RevolutionZ
RevolutionZ
Ep 368 Bhaskar Sunkara on Socialism and Us
Episode 368 of RevolutionZ has as its guest Bhaskar Sunkara of Jacobin and more recently The Nation and author of The Socialist Manifesto. Our topic isn’t a kinder capitalism; it’s a post capitalist vision and practice where private ownership is overcome and control of production resides with the people who do the work.
Together we discuss seeking a higher minimum wages and seeking higher wages more generally, full employment, greater workers say in the workplace and community, municipal support for co-ops and more. We urge that what we seek, how we seek it, and even what issues we raise while engaged in the pursuits, should deliver concrete gains in the present and also rewire expectations about who should decide and who should benefit in the future.
Sunkara discusses electoral campaigns and candidates, but more so the system in which elections occur. He challenges the limits of welfarism and highlights the power question: who owns, who governs, who invests. Together we also broach the hard problem of the division of labor and derivative class divisions. Sunkara says that specialization won’t disappear. We can't and won't all do everything. But what we do and how we do it must be democratized so that expertise serves everyone instead of hardening into a class that serves mainly itself over workers. We also explore differences and agreements about when to challenge what issues and about what structures are needed to attain our goals versus what structures will continually obstruct our goals. How can and should the choices of a socialist in a workplace or on a campus, for example, and really anywhere, differ from the choices of a progressive working in the same settings? Issues. Demands. Formulations.
Regarding the electoral arena we consider why some workers back Trump and why even center-left parties feel distant. We agree the answer isn’t to scold; it’s to organize. It is to show up where people live, to honor local experiences and concerns, and to build organizations that feel like home not like elite seminars. Sunkara explores how an independent profile—more Sanders than party brand—and now more Mamdani than party brand—can help rebuild trust and make clear class politics evident again.
Are we ready to move beyond slogans and toward a post-capitalism that’s practical, democratic, and winnable? Are we ready to further define our vision's features to the extent we now can, and to refine and improve them as we proceed? Sunkara proposes a path forward to consider.
Hello, my name is Michael Albert, and I am the host of the podcast that's titled Revolution Z. This is our 368th consecutive episode, and this time my guest is Bashkar uh Sankara. Boshkar is the founding editor of Jacobin, president of the Nation magazine, and author of the Socialist Manifesto, The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality. And it was that book that led to the invitation to Baskar. So, Boshkar, welcome to Revolution Z.
SPEAKER_01:It's an honor to uh to talk to you, Michael. Like, like we were saying before, I've been familiar with your work for a very long time since I first joined the left as kind of a teenager. So I'm glad we finally got this chance. Uh, 20 20-something years after the fact of rediscovering you, I guess it was nice that you uh you came across my uh my book too.
SPEAKER_00:Well, in the anecdotal rain, um I first met you and somebody told me that there was this guy who seemed like he was even better at the things you do than you are, and that was from somebody who thought I was pretty good at those things, and they meant media uh activity. And indeed it turns out to be true. Anyway, you and I share a belief, I think, that having vision matters for effective social activism. It's not alone enough to be against something that is, to overcome cynicism and garner sufficient support to win and to also arrive somewhere that you actually want to be. You also have to have and communicate vision. So is that true of you? Is it part of why you wrote the Socialism Manifesto?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I I think that that at first I think when people encounter the left and they encounter various debates about what a post-capitalist society should look like, either Paracon or they they encounter um, you know, a book by Alec Nove or Romer or other people on the other side of that debate. Um, it's very easy to just recite that old Marx line about writing uh recipes for cookshops of the future. But I think it fundamentally that approach is unaware of the fact that we're living in such a time of defeat that so many people just don't think that another world is technically possible. So it used to be that we used to think that another world was technically possible, it just wasn't politically possible. And obviously the model, and it turned out to be a pretty bad model in many ways, that a lot of people on the left had for decades was something closer to the central planning of the Soviet model, or maybe if they were in Latin America, they would look to Cuba, or they would, you know, some people on the left look to Yugoslavia or any sort of more idiosyncratic model to look to. Social Democrats look to Sweden as that model was developing in the 60s or 70s. But at the very least, there was this thinking that we kind of know what to do. Maybe we'll have to tweak it to our national context, but we um really don't have the political power to get there. So now we need to focus on building a political power. But today, in 2025, so many people are just confused about what a different world could look like. And at best, a lot of people say, okay, I'll just hope that we get Medicare for all by the time we we die. And listen, like I'm all for Medicare for All, I'm all for defending the welfare state. But if we're going to be socialists, if we're gonna be radicals in the uh 21st century, we need to have higher aspirations than that. And and that that really, I think, was part of the purpose of at least um my work advocating for us debating and talking about visions of socialism after capitalism, because I don't want to be stuck just um fighting for um little doses of socialism within capitalism.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, and I I got that message when I read your work, and I recently read the book, uh The Socialist Manifesto, but I was left wondering a bit about one overarching question in particular. And then coincidentally, literally, thinking about that, I got an ad, you know, an email, uh, for, and I chose to read Rick Wolfe's new book on socialism titled Understanding Socialism. And I finished that. And I still have the question, though Wolf tried to very explicitly answer it. The question is, what is socialism? So now I wonder if I can ask you what you think of how Wolf designs socialism, which is, he writes, at the outset of the book, and then also at the outset of a section that's called Literally, What is Socialism? He writes, quote, socialism is a yearning by people living in a capitalist economic system, whether private or state capitalist, to do better than what that capitalism permits and enables. So I wonder, what do you think of that as a definition? Does that suffice uh to fulfill the kind of uh desire that you just expressed?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean, I kind of don't buy the traditional or use the traditional Marxist understanding of capitalism is a fetter on production, and therefore that's one reason, major reason why we need socialism. I think we need to ensure that a socialism can roughly provide at least the standard of living that people expect and are used to under capitalism, but in a obviously in a ecologically sustainable um manner. But fundamentally, the goal of a socialism is to do two things. One, it's to make sure that basic needs for people are guaranteed. And we do that by decommodifying certain sectors of the economy and making sure they're provided as social rights. And two, the goal of a socialism, I think, is to, for both practical and normative reasons, to overcome private ownership, to imagine a world in which workers control production, in which a democratic, responsive state controls the means of production, in which both we're providing people with not just exit in the workplace. So obviously under capitalism, you're free to leave your job, but you're also, you know, probably going to miserate yourself if you do that economically. But um, not just exit, but also have voice. And true voice to me means having a democratic say as producers in in production. And the practical reason why we need to get rid of capitalism is, of course, because uh the threat of capital strike is always used to undermine even modest social democratic advances into the rule of capital. So I think it's important to kind of have both understandings of we're going to guarantee basic um needs, but we're also going to uh get rid of um the hierarchies and the inequities of power that um that plague production today.
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Powell The response says to me that you don't think that yearning for something better is sufficient. You want, in addition to that, some uh specification, I guess, of what it is that people are yearning for, and you're saying one element is no more private ownership, uh uh people having a say, and so on. Is that enough? So, in other words, I guess put differently, is socialism just a label for nice outcomes we can list, or is it a label for a particular system, a particular economic system, or perhaps for a particular broader social system able to deliver such outcomes? And so if it's a label for the system, then we have to ask, or it seems to me, what are the core defining features of that economic or social system? And along with what you said at the outset, if it's the case that people are skeptical of any alternative, is it sufficient to tell them or to say, to offer, well, these are the nice things that an alternative could deliver, but not answer the question, well, what is the alternative? What is the different system that could deliver that? Because that's what I'm skeptical of.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think we definitely need to lay out a kind of clear, at the very least, schematic sort of account of the core features of an alternative. And I think at the very least, that creates a conversation. It creates a conversation among socialists, but also among the wider public about what people want in a society that's different than what capitalism is delivering. What are the practical constraints on how we can imagine how radical we could go in an egalitarian direction? So, in other words, let's talk about every single bit of inequality uh that we have in society and what's justifiable and what's not justifiable. Uh, let's talk about every bit of hierarchy and what's justifiable and how hierarchy becomes justifiable. Like what sort of democratic checks do we need on hierarchy to make it um justifiable? And I think that process itself is radical political practice in addition to just theorizing. And, you know, I think that's something that your work has done quite quite well because people engage with it and they think about okay, how does our system function? How does this proposed alternative function? What maybe, you know, where we differ or disagree or whatever else. Uh I think in itself that's that's a form of political practice. So, right now, for example, um in New York City, Zoramamdani, um, you know, someone that that I've known off and on for a while, um, a very committed socialist, a very committed egalitarian, he's coming into power with an agenda that's mostly built around uh welfare state protections and expansions, which is great. You know, I think he wants to make people's lives better. He calls it kind of the affordability agenda. But what would it mean now to use this opportunity to also talk about, let's talk about neighborhood assemblies, let's talk about radical forms of democracy, let's talk about forms of municipal level socialization and what it would mean like for the city government to support the creation of worker cooperatives and things like that. Again, not necessarily radical in the sense of challenging um uh you know capitalism as at the broad systemic level, but it at least starts us in that road of distinguishing between progressive governance and what a particularly socialist or transitional form of governance would look like. And I think that applies at at many level too.
SPEAKER_00:So that suggests, I think, insofar as say you get City Hall or whatever else, how do you judge, how do you gauge whether or not something is in fact opening the road to or on the road to uh something that's that's alternative, that's different, something that we'll call, say, socialism. In a sense, it sounds to me a little bit like the old phrase about plant the seeds of the future in the present. So Mam Dani can pass some policies, he can do some things, and they can either be leading toward and educating about and arousing desires for this new thing, even as they're ameliorating pain in the present, or they could be doing things about the present that go nowhere. We've seen that often enough. They may meet some needs in the present, but they don't lead anywhere. I don't see how, and I wonder if what your take would be on this, I don't see how we can sort of do that compellingly and sensibly unless we have a picture of at least a subset of essential features of the thing we're trying to get to. Otherwise, it's it's so vague that it isn't obvious what it means, right?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, no, I I I think you're you're absolutely right as far as the vision of socialism, the vision as a post-capitalist system. I do think that that sometimes the concept of uh the gores brings up up non-reformist reforms could mean that something like even a predistributional demand, like the minimum wage going up or a full employment program that tightens the labor market, could still open the way to more radical reforms. But again, I think it's a job of socialist leadership to bring up questions of power and control, not just questions of distribution. Though they're both important in a moral and ethical sense, I think what's really lacking in general, if you hear people like, let's say AOC and other people that I support politically, I think are great. But a lot of the, I don't mean this derisively, the way a right-winger would say this word, but a lot of it's kind of welfarism. Like we want, here's a list of 10 things we want to give to people, or we want to subsidize their demand so they could access childcare and they can afford health care. And and God knows people need all those things. But I think it is a little bit different than what as socialists we should be um you know in injecting, which is um, you know, I think what would um a system of social ownership without central command look like? Uh what would it mean like to have a society with democratic uh firms? Uh let's talk about you know forms of socialized investment and things like that. And again, these are going to be minoritarian views today. These are concepts that are foreign to a lot of Americans. We can debate whether there's certain reforms we can make in the short term that will make them less less foreign. Um I think, for instance, in countries where you have experience of lots of unionization and forms of codetermination and co-management, even though those are often trapped in very corporatist forms that aren't that radical, maybe you could say that that at least gets people used to unions and workers collectively having a certain say over production that might get them used to these um these ideas. But I think that is kind of the distinct role of socialists and the dividing line between uh socialists and other radicals, whether you're from anarchist traditions or others, and um ordinary progressives. And I think it's a dividing line that's that's productive and useful because it doesn't mean we oppose anything the progressives are doing, but we're actually just adding an addendum. We're saying actually you should think about these issues too. And actually, if you are an egalitarian and you do believe in democracy and you're trying to defend the political democracy we have now from Trump, uh, what do you also think about these ideas about democracy in the workplace? Or what do you also think about even more radical forms of political democracy? Let's have a debate or discussion about sortition, for example. Like let's have these um, you know, I think um horizon expanding debates in um in civil society. Um and I think uh I'm very excited by this, by this moment, by actually having politicians that are on the left. But uh so at the same time, I don't want to um attack kind of the new social democracy, however you you want to describe it. But um I do think it's very important that we draw productive distinctions um as we continue to keep alive, I think, the idea of uh a society after capitalism.
SPEAKER_00:Let me give a concrete example and see where we how we go on that. Imagine um you're pursuing a higher minimum wage, or you're pursuing uh you're pursuing an increased wage for a set of people in your workplace or on a college campus, whatever it might be. What does it mean? What's the difference between a student on that campus who wants to help, or a worker in that workplace who wants to help, and they're talking about the need to get$15 an hour, whatever it might be,$20,$30 an hour, whatever it might be, and a socialist? Would it be, or to me it makes sense that it might be, that at the same time that the socialist activist is pursuing the same demand and being as solidaristic as one can be, the socialist is also talking about, well, okay, but what should remuneration be? What should the difference between, if there is one, different people's incomes be inside what should income be pegged to? What is the right way to do income? In which case you have to say something about what the right way to do income is. Does that make sense?
SPEAKER_01:That makes sense. I would say that I think it's necessary for us to engage with existing struggle, struggles on their own terms. So, in other words, you know, I know I know you would practice, you know, agree with this too, but but let's say, you know, just for the sake of the the listeners, let's say you're engaging in a campaign to raise the minimum wage, you know, our activity as radicals should be we're supporting this campaign to raise the minimum wage. I think sometimes that the next conversation happens after because fundamentally in that moment, we're using that sort of minimum demand in order to increase polarization between uh obviously deliver the thing itself to help people, but also increase polarization between the interests of workers and the interests of capitalists and explain in which the ways in which they differ, right? Um and and I I think some of these wider questions make sense to kind of uh put off till later as we're just highlighting the polarization. Um, though again, that that being said, um uh I you know I think it is important to also get to these kind of wider, wider issues too. Um I obviously our our own um you know idea, I think, of what a post-capitalist society should look like um is is a little bit um different. You know, I'm um closer to the realm of David Switecard and other people that I've known you've engaged with uh over the um the years, though in part I think that debate and conversation that that you've had with David and other people, and you probably have a parallel one with with me, is less about kind of our normative desires and more about practical implic implications and what role the market's uh market needs to needs to play and and and so on.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I uh agreed. Um but take it away from allocation toward one of those other elements of and uh we could talk economics or really anything else, but for example, you're setting up a co-op. So so the the activist group, maybe you're in a factory like it used to be in Argentina, where the capitalist has taken a hike, or maybe it's somebody starting a new operation, and you're setting it up, and you want to talk about decision making, and you want to talk about the relative situation of everybody in the workplace. Is it essential? Well, let me pose I think it's essential and see what you think, um to talk about not only getting rid of the owners, let's say. No longer having your workplace be owned by somebody who is the final authority about everything. Or even one could put it less so, and it happens sometimes in left organizations. It shouldn't be the case that there's somebody who's the fundraiser and who has all the funding contacts and is the final word on everything because of that. Or, and this is more important, I think, that there's some kind of a split between a subset, some workers, some employees, let's call it, some employees who are basically obeying orders, following instructions, uh, doing things that are relatively rote, et cetera, et cetera. And another set of employees who have activities, and probably background, but certainly activities, that give them more confidence, more knowledge about what's going on, more access to the situation of making decisions. And as a result, it's it's divided, and there's tensions, and not addressing them can be a big problem, as we have witnessed, I think, in the mindset of many people in the working class with the emergence of Trump.
SPEAKER_01:I definitely agree that that um, well, first of all, let's let's maybe take this conversation into the realm, into the post-capitalist realm, because it might be easier to talk about it um, you know, there. Um you know, I I think, and obviously I know you would agree to the first part of this, um, the division of labor is is obviously unavoidable in any um complex society. Um, you know, so that the the real question that we're we're discussing, and I'm just saying this for the sake of listeners, isn't whether or not we have a division of labor, but really how it's organized and and governed. So, you know, the specialization in any job exists because people have different skills, interests, capabilities, and complex production depends on accumulated, you know, knowledge, right? But um, you know, we really don't, I'm wary of attempting to abolish the division of labor or going that direction, in part because I don't think it eliminates hierarchies, it just kind of recreates it informally at a at a social cost. But I do agree that the task of uh socialism or post-capitalism is to democratize specialization, right? So um, you know, I I think this is one of the virtues of uh the way, and it's been many years since I've I've read Paracon, but um I think I think that the virtues of bringing it up is to um address the real problem that specialization can harden into something that's like a class um power. I'm not sure whether the solution is balanced job complexes as kind of a core feature of this of the system itself, or whether we just need to be aware of it and kind of um take measures to encourage um job rotations and um you know uh figure out ways in which allowing people to develop masteries in different different uh you know um fields. Like I'm I'm not sure how we address the the problem. I kind of uh uh for me it's less of a system level thing that we need to address and more of something that should be addressed at a level of of policy and should be discussed in any post-capital society as a potential um problem. So, in other words, if you're if you have wage compression, if you have worker governance, if you have public control of investment as the system level thing, maybe then we can leave some of these debates and discussions of specialization and um and you know to the level of policy uh once we see how how kind of the complex post-capital society actually functions in um um in practice.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. Let me come back. I don't want to debate these things because uh I don't feel good inviting somebody on and then debating with them. I don't know whether that's uh just idiosyncratic to me, but I don't feel good. But so let me go back. Let me let me take it in another direction for a minute, more strategic. How do you explain, or to you, what does it mean that there is a significant portion of working people, working class people, who supported and even still support Trump? How do you understand that in light of the of the need of the socialism, whatever precisely it is that we want, um, obviously it's going to only come about if working people uh wind up, become advocates of it, essentially uh uh activists in its creation. How can that be? For me, at my age, the way I run into this question is I honestly say to myself, how can it be that we've done what we've done for the last 50 years and this guy wins the election? How is that possible? How is it possible for a working person who, if you sit down and talk with them, you like them? I'm not talking about somebody who's down a rabbit hole of, you know, fascist racism. I'm talking about normal people in rural areas who voted for Trump. What's going on there, do you think?
SPEAKER_01:Or even working class minorities in urban areas that swung, you know, still voted in the majority for Democrats, but swung in the direction of Trump. I think first we should acknowledge and that there's certain preferences that people have based on, let's say, their social views or something like that. There is a segment of the working class that is more socially conservative and does have particular views in which they they differ than you and I. And some of them, um, that issue is is very salient. You know, there's a if you're a working class person, you think that the number one issue is um abortion rights in your pro-life, um, you know, to use the language, um, and you think uh Trump's a bad immoral guy, but he's gonna appoint the right judges, therefore I'm gonna vote for Trump. That's something that we just need to acknowledge as a segment of the of the people.
SPEAKER_00:I'll go even further. Let me it's not dumb. That is to say, if that's your biggest issue, or for that matter, uh whatever it is, guns, you know, personal control over guns. Some issue like that rings to you very, very important. And you look at an election and you ask yourself, what vocal formulation by a candidate is likely to be implemented? One's about peace, one's about equity, one's about income, or one's about guns and abortion. It can very sensibly feel like: look, the only thing that I might be able to impact is abortion and guns, and so I'm going to vote for the person who has the view I want. So it's not even irrational. I mean, it's it's a it can be a sort of a strategic calculated choice by somebody who has those views. Okay, I agree. That's one and part of the explanation, but I don't think it's all of it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think that that fundamentally there is an issue at the level of class consciousness that's rooted mostly in our organizing failures, right? Our inability to have, let's say, a party or a movement that very clearly represents working class interests, and being able to identify the Republican Party as representing the interests of capitalists. And I think that that is not something that I say, oh, this is a problem with individual workers. I'm not suggesting some sort of false consciousness as the um kind of main problem here. Um but um I do think it's an organizing um uh problem that's rooted in decades of mistakes um that the left has made, decades of political defeat, and now it's kind of become obscure. We've seen a dealignment of your position in the world and what party you're voting for. We used to be able to take for granted that at least 60% of people who were poor working class would vote for a party that advocates for redistributing some wealth and power. So if you have less six majority of time, you're gonna vote for a party that's gonna redistribute. I think you're seeing that um collapse and parties of the center left and left losing their working class support. And now it's it's becoming purely where do you stand on this as kind of an abstract um moral idea. So if you're a college-educated professional and you have liberal social views, and you um at some sort of empathetic level or practical level, you are kind of more redistributionist, you'll vote for the left. And if you're from that same background, you're gonna vote from the right, it's kind of become this very a la carte politics without the clear class grounding. And I think that's one of our central practical challenges right now is to rebuild that association of uh movements of the left with the interests of workers, not because we're gonna win over 100% of them, but because we should be winning over 60 to 65% of them. Um that should at least be the default. And then if you have some particular social view or some particular interest or some idiosyncratic uh view that might lead you to the to the right, like that's that's that 30, 35%, you know, I was I was um you know talking talking about. But in in the US, with with you know, I I think it's really a failure of the Democratic Party and a failure of the left to not um you know draw this sort of clear distinction to say, you know, we actually represent the interests of working class people in an objective sense. Interests not in kind of this vaguely articulated thing, but actually you're a member of a class and you actually have certain interests based on your material position. Uh, I think that's becoming lost in a lot of our politics, including our politics on the on the left, when we make it purely a moral um thing or we get we get bogged down and culture wars.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. And again, I, you know, I certainly think all of that is part of what's going on. We agree. But let me pose an additional possibility and and see what you think of it, which is you've got large numbers of working people, employees voting for Trump, a billionaire who transparently is not anything to do with. You don't need a a big distinction to see that dis difference, and yet they vote for him. What if part of this has to do with and maybe a large part has to do with the way working people view candidates? Whether they see someone who they trust or who they think may have their interests at heart, or they don't trust and simply don't believe have their interests at heart. And what if the the latter camp includes most democratic politicians, not all of them, not Sanders, and we'd have to figure out why, but not Sanders, but most, and certainly say Clinton or Kamala Harris and and so on. And for some reason, the antipathy that some feel or employees, workers feel toward Trump gets outweighed by some other attribute of Trump. What if the attribute that we're talking about here is class consciousness, but a different class consciousness. So instead of the class consciousness that poses the owner as the problem, the class consciousness that says, yeah, they're a problem for sure, sure. But you know what? So too are managers, doctors, engineers, these people who think that they're entitled to everything, who have a different language than I do, who have different style than I do, who have different tastes than I do, and who call me what was the famous line from Clinton? A basket deplorable, etc. Right. What if that impedes even hearing your attempt to make the case vis-a-vis owners? Right? Because because that's what registers most powerfully to them.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I think it's important that we ground ourselves um socially and culturally in the working class. And I'm not saying that we should adopt socially conservative views on everything, but for example, if a huge portion of um, I'll I'll give you an example. My um my godmother is um a uh Jamaican nurse. She's always voted for the Michael Manley's party when she was in Jamaica, so definitely vaguely of the left, but not very political. I couldn't bring her by herself. You know, I would go with her. If if I'd if I just encourage her to go to this DSA meeting, she'd be very confused because she's in her 60s at this point. The average age in the DSA meeting is maybe 30. I I'm not positive it would be the environment to introduce even a vaguely ideologically sympathetic Democrat voting working class person to the left. So, how do we create environments that are actually inclusive of all sorts of workers, not just, let's say, white-collar workers, um, but but but manual workers, blue collar workers. Um how like, you know, you know, I I think that's a real um challenge. Then again, just saying we're going to What makes it a challenge?
SPEAKER_00:What's the obstacle? Well, I think what is it about, you know, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:I think the obstacle is that on the left, to the extent we have a working class base, it is white-collar, working class people who are college educated and who come from a certain social and cultural milieu. Therefore, there is that kind of polarization that is real. And even though it's not the, to use the old language, the primary contradiction between labor and capital, it is, it is a um, there, there is a gap. And I think we need to solve that gap through um, you know, lots of organizing, um, through, you know, creating an environment that allows for um for difference, that doesn't turn people away because they don't have all their quote unquote right um social and cultural views. Um and I think that's a honestly a project that requires finding class-rooted, organic intellectuals, putting them in positions of leadership and power. You know, ultimately it's something that might take a different organization than the Democratic Socialists of America. It might take different sorts of articulation, it might take a certain left populist movement to be the first spark to really get these people engaged in their politics. I'll give you one example. Uh, Dan Osborne, who's who's um organized, who's uh running for Senate out in Nebraska, one of his most popular issues uh with working class people is right to repair. This idea that there shouldn't be anything proprietary in like a John Deere or kind of any products like this, and it shouldn't void the warranty if you repair it at a non-specified dealer, if you kind of repair it yourself or you bring it to some independent contractor. Perfectly reasonable, class focused, you know, demand, but one that is totally alien to my life in New York City as a renter. It doesn't mean that that anyone in New York City is is is is less um, you know, their their life as a working class person is less valid because they don't have this concern. But it does mean that like unless we're actually in rural and semi-rural areas, we might not even know what demands are kind of the um demands that are gonna win people over unless we we kind of are um entrenched in those um in those areas. So there's no quick fix, but I think it requires a certain level of open openness and flexibility. When it comes to faith, for example, I think we need to accept that if we want to be a more rooted movement, we are going to have people in our movement that have more socially conservative views. And that's perfectly compatible. If you think about um uh black Americans in the Democratic Party, black Americans are the most reliable votes for social democratic redistributionist measures in the country. And they're also more conservative on a lot of social issues as a whole than uh a lot of members, other members of the Democratic Party coalition. So it is it is doable. You you you you you you you can reconcile the the two.
SPEAKER_00:I don't disagree again, but you're talking about those things called social issues, uh just as a way of talking. So race, gender, uh various kinds of issues, abortion, and so on. I'm talking about regarding class, there's a serious problem. And the serious problem or obstacle could be, for example, if your organization feels like a graduate school more than it feels like a working class pub, and I'm not sure which of those two things is more conducive to intellectual stimulation, etc. So it's not a matter of that. It's a matter of well, let me give you a story. I was teaching in in prison, and I had a class, and I because it was uh I don't know why, but they let me do whatever I wanted. So I taught a course that was on uh, you know, modern American blah, blah, and I would talk about capitalism and all the rest of it. When I would talk about owners and capitalists, the room was quite passive, right? It wasn't very excited, it wasn't very involved. I had to pull to get people. It wasn't that they disagreed, it just didn't catch them. Then I would talk about managers, engineers, doctors, and the room would go ballistic. And it would people would talk about walking down the street and knowing what you're whether you were uh I call it coordinator class, professional, whatever you want to call it, knowing whether that's who you were coming toward the worker coming in the other way, because the professional expected the working class person to to go around. They would talk about things like that. It sounded a lot like in many respects race and gender discussions. And for them, that difference, why was it more animated? It's because they knew them, they encountered them, they experienced it directly, you know, the arrogance and the dismissiveness. And none of them had ever not only hadn't they met a capitalist, they hadn't even been anywhere near where a capitalist lives. They had no experience of any of that. And I'm wondering whether that kind of dynamic I don't know whether you're old enough to remember Spyro Agnew, he appealed to it also, like Trump. I think Trump very effectively appealed to it, isn't a big problem. You know, for For anybody who wants to have working class employees, meaning the employees who are not empowered on the side of a movement.
SPEAKER_01:Well, this gets to the fact that why are, let's say, Democrats as a whole or center-left parties around the world that are that are more to the left, like the European Social Democratic parties or the left, why are we even associated with that professional stratum in people's minds? And I think that is an organizing problem. As far as I think you're right to think about this middle strata. I think too many people, especially those with Marxist backgrounds, tend to just think of it as something that's going to disappear. The history of the development of capitalism is that this middle strata is not disappearing. And you can't just kind of theorize away the middle class. And that's consequential in an organizing fashion. There's plenty of people who have supervisory control but not ownership. Whereas to be a capitalist, you need both control and ownership. But if you have control but not ownership, doesn't that inherently put you in a kind of a different position vis-a-vis working class people that have neither control nor ownership? And I think it is useful to think about that. But fundamentally, I think our organizing challenge is still to um associate us primarily with um working class people who have neither ownership nor control, than if people of good conscience who are professionals or even capitalists, people of good conscience want to, on ideological grounds, support our cause all the better. But it is still kind of going back to what I said, is still ultimately an organizing problem to get to the point where one can make that association. And I think it does require some confrontation with the Democratic Party and kind of the loosening of the association of, oh, you're on the left, you must be a Democrat. And I hate, you know, these sorts of Democrats. Um and that uh I think, first of all, requires an independent political profile. So say what you want about Zora Mamdani. Zoramamdani was not seen or is is not seen now by most New Yorkers as a Democrat, and that that he's seen as kind of his own third thing. Um and I think that's very useful.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah, same thing for Sanders. Or I I think it's probably the same for Sanders anyway. Earlier, when we were talking about the need for the vision or the need to uh have answers to questions, et cetera, part of the reason was to orient what we're doing so that it's leading in the direction that we want to go, so that it's modeling the direction that we want to go, et cetera, et cetera. You founded Jacobin. Yeah. And you're now the president of the nation, although honestly, I gotta admit I don't know exactly what that means. Um and I wonder whether and you're a socialist. I wonder what the difference would be. What the difference is, and I really have no idea I'm asking this, um, between you in those positions as a socialist and somebody else in those positions as let's say, you know, uh an extremely well-meaning and um and humane advocate of various kinds of policies. Is there is there a difference now, today, in that kind of does it does it mean something for what you do in those roles?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think that fundamentally if you're a socialist, even if you're engaged in broader um day-to-day reform struggles, you're probably going to enter those those conversations with some sort of class analysis, right? You're going to enter it with some sort of idea of um fundamentally, even though workers and capitalists are dependent on each other, it's an asymmetrical dependency. Um, you know, workers need capitalists as individuals more than capitalists need workers as individuals. And that leads you, if you want to balance the odds a bit, towards needing to organize collectively and thinking about the interests as being separate. Um I think that that fundamentally um requires a socialist analysis, being able to say that our goal isn't some sort of corporatist uh class compromise where there's a fair profit being earned and a fair wage being earned and a fair level of taxation. I think so much of uh progressivism is fundamentally aiming to reconcile uh class conflict through this sort of corporatist compromise, whereas the goal of socialist politics in my mind is to win class conflict and to create a uh a sort of world where those contradictions don't exist at all. And I have no doubt that as long as there's a system as um unequal of capitalism, you're going to have a resistance to it. And to me, long term, um there's going to be no um way to solve this kind of problem without a post-capitalist system. And and what I sometimes have doubts about is whether I'll see it in my lifetime, but I don't have doubts about whether or not in the long run, if there is going to be a humanity or society at all, yeah, I have no doubt that we're gonna be living in some form of uh of socialism um before before long. Uh the question is obviously in my mind whether it'll be a good form or or a bad form. But Michael, I actually need to uh uh uh head out to this nation meeting um in a in a in a few. I I I delayed them 10 minutes, but uh I didn't wrap up about two minutes.
SPEAKER_00:Do you want me to close it out or what do you want me to do? Yeah, that'd be great. All right. Well, first of all, thank you for doing this. Thank you for being on, and it's a pleasure to meet you. But I I believe we haven't met before, and it's a pleasure, and uh uh I appreciate it. And that said, uh I guess uh this is Mike Albert signing off until next time for Revolution Z.