#349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism - Transcripts

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 in an era of extreme inequality. As a side note, let me say that this conversation with Bhaskar Sankara, who's a brilliant socialist writer and philosopher, represents what I hope to do with this podcast. I hope to talk to the left and the right, to the far left and the far right, always with a 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.

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

that are at the core of this? I think at the core, it's the idea that we have intrinsic value. We are individuals that have unequal talents, of course. We're individuals that want different things, but this unique individualness can only truly come to light in a society in which there are certain collective or social guarantees. So we could think just like Stephen Jay Gould, the scientist and socialist used to say about how many thousands of potential Einsteins 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 in part what was special and important to them, to future generations and to posterity. My own grandmother, I was born in Trinidad and Tobago. She was illiterate till her dying days. She been 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. 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 it would reward people who make innovations and who would improve lives for everyone for 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 gonna 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 a maybe a reallocation of wealth,

reallocation of resources? I think it's wealth and resources, yes, but it's also power. And I guess one way to think about this is some thinkers on the right like Hayek, they would say in their most generous moments talking about socialists and socialism, they would say socialists 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 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 abridgement of your freedom as an entrepreneur, your freedom to set certain terms of employment, to engage in a contract with free people.

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. So 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 is both malicious people that want to take advantage? Maybe not malicious, but people that like me are lazy and want to take advantage.

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 have the rise of this authoritarian bureaucracy that dominate and coerce others in the name of socialism. How 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 priority, 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.

change the lives of 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 thing, I'm going to have to work on that. I didn't realize that's also including leisure because I'm going to have to reconsider my whole life here.

Anyway, I'm going to have to include leisure because I'm going to have to, anyway. No, leisure should mean civic activity too, right? I mean, there's that famous book, the Robert Putnam one, Bowling Alone or whatever, would describe it for now. I mean, I was born in 1989, I like video and computer games, you know? So I definitely do that type of leisure too, but I found a lot more richness in my life when in the last decade, a lot of my leisure has returned to going to the local bar for the couple drinks I have a week instead of doing it at home alone, watching TV or something, because you get that random conversation, that sense of a place and belonging. But I guess what's the undercurrent maybe of your question was, now, if you have a system with lots of carrots, but not the whip of, hey, you might be destitute, you might be unemployed, you might not be able to support yourself unless you're working a certain amount, would we still be as productive? Would we still be able to generate enough value for society? And I think that that's a question that is quite interesting. I think that we're living in a society now with enough abundance that we could afford more people deciding to opt out of the system, out of production, and that the carrots of staying in, you know, more money for consumption, more ability to do cool things, more just social rewards that comes from being successful or from providing would be enough. But that's another thing that would have to be balanced in a system. So if 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.

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, so 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. So that's the motivator 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 Lyft, I did tip, but I think my Lyft was like eight bucks space or whatever else. I think that we are all indebted to people who are working, and we don't see it at various stages of the production process from the workers in China and Taiwan producing technological things that we're recording this on to growers and workers 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 a ready 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 and innately striving that a lot of people have, but we don't really give people in our current society the tools to really be full participants in our society. We just take for granted, for example, and I'm from the Northeast, so I give like excessively Northeast example, we take for granted that someone from Hartford, Connecticut is going to have, your average working class person in Hartford is going to have a very different life outcome than someone born on the same day, the same hour in Greenwich, Connecticut. We take for granted that accidents of birth are going to dictate outcomes.

So you mean like, depending on the conditions of where you 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, of course. Yes, if you do a poor city in a rich city and Connecticut is great. It's highly, highly underrated. Both New Yorkers and people from Boston kind of have a colonial feeling about Connecticut where we make fun of it and we try to carve it up. The West belongs to New York, the East to Boston, but I'm here for Connecticut nationalism. I think it's a great place.

Okay. Can we actually step back a little bit on definitions because you said that some of the ideas practically that you're playing with is democratic socialism. We talked about the higher level, the higher kind of vision of socialism, the ideals, 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-truth 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. They 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 Tarkic. 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 in 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 before one came, the workers movement was split between parties that decided to either keep their head down or to implicitly support the war and support the war for now or keep your heads down, don't get banned, don't get arrested, and then we'll just take power after the war is over.

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 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, 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 the Czar 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 the old Russian Empire as possible. We'll try to slowly implement changes, re-stabilize the economy through something called the 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 that's something we should, you know, talk about. And that's a really complicated human question. It does seem that the rhetoric, the populism of workers unite. We've been fucked over for way too long. Let's stand together. Somehow that message allows flawed or evil people to take power. It seems like the rhetoric, the idea is so good, maybe the utopian nature of the idea is so good that it allows a great speaker to take power. It's almost like if the mission, like come with me friends, beyond the horizon, a great land is waiting for us, that encourages sort of, yeah, dictators, authoritarians to take power. Is there something within the ideology that allows for that, for the sort of, for lying to people, essentially?

Well, I might surprise you with my answer because I would say, yes, maybe. But I think that it's not just socialism, any sort of ideology that appeals to the collective and appeals to our long-term destiny, either as a species or as a nation or as a class or whatever else, can lend itself to authoritarianism. So you can see this in many of the nationalisms of the 20th century. Now some of these nationalisms use incredibly lofty collective rhetoric, like in Sweden, the rhetoric of we're going to create the people's home. We're going to make this a country with dignity for all Swedes. We're going to make this a country that's more developed, more free, and so on. And they managed to build a pretty excellent society in my estimation from that. In countries like fascist Germany and Italy, they managed to do horrendous things in Japan and horrendous things with that. In the US, with national popular appeals, FDR was able to unite a nation to elevate ordinary working class people into a position where they felt like they had a real stake in the country, and I think did great things with the New Deal. In Russia, of course, this language was used to trample upon individual rights and to justify hardship and abuses of ordinary individual people in the name of a collective destiny. A destiny, of course, was just decided by the party in power and during the 30s and 40s by just Stalin himself, really. Now I think that that's really the case for making sure that we have a bedrock of civil rights and democracy, and then on top of that, we could debate.

don't take away what's fundamentally ours, which is our life, which is our basic rights. And voice, our voice. So this complicated picture, because, help me understand, you mentioned that social democracy is trying to have social policies within a capitalist system in part, but your vision, your hope for a social democracy is one that goes beyond that. How do you give everybody a voice while not becoming the Soviet Union, while not becoming where basically people are silenced either directly through violence or through the implied

threat of violence and therefore fear? So I think you need to limit the scope of where the state is and what the state can do and how the state functions, first of all. Now for me, social democracy was like the equivalent of, I'll give a football analogy, it was the equivalent of getting to the red zone and then kicking a field goal. You'll take the three points, but you would have rather got a touchdown, and for me, socialism would be the touchdown.

It's not a separate, different playing field.

Some people would say socialism would be an interception. Sure, 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 safer route, right? So you're going against the decision. Anyway, I'll just take it too far. But I understand, I understand.

So for you, the goal is full socialism. But I'll take the three points. It's part of, 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 early 70s, listen, I was fine with this arrangement 10 years ago, but now I feel like I'm going to, you know, take my money and I'm going to go move to a different country or I'm just going to not invest because my workers are paid too much. I'm still making money, but I feel like I could be making more. I need more of an upper hand, right? So their economic power is then challenging the democratic mandate of Swedish workers that were voting for the Social Democratic Party and were behind this, this advance. So to me, what socialism is in part is taking the means of production, right, where this capitalist power is coming from and making it socially owned so that ordinary workers can control their workplaces, can make investment decisions and so on. Now does that mean total state ownership of everything or a planned economy?

So there is a tricky thing here. So in Ukraine especially, but in the Soviet Union, there's the Kulex. The possible trajectory of fighting for the beautiful message of respecting workers' rights has this dynamic of making an enemy of the capitalist class too easily making an enemy of the capitalist class with a central leader, populist leader, that says the rich and the powerful, they're taking advantage of you. We need to remove them, we need to put them in camps perhaps, not said explicitly until it happens, it can happen overnight. But just putting a giant pressure on that capitalist class and again, the Stalin type figure takes hold. 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 gonna say too much, maybe not enough, but a lot about books like Stalin's War in 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 implementations. So I just wanna 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 socialist movement. So the battle in Sweden, for instance, was about establishing political democracy, establishing troop 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, add layers of economic democracy, social democracy. The Swedish social democrats ruled basically uninterrupted from the early 1930s until 1976. Kind of crazy to think about, but they were just in government, they were the leading member of government that a few different coalition partners would shift. Sometimes they were with the agrarian, sometimes they were with the communists briefly, but they ruled uninterrupted and they lost an election in 1976 and they just left power. Then they got back into power in the eighties. So, so in other words, I, they created a democratic system, of course, with mass import of working class people.

You mean the capitalist class and the working class just to clarify?

Yeah, okay. Yeah. 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 a supporter or oppose it, 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 basis to help workers take collective action to help them organize and political parties and so on to represent their interests, economic and otherwise. But the contradiction exists to begin with. And if anything, this system, which I'm proposing, democratic socialism, would be kind of a resolution of this conflict, this dilemma, this thing that has always existed since chieftain and follower and so on. We've had class divisions 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 steel man the case that this class difference is over-exaggerated? That there's a difference, but it's not the difference of the abuser and the abused.

It's more of a difference of people that were successful and people that were less successful. So I'll play devil's advocate, which is saying that maybe one could argue that in its purest earliest stage, capitalism was based on a stark difference. But then since then, two things have happened. One, a bunch of socialists and workers have organized to guarantee certain rights for working class people, certain protections. So in our system now, there are certain safety nets, less in the US than in other countries,

but in a lot of countries are pretty extensive safety nets.

Something like 40 hour workweek, minimum wage, safety regulations, all that kind of stuff. And all those things are, in my mind, doses of socialism within capitalism. Because what you're doing is you are taking the autonomy of capitalists to do whatever they want with 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 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. But 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 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.

capitalists. So there's a lot of things to say, maybe within just a very low-level question of, if the workers are running the show, there's a brutal truth to the fact that some people are better and the workers know this. It's the Steve Jobs, A-players, you want to have all the A-players in the room, because one B-player can poison the pool, because then everybody gets demotivated by the nature of that lack of excellence and competence. This is just to take sort of a crude devil's advocate perspective. Are the workers going to be able to remove the incompetent from the pool in the name,

in the goal towards the mission of succeeding as a collective? So I think that any successful model of socialism that involves the market, you need two things. One is at the micro level, you need the ability to fire people and for them to exit firms, which might be a slower process in cooperative-based firms than it is in a capitalist firm without a union. But we're 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 deposit 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 they could be? But isn't the person that's not doing a great of a job going to start to manipulate the system that slows the firing in their self-interest?

Well, I think there would be certain, so maybe another way to put it is, think about, like, if you're a partner at a law firm, right, I don't really know how law firms work. So I probably shouldn't use this analogy, but correct me if I'm wrong. But let's say you're a partner, you kind of have equity in your law firm or something beyond your billable hours. And let's say you're going to be fired from your law firm or they're laying off people or whatever else. They could just get rid of you, but they would also have to figure out how to kind of buy you out, too, after a certain point. So I think that, like, in a cooperative firm, you'd probably have a system where you, after a certain point of working productively, you probably have a period where you get fired really quickly, no matter what. But once your job security kicks in, you would be able to, you know, it would be a process. It would probably be, like, you know, a day or two process to figure it out. Or maybe they would have a progressive discipline process, which is, first, you have to get a verbal feedback, and then maybe a written performance review, then you could be fired. I mean, that's how it works in a lot of workplaces with either unions or with just basic job security. Most countries, that's how it works, because there's not at-will employment in most countries. So I think that the real tension is if you fire someone, if you're condemning them to destitution, then morally, you'd really feel something there, as you should, as a human being concerned about other people.

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 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 there's a lot of ways you can maybe correct me on the numbers, but you could say that the top 1% of Americans have more wealth than the bottom 50%. That's not talking about, perhaps, capitalist class and the working class, but it's a good sort of estimate, right? The flip side of that, if you just look at countries that have more economic freedom versus less economic freedom, more capitalism versus less capitalism, their GDP seems to be significantly higher. And so at the local level, you might say that there's an inequality, but if you look historically over decades, it seems like the more capitalism there is, the higher the GDP grows, and therefore the level of the quality of life and the basic income, the basic wealth, the average, even including the working class, goes up over time.

Can you see both sides of this? So I could definitely accept some of that premise. One, within capitalism, you want a bigger pie. Then if you divide up that pie, even if the bottom 10% of the working class share, 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 for the state, or you need to bribe someone to get an incorporation done or whatever else, that's in case in which I would accept the premise of, OK, 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 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.

the right way. Could you just link on that a little more, the pattern wage bargaining? So GM is the most efficient, and Ford is the second most. Can you explain to me how, can you explain to me again, the wages, setting the wages

to the Ford level, how that is good for GM, how that encourages more GM or 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 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 there 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? Because the interest of the union, maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong, I have a lot to learn both about the economics and the human experience of a union. The union's interest is to what, to protect worker rights and to maximize worker happiness,

not the success and the productivity and the efficiency of a company, right? No, I would disagree. So I think a union's interest is in what's collectively bargaining on behalf of workers. Because in certain cases, I am right now a manager at The Nation magazine, right? If I have a problem with my working conditions or I need a raise or whatever else, I could with my skill set, 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? You try the Rite 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 Rite Aid, CVS, Walgreens went to our bosses and said, listen, we collectively need $2 more and better hours, 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.

Yeah, but the problem is the way firms go out of business isn't by explosion like 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, 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, 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. 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. That's the Chrysler, my old centralized bargain. 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, the automotive industry is probably a good example of that. It incentivizes cutting costs everywhere and 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. 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 5, 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 5, 10, 20 years. This is just a problem with a lot of capitalism, which is about short-termism, because the same thing could be said from you're starting a company, you have a plan for it to make a lot of money, but your investors want dividends right away, so you have to take away from your long-term R&D or other plans and deliver short-term dividends. That's often why a lot of R&D is often rooted in state institutions and research and whatever else is being drawn on, and also I think that that's a reason why the state has some sort of role in fostering firms in either a, my version of a socialist economy or a capitalist economy or whatever else to help with these time horizon problems. So I won't dispute that workers could play a role or wage demands could play a role in time horizon problems, but more often than that, it's coming from investors, it's coming from just a host of other market pressures that people might have. And I would say that And 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, 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 like 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.

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 socialist society, there would be similar way that unions work and in my example, the centralized bargaining unions would work that bargain at the sectoral level and not just at the enterprise level like our unions do today. There could be benchmarks set for different occupations or wages. And the reason why you would want a benchmark at a worker controlled firm is that you don't want workers self-exploiting themselves in order to gobble up market share 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 an Italian, but not this guy's firm because he's Albanian or whatever else.

like what can we do right away within our lifetime vision? So that means through some level of central planning,

reallocating resources to the workers. So I think the primary mechanism in this private sector under socialism would be a market mechanism, firms competing against each other to expand, connected to a system of public financing. But even at that level, the individual bankers and public banks and so on would be operating based on their own rationality and the state would certainly shape investment decisions, but maybe no more than they do in a lot of capitalist systems. So the state might already today in a lot of countries decide, we want to invest in green technology, so it's gonna 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, 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 services, 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 is a huge amount of corruption in Mexico, but it's not like you haven't seen this corruption. You understand when the cop pulls you over, you give this much money and so on. And so that kind of seems to happen in certain systems and it seems to have happened in socialist systems more than in capitalist systems in the 20th century.

Or maybe I'm wrong on that. No, I mean, I think in a lot of countries it's seen as the cost of doing business, right? Now, in particular countries built on a system of central planning or just state allocation resources with the state, both produces and allocates and things run through bureaucracies, then I think you're much more apt to have corruption than in a system with just a smaller sphere for the state. So for example, if you're in a hypothetical version of the US, you might see a lot more corruption like the post office, but you wouldn't have that corruption in your workplace. So you kind of learn to go around that. For one thing, even in state sectors, you can have, and this often is the case in democratic countries, you have a transparent civil service where people who are corrupt are prosecuted by judges where it's frowned upon and it just over time, it goes away. So you go from having political machines that were tied to certain, had friends at certain police precincts and whatever else in the US in the 19th century and an early 20th century to now today that would be a huge scandal and unheard of. 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, people going from peasants to supreme leaders of countries just through getting hooked up in the bureaucracy and advancing within it. And not all of these were bad people.

in such a way that it's not rational to behave poorly. In sort of from a theoretical perspective, either a socialist or capitalist system can have either culture. But it seems like if you prioritize meritocracy, if the people that are good, whatever the good means in terms of integrity, in terms of performance, in terms of competence, it seems like that leads to a less corrupt system. And it seems like capitalism, there's all kinds of flavors of capitalism, But capitalism, because it does prioritize meritocracy, more often leads to less corruption. So that's not a question of political or economic systems. It's a question of what kind of stuff do you talk about

that leads to a culture of less corruption? First of all, I think in theory, maybe capitalism burns 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, you know, working class people working in the food service industry or whatever else, right? I think we don't have, in practice, I don't think we actually live in a society that rewards people for hard work. I think we reward people for a combination of accidents of birth plus hard work.

So not, yeah. Let me push back because yes, so I agree with you, but let me push back on a subtle point because I like to draw a difference between hard work and meritocracy because as a person who works really hard, like 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 kind of draw that distinction, but I agree with you. I don't think our society rewards directly hard work or even high skilled. There's many examples at least we can see

that it does not do so. So we have an unequal distribution of talent, of course. So if we lived in a society in which there was some level of acceptable inequality and it's a normative kind of the question of how much we would say is 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, K through 12, out of those people, there will be some that work extra hard and go on to do incredible things or are very successful. And there'll be other people that do not, right? And decide for whatever reason or go down a different path. And you could say maybe among that group of the upper middle class, there is a meritocracy, right? But they're actually given those opportunities to make their own decisions and to fail. Whereas many, many other people, the vast majority of American society, I would say 60 plus percent, don't really get those opportunities to make those choices to begin with. And I would aspire to the type of world at least as a first step in which our only inequalities are based on 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 gonna be more altruistic or whatever else. Even on purely bourgeois terms, the same way you would maybe justify getting 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.

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 were 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 wanna 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. 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 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

equations 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 to enjoy and for future people of the world to to enjoy and actually that analogy that I just gave about the pyramids was 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 you know how are these people blind to the

suffering you know behind these things they're marveling about. Speaking of which I think you mentioned in the context of a social democracy that freedom of speech and freedom of the press or 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 like 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 the words

you say so what is there a tension there for you? I think there's no tension and part I think that it is very condescending or patronizing for to assume that people can't take debate that people can't either a society or individuals visually be engaged in the exchange of ideas without even very vigorous debate without you know being broken by it it's just not the case I'm basically a free speech absolutist I mean I would draw the line at obviously direct incitements of violence or certain other speech like that but in general you think a lot of people would be surprised to hear that no I mean not 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 watch censor them but I think a lot on the Far Left on the the Marxist Socialist Left I think that you

know free speech is more or less the norm yeah yeah Where is the imperative, the censor coming from? Is this just some small subset of the left on Twitter? Is there some philosophical idea behind certain groups that like, if we're to steel man the case and which group actually has the interest of humanity

in mind in wanting to censor speech? I think we might need to just take it case by case for an example, by example, because honestly, I would have to think about a particular case, but let's just say generally that a lot of American liberalism rightly sees the revolution around the civil rights and later the extension of this rights revolution for gay rights and so on as being a very positive achievement in the last half century and I completely agree. Now for me, now that we've won those rights, a lot of our battle for change needs to go beyond the representational realm and needs to really reground itself in the material bread and butter struggles of ordinary people trying to survive, the battle for good healthcare for all Americans and so on, these are my immediate demands. I think there's a segment of American liberalism that doesn't want to go in that confrontational economic direction and wants to skirt away from battles over things like universal healthcare and so on and really are just still caught at this battle over rights 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, they look at comedians who said the wrong thing or they look at all sorts of other ways to make change, it's not really making a change, it's just making them look bad and making our culture worse and I think that'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 race and lots of other stuff like real serious anti-racist and the left, of course I'm an anti-racist but a lot of my work is focused on the primacy of class but even these people are very concerned about material struggles and issues and they don't really care about these issues,

they think are ephemeral kind of issues. So when you focus exclusively on language that somehow leads you astray, like on being concerned about language without like deeper economic inequalities and so on, you just become an asshole. That's on Twitter pointing out how everything, how racist everyone is.

So the anti-racism becomes a caricature of anti-racism. Exactly, because anti-racism was really about the struggle of people for equal rights and voting, it was about the struggle for people who were trapped into bad neighborhoods because they couldn't get decent jobs and their neighborhoods were redlined or whatever else. It was really like a struggle for survival. And what was the main demands, like the language of this one? It was the march for jobs and freedom. It was the slogan, I am a man, asserting the kind of universal dignity of people. This is what the civil rights movement was about and it wasn't a surprise, there was a lot of self-described socialists, people like Bayard Rustin, A. Philip 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 socialist, 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 disconcerting complaints

about language or culture and so on. Martin Luther King was a socialist. To what degree was he a socialist?

I would love to learn about that. Martin Luther King, I think, broadly called himself at various points in his life a Christian socialist or a democratic socialist, especially after his speech against the Vietnam War and the Riverside Church, I think that was 67, the last years of his life, he became much more involved in struggles against the 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 gonna 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 were in part socialists. Albert Einstein was one. Albert Einstein wrote an article for the first issue of this left wing magazines 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. Albert Einstein was so taught. 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 more about, I think it was actually more economically focused,

but I would need to go back and- But is war in general a part of the fundamental ideas that socialists are again, democratic socialists are against?

Like 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 robberies 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 am opposed to more, I'm opposed to imperialism, the domination of strong nations, dominating smaller nations. I wouldn't call myself a pacifist. I think most socialists 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, our children, our children, 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. Like 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.

even if some advocates of capitalism have gotten war. 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 relation to socialism

and the military industrial complex? Well, a lot of it's government contracts, but it's privately produced, right? My company's a glocky 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 weapons system to be prepared for a conventional war with China, Russia. Meanwhile, I think we all know that if there's gonna be conventional war between these countries, it's gonna lead to something worse. And no amount of advanced fighter jets is gonna make a difference. But I try to avoid crude or casual connections, even though there are relationships. It's kind of like the old slogan, which was quite an effective slogan in the early 2000s. At my first anti-war marches when I was a teenager, I definitely have shouted at no war for oil. Both is correct in that it gets to what people's senses of what's going on and how it's bad.

which is a much more complex geopolitical story. Yeah, and it is a story of geopolitics. It's perhaps less a story of capitalism or socialism. It's a story, yeah, it's a geopolitical story that I think actually operates outside of the economic system of individual nations. It has to do more with, honestly, in part egos of leaders. And there's an international battle for resources,

but surely there's alternatives. Yeah, definitely. And I think that part of what being a socialist is about dreaming in the long term about a different sort of world without, in my mind, needless divisions of people into nations with standing armies. I'm sure we'll still have pride about where we're from, and there'll still be distinctive cultural features and so on about where we're from. We definitely would, at least for the foreseeable future, be divided into places as administrative units. But the idea that there should be a Mexican army and an American army and a Russian army and a Ukrainian army is just on the face of it, I think that the long run, will be seen as ridiculous, just like we see it as ridiculous today, looking back at the idea that a Lord from London would be engaged in civil strife with a Lord from Liverpool and a bunch of peasants would die, just kind of on the face of it that 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 1,000 years, but in the long run, people will say the same about nation states and standing armies and battles over, you know, 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 seemingly insignificant. 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, you know, human history is only now beginning before we're in prehistory, but in the future, like, we'll be in kind of real history. You know, I think that a lot of really important history has already happened, and I think posterity will remember it, and I think that it will be easier to assign certain people the role of, like, villains, the people, you know, not to engage in the contentious topic, off topic of Ukraine or whatever else, but the idea that, you know, one government or a bad would launch a, you know, war to recover, you know, or to take, you know, several hundred square miles of territory, and tens of thousands of people will die, I think seems absurd to us many people today, luckily, but it would not have seemed absurd 50, 60 years ago. It would have just been a normal thing, right, these kind of territorial disputes and so on. And I think, you know, projecting in the future, I think within our lifetimes, we'll live to see that kind of conflict be eradicated. And in part, you could say that, like, why? I think it's because of popular pressure and organization. So you could say kind of 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 rational.

I don't really have a firm answer, whatever it is, I think it's a good thing. You mentioned Marxist view of history, it's kind of interesting to just briefly talk about what do you think of it, what do you think of this Marxist view of how the different

systems evolve from the perspective of class struggle, as we were talking about? Well, I fundamentally, I'm a Marxist, I fundamentally believe in the broad contours of 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 have evolved about how the distributional resources work in any given society, who owns, who doesn't, how the conflict, distributional conflicts and so on.

I think Marxism can tell us a lot. How surplus is distributed.

Exactly, exactly, exactly. What it can't tell us is like, as a friend put it, like the sex appeal of blue jeans or whatever else,

you know, 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, you know, the Soviet style dialectical materialism, was meant to tell us everything from, you know, explain genetics and agriculture and whatever else in a very disastrous way, you know. So I definitely don't believe in the application of these ideas in an extremely wide way. And 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 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 unscientific or unserious thing to say, this is my framework from beginning to end, you know, for the rest of my life.

But from a perspective of history, you should say that, so Marx says that you go through, societies go through different stages. It could be crudely summarized as primitive communism, imperialism, maybe slave society, feudalism, defined by mercantilism, then capitalism and socialism, and finally, stateless communism.

Am I... 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 us to socially create wealth on a mass scale. But that wealth is that process is being privately directed. And also the surplus is being privately kind of appropriated, is a contradiction. And that would lead to some sort of rebellion or revolution or change. And we'll have... And eventually, this contradiction would be a fetter on production too, so we would have to move into socialist society.

But actually, it's just the backtrack, so in terms of contradictions. 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, right? All right, maybe... Just let me... Hold on a second. And then inequalities form of different flavors. So that's what imperialism is, this one dude rises to the top and has some control of different flavor. That's what feudalism would... When you have one dude at the top, and you have merchants doing some trading and so on, and then that leads to capitalism, when you have private ownership of companies, and they do some... They result in some kind of class inequality. And eventually, that results in a revolution that says, no, this inequality 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.

What part of that is wrong? No, I think, broadly, the Marxist theory of history is about different types, different modes of production that exist at 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 that were in classes of their age that controlled and distributed that division of 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 kind of pray and write and kind of 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 or whatever else.

Although that's gaining popularity. In Europe or elsewhere? No, in the anarchist tradition, isn't there, aren't they saying that one of the ways you could have a leader's in monarchy because they're more directly responsible to the citizens, if you have a leader, it's healthier to have a monarch? Anyway, I'm not familiar with this

but I have heard this stated multiple times but I have heard this stated multiple times. The left-wing anarchist traditions like anarchocynicalism or whatever else, Their slogan is kind of, no kings, no gods, no masters or whatever, so no bosses. They definitely would not agree with that, but I'm not familiar enough.

Anarchism runs a gamut from left to right in interesting ways. I'll have to ask about that, but yeah, okay, so you're not, you don't believe Marx's theory of history in the sense that everything, 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. So 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 kind of implied that it would naturally happen. And 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, and 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. So he was living through an era of upheaval, and Engels especially oversaw and was the mentor to all these rising socialist parties. So 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. So 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 you could have imagined, but also developments like the welfare state and mass democracy and universal suffrage, which might have changed how workers relate to the system or operate within it. So I think it's just the transition part that I think wasn't spelled out properly.

they have accomplished very little in those 30 years. So that's the practical and the pragmatic. And we actually jumped to the, to the, at the horizon, as you mentioned, as a social democratically, you focus on the policies of today, but you also have a vision and dream of a future. And so Marx did as well. So the perfect communism at the end, can you, can you describe that world? Also, is there elements to that world that's, that has elements of anarchism? So again, like I said, there's Michael Malice next door, so 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 kind of, if you want to call it full communism would be very similar to the anarchist vision of a world without a coercion, a 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 the other, all other political questions would be resolved. And I think that's a lot behind a lot of the thinking of we're going to have a full communism after politics. I don't think there will be an after politics. I think for one thing, let's say, I'll give you another Northeast example. Let's say me and you are trying to, with different groups of people, we're trying to figure out how to build a crossing of the Hudson River. And for various reasons, you and the people around you want to build a bridge, me and the people around me need a, want to build a tunnel. That's a question that you will probably need a mediation for, right? You'll need one, it's a big project.

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 a tyrant emerging in the vacuum? So I think people's fear of the state is what would happen if the state had too much power. And I think that's a 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 an egalitarian thinker. I'm a socialist. But my mind just goes to, I could see a vision of the future that I would like 50, 60 years from now. Maybe there's some sort of future of superabundance and automation, and there's some sort of techno-utopian future.

And I want to keep that. And also, yeah. So you're worried about revolution or otherwise, the 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 gonna be a place for the 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 just to go on a tangent, do you think it's possible to have a future world at least 50 years, 50, 100 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 different ideologies and more to do with the humans in the vacuums and how humans feel vacuums and the corrupting nature of power and so on. If we have AI that it'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 solve through advanced computing. But I would say that there's another whole set of problems with the system that were incentive problems. And I'm not sure how that advanced computing would solve the incentive problems of how do you get people to actually produce things that other people want? Kind of that informational question, how do you communicate without endless meetings or someone reading your brain? Yeah, what do you actually want? So so there's there's that kind of informational question. But then there's the incentive of, you know, how do you get people to work efficiently at work? And how do you get firms to to use their resources that they're getting more more efficiently? And I think solving the calculation problem solves some of these questions, but not all of them. But you know, 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 resource 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 there is 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 that'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, 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, half joking. But the reason I'm really terrified of that is because usually, there's a possibility of a human taking control of that system. You now start to get the same kind of authoritarian thing. Well, I am a human, I'm smart enough to be able to control this AI system. And I will do based on what the 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 Hollermore 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 a very interesting concept, leisure. We're going to have to, how do you spell that? All right, so if we can step into the practical, we were 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, increasing minimum wage, maybe stronger unions, like we talked about. What are some ideas here? What are some ideas there's special policy, especially exciting to you?

Well, I think that hours reduction has always been an important demand for socialists. So, I mean, it's been a reality in certain countries like France and 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 slack in in hours. So one, I think it's a solid or a stick thing in working class movements between unemployed and employed workers. I also think that, yeah, it gives people more time. So Marx was a big advocate in his day of a 10 hour bill in the UK, that would have reduced the hours of working time, and reduce child or eliminated, or reduce child labor and other things as well. And part of it was, this is a radical demand, because it's reducing the sphere, as you saw, of exploitation. So it's putting limits on on how much time the capitalists can take from ordinary workers and how much freedom they would they would have. With healthcare, one, I just think it's a government healthcare system, you know, 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 and hospitals are run directly by the state. It's almost like a mini Soviet system, to be honest, but just for healthcare. And it works pretty well just for healthcare. And I think it's one example of the way in which you could actually take the market. So I give you a vision of socialism that involves a lot of market. But I think there's certain spheres where you could remove the market from and still have an efficient system. In part because, you know, this is a area in which we people don't have obviously for cosmetic procedures, whatever they have preferences. But for most routine things that people do in healthcare, they just need to see a doctor, you know, they need to get diagnosed. Some of these systems have had trouble with wait lists 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 planning and and government run healthcare. So that's that's kind of the most left wing that you could get is what the system the United Kingdom.

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 of what's the right answer. Everyone's certain the 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, or with the help of automation in the 21st century. I don't think anyone knows. So like you, people like you are basically saying like, arguing for ideas, and we'll have to explore those ideas together.

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 vested interest in not having universal health care. There's large industries with the vested interest of 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 and you're trying to make a change, like Obamacare was supposed to have a public option. Everybody's been running on a public option in the Democratic Party for 12, 13 years. Why don't we have a public option?

So I think a lot of it's opposition. Do you like that idea of the public option? Maybe you can, like, because, isn't there complexities, like, pre-existing conditions? So isn't a public option mean you can not have any insurance until you get to 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, which is just kind of a way to signal 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 public option. I think in practice, if a public option is defined in such a way that it just means you, by default, can just opt in to a public plan, and let's say, hypothetically, you don't even have to pay for it, then it's just a backdoor to universal 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 $400, $500 on the Obamacare market for health insurance, and that's hampering your ability to do what you want to do in your life, then maybe you would support a candidate who's for universal 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 tenant and whatever else. So I think it's like these day-to-day concerns need to be connected to the more abstract and lofty vision of change. Otherwise, our politics just becomes like this fantasy world thing that's nice ideas to think about or debate but really won't make much of a difference in people's lives. What do you think about free college? Should college be free?

be free in my vision of a just society. What is it just to clarify? Is the universal health care

up there? Yeah, universal health care is probably far higher in my priorities than free college. I think right now the way our system is built, when someone goes to college, they're given credentials, they're given a degree they carry with them for the rest of their life. It gives them a chance to join a privileged part of the labor market. It's not a zero-sum game. I don't want college-educated people to think that non-college-educated people are their enemies and vice versa because a lot of them are just ordinary working-life people trying to survive and they're in different areas or in different sectors. Some of them are in nursing sectors where they need a college degree and so on. But if you just make college tuition free, but you don't also make trade skills and other things free for someone to learn how to become an electrician or a plumber or whatever else, then to some degree you're privileging one sector of the labor market over another. So I would advocate if you're going to make something like that free, you just have to make sure that you're doing it in an egalitarian way and that one, the options, the routes to college are more equal. So there's more investment in K-12 education so that more kids in rough neighborhoods have the chance to go to college. And for those that choose the trade route from any part of the country, that they're given the skills and resources for vocational trainings and those are also free. And it just feels like in terms of order of operation, I would just start with K-12 education,

improving it and whatever else, then college after, but I'm not opposed to it. So does that improving K-12 education, does that mean investing more into it? Is it as simple as just increasing the amount of money that's invested in public education?

In general, when it comes to the public sector or any sphere that you're investing in, obviously it's not just as simple as throwing money at a problem. I do think we have a lot of schools that are underfunded, but we have other schools that are adequately funded, but the conditions in which those schools are, like the neighborhoods they're 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, investing in education to help people. If kids are living in poverty, if they go into school hungry or whatever else, education's not going to give them everything they need to succeed. So sometimes we, I think, put too much weight on education.

And of course, you could define education more broadly, which is like the care of the flourishing

of the young mind, whatever that is. And a lot of it starts early. So New York City, at least, we do have universal pre-K. So from age three onward, you have the option for that. It's important for kids' socialization. Their parents are now able to know that they could go to work or do something else and have their kids taken care of. There's a lot of measures like that that we could do to equalize things. And again, for libertarians in the audience, some of this stuff is scary because it's obviously more state involved, state involved in pre-K, state is already very involved in K through 12, more investment into state institutions like our state universities and in college. But for me, it's not a question of state versus non-state. It's a question of good outcomes for people. And it just happens to be that for working class people, having the collective power to elect representatives that will build a broader safety net is in their interest. For upper middle class people, for others, they could afford to pay for their own provisioning either directly or through Obamacare-like schemes where you just get a subsidy and you pay the rest yourself and whatever.

society, but it's especially bad for the people at the bottom of the labor market. So I saw various estimates for socialist programs like Social Security expansion, free college, Medicare for All will cost upwards of $40 trillion over 10 years for zero. They argue with those numbers and so on. So there's a cost. There's a taxpayer cost. Given the weight of that cost, can you still make the case with these programs and then can you try to make the case against them

that the cost is too high? So I will not argue with you on the numbers because you just 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 health care, a huge percentage are at GDP. So I think it could be done in a way that's close to

cost neutral. So actually, can you argue on the numbers without arguing on the numbers? So you're saying just your gut says that there's a lot of, depending on how these programs are done,

there's a lot of variance in how much it will actually cost. There's a lot of bureaucracy and billing right now in our health care sector, for example, that would be eliminated. There's a lot of costs that are spiraling upward, a provider cost from both doctors, hospitals, but also pharmaceuticals to drug costs that insurance companies shoulder because their market share is too fragmented to really negotiate hard. Medicare can 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 involvement. And there's a reason why we spend a bigger share of our GDP on health care than other places. But let me just accept the broad premise that social programs cost money. Now, I think that one, for ordinary people, most of them, the trade off of even hypothetically, if taxes on lower middle class and working class people in certain cases go up, 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 rich will pay more, the majority will consume more of them. Also, I think a lot of these programs are the bedrock of a healthy society. So one reason, for example, that we have so much crime and violence in the US, there's lots of, you know, cultural and other causes with our level of gun ownership, American history and so on. But one really important factor is just the level of poverty and inequality in the US compared to other countries that combined with guns and other factors mean.

thing where you could just, you know, have everything without trade offs. So in a progressive tax system, is there to push back on the costs here? Is there a point at which taxing the rich is counterproductive in the long term? So in the short term, there might be a net benefit of increasing taxes, because the programs the middle class, the lower middle class gets is more

beneficial. Is there a negative side to taxing the rich? In theory, yes, of course. So one would be if you tax the rich so much, they change their consumption patterns. And that has negative impacts on the economy as a whole, 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 other wealthy, you know, people in society to the point that they have potentially less money for productive investment, because you're in a capitalist society, so you're 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. And my vision, of course, of socialism, that's one reason why we'd have to take the investment function away from capitalists. If you're going to make it so hard for them that they can't invest, or they can't employ labor the way they're employing now, you have to create another mechanism for supply to be created. And that's why that's

that transition point. 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. First of all, we already have a progressive taxation system. The government does take a bunch of the money away, and people are still striving to become rich. A lot of what people want when they dream of success is they want accolades, they want respect, and of course, they want some more wealth. Wealth they consume luxury goods with or whatever else. But at a certain point, it becomes better for the state to tax and either redistribute directly or through social programs, or redirect that money through tax credits and other ways to shape investment towards productive investment. We don't want a society in which a bunch of rich people fly around in helicopters going from club to club, while the productive economy does nothing. At that point, I think a lot of ordinary rich people might prefer the government to come in to tax them and to try to spur investment in certain productive sectors. It really just depends. But I honestly believe that most people don't necessarily want to be rich for the sake of being rich. They want to be successful. And there's many different dynamics to that.

their money. On that topic, sort of a little bit of a tangent, there's a lot of folks in the left community, far left community, socialist community that I think are at the source of a kind of derision towards the B word, the billionaires. Does it bother you? Or do you think that's in part justified, a kind of using the word billionaire as a dirty word?

I think it's perfectly justified and that it's a popular shorthand. So obviously, when I talk about inequality, I often talk about power dynamics between workers and bosses and so on. Billionaire is just the 99, 1% version of it. It's just a popular shorthand to just explain the fact that there's a lot of people who have accumulated obscene wealth. These people aren't, in my mind, parasites in the kind of very, very old school socialist rhetoric. And that, of course, capitalists provide employment, take entrepreneurs, come up with new ideas sometimes themselves, sometimes directly manage work and whatever else. But they exert so much power over the lives of not just their workers, but society as a whole. Taking away some of their wealth and power is a way to just empower others. And again, these things have policy trade offs. If you just snap your fingers and say, Elon Musk, all your wealth is gone, you're now on food stamps or whatever else in that kind of arbitrary way, you'd be a totally disincentivized people from trusting the rules of the game as they've been set up in a capitalist society. And I think that would have negative consequences for workers. But saying that, hey, this person has too much power and too much wealth and has too much ability to dictate things about the lives of others, I think is just simply a fact.

So I agree with you in part, but I have to push back here. So one of the problems I see is using billionaires as shorthand to talk about power inequality and wealth inequality, often dismisses the fact that some of these folks are some of the best members of our society. So outside of the, however, the system has created inequalities, a young person today should dream to build cool stuff, not for the wealth, not for the power, the fame, but to be part of building cool stuff. Now, there's a lot of examples of billionaires that have gotten there in shady ways and so on. And you can point that out. But in the same way, we celebrate great artists and great athletes and great literary icons and sort of writers and poets and musicians and engineers and scientists, we should sort of separate the human creator from the wealth that the system has given them. That's what I worry about, is like in our system, some of the greatest humans are the ones that have become rich. And so we sometimes mix up the, if you want to criticize the wealth, we sometimes criticize the human and the creator while that should actually be the person we aspire to be.

So, you know, I would agree with that. LeBron James, if he's not already in his lifetime, will be a billionaire. And he got his money largely through just being a credible athlete, excelling in his field more than anyone besides Michael Jordan. I think he's my number two. He might be my number one. Yeah, I'm willing to keep keeping open mind about the LeBron versus Jordan conversation. But, you know, he got that through his merit and he's been rewarded. And the 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 a salary cap league. Whenever he's doing an endorsement, obviously that company is thinking that he's worth more than what they're paying him for that endorsement and so on. And to the extent with Elon Musk, people see innovation and they see someone who will put himself out there with sometimes crazy ideas because he's trying to think about the future and trying to just push things forward instead of just sitting on whatever money he has now and just investing it, earning, you know, 6% return for the rest of his life.

a real thing. Yeah, and 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 productive discourse. Okay, speaking of which, you said you're a fan of Bernie Sanders. Would you classify yourself as a Bernie bro? What's the technical definition of a Bernie bro? Is that a very, it's a subset? No, no, no, I'm sorry. You're a sophisticated philosopher, writer, economic and political

thinker. Of course you would not call yourself a Bernie bro. I'm fine with calling myself a Bernie bro because it was made up by liberal journalists to smear Bernie and his supporters during the 2016 campaign, even though disproportionately his supporters were like young women in their 20s, but whatever. I ride for Bernie. There's worse things in the

world than being called a bro, so it's fine. That's hilarious. I ride for Bernie. What do you like about Bernie Sanders and to what degree does he represent ideas of socialism? To what degree does he represent the more traditional sort of liberal ideas?

I love Bernie. Most of all, I like his clarity. He's by far the best communicator we have on the left. He speaks with a moral force. He's relatable and he has taken a lot of socialist rhetoric from academia and brought it down to its core in a way that's comprehensible for ordinary people and speaks to their daily lives. When Bernie does a speech, people can finish his lines because they know what he's going to say. They know what points he's going to hit because socialism, in my mind, should not be a complicated thing. Now, when we get to more abstract discussions about what a future system would look like, when we get to the policy trade-offs today, I think we need to put on a different hat. We should embrace all sorts of nuance and contradiction and complication. When it comes to the core moral and ethical appeal, I think Bernie grasps that and how to communicate it. Now, Bernie Sanders was politicized a very long time ago. I actually once told him, I've only met him a few times, but one time I joked that in his book, he mentioned that one politicizing moment in his life was when the Brooklyn Dodgers left town and he was devastated because he was a Dodgers fan from Brooklyn.

different sort of future. I don't think he, at least I haven't heard him talk about this big broad history and future, so the Marxist ideology and so on. Not that he's afraid of

or something. It's just not how he thinks about it. I think he's a practical thinker. He is running, even if he should be afraid of it too, because he is a major politician running for president. I think what people want is they want the left wing of the possible, or 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. I think we lost a chance in 2016 to elect someone that I think would have beaten Trump or at the very least would have been close. Do you think the Democrats screwed him over? Yes, not in the way of deliberate or direct vote working, but they put their thumb on the scale for sure. I mean, it's not even conspiracy theory. There's all this stuff in the debates about Clinton's people being fed questions and whatever else, and just the tone of the media. The media was extremely dismissive and hostile to him.

What was that? Because that was really annoying. That was really annoying, how dismissive they were. I've seen that in some other candidates. They were dismissive towards Andrew Yang in that same way. So forget the ideology. Why are they so smug sometimes towards certain candidates? What is that? Because I think that's actually at the core to a degree if Democrats or any party fails, that it's that smugness, because people see through that.

I think a lot of these people are friends, even if they don't know each other, they're friends, because they went to the same schools. They know the same people. They have the same broad, 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 unserious. So Bernie would say some things about the world that objectively tell a lot of people seem correct, or at least pretty close to correct. A journalist would just look at him like he's from outer space. To some extent, this also happens to people on the right. People on the right often say things that I find repulsive or just wrong, but there's parts of the media that would describe their certain views as illegitimate or outside the boundaries of acceptable conversation. I think there should be a few things outside the boundary of acceptable conversation, hate speech, and so on. But there's this attempt to say their views are illegitimate, and therefore, anyone who votes for them for any reason is illegitimate too. That's one reason why I think it fueled a lot of resentment and will ultimately end up fueling the extremes of American politics that people feel like they're not being listened to.

Yeah, 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, 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, people dismiss you. I think in certain sense, whatever you feel about him, people dismiss Donald Trump for the same reason where it's the style speaking, the personality of the person that he's not playing by the rules of polite society, of polite politician society and so on. And that's really, that troubles me because it feels like solutions, the great leaders will not be polite. They're not going to behave in the way they're supposed to behave. And I just wish the media was at least open-minded to that, which I guess gives me hope about the new media, which is like more distributed citizen media, right? That they're more open-minded to the revolutionary, to the outsiders, right? I actually first, I really like Bernie Sanders. I first heard him in conversation with Tom Hartman. He had these like 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.

She does self-identify as a democratic socialist. I think she was a very inspiring figure for a lot of people. She was kind of out of this Bernie wave of the first set of Bernie candidates in 2018 that identified with him instead of the Democratic Party establishment. I think that, she's still developing as a politician. It's very difficult when you're in a deep blue district. And when you don't often have to worry about re-election or talk to, but modulate your rhetoric to win over swing voters in your district. But then you're immediately a national and cultural figure. So AOC basically goes from her views, which are compelling, in my mind, a lot of her programmatic views are compelling, wins her district and then has her own 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 the sense that she's like a Marxist or whatever else, but academic in the way that she may be using at times like confusing language to convey basic points when she gets into like the language of intersectionality and whatever else.

Especially in the context of cultural issues and stuff. Exactly.

Instead of just the plain spoken Bernie, like, yeah, discrimination is wrong. If you ask me about a cultural issue, I'll come down on the same side as AOC, I'm sure, nine plus 10s out of, times out of 10. But I'll try to root it into just basic, like, yeah, treat people with respect, and they'll treat you with respect. And that's a way we should govern our civic sphere. And we don't need to talk about intersectionality to, I think, get that. But so there's that rhetoric. But she's not just a 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 a large media event of her surprising upset election and her being young and being really connected to this post-Bernie moment. And I think amid these constant 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.

I'll give you a sports analogy. I mean, NFL is up there, soccer is up there,

but probably UFC. OK, well, I can't give you a good analogy for any of those. But it's like a raw prospect. Like someone who shows glimmers of hope, so they were drafted really high, and they bounced from team to team. And you're like, I'm clinging on to my AOC stock. But I think that she needs to be self-critical enough, and her team needs to be self-critical enough to know that the goal is not merely to be a national cultural figure and win a re-election in your deep blue district. The goal has to be to become truly

a national political figure, which will require changes. A unifier and inspiring figure about the ideas

that she represents. Definitely, and she has other things against her. Like, I'm obviously class focused, but there's no denying, I think, that some of the hostility to her is sexism. It's rooted in, I think, people wanting to see her fail or whatever else. But that's only some of it. I think some of it, otherwise, is her struggling to relate to people who don't have a lot of her starting points

as far as moral and ethical beliefs. Yeah, but she's actually great at flourishing in all the attacks she's getting. She's doing a good job of that.

And a lot of those attacks will break me, if I'm being honest. Yes, that's 10 of 6.

The amount of fire she's under. But you don't want that to become a drug to where you just get good at being a national figure that's constantly in the fights and are using that for attention and so on. You still want to be the unifier. And that's a tricky, tricky switch. Do you think there's a chance there's a world in which she's able to modulate it enough

to be a unifier and run for president and win? I think she's very far away from being able to do that. I think that even other politicians that are also polarizing within the squad in terms of what they say or their ideas, whatever else, are very effective communicators like Ilhan Omar and others. I think AOC, I mean, that's my hope. My hope is that someone like AOC could. The last year plus has not been extremely promising in my mind, in part because she's become or she's continued to position herself as a lightning rod, cultural figure. Whereas I think a national political figure needs to pick their spots and also pick their moment for changing their rhetoric and adjusting to their audience. And I think she does it in certain environments, but that needs to be your national message when you're out there. You need to be speaking towards the not already converted. And I think Bernie does that.

Bernie strips his politics down to the basics. So I agree with you spiritually, but we also have an example of Donald Trump winning the presidency. Isn't some of the game of politics that's separate from the policy being able to engage in rhetoric that leads to outrage

and then walking through that fire with grace? First of all, I think Trump is kind of a unique personality in American history.

So it's hard to compare anyone to Trump. But don't you think AOC is comparable in terms of the uniqueness in the political system we're in or no?

I think Trump is much more of a firebrand anti-establishment force in that, and I mean this negatively for what it's worth because I disagree with Trump, but he was willing to set fire to the Republican establishment. He was able to self-fund largely his campaign, and he already was a media figure without them. AOC has been much more cautious with the Democratic Party establishment, in part because she is not trying to run a national political campaign right now for the outside, like a 5% chance they're going to be president. Let me set fire to everything. She's trying to help people and help her constituents through the game of getting committee appointments and getting wins 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 Kratz and a progressive Democrat, because we were establishing our own outside third force in American politics. You could knock on the door of a lot of people who would end up voting for Trump, and they would say, oh, I have a lot of respect for Bernie, or whatever. They were still going to not vote for him, but he wasn't considered part of the Democratic Party milieu. I think now with AOC, there's a much closer association of AOC in our policies with ordinary Democrats, where she needs to draw stronger distinctions. She doesn't need to do it like Trump did with just, man, I forgot all of them, though I found some of them amusing in the moment, like all his nicknames about a lion, Ted Cruz, and then the rest.

So that's a message discipline that Bernie has been exemplary on, yeah, for sure. But I think that's learned.

That could be developed. 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 people on the left and elsewhere. I hope AOC goes in that direction. I just think that she is a lot going against her just because she's already a national figure and she's in a deeper blue district. But we need to root our politics then in working class people and a lot of districts that the type of kitchen table conversations are, I hate that cliche, but I just used it, but a lot of these conversations are just different in their tone and cadence. And it's not just a question of Fetterman or Tim Ryan in Ohio and just white working class voters. I mean, working class voters of any race.

than a Met Gala cultural statement. Yeah, I mean, it's clear that you're a respect and lover and would like to see different ways. I mean, she's young, so the different trajectories that she could develop that would ultimately make her a good candidate. I'm just looking at odds here for, and I disagree with them. I'm buying AOC stock here, given these odds. So in terms of Democratic, who's going to win the 2024 election? So that includes running and winning. On the Democrat side is 18% chance for Biden, 7% chance for Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom at 6%, Michelle Obama at 3%, Hillary Clinton at 2%, and AOC at 1.5%, and then Bernie at 1%.

So I would not buy AOC at that mark. I would buy Biden like crazy, though. I'm not a gambling man, but I would totally

toss a G at Biden at that amount.

AOC at 1.5% chance?

I think it's, I don't think she runs. You don't think she runs yet?

OK, that's it. I don't think Bernie will primary Biden, either. I mean, if Biden doesn't run, then obviously it's an open field, but I just feel like. Do you think Biden runs? Yes, I think Biden properly runs. Oh, boy. He's an incumbent president. He's an incumbent president, so it's very hard to imagine another Democrat being

able to do better than him.

All right, what about the competition? I think Donald Trump is the best thing for the Democrats, period, just because it would create this turnout mechanism, this excitement around we have to stop Donald Trump. He's attacking DeSantis already. He's trying to, you know, the de-sanctimonious thing. But yeah, Trump's kind of like the Don

King of American politics. Yeah, it's interesting what kind of dynamic chaos he's created. It probably led to more people being interested in politics. Well, it almost guaranteed it led to more people being interested in politics, but maybe not in a healthy way. Maybe it created an unhealthy relationship with politics,

where it created more partisanship. For me, I don't have a problem with a partnership. It's what kind of partnership. So I think Trump has cultivated a lot of right populist, a relationship with his supporters. It's almost like a leader-follower relationship in a way that doesn't actually enhance people's knowledge of politics and the issues, but actually just leads them to follow the party line. Ideally, I think socialist politics and politics on the left should be something different. Eugene Debs, the great American socialist leader of the late 19th and early 20th century, used to say, I'm not your Moses. I can't promise to lead you to the promised land, because if I can lead you there and you just follow me there, someone's just going to lead you straight out as soon as I'm gone. And I think there's something nice about that kind of anti-blind-following-leader-follower

kind of dynamic on the left at its best. That said, in the way at least the political race in the United States has turned out, it seems like it's turned into a bit of an entertainment. And there, having personalities and characters is really important. So in terms of policy and actual leadership, yes, maybe having a leader, like an authoritarian big leader, is not good, but maybe for the race it is, for the drama of it. You just want to have drama and attention on people who are actually going to turn out to be good leaders.

That's a weird balance to strike. Earned media is what they always talk about in political campaigns. The more you could get on TV, the better. Even I really like Federman. He just won his campaign. But a good part of his early campaign, he had pivoted from talking about issues to just talking about Dr. Oz living in New Jersey and kind of having the troll campaign against him, which I found amusing. But also, it was effective, obviously, he won. But it's a bit depressing, because I would rather a whole campaign cycle about health care

and jobs and other issues. Yeah, and the hope is that people just get better at that kind of social media communication. So I do actually think there's something about doing political speeches that makes you sound less authentic. Because you have to do so many of them. It must be exhausting to day after day after day make the speech. You're going to start 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. It's just tough.

I just wish they didn't have to constantly do speeches. So I think that the fact that Bernie's speeches very clearly came out of, if not directly his own pen, but his own rhetoric over the years, and he kind of wrote it seemed authentic, even if he was repeating it. And then Trump has just wild improvisation. I think people found real 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 it in a way that's productive, that doesn't blame immigrants or whatever calls for problems, but it's built on a different basis. But people are fed up for good reason with a lot of conventional politics. And we need to speak to that. Otherwise, it'll only be the right

that is taking advantage of those people's anger. Well, I almost forgot to ask you about China. So both historically, we talked about the Soviet Union. But what lessons do you draw from the implementation of socialism, communism, in Maoist China and modern China?

What's the good and the bad? Well, I think it's very similar to the Soviet case, in that socialism came to China through not a base of organized workers in a capitalist country to a certain level of development and so on. But it came through the countryside and in conditions of civil war, strife. You had a Japanese invasion and whatever else. And Mao built his base in the peasantry, then came down to the city to govern and try to build a base and rule over workers. So it was kind of an inversion of classic socialist theory. Now, the same thing that I said before about Stalin and assessing the Soviet Union has to apply here. Because obviously, I oppose authoritarianism. And obviously, there's all sorts of moral combinations. I should do. But to look at what the Chinese Communist Party actually accomplished, I think we kind of need to take a step backwards from our moral opposition to the means in which they accomplished it and just look at it developmentally. China benefited greatly from the Communist Party's implementation of basic education and health care.

economically, spilling over into something worse. From a democratic socialist perspective, what's one policy or one or two ways you could fix China? If you took over China, what would

you like to see change? Well, the democratic part comes before the socialist part. So I would say there needs to be multi-party elections in China and state censorship and control over the press, in other words, needs to be done with. As far as their immediate economic policy, I think the idea of maintaining strong state control of certain commanding heights of the economy while liberalizing other spheres has done quite well in China's case, lifting people out of poverty. But again, there's something really lost in the society, even if it's getting wealthier, if ordinary people don't have the ability to participate in dissent freely. And the Chinese authorities have allowed some. It's not North Korea. It's not a totally totalitarian state. There's been workplace protests. There have been all sorts of local anti-corruption protests and things like that. But the government decides what's permitted and what's not at what particular moment. And I think the long run, even if it can survive, there's a better way to do things, which is just

quite simply a democracy. The thing is, though, the lessons of history that China is looking at, there's this dark aspect. So building on top of the fact that it seems like under Stalin and under Mao, under Stalin, the Soviet Union, and under Mao, China, has seen a lot of economic growth. And then one dark aspect of that, while under the Great Leap Forward, you have 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 there's a lot of people who miss the Soviet Union. The reason why they miss it is that it was a system they knew. It provided the basics of their livelihood. Then afterwards, look at Russia in the 90s. People were in chaos. The Communist Party had a huge amount of support democratically. Anti-democratic measures had to be taken, ironically, against the Communist Party to keep it from regaining more of a foothold in Russia. But we don't need that trade-off. We could have a form of, imagine if Russia went to a system closer to social democracy that maintained the stability that people wanted, the welfare state that people wanted, but restructured the economy in not a shock way, but in a way that made sense and that ordinary people felt ownership of, instead of just oligarchs who were a former Communist Party bureaucracy just dividing up the country for themselves. I think the same thing in China.

and the USSR and so on. You are the founder of the magazine, Jacobin, of which I am a subscriber. I recommend everybody subscribe whether you're on the left or the right. The magazine does tend to lean left.

Does it officially say it's socialist or socialist? Yeah, we're a socialist publication. We try to be interesting. So we try to have articles that 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 only, like the product of the 21st century, only subscribe to the digital version.

But I guess there's also a paper version. Yeah, there's like 70,000 subscribers in print.

In print, in print. Does it come like on a scroll? I don't even know, it's a paper.

Do they even publish paper land since April? Do they even publish paper land since April? I'm going to mail you a bunch of copies. It's perfect bound. It's long issues. Our Jackman's publisher, Remake F4 of us recently, did a redesign of the publication. So it looks really good. It's up there in the design award competition range.

Nice, it's sexy. Nice, it's sexy.

I can show it off to all my friends. Put it in your coffee table.

You don't even have to read it. First I need to get a coffee table. But yes, I'll get both. That's what a respectable adult, listen, I've upgraded my life. I haven't had a couch, I don't think ever. So I got a couch recently because somebody told me that serious adults have a couch. And I also got a TV because serious adults have a couch and TV and as you can see, it's been here for many months and I still haven't like unboxed it. So I'm trying to learn how to be an adult, looking up on YouTube how to be an adult and learning slowly. After that, I'll look into this whole leisure thing. Anyway, what's the origin of Jackman? What was the idea?

What was the mission and what's the origin story? So I started Jackman when I was between my sophomore and junior year of college. Basically, I was already a socialist. I was involved in the Democratic Social of America. I was in the youth section, the young democratic socialist. I was editing 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 of people around me that we would debate together and occasionally write for this other publication, The Activist and so on. And yeah, just a product of creative ignorance in the sense that I knew I had the capacity to maybe pull off an issue or two. I just had no idea how long I would keep doing it. And I'd just eventually consume my life slowly but surely. I had different plans for my future, kind of.

But it just kind of happened.

What's the hardest part about running a magazine? Well, the hardest part is obviously the things just like any enterprise, right? The things beyond your control. You could put out something that you think is great or interesting, but then you need the feedback of people actually subscribing to it. And you occasionally encounter periods where you feel like you're doing your best work, but you're not getting the audience response. And I think you just need the self-confidence to just keep doing it. And obviously, if you're totally obscure and crazy and way off the mark, you're never going to build that audience. But I think a lot of publications have tried to, same thing, I guess, goes with YouTube shows, whatever else. They try to adapt to what everyone else is doing right away when they don't achieve success. Whereas for me, the early issues at 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. Is there some pressure that you could speak to of audience capture? Because it is a socialist publication. You have a fan base, a readership base. Is there times you feel pressured not to say a certain thing, not to call out bullshit, not to criticize certain candidates,

all that kind of stuff? Yes, definitely, of course. I myself am looser on the self-censorship than other people. That's only because I've gotten this far just shooting from the hip or whatever. And occasionally, you'll come to a rash judgment. You'll speak too soon or complain about something too soon, and you'll have to either apologize or reconsider whatever else. But on a host of issues, I have used that maybe not all of the left has. But I know that the core of my politics is a politics against oppression, against exploitation, against all the things that we talked about. And if you know that's at the core of your politics, then you could maybe say, you know what? I don't think the left should respond to the real racists and the still rat in the world by adopting an excessively racialized rhetoric, if that makes sense. I fundamentally just am a universalist. And I believe that people, no matter where their backgrounds are and so on, kind of want the same things for themselves and for their families.

instead of criticizing this part of. No, I think it's really, I'm really glad you exist. I'm really glad you're beating that drum, because I think that's one of the reasons that the left has not had a broader impact or is not heard by more people that could hear its message is because the othering. The othering of, like, as if there's two teams as if it's black and white, as opposed to having, there's a common humanity and a common struggle amongst all of us. You also wrote the book that we mentioned a few times, The Socialist Manifesto, The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality. What's the framework?

What are the key ideas of the book? So a lot of it's a look at socialism's past, present, and future, basically. So a lot of it is historical. The opening chapter uses a pasta sauce factory as a way to explain certain Marxist concepts, but also a theory of change, like how we get from, let's say, pure capitalism to more regulated, unionized and social democratic systems, 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 look at the future of socialism. But then I try to explain why some of the 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, and kind of more of a historical overview. Then 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 the US, the UK, other advanced economies, and why I think the socialist message is still relevant.

of the same broad movement. How did you become a socialist?

What was the personal story or the idea to colden your mind? So I'm the youngest of five. I was only one of my family born in the United States. So it was very obvious to me that my life outcomes were very different than life outcomes of my siblings. So my three older siblings didn't go to college. After high school, some of them got their degrees much later on as adults. But I was, from a pretty young age, had access to a great public school district and was put on the track that you're going to go to college. This is kind of the outcome. And like I said, even my grandmother was illiterate. My mom didn't have a lot of educational opportunities early in her life. She actually graduated from college the same year I did. So she later got her kind of degrees and whatever else.

and our vision of the future. What do you think Marx would say if he were

to read your book, Socialist Manifest, and do a review? So I think Marx would say that my vision of a socialist after capitalism maintains key elements of the commodity form. So a lot of what Marx was concerned about was what markets do to human relationships in a negative sense. His early writings, especially, focus a lot on the alienation of labor. My vision of socialism, at least in the near term, is about de-commodifying certain sectors, so reducing the market in certain sectors and reducing alienation, but not eliminating it. It is about eliminating exploitation and oppression. So knowing Marx and knowing how critical he was of certain other socialist strands and tendencies, and he would often write very snarky notes and letters to people like Engels being like, this guy, LaSalle, he's a total asshole. Then he would send a separate note to LaSalle saying, hey, can I borrow five grand? This is actually true. He did the both, I think, the same month. So he would be really good at Twitter, is what you say. Oh, he would be the best at Twitter.

What advice would you give to young folks? In high school, in college, how to have a career they can be proud of

or how to change the world? I think be intellectually curious. Read outside your current beliefs and understand and read authors on their own terms. So the worst thing in the world to do is to read anything, especially work on fiction, but anything, and try to deduce the author's backgrounds or politics, whatever else. Read it on its own terms first, then you could reread it and do other examinations or whatever else, and also read a lot of history. So I started off reading books like Eric Hoppe's Bombs, four books on history going from the 1700s all the way to 1994. The last book is Age of Extremes. But I think understanding history gives you a bird's eye view of everything, sociology, economics, everything. So these big, sweeping historical books are really useful to know. Everybody should know basically what year, or at least what decade, serfdom was abolished, what decade, as slavery was abolished, what century Magda Carta was, when the Roman Empire fell, that's kind of debated when the Roman Empire fell. All these, I think, being a person with a general knowledge and general sense of history and whatever else just makes you more eclectic and interesting. And it's way better than just, like especially a lot of my Indian friends, you know, not just Indians, but the hyper-focus on you gotta specialize, and you gotta focus on math or engineering, whatever you wanna do.

giving yourself kind of a liberal arts education. I think there's a lot of power, too. Having the facts of history in terms of in time, when stuff happened, but also really powerful is knowing spatially, like the geography. There were a point on the map, and there's interesting dynamics that happen throughout history of all the different nations in Europe, of all the different military conflicts and the expansions, and the wars, and the empires and all that kind of stuff. It really puts into context how human history has led to the place we are today because all the different geopolitical conflicts we have today, even the politics of the day, is grounded in history. Maybe less so for the United States because it has a very young history. But that history, even for the United States, is still there, right, from the Civil War. And understanding that gives you context to when you tweet random stuff about this or that person or politician and so on. So, yeah, very true, very true. One of the regrets I have currently is I have perhaps been too focused on the 20th century in terms of history, the present and the 20th century. A lot of people write to me that there's a lot of lessons to be learned in ancient history as well. So not just even American history, but just looking farther and farther and farther back.

that it's the same human beings, right? Yeah, and also we're no smarter than them. We just have more crude knowledge in part because of them.

But they were just as clever as us. What do you think is the meaning of this whole experiment we have going on on Earth?

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 posterity, trying to do something worthwhile while on Earth, but also leaving something behind. It could just be relationships with friends or family. In the future, maybe having a family and kind of like leaving behind that sort of legacy, the little bits of yourself, but also, you know, them being able to learn the same way I have little bits of my parents and my grandparents in me. But then also, I think in a social sense, zooming out from just the individual and the family, 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 whatever else. That's really why I'm a socialist, you know? It's not about snapping your fingers and curing the world of everything in one go, but it is about, I think, giving our lives some sort of meeting and purpose. And you don't have to be a socialist to do that. You could just do it at the micro level on your own day-to-day interactions, but I just feel like life has no good meaning

without thinking of posterity in the future. And I have to say, thank you for doing so. Thank you for caring about the struggle for 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. Bosca, thank you so much for talking today. Thank you for all the work you do.

I can't wait to see what you do next. I appreciate it. And yeah, thanks for keeping an open mind to these conversations and to your audience too. It's nice to have a space where people can debate and think at length and don't have to worry about soundbite culture.

Thank you, brother. Thank you for listening to this conversation with Bosca and Cara. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Karl Marx. Democracy is the road to socialism. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.