion,

you know, write up a treatise now and 50 years from now, you know, try to follow it like it's

Scripture. So by the way, I do like how you said whip instead of stick in carrot and stick. That's

putting a weight on the scale of which is better. But yes, but I would actually argue to push back

that the wealthier we get as a society, as a world, that the more comfortable the socialness

become, the less of a whip or stick they become. Because one of the negative consequences, even

if you're on welfare is like, well, life is not going to be that great. But the wealthier we become,

the better the social programs become, the easier life becomes at the bottom. And so you might not

have this motivation financially to get out from the bottom. That said, the pushback and the pushback

is that there's something about human nature in general, money aside, that strives for greatness,

that strives to provide a great life, a great middle class life for your family. So that's

the motivated to get off from the bottom. Well, I think a lot of people who are stuck at the bottom

of the labor market today, one, these are people who are kind of our true philanthropists, because

a lot of them are the ones who are working two jobs and are working 60 plus hours and are providing

in this country, it's such a bargain for their labor because they're so underpaid.

So many of the things that the rest of us use to enjoy life and consumption or whatever else.

Like, I got here from downtown Austin, and I think my lift, I did tip, but I think my lift was

like eight bucks space or whatever else. I think that we are all indebted to people who are working

and we don't see it at various stages of the production process from the workers in China

and Taiwan producing technological things that we're recording this on to growers and workers

and agriculture in the US. So I think that one working class people are already working, but as

far as getting out from under poverty and desperation, we're in a society that doesn't give people a

lot of tools. So if you don't have access to good public schools from age five until 12, 13,

it's going to be really hard to move from generations of your family being involved in manual labor

to doing other forms of labor. You're going to be stuck at a certain part of our labor market

as a result. If you don't have access to decent health care throughout your life, you might be

already preordained to an early grave by the time that something kicks in, you really want to change

something in your life in your mid-20s. Obviously, it's a combination of agency

and all these other factors. There's still something, I think, innately human, innately

striving that a lot of people have, but we don't really give people in our current society the

tools to really be full participants in our society. We just take for granted, for example,

and I'm from the Northeast, so I give like excessively Northeast examples. We take for

granted that someone from Hartford, Connecticut is going to have your average working class person,

Hartford, is going to have a very different life outcome than someone born on the same day,

the same hour in Greenwich, Connecticut. We take for granted that accidents of birth

are going to dictate outcomes. So you mean like depending on the conditions of where you grow up,

there's going to be fundamentally different experience in terms of education,

in terms of the resources available to you to allow yourself to flourish?

Yes, of course, city and a rich city, and Connecticut is great. It's highly, highly

underrated. Both New Yorkers and people from Boston kind of have a colonial feeling about

Connecticut where we make fun of it and we try to carve it up. The West belongs to New York,

the East to Boston, but I'm here for Connecticut nationalism. I think it's a great place.

Okay. Can we actually step back a little bit on definitions because you said that

some of the ideas practically that you're playing with is democratic socialism.

We talked about the higher level, the higher kind of vision of socialism, the ideas,

the philosophical ideas, but how does it all fit into the big picture historically of ideas of

Marxism, communism, and socialism as it was defined and experienced and implemented in the 20th

century? So what's your key differences? Maybe even just like socialism, communism.

Yeah. Well, I hate the no-true-Scotsman sort of response to this, which is,

oh, that socialism is bad. So it wasn't really socialism, and my socialism is good, so it is

socialism. But I think that socialism and communism share a common ancestor, which is they both

emerged out of the turmoil and development of late 19th century capitalism and the fact that

there was all these workers' parties that were organizing across the capitalist world.

So in Europe, for instance, you had this mass party called the German Social Democratic Party,

and that became probably the most important, the most vibrant party in Germany in the 1880s

and 1890s. But they were locked out of power because Germany at the time was still mostly

a target. It had a parliamentary democracy, but it was a very undemocratic democracy.

The Kaiser is still ruled. These movements took root across the capitalist world,

but including in Russia and in conditions of illegality. So it was assumed for many, many

years, and the workers' movement across Europe and among socialists of Europe,

they called themselves social democrats then, that the revolution would first probably happen in

Germany in this developed, growing hub of industrial capitalism and not in semi-feudal Russia.

But then World War I came, the workers' movement was split between parties that decided to either

keep their head down or to implicitly support the war, and then support the war for now or

keep their heads down, don't get banned, don't get arrested, and then we'll just take power after

the war is over. And those like Russia, and also in the United States for that matter,

that chose the path of resistance to the war. And it was the Bolshevik faction of the Russian

movement, Lenin's Bolshevik party that took power in Russia after a period of turmoil where it

didn't seem, well, was it going to go to the fascist right or was it going to go to the far

left? There was a period of flux and turmoil in Russia, but definitely the old regime was not

able to stand. And these Russian social democrats, these Bolsheviks said,

social democracy has so betrayed the idea of internationalism and brotherhood and progress

it was supposed to stand for that we can't call ourselves social democrats anymore.

We're going to go back to this old term that Marx used, we're going to call ourselves communists.

And that's where official kind of communism out of Russia emerged. In other parts of Europe,

parties were actually able to take power, some in the interwar period, but most in the post-war

period. And they also came out of this old social democratic movement. And these parties

mostly just call themselves socialists. And a lot of them still on paper wanted to go beyond

capitalism. But in practice, they just managed capitalism better in the interests of workers.

But they all had the same common ancestor. And in practice, to me, social democracy means

trying to insert doses of socialism within capitalism, of maintaining capitalism.

Communism met this attempt to build a socialism outside of capitalism and often authoritarian

ways, in part because of the ideology of these communists, but in part because of the conditions

in which they inherited. They were inheriting a democracy. They were inhering a country that had

been ruled by the Tsars for centuries. And with very little condition, like a very weak working

class, very poor and devastated by war, and so on, where authoritarianism kind of lended itself

to those conditions. And then there's me. Then there's democratic socialists. And the way I

would define it is we like a lot of what the social democrats accomplished, but we still

believe in going beyond capitalism and not just building socialism within capitalism,

but we believe in this ultimate vision of a world after capitalism.

What does that world look like and how is it different from communism? Actually,

maybe we can linger before we talk about your vision of democratic socialism. What was wrong

with communism, Stalinism, implementation of communism in the Soviet Union? Why did it go

wrong? And in what ways did it not go wrong? In what ways did it succeed?

Let me start with the second part of that question. And that's a very difficult one to

answer in part because I morally and ethically am opposed to any form of authoritarianism or

dictatorship. And often when you talk about the successes of a government or what it did

developmentally that might have been positive, we have to abstract ourselves from what we

morally believe and just just kind of look at the record, right? I would say that the

Soviet experiment started off by in Lenin's time as the attempt to kind of just hold a holding

action. Hey, we don't really have the conditions to rule this country. We have the support of the

working class or most of it, but the working class is only 3% of the population. The peasantry

is really against us. A lot of this 3% of the population has died in war and half of them

supported the Mensheviks and the more moderate socialists anyway. But the alternative in their

minds was going to be a far right reaction, you know, some sort of general taking power in a coup

or whatever else, or just them ending up back in prison because a lot of them were in prison

under Tsar or just killed. So they figured, all right, we're going to have a holding action where

we maintain as much of this territory of their old Russian empire as possible. We'll try to slowly

implement changes, re-stabilize the economy through something called a new economic program,

which was kind of a form of social democracy, if you will, because it allowed market exchange for

the peasants combined with state ownership of industries in the cities. And for a while,

it seemed to be working. The revolution never came that they were expecting in Western Europe.

But in Russia itself, they were able to re-stabilize things by the middle or end of the 1920s,

and they were able to build more of a popular base for some of their policies because people who had

seen the chaos of World War I and Revolution and then Civil War kind of just wanted stability.

And after a decade plus of war, if you had a government that was able to give you enough to

eat and a job, you know, that was good enough for them, then Stalin came into power and he

wanted to rapidly industrialize. And his logic was the revolution is not going to come in the

West. We need to build socialism in one country, and we need to catch up with the West. We need to

turn ourselves into an industrial powerhouse as quickly as possible. And that's where you got

forced collectivization to try to increase the productivity of Russian agriculture through

state ownership of previously fragmented agricultural holdings and through the implementation

of mechanization. So bringing in more machines to make agriculture more productive, all under

state ownership, plus more ambitious attempts to build heavy industry through five year plans.

Now, I say this kind of coolly, but we know in practice what that meant, you know, forced

collectivization was a disaster. I mean, first of all, I think was built on the faulty premise

that scale always equals more productivity when in fact, especially in agriculture, but in any field,

it's a little bit more complicated than that. And it led to millions of deaths, you know,

it led to famine, it led to a host of other problems. Industrialization in the way that

had happened under Stalin also kind of unbalanced the Soviet economy to lean too heavy towards

heavy industry, not enough for medium or light industry. But this did mean especially the

five year plan industrialization did manage to put Russia on a different

developmental trajectory. So by the time the post war period came,

one, it might have gave them the ability to survive the Nazi invasion to begin with. That's

a complicated question. And then by the time the post war period came, Russia had kind of jumped

ahead of its developmental trajectory in a way that a lot of other countries didn't do. There

are a few examples like Japan is one to manage to, if you kind of ran a scenario of where Japan

would be in the 1870s, 1880s and ran it 100 times, the Japan of the post war period is kind of one

of the best outcomes, right? And I think that that you could say that about Russian economic

development, its ability to catch up at a certain level to the West. And then after that, of course,

later on, as economies got more complex, as they kind of move beyond regular heavy industry and

as the main stable of the economy, the Russian economy in its command system was unable to adapt

and cope and ended up falling back behind the West again by the 1970s. So all this is a very long

story to say that a lot went wrong. In Russia, the economic picture is actually a little bit more

complicated. Politically, I think it's just a small party without much popular support,

but with real popular support in a couple of cities, without a lot of popular support

empire wide took power and they felt they couldn't give back power. And they kept holding on to power

and eventually among their ranks in these conditions. One of history's great tyrants took

power and was able to justify what he was doing in the context of the Russian nation and development,

but also all the threats that came from abroad through, you know, the Civil War wasn't just a

civil war, it was really an invasion by many imperial powers all around the world as well.

So I think a lot of it was conditions and circumstance. And I guess the question really is

to what role ideology played. Is there something within the socialist tradition that might have

lend itself to authoritarianism? And that's something we should talk about.

And that's a really complicated human question. It does seem that the rhetoric, the populism

of workers unite, we've been fucked over for way too long. Let's stand together.

Somehow that message allows flawed or evil people to take power. It seems like the rhetoric,

the idea is so good, maybe the utopian nature of the idea is so good that it allows a great

speaker to take power. It's almost like if the mission, like come with me friends,

beyond the horizon, a great land is waiting for us, that encourages sort of, yeah,

dictators, authoritarians to take power. Is there something within the ideology

that allows for that, for the sort of, for lying to people, essentially?

Well, I might surprise you with my answer because I would say yes, maybe. But I think that it's not

just socialism. Any sort of ideology that appeals to the collective and appeals to our long-term

destiny, either as a species or as a nation or as a class or whatever else, can lend itself to

authoritarianism. So you can see this in many of the nationalisms of the 20th century. Now,

some of these nationalisms use incredibly lofty collective rhetoric, like in Sweden,

the rhetoric of we're going to create the people's home. We're going to make this a country with

dignity for all Swedes. We're going to make this a country that's more developed, more free, and so

on. And they managed to build a pretty excellent society in my estimation from that. In countries

like fascist Germany and Italy, they managed to do horrendous things in Japan and horrendous things

with that. In the US with national popular appeals, FDR was able to unite a nation to elevate ordinary

working class people into a position where they felt like they had a real stake in the country,

and I think did great things with the New Deal. In Russia, of course, this language was used to

trample upon individual rights and to justify hardship and abuses of ordinary individual people

in the name of a collective destiny. A destiny, of course, it was just decided by the party in power

and during the 30s and 40s by just Stalin himself, really. Now, I think that that's really the case

for making sure that we have a bedrock of civil rights and democracy. And then on top of that,

we could debate. We could debate different national destinies. We could debate different appeals,

different visions of the world, but as long as people have a say in what sacrifices they're

being asked to do, and as long as those sacrifices don't take away what's fundamentally ours,

which is our life, which is our basic rights. And voice, our voice. So this complicated picture,

because, help me understand, you mentioned that social democracy is trying to have social policies

within a capitalist system in part, but your vision, your hope for a social democracy is one

that goes beyond that. How do you give everybody a voice while not becoming the Soviet Union,

while not becoming where basically people are silenced either directly through violence or

through the implied threat of violence and therefore fear?

So I think you need to limit the scope of where the state is and what the state can do

and how the state functions, first of all. Now, for me, social democracy was like the equivalent

of, I'll give a football analogy. It was the equivalent of getting to the red zone and then

kicking a field goal. You'll take the three points, but you would have rather got a touchdown.

And for me, socialism would be the touchdown. It's not a separate, different playing field.

Some people would say socialism would be an interception.

Sure. No, and they would have the right to, again, to say that and to say we shouldn't go

go further. And most coaches would take the safe route, right? So you're going against the decision.

Anyway, I understand. So for you, the goal is full socialism.

But I'll take the three points. I just want to march down the field. I want to get within

scoring position. The reason why we should really move from this analogy, but the reason why

I call myself a socialist is looking through history and these examples of social democracy.

You saw that they were able to give working class people lots of rights and income and power in

their society. But at the end of the day, capitalists still have the ultimate power, which is the

ability to withhold investment. So they could say in the late 1960s and the early 70s, listen,

I was fine with this arrangement 10 years ago. But now I feel like I'm going to, you know,

take my money and I'm going to go move to a different country or I'm just going to not invest

because my workers are paid too much. I'm still making money, but I feel like I could be making

more. I need more of an upper hand, right? So their economic power is then challenging the

democratic mandate of Swedish workers that were voting for the Social Democratic Party and were

behind this advance. So to me, what socialism is in part is taking the means of production,

right, where this capitalist power is coming from and making it socially owned so that ordinary

workers can control their workplaces, can make investment decisions and so on. Now,

does that mean total state ownership of everything or a planned economy? I don't think that makes

any sense. You know, I think that we should live in a society in which markets are harnessed and

regulated and so on. My main problem is capitalist ownership in part on normative grounds, just

because I think that it doesn't make sense that we celebrate democracy and all these other spheres,

but we have workplaces that are just treated like tyrannies. And in part because I think that

ordinary workers would much prefer a system in which over time they accrued shares and ownership,

where they got in addition to a base kind of wage, they got dividends from their firm being

successful and that they figured out how to, you know, large firms, they're not going to be making

day-to-day decisions by democratic vote, right? But maybe you would elect representatives,

elected managements once every year or two, depending on your operating agreement and so on.

That's kind of my vision of a socialist society. And this sounds, I hope, like agree or disagree,

like it would not be a crazy leap into year zero, right? That this could be maybe a way in which we

could take a lot of what's existing in society, but then just add this on top. But what it would

mean is a society without a capitalist class. This class hasn't been, you know, individually,

these people, you know, haven't been taking to reeducation camps or whatever else,

but they're just no longer in this position. And they're now part of the economy in other ways,

like they'll probably be the first set of highly competent technocrats and managers and so on.

They'll probably be very well compensated for their time and expertise and whatever,

whatever else. But to me, both a practical end of things, like taking away this ability to withhold

investment and increasing our ability to democratically shape investment priorities

and to continue down the road of social democracy and on normative grounds, my kind of egalitarian

belief that ordinary people should have more stake in their lives in the workplace leads me

beyond social democracy to socialism. So there's a tricky thing here. So in

Ukraine especially, but in the Soviet Union, there's the Kulaks,

the possible trajectory of fighting for the beautiful message of respecting workers' rights

has this dynamic of making an enemy of the capitalist class too easily making an enemy

of the capitalist class with a central leader, populist leader, that says the rich and the

powerful, they're taking advantage of you. We need to remove them. We need to put them in camps,

perhaps, not said explicitly until it happens. It can happen overnight, but just putting a giant

pressure on that capitalist class. And again, the Stalin type figure takes hold. So I'm trying to

understand how the mechanism can prevent that. And perhaps I'll sort of reveal my bias here,

as I've been reading, I was going to say too much, maybe not enough, but a lot about books

like Stalin's War on Ukraine. And just I've been reading a lot about the 30s and the 40s

for personal reasons related to my travels in Ukraine and all that kind of stuff. So I have

a little bit of a focus on the historical implementations of communism currently without

kind of an updated view of all the possible future implementation. So I want to lay that out there.

But I worry about the slippery slope into the authoritarian figure that takes the sexy message,

destroys everyone who's powerful in the name of the working class, and then fucks the working class

afterwards. So first of all, I think it's worth remembering that the socialist movement had

different outcomes across Western Europe and Eastern Europe. And in some of these countries,

in Western Europe, there wasn't actually democracy before the workers movement and before the

socialist movement. So the battle in Sweden, for instance, was about establishing political

democracy, establishing true representation for workers. And that's how the parties

became popular, the same thing in Germany too. Then it was the social democrats who were able

to build political democracy. Then on top of that, had layers of economic democracy, social democracy.

The Swedish social democrats ruled basically uninterrupted from the early 1930s until 1976.

It's kind of crazy to think about, but they were just in government. They were the leading

member of government that a few different coalition partners would shift. Sometimes they

were with the agrarians, sometimes they were with the communists briefly, but they ruled uninterrupted

and they lost an election in 1976 and they just left power. Then they got back into power in the

80s. So in other words, they created a democratic system, of course, with mass support of working

class people. Then they truly honored the system because when they lost power, they lost power.

They left power. There's plenty of cases like that across Europe and the world and in other

countries like Korea and elsewhere with their workers movements. The most militant, the most

class and trick workers, South Africa is the same way, created democratic systems.

Now, Russia, I think a lot of what happened had to do with the fact that it was never a democratic

country. It was ruled by a party and the party itself was very easy to shift from a somewhat

democratic party in Lennon's day to an authoritarian one in Russia. And there was no distinction

then between the party and the state. So your authoritarian party then became authoritarian

total control over the entirety of the state. Now, the fact that the Soviet system involved

total state ownership of production meant that the authoritarianism of the party state could go

even deeper into the lives of ordinary people compared to other horrific dictatorships like

Pinochet's Chile and so on, when maybe you could find some solace just at home or whatever else.

You didn't have the same totalitarian control of people's lives. But I would say that socialism

itself is yield different outcomes. Now, on the question of polarization, I guess that implies

that this polarization, this distinction is a distinction that isn't real in society and that

is kind of being manufactured or generated. You mean the capitalist class and the working class

just to clarify it? Yeah, okay. So in certain populist distinctions, the division is basically

arbitrary or made up, the us versus them polarization, depending who the us and who the them are.

You know, it's truly something that's manufactured. But capitalism itself as a system,

as a system based on class division, whether you're your supporter or opponent, I think we

should acknowledge it's based on class division, that is the thing creating that polarization.

Now, I think what a lot of what socialists try to do is we try to take bits of working class

opposition to capitalism, to their lives, to the way they're treated at work, and so on.

And yes, we do try to organize on those bases to help workers take collective action, to help them

organize and political parties, and so on to represent their interests, economic and otherwise.

But the contradiction exists to begin with. And if anything, this system, which I'm proposing

democratic socialism, would be kind of a resolution of this conflict, this dilemma,

this thing that has always existed since chieftain and follower, and so on.

We've had class division since the Neolithic Revolution. I think this is a democratic road

out of that tension and that division of humanity into people who own and people have

nothing to give but their ability to work. So that idea is grounded in going all the way back

to Marx, that all of human history can be told through the lens of class struggle.

Is there some sense, can you still man the case that this class difference is over exaggerated,

that there's a difference, but it's not the difference of the abuser and the abused.

It's more of a difference of people that were successful and people that were less successful.

So I'll play devil's advocate, which is saying that maybe one could argue that in its purest,

earliest stage, capitalism was based on a stark difference. But then since then, two things have

happened. One, a bunch of socialists and workers have organized to guarantee certain rights for

working class people, certain protections. So in our system now, there are certain safety nets

less in the US than in other countries, but in a lot of countries are pretty extensive safety

nets. Even like 40-hour work week, minimum wage, safety regulations, all that kind of stuff.

And all those things are, in my mind, doses of socialism within capitalism. Because what you're

doing is you are taking the autonomy of capitalists to do whatever they want with people contracted

to them. And the only thing stopping them is them potentially being able to go to another

employer. But even then, it's kind of a potentially race to the bottom. If you can't get more than

$2 an hour from any employer in your market, you're going to have to live with it.

So one factor is we have built in those protections. So we've taken enough socialism

into capitalism that you could say that at a certain point, maybe it makes a qualitative

difference and not just a quantitative difference in people's lives. The other thing is, over time,

we've gotten wealthier and more productive as a society. So maybe at some point, the quantitative

difference of just more and more wealth means that even if in the abstract, the division between

a worker and a capitalist is real, if that worker is earning a quarter million dollars a year and

has a good life and only has to clock in 35 hours a week, 30 hours a week, and has four weeks of

vacation, then isn't it just an abstract or philosophical difference? So I think you could

level those two arguments. What I would say is that, one, a lot of these rights that we have

fought for are constantly being eroded and they're underattacked, in part because the economic power

that capitalists have bleeds into our political democracy as well. There's constant lobbying

for all sorts of labor market deregulations and so on. I fundamentally believe that if tomorrow,

all those regulations went away, capitalists would fight to pay people as little as possible and we

would be back in 19th century capitalism and not because they're bad people, because if I'm running

a firm and all of a sudden my competition is able to find a labor pool and is paying people

less than me, I'm going to be undercut because they'll be able to take some of that extra savings

and invest into new technology or whatever else and they'll gobble up my market share

before long. And then also beyond that, I do think there's a normative question here, which is,

now, do we believe that ordinary people have a capacity to be able to make certain decisions

about their work? Do we believe they know more about their work than their bosses? Now, I don't

think that's not true at every level, but I think there's no doubt that in workplaces,

workers know how to productively do their task in ways that their manager might not know. I think

we've all been in workplaces where we've had managers who kind of don't know what you do

or whatever else. And I think that collectively, if incentivized, we could have them one instead

of hoarding that information since they're getting a stake in production and so on,

they'd be able to more freely share it and be able to reshape how their day-to-day work happens.

And also, with elected managers, you kind of take that up the chain. I think you'd have

perfectly efficient market-based firms that could exist without capitalists.

So there's a lot of things to say. Maybe within just a very low-level question of,

if the workers are running the show, there's a brutal truth to the fact that some people are

better and the workers know this. It's the Steve Jobs A-players. You want to have all the A-players

in the room because one B-player can poison the pool because then everybody gets demotivated by

the nature of that lack of excellence and competence. This is just to take

sort of a crude devil's advocate perspective. Are the workers going to be able to remove

the incompetent from the pool in the goal of towards the mission of succeeding as a collective?

So I think that any successful model of socialism that involves the market, you need two things.

One is at the micro-level, you need the ability to fire people and for them to exit firms,

which might be a slower process in cooperative-based firms than it is in a capitalist firm without a

union, but it would probably akin to the process that would happen in a capitalist firm

of which there are many with unions. So you need that. Then at the macro-level,

you need firm failure. You need to avoid a dilemma that happened in Soviet-style economies,

which was soft-budget constraints and firms basically not being allowed to fail because

the government was committed to full employment, the firms employed people, so even inefficient

firms were at the end of the day, they knew they were going to be propped up by the government,

and they would be given all the resources they would need no matter how inefficiently

they were using those resources to maintain employment. So I think you need both.

Do you worry about this idea of firing people? Man, I'm uncomfortable with the idea, I hate it,

but I also know it's extremely necessary. So is there something about a collective,

a socialist system that makes firing, you said it might be slower, might it become extremely

slow, too much friction? Isn't there a tension between respecting the rights of a human being

and saying, you need to step up, maybe sort of the pause of the carrot, you really encourage

fellow workers know when there's a person that's not pulling their side of doing as great of a

job as it could be. But isn't the person that's not doing a great of a job going to start to

manipulate the system that slows the firing in their self-interest? Well, I think there would

be certain, so maybe another way to put it is think about like, if you're a partner at a law firm,

right? I don't really know how law firms work. So I probably shouldn't use this analogy, but

correct me if I'm wrong. But let's say you're a partner, you kind of have equity in your law firm

or something beyond your billable hours. And let's say you're going to be fired from your law

firm or they're laying off people or whatever else, they could just get rid of you. But they

would also have to figure out how to kind of buy you out too, after a certain point. So I think

that like in a cooperative firm, you'd probably have a system where you, after a certain point

of working productively, you probably have a period where you get fired really quickly,

no matter what. But once you have job security kicks in, you would be able to,

you know, it would be a process. It would probably be like, you know, a day or two process to figure

it out. Or maybe they would have a progressive discipline process, which is first you have to

get a verbal feedback, and then maybe a written performance review, then you could be fired.

I mean, that's how it works in a lot of workplaces with either unions or with just basic job security.

Most countries, that's how it works, because there's not at will employment in most countries.

So I think that the real tension is if you fire someone, if you're condemning them to

destitution, then morally, you'd really feel something there as you should as a human being

concerned about other people. But in a social system or even basic social democratic system,

there would be mechanisms to take care of that person. So one, if a firm is failing for any

reason, they're getting out compete or whatever, whatever else, those workers would then land

in the hands just for a little bit of the state, right? And there could be active labor market

policies to retrain people to go into expanding sectors or your sector is now obsolete, but here

you have these skills, you're going to be trained and hear some resources to kind of help you along

your training. And then there's a bunch of firms hiring, so go on your way. Then also just with

an expanded welfare state, being destitute in certain countries, being unemployed in certain

countries is easier than in other countries or situations. So you still can fall back on

that mechanism. And also my vision of market socialism, a democratic socialism, there would

be an expanded state sector, not anything you can imagine, but the way in which there's more of a

state sector in countries like Norway or Denmark than there is in the US. So there would be

various forms of state employment and whatever, whatever else. So I mean, I think that the real

question is, should being bad at your job or getting fired for any reason or getting laid off,

should that be a cause to have you totally lose your shirt? Or maybe should you just have to

rebound? Maybe you have less money for consumption or whatever else and you'll be on your way onto

bigger and better things in a few months. So a strong social net in many ways make it

more efficient to fire people who are not good at their job because then they won't be,

that won't actually significantly damage their quality of life and they have a chance to find a

job at which they can flourish. To step out into the macro, there's attention here as well. So

you said that there's an equality between the classes, the capitalist class and the working

class and sort of, there's a lot of ways you can maybe correct me on the numbers, but you could

say that the top 1% of Americans have more wealth than the bottom 50%. That's not talking about

perhaps capitalist class and the working class, but it's a good sort of estimate, right?

The flip side of that, if you just look at countries that have more economic freedom

versus less economic freedom, more capitalism versus less capitalism, their GDP seems to be

significantly higher. And so at the local level, you might say that there's an inequality, but if

you look historically over decades, it seems like the more capitalism there is, the higher the GDP

grows and therefore the level of the quality of life and the basic income, the basic wealth, the

average, even including the working class goes up over time. Can you see both sides of this?

So I could definitely accept some of that premise. One, within capitalism,

you want a bigger pie. Then if you divide up that pie, even if the bottom 10% of the working

class share is less as a percentage, it's still more in raw terms, so it's better for everyone.

The part that I would dispute is more economic freedom versus less economic freedom. So there's

obviously some countries in which capitalism doesn't work and maybe economic freedom plays a

role. If you're in a country like Egypt or India with a highly or previously highly bureaucratic

system, so you need to get licenses to do anything and you need to run things for the state or you

need to bribe someone to get an incorporation done or whatever else, that's in case in which I would

accept the premise of economic freedom to take an entrepreneurial risk to start something new is

limited. There's all sorts of factors in which it's too difficult to start a firm and it benefits

no one really except for whatever bureaucracy might be taking their 15% cut.

But in general, I think in advanced economies, it doesn't really work that way. So think about it

this way. If you pretend like we're back, I'm sorry to go to Scandinavia again, but this is

a good example. Let's say you're back in the 1970s in Scandinavia or whatever else,

you're in a country with extremely powerful unions. So the unions have a lot of labor rights,

the state has certain high taxation, certain guarantees on you too, but you're a capitalist

there. Now, what would you do if your capitalist competitors in the US were able to pay workers

$10 an hour and you have to pay them 20? You would probably, and assuming you can't just flee

or shut down or whatever else, you'd probably find ways to use labor saving technology,

right? That power of the high wages might encourage you to invest more in technology

and to utilize people's time is better so they're more productive at work so they're not just sitting

around or whatever else. So this really happened in practice in the Scandinavian countries in part

because it was combined with a certain type of pattern wage bargaining. So I'll explain this

really simply, but let's pretend that you're in a sector with three different companies.

Let's say an automotive sector and I'll just say one is GM, one is Ford, one is Chrysler.

Now, all these workers in your sector are all unionized. They're all, you know,

Swedish UAW, whatever the equivalent is, members and they're all paid the same and the union is

setting through marketing. The union is setting the wages across the sector. But the unions,

and let's say GM is the most productive of these companies, Ford is number two, Chrysler is number

three. The unions would intentionally set the wages, set their benchmark to Ford in the middle.

So what that would do is say to Ford, okay, Ford will stay in business because they'll be able to

meet the wage demands. Chrysler's might go out of business because, you know, they won't be able

to meet the demands or they'll have to really adapt really quickly. They might have to lay

off people, they might have to restructure. So union knows this in advance and all the auto

workers know this. But the most efficient manufacturer GM now has excess profits because

if they were negotiating with just the GM workers, the GM workers might even have been able to demand

more. But instead, these workers are are pegging their wage demands to Ford's level. And GM is,

in theory, able to expand and employ more people and adopt new production techniques with their

surplus. Then those Chrysler workers would be absorbed by the state by active labor market

policies, then put back to work for GM or for these expanding sectors. So in other words,

you're now in a situation where the state has a pretty big role in your economy,

taking a lot of your money and taxes. The unions are really shaping your life as a capitalist far

more that would happen in a country like the United States. And yet still, despite your more

limited economic freedom, you're still creating a more productive economy. So it could work. It

just has the system has to be designed right. And I think social democracies were designed

the right way. I think any future democratic socialism after social democracy would have

to be designed the right way. Can you just link on that a little more the pattern wage

bargaining? So GM is the most efficient. And Ford is the second most. Can you explain to me how,

can you explain to me again, the wages, setting the wages to the Ford level, how that is good for

GM? So how that encourages more of GM? This is just sectoral or actually in this case,

centralized wage bargaining. So setting the wages at a level that Ford can afford,

but a level that would probably be too expensive for Chrysler in the automotive sector would benefit

would benefit GM because they're drawing what we could call excess profits. Because

GM, if the GM itself could potentially have to deal with just the enterprise of GM workers

bargaining for wages, and if they saw their profitability was high, they would know their

leverage and they would say, pay us even more or else we're going to go on strike.

But instead, they're accepting slightly lower wages than they would have otherwise had in return

for the company having excess profits that they're through both the state, their union,

and sometimes there's worker councils or whatever else, they're playing a role in saying, okay,

we're going to make sure this excess profit is actually invested productively in order to

expand employment and just output. Okay, can we talk about unions? In general,

then, what are the pros and cons of unions? So the interest of the union,

maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong, I have a lot to learn both about the economics and the

human experience of a union. The union's interest is to protect worker rights and to maximize worker

happiness, not the success and the productivity and the efficiency of a company, right?

No, I would disagree. So I think a union's interest is in what's collectively bargaining

on behalf of workers, because in certain cases, I am right now a manager at the nation magazine,

right? If I have a problem with my working conditions or I need to raise or whatever else,

I could with my skillset, my background, my role in the company, I could go to my boss,

the owner of the nation and say, okay, I need to renegotiate my contract

on these terms. I could bargain, right? Now, if I was a ordinary worker at like a CVS or

something, if I didn't like my conditions and I went to my boss and said, hey, I need a $2 raise

and I need to be home by 830 because I have obligations at home, the boss would probably

say, I'm sorry, that's not possible, right? Maybe try the right aid down the street or the

Walgreens down the street or whatever. Now, if I went to the boss at a place like CVS or even

better, if all the pharmaceutical workers at right aid CVS Walgreens went to our bosses and said,

listen, we collectively need $2 more and a better hour, shorter shifts or whatever else,

then they would probably have no choice but to concede. You have to bargain collectively at any

level if you're an ordinary worker. And there are some exceptions, but that's for certain highly

skilled workers. But even in those cases, of course, all workers are skilled. I mean, just the

technical definition. Even in those cases, a lot of those workers have to bargain collectively

as well in order to get more wealth. But they cannot make their demands so excessive

that their firm gets out of business. The workers only are workers as long as they're

gainfully employed. So often unions will try to select their wage demands at such a level

that it ensures that their firm will stay in business.

Yeah, but the problem is the way firms go out of business isn't by explosion,

like a way popcorn starts getting cooked. At a certain moment, it just is over. It seems like

the union can, through collective bargaining, keep increasing the wage, keep increasing the interest

of the worker until it suffocates the company that it doesn't die immediately, but it dies

in five years. So that might still serve the interest of the worker, but it doesn't serve

the interest of society as a whole that's creating cool stuff and increasing a market

that's operating and increasing cool stuff and constantly innovating and so on and creating

more and more cool stuff and increasing the quality of life in general.

I just agree with the premise because I think even taking your example, that would be better

for society. If a firm cannot pay its workers a living wage, but its competitors can, then that

firm will either figure out a way to innovate, develop new techniques, new markets, new ways to

be productive, or it should go out of business. And it would be better for it to go out of business

than to stay in business or to be artificially kept in business in any sort of way.

So that's a Chrysler, my old centralized bargaining example.

But then there is innovation costs money too. So the flip side of that,

I think to play devil's advocate, is that it incentivizes automotive industry is probably a

good example of that. It incentivizes cutting costs everywhere and sort of whatever that's

been making you money currently, figuring out how to do that really well without investing into

the long-term future of the company for like all the different ways it can pivot, all the

different interesting things it could do in terms of investing into R&D. Whenever there's more and

more and more pressure on paying a living wage for the workers, it might suffocate and die

over the next five, 10, 20 years, which might be a good destructive force from a capitalist

perspective, but it might rob us of the Einstein of a company, of the flourishing that the company

and the workers within it can do over a period of five, 10, 20 years.

Well, this is just a problem with a lot of capitalism, which is about short-termism.

Because the same thing could be said from you're starting a company, you have a plan for it to

make a lot of money, but your investors want dividends right away. So you have to take away

from your long-term R&D or other plans and deliver short-term dividends. That's often why a lot of,

I think, R&D is often rooted in state institutions and research and whatever else is being drawn on.

And also, I think that that's a reason why the state has some sort of role in fostering firms

in either a, my version of a socialist economy or a capitalist economy or whatever else,

to help with these time horizon problems. So I won't dispute that workers could play a role or

wage demands could play a role in time horizon problems, but more often than that, it's coming

from investors, it's coming from just a host of other market pressures that people might have.

And I would say that in the real world, a lot of investment funds don't come from just retained

earnings, it comes from a lot of sources. So I think this is a problem that could be solved

through public policy, but definitely exists today as well.

So you mentioned living wage. Is there a tension between a living wage,

and maybe you could speak to what a living wage means, and the workers owning all of the profit

of the company? Sort of this kind of spectrum. No, I guess the spectrum is from no minimum wage,

the lowest possible thing you could pay to a worker, then somewhere in that spectrum is a living wage,

and then at the top is like all of the profit from the company is owned by the workers.

So split to the workers. I mean, I think that any society is going to have to make

distributional choices. You could have imagined a variety of capitalism in which

workers are paid quite little, but there's extremely high taxation, and there's redistribution

after the fact. You could imagine a system in which there's less taxation after the fact,

but there's more guarantees and regulations on how much people are paid before the fact.

In my vision of a social society, there would be similar way that unions work,

and in my example, the centralized bargaining unions would work, that bargain at the sectoral

level, and not just at the enterprise level like our unions do today.

There could be benchmarks set for different occupations or wages, and the reason why you

would want a benchmark at a worker-controlled firm is that you don't want workers self-exporting

themselves in order to gobble up market share, or because you don't want them collectively

deciding, okay, we're going to invest in this longer-term time horizon and outcompete other

people that way. So you might say, okay, if you do this sort of clerical work, you have to be paid

the equivalent of $15 an hour, and that's a minimum, but on top of that, you get dividends

from excess profits, and I think it would also have to be combined with public financing for

expansions and for development, which could be done in quite a competitive way. So you could

have a variety of banks, my vision, state-owned banks, but how would they decide who to invest in

and who to not invest in, who to give a loan for expansion to and who not to? Because you don't

want it to be like, oh, I'm going to invest in my nephew's firm and not this other firm, or I'm

going to invest in this guy's firm because he's a Italian, but not this guy's firm because he's

Albanian or whatever else. Just make it rational at the level of their goal is just like any other

investment person at a bank today to maintain a certain risk profile and to have an interest yield

and decide to invest on that basis. So if there's a huge automotive firm that has been on business

for 50 years that needs a little operating cash, like yeah, they could get their $50 million at

a 3% loan. If you have some crazy blue sky idea and you managed to get it to that point,

like maybe you and your friends would get it at 12% or something close to what a VC would offer

today. So I only kind of go into these details not because to say that a system doesn't have to

in advance map out all the different possibilities, but I think it does have to be willing to accept

a lot of things that we know today. I can't give you a version of socialism that everything's

going to be fine. We're going to live harmoniously and we won't have these sort of tensions and

you could hunt in the evening and fish in the afternoon and write criticism, whatever else.

I do hope that there's horizons beyond this that we could aspire to. I do have those visions,

but for now, I think our task as socialists is to imagine a five minutes after midnight.

What can we do right away within our lifetime vision?

So that means through some level of central planning, reallocating resources to the workers?

So I think the primary mechanism in this private sector under socialism would be a

market mechanism, firms competing against each other to expand, connected to a system of

public financing. But even at that level, the individual bankers and public banks and so on

would be operating based on their own rationality and the state would certainly shape investment

decisions, but maybe no more than they do in a lot of capitalist systems. So the state might

already today, in a lot of countries, decide we want to invest in green technology. So it's going

to be favorable rates for people or tax credits for people investing in green technology. So the

state already shapes investment. I think what should be centrally planned, and this is where

I'm proud to sound like an old school socialist, is things like healthcare, things like transit,

things like our natural monopolies of lots of types can be done very well through planning.

And we already have plenty of examples. But a lot of this society, I think, would be the

private sphere of worker-controlled cooperatives competing against each other, weak firms failing,

successful firms expanding. And the banks, you're saying publicly or privately owned?

Publicly owned. Let's just put it all on the table that it's almost guaranteed that every system

has corruption. So I guess the bigger question is, which system has more corruption? This one

was central planning and worker cooperatives versus unfettered capitalism or any flavor of

capitalism? I think any system has potential for corruption. I think it depends on how good your

civil service is, how much oversight do you have to resolve a problem once it arises?

How does corruption happen in a social system? So you have to, again, I apologize, but the large

scale examples of it. So we can look at Soviet Union, China, and Sweden,

fundamentally different nations and histories and peoples and economic systems and political systems,

but all could be called in part socialist. And so there's a ridiculous, almost caricature of

corruption in the Soviet system, the gigantic bureaucracy that's built, where somehow corruption

seeps in through kind of dispersion of responsibility that nobody's really responsible for the corruption.

I just had a conversation with Ed Calderon who fought the cartels in Mexico, and there's a huge

amount of corruption in Mexico, but it's not like even seen as corruption. You understand

when the cop pulls you over, you give this much money and so on. And so that kind of seems to happen

in certain systems. And it seems to have happened in socialist systems more than in capitalist systems

in the 20th century. Or maybe I'm wrong on that. No, I mean, I think in a lot of countries it's

seen as the cost of doing business, right? Now, in particular countries built on a system of

central planning, or just state allocation resources for the state, both produces and

allocates and things run through bureaucracies, then I think you're much more apt to have corruption

than in a system with just a smaller sphere for the state. So for example, if you're in a hypothetical

version of the US, you might see a lot more corruption like the post office, but you wouldn't

have that corruption in your workplace. So you kind of learn to go around that. For one thing,

even in state sectors, you can have, and this often is the case in democratic countries, you have

a transparent civil service where people who are corrupt are prosecuted by judges where it's

frowned upon and it just, over time, it goes away. So you go from having political machines that were

tied to certain, you know, had friends in certain police precincts and whatever else in the US in

the 19th century and early 20th century to now today, that would be a huge scandal and unheard of,

right? So I think over time, having a independent court system, having a truly meritocratic civil

service can be implemented anywhere. I think though in the Soviet Union, the extra little bit

that happened was you had a bureaucracy that just had so much power because the bureaucracy

was producing and distributing everything and everyone was relying the bureaucracy with jobs.

The way to social advancement was through the bureaucracies. So you end up with people like

Khrushchev, you know, people going from peasants to, you know, supreme leaders of countries just

through getting hooked up in the bureaucracy and advancing within it. And, you know, not all

these were bad people. I don't think Khrushchev was that bad of a person or Gorbachev, you know,

but this is their mechanism to advancement in systems like this. In the vision of democratic

socialism that I propose, the state doesn't have that overriding power to begin with. But I think

in either case, you know, corruption has arose in many different systems and has been successfully

dealt with. I think on the developmental trajectory of even countries today that we think of as being

very corrupt, corruption will, will, you know, fade away as well. But you definitely need a system

in which individuals act, individuals are incentivized to act rationally. So if you're in

a system in which cops who are corrupt are prosecuted and investigated and there's internal

controls, a civilian border review and kind of an internal investigators within police departments

or whatever else, there will be less corruption over time if people are punished. If you're in

a system in which you're running a firm, you're the manager of a firm and elected manager,

and everyone at that firm is trying for more efficiency and trying for more excess profits

or whatever else at the end of the day, you know, dividends at the end of the day,

then if you try to hire your nephew and he's not good at your job, you're not going to win

reelection, right? So you shouldn't, I think no system should rely on a change in culture

that come naturally or some sort of individual altruism. I think the systems have to be

constructed in such a way that it's not rational to behave poorly.

In sort of from a theoretical perspective, either a socialist or capitalist system can have

either culture. But it seems like if you prioritize meritocracy, if the people that are good,

whatever the good means, in terms of integrity, in terms of performance, in terms of competence,

it seems like that leads to a less corrupt system. And it seems like capitalism,

there's all kinds of flavors of capitalism, but capitalism, because it does prioritize

meritocracy, more often leads to less corruption. So that's not a question of political or economic

systems. It's a question of what kind of stuff do you talk about that leads to a culture of less

corruption? First of all, I think in theory, maybe capitals and words, meritocracy, but I think

in practice, anyone watching this or you and me would think of some of the people we know that

work the hardest and they're often working class people, working the food service industry or

whatever else, right? I think we don't have, in practice, I don't think we actually live in a

society that rewards people for hard work. I think we reward people for a combination of accidents

of birth plus hard work. Let me push back because, yes, so I agree with you, but let me push back

on a subtle point, because I like to draw a difference between hard work and meritocracy,

because as a person who works really hard, I work crazy hard, but I've also worked with a lot of

people, they're just much better than me. So hard work does not equal skill, good, productive.

So I just want to kind of draw that distinction, but I agree with you. I don't think our society

rewards directly hard work or even high skill. There's many examples, at least we can see,

that it does not do so. So we have an unequal distribution of talent, of course. So if we

lived in society in which there was some level of acceptable inequality, and it's a normative

kind of question of how much we would say it's acceptable, right? And that inequality was based

on this unequal distribution of talent, then I think that would be fine with me, right? That

would actually be a meritocracy. What I see in the US is often, okay, so if you are a upper middle

class or rich kid, and you get a good education, you know, K through 12, out of those people,

there will be some that work extra hard and go on to do incredible things or very successful,

and there will be other people that do not, right? And decide for whatever reason, or go down a

different path. And you could say maybe among that group of the upper middle class, there is a

meritocracy, right? But they're actually given those opportunities to make their own decisions

and to fail, whereas many, many other people, the vast majority of American society, I would say,

60 plus percent, don't really get those opportunities to make those choices to begin with.

And I would aspire to the type of world at least as a first step in which our only inequalities are

based on the or unequal innate kind of distributions of talent. Yeah, I guess a lot of people worry

that when you have a socialist in any degree central planning, or perhaps a collective of

workers, that it won't result in that kind of meritocracy that you're talking about. But you're

saying that no, it's possible to have that kind of meritocracy. Think about it this way. The workers

themselves are incentivized and are shaped by market forces too, right? They're trying to

respond to consumer needs and preferences. They're trying to expand market share. They're trying to

make money. So it requires no kind of leap into these people are going to be more altruistic or

whatever else, even on purely bourgeois terms, the same way you would maybe justify competitive

capitalist firms. I think you could justify this system as long as you think that people,

elected management can perform just as well. I think based on the experiences of cooperatives,

we've seen that they can. And then at the state level, state bureaucracies have their own sort of

sets of incentives. But in most systems that already have extensive state bureaucracies,

these people at high levels are appointed or elected, they're held to certain standards.

At the national level, a national government wants to maintain the tax revenue that they

need to pay for services. We already, I think, have incentive structures that you could say that

some people might just, I think, disagree with the normative thing of why would people

have to own their own means of production, control their workplaces or whatever else?

Why do we need this level of equality? Can't we just get by with our existing system,

but just make things a little bit easier for capitalists to make money of

than everyone will benefit or whatever else? I mean, that's a normative question.

In my vision of socialism, there'll be plenty of multiple parties with different views and

perspectives trying to either push us deeper into more radical forms of socialism or, on the other

hand, to roll back to more capitalist forms of government. So I think that, again, you can't

try to make up a perfect system and try to implement it. You have to do it as a process

democratically and so on. So just philosophically, in your gut,

you're more concerned about the innate equal value of human beings versus the efficiency

of this wonderful mechanism that we call human civilization at producing cool stuff.

Just like a gut. If we're sitting at a bar, that's where the gut feeling you come with.

Of course, your mind is open, but you want to protect the equal value of humans.

So I don't want to fight the hypothetical. So I'll say equality. I am concerned with equality,

but I don't think the two are necessarily always in tension.

But also, when you think about all the great things that human beings have produced,

often, I think people today just look at the end outcome. We go to the pyramids and we'll marvel

at the pyramids and the human achievement that it took to make it happen, but we won't stop to

think about all the suffering that went into the making of that thing. So I think we lean in the

opposite direction where we marvel at our achievements, but we don't often think about

the suffering or exploitation that went into certain human achievements. I would love a society in

which we could marvel at things and not have to worry about the exploitation that was involved,

because there was no exploitation or oppression involved. There was just human ingenuity and

creativity and collaboration.

And to the degree which you may disagree to the degree there's a tension between the two,

at least give equal weight to the consideration of the suffering and don't just marvel at the

beauty of the creations. To the degree there is a tension between the two.

What Stalin did, actually, too, it's not just capitalist, what Stalin did was he sacrificed

whole generations because he thought that he was building something for the future,

for future Russians to enjoy and for future people of the world to enjoy. And actually,

that analogy that I just gave about the pyramids was written by Karl Kotsky, the German socialist,

anti-Stalinist critic, when he was complaining about US journalists and others going to Russia

in the 1930s and marveling at all the new industries. Are these people blind to the suffering

behind these things they're marveling about?

Speaking of which, I think you mentioned in the context of a social democracy that freedom of

speech and freedom of the press are basically the freedom of people to have a voice is an

important component, which I think is something that caught my ear a little bit. Because if you

think about the Soviet Union, one of the ways that the authoritarian regime was able to control,

it's almost part of the central planning is you have to control the message and you have

to limit the freedom of the press. So there's a kind of notion, especially in ideas or maybe

caricatures of the ideas of cultural Marxism, sometimes caricatured even further as wokeism,

that you want to be careful with speech. You want the sense of speech because some speech

hurts people. So in some sense, you want to respect the value, the equality of human beings

by being careful towards you say. So is there a tension there for you?

I think there's no tension. And in part, I think that it is very condescending or patronizing to

assume that people can't take debate, that people can't either as a society or individuals visually

be engaged in the exchange of ideas without or even very vigorous debate without being broken

by it. It's just not the case. I'm basically a free speech absolutist. I mean, I would draw the

line at obviously direct incitements of violence or certain other speech like that. But in general,

you think a lot of people would be surprised to hear that?

No, I mean, not people who know my work. I mean, more generally, I think a lot of people on the

right, even in the center, I think might have the idea that a lot of the far left wants to

censor them. I think some of the center left wants to censor them. But I think on the far left,

on the Marxist or Socialist left, I think that free speech is more or less the norm.

Yeah, where is the imperative the sense are coming from? Is this just some small subset

of the left on Twitter? Is there some philosophical idea behind certain groups that

like, if we're to steal man, the case, and which group actually has the interest of humanity in

mind in wanting to censor speech? I think we might need to just take it case by

case for an example by example, because honestly, I would have to think about a particular case.

But let's just say generally that a lot of American liberalism rightly sees the

revolution around the civil rights, and later the extension of this rights revolution for gay

rights and so on as being a very positive achievement in the last half century. And I

completely agree. Now, for me, now that we've won those rights, a lot of our battle for change

needs to go beyond the representational realm and needs to really reground itself in the

material bread and butter struggles of ordinary people trying to survive, the battle for good

healthcare for all Americans, and so on. These are my immediate demands. I think there's a segment

of American liberalism that doesn't want to go in that confrontational economic direction

and wants to skirt away from battles over things like universal healthcare and so on,

and really are just still caught at this battle over rights representation. And it's devolved

in such a way that they feel like they need to make change. The way they make change is only

through interventions and culture, because they don't really have the same sense of class and

class struggle that agree or disagree with it. It's a very material plane. So instead,

you know, they look at comedians who said the wrong thing or they look at all sorts of other

ways to make change. It's not really making a change. It's just making them look bad and making

our culture worse. And I think that that's where a lot of it comes from. But I think that a lot of

the left, even the left that's much more in two battles over race and lots of other stuff,

like real serious anti-racist on the left. Of course, I'm an anti-racist, but a lot of my

work is focused on the primacy of class. But even these people are very concerned about material

struggles and issues, and they don't really care about these issues they think are

ephemeral kind of issues. So when you focus exclusively on language, that somehow leads

you astray. Like on being concerned about language without like deeper economic inequalities and so

on, you just become an asshole. That's on Twitter pointing out how everything, how racist everyone

is. So the anti-racism becomes a caricature of anti-racism. Exactly, because anti-racism was

really about the struggle of people for equal rights and voting. It was about the struggle for

people who were trapped into bad neighborhoods because they couldn't get decent jobs and their

neighborhoods were redlined or whatever else. It was really like a struggle for survival.

And what was the main demands, like the language of this one? It was the march for jobs and freedom.

It was the slogan, I am a man, asserting the kind of universal dignity of people. This is what the

civil rights movement was about. And it wasn't surprised, there was a lot of self-described

socialists, people like Bayard Rustin, Eiffelt Randolph, Martin Luther King, Jr. I mean,

these were people who were Ella Baker, they were socialists. And I think a lot of Americans

agree with them with their immediate demands, even though they weren't themselves socialists,

but it was a very materialistic struggle. And I think a lot of this has been co-opted into

just some sort of vague and just disconcerting complaints about language or culture and so on.

Martin Luther King was a socialist. To what degree was he a socialist? I would love to

learn about that. Martin Luther King, I think, broadly called himself, at various points in

his life, a Christian socialist or a democratic socialist, especially after his speech against

the Vietnam War and the Riverside Church. I think that was 67. The last years of his life,

he became much more involved in struggles against war and also struggles for workers' rights.

He was assassinated when he was at a rally at workers' rights, where he thought the next

battle was going to be an economic battle. He had this famous line where he said,

I don't just want to integrate the lunch counter if it means that we can't afford to order a burger

while we're there. That was the line along those lines. And I think that got to his point,

where the civil rights struggle was part of a step of building sort of a wider movement.

So he and these other civil rights leaders were very much interested in working with organized

labor, working with the left as it was constructed then, and building some sort of mass base for

not just rights, but redistribution. It's fascinating. It's fascinating which figures

self-identified and more in part socialists. Albert Einstein was one. Albert Einstein wrote

an article for the first issue of this left-wing magazine. It's actually still publishing today

called Monthly Review. And I think 1949, and his article is called Why Socialism. I don't think

it's paywalled, so people should check it out. But yeah, Einstein was one.

So probably the central idea is the pacifist, the anti-war idea for him? Or no?

Honestly, it's been so many years since I read it. I think it was actually more economically

focused, but I would need to go back and read it. But is war in general a part of the fundamental

ideas that socialists are against, democratic socialists are against? What's the relation

between socialism and war? So I think that traditionally in the socialist movement,

war was associated with capitalist competition and international competition. And you can look at

World War I as very much a case where different nations were competing with each other and

developing quite violent rivalries that was in part based on competition and the periphery

over access to markets and colonies and whatever else. So it was very easy to draw a direct

correlation. I'm opposed to imperialism, the domination of strong nations, dominating

smaller nations. I wouldn't call myself a pacifist. I think most socialist wouldn't call

themselves pacifists because there are some struggles that are worth fighting for. There's

national liberation struggles and so on where if there's no democratic avenue for change,

positive change has been made through armed revolts around colonialism and whatnot. But

we're living in an age where hopefully, I know neither of us have children, but our children

or children and children in the future won't have to live through war. And that is one thing that as

countries have gotten more developed. As the world has changed, we've actually seen less and less

war. I won't dispute Pinker on this. I think it's true. Obviously Putin's invasion of Ukraine and

the conflict in Ethiopia is an exception, but on the whole, I think we're going in that direction.

But I think it's always been a major organizing plank of socialists against war and against just

kind of this sense of right-wing nationalism and national identity that often leads to war. And

obviously not everyone on the right has embraced that. A lot of libertarians are consistently

anti-war as well. But I think the right ideologically has been associated with war, even if some

advocates of capitalism have not been. Then there's the military industrial complexes,

which is the financial machine of the whole thing. I presume, well, since a lot of that is

government, what's the relationship to socialism and the military industrial complex?

Well, a lot of it's government contracts, but it's privately produced. My company's the Glocky

Market Martin and things like that. You could draw a very crude, materialist connection between any

of these things and to kind of prove an ideological point. But we could produce just as many arms and

then just bury them or never fire them off or whatever else. Obviously, there are companies

that have a vested interest in heightening up tensions or saying that we need to buy a new

weapon system to be prepared for a conventional war with China, Russia. Meanwhile, I think we

all know that if there's going to be conventional war between these countries, it's going to

lead to something worse. No amount of advanced fighter jets is going to make a difference.

But I try to avoid crude or causal connections, even though there are relationships. It's kind

of like the old slogan, which was quite an effective slogan in the early 2000s. My first

anti-war marches when I was a teenager, I definitely have shouted at no war for oil. Both

is correct in that it gets to what people's senses of what's going on and how it's bad,

but also analytically, it's kind of wanting to explain what really happened or why we ended up

in the Middle East, which is a much more complex geopolitical story.

Yeah, and it is a story of geopolitics. It's perhaps less a story of capitalism or socialism.

It's a story, it's a geopolitical story that I think actually operates outside of the economic

system of the individual nations. It has to do more with, honestly, in part, egos of leaders.

There's an international battle for resources, but surely there's alternatives.

Yeah, definitely. And I think that part of what being a socialist is about dreaming in the long

term about a different sort of world without, in my mind, needless divisions of people into

nations with standing armies. I'm sure we'll still have pride about where we're from,

and there'll still be distinctive cultural features and so on about where we're from.

We definitely would, at least for the foreseeable future, be divided into

places as administrative units, but the idea that there should be a Mexican army and an American

army and a Russian army and a Ukrainian army is just on the face of it. I think the long run

will be seen as ridiculous, just like we see it as ridiculous today, looking back at the idea that

a lord from London would be engaged in civil strife with a lord from

Liverpool and a bunch of peasants would die. Just kind of on the face of it just seems kind

of ridiculous that these different places would have their own banners and lords and armies.

I think in the long run, you might have to zoom out a thousand years, but in the long run,

people will say the same about nation states and standing armies and battles over

specks of dirt that mean nothing in a cosmic sense.

Yeah, no, for sure, aliens would laugh at us or humans that go far beyond earth and look at the

history. Well, most of the history will be forgotten because if humans successfully expand

on into the universe, just the scale of civilization will grow so fast that the bickering

of the first few thousand years of human history will be seeming significant.

There's a very Marxist idea that I both appreciate in one way, but on the other hand,

it's kind of scary, which is that human history is only now beginning before we're in prehistory,

but in the future, we'll be in kind of real history. I think that a lot of

really important history has already happened, and I think posterity will remember,

and I think that it will be easier to assign certain people the role of villains, the people,

not to engage in the contentious topic, off topic of Ukraine or whatever else,

but the idea that one government or a bad one would launch more to recover

or to take several hundred square miles of territory and tens of thousands of people

will die, I think seems absurd to us, many people today, luckily, but it would not have seemed to

serve 50, 60 years ago, it would have just been a normal thing, these kind of territorial disputes

and so on. I think projecting in the future, I think within our lifetimes, we'll live to see

that kind of conflict be eradicated, and in part, you could say that, why? I think it's

because of popular pressure and organization, so you could say the pro-worker, socialist organizing

part of it, making it less normal. If you're a capitalist, you could say, well, markets are

more interlinked, so war is even more irrational. I don't really have a firm answer or whatever it

is. I think it's a good thing. You mentioned Marxist view of history. It's kind of interesting

to just briefly talk about, what do you think of it? What do you think of this Marxist view

of how the different systems evolve from the perspective of class struggle as we were talking

about? Well, I fundamentally, I'm a Marxist, I fundamentally believe in the broad contours of

historical materialism, but I think we should be clear of what Marxist theory tells us and what it

doesn't tell us. I think Marxist theory tells us pertinent things about how societies evolve,

about how the distributional resources work in any given society, who owns, who doesn't, how

the conflict, distributional conflicts, and so on. I think Marxism can tell us a lot.

How surplus is distributed. Exactly. Exactly. What it can't tell us is,

as a friend put it, the sex appeal of blue jeans or whatever else. That's beyond what Marxism is

meant to do. What economic system can't tell us about the sex appeal of blue jeans?

No economic system, but socialism in the Soviet sense, when it was turned into the Soviet style,

dialectical materialism was meant to tell us everything from explain genetics and agriculture

and whatever else in a very disastrous way. I definitely don't believe in the application

of these ideas in an extremely wide way. Also, I'm a Marxist because it's a framework that helps

me understand pertinent facts about the world. If at some point I no longer think the framework

is doing that, I will not be a Marxist. I'm a socialist on normative grounds because I have

certain beliefs about the equality of people because I believe we should have a society with

liberty, with equality, with fraternity. I hope I'll always be a socialist until the day I die,

but it's kind of a very unscientific or unserious thing to say, this is my framework from beginning

to end for the rest of my life. From a perspective of history, you should say that Marx says that

societies go through different stages. It could be crudely summarizes primitive communism,

imperialism, maybe slave society, feudalism, defined by mercantilism, then capitalism and

socialism, and finally, stateless communism. Did I miss something there?

I mean, I think that was close enough. I think that's definitely true of Marxist theory,

that the contradictions of capitalism, the fact that it has brought together all these workers,

all these materials and whatever else, and it's now allowing us to socially create wealth on a

mass scale, but that wealth is that process is being privately directed, and also the surplus

is being privately appropriated, is a contradiction, and that would lead to some sort of rebellion or

revolution or change, and eventually this contradiction would be a fetter on production

too, so we would have to move into socialist society.

But actually, the backtrack, so in terms of contradiction, so it starts when we're in a

village, hunter-gatherers, that's what you call primitive communism, where everyone's kind of

equal, it's kind of a collective. Hold on a second, and then inequality's form of different

flavors, so that's what imperialism is, is one dude rises to the top and has some control

of different flavor. That's what feudalism, when you have one dude at the top and you have merchants

doing some trading and so on, and then that leads to capitalism, when you have private ownership

of companies and they do some, they result in some kind of class inequality, and eventually

that results in a revolution that says, no, this inequality's not okay, it's not natural,

doesn't respect the value of human beings, and therefore it goes to socialism, where there is,

under Marx's view, I guess some role for the state, state is doing some redistribution,

and then the pure communism at the end is when it's a collective, where there's no state-centralized

power. What's part of that is wrong? No, I think, and broadly, the Marxist theory of history

is about different types, different modes of production that existed various times, based

on material conditions. In the early times, in this theory, there was not much surplus being

generated, and there was generally egalitarian societies. Then, as we became agricultural,

as society developed, there was more surplus being produced, and then there was a group of people

that were ruling classes of their age that controlled and distributed that, controlled

that divisional labor, and appropriated more of that surplus for themselves, and they weren't

involved in productive labor. In the early print of society, everybody's involved in productive

labor. Later on, you had castes of priests who did nothing but pray and write and lecture

people all day. You had kings and rulers and barocrats and traders and so on. You have a more

complex division of labor, but also more inequity driving out of that. Capitalism was a revolutionary

system because it took away, one, it made us tremendously more productive. It expanded production

beyond our wildest imaginations, but it also no longer bound workers to their lord or

manor or whatever else. They were now free to move, free to engage in contracts with employers,

and so on. Even though workers are now producing all this tremendous wealth,

and even though productive forces had been matured in such a way, they were ultimately

taken away from all the wealth they were created. They got some of it back. They were in wealthy

societies, but they were all their collectivity together producing this wealth, and that was

a potent force. So Marx theorized that would lead to a revolutionary change in a socialist

direction. I think, in fact, what we saw was that, yes, workers are dependent on,

on, capitalists are dependent on workers, but the dependency is obviously symmetrical in

the sense that workers are also dependent on capitalists. But in fact, it's an asymmetrical

dependency in that ordinary workers need their jobs more than capitalists need the contribution

of individual workers. So it became kind of a collective action problem where you would need

the mass of workers to get together, decide to change things, but also people would be afraid

because they'd be dependent on their jobs for their livelihood and so on. So revolution became

a lot harder than people thought, especially in democratic countries, where workers had

certain outlets and certain powers and rights and responsibility. It's no surprise that

where you did have socialist revolutions, they were in places like the third world,

postcolonial states trying to merge out of colonialism. They were in places like China

and Russia, autocratic countries, and never in an advanced capitalist country. Now,

in Marxist theory of history, even as interpreted by a lot of smart Marxists like

G.A. Cohen and others, there is a certain inevitability to socialism after capitalism.

The way that I would put it myself is, I kind of have a more, I guess you could say,

like Kantian view of it. I think socialism is something that ought to happen,

but it's not something that necessarily will happen and will need to organize and persuade

and also potentially, again, the key part of any social system that's democratic is

you have to allow for the possibility of a democratic revision to a different sort of system.

So I'd be more than happy in my vision of socialism for there to be capitalist parties

getting, hopefully, three, four or five percent of the vote, maybe a lot more,

in the same way that in the U.S. or a republic, we could right now have a monarchist party.

No one's going to support a monarchist party in the U.S. in serious numbers.

Although that's gaining popularity.

In Europe or elsewhere?

No. In anarchist tradition, aren't they saying that one of the ways you could have

a leader in monarchy because they're more directly responsible to the citizens? If you

have a leader, it's healthier to have a monarch. Anyway, I'm not familiar with this,

but I have heard this stated multiple times. The left-wing anarchist traditions, like

anarcho-syndicalism or whatever else, their slogan is kind of no kings, no gods, no masters or

whatever, so no bosses. They definitely would not agree with that, but I'm not familiar enough.

Anarchism runs a gamut from left to right in an interesting way.

I'll have to ask about that. You don't believe Marx's theory of history in the

sense that every stage is a natural consequence of every other stage. Of course,

he would predict that somebody like you must exist in order for those stages to go from one to the

next because you have to believe ought in order for action to be taken to inspire the populace

to take action. Two things. One is, I do broadly believe in Marx's theory of history because it

just explaining how productive forces develop in the relations of production in any given system.

I guess there's a theory of transition from capitalism to socialism that Marx didn't

really spell out, but it was implied that it would naturally happen. Marx was living in an era of

tremendous upheaval. Marx himself actually saw when he was living in London in the 1870s,

the Paris Commune. When workers took over for just a few months, but they took over,

the producers of Paris took over the city, basically created their own government,

their own system, and so on. He was living through an era of upheaval and angles especially

oversaw and was the mentor to all these rising socialist parties. He was very closely collaborating

with socialists in places like Britain and Germany when they were drafting their first programs

for the Social Democratic Party. It felt like this was going to happen. It felt like this rising

working class would take power, but I think the stability of the system was underestimated.

It's easy to see the contradictions in the system, but can you see its mechanisms of stability?

The way in which mass collective action or revolutions, more of the exception or the

norm, could you have imagined, if your remarks, not only how much wealth the system would produce

over time, which I think you could have imagined, but also developments like the welfare state

and mass democracy and universal suffrage, which might have changed how workers

relate to the system or operate within it. I think it's just a transition part that I think

wasn't spelled out properly, but I think in either case, as socialists, we can assume

that history is working in our favor. We just need to hold out and wait for the inevitable

revolution. We have to convince people of both, one, the struggle for day-to-day reforms and why

it's important to be politically organized, why it's important to be a member of a union or to

advocate for things like universal healthcare or whatever else to try to build the cohesion

and sense of self of the class. Then ultimately, for the desirability once we accomplish it,

once we build social democracy of going beyond social democracy, which is, of course, the challenge.

Now, I don't think it requires leadership from the outside. I think there are plenty of organic

leaders that have emerged from the working class that have advocated for socialism from the working

class. If you look at the class composition during the glory days of the European socialist

parties, this was very much a working class parties and organizations. It's only been

the last 30 years that it's been taken over by professionals. Not coincidentally, they have

accomplished very little in those 30 years. That's the practical and the pragmatic. Can

we actually jump to the horizon? As you mentioned, as a social democratic, you're focused on the

policies of today, but you also have a vision and dream of a future. Mark's did as well,

solve the perfect communism at the end. Can you describe that world? Also, is there elements

to that world that has elements of anarchism? Like I said, there's Michael Malice next door.

Like anarcho-communism, I don't even know if I'm using that term correctly, but basically no

central control. Can you describe what that world looks like? I think the traditional

socialist vision of if you want to call it full communism would be very similar to the anarchist

vision of a world without coercion, mass abundance, and so on. I myself don't share that vision.

I believe that we will always need to have a state in some form as a way to,

one, even just mediate difference. I think traditionally a lot of Marxists have

thought that after you remove the primary contradiction, quote unquote, of class,

that all other political questions would be resolved. I think that's a lot behind a lot of

the thinking of we're going to have a full communism after politics. I don't think there

will be an after politics. I think for one thing, let's say, I'll give you another Northeast example,

let's say me and you are trying to, with different groups of people, we're trying to figure out how

to build a crossing of the Hudson River. And for various reasons, you and the people around you

want to build a bridge, me and the people around me want to build a tunnel. That's a question that

you will probably need a mediation for, right? You'll need, one, it's a big project, so there'll

be a very complex division of labor and so on. But even beyond that, just politically,

you will need the state to mediate the difference. You'll need to have a vote,

have a vote that people trust, have institutions of people trust, and so on to make a decision.

Society is never going to go beyond that decision-making.

You don't think it's possible outside of the state to create stable voting mechanisms?

Or is human nature going to always seep into that?

I just wonder why we would have to if the state is democratic and responsive. The state isn't

authoritarian. So it might not be called a state, but it would function as a state, right?

But why not just call it a state? But in other words, if you don't have something like that,

then don't you have a greater risk of tyranny or a tyrant emerging in the vacuum? So I think people's

fear of the state is what would happen if the state had too much power. And I think that's

legitimate fear. That's why we have democratic checks on state power and certain guarantees

of freedom and so on. But yeah, I guess I just wonder, I'm more afraid of the vacuum and not

having a democratic, responsive state and what the world would turn into. And also, I'm just not a

utopian thinker, if that makes sense. I like to think that I'm a egalitarian thinker. I'm a

socialist. But my mind just goes to like, you know, I could see a vision of the future that I

would like like 50, 60 years from now. Maybe there's some sort of future of superabundance

and automation. And there's some sort of techno utopian future. We don't want some of those things

that would exist in my five minutes for now vision of socialism. But I just don't see it. And in

general, I'm kind of wary of visions of change that seem like they're not built off little

thing pieces that we have now and not built off history and experience or whatever else. I don't

want a year zero. I don't even like the term prehistory because I think there's a lot in history

that I want. I want Shakespeare under socialism. I want a lot of things that I think we should

be grateful for. There's a part of tradition that I think that exists that's hierarchical

and exploitative and whatever else. But there's another part of tradition that's our sense of

place and belonging and our connection with the past and hopefully the future. And I want to keep

that. Yeah. So you're worried about revolution or otherwise a vacuum being created and you're

worried about the things that might fill that vacuum. So the anarchists often worry about the

same mechanism of the state that controls voting or keeps voting robust and resilient and stable.

The same mechanism also having a monopoly on violence. That's the tension. So they get very

nervous about a central place having a monopoly on violence. Whereas if there is going to be a

place within a monopoly on violence, let's just say we temporarily take that for granted,

should it not be a place with a skilled, elected, accountable, transparent civil service

with a democratic mandate and so on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well put. Speaking of AI,

just to go into that tangent, do you think it's possible to have a future war? It's the 50 years.

50 hundred years where AI, there's an AI sort of central planning,

sort of the, we've removed some of the human elements that I think get us into a lot of trouble.

Like you could, you can take a perspective on the Soviet Union and the flaws of the system there

have less to do with the different ideologies and more to do with the humans and the vacuums

and how humans fill vacuums and the corrupting nature of power and so on. If we have AI that's

that's more data driven and is not susceptible to the human elements, is that possible to imagine

such a world almost like a phono sci-fi perspective? Maybe in the future you could imagine certain

calculation problems that arose during central planning solve through advanced computing.

But I would say that there's another whole set of problems with the system that were

incentive problems and I'm not sure how that advanced computing would solve the incentive

problems of how do you get people to actually produce things that other people want?

Kind of that informational question, how do you communicate without endless meetings or

someone reading your brain? What do you actually want? So there's that kind of informational

question, but then there's the incentive of how do you get people to work efficiently at work

and how do you get firms to use their resources that they're getting more efficiently and I think

solving the calculation problem solves some of these questions but not all of them.

But that's kind of a who knows, but if your vision of the future requires some sort of

leap into technological unknown that's very hard to advocate for today.

It's exciting to consider the possibility of technology empowering a better reallocation

of resources. If you care about the innate value of human beings and think of the mechanism of

reallocation of resources is a good way to empower that equality, it's nice to remove the human

element from that. If you work really hard and you're really good at your job, it's nice to be

really data driven in allocating more resources to you.

So kind of like I kind of think that the agency part requires human beings and conscious human

activity. So I think if you have a sort of planning system that works and let's say the

technology is there for it to work, I would want it to be democratic planning in such a way that

there's a human element, there is some debate and deliberation society. And also even in my

vision of socialism with the state sector and state investments and so on, I want there to be

more public discussion and debate about certain things. So it's not just left to technocrats

because you'd want to live in society where you just find out the next day that there's

some massive infrastructure project that you haven't had a chance to think about or debate

or feel like you're participating in. And debate is not just facts and logic. That's why if the

whole universe was about facts and logic, computers could do a better job of that. There's something

about humans debating each other that goes into the difficult gray areas of what it means to be

human or what it means to have a life that's worth living. That requires humanity. And I'm

also worried about while I'm excited by the possibility of AI controlling everything,

half joking. But the reason I'm really terrified of that is because usually there's a possibility

of a human taking control of that system. So you now start to get the same kind of authoritarian

thing. Well, I am a human, I'm smart enough to be able to control this AI system. And I will do

based on what this AI system says, what's good for you. It's kind of like talking down to people

and then use that AI system to now have the same kind of thing as Hall or Moore in 1930s.

And also our preferences might change. So an AI system might say the goal of humanity is to just

increase infinitely efficiency or increase output, whereas we might collectively decide that

we have enough and we want to have a trade-off. And I think that we need a system that allows for

people to make certain trade-offs. And have more of this leisure that I've been learning about

from you. This is a very interesting concept, leisure. How do you spell that? If we can step

into the practical, where we're talking about historical and philosophical, into the practical

of today, what are some of the exciting policies that represent democratic socialism today,

modern socialism? I think you mentioned some of them, Medicare for all or universal health care,

something you haven't mentioned is tuition-free college, increase in minimum wage,

maybe stronger unions like we talked about. What are some ideas here? What are some ideas

there's especially policy, especially exciting to you? Well, I think that hours reduction has

always been an important demand for socialists. So I mean, it's been a reality in certain countries

like France in recent decades, where part of the logic is, if you have a bunch of people working

for 40 plus hours a week, and you also have some unemployed people who would like more employment,

then it's not as if you're some game, you could reduce hours to 35 hours and still maintain the

same output by employing more people to kind of fill the slack in hours. So one, I think it's a

solid heuristic thing in working class movements between unemployed and employed workers. I also

think that, yeah, it gives people more time. So Marx was a big advocate in his day of a 10-hour

bill in the UK that would have reduced the hours of working time and reduced child or eliminated

or reduced child labor and other things as well. And part of it was, this is a radical demand

because it's reducing the sphere as you saw of exploitation. So it's putting limits on how much

time the capitalist can take from ordinary workers and how much freedom they would have.

With healthcare, one, I just think it's a government healthcare system. You could tell me

that you don't want it in the US, but you can't tell me it doesn't work because we've seen it work

in every other major industrial system in different forms.

So what does that usually involve? What does universal healthcare involve?

So there's different varieties. In the UK, for instance, they have a national health service

in which medical personnel and hospitals are run directly by the state. It's almost like

a mini Soviet system, to be honest, but just for healthcare. And it works pretty well just for

healthcare. And I think it's one example of the way in which you could actually take the market.

So I give you a vision of socialism that involves a lot of market, but I think there's certain spheres

where you could remove the market from and still have an efficient system, in part because

this is an area in which people don't have, obviously for cosmetic procedures or whatever,

they have preferences. But for most routine things that people do in healthcare,

they just need to see a doctor. They need to get diagnosed.

Some of these systems have had trouble with waitlist for specialists or whatever. That's more

like an allocation problem of if you want more specialists, you pay specialists more.

Like this is just problems that could be solved by like through the mechanisms of

a planning and government-run healthcare. So that's kind of the most

left-wing that you could get is the system in the United Kingdom.

Beyond that, you have a system like Medicare for All where you say, all right, most of the

doctors, besides for public hospitals that already exist, are going to be privately employed

by hospitals. Now, hospitals are going to be private. But instead of having all these different

insurance carriers, we're just going to have one national insurance carrier that we're all going

to pay into. That national insurance carrier is going to negotiate the price of healthcare with

doctors, a price of drugs with pharmaceutical companies and so on to hopefully reduce

prices and to implement a different little bit of planning into the system. Because if there's

only one big national insurance company, that company has a lot of weight and power. But

you could still visit your same doctor and it's not as radical of a shift in that direction.

And that's the dominant demand of Bernie Sanders and the left right now. There's 30 plus million

people in the US that would be insured that currently aren't insured if we move to this system.

There's a lot of other people that are underinsured or worried about how to pay co-pays or premiums

involved. I think it would be a net benefit for the vast majority of the US population,

even if it was offset with certain taxes because we spend a lot of money out of

pocket with health insurance. And it's a demand also that's widely popular. So for me,

it's almost like if you're trying to build support for something like socialism. We were talking

this loft division of socialism after capitalism or what worker ownership, the means of production

would look like in practice and so on. And by the way, you're one of the few interviewers who

will ever ask me any of the details. So it's good that I've been thinking of a rough sketch in my

head for the last whatever 16 years I've been a socialist. But we have to start in the here and

now. And if you can't convince people that the state could play a big role in their health

insurance and you can convince Americans and a whole host of other sectors that they should

be living in something closer to their social democracy, how are you going to convince those

people that there should be worker ownership of the means of production? It's kind of a ridiculous

like leap if you don't have the credibility as the group of people organizing for universal

healthcare, organizing for a $15 bin of wage, unable to get the goods. And also in practice,

as we fight for these reforms, ordinary people will have a better sense, at least my hope is

of what it means to be involved with politics and what politics can do for their lives. It's

positive because right now when we talk about politics, it often just seems that we're talking

about like a very glib cultural conflict removed from the things that are important in our lives.

Whereas in truth, I think politics can be a tool for us to make our lives better.

Yeah. And there's like deep ideas here where in some sense, universal healthcare and worker

collectives are not so radically different that there's just, there's philosophical ideas to

explore and accept. And also from my perspective, at least, maybe I'm wrong on this, but it seems

like with a lot of things at the core of politics, the right answer from an alien perspective is not

clear. Like everybody's very certain with the right answer. Everyone's certain universal healthcare

is terrible or in the case of universal healthcare, majority of people think it's a good idea,

but I don't think anyone knows. Because I think that depends on cultural history, on the particular

dynamics of a country, of a political system, on the dynamics of the economic system in this country,

of the changing world. The 21st century is different than the 20th century. Maybe the failures

of communism in the 20th century will not be repeated in the 21st century. Or the flip side

of that may be capitalism will actually truly flourish with the help of automation in the

21st century. I don't think anyone knows. So people like you are basically arguing for ideas,

and we'll have to explore those ideas together. Why do you think if universal healthcare is

popular, why don't we have universal healthcare in the United States?

Well, democracy is a great thing. Political democracy is wonderful. It came from the struggles

of ordinary people to expand suffrage and so on. But the economic sphere, entrenched power in the

economic sphere, bleeds into our political democracy. So I think there's a lot of people

with a vested interest in not having universal healthcare. There's large industries with a

vested interest in not having universal healthcare. They pay for ads, pay lobbyists,

they influence government, and they have made it very difficult. So you can't get universal healthcare

done without the bill, even if you pass something and you're trying to make a change. Like,

Obamacare was supposed to have a public option. Everybody's been running on a public option

in the Democratic Party for 12, 13 years. Why don't we have a public option?

People know that if people have the choice of bombing into a government plan, that might be

the slow road to really having universal healthcare. So I think a lot of it's opposition. Do you like

that idea of the public option? Maybe you can, like, because isn't there complexities like pre-existing

conditions? So isn't a public option mean you can not have any insurance until you get into trouble?

And then you can, if it covers pre-existing conditions, just start paying for insurance.

Then therefore, young people don't pay for insurance. Isn't it better to go full in?

I don't support a public option in part because I think if we allow politicians to just say,

hey, I support a public option, it's just kind of a way to signal your support for universal

healthcare, but give us nothing. And I think that's what we saw with Biden and a lot of other

politicians that have supported a public option. I think in practice, if a public option is defined

in such a way that it just means you by default can just opt in to a public plan and let's say

hypothetically, you don't even have to pay for it, then it's just a backdoor to universal healthcare

really quickly because I think the vast majority of people who aren't currently covered, and also a

lot of employers, to be honest, would probably drop their private coverage if they knew their

employees can just get a public option and maybe would only provide supplemental insurance or whatever

else. But I think the broad overarching point of all these demands is to say that socialists need

to be really connected to the day-to-day struggles of people to just improve their lives.

So if you're feeling like you're paying $400, $500 on the Obamacare market for health insurance

and that's hampering your ability to do what you want to do in your life, then maybe you would

support a candidate who's for universal healthcare. If you feel like you're struggling to find work

that you could afford to pay your rent with or whatever else, maybe you'll support a candidate

committed to all sorts of mechanisms to reduce housing prices or increase your power as a tenant

and whatever else. So I think it's like these day-to-day concerns need to be connected to

the more abstract and lofty vision of change. Otherwise, our politics just becomes this fantasy

world thing that's nice ideas to think about or debate but really won't make much of a difference

in people's lives. What do you think about free college? Should college be free?

So I would say free college is not at the top of my list of priorities, but it definitely

should be free in my vision of a just society. What is it that you're just to clarify? Is the

universal healthcare up there? Yeah, universal healthcare is probably far higher in my priorities

than free college. I think right now the way our system is built, when someone goes to college,

they're given credentials, they're given a degree, they carry with them for the rest of their life.

It gives them a chance to join a privileged part of the labor market. It's not a zero-sum game.

I don't want college-educated people to think that non-college-educated people are their enemies

and vice versa because a lot of them are just ordinary working-class people trying to survive

and they're in different areas or in different sectors. Some of them are in nursing sectors

where they need a college degree and so on. But if you just make college tuition free,

but you don't also make trade skills and other things free for someone to learn how to become

an electrician or a plumber or whatever else, then to some degree you're privileging one sector

of the labor market over another. I would advocate just if you're going to make something

like that free, you just have to make sure that you're doing an egalitarian way and that one,

the options, the routes to college are more equal. There's more investment in K-12 education

so that more kids in rough neighborhoods have the chance to go to college and for those that

choose the trade route from any part of the country, that they're given the skills and

resources for vocational trainings and that those are also free. It just feels like in

terms of order of operation, I would just start with K-12 education, improving it and whatever

else, then college after. But I'm not opposed to it.

So does that improving K-12 education, does that mean investing more into it? Is it as simple as

just increasing the amount of money that's invested in public education?

In general, when it comes to the public sector or any sphere that you're investing in,

obviously it's not just as simple as throwing money at a problem. I do think we have a lot of

schools that are underfunded, but we have other schools that are adequately funded,

but the conditions in which those schools are, like the neighborhoods are in and what's going on

in society, the problems are so deep that it's impossible for just education to solve everything.

And I think especially a lot of liberals think that education should be the panacea,

invest in education, you'll help people. If kids are living in poverty, if they go into school

hungry or whatever else, education's not going to give them everything they need to succeed.

So sometimes we, I think, put too much weight on education.

And of course, you could define education more broadly, which is the care of the flourishing

of the young mind, whatever that is. Yeah, a lot of it starts early. Yeah,

a lot of it starts with, so New York City at least, we do have universal pre-K. So from age

three onward, you have the option for that. I mean, it's important for kids' socialization.

Their parents are now able to know that they could go to work or do something else and have

their kids taken care of. There's a lot of measures like that that we could do to

to equalize things. And again, for libertarians in the audience, some of this stuff is scary,

because it's obviously more state involved, state involved in pre-K, state, it's already very

involved in K through 12, more investment to state institutions like our state universities

and in college. But for me, it's not a question of state versus non-state. It's a question of,

you know, good outcomes for people. And it just happens to be that for working class people,

having the collective power to elect representatives that will build a broader

safety net is in their interest. For upper middle class people, for others, they could afford to

pay for their own provisioning either directly or through like Obamacare-like schemes where you

just get a subsidy and you pay the rest yourself and whatever. This is for really the bottom 40%

plus of the population. They really don't have any options, so they prioritize other things and

they end up with some sort of injury or health problem or whatever else. And it's bad for everyone

in society, but it's especially bad for the people at the bottom of the labor market.

So I saw various estimates for socialist programs like social security expansion, free college,

Medicare for all will cost upwards of $40 trillion over 10 years for zero. Okay, they

argue with those numbers and so on. But so there's a cost. There's a taxpayer cost. What are

given the weight of that cost? Can you still make the case with these programs? And then can

you try to make the case against them that the cost is too high? So I will not argue with you

on the numbers because you just threw out random numbers. I do think universal healthcare, if

done right, can be basically cost neutral. I think it's an exception because we spend a

tremendous amount of money on healthcare, a huge percentage, or GDP. So I think it could be done

in a way that's close to cost neutral. So actually, can you argue on the numbers without

arguing on the numbers? So you're saying just your gut says that there's a lot of, depending on how

these programs are done, there's a lot of variance in how much it will actually cost.

There's a lot of bureaucracy and billing right now in our healthcare sector. For example, there

would be eliminated. There's a lot of costs that are spiraling upward of provider costs from both

doctors, hospitals, but also pharmaceuticals to drug costs that insurance companies shoulder,

because their market share is too fragmented to really negotiate hard.

Medicare could sometimes negotiate better rates, but Medicare for all would negotiate even better

rates. So I think there's a cost spiral that we can adjust with more government involvement.

And there's a reason why we spend a bigger share of our GDP on healthcare than other places.

But let me just accept the broad premise that social programs cost money.

Now, I think that one, for ordinary people, most of them, the trade off of even hypothetically if

taxes on lower middle class and working class people in certain cases go up,

the trade off would still be in their benefit, because they're the ones who currently, who

would be consuming more of those goods, and also our tax system and whatnot is progressive.

So the rich will pay more. The majority will consume more of them. Also, I think a lot of

these programs are the bedrock of a healthy society. So one reason, for example, that we have

so much crime and violence in the US, there's lots of cultural and other

causes with our level of gun ownership, American history, and so on. But one really important

factor is just the level of poverty and inequality in the US compared to other countries that combine

with guns and other factors. So we live in more violent, unequal societies. A European would be

shocked by the fact that in even some of our nicest areas and cities and elsewhere, there's

not a real violence too. It's just normal to have gun violence. It's normal to have drug-related

violence. We have, what, like 400 or 500 people some years in Baltimore, a city of under a million

getting killed. These are all recipes for a society in which, one, the public sphere is

shrunk like crazy because you're not going to go wander out for an evening stroll in a park if you

live in a dangerous area or whatever else. The rot goes very deep and a welfare state is one way

to live in a better society for everyone. There's been plenty of studies. There's one book called

The Spirit Level on inequality that was quite popular that just notes that inequality is really

terrible for the psyches of the rich too, not just for the poor. So I think spending some more

money living in a more just society is doable. There's different ways to address certain costs,

spirals. One reason why our welfare states are getting more and more expensive is in part just

because our population is aging. But many of the same people say we can't afford more in our welfare

states because we're already spending so much on social security and all these other entitlements

are the same people. Also for one, closing borders so immigrants can't come in to help build the

economy and to fill gaps in the economy and also who aren't for things that'll make it easier to

have kids. I'm 33 years old. I have a lot of friends who have been putting them off having

kids until they save up X amount of dollars even though they have someone they could raise children

with because they can't afford the cost of childcare. Their job probably won't give them

more than four or six weeks of family leave or whatever else. This is not the case in other

countries. I think there's all sorts of benefits from having a bigger welfare state. But yes,

there are costs and there are going to be certain trade-offs. It's not a magical thing where you

could just have everything without trade-offs. In a progressive tax system, is there to push back

on the costs here? Is there a point at which taxing the rich is kind of productive in the long

term? In the short term, there might be a net benefit of increasing taxes because the programs,

the middle class, the lower middle class gets is more beneficial. Is there a negative side to taxing

the rich? In theory, yes. One would be if you tax the rich so much, they change their consumption

patterns and that has negative impacts on the economy as a whole. You would have to

kind of really model it out, but there would be a certain point in which the consumption

changes might have net detrimental effects. I think that's more unlikely. The more likely

scenario is you tax corporations and other wealthy people in society to the point that

they have potentially less money for productive investment because you're in a capitalist society,

so you're reliant on capitalists to invest. You kind of don't want to be in the worst of both worlds

where you've gone too far for capitalism but not far enough for socialism.

In my vision, of course, of socialism, that's one reason why we'd have to take

the investment function away from capitalists. If you're going to make it so hard for them

that they can't invest or they can't employ labor the way they're employing now,

you have to create another mechanism for supply to be created. That's a transition point.

Yeah. What about longer term de-incentivizing young people that are dreaming of becoming

entrepreneurs and realizing that there's this huge tax on being wealthy? If you take these big

risks, which is what's required to be an entrepreneur and you are lucky enough to succeed

and good enough to succeed, that the government will take most of your money away?

I think realistically, that's not a disincentive for most people. First of all, we already have

a progressive taxation system. The government does take a bunch of the money away and people

are still striving to become rich. A lot of what people want when they dream of success

is they want accolades, they want respect, and of course they want some more wealth. Wealth,

they consume luxury goods with or whatever else, but at a certain point, it becomes better for

the state to tax and either redistribute directly or through social programs or redirect that money

through tax credits and on other ways to shape investment towards productive investment. We

don't want a society in which a bunch of rich people fly around in helicopters going from

club to club while the productive economy does nothing. At that point, I think a lot of

ordinary rich people might prefer the government to come in to tax them and to try to spur investment

in certain productive sectors. It really just depends, but I honestly believe that

most people don't necessarily want to be rich for the sake of being rich. They want to be

successful and there's many different dynamics to that. Accolades and social respect is an

important one of them. It's also why people who just become filthy rich often, the first thing

they do is start out filling traffic trusts and try to give away their money because they want

the social respect and accolades and whatever else, they don't want just their money.

On that topic, a little bit of a tangent. There's a lot of folks in the left community,

far left community, socialist community that I think are at the source of a kind of derision

towards the B word, the billionaires. Does it bother you or do you think that's in part justified

a kind of using the word billionaire as a dirty word?

I think it's perfectly justified and that it's a populist shorthand.

So obviously, when I talk about inequality, I often talk about power dynamics between

workers and bosses and so on. Billionaires, just the 99%, 1% version of it is just a

populist shorthand to just explain the fact that there's a lot of people who have accumulated

obscene wealth. These people aren't, in my mind, parasites in the kind of very,

very old school socialist rhetoric in that, of course, capitalists provide employment,

take entrepreneurial risks, come up with new ideas sometimes themselves, sometimes directly manage

work and whatever else. But they exert so much power over the lives of not just their workers

with society as a whole. Taking away some of their wealth and power is a way to just empower others.

And again, these things have policy trade-offs. If you just snap your fingers and say,

Elon Musk, you're now, all your wealth is gone, you're now on food stamps or whatever else in that

kind of arbitrary way, you'd be a totally disincentivized people from trusting the rules of the game

as they've been set up in a capitalist society. And I think that would have negative consequences

for workers. But saying that, hey, this person has too much power and too much wealth and has

too much ability to dictate things about the lives of others, I think is just simply a fact.

And I think it's true in the cases of people who are good people and have risen to this position,

and it's true in the cases of people who are maybe not so good people and who have risen to

these positions. So I agree with you in part, but I had to push back here. So one of the problems I

see is using billionaires as a shorthand to talk about power inequality and wealth inequality,

often dismisses the fact that some of these folks are some of the best members of our society.

So outside of the, however the system is created inequalities, a young person today

should dream to build cool stuff, not for the wealth, not for the power, the fame,

but to be part of building cool stuff. Now there's a lot of examples of billionaires

that have gotten there in shady ways and so on. And you can point that out. But in the same way,

we celebrate great artists and great athletes and great literary icons and sort of writers

and poets and musicians and engineers and scientists, we should sort of separate

the human creator from the wealth that the system has given them. That's what I worry about, is like

in our system, some of the greatest humans are the ones that have become rich. And so we sometimes

mix up the, if you want to criticize the wealth, we sometimes criticize the human and the creator

while that should actually be the person we aspire to be.

So, you know, I would agree with that. LeBron James, if he's not already in his lifetime,

will be a billionaire. And he got his money largely through just being an incredible athlete,

excelling in his field more than anyone, besides for Michael Jordan, I think he's my number two.

He might be my number one. I'm willing to keep keeping open mind about the LeBron versus Jordan

conversation. But, you know, he got that through his merit and he's been rewarded. And a party's

getting rewarded because he's created vast amounts of wealth beyond what he's getting. This is just

his share. You know, it's the salary cap league. Whenever he's doing an endorsement, obviously

that company is thinking that he's worth more than what they're paying him for that endorsement

and so on. And to the extent with Elon Musk, people see innovation and they see someone who

will put himself out there with sometimes crazy ideas because he's trying to think about the

future and trying to just push things forward instead of just sitting on whatever money he has

now and just investing it earning, you know, 6% return for the rest of his life. You know,

I think that that's a positive thing. But I think it doesn't get to the broader policy question.

When people invoke billionaires, they're invoking the specter of inequality and power.

It's not normally the rhetoric that I use because I propose and I use more traditional

socialist rhetoric and terms. But I think it gets at something real. So often with these

sorts of shorthands we use in politics, they're imperfect, but they speak to a real thing.

And they feed a little bit of fun that folks like AOC and Elon have with each other. It feeds,

it inspires, it serves as a catalyst for productive discourse. Okay, speaking of which,

you said you're a fan of Bernie Sanders. Would you classify yourself as a Bernie bro? What's

the technical definition of a Bernie bro? Is that it's a subset? No, no, no. I'm sorry. You're

a sophisticated philosopher, writer, economic and political thinker. Of course, you would not call

yourself a Bernie bro. I'm fine with calling myself a Bernie bro. Because it was made up by

liberal journalists to smear Bernie and his supporters during the 2016 campaign, even though

disproportionately his supporters were young women in their 20s. But whatever, I think.

I ride for Bernie. There's the worst things in the world being called a bro. So that's fine.

What do you like about Bernie Sanders? And to what degree does he represent

his ideas of socialism? To what degree does he represent the more traditional sort of liberal

ideas? I love Bernie. Most of all, I like his clarity. He's by far the best communicator we

have on the left. He speaks with a moral force. He's relatable. And he has taken a lot of socialist

rhetoric from academia and brought it down to its core in a way that's comprehensible for ordinary

people and speaks to their daily lives. So when Bernie does a speech, people can finish his lines

because they know what he's going to say. They know what points he's going to hit because socialism,

in my mind, should not be a complicated thing. Now, when we get to more abstract discussions

about what a future system would look like, when we get to the policy trade-offs today,

I think we need to put on a different hat. We should embrace all sorts of nuance and

contradiction and complication. When it comes to the core moral and ethical appeal,

I think Bernie grasps that and how to communicate it. Now, Bernie Sanders was politicized

a very long time ago. I actually once told him, I've only met him a few times, but one time I

joked that in his book, he mentioned that one politicizing moment in his life was when the

Brooklyn Dodgers left town. And he was devastated because he was a Dodgers fan from Brooklyn.

And I said, this is like 2020 campaign. This is maybe 2019. I said, Bernie,

you're running for president. You do not need to keep reminding people of your age.

But he was politicized through the Young People Socials League,

which was an old offshoot of the Norm Thomas Socialist Party of America. So very old school

socialist tradition. Then he was engaged in labor struggles in the 60s. He was engaged in the

civil rights movement. So he came from this old left generation that I think just had a

more plain spoken, more rooted way of understanding change and socialism. It wasn't, in my mind,

polluted by academia and by some of the turn towards issues of culture and excessive focus

on representation or whatever else. It was really rooted in something economic in a way.

Then obviously he had all his ideas and he was also a product of the left and that he went to

Vermont. He kind of did the back to the land thing. He was basically like a, not quite a hippie

and an affect, but he was out there trying to farm or whatever and, you know, cold as hell,

northern Vermont. And then he decided to do politics, do electoral politics. And he failed

for a long time. He did third party politics. He kept losing races. Eventually he became

by savvy and luck and things he learned, the mayor of Burlington, Vermont.

And he just kept with the same message. In my book, I talk about, I quote, I think a Bernie

speech from the 1970s, one of his early campaigns. And I compared it to a Bernie speech during his

2016 campaign. It was virtually identical. Millionaires was swapped with millionaires and

billionaires, speaking of billionaires, which is beautiful. I think there's something

great to what he offered American politics. And also all around the world,

there's a socialist poll in politics, whether you agree with it or not. And all these countries in

Europe and any rich country, Japan and so on. And the US really didn't have that. The furthest

left you could go was Chris Hayes and MSNBC or whatever. I'm very glad that there's a social

poll. And I think we have Bernie to thank for it, to the extent that a lot of self-described

socialists don't think Bernie is a real socialist. It's in part because he stays grounded in people's

day-to-day lives and struggles. I don't think he thinks often the way that I do and other people

more disconnected or step-and-move from day-to-day politics, think about the future

contours of a social society and so on. But I think he's morally committed to a egalitarian

different sort of future. And I don't think he, at least I haven't heard him talk about this big,

broad history and future. So the Marxist ideology and so on. Not that he's afraid of

or something. It's just not how he thinks about it. Yeah, I think he's a practical thinker. And

also, yeah, he is running, even if he should be afraid of it too, because he is a major politician

running for president. I think what people want is they want the left wing of the possible,

and at least the segment of the party that was voting for him, the Democratic Party

is voting for him. They wanted something that was a step or two removed from what they had now

and was visionary, but not so far removed that it seemed like a scary leap. And I think we

lost a chance in 2016 to someone that I think would have beaten Trump, or at the very least would

have been close. Do you think the Democrats screwed him over? Yes, not in the way of deliberate

or direct vote-making, but they put their thumb on the scale for sure. It's not even conspiracy

theory. There's all this stuff in the debates about Clinton's people being fed questions and

whatever else, and just the tone of the media. The media was extremely dismissive and hostile

to him. I love that Bernie still does the Fox News town hall, because they're just him speaking

to the people, and he's not afraid of going on any sort of outlet and making his case. But I think

a lot of the liberal media in particular always had it out for Bernie Sanders. Because that was

really annoying. That was really annoying, how dismissive they were. I've seen that in some other

candidates. They were dismissive towards Andrew Yang in that same way. So forget the ideology.

Why are they so smug sometimes towards certain candidates? What is that? Because I think that's

actually at the core to a degree if Democrats or any party fails, that it's that smugness. Because

people see through that. I think a lot of these people are friends, even if they don't know each

other, they're friends because they went to the same schools. They know the same people. They have

the same broad ideology and worldview. So they had a sense of what the Democratic Party should be,

and who it should be running, and who is going to win, and also what was serious and on-serious.

Yeah. So Bernie would say some things about the world that objectively tell a lot of people seem

correct, or at least pretty close to correct. And a journalist would just look at him like he's

from outer space. To some extent, this also happens to people on the right. People on the right

often say things that I find repulsive or just wrong. But there's parts of the media

that would describe their certain views as illegitimate or outside the boundaries of

acceptable conversation. I think there should be a few things outside the boundary of acceptable

conversation, hate speech, and so on. But there's this attempt to say their views are illegitimate,

and therefore anyone who votes for them for any reason is illegitimate too. And that's one reason

why I think it's fueled a lot of resentment, and it will ultimately end up fueling the extremes of

American politics that people feel like they're not being listened to. And some of it is also style

of speaking and personality, where if you're not willing to play a game of civility,

there's a proper way of speaking if you're a Democrat. If you're not doing that kind of

proper way of speaking, people dismiss you. I think in a certain sense, whatever you feel about him,

people dismiss Donald Trump for the same reason, where it's the style of speaking,

the personality of the person, that he's not playing by the rules of polite society, of polite

politician society, and so on. And that's really, that troubles me because it feels like solutions,

the great leaders will not be polite in the way they're not, they're not going to behave in the

way they're supposed to behave. And I just wish the media was at least open-minded to that, like,

which I guess gives me hope about the new media, which is like more distributed citizen media,

right, that they're more open-minded to the revolutionary, to the outsiders, right? I actually

first, I really like Bernie Sanders. I first heard him in conversation with Tom Hartman.

He had these like, like weekly conversations, and just the authenticity from the guy. I didn't

even know any context. I didn't even know, honestly, he was a Democratic socialist or anything. The

authenticity of the human being was really refreshing. And when he, I guess, decided to run for

president, that was really strange. I was like, surely this kind of, this person has no chance.

Just like, he seemed too authentic. He seemed to, like, he's not going to be effective at playing

the game of politics. So it was very inspiring to me to see that you don't necessarily need to be

good at playing the game of politics. You can actually have a chance of winning. Yeah, that was,

that was really inspiring to see. What about some of the other popular candidates? What do you think

about AOC? I don't know if she self-identifies as a socialist or not. She does self-identify as a

Democratic socialist. I think she was a very inspiring figure for a lot of people. She was kind

of out of this Bernie wave of the first set of Bernie candidates in 2018 that identified with him

instead of the Democratic Party establishment. I think that she's still developing as a politician.

And it's very difficult when you're in a deep blue district and when you don't often have to

worry about reelection or talk to, but modulate your rhetoric to win over swing voters in your

district, but then you're immediately a national and cultural figure. So AOC basically goes from

her views, which are compelling in my mind. A lot of her programmatic views are compelling,

wins her district, and then has her on rhetoric, which to me compared to Bernie owes itself more

to the academic left and the way that a lot of the left has learned to talk. I don't mean

academic in the sense that she's like a Marxist or whatever else, but academic in the way that

she may be using at times like confusing language to convey basic points when she gets into like

the language of intersectionality and whatever else. Especially in the context of cultural

issues and stuff like that. Exactly. Instead of just the plain spoken Bernie, like, yeah,

discrimination is wrong. If you ask me about a cultural issue, I'll come down on the same side

as AOC. I'm sure nine plus times out of 10, but I'll try to root it into just basic, like, yeah,

treat people with respect, and they'll treat you with respect, and that's the way we should

govern our civic sphere. We don't need to talk about intersectionality to I think get that.

So there's that rhetoric, but she's not just regular congressperson in a deep blue district.

She's also a national and international cultural and political figure, so she's now a spokesperson

because of large like a media event of her surprising upset election and her being young

and like being really connected to this post Bernie moment. And I think amid these constant

one attacks on her from the right, and also this media attention, and this notoriety,

she hasn't really modulated or adjusted her audience, her rhetoric and how do you win over

someone who really hates a lot of your ideas, but might actually believe in some of your policies.

And I think she's been ineffective, quite frankly, in the last year, making that transition. Whereas

I think other politicians who are not so far left who don't identify as socialists, let's say

that John Fetterman has managed to become more effective. And I don't think it's a question

of character or whatever else. And I like AOC. So I don't want to put it so harshly. But I think a

lot of it has to do with her being a congressperson in a deep blue district and Fetterman being

running for statewide office in a quote unquote purple state. But at her best, she does it,

but it's like glimmers. It's kind of like, I don't know, what sport are you biggest fan of?

I'll give you a sports analogy. I mean, NFL is up there, soccer is up there, but probably UFC.

Okay, well, I can't give you a good analogy for any of those, but it's like a raw prospect.

Like, you know, someone who shows glimmers of hope, so they were drafted really high and they

bounce from team to team. You're like, I'm clinging on to my AOC stock, but I think that

she needs to be self critical enough and her team needs to be self critical enough to know that

the goal is not merely to be a national cultural figure and win a reelection near a deep blue

district. The goal has to be to become truly a national political figure, which will require

changes. A unifier and inspiring figure about the ideas that she represents.

Definitely. And she has other things against her, like obviously class focus, but there's no

denying, I think that some of the hostility to her is like sexism. It's rooted in, I think people

wanting to see her fail or whatever else, but that's only some of it. I think some of it

otherwise is her struggling to relate to people who don't have a lot of her starting points as

far as moral and ethical beliefs. Yeah, but she's actually great at flourishing in all the attacks

she's getting. She's doing a good job of that. A lot of those attacks will break me if I'm being

honest. Yes. The amount of fire she's under, but you don't want that to become a drug to

where you just get good at being a national figure that's constantly in the fights and are

using that for attention and so on. You still want to be the unifier. And that's the tricky,

tricky switch. Do you think there's a chance there's a world in which she's able to modulate it

enough to be a unifier and run for president and win? I think she's very far away from being able

to do that. I think that even other politicians that are also polarizing within the squad in

terms of what they say or their ideas or whatever else are very effective communicators like Ilhan

Omar and others, I think AOC, I mean, that's my hope. My hope is that someone like AOC could.

The last year plus has not been extremely promising in my mind in part because she's

become or she's continued to position herself as a lightning rod cultural figure. Whereas I think

a national political figure needs to pick their spots and also pick their moment for changing

their rhetoric and adjusting to their audience. And I think she does it in certain environments,

but that needs to be your national message when you're out there. You need to be speaking towards

the not already converted. And I think Bernie does that. Bernie strips his politics down to the

basics. So I agree with you spiritually, but we also have an example of Donald Trump winning

the presidency. Isn't some of the game of politics that's separate from the policy being able to

engage in rhetoric that leads to outrage and then walking through that fire with grace?

First of all, I think Trump is kind of a unique personality in American history. So it's hard to

compare anyone to Trump. But don't you think AOC is comparable in terms of the uniqueness

in the political system we're in or no? I think Trump is much more of a fire brand

anti-establishment force. And I mean this negatively for what is worth because I disagree

with Trump, but he was willing to set fire to the Republican establishment. He was able to

self-fund largely his campaign and he already was a media figure without them. AOC has been

much more cautious with the Democratic Party establishment in part because she's not trying

to run a national political campaign right now for the outside. Like a 5% chance they're going to be

president. Let me set fire to everything. She's trying to help people and help her constituents

through the game of getting committee appointments and getting wins on the margins.

And I think that's understandable for what it's worth. But in the process, I think

what's the difference between AOC and a progressive Democrat? During 2016, it used to be

pretty easy to say the difference between the Bernie Crats and a progressive Democrat because

we were establishing our own outside third force in American politics where you could

knock on the door of a lot of people who would end up voting for Trump and they would say,

oh, I have a lot of respect for Bernie or whatever. They're still going to not vote for him.

But he wasn't considered part of the Democratic Party milieu. I think now with AOC,

there's a much closer association of AOC in our policies with ordinary Democrats

where she needs to draw stronger distinctions. She doesn't need to do it like Trump did with just

man, I forgot all of them, though I found some of them amusing in the moment,

like all his nicknames about lion, Ted Cruz, and then the rest. But I do feel like she needs to

differentiate herself a bit more, but then also just keep her language simple. Trump

was more complex than Bernie in his literal language, but he was repetitive and there was

kind of a rhythm and a cadence to Trump's speech. I think AOC needs to like Bernie reduce her rhetoric

down to a couple key lines and signatures and focus her politics not on 20 issues,

but on three or four most important issues and have that message just one.

Bernie will do an interview with you and he'll write down, I hope you do interview Bernie,

but he'll write down like five things and I'm only going to talk about these five things.

Yeah, ask me about this. Okay, I'm talking about these five things.

So that's a message discipline that Bernie has been exemplary on, yeah, for sure.

But I think that's learned, that could be developed.

I think she could develop it. Listen, I hope, I'm answering your question,

I think not the way I should answer it, being someone broadcasting to people on the left and

and elsewhere. I hope AOC goes in that direction. I just think that she has a lot going against her

just because she's already a national figure and she's in a deeper blue district. But we need to

root our politics then in working class people and a lot of districts that, I don't know, the type of

kitchen table conversations are, I hate that cliche, but I just used it, but a lot of these

conversations are just different in their tone and cadence. And it's not just a question of,

Federman or Tim Ryan in Ohio and kind of just white working class voters. I mean,

working class voters of any race, their day to day needs and the day to day things they

want to talk about is just at a different plane than a Met Gala cultural statement.

Yeah. I mean, it's clear that you respect and love her and would like to see

different ways. I mean, she's young, so the different trajectories that she could develop

that would ultimately make her a good candidate. I'm just looking at odds here for, and I disagree

with them. I'm buying AOC stock here, given these odds. So in terms of Democratic, who's going to

win the 2024 election? So that includes running and winning on the Democrat side is 18% chance for

Biden. So 7% chance for Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom at 6%, Michelle Obama at 3%, Hillary Clinton

at 2%, and AOC at 1.5%. And then Bernie at 1%. So I would not buy AOC at that mark. I would buy

Biden like crazy though. I'm not a gambling man, but I would totally toss a G at Biden at that

amount. AOC at 1.5% chance? I think it's, I don't think she runs. You don't think she runs yet?

Okay. I don't think Bernie will primary Biden either. I mean, if Biden doesn't run, then obviously,

it's an open field, but I just feel like. Do you think Biden runs? Yes, I think Biden

probably runs. Oh, boy. He's an incumbent president. So it's just, it's very hard to imagine another

Democrat being able to do better than him. All right. What about the competition?

I think Donald Trump is the best thing for the Democrats period, just because it would create

this turnout mechanism, this excitement around, we have to stop Donald Trump. He's attacking

DeSantis. I mean, already he's trying to, you know, the desentimonious thing, but yeah. Trump's

kind of like the Don King of American politics. Yeah. It's interesting what kind of dynamic

chaos he's created. It probably led to more people being interested in politics. Well,

almost guaranteed it led to more people being interested in politics, but maybe not in a healthy

way. Maybe it created an unhealthy relationship with politics where it created more partisanship.

For me, I don't have a problem with partisanship. It's what kind of partisanship. So I think Trump

has cultivated a lot of right populace, a relationship with his supporters. It's almost

like a leader, follower relationship in a way that doesn't actually enhance people's knowledge

of politics and the issues, but actually just leads them to follow the party line.

Ideally, I think socialist politics and politics on the left should be something different.

Eugene Debs, the great American and socialist leader of the late 19th and early 20th century,

used to say, you know, I'm not your Moses. I can't promise to lead you to the

promised land because if I can lead you there and you just follow me there,

someone's just going to lead you straight out as soon as I'm gone.

And I think there's something nice about that kind of anti, you know,

blind following leader, follower kind of dynamic on the left at its best.

That said, in the way the, at least the political race in the United States has turned out,

it seems like it's turned into a bit of entertainment and there having

personalities and characters is really important. So in terms of policy and actual

leadership, yes, maybe having a leader, like an authoritarian big leader is not good,

but maybe for the race it is, for the drama of it. You just want to have drama and attention

on people who are actually going to turn out to be good leaders. That's a weird balance to strike.

Earned media is what they always talk about, right? And political campaigns,

like, you know, the more you could get on TV, the better. Even like, I really like

Federman, he just won his campaign, but a good part of his early campaign,

he had pivoted from talking about issues to just talking about Dr. Oz living in New Jersey

and kind of having the troll campaign against him, which I found amusing.

But also, and it was effective, obviously won. But, you know, it's a bit depressing because I

would rather have a whole campaign cycle about healthcare and jobs and other issues.

Yeah. And the hope is that people just get better at that kind of social media communication. So

I do actually think there's something about doing political speeches that makes you sound less

authentic because you have to, like, do so many of them. It must be exhausting to, like, day after

day after day, make the speech. You're going to start sort of replaying the same stuff over and

over as opposed to actually thinking about the words that are coming out of your mouth.

And then the public will know that you're not really being that authentic. Even though you

believe those things, you just, it's just tough. I just wish they didn't have to do constantly

do speeches. So I think that the fact that Bernie's speeches very clearly, like, came out of, if not

directly his own pen, but his own rhetoric over the years, and he kind of wrote it seemed authentic.

Yes. Even if he was repeating it. And then Trump has just wild improvisation. I think people found

real, you know, in a certain way. And I would love for the left more generally

to tap into some of that anti-establishment sentiment. But obviously, due in a way that's

productive, that doesn't blame immigrants or whatever else for problems. But, you know,

it's kind of built on a different basis. But people are fed up for good reason with a lot

of conventional politics. And we need to speak to that. Otherwise, it'll only be the right

that is taking advantage of those people's anger. Well, I almost forgot to ask you about China.

So both historically, we talked about the Soviet Union. But what lessons do you draw

from the implementation of socialism, communism in Maoist China and modern China? What's the

good and the bad? Well, I think it's very similar to the Soviet case. And that socialism came to

China through not a base of organized workers in a capitalist country to a certain level

development and so on. But it came through the countryside and in conditions of civil war,

strife, you have Japanese invasion and whatever else. And Mao built his base in the peasantry,

then came down to the city to govern and try to build a base and rule over workers. So it's kind

of an inversion of classic socialist theory. Now, the same thing that I said before about

Stalin and assessing the Soviet Union has to apply here. Because obviously, I oppose authoritarianism

and all sorts of moral condemnations I should do. But to look at what the Chinese Communist Party

actually accomplished, I think we kind of need to take a step backwards from our moral opposition

to the means in which they accomplished it and just look at it developmentally. China benefited

greatly from the Communist Party's implementation of basic education and health care. So in a lot

of China, you had one of the conditions women were absolutely terrible. They were still foot

binding and all sorts of like terrible backward practice. You had a huge vast majority of the

population that was illiterate without any access to basic education and you had no health access,

especially on the countryside. So those are the three good things that China did, improve the

status of women, get everyone into primary education and improve the lot of health care.

Besides that, their agricultural campaign was a failure just like Stalin's for many

of the same reasons I mentioned before. The great leap forward and crash industrialization

didn't really work either. In a way, is China better than India or other

countries that didn't have the basic education and the strong state authority and

the health improvements and whatever. I think maybe, but I think that's why we need to

sometimes go beyond just economic measures of success. Because if you told me tomorrow,

the US will grow at 3% if we maintain democracy, but it'll grow at 8%, 9%. Everyone will be wealthier

if we move to some sort of authoritarian government. I think you're asking the wrong

question if we're going to make your decision based on growth because it has to be based on

some sort of principle. But the same dynamic of from the beginning, the Chinese Communist Party

ruling over people emerging from the outside through armed conflicts and ruling over ordinary

Chinese people have continued. Since then, the policies have been better economically

and often at times, not always, the technocratic governance has been quite good. But that doesn't

mean that the party has a democratic mandate or should have the right to govern as they see fit.

Because clearly, it doesn't have that mandate in swads of the country or in places like Hong Kong

or elsewhere. But to me, nothing the Chinese Communist Party does has anything to do with

socialism. I think even by their own definition today, it really doesn't. It's a sort of nationalist,

authoritarian developmental state that has done some good things to improve the living standards

of the Chinese people, other things that were counterproductive. And as a democratic socialist,

I certainly don't support that state. But I also hope that the US and Biden will find a way to avoid

intense rivalry and competition economically spilling over into something worse.

From a democratic socialist perspective, what's one policy or one or two ways you could fix

if you could fix China? If you took over China, what would you like to see change?

Well, the democratic part becomes before the socialist part. So I would say there needs to be

multi-party elections in China. And state censorship and control over the press, in other words,

needs to be done with. As far as their immediate economic policy, I think the idea of maintaining

strong state control of certain commanding heights of the economy while liberalizing other spheres

has done quite well in China's case, lifting people out of poverty. But again,

there's something really lost in society, even if it's getting wealthier, if ordinary people

don't have the ability to participate in dissent freely. And the Chinese authorities have allowed

some. It's not North Korea. It's not a totally totalitarian state. There's been workplace protests.

There have been all sorts of local anti-corruption protests and things like that. But the government

decides what's permitted and what's not at what particular moment. And I think the long run,

even if it can survive, there's a better way to do things, which is quite simply a democracy.

The thing is, though, the lessons of history that China is looking at, this is a dark aspect.

So building on top of the fact that it seems like under Stalin and under Mao, under Stalin,

the Soviet Union, and under Mao, China has seen a lot of economic growth. And then one dark aspect

of that, while under the Great Leap Forward, upwards of 70 million people dead. Today, I think

there's a large number of people who admire Stalin and admire Mao.

What they admire is the stability and the strong leadership. And there's a lot of people who miss

the Soviet Union. The reason why they miss it is that it was a system they knew that provided the

basics of their livelihood. Then afterwards, look at Russia in the 90s, people were in chaos.

The Communist Party had a huge amount of support, democratically. Anti-democratic measures had to

be taken ironically against the Communist Party to keep it from regaining more of a foothold in

Russia. But we don't need that trade-off. We could have a form of... Imagine if Russia went to a

system closer to social democracy that maintained the stability that people wanted, the welfare

state that people wanted, but restructured the economy in not a shock way, but in a way that

made sense and that ordinary people felt ownership of instead of just oligarchs who were a former

Communist Party bureaucracy just dividing up the country for themselves. I think the same thing in

China. First of all, certainly from the West, the US government and people in the US have

no say over what should happen in China. The Chinese Communist Party has more authentic authority

than any of us do in the country. But I think that the fears and stability that a lot of Chinese

people have, why I would imagine that even in a democratic election, the Communist Party might

have majority support is because they fear the unknown. They fear collapse. That was one of the

big lessons of the Soviet collapse. Do you want China divided into five, six states? Do you want

economic turmoil? Do you want mass immediate privatization? Do you want whatever welfare

state you have destroyed and so on? I think people are right to have those fears, but there's a

different route towards democratization that maintains stability. There's different routes

that you could have democracy. Not every country had to go down the route of Yugoslavia and the

USSR and so on. You are the founder of the magazine Jacobin, of which I am a subscriber.

I recommend everybody subscribe whether you're on the left or the right. The magazine does tend to

lean left. Does it officially say it's socialist? We're a socialist publication. We try to be

interested. We try to have articles that have debates and contestation and whatever else,

but we're definitely, we're all socialists. Well, it's a lot of really interesting articles,

so I definitely recommend that people subscribe, support. The product of the 21st century only

subscribed to the digital version, but I guess there's also paper version. Yeah, there's like

70,000 subscribers in print. Does it come on a scroll? I don't even know. Do they even publish

paper then? I'm going to mail you a bunch of copies. It's perfect bound. It's long issues.

Our Jackman's publisher, we're making it for, recently did a redesign of the publication,

so it looks really good. It's up there in the design award competition range.

Nice. It's sexy. I can show it off to all my friends. Put it in your coffee table. You don't

even have to read it. First, I need to get a coffee table, but yes, I'll get both.

That's what a respectable adult, listen, I've upgraded my life. I haven't had a couch,

I don't think ever. So I got a couch recently because somebody told me that serious adults

have a couch. And they also got a TV because serious adults have a couch and a TV. And as you

see, it's been here for many months and I still haven't like unboxed it. So I'm trying to learn

how to be an adult looking up on YouTube, how to be an adult and learning slowly. After that,

I'll look into this whole leisure thing. Anyway, what's the origin of Jackman? What was the

idea? What was the mission and what's the origin story? So I started Jackman when I was

between my sophomore and junior year of college. Basically, I was already a socialist. I was

involved in the Democratic Socialist of America. I was in the youth section, the young Democratic

Socialist. I was editing their kind of youth online magazine called The Activist back then.

And to be honest, I had my ideology, I had my views. I had a group of people around me

that we would debate together and occasionally write for this other publication, The Activist

and so on. And yeah, just a product of creative ignorance in the sense that I knew I had the

capacity to maybe pull off an issue or two. I just had no idea how long I would keep doing it,

you know, and I'd just eventually consume my life slowly but surely. I had different plans

for my future kind of, you know, but I ended up just being a magazine publisher. I literally

didn't know what a magazine publisher was, but it just kind of happened.

What's the hardest part about running a magazine?

Well, the hardest part is obviously the things just like any enterprise, right? The things

beyond your control, like you could put out something that you think is great or interesting,

but then you need the feedback of people actually subscribing to it and you occasionally

encounter periods where you feel like you're doing your best work but you're not getting the

audience response. And I think you just need the kind of the self-confidence to just keep

doing it. And obviously, if you're totally obscure and crazy and way off the mark, you're

never going to build that audience. But I think a lot of publications have tried to,

same thing I guess goes with YouTube shows, whatever else, they try to adapt to what everyone

else is doing right away when they don't achieve success. Whereas for me, the early issues that

Jackman got very little resonance and it took a while for it to build into something, but a lot

of it was just the confidence to just keep going and keep publishing what I would want to read

and just hope that I'm not so much of a weirdo, that I'm the only one.

Is there some pressure that you could speak to of audience capture? Because it is a socialist

publication. You have a fan base, a readership base. Is there times you feel pressured not to

say a certain thing, not to call out bullshit, not to criticize certain candidates, all that kind

of stuff? Yes, definitely, of course. I myself am looser on the self-censorship than other people,

but that's only because I've gotten this far just shooting for the hip or whatever. Occasionally,

you'll come to a rash judgment. You'll speak too soon or complain about something too soon,

and you'll have to either apologize or reconsider or whatever else. But on a host of issues,

I have views that maybe not all of the left has, but I know that the core of my politics is

a politics against oppression, against exploitation, against all the things that we talked about.

And if you know that's at the core of your politics, then you could maybe say,

you know what, I don't think the left should respond to the real racism that's still around

in the world by adopting an excessively racialized rhetoric, if that makes sense. I fundamentally

just am a universalist, and I believe that people, no matter where their backgrounds are and so on,

kind of want the same things for themselves and for their families. And I feel like a lot of the

left or some of the left, not even the far left, more like the center left, has adopted kind of

a stance saying, oh, we need to talk about white privilege or white Karens or white guys or old

white guys doing this or whatever else. And to me, it's not only wrong in a moral sense,

but it's counterproductive. Because the last thing I want is a young white teenager

who feels unrepresented politically and wants to be a part of maybe even the left

to feel like, oh, I should think more about my identity. No, the whole point of anti-racist

politics is that we want to live in a world where me and you can go around the corner and get a

bear and we're not people of two different races getting a bear. We're just two guys in America

getting a bear. We're trying to have the type of society in which there's less of that sort of

communal or racialized identity. And that was a whole point of a whole generation of anti-racist

struggle, but now we seem to be kind of reifying it in the media and in culture and in politics.

And that's one issue where I've been kind of banging the drum on this to the point that it's

annoying in certain parts of the left. I don't think there's maybe extreme opposition among

socialists, but it's more like, why do you keep focusing on this? Let's focus on our real enemy,

the right, instead of criticizing this part of... No, I think it's really... I'm really glad you

exist. I'm really glad you're beating that drum because I think that's one of the reasons that

the left has not had a broader impact or is not heard by more people that could hear its message

is because the othering of... As if there's two teams, as if it's black and white,

as opposed to having... There's a common humanity and a common struggle amongst all of us.

You also wrote the book that we mentioned a few times, The Socialist Manifesto,

The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality. What's the framework,

what are the key ideas of the book? A lot of it's a look at socialism's past,

present and future, basically. A lot of it is historical. The opening chapter uses a

pasta sauce factory as a way to explain certain Marxist concepts, but also a theory of change,

like how we get from, let's say, pure capitalism to more regulated unionized and social democratic

systems, then beyond social democracy into my vision of socialism. That's kind of the first

little bit. It's like a visionary look at the future of socialism, but then I try to explain

why some of the past social movements have gone wrong because I think we can't take for granted.

I think a lot of people want to live in a different or better society, but they look at past

examples and they're skeptical. I think there's good reason for skepticism. I try to explain both

the successes of certain systems like social democracy, but also what happened in Russia,

China, and more of a historical overview. Then the book ends in the present. It ends with looking

at the Bernie Sanders campaign, why it resonated, looking at some of the problems facing the US,

the UK, other advanced economies, and why I think the socialist message is still relevant.

Because for the longest time, I'm 33, I became a socialist as a teenager. For the longest time,

it seemed like I was just a member of a historical society, keeping alive an idea that nobody was

interested in anymore. Now it's heartening to see more young people interested in the idea,

but we actually need to, I think, have a clearer sense of what we stand for and how we make our

movement, like it used to be, more rooted in the working class. If anyone rewinds the tape,

they go to when we first started talking about early socialism, when I was talking about the

German social democratic workers movement, or all these different early parties. I think at

various points, I use the word worker and socialist movement interchangeably, because in fact,

at the time, it was pretty interchangeable. Socialism was the ideology that had the appeal

of the working class movement. You couldn't really separate between the two. Now, obviously,

socialism is like a fringe ideological concurrent among a very small minority of the working

class, which is fine, but we need to get to the point, I think, ideally, where when people talk

about unions and people protesting in social movements and socialism, they all are one and

the same as part of the same broad movement. How did you become a socialist? What was the

personal story or the idea that took hold in your mind? I'm the youngest of five. I was the only one

of my family born in the United States. It was very obvious to me that my life outcomes were

very different than life outcomes of my siblings. My three oldest siblings didn't go to college

after high school. Some of them got their degrees much later on as adults, but I was,

from a pretty young age, had access to a great public school district and was put on the track

to go to college. This is the outcome. Like I said, even my grandmother was illiterate.

My mom didn't have a lot of educational opportunities early in her life. She actually

graduated from college the same year I did, so she later got her degrees and whatever else.

But to me, it was obvious that so much of my life outcomes weren't just a product of hard work

or my family's sacrifices because, of course, I had the same family as my siblings,

but the product of state institutions helping out, evening things out, public school district,

public library, all sorts of after-school programs, all that was the domain of the

state and I really benefited from it. In essence, my core was the social democratic belief

the state should. We distribute a bit, build public institutions, be an equalizer.

Now, how it became a Marxist and a socialist was much more random. I was just intellectually

interested in it and eventually I merged the two together, where I merged together my more

pragmatic and practical interest and day-to-day concerns and reforms and so on with my loftier

intellectual interests and Marxism into the politics I have today, which I try to balance

and do both. I think a lot of socialists in the organization that I joined as a teenager,

the Democratic Socialists of America and elsewhere, try to do the two, try to maintain some sort of

balanced dream here and our vision of the future.

What do you think Marx would say if he were to read your book, Socialist Manifestant, do a review?

So, I think Marx would say that my vision of a Socialism after capitalism maintains key elements

of what he would, the commodity form. So, a lot of what Marx was concerned about was

what markets do to human relationships in a negative sense. His early writings especially

focus a lot on the alienation of labor. My vision of Socialism, at least in the near term,

a lot of that is about decmodifying certain sectors. So, reducing the market in certain

sectors and reducing alienation, but not eliminating it. It is about eliminating

exploitation and oppression. So, knowing Marx and knowing how critical he was of certain other

Socialist strands and tendencies, and he would often write very snarky notes and letters to

people like Engels being like, this guy LaSalle, he's a total asshole. Then he would send a separate

note to LaSalle saying, hey, can I borrow five grand? This is actually true. He did the boat.

He did the boat, I think the same month. So, he would be really good at Twitter is what you say.

Oh, he would be the best at Twitter. And also, he was a journalist before with his work for

the New York Tribune. He was very clever, very snarky. He would be awesome at Twitter. I think

him and Elon would have good back and forwards. But I think it would be critical to some parts,

but I think the strangest part for him would be reading the historical sections and seeing the way

in which his ideas, which is fundamentally ideas about human emancipation, were used for evil,

for hardship, in ways that did the opposite of emancipated, but in some cases, enslaved people.

And I think he would have definitely not want to be associated with them. He probably would

rather be associated with me than them, but even then, only begrudgingly.

What advice would you give to young folks in high school, in college, how to have a career

they can be proud of or how to change the world? I think be intellectually curious.

Read outside your current beliefs and understand and read authors on their own terms.

So the worst thing in the world to do is to read anything, especially work of fiction,

but anything, and try to deduce the authors' backgrounds or politics, whatever else. Read

it on its own terms first, then you could reread it and do other examinations or whatever else.

And also read a lot of history. So I started off reading books like Eric Hoppe's bombs,

four books on history, going from the 1700s all the way to 1994, the last book is The Age of

Extremes. But I think understanding history gives you a bird's eye view of everything,

sociology, economics, everything. So these big sweeping historical books are really

useful to know. Everybody should know basically what year or at least what decade. Serfdom was

abolished, what decade, slavery was abolished, what century Magna Carta was, when the Roman

Empire fell. That's debated when the Roman Empire fell. All these, I think, being a person with a

general knowledge and general sense of history and whatever else just makes you more eclectic and

interesting. And it's way better than just, especially a lot of my Indian friends, not just

Indians, but the hyper focus on, you got to specialize and you got to focus on math or engineering,

whatever you want to do. You just know your field really well, but nothing else. I think there's

something really too, whether you're getting at school or you're just going to do it by yourself,

giving yourself a liberal arts education. I think there's a lot of power to having the facts of

history in terms of in time, when stuff happened, but also really powerful is knowing spatially,

like the geography. There were a point on the map and there's interesting dynamics that happened

throughout history of all the different nations in Europe, of all the different military conflicts

and the expansions and the wars and the empires and all that kind of stuff. It really puts into

context how human history has led to the place we are today, because all the different geopolitical

conflicts we have today, even the politics of the day is grounded in history, maybe less so for

the United States, because it has a very young history, but that history, even for the United

States is still there, right, from the civil war. And understanding that gives you context to when

you tweet random stuff about this or that person or politician and so on. Yeah, very true. Very

true. One of the regrets I have currently is I have perhaps been too focused on the 20th century

in terms of history, the present and the 20th century. A lot of people write to me that there's

a lot of lessons to be learned in ancient history as well. So not just even American history, but

just looking farther and farther and farther back. Yeah, that feels like it's another time,

it's another place. It totally has no lessons, but then you remind yourself that it's the same

human beings, right? Yeah, and also we're no smarter than them. We just have more crude

knowledge in part because of them, but they were just as clever as us. What do you think is

the meaning of this whole experiment we have going on on Earth? What's the meaning of life?

Well, I think there's no broad meaning of life. There's, it was an accident, but we ourselves

needed to make our own meeting. And for me, a lot of it is about posterity, trying to do something

worthwhile while on Earth, but also leaving something behind. It could just be relationships

with friends or family in the future, maybe having a family and kind of like leaving behind that sort

of legacy, like little bits of yourself, but also them being able to learn the same way I have

little bits of my parents and my grandparents in me. And then also, I think in a social sense,

zooming out from just the individual on the family, leaving the world behind a little better.

I would love to be a part of a movement that created a world with a little bit less suffering,

a little bit less oppression or exploitation or whatever else. That's really why I'm a

socialist. It's not about snapping your fingers and curing the world of everything in one go,

but it is about, I think, giving our lives some sort of meaning and purpose. And you don't have

to be a socialist to do that. You could just do it at the micro level in your own day-to-day

interactions, but I just feel like life has no good meaning without thinking of posterity in

the future. And I have to say thank you for doing so. Thank you for caring about the struggle of

the people in the world through ideas that are bold and I think challenging for a lot of people.

In a time when socialism is something that can be attacked aggressively by large numbers of people,

still persevering and still exploring those ideas and seeing what of those ideas can make

for a better world that's beautiful to see. Bhaskar, thank you so much for talking today. Thank you

for all the work you do. I can't wait to see what you do next. I appreciate it. And yeah, thanks

for keeping an open mind with these conversations and to your audience too. It's nice to have a

space where people can debate and think at length and don't have to worry about sound bite culture.

Thank you, brother. Thank you for listening to this conversation with Bhaskar Sankara. To support

this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with

some words from Karl Marx. Democracy is the road to socialism. Thank you for listening and hope to

see you next time.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.