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 is 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 cases 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.
This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, 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 Steven 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 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
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 trade-off, but it's really a
trade-off 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
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, the 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 could 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 would like to take on socialism versus capitalism is under each system, the extremes of each
system 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, 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 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. And as soon as, of course, little elements of democracy was brought to that system,
the system collapsed because there started to be outlets 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 shouting Chinese authoritarianism
and they're saying China is building this efficient system, this 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 beers, kind of wasting your life away
that way. Leisure might mean spending more time with your friends and family, building these sort
of relationships that are gonna maybe not change the world and some medicines, but will change
the lives of the people around you and will change your community for the better. I'm taking notes
here because 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. Hey, leisure should mean civic activity too,
right? I mean, there's that famous book, The Robert Putnam One, Bowling Alone or whatever,
which described that for now, I mean, I was born 1989, I like, you know, 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, 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
that is, is quite, 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 from providing,
would be enough. But that's another thing that would have to be balanced in a system.
So if you'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 social nets become,
the less of a whip or a 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. And 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. I got here from
downtown Austin, and I think my lift, I did tip, but I think my lift was like eight bucks
based 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 in 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 excessively Northeast examples. We take
for granted that someone from Hartford, Connecticut is going to have your average working-class person
in Hartford. It's 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. You mean depending on the conditions of where you grew 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. A poor city and a rich city. 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 of
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 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 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 an hour,
keep your 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 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 postwar period. And they also came out of this
old social democratic movement. And these parties mostly just called 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 interest 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, but 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, you know, they were
inheriting a democracy, they were inheriting 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.
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 kind of look at the record. 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, restabilize 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 restabilize 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's 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
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 to bring in more
machines to make agriculture more productive, all understate 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 a famine. It led to a host of other
problems. Industrialization in the way that it 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 has won. They managed to, if you kind of ran a scenario where
Japan would be in the 1870s, 1880s, and ran it a hundred times, the Japan of the post-war period
is kind of one of the best outcomes, right? And I think 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 moved
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 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 cities,
but 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. 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 allows a great speaker
to take power. It's almost like if the mission, come with me friends, beyond the horizon,
a great land is waiting for us, that encourages dictators, authoritarians to take power. Is
there something within the ideology that allows for that, 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. You can see this in many of the nationalisms of the 20th century.
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. 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. 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 are 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. 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
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 further. And most coaches would take the safe route, right?
Right. So, you're going against the decision. Anyway, I understand, 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 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, 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. 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 in 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 in 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,
large firms, they're not going to be making day-to-day decisions by democratic vote, right?
But maybe you would elect representatives, elected management 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? 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, individually, these people haven't been taken 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. 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 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, by kind of egalitarian belief
that ordinary people should have more stake in their lives in the workplace leads me
beyond social democracy to socialism. There's a tricky thing here. 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 set 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'm going to lay that out there. But I worry about the slippery slope into the authoritarian
figure that takes this 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 social 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, same thing in Germany too. Then it was the social
Democrats who were able to build political democracy. Then on top of that, at 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 their agrarians. Sometimes they were with
the communists briefly, but they ruled uninterrupted. And they lost an election in 1976,
and they just left power. And then they got back into power in the 80s. So in other words,
they created a democratic system, of course, with mass import 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 the workers movements, almost 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,
like 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 being manufactured or generated.
You mean the capitalist class and the working class just to clarify?
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. It's truly
something that's manufactured. But capitalism itself as a system, as a system based on class
division, whether you're supported or opposed, 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 in 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 and to
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 say
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
capitalist to do whatever they want with the 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 a 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
like 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 under attack 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'd 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 would 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. That'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 a crude devil's advocate perspective. Are the workers going to be able
to remove the incompetent from the pool in the name, 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 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. And 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, like, you need to step up, maybe sort of the pause of the carrot, like, you really,
like to really encourage fellow workers, no, when there's a person that's not pulling their side of
the 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, 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 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. In 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
condemn 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 lend 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.
And 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 and 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 a tension here as well. So you said that there's an equality between the classes,
the capitalist class and the working class. And so 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. 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, let's say, 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 through 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
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're 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. 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 like
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 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 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 might
go out of business because 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 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 and 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. 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. Could you just link on that a little more of the pattern wage
bargaining? So GM is the most efficient and Ford is the second most. Can you explain to me again
the wages, setting the wages to the Ford level, how that is good for GM? 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 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 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.
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 of 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 well. 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 an 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 like 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
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 disagree 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 the 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,
right? 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 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 some other way that unions work, 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 out-compete 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, 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 3% loan. If you have some crazy blue sky idea and
you manage to get it to that point, 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, you know, 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, you know, I think 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 expanded. 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 like 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 socialist 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 holds 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 producers 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 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 on 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 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 or 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 may be capitals and birds 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.
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 the 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
that are just much better than me. So hard work does not equal skill, good, productive. I just
want to 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 that 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 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, you know, there is 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, our 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, you know, 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. So we already,
I think, have incentive structures that you could say that some people might just, I think,
disagree with the normative thing of like, 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 like make things a little bit easier for
capitalists to make money or then everyone will benefit or whatever else? I mean, that's a normative
question. In my vision of socialism, there'll be plenty of, you know, 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 kind of roll back to, you know, 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, you know, 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, like 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 kind of 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 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 of the words 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
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.
Do 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 a lot 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
if we're to steal me on the case, in 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 health care 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 health care and so on, and really are just still caught
at this battle over rights and 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 that's not really making
a change is 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
into battles over, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, asserting the kind of universal dignity of people. This
is what the civil rights movement was about. And it wasn't a surprise there was a lot of
self-described socialists, people like Bayard Rustin, Eiffel Randolph, Martin Luther King,
Jr. I mean, these were people who were, Ella Baker, they were socialists, you know, 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, you know, just disconcerting complaints about
language or culture and so on. Martin Luther King was a socialist. To a degree,
he was 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 it was
67, the last years of his life, he became much more involved in struggles against war and also
struggles for workers' rights. You know, he was assassinated when he was at a rally at workers'
rights. So 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. You know, 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 some sort of 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 space 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 is 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 kind of 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 socialist
against war and against 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 complex, 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 and 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 it, but kind of no war for oil.
Both is correct in that it gets to what people sense is 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. It is a story of geopolitics. It's perhaps less a story of capitalism or socialism.
Yeah. 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.
And there is 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,
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 out 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 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 bad would launch a war to recover or to take several
hundred square miles of territory and tens of thousands of people die. I think seems absurd
to us many people today, luckily, but it would not have seemed absurd 50, 60 years ago. It would
have just been a normal thing, these kind of territorial disputes and so on. I think projecting
into the future, I think within our lifetimes, we'll live to see that kind of conflict be
eradicated. In part, you could say that why? I think it's because of popular pressure and
organization. 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 is what we're 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. 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 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.
So 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. But I'm a socialist on normative grounds because I have certain beliefs
about the equality of people because I believe in it. We should have a society with liberty,
with equality, with fraternity, and that I hope I'll always be a socialist until the day I die.
But it's kind of a very un-scientific or unserious thing to say,
this is my framework from beginning to end for the rest of my life.
But from a perspective of history, Marx says that societies go through different stages.
It could be crudely summarized as primitive communism, imperialism, maybe slave society,
feudalism, defined by mercantilism, then capitalism, then socialism, and finally
stateless communism. Am I damn miss something there?
I mean, I think that was close enough. I mean, 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 it 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. Eventually, this contradiction would be a
federal 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. All right, maybe you could just let me, hold on a second,
and then inequalities 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 was 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 result in some kind of class
inequality. And eventually, that results in a revolution that says, no, this inequality is not
okay, it's not natural, it 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. So 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. So in the early
times in this theory, there was not much surplus being generated, right? And there was generally
egalitarian societies. Then as we became agricultural, as society developed, there was more surplus
being produced. Then there was a group of people, the ruling classes of their age, that controlled
and distributed that, 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 casts of priests who did
nothing but pray and write and lecture people all day, right? And you had kings and rulers
and bureaucrats 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, right? It expanded production
beyond our wildest imaginations, but it also no longer bound workers to their lord or manor,
whatever else. They were now free to move, free to engage in contracts with employers and so on.
But 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 collectively 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 post-colonial states trying to emerge out of colonialism. They were in places
like China and Russia, autocratic countries, and never in an advanced capitalist country.
Now, in Marx's 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 Conti
in view of it, like 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
the recapitalist parties getting hopefully 3, 4, 5% of the vote, maybe a lot more in the same way
that in the US or a public, we could right now have a monarchist party. No one's going to support
a monarchist party in the US 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 leaders 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've heard this stated a lot of times. In the left-wing anarchist traditions, like
anarcho-syndicalism or whatever else, they're 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 and interesting.
I'll have to ask about that, but yeah, okay. 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's 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 you're Marx, not only how much wealth the system would produce
over time, which I think he 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't 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
in the last 30 years that it's been taken over by professionals and 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. 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. 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 is an
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 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, I can see a vision
of the future that I would like like 50, 60 years from now. Maybe there's some sort of future of
super abundance 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
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.
And so 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 world? It's the 50 years. 50 hundred years where AI, there's an AI
sort of central planning. Sort of the we remove 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 then
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 it'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 from a sci-fi perspective?
Maybe in the future you can imagine certain calculation problems that arose during central
planning solved 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 and how do you communicate
without endless meetings or someone reading your brain? Yeah. 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 of kind of the innate value of human beings and think of the
mechanism of reallocation of resources is a good way to empower that equality that it's nice to
remove the human element from that. Like 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 don't want to live in society where
you're you just find out the next day that there's some massive infrastructure project that you
haven't you know had a chance to think about or debate or feel like you're participating in you
know and and debate is not just facts and logic that's 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 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 have 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
when 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 holler more 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 or increase
output whereas we might collectively decide that you know we we have enough and we want to you
know have a trade-off right and I think that you know 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
very interesting concept leisure we have to how do you spell that all right so if we can step into
the practical 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 you know Medicare for all or universal health care
something you haven't mentioned is tuition free college increase 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 ours reduction has always been an important demand
for socialists so I mean it's been a reality in certain countries like France and 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 a
zero sum game you could reduce hours to 35 hours and still maintain the same output by employing
more people to kind of fill the the slack in in hours so one I think it's a solid heuristic thing
in working class movement 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 a bill in in in the UK
that would have reduced the hours of working time and reduced child or eliminated or reduced child
labor and 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 on how much time the
capitalist can take from ordinary workers and how much freedom they would they would have
with health care one I just think it's a a government health care system you know you
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 health care involve so there's different
varieties in the UK for instance they have a national health service in which medical
personnel's and hospitals are run directly by the state it's almost like a mini-soviet system
to be honest but just for health care and it works pretty well just for health care
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
you know this is a area in which we people don't have obviously for cosmetic procedures
whatever they have preferences or for most routine things that people do in health care
they just need to see a doctor you know they need to get diagnosed some of these systems
have had trouble with weightless for specialists or whatever that's more of like an allocation
problem of if you want more specialists you pay specialists more like this is this problems that
could be solved by like through the mechanisms of a planning and and government-run health care so
that's that's kind of the most left wing that you could get is what the system in the United Kingdom
beyond that you have a system like medica 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
the 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 health care 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 into the system because if there's only one you know
big national insurance company that that company has a lot of weight and power but you know you
could still visit your same doctor and there's still some it's not as radical of a shift in that
direction and that's a dominant demand of Bernie Sanders and the left right now there's 30 plus
million people in the u.s. 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 would be a net benefit for the vast majority of the u.s.
population even if it was offset with certain taxes because we spend a lot of money out of
pocket with with health insurance and it's a demand also that's like 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 and so on and by the way you're one of the few
interviewers who will ever ask me any the details so it's good that I had a I've been thinking of
a rough sketched my head for the last you know whatever 16 years I've been a socialist but
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 social democracy how are you going to
convince those people that they 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 health care organizing for a $15 bend of wage enabled 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 health care and worker
collectives are not so radically different that there is 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 what's the right answer everyone's certain universal
health care is terrible or in the case of universal health care 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
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 like I don't think anyone knows
so like you people like you are basically saying like arguing for ideas and we have to
explore those ideas together why do you think if universal health care is popular
why don't we have universal health care 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 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 the best interest in not having
universal health care there's a large industries with the best interest in not having universal
health care they pay for ads pay lobbyists they influence government and they have made it very
difficult so you can't get universal health care done without the bill even if you pass something
you're trying to make a change like obama care we're supposed to have a public option everybody's
been running on a public option 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 government plan they might just
keep that might be the slow road to really having universal health care so I think a lot of its
opposition do you like that idea the public option maybe you can like because then isn't
there complexities like pre-existing conditions so isn't a public option
mean you can not have any insurance until you get the 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 well it just kind of a
way to signal your support for universal health care but give us nothing and I think that's what
we saw under with biden 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 you um you know by
default can just opt in to a public plan and let's say hypothetically you don't even have to pay for
then it's just a back door to universal health care really quickly because I think the vast
majority of people who aren't currently covered and I saw 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 four hundred
five hundred dollars on the obama care 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
health care 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 as a tenant and you know whatever else so I
think it's like these day-to-day concerns need to be connected to the more abstract and loft
division of change otherwise our politics just becomes like this this fantasy world thing that's
that's you know nice ideas to think about or debate but 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 just society what is that you're just to clarify is the
universal health care up there yeah universal health care is probably far higher in my priorities
than 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 decree they carry with them for the rest of their life
it gives them a chance to join kind of a privileged part of the labor market right 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 you know some of them are in nursing
sectors where they need a college degree and and so on but if you just make college tuition free
but you don't also make trade skills and other things to wish 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 so 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 more equal so you know there's more investment
in K through 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 from any any part of the country that they're
given the skills and resources for vocational you know trainings and that those are also free
and it just feels like in terms of order of operation I would just start with K through 12
education improving it and and whatever else other than college after but I'm not opposed to it
so does that improving K through 12 education does that mean investing more into it is that
as simple as just increasing the amount of money that's invested in the in public education
in general when it comes to the public sector or any 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 like
education's not gonna give them everything they need to to succeed so sometimes we I think put
too much weight on on education and of course you can define education more broadly which is
like the care of the flourishing of the young mind whatever that is yeah a lot of you call it
early yeah a lot of it starts with so New York City at least we do have um universal pre-k so
from age three onward you have the option for that I mean it's important for kids socialization
you know their parents are now able to you know know that they could go to work or do something
else and have their you know 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 you know 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
um our state universities and in college but for me it's not a question of state versus non-state
it's a question of um you know good outcomes for for people and it just happens to be that for
working class people um 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 obama care 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 with some sort of injury or health problem or whatever else and it's 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 uh
medicare for all will cost upwards of 40 trillion dollars over 10 years for zero okay they could
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 uh 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 read random numbers i do think universal health care if done right can be
basically cost neutral i think it's an exception because we spend a tremendous amount of money
on on on health care a huge percentage or gdp so i think it could be done in a way that's close to
class neutral so actually can you argue on the numbers without arguing on the number 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 health care sector for example there would be um eliminated um 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 the their market share
is too fragmented to really negotiate hard um medicare could sometimes negotiate better rates
but a medicare for all would negotiate even better rates so i think there's a cost spiral
that we can adjust with more government um involvement there's a reason why we spend
a bigger share of our gdp on health care than other places but but let me just accept the
broad premise that social programs cost money um now i think that that one for ordinary people
most of them that trade off of even hypothetically if if taxes on um lower middle class and working
class people in certain cases go up that 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 the rich will pay pay more the majority will consume
more of them um also i think a lot of these programs are the bedrock of a healthy society
so one reason for example that we have um so much crime and violence in the u.s there's lots of
you know cultural and other um causes with our level of gun ownership american history and and
so on but one one really important factor is just the level of poverty and inequality in the u.s
compared to other other countries that combined with guns and and other factors means so we
live in more violent unequal societies you know a european would be shocked by the fact that in
even some of our our nicest areas and our and city isn't elsewhere because there's not a real violence
too um it's just normal to have gun uh violence it's normal to have uh drug related violence you
know the we have what like four or five hundred people some years in like baltimore i got a city
of under a million getting getting killed um these are all recipes for a society in which
uh one the public sphere is is drunk 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 like the the
rot goes very deep in a welfare state is one way to to live in a better society for everyone um
there's been plenty of of studies uh there's one book called the spirit level on um on inequality
that was quite popular that just notes that inequality is really terrible for the psyches
um of the rich too not just for for the poor so i think uh spending some more money living in more
just society is is doable there's different ways to to address certain costs um spirals
one reason why our welfare states are getting more and more expensive is in part just because our
population is is aging but many of the same people say we can't afford um more in our welfare
states because um you know we're already spending so much on social security and all these other
entitlements are the same people also for one you know closing borders so immigrants can't come in
to to help build the economy and to fill gaps in the economy and also who aren't for things that
will make it easier to have kids you know i'm uh 33 years old i have a lot of friends um who
have been putting them off having kids until they save up x amount of dollars even though they have
someone they could you know raise raise children with um because they can't afford the cost of
childcare they can't they can't you know their job probably won't give them more than four six
weeks of of family leave or whatever else like this is not the case in other other countries so 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 tradeoffs it's not a magical thing where you could just you know have
everything without tradeoffs so in a progressive tax system is there to to push back on the costs
here is there a point at which taxing the rich uh it's kind of productive in the long term so in
the short term there might be a net benefit of increasing taxes um because the program's the
middle class the lower middle class gets is more beneficial is there is there a negative side to
taxing the rich in theory yes of course so one it would be um if you tax the rich so much they
change their consumption patterns and that has negative impacts on the economy as a whole
that you like 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
and the more likely scenario is you tax corporations and and and other um wealthy you know people in
society to the point that um they have potentially less money for productive investment because you're
in a capitalist society so you're relying on capitalists to invest so 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 um and my vision of course of socialism that's one reason why we'd have to take the
investment function away from capitalism there has to be 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 and that's why yeah that's a transition point yeah
um 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 so 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 um first of all we already have a progressive
taxation system uh the government does take 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 um
to tax and either redistribute directly or through social programs or redirect that money
through tax credits and another ways to shape investment towards productive investment you
know 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 um kind of does nothing right 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 um sectors so it really just just depends but i
honestly believe that 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 and um accolades
and social respect is 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 trust 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 sort of a little bit of a tangent there's a lot of folks in the in the in the left
community uh 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 uh using the word billionaire as a dirty word i think it's perfectly justified
in that it's a popular shorthand right um so obviously when i talk about inequality i often
talk about power dynamics right between workers and bosses and and so on uh billionaire is just
the 99 one percent version of it it's just a popular shorthand to just explain the fact that
you know there's um a lot of people who have accumulated obscene wealth um these people aren't
in my mind parasites you know in the in the kind of very very old school um socialist rhetoric and
that of course um capitalists um provide employment take entrepreneurial risks come up with new ideas
sometimes themselves so sometimes directly manage uh work and whatever whatever else
but they exert so much power over the lives of not just their workers but society as a whole
taking away some of their wealth and power is a way to just empower others and again
uh these things have policy trade-offs if you if you just snap your fingers and say um
Elon Musk you're now um all your wealth is gone you're now you know on food stamps or whatever
else in that kind of arbitrary way you'd be a total 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 of others
i think is just simply a fact and um i think it's true in the cases of people who are good people
and 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 these positions so i agree with you in part
but i have to push back here so one of the problems i see is using billionaires a shorthand
to talk about power inequality and what's an 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 uh literary icons and
sort of writers and poets and musicians and uh engineers and scientists we should sell up we
should sort of separate the the human creator from the wealth that the system has given them
that that's what i worry about is like in our system some of the greatest humans are the
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 um lebron james if he's not already in his lifetime will be a
billionaire um and he got his money largely through just being an incredible athlete
excelling in his field more than anyone you know besides for michael jordan i think he's
my number two he might be my number one we'll see um yeah i'm willing to keep keeping open
mind about the lebron vs jordan conversation but um 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
uh whenever he's doing an endorsement obviously that company is just thinking that he's worth
more than what they're paying him for that that endorsement and so on and to the extent with um
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 six percent you know for the return for the rest of his life you know i think
that that's that's a positive thing but i think it it doesn't get to the broader policy question
when people invoke billionaires they're invoking the specter of inequality and power um it it's
not normally the rhetoric that i use because i propose and i use more traditional um socialist
rhetoric and terms but i think it gets to something real so often with these sorts of
shorthands we use in politics um there are um you know they're imperfect but they speak to
to a real a real thing and they they feed a little bit of fun that folks like aoc and elon
have with each other creates it feeds it inspires it serves as a catalyst for uh productive discourse
okay speaking of which you said you're a fan of bernie sanders uh 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 uh writer uh 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 um campaign
uh even though disproportionately his supporters were like young women in their 20s you know
album but whatever i think i'll i'll write for bernie there's worse things in the world being
called a bro so that's fine what uh what do you like about bernie sanders and to what degree
this he represents ideas of socialism to what degree does he uh represent the more traditional
sort of liberal ideas i love bernie uh most of all like his clarity he's by far the best communicator
we have on the left he speaks with a moral force uh he's relatable um 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 you know they 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
tradeoffs today i think we need to put on a different hat we should embrace um all sorts of
nuance and contradiction and complication when it comes to the core moral and ethical appeal
i think bernie grasped that and how to communicate it now bernie sanders was politicized a very long
time ago um i actually once told him i've only met him a few times but one time i took a joke that
um in his in his book he mentioned that one politicizing moment in his life was when um
the brooklyn dodgers left town and he was devastated because he was a dodgers fan you
know from brooklyn and i said this is like 2020 campaign this may be 2019 i said bernie you're
running for president you do not need to keep reminding people of your age yeah um but um
you know he he was politicized through the young people social sleek 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 um 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 the turn towards issues of culture and and excessive focus on representation or
whatever else it was rooted 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 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
berlington vermont and he just kept with the same message and in my my book i talk about um i quote
i think a bernie speech from the 1970s one of his early campaigns and i compared it to a bernie
speech um during his 2016 campaign it was virtually identical millionaires was swapped with millionaires
and billionaires speaking of billionaires which is which is beautiful you know it's it's it's i i
think there's there's something you know 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 any rich country japan and so on and the u.s really didn't have that
the furthest left you could go was like you know chris haze and msnbc or whatever um i'm very glad
that there's there's a socialist poll and i think we have bernie to to thank for it um to the extent
that a lot of you know 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 that i do and other people more disconnected or step and move from day-to-day
politics think about the future um contours of 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 haven't
heard him talk about sort of 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 he he should be afraid of it too because
he is a uh you know he's is a major politician running for president i think what people want
is they want um they want the left wing of the possible and i 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 we lost lost a chance in 2016 to elect someone that i think
would have beaten trump or the very least would have you know been close do you think the democrats
screwed him over yes not in the way of deliberate or direct vote working but they put their thumb
in the scale uh for sure i mean there's there's it's not even conspiracy theory there's all this
stuff in the debates about uh clinton you know being clinton's people being fed questions and
and whatever else and just the tone of the media the media was extremely dismissive and hostile
to him uh 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 of going on you know any sort of outlet and making
his uh his case but i think a lot of the the liberal media in particular um always headed
out for bernie sanders what was the because that was really annoying that was really annoying
how dismissive they were i i've seen that in some other candidates like um 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 uh schools they know the same people they have the same broad just
ideology and worldview so they had a sense of what the democratic party should be and who
should be running and who is going to win and also what was serious and on-series so bernie
would say some things about the world that objectively tell a lot of people seemed 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 you know people on the
right often say things that i find uh repulsive or or just wrong but there's parts of the media
that would describe their certain views as illegitimate or outside this boundaries of
acceptable conversation i think there should be a few things outside the boundary of acceptable
well conversation you know hate speech and and so on but like 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 will
ultimately end up fueling the extremes of american politics and people feel like you know they're
they're not being listened to and some of it is also style speaking and personality
where if you're not willing to sort of play kind of a game of civility or there's like a proper way
of speaking if you're a democrat if you're not doing that kind of proper way of speaking and
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 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 their 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 mind to the revolutionary to the outsiders right i actually first uh i really
like bernie sanders um i first heard him on uh in conversation with tom hartman
uh he had these like uh 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
of 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 um 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 as a democratic socialist i think she was a very inspiring
figure for 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 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
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 in the way that a lot of the left
has learned to talk i don't mean academic in 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 like language of intersectionality and whatever else
especially in the context of cultural issues and stuff exactly instead of just the plain
spoken bernie like yeah discrimination is is wrong if you asked me about a cultural issue
i'll come down on the same side as aoc i'm sure you know nine plus tens out of times out of ten
but i'll try to root it into just basic like yeah treat people with respect you know and
they'll treat you with respect and that's the way we should govern our civics fair you know and
we don't need to talk about about intersectionality to to i think get that but so there's that rhetoric
here 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 largely
like a media event of her surprising upset election and her being you know 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 but 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 you know quote unquote purple state but at her best at her best
she does it but it's like glimmers you okay it's kind of like um i don't know what's what's border
you biggest fan of i'll give you a sports analogy i'd like the end i mean nfl is up there
if a soccer is up there but probably ufc okay well i can't give you good analogy for any of those
but it's like it's like a raw prospect like you know someone who 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 um but i think that 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 an inspiring figure
about the ideas that she represents definitely and and she has other things against her like
i'm obviously class focus but there's no denying i think that some of the hostility to her is like
sexism you know it's rooted in i think people um wanting to see her fail or whatever else but
that's only some of it you know i think some of it otherwise is her uh struggling to relate to
people who don't have a lot of her her you know starting points as far as moral and ethical beliefs
yeah but she's actually great at flourishing in all the all the attacks she's getting she's
she's doing a good job with that and a lot of those attacks will break me if i'm being honest
yes that's that's the amount of fire she's under um 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 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 um 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 yelhan
omar and others um i think i think aoc i mean that's my hope right my hope is that someone like aoc
could uh the last year plus have not has not been extremely promising you know in my 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 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 um 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 i also we also have an example of donald trump winning the presidency isn't some
isn't some of the game of politics that's separate from the policy being able to engage in rhetoric
that's that leads to outrage and then walking through that fire with grace
first of all i think trump was it's kind of a unique personality in american history so it's
hard to to to um compare anyone to 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 i think trump is much more not much more
of a firebrand anti-establishment force um in that and i mean this negatively for what it's worth
because i i you know disagree with with trump but he was willing to set fire to the republican um
um establishment right uh he was able to self fund you know largely his campaign and he already was
a media figure without them uh aoc has been much more cautious for the democratic party
establishment in part because she's not trying to run a national political campaign right now
for the outside like a five percent chance 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 you know getting wins in 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 right because we were establishing our own outside third force in american politics
we're you know 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 for bernie or whatever they're still gonna
not vote for him but he wasn't considered part of the democratic party milieu um i think now with
aoc there's a much closer association of aoc in our policies with ordinary um democrats where she
needs to draw stronger distinctions she doesn't need to do it like um 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 crews and then the rest you know um but i do feel like she needs to um
yes differentiate herself a bit more but then also just keep her language simple trump was
more complex than bernie um in his 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 discipline bernie will do an
interview with you and he'll write down i hope you do interview bernie um but he'll write down
like five things and i yeah i'm only gonna talk about these five things 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 sure so 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
you know broadcasting to um two people on the on the left and and and and you know elsewhere
i hope aoc goes in that direction i just think that she has a lot going against her just because
she's a ready a national figure and she's in a deeper blue district but but we need to root
our politics then in working class people and a lot of districts that i don't know the the type of
kitchen table conversations are i hate that cliche but i just used it but a lot of these
these conversations are just different in their tone and cadence and it's not just a question of
a you know featherman or tim ryan in ohio and kind of just white working class voters i mean working
class voters of any race um there's their day-to-day needs and the day-to-day things they want to talk
about is just at a different plane than you know a met gala cultural statement yeah i mean it's
clear that your respect and lover and and would like to see oh 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 odds here for and i disagree with them i'm buying aoc stock here
given these odds so um in terms of democratic who's going to win the 2024 election so that
includes running and winning uh on the democrat side is 18 chance for biden so seven percent
chance for kamala harris gavin usum at six percent michelle obama at three percent hillary clinton at
two percent and aoc at 1.5 percent and then bernie at one percent so uh i would not buy aoc at that
mark i would buy biden like crazy though i'm not a gambling man but i would i would totally toss a
toss a g at biden at that amount aoc at 1.5 chance i think it's i think it's i don't think she
runs um 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 i just feel like
do you think biden runs yes i think biden properly runs oh man oh boy he's an incumbent president
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 uh 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 disantis i mean already he's he's trying to you
know the desentimonious thing um but yeah he's i kind of like yeah trump's kind of like the
don king of american politics you know yeah it's it's it's interesting what kind of
dynamic chaos he's created um 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
the healthy way maybe it created an unhealthy relationship with politics where it created
more partnership for me i'm not i don't have a problem with partnership it's what kind of partnership
so i think trump has cultivated like a lot of right populace a relationship with his
supporters it's almost like a leader follower relationship and a way that doesn't actually
enhance people's knowledge of politics and the issues but actually just fall leads them to fall
the party line um ideally i think socialist politics and politics on the left should be
something different uh eugene uh debbs the great american socialist leader of the late 19th and early
20th century used to say um you know i'm not your moses i can't promise to lead you to the
promise 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 um 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 they're having uh 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 earn 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 i really like feterman 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. aah is 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 have rather a whole
campaign cycle about health care and jobs and other other issues yeah i'll yeah and this is the
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's it must be exhausting to like day
after day after day make the speech you're going to start uh 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 um and then trump is 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 do in a way that's productive that doesn't blame
immigrants or whatever else for 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 um anger
well um 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 what's the good and the bad well i think it's very similar
um to the soviet case and that socialism came to china um 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 mal 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 stan and assessing the soviet union has to apply here
because obviously you know i oppose authoritarianism and you know my office also some work and
condemnations i i should 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 accomplish it and just look at it developmentally china benefited
greatly from the communist party's implementation of basic education and health care um so in a
lot of china you had one of the conditions women were absolutely terrible they were still
footbinding and all sorts of like terrible backward um practice um you had a huge vast
majority of the population that was illiterate without any access to basic education and you had
no um health access especially on the countryside so those are the three good things that the china
the china did improve the status of women get everyone into primary education and improve
the lot of health care besides for that their agricultural campaign was a failure just like
stands for many of the same reasons i mentioned before the great leap forward and crash industrialization
didn't really work either um in a way is china better than india or other um countries that that
didn't have the basic education and the strong state authority and and um the 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 three percent
if we maintain democracy but it'll grow at eight nine percent everyone will be wealthier if we
move to some sort of authoritarian government i think you're asking the wrong question if you're
going to make your decision based on growth right because it has to be based on some sort of
you know 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 jiao ping the policies have been better
economically and often at times not always the technocratic governance has been you know quite
good but that doesn't mean that the party has a democratic mandate or has the should have the
right to govern as they see as they see fit because clearly you know it doesn't have that mandate
and swads of the country or in places of kong kong or or or elsewhere um but to me um nothing
the chinese communist party does has anything to do with socialism i think even by their own
definition today it really doesn't um 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 um you know as a democratic socialist you know i
i certainly don't support that state but i also hope that the u.s and biden will find a way to
avoid um you know 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 the change well the democratic
part becomes before the socialist part so i would say there needs to be multi-party elections in
china and um state censorship and control over the press in other words need to be be done with
as far as their immediate economic um policy i think the idea of maintaining um strong state
control of certain you know commanding heights the economy while liberalizing other spheres
has done quite well in china's case lifting people out of poverty um but again you know
there's something really lost in society even if it's getting wealthier if you're great you know
if ordinary people don't have the ability to um participate in dissent um freely and the chinese
authorities have allowed some you know it's not north korea it's not a totally totalitarian state
there's been workplace protests have been all sorts of um anti-corruption local anti-corruption
protests and things like that but it's up the government decides what's permitted and what's
not at what particular moment and i think the long run um even if it can survive um there's
there's a better way to do things which is just quite simply a democracy the thing is though the
lessons of history that china is looking at this is a dark aspect um so building on top of the fact
that it seems like under Stalin and under Mao under Stalin's 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
you have you know 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
so and there's a lot of people who miss the sova union right the reason why they miss it is that
it was a system they knew it provided the basics of their livelihood uh then afterwards like look
at russia in the nineties people were in chaos you know the communist party was had a huge amount
of support democratically um anti-democratic measures had to be taken ironically against the
communist party um to keep it from regaining more of a foothold in in russia but we don't need that
trade-off you know we could have a form of um imagine if russia went to a system closer to
social democracy that maintained um the stability that people wanted the welfare state that people
wanted um but restructured the economy not a shock way but in a way that that made sense and
that ordinary people felt ownership of instead of just oligarchs who are former communist party
bureaucracy just dividing up the country for themselves um i think the same thing in china
like first of all certainly from the west um you know the u.s government and people in the
u.s should have you know have no say over what should happen in china right the the chinese
communist party has more authentic authentic authority than any of us do in the country but
you know i think that the fears its ability that a lot of chinese people have why i would imagine
that even in democratic election the uh a communist party might have uh majority support
is because they fear the unknown they fear collapse that was one of the big lessons of the
the soviet collapse right do you want trying to divide into five six states you know do you want
economic turmoil do you want mass immediate privatization do you want whatever welfare state
you have um destroyed and so on i think people are right to have those fears but there's a
different route towards democratization that maintains stability right there's different
routes that you could that you could have um you know democracy not not every country had to go
down the route of ukoslavia and the ussr and and so on you are the founder of the magazine
jackabin of which i am a subscriber i recommend everybody subscribe whether you're on the left
or the right the the magazine does tend to lean left does it officially say it's socialist
we're a socialist publication we try to be interesting so we try to like you know have
articles that they kind of 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 i i only like the like uh the product of the 21st century only
subscribe to the digital version but i guess there's also paper version yeah there's like
70 000 subscribers and and print and print yeah does it come like on a scroll i don't even know
the paper do they even publish paper then i'm gonna i'm gonna mail you a bunch of copies uh
you know it's perfect bound you know it's long issues are our um jackman's publisher uh we're
making a four of his recently did a redesign of the of the publication so it looks really good
it's you know it's up there in the design award competition range it's nice it's sexy i can show
it off to all my friends look 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 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 um this 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 what was the idea what was the mission and what's the origin
story so i started jackman when i was um between my sophomore and junior year of college basically
i was already a socialist i was involved in the democratic social of america i was um in the
youth section the young democratic socialist i was editing um the 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
people around me that we would debate together and occasionally write for this other publication
the activist and 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 just eventually consumed my life
slowly but surely like i had i had different plans for my future i kind of you know but
i ended up um just being a magazine publisher i literally didn't know what a magazine publisher
was but uh 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 uh 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 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 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
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 uh 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 you know i um
i myself am looser on the self-censorship than other people but that's only because i've
you know gotten this far um just shooting for the hip or whatever and occasionally you know you'll
come to a rash judgment right you'll speak too soon or complain about something too soon and you'll
have to kind of either apologize or kind of reconsider whatever else um but on a host of issues
um you know i have views that maybe not all of the left has but i know that the core of my politics
is a politics against you know oppression against exploitation against all the things that we 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 um should respond to the real racism that's still around in the
world by adopting like an excessively racialized rhetoric if that makes sense like i fundamentally
like 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 for their
families and um i feel like a lot of the left or some of the left um not not even the far left
more like the center left has adopted kind of a stance saying oh we need to talk about white
privileged or you know 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 um you know feels unrepresented politically and wants to be
a part of maybe even the left to feel like um 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 you know um
you know me and you can go around the corner and get a bear and we're not you know people of two
different you know races getting a bear or just two you know guys in america getting a bear you
know it's just we're trying to get 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 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 um maybe extreme opposition among
socialists but it's more like a why do you keep focusing on this let's focus on our real enemy
the right instead of criticizing you know this part of no i think it's really uh i i'm really glad
you exist i'm really glad you're beating that drum because i think that's one of the 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 the othering of like as if there's there's 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 uh you 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 so a lot of it's a look at socialism's past um present and future basically
so a lot of it is historical um the opening chapter uses a um pasta sauce factory as a way to
explain certain marxist concepts but also theory of change like how we get from let's say pure
capitalism to more regulated you know unionized and social democratic systems and then beyond
social democracy into my vision of socialism that's kind of the first little bit it's like a
visionary kind of like look at the the future of socialism but then i try to explain why some of
past socialist 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 and i think there's good reason for skepticism so i try to explain both the successes
of certain systems like social democracy but also what happened in russia china um and kind of more
of historical overview uh then um the book kind of ends in the present it ends with looking at the
bernie sanders campaign why it resonated looking at some of the problems facing um the us the uk
other advanced economies and why um i think the socialist message is still relevant because for
the longest time um i'm 33 i became a socialist as like a teenager and for the longest time it seemed
like i was just a member of a historical society you know keeping alive an idea that nobody was
interested in anymore and now you know 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 so 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 uh because in fact the
time it was pretty interchangeable um socialism was the ideology that had the appeal of the working
class movement you know um you couldn't really separate between the two um now obviously socialism
is like a fringe ideological concurrent among a very small minority of the working class um
which is fine but we need to get to the point i think ideally where when people talk about
unions and people protesting and social movements and socialism they all kind of are
one in the same as part of the same broad broad movement how did you become a socialist well
what was the what was the personal story where the idea took hold in your mind so i'm the youngest
of five i was the only one of my family born in the united states um so it was very obvious to me
that my life outcomes were very different than life outcomes of my siblings so my three oldest
siblings you know didn't go to college um after after high school some of them got their degrees um
you know much later on as adults um but i was from a pretty young age had accessed a great
public school district and um was put on the track that you're going to go to college you know this
this is kind of the the outcome and like i said even my my grandmother was illiterate um my mom
didn't have a lot of educational opportunities early um you know in her in her life she actually
graduated from college the same year i did so she she later got her kind of degrees and whatever
else but um but to me it was obvious that so much of my life outcomes weren't just a product of
hard work or my family sacrifices because of course i had the same uh family as my my siblings um
but the product of state institutions helping out evening things out the public school district
public library like all sorts of after school programs all that was the domain of the of the
state and i really benefited from it so in a essence my core was the social democratic belief
the state should we distribute a bit build public institutions being equalizer now how it became a
marxist and the socialist was much more random i was just intellectually interested in it and
eventually i kind of merged the two together where i merged together my more pragmatic and practical
interest in day-to-day concerns and reforms and so on with my loftier intellectual interest in
marxism into you know the politics i have today which i try to kind of balance and do both and
i think a lot of socialists in the organization that i joined as a teenager the democratic socialists
of america and elsewhere uh try to do the two try to maintain some sort of balanced dream
here and you know our vision of the future what do you think marx would say if you were to read
your book uh socialist manifest and do a review so i think marx would say that um my vision of a
socialist after capitalism maintains key elements of what he would uh the commodity form so a lot
of what marx was concerned about was um what markets do to human relationships um in a negative
sense his early writings especially focus a lot on the alienation of labor um my vision of socialism
at least in the near term a lot of that is about um decommodifying 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 lasal he's a total asshole and then he would send a separate
note to lasal saying hey can i borrow five grand this is actually true he did the boat he did the
boat i think the same like um the same month um so he would be really good at twitter is what
you're saying oh he would be the best at twitter and also he used to be a he was a journalist
before with his work for the new york tribune um he was very clever very snarky he would be
awesome at at twitter i think him and elon would have a good back and forwards but i think it would
be critical some parts but i think that 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 um were used for for evil for hardship you know in ways that did the opposite
of of emancipated but in some cases you know enslaved people and i think he would have definitely
not want to be associated with them uh he probably would rather be associated with me than them but
even then uh only begrudgingly uh what uh advice would you give to young folks in high school in
college how to have a career that can be proud of or how to change the world i think be intellectually
curious um you know read outside your your current beliefs and understand and read authors on their
own terms so the worst thing the world to do is to read anything especially work of fiction but
anything and try to deduce the authors you know backgrounds or politics whatever else like read
it on its own terms first then you could reread it and kind of do other examinations or or whatever
else and also read a lot of history so i started off reading books like eric hoppers bombs um uh
four books on um history going from the 1700s all the way to 1994 the last book is age of extremes
but i think understanding history gives your bird's eye view of everything uh sociology
economics everything so these big sweeping historical books are really useful to know
like everybody should know basically you know what year um or at least like what decade you know
serfdom was abolished what decade service as labor is abolished you know what century magna
cardo was you know when the roman empire fell you know that's kind of debated when the roman empire
fell like all these i think like 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 like especially a lot of my indian friends you know the the not just indians but the hyper
focus on like you got to specialize and you have to like focus on on math or engineering whatever
you want to do you just know your field really well but nothing else like i think there's something
really too whether you're getting at school or you're just going to do by yourself giving yourself
kind of a liberal arts education i think there's a lot of power to sort of having the facts of
history in terms of in time when stuff happened but also really powerful is knowing spatially like
the geography that we're 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 and the wars and the empires and all that kind of stuff it's it
really puts into context how 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
from the united states is still there right from the civil war and understanding that gives you
context to when you tweet random stuff about uh this or that person or politician and so on uh
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 um 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's 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 yeah but like you know they're just as they were just as
clever as us you know uh what do you think is the meaning of this whole experiment we have going on
on earth now what's the meaning of life well i think there's no broad meaning of life there's
you know it was an accident but we ourselves need to make our own meeting and for me a lot of it is
about um posterity trying to do something worthwhile while on earth but also leaving something behind
it could just be relationships with friends or family um in the future maybe having a family and
and kind of like leaving behind that sort of legacy um like little bits of yourself but also
you know like them being able to learn the same way i have little bits of my my parents and my
grandparents um in me and then also i think in a social sense zooming out from just the individual
on the the family um leaving the world behind a little better you know 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 or whatever else um that's really why i'm a why i'm a socialist you know
it's not about snapping your fingers and curing the world of everything in one in one go but it is
about i think putting our lives giving our lives some sort of meaning and purpose and you don't
have to be a socialist do that you could just do it at the you know at the um micro level in your
own day-to-day interactions but i just feel like life has no good meaning without um 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 baska 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 uh yeah thanks for keeping an open mind with these conversations and to your audience too
you know it's it's nice to have a space where you know 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 baska asankara to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in
the description and now let me leave you with some words from carl marx democracy is the road to
socialism thank you for listening and hope to see you next time