Vivek Chibber What Is Socialism Today Doomscroll

TITLE: Vivek Chibber: What is Socialism Today? | Doomscroll CHANNEL: Joshua Citarella DATE: 2025-12-09 ---TRANSCRIPT--- This is an a effect of the college educated liberal left that doesn’t reflect realities about workers. It reflects their hatred of workers. It reflects their contempt of workers. The working class itself is moving along. It’s become multi-racial. It’s much more cosmopolitan. It’s much more inviting. It’s much more open. The problem is with the intellectuals that they cannot let go of this image. And it’s cuz they don’t want to let go of it because it deprivives them of their favorite talking points. by why they want to keep on poor people. That’s all it is.

Welcome to Doomscroll. I’m your host Joshua Citerella. My guest is VC Chibber, a professor of sociology at New York University. [music] He is the author of many books including Confronting Capitalism. He is the editor of Catalyst Journal and the host of the Confronting Capitalism podcast. People will argue that capitalism creates its own gravediggers. Is that true? Uh, in a very qualified sense, it’s true. and and maybe what do we mean by that specifically? So this was something that Markx and Engles wrote in the communist manifesto in 1848 and what they essentially were saying was that capitalism is brutal, exploitative, oppressive, but this system which seems to be so horrible is actually coming in with a time stamp and that time stamp is that the very people who it’s treating the worst are the ones who are going to overthrow it. right now. First of all, that for about 50 years that seemed to be coming true because all the way until the 1920s, Western Europe was royal with a series of revolutions, some successful, most unsuccessful, but still it was what you would call a revolutionary opening. And the grave was right there. It was just a question of pushing capitalism into it, right? Um, by the 19 by the middle of the century, that moment had gone. And so that grave had been filled up and nobody was going to go into that grave anymore. So in a very narrow sense, it’s false to say that it created its own gravediggers. It turned out that the people who were digging the graves just ended up lying down next to it really unhappy, tired, and unable to do anything about it. M but in a wider sense it’s true which is that capitalism you could say does create the the constituency that can a minimally civilize it and b maximally dismantle it which is the same class of people the workers they are the gravediggers in this sense which is that they’re the gravediggers of either free market capitalism which they can kill and has been killed more ambitiously perhaps of capitalism itself. The reason they’re the ones who are the gravediggers is that they’re the ones the only ones who have any kind of leverage against capital because capital depends on them to make its profits on no one else. There’s nobody. So this is why on the left today, if you romanticize the most marginal, the unemployed, the the people who are um disabled, the people who are oppressed for a variety of other reasons, you can romanticize them and there’s a moral urgency to their situation. In many ways, they might be worse off than the typical worker is. Sure. But that’s not why socialists have prioritized workers. The reason is that they have a social power that nobody else does. So even while they may not be the worst off, the most vulnerable, the most marginal, they are the ones who have the most power against capital and and an an interest in fighting against capital. Conceivably there could be a group of people who have a lot of power but every reason to cooperate and to go over the side of capital. What makes workers different is that they have capacity to fight and they have an interest in fighting which is that they’re the ones who routinely get screwed over by the capitalist class. And then finally they’re the majority. They are even today about yeah depending on how you measure 60 to 70% of the occupational labor force is workers. So fighting for them, you’re also fighting for the majority of the population and not just this or that hobby horse that you might have in the pantheon of the most marginal. Right? So in this sense, it is still an effective metaphor for who to go and try to organize. They’re the grave they’re certainly the gravediggers of neoliberalism. Absolutely. Potentially they could be the gravediggers of capitalism as well. H yeah I think it’s an important sticking point here that you know we can say that all of these marginalized or oppressed groups are equally morally deserving but there are reasons strategic reasons why we focus our organizational efforts on labor. Yeah. In fact um they have good reason to hitch their wagons to labor cuz being marginal actually makes you very ineffective politically. The way you become effective politically is by riding with the people who are affected which is which is the working class. That’s why Marx called it the universal class. The working class is going to defend itself by passing universal measures of justice, social insurance and healthcare etc. which benefits everyone especially those that don’t have the social power that working people do. And you know it goes without saying but let me just iterate reiterate those people who are disabled and who are really suffering are the workers. Rich people who are disabled don’t need our benefit, our sympathy, our pity. Yeah. It’s the people who are structurally in the position of having to work but cannot work because they’re disabled. Of course, they should be aligned with the working- class movement. The reason this has been hived off is the working class died. All these movements of the what’s called the marginal were taken over by social worker groups, by NOS’s, by middle class and they are in the business of charity, pity party parties and advocacy rather than organizing. So this kind of pity approach took over instead of what the left always did was to say to solve these problems of the disabled of the unemployed we have to bring them socialism. Well, this is the kind of uh coup in political common sense on the left where as a hazard of having retreated into what I would describe as enlightenment institutions, right? Let’s take the university for example, that one could uh conceivably take up uh a political charge um advocate for greater accessibility for some group and within the framework of the university there will be people there who are receptive to those things. They will be successful in advocating for them. If you take that political rationale outside of the university or outside of the framework of an enlightenment institution, we’re basically making moral pleas to a capitalist class that does not believe in the equality of all of these subjects whether they work or not or what group that they come from. They’re like, well, I’m in charge of this. It’s working pretty good for me and there’s no mechanism, there’s no coercive mechanism as to why I need to meet your demands. And so part I think part of the job that we have to do now is to kind of educate people as to why labor was the pivotal point over which we organized in the first place. You don’t have to convince labor of this very much. The reason it seems like an uphill battle is we’re constantly talking to the wrong people. People in these cultural institutions and media institutions and universities and such. And you have to remember that for most of them they are either themselves of a fairly privileged class position or aspiring into that class position there’s a class instinct and a class view that comes with that which is generally one of anywhere from indifference to disdain for the unwashed masses for the working class right so my view is if you just get ordinary people mobilized moving and doing things we’re seeing the first glimmerings of that now even though it’s through elections it’ll civilize the middle classes. Um because see a lot of these people in the university scene and the cultural scene who kind of fall into the pity party and the um advocacy kind of stuff. They’re not ideologically committed to it. It’s just it’s all they know. H uh so and they can be brought over to a more mobilizational universalistic class-based perspective if they see that it’s going to offer them something like in New York all these people who are in the who are in the finance sector and who go to work in Wall Street they will love free subways for themselves they’ll like it they’ll like [laughter] getting free child care because they’re both working and it is in New York childare really is expensive what you have to the people I worry more about is you know, the ideologues, the people who have a material interest in promoting identity politics, in promoting this cultural stuff because they work in that industry, whether it’s the entertainment industry, the media, or especially in universities. You have entire academic departments built around the specificity, the the historical unsolvability of race and of gender and such things like that. You’re not going to win those people over for a very long time because their bread and butter, their jobs depend on making sure that this issue is the issue and it cannot be related to universal problems of exploitation and um economic inequality and things like that. The mangoes, media, academics, NOS’s. Exactly. We’re here today to talk about your celebrated book, Confronting Capitalism. One of the arguments that you make towards the end of this book may have also been on a recent podcast uh confronting capitalism, same name, that neoliberalism is in crisis right now. Capitalism in general is not. So what do we as organizers take away from this crisis of neoliberalism? What are the opportunities that begin to open up in that space? Well, it’s important to be clear on what we mean by crisis here. Neoliberalism is in one sort of crisis, but not in any other sort of crisis. So before we even can ponder if capitalism is in crisis, you have to be clear in what sense and to what extent neoliberalism itself is in crisis cuz if if it is not in a thoroughgoing crisis, then it’s impossible to imagine that capitalism which is underlying neoliberalism could be. So the crisis of neoliberalism right now is what you might call an ideological one or a and even a political one. ideologically that it’s that the sense that people had for 40 odd years that this is the only game in town and you got to suck it up and accept it. that sense is no longer there and it’s been replaced a by some I feeling that change is possible but more than anything else a rage things that any advanced country ought to be able to take for granted just certain rights certain access to certain goods have been denied for two generations now while there is this vulgar and very obvious um celebration of wealth by people on the top who’ve only gotten richer and richer that has generated what you might call a crisis of legitimacy that it people really feel that it’s an illegitimate order. Yeah. And it’s not that they felt in say 2005 that it was legitimate. It was they felt it was unchangeable. So now the illegitimacy is married to a sense that things can move. M that has also led to some kind of political crisis and that’s a crisis of representation and control because there’s so much anger and there’s so much revulsion on the part of the general population about neoliberalism. The parties that have kept it in place have really found their support bases withering both in the center and on the left. Oddly enough, the right of a certain kind has benefited from it for reasons that we can get into. But that political crisis is really deep. There is a pretty widespread feeling among political elites now that the old way of doing things of keeping things secure is not going to work anymore. And they’ve been uh grasping and groping around for a solution to keep their corporate masters and their donors happy by keeping some measure of stability and control. In the United States, it was the the last it was the danger was represented by Bernie to a lesser extent by Trump. Trump was deemed to be the more acceptable um solution by for economic elites. So they fell in behind him, right? And both parties decided that the enemy number one was Bernie Sanders. They took different approaches to containing it. Yeah. But now even that is coming under doubt. So the crisis one is what we might call a political and legitimacy crisis of neoliberalism. That does not mean that it’s under any kind of real threat. That’s the problem. Because for the for this particular model of capitalism to be under threat, there needs to be something on the horizon that could replace it. Right now, the political formation that’s gained the most from this crisis has been the right and the far right. Yes, that’s what I was going to ask. So could they not replace neoliberalism with something else? And the answer is no. That what’s clear is that none of the farright parties, none of them, including Trump in the United States, have anything like a viable economic model that might replace neoliberalism. Even Trump’s tariffs, even all of his his talk about populism and all that. That is the populism is false. That much is clear. But the tariffs are a wrinkle within neoliberalism. and he’s rolled them back so far now that uh they are just that there there was a possibility there could be something more but there isn’t going to be that in Europe there’s no there’s no idea whatsoever on the part of the far right as to what it’s going to do so we’re in this the the Marxism used to have this saying that the old order is dying but the new one can new one cannot yet be born that’s where we are what gives me hope right now at this moment when things are quite dark in many ways is that the only viable the only political tend dependency political stream that has any alternative to this political crisis an alternative in the form of another economic and distributive model is is the social democratic left the class struggle left what I would call right and that’s why it’s nothing’s more important right now than to try to achieve clarity and some kind of cohesiveness within this left because this crisis could drag on for a very long time and politics abhores a vacuum at some point, they’re going to come up with some sort of economic resolution to this. And because it’s the right that’s going to do it, it won’t be friendly to the majority of the population. I don’t think fascism’s on the agenda. It’s an overused word, but something like a corporatist state-led economic model could be resorted to and that’s going to be very a huge step backwards for ordinary people, for working people. So it is a crisis yes of neoliberalism but there’s no reason yet to be complacent about it. You can’t for a second think that the resol resolution will be in the direction that the left might want. We’ve got roughly I’m just blocking this out. So 1980 to like let’s say 2020 or

2024. There’s four uninterrupted decades of neoliberal consensus between not just both American parties but basically all parties in European parliaments everywhere across the advanced world. That legitimacy is now coming apart. What one might expect is that deprivation from those basic goods uh social democracy by any other name would result in a renewed trade unionist movement some social democratic movement from the left. But what we’re seeing is this rise of right-wing populism. Uh I think one of the primary criticisms that we hear about these arguments is that a socialist society or a social democratic society even would be less competitive and less productive. How should we respond to criticisms like that?

Um if there is historical reasons to of course say that socialism would be less productive because where we saw socialist economies in Eastern Europe and in parts of Asia they were less productive. They were very good at what’s called allocative decisions of making sure everybody got something. They were much less good at what’s called dynamic efficiency, building wealth over time. Now, China has been an exception to that. But you can, you know, it’s an open question whether you can call China socialist after say 1992 or 1994 at all. Even if you thought as some people did that it was socialist in the past. the increasing reliance on markets and the opening up of markets in China you can argue you could say that’s more form of state capitalism and what it’s not important the very few people who are socialists would say China is the model you want to aspire towards in any case for a variety of reasons now if that argument is taken to apply to social democracies that they’re less efficient and less adept at creating wealth is absolutely false for the whole post-war era social democratic countries by and large outper performed the American economy in rates of productivity growth, in rates of GDP growth, in labor force participation. On every metric, they did as well or better than the United States. In the last, I would say 20 years, it’s become much more um of an even race. Some of them falling behind the US, others still maintaining their lead on a variety of dimensions. But even in that situation, there is no qualitative break between the efficiency and the productivity of the American economy and of social democracy large. So there’s zero reasons to believe that a movement away from a free market economy or a overwhelmingly market dominated economy like the United States would result in economic losses. That’s just no basis for that. M I would describe the current version of neoliberalism that we have now as asset price Keynesianism that you have a majority of the population where all of their wealth is in the market and then you can pump the valuation of those stocks rather than redistributing basic services. Yeah. Uh, one example of the kind of less competitive aspects of the current neoliberal economy as compared to a social democratic country in Europe is that we expend 2 to1 any other advanced country in the world on our healthcare. And so I think it’s a fair argument to make that the current version the economic arrangement we have now is less competitive than some of these more redistributive models. You had mentioned China previously. Um, I think we have a general kind of question of what we mean by the word socialism in 2025. Right? We’ve had kind of a hundred years of socialist struggle. Uh what what are we pointing to as socialists in 2025? Is it this Chinese style state management of the economy? Is it the Nordic model? Or what do we point to as an actually existing example? So in the United States, the term that’s now gained currency since 2016 is what’s called democratic socialism. And democratic socialism when you probe what it is intended to mean by its by its practitioners, right, is just social democracy, right? So when someone like Bernie Sanders or Zoran Mandani says I’m a democratic socialist, what they mean is some kind of readjustment of the mechanisms of distribution and redistribution within capitalism to tame it and to make it uh less uh um precarious and less oppressive to ordinary people. Now what does that mean institutionally? It means certain things that are taken to be privileges right now ought to become guarantees. Medicare for all was one very examp one one very good example. The idea behind Medicare for all is that it becomes a a citizenship right. Yes. Instead of see everything on the market when you have to buy it on the market to acquire it becomes a privilege. Everything that requires money its consumption is now a privilege. It’s only consumed by people who have the resources to buy it. Which means it’s the opposite of a right. means you have to have some kind of endowment to be able to get it. Right now, most basic necessities in American capitalism are acquired as privileges because if you don’t have the money, you don’t get them. So, um Medicare, oh sorry, medicine, housing, um if you think college education ought to be a right, as I do, then of course that’s a privilege. Transportation, all of these things. So what a democratic central democrat democratic socialist wants to do [laughter] is u make them into citizenship rights but without abolishing capitalism and that’s a kind of social democracy and I would even call it a centrist social it’s not very radical and it’s not very ambitious because many countries on the right have had these things within capitalism so it the ide the equating it with non-c capitalist forms of production is um It’s understandable because it is departing from certain principles of capitalism but it is entirely consistent with capitalism. So that’s democratic socialism. You I would call it kind of a centrist welfare state or social democracy. Sure. Then there’s a more ambitious version of social democracy you could have. And in that one it’s not just two things are different from this version the centrist version that I’m talking about. One is the scope of things that’ll be decommodified. Things will be made available as rights independently of the market. So they’re not commodities anymore. One is that the scope will increase beyond just medicine, beyond just transportation. You might just make housing free for all. You might make education from elementary to uh college through college free for all. You might turn to making aspects of consumption also free, certain basic necessities also free. Um those are all expanding the scope of what’s called the decommodified sector. But then the other dimension of it is um democratic socialists are friendly to unions but they don’t require unions for their vision to be true. Um a more expansive more ambitious social democracy would actually grow on the backs of unions. It would make it its a central mission to change legislation and to change economic policy in such a way that a makes it easier for people to organize themselves into unions and b makes it easier to sustain those unions once they’re created. I think that ought to be part of any acceptable and any desirable socialist movement today. It has to make people’s entrance into and the sustainability of unions a lot easier. These are both forms of social democracy and we’ve seen both of them flourish in the world for generations at a time. We know they’re possible. It’s just a question of rebuilding them if we can. Socialism itself is a different matter. Social democracy is something you fight for within capitalist property relations. So you’re still allowing private ownership of the means of production. You still have private wealth. You still allow profitm to be a central goal of enterprises, but you just find ways of marrying that to your vision of distribution and vision of social harmony. It’s not easy. That marriage is going to be a rocky one. But what we know is that it’s not impossible because it’s been sustained for decades now. Yeah. Yeah. Socialism is a different matter there. The fundamental difference will be you have done away with private property that the means of production now are socially owned either by the state itself or through various kinds of community institutions, public institutions, municipalities, local government, co-ops, things like that. But private ownership is gone. Now there’s going to be different models of socialism as well. Historically, the left took it for granted that once you have socialism, it’s going to be fully planned. That [laughter] was the first two generations of socialists, right? from Kowsky all the way into the 1930s. That’s still there. People still feel that. I’m not one of them, but people still feel that a acceptable socialist socialism should be a planned economy. The other uh model that’s out there is some kind of combination of markets that means non-planning. Markets necessarily means that you’re letting prices make the decisions and not planners. A marriage of markets with planning in other key sectors of the economy. That’ll be that is not capitalism or social democracy because it’s not private property. Private property will be gone. You’ll just have markets aiding the the work of planners. That we’ve seen for brief periods some versions of it in countries like Yugoslavia and Hungary. And I would argue even in the Soviet Union really you had a lot of markets that weren’t admitted to but but it was not built from the ground up. It was markets grafted onto a planning operation and planning apparatus. in my view that that didn’t have much of a chance to work because of that. So that’s the spectrum of visions of socialism that the left has had and continues to have ranging from milk toast weak social democracy which is what Sanders and Mandani are are fighting for which today is a huge leap. Make no mistake, it’d be great to have that world to a more ambitious Nordic style social democracy that Sweden and Norway and Denmark had. Mhm. Then shading over into market socialism and potentially if you think it’s viable, the movement into planned economies away from any kind of markets at all. Mhm. So social democracy, we’re talking about decommodifying the necessary goods for survival. Things like food, fuel, housing, education. You can get some parts of nutrition ought to be decommodified. I mean, look what what do we do in public schools? Kids get meals. That’s a demodification. Yeah. The school lunches are decommodification. You could have things like you could have mandani is talking about community grocery stores. You could have community kitchens as well. So it’s not like I don’t want to scare people. It’s not like somebody going to come to your home and say, “Here’s your slop for the day. [laughter] This is what you’re going to eat.” It’s not that. It’s that you should be bugs and bugs in the pod. No. [laughter] Right. The goulash for breakfast and coconut milk for dinner. No, it’s going to be people obviously should have the opportunity to cook for themselves by the But it’s just that you shouldn’t have to rely on something called money to know that you have the means to survive. Mhm. Mhm. European countries still have shades of and significantly decommodified healthare systems, transportation systems, and education systems. We know that’s possible now. We just need to extend it to utilities. We need to extend it to other forms of certain necessities. Media should be decommodified. Then we’ll see where we can go after that. And just to put a fine point on this, you know, American society is very capitalistic. We are driven by accumulating all these profits. We think of ourselves as being super productive. We’ve already established that there’s a few questions to ask in that process. If the socialized version of healthare, something like the NHS, is less expensive overall, Americans are spending 2:1 on healthcare, why is it that we, as the most competitive capitalist country, do not have a national health service in the United States? Very simple. Um, the corporate community hasn’t allowed it. And it’s really interesting. Um the I want to be clear about why listeners may not know why is something like the NHS or the French system or the German or the Canadian system as you said more competitive or more efficient. Um it’s because they the ironically a marketbased privatelyun medical system creates bureaucracy and this has been always the idea has been that’s socialism. Socialism is bureaucracy. Exactly. What’s happened is that the publicly run ones prune away and reduce bureaucracy. The private ones multiply bureaucracy. And that is the largest and growing component of costs in the United States in the medical system is bureaucracy. So how can that be? It’s very simple. When you walk into an American hospital, there has to be an army of clerks to figure out which insurance you are um carrying for yourself and what the uh coverage is that comes with that. And then there’s a bureaucracy on top of that whose job it is to make sure that you might not make sure but to try to deny you access to that insurance by seeing whether or not there’s wiggle room to come out of it. Um the fastest growing component over the past 40 years of costs in the United States in the medical system has been administrative costs. Right. Right. So why don’t these governmentr run systems have the administrative costs? is because when you walk into one of their hospitals, there’s no there’s one insurance company that’s the government, right? So, you walk in, you show them your card, which is your citizenship card, your residency card, and they go, “Cool, now go and there you go. There’s your medical care.” Secondly, over there, because the government has to pay, has to cover those costs. Government negotiates with hospitals and so hospitals have to um justify themselves to government as to why they’re charging what they’re charging. Whereas in the United States, you get a collusion between the insurance companies and the hospitals to collectively raise costs. So the the irony here, this is just one instance in which there’s many ways in which removing market actors can actually lower costs and you can actually make things more efficient. In Europe, the reason you had all these gains in the medical system was the labor movement fought for it. Right? In Canada, it was the social democrats who fought for it. They had the social leverage and the power to do so. in the United States because you’ve never had a labor party because you’ve never had trade unions as strong and as powerful with the leverage that the Europeans have. You haven’t had the social weight to counter what the employers want. The employers have never wanted national health care system. Ironically, their own costs would go down. If the government picked up the bill for their workers hospital costs, corporations would have to actually pay less to their workers. So it seems irrational. Why don’t they agree to it? The best the most compelling explanation is that once you allow the idea in where that people have access to certain goods as a right, where do you stop that? And for for capitalists, for employers, that’s a big problem, right? Secondly, you know what one reason you you fight like hell to hold on to your job and take all kinds of crap from your employer is that the job is your lifeline. Yeah. Now, if you start getting certain social goods, necessities as a matter of right, you’re going to be less terrified of your employer. If you’re less terrified of your employer, the negotiations at the workplace for wages, for benefits, for all these other things change where the employer isn’t able to impose unilaterally their preferences onto their employees because the employees say, “Hey, I might get fired, but I’ll have unemployment insurance. I’ll have health my health coverage. I’ll have housing. I’ll have transportation.” So that changes the balance at the workplace too. So even though there are clear and direct economic benefits to employers of having socialized medicine, there also indirect political and economic costs that come to them. And not only have American employers resisted national healthcare, you see European employers when the opportunity has presented itself to push back against the health systems they do have. right in their minds everywhere there’s this idea that we have we can learn to live with the welfare state we can learn to live with unions but a perfect world is one without either of these these two things and that’s what the US has been in the position of being able to stave it off the European capitalists are now in the position of reaching for it after 50 60 years of having to live with all these things that they hate to watch part two of this episode. You can support the show on Patreon. I was talking to Catherine a few days ago and we were talking about this theme of competition. And I I completely agree that we want to tamp down competition in the labor market, but we were also saying that there’s some element of just human sociality that like competition is important. And she’s like, yeah, we’re going to have a lot of bake sales. Like there’s going to be all sorts of little things. What is sports if it’s not people’s competitive spirits? And why would you want to do away with that? want to, you know, these the right likes to make fun of participation trophies and things like that. Absolutely they should. What nonsense you [laughter] should have competitive sports. They should be winners and they should be losers. It’s just that people shouldn’t be made to feel like if they lost. Deprived of healthcare, fuel, education. Absolutely. But, you know, you have pickup games in basketball. You have you play table tennis or you play tennis with your friends. You don’t become enemies, but you enjoy the competition. this notion that everybody just nobody should be made to feel like they lost just it’s just all you’re going to do is repel people when you go like that. So that’s a very good example of how there’s certain domains and certain forms of competition uh that you should not only want you should cultivate it. You know you should want it. It brings out the best in us and it it doesn’t turn everybody into an enemy by any means. You will also you I’m an advocate for having certain level of competition also in the product market. Oh yeah. And a certain level in the labor market as well. You just make it less um you make it less uh potentous for people’s lives. The the implications shouldn’t be as as as huge as they are in capitalism. I I think any kind of social democratic economy or market socialist economy will have competition on both those domains. Yeah. As we get into these what I would describe as infr questions, uh, one of the postures that we hear a lot in the last few years is something like trade unionism is a bad strategy because the workers are too racist to organize with each other. How should we understand criticisms like this? It’s garbage. It has no basis in reality whatsoever. Look, workers are not born racist. Workers are made racist and they’re made racist because of the social conditions that they’re in. Part of those social conditions are the labor market and they’re forced to compete with workers of other ethnicities. But also the social conditions is the wider civic and political culture that they inhabit. Now just compare the labor market today and the degree of racism within it with the labor market say in 1955 in the United States and degree of racism within that. In both cases, you had a ethnically and racially diverse working class. And in the but in the 50s, there was an enormous degree of racism within the white working class towards blacks, but also to towards non-whites more generally. In spite of that, 35 to 65 is a period of trade union growth. In spite of that, you had black trade union leaders rising to the front ranks of the labor movement and of course Latinos in spite of all that. And that was a period in which you had the afflloresence of multi-racial trade unionism even inside the United States. That was that was when racism was at its worst. Now compare that to today. You got a labor movement that’s flat on its back. But just look at the successful drives for unionization and even for contracts the last five years whether it’s Starbucks whether it’s the Amazon warehouses whether it’s the UAW all of these are multi-racial workers all of them Amazon and UAW they reflect the working class in general in which whites may be a majority but at best a tiny majority. If you just go back and look at the newspaper articles and the reportage and the uh self-reporting of the workers in those, they came up against many obstacles in the Amazon drive, in the UAW contract negotiations. White racism wasn’t one of them. What that tells you is that you can’t take racism as this undying, everpresent, unchangeable fact about the consciousness of white workers. The civic and the political culture that they inhabit today is profoundly different from what it was 50, 60 years ago. And that culture is one that’s moved in the direction of more openness, more inclusiveness, and less racism. That right there tells you in the depths of racist America, you had multi-racial trade unions. Today, you have where you have unionization drives, you don’t even see that racism anymore. This is an affect of the college educated liberal left that doesn’t reflect realities about workers. It reflects their hatred of workers. It reflects their contempt of workers. The working class itself is moving along. It’s become multi-racial. It’s much more cosmopolitan. It’s much more inviting. It’s much more open. The problem is with the intellectuals that they cannot let go of this image. And it’s because they don’t want to let go of it because it deprivives them of their favorite talking points about why they want to keep on poor people. That’s all it is. There’s a famous example as well. You will probably know this history better than I do, but the Philadelphia Doc Workers Union, for people who are maybe not familiar with this history, one of the largest, most powerful unions in the 20th century, my understanding, my recollection is that when they first organized, the unions were racially segregated. Um they then a generation later became the psalters organizers that helped to integrate the next generation of unions. Absolutely. Look, you you have to bring the people together and once they’re together and they fight together, they live together, they grow together, you see the racism dissipating. It just I don’t see how it got to the point where people calling themselves leftists in the United States think racism is a fact of nature. This never happened, Josh. And up until the 1970s and ’ 80s, if you saw a black intellectual on the left in the United States, their entire intellectual project was to show the temporality of racism, the fact that it’s socially constructed, the fact that it’s historically recent, the fact that it can be fought against. This is this all changed with this horrible book by Cedric Robinson called Black Marxism, which is touted as this great uh um intervention into race politics, which tries to marry anti-racism to Marxism. That’s absolutely false. That was the book that actually opened the door to saying racism is an onlogical fact. He uses that term. It’s an onlogical fact about global history, not just American history. Where racial animosity, racial antipathy has an independent existence of its own. And it wormed its way into everything. And the fault of the Marxist tradition is that it thought that could be changed. It thought that could be socially re-engineered. And in fact they didn’t realize that it is a objur fact about and this is what you now have in the college educated left because works like this are touted as the the texts of anti-racism. But what they in fact did was they enshrined a permanent tribalism within the intelligencia until we come out of this kind of stuff. What’s going to it’s not that we will not allow a left to develop. It’s that the rest of the culture is leaving the left behind. Right? because they’re moving on to their lives and the left is still holding up a banner saying racism Uber. Right. Right. That has been a kind of guiding principle of this show is that you know previous to Doomscroll I did all of these interviews with mostly young men but young people from all different corners of the political spectrum and a thing that I was made acutely aware of is that we are just hemorrhaging people. Like there’s a sense that the left is growing if you look at how many people are joining DSA and you know tiny bumps in union growth. But generally, I think if we look at the 2024 election as the the biggest kind and most preeminent example, um we’re just losing people from this coalition. So, we really do have to address these questions that people come to the left with and are given insufficient answers. Uh and they are frankly not persuaded. So, I’m going to ask you a few questions about the 1970s and 1980s, in particular, what happened to the American economy and the left in general at that time, but I don’t want to lose track of this other uh other topic. You mentioned Amazon. Uh what we will frequently hear from people who are curious about the left, maybe thinking of uh listening to some media, maybe they can be persuaded about how they vote or organize, we hear things like Amazon is logistically efficient. It’s cruel to its workers. We should get rid of these big companies like Amazon and Walmart. Um cruelty to workers isn’t the monopoly of big companies. Um in fact historically big companies have been um a better place for endowing workers with decent jobs and higher wages than small companies. Right? And the reason is should be obvious and this is why political economy matters and you shouldn’t just do vibes and culture. Um big companies have huge profit margins and they can be parlayed into higher wages and better work conditions for for workers. Smaller companies are in much more ruthlessly competitive markets. they have smaller margins and they survive by just turning the screws on their workers. So the answer isn’t big versus small companies per se. Again, the answer is mitigating doing away with the competitive threat of markets, which is why you try to in socialism, you won’t have markets be playing as central a role as they do in capitalism. And even if they are central, less will depend on them for people’s lives than now. Uh but within capitalism the idea is not simply to do away with mean companies. The idea is to organize workers to fight better against companies. There are companies that have to be done away with. Sweat shops should not exist. They should be done away with. But um the primary goal should be of developing productivity to the point where companies can actually afford to give better wages. Secondly, then putting workers in a place where they can fight for those better wages and better conditions. And then re-engineering the economy so that the economy is one that’s geared towards sustainability, towards a more friendly environment for workers and for a more friendly environment for organizing those workers. Amazon per se is not the problem. So, we’ve spent a long time talking about the economy in this episode. What was the calculation debate and who won it? The calculation debate was a debate among economists mostly playing out I would in the 30s although really it went the full debate starts around 1920 and goes to about 194546 and it was a debate about whether a planned economy could actually work. The word calculation is in there because the challenge coming from the critics was how do you calculate what’s to be produced and the prices at which it’s to be provided to people the quantities and the relative prices of all things. In a the challenge was that look in a capitalist economy the market decides all this. Sure. People come to the market and they are they are willing to put up a certain amount of money for a good and pro producers come to the market and they’re willing to accept a certain money price for the good and the two haggle with each other and you reach some kind of equilibrium between them and nobody has to know everything that what’s going on. They just have to know what their wants and what their uh capacities are whether you’re a producer or you’re a consumer. The problem in planning is that you’ve done away with those prices. Now planners have to figure out what to produce and in what quantities to produce it relative to other goods. That’s called opportunity cost. How are you going to do that? Now this was it was van’s and then later on hayek who u issued this challenge and the protagonists on the other side were primarily Oscar lung abaler who is a economist and then Maurice do also took part in this. This was the first iteration of that debate. Yeah, the debate on socialism and planning really has occurred in the west in two periods. One was this 30 to 40 45 and the other was the 70s and ’ 80s when the new left came up and it was thinking about these things and hopefully there’ll be a third one now if we can get our act together. I’m hopeful. So that that c that debate was over can planners replace the market and the fundamental challenge coming from the Austrians. These were all was called Austrian economists vanis and height. The fundamental uh challenge was you have an information problem. How will you possibly know a what people want and b in what quantities they want it and then c um what how to produce over time in the future. And um the response on the part of of uh Learner and Lung was that well we know we think planners can replace the market because the general equilibrium model that market proponents work with which is the Walzian market is a model in which equilibrium is acquired through the means of a fictitious entity called the auctioneer and And the auctioneer is a an enti an an entity that sort of presides over all the haggling that’s going on and helps them reach equilibrium amongst themselves. And um L said well the planner can be the auctioneer. So just like so in in essence they were saying that markets market models assume a planner and what socialism is going to do is institute a planner. So that was one very powerful element of the debate. It seemed at the time like they had won a rhetorical victory in that but you said who won. Uh I think the Austrians won that debate because in the 20th century yeah because what ended up happening was that in fact planners were not able to acquire the information and not able to make the appropriate quantities in their calculations or make the adjustments on the quantities were wrong. So I agree. I agree that they won the 20th century. Are they still winning in the 21st? I think so. And the reason for that is the debate itself. Um you can think of the problems of planning in I think along two dimensions. One is the information problem which is Alec Nove argument when he wrote the economics of feasible socialism. a very influential book came out in ’ 83 I think it was in which he said the problem with planning you have to produce something like 354,000 different goods and how can planners ever first of all get accurate information about so many things and then process that information and get it back out to people to the producers. So that’s a problem of information. Can we know what’s to be produced with what quantities etc. The response to that on the part of the left was to say well now you have supercomputers certainly but supercomput and that’s true with supercomputers you can solve a lot of these problems but I think if you look at how planning actually went down there’s a second problem which is not covered nor is I do I think it’s solvable by supercomputers and that’s what you might call the incentives problem. Okay and that basically is that when you’re planning and you’re issuing orders the way a plan works is it’s called a principal agent problem. The planner issues orders to various establishments as to what they’re supposed to make, when it’s supposed to be delivered. Um, and they’re held accountable. If you don’t deliver, there’s going to be some kind of reckoning. Sure. Okay. So, that requires that each establishment also be given the inputs that it needs if it’s going to be held accountable for producing the outputs. Each input is the output of somebody else. Yeah, they make that. so that they have to be told what to make and they have to rely on inputs coming into them. Okay. So there are like hundreds of thousands of moving parts to each plan. Now suppose in 10% of them something goes wrong and the appropriate inputs don’t reach in time but the person making the good who was supposed to get that input is still accountable for producing that good. Inevitably what they do start doing is hedging their bets in two ways. First of all, they give improper information to the planner because they’re worried that if I don’t make good on my promise, I’m going to be taken to task. So, they under reportport or over report, hedging their bets in some way, which means now the information problem. You’re getting wrong information. It’s not a question of getting processing the information you have. People are willfully giving you wrong information because they’re incentivized to protect themselves by doing it. The second thing they do is not just give wrong information. They start hoarding a lot of the inputs that they’re getting in case there’s a shortfall 2 years from now when something goes wrong. Right? Okay. So that means then that the actual quantities being produced are out of step with what the plan asked for. Okay. Then that what happens is planners learn that this is what’s happening. So planners try to outf fox what the establishments are doing. So they adjust their planning demands on the assumption of a certain rate of lying. This is what happened in the Soviet Union. Okay. That means then the signals that the establishments are get getting are not actually what the plan wants. They are discounted expression of what the plan wants or an inflated version of what the plan wants. So there’s systematic deception from both sides coming in and the actual goods produced are out of equilibrium with what is needed in the economy because people are trying to save themselves. Okay, this is an inevitable unavoidable fallout of uncertainty in the delivery of goods which generates problems of information which cannot be solved by supercomputing. Mhm. Now what are the odds that something like this actually happens? I think it’s 100%. Imagine in an open economy something like COVID happening or tariffs trumps happening in a global economy when so much is integrated or even in a national economy when individual governments have some power over what they’re doing. state governments, municipal governments, there’s so much uncertainty that if if the entire economy depends on planners, you’re basically guaranteeing that sooner or later there’s going to be a a ongoing battle between managers of establishments and the planners each trying to outwit the other because neither trust the other. To my mind, that’s an incentive problem which creates an information problem. But even if you had perfect information, the uncertainty coming from the delivery of goods, the breakdown in goods would create what I what I think of as the incentive problem, which is managers of establishments have an incentive to actively disobey the plan. I don’t think there’s a resolution to this. And things like handwaving and saying, well, no, democratic enterprises and real democracy, none of that solves this because people will rationally choose to be deceptive. Mhm. Mhm. So there’s two there’s two arguments that I want to touch on here. Um what do you make of these uh on the one hand the theory that the penalties in the Soviet Union were so excessively high that it became an incentive structure for people to be deceptive and to uh misrepresent the knowledge information inputs that went into the planned economy. On the other hand, we have actually existing examples now, things like Google, Amazon, Walmart that can predict price that literally if you go through some Walmart locations, they will modulate prices in real time and update them based on you know uh further upstream supply chain issues. How um how do you think of those real actually existing examples now and how they kind of reframe the calculation debate? Well, to go to your first question about the Soviet Union, the truth is there was very little punishment in the Soviet Union of economic managers because no all production would have shut down if you started punishing people on being deceptive, on being deceitful. In fact, what was called the plans in the Soviet Union were just notional exercises. Essentially, what this what what would happen is they would announce a plan and then they would have to learn to live with the fact that nobody was actually following the plan. [laughter] And if they had gone out and punished everybody who was not following the plan, they would have shut down the economy. So what they learned to do was figure out how to outmaneuver managers who were systematically lying or um not following the orders. That’s what happened. The punishments that were given out were often times for symbolic effect for legitimacy reasons and such. But in no way or form was um was there a systematic and and consistent punishment of the the managers. Now as for your um question about things like Google and Amazon and all that, yeah, I think it that does help things. I I I think that that’s why I said we should distinguish information problems from incentive problems. Okay. a great much more of the information problem today is resolvable compared to 60 or 80 years ago. Yeah. And computing will definitely help with that. It’s not just Amazon. There’s the entire just in time production system today that the auto industry uh is committed to that warehousing is committed to. It’s based on very precise and timely delivery of information. Yeah. And we can make those adjustments all the time. The difficulty is this that they’re empowered and they are committed to solving information problems in one firm or one vertically integrated firm which is just a tiny part of the entire economy. So when you try to scale upwards from that into the rest of the economy it becomes much more daunting. And that’s why to my mind planning in 40 50% where you it’s easier to predict um demand supply problems. Mhm. Warehousing might be one of it. We should start with those. But now imagine trying to plan for things like restaurants and eeries and hotels. Um it’s just a lot lot harder then. So remember the parameters of the debate. It was a planned economy. Not planning in this sector or that sector, but the economy as a whole. Anecdotal evidence for Google or Amazon isn’t going to help you solve that problem. You have to think of representative enterprises across sectors. That’s very daunting. Should we reject the Leninist party model? Um, you know, it’s an it’s one of those qu questions to which um everybody has their own pet answer depending on how you define Leninist party model. Okay. [laughter] So if you define it really narrowly then yeah you’re not going to be able to have that model today because that model was a very secretive very militaristic model based on um very tight control structures and mechanisms within the party and that was attuned to parties in a pre-democratic era. Remember western European countries didn’t get democracy really till the 20s and by that the Leninist model was incubated between 1890 and 1915. Mhm. So for this world today that narrow definition of leninis models can’t really work I think what do we mean in this kind of broader definition then broader definition is I think I think it require I think we do require a party which is like the leninist party based in the working class so it is in that sense a vanguard of the class right but vanguard doesn’t mean pointy-headed professors imagining what the workers [laughter] want and and telling them vanguard means what lenon meant was the class conscious element that the most politically active advanced most class conscious workers really being entrusted and empowered to organize the party. So that’s one. Yeah. Second is I think you have to have an ideological coherence to the party. You have to stand for something and now that might seem trivial but standing for something means then you have to have trained cadre that go out to people and sell that vision. not not people in general but your constituency which is the working class. So I think you do have to have a platform and a program of what you and it has to come from the class and it has you have to have cadre who then help proitize to the rest of the class and then if you’re going to do that you have to have discipline you have to have internal party you have the party has members have to be accountable to the rest of the party which means you can’t just be in the party and advocate for anything you want and when somebody says hey that’s not what we’re fighting for you scream dictatorship my democratic rights are you go on a Twitter thread or something. Yeah. There has to be some degree of discipline. So now that necessarily means you’re going to be a lot more selective than the parties today. But to my mind, that means you shouldn’t think of everything as coming from that party. You can have what used to be called mass fronts. You can have mass organizations like I think the DSA is actually a mass organization thinking it’s a party. Yeah, you can have a mass organization that lets people in on much more fluid grounds, which is much more open, which doesn’t have criteria like that. But I think that actual direction, I don’t see any way that you will not have to rely on a more discipline on a more internally coherent party formation of some kind. If that’s what we mean by the Leninist party and I think it does have a it will be a lineal descendant of the Leninist model, then I think you have to have it. Um, but if it seems believe something narrower, then I mean that’s just a talking point. We’re never going to get that again. It’s just not going to happen. I think people generally mean is like is there an intellectual vanguard? Is there some role for intellectuals in this movement properly understood? intellectuals in the you know Lanninest and Grchian sense is just people people who do the thinking and the debating and the try to come up with an articulate program that expresses the views and the the the lives of the people who they’re trying to organize you have to without that what are you you know somebody has to set the agenda somewhere every party somebody is getting the setting the agenda those people are by definition intellectuals if by intellectuals you mean like professors and things like that then No, those should just be thought of as guns for hire. When [laughter] you need someone to, you know, help you with a a model, how do I run a transportation? You bring in the economist who do transportation. They’ll be happy to come. They want to be relevant. But in the people who are setting the agenda, you might have some professors, but this criteria, the selection criterion will be people who are have given their life to the organization, who are committed to it, and who are in touch with the people we’re trying to organize. and who were therefore also part of the conveyor belt to those people. While we’re in the middle of talking about socialism and Lenin and scaring the pants off the normies, um why why are we talking about these methods of leftwing organization now? Um what is it about, let’s say, the golden age of liberalism that made it so functional and what happened in neoliberalism that made it relatively dysfunctional, right? like why should we even be concerned about organizing on the left if capitalism is producing all of this surplus and productivity and raising uh material conditions for everyone? Yeah, it the the reason is that it’s not making them available to everyone. The history of capitalism is that it produces a lot. It increases wealth, but it doesn’t automatically make it available to people in a way that will improve their lives consistently. And that when it has done that it’s required some kind of leverage on the part of workers. That leverage has typically come from organizations of the workers most importantly trade unions but around the trade unions have also been a bevy of other kinds of organizations like community organizations tenants organizations and of course political parties. So without that what we’ve seen without that power without that that kind of social support on the part of workers a lot of stuff is produced wealth increases but it all goes into the pockets of the wealthy without the organizing you’re not going to get wealth benefiting everyone it’s going to be wealth overwhelmingly benefiting the rich. Some some does trickle down. It is true some does trickle down but that can’t be our standard. Our standard has to be with the wealth and the resources that we have, how well could we do? That that’s always been the vision of the left. Yeah. There’s some statistics that I won’t recall exactly off the top of my head, but like 80% of wealth generated or 80% of productivity gains, they’re all captured by the 1%. in the last uh 45 years that is that is uh all the income generated about 80% has gone to the top 1% about close to 100% of the wealth has gone to them it’s almost all of it so for longer than I’ve been alive yeah the overwhelming lion share almost all of the wealth generated has gone to the 1% yeah because remember wealth is net so you might have if you’re a worker you might have some stock holdings you might have pensions and all that but then you also have your debt and mo the working classes is overwhelmingly in debt. So if you look at the wealth generation, it’s over 95 90 to 95% has gone to the 1%. Income generation is less. It’s 65 70% or something. I forget the number. What about some of these liberal arguments? We used to be we used to hear it a lot more that this is the best time to be alive, right? It’s like if you’re rich. If you’re rich. Well, capitalism is raising the living standards. It’s uh you know, a rising tide floats all the boats. And this used to be a question that we heard within the context of the United States or the advanced world. And they’ve kind of moved the goalpost now where well it’s maybe not that case. You know, we have declining life expectancy in the US. It’s not the best time to be alive here, but it’s the best time to be alive globally. So this idea is still true. Is capitalism raising the living standards of everyone in the world? No. Uh these are very difficult questions because how do you measure living standards? Right? So if you look at usually you have to end up using very thin measures because you need to have comparable observations of those things across cultures and it’s usually something like um a real wage of some kind or employment levels and such things. Life expectancy. Yeah. And the thing is no doubt about it life expectancy has gone up most everywhere. Oddly enough the US is the one country among the rich countries where that’s not happened. it’s actually gone down and it it’s concentrated on white men actually that it’s gone down but yeah it has gone up uh in most of the world and wages um have gone up dep depending on whether or not you include China uh if you [laughter] take China out of it’s a much more mixed story but uh two things one is that wages are only one part of saying people’s lives have improved because what’s also happened is that procarity has gone up and the hours worked has had to go up and a great deal of the the asurances people had in their lives of certain basic commodities in the middle decades has been taken away from them. So their insecurity has actually gone up. Um and the second thing is again what are you comparing it to? If if you’re just if all you’re saying is that the living standards have continued to go up and that’s all you’re saying at least to one conclusion. But then you’re comparing it to zero. But if you’re comparing it to what living standards could be under a more humane, more just regime, then there’s a lot actually to be embarrassed about because every time you say wealth is increasing rapidly and you showed that people at the bottom are having their fortunes go up by this much, then you’re Maria Antinet, right? [laughter] You’re just saying, look, you have some crumbs. You have nothing to complain about. But I just think I mean, look, if it were the case that things were improving in the way that the right says, you would not have this global crisis right now of the far right gaining. Oh, sure. Of the electoral system being royal, uh, people opting out. You know, Europe is looking like the US now where people are just opting out of voting alto together and it’s all people at the bottom because they think everything’s stacked against them. It’s kind of I think obscene to in a time like this to be saying pointing to them and saying, “Hey, look, you could be eating cake.” Do socialists want to smash the state? [laughter] I don’t think so for a variety of reason. Again, this comes down to the word, right? What do you mean by smash the state? If you mean dismantle the state, well, obviously that’s ridiculous. Um, unless you redefine it. So, Lenin did this bit of tom fooler tom foolery. There moments when he says, well, we’ll have an administrative apparatus, but that’s not the state. [laughter] Okay, you redefined it. Okay, you know, are you going to have a lawmaking institution that enforces the laws or not? Uhhuh. Okay, that’s a state. Like it or not, that’s a state. Right. Yeah. So, no, there’s no qu here’s what’s funny about that. So, a lot of the people who say we want to smash the state are also the people who say we want a planned economy. Well, who’s doing your planning? [laughter] You can’t It can’t just be every single workers co-op making its own plan because then you just have a market. Yeah. Yeah. So, if somebody is making and then enforcing plans, well, that’s a state, like it or not. That’s a centralized authority with law makingaking power and enforcing power. So, you have to choose. Do you want a centrally planned economy or do you want to smash the state? If you want a planned economy, you’re going to have to have a state. And in these very general broad orientations on the left, what are some of the differences between socialism and anarchism? How are these things different? These are all words. I mean, most of the anarchist movement was part of the socialist movement and always was because it was part of the labor movement, the working-class movement. they were just much more um committed to a kind of a bottomup approach to workplace governance, not just organizing but governance where CNT for example. Exactly. Uh they called themselves syndicicalism syndicists or later in the United States or the Russia council communists and things like that I think it’s a noble and a very important tradition within the left. Um and then the second thing of course was having a much more ambitious program of the dismantling the state. Now the thing of it is they didn’t really get take power anywhere. One of the things that power does is it’s it’s a kind of um um cleansing mechanism. It disabuses you a lot of fantasies that you might have because they’re practical exigencies of holding power. Yeah. which if you’re open to it and if you’re learning should force you to rethink your priors. I mean that’s what I think we should be doing now about central planning. When I say I think planning can’t work is because I I tried really hard to study Soviet history and the history of Eastern Europe and say with an open mind could this have made been made better or are there intrinsic unresolvable problems in it. So that experience now if we are in so inclined gives us the resources to recalibrate our expectations about what is possible and therefore also what is desirable. Anarchists never had that that opportunity because they never actually were able to take power in any reasonable in any significant way anywhere else. So they I think while their aspirations are noble, a lot of it is just fantasy that it they they take what they want to do in an enterprise and they think it can be scaled up to the social formation as a whole or the economy as a whole or the political economy and I don’t think it can be. Well, one of the things that people say of this kind of anarchistic tendency um is that power itself is corrupting and what we want to do is not take power, we want to dismantle power. How should we understand those types of criticisms? Again, I I see what’s behind it is that they they think that um there are two ways of looking at power. One is that it’s a learning thing. You figure you see that certain aspirations that you had were never going to be realistic. And now that you are you are you have the responsibility of actually enacting change, you have to weigh your aspirations against what’s in fact practicable and what’s real out there. Okay. Um the other thing is that once you get power you just want to hold on to it no matter what and you you become a privileged cast. Sure. Now what anarchists often do is they confuse the first for the second. That is to say they they are correct that power does corrupt in the second sense that I have power and I want to hold on to it. But then they think that everything that a powerful entity does which doesn’t align with their views is because of that moral corruption rather than the possibility that those initial views and aspirations were never realistic to start with. M and that leads to what’s kind of an ultralleftism and a purity politics and you find yourself not only continuing with the view that I want to stay out of power. You never get power because you become so marginal and your demands are so outlandishly unrealistic that you can’t attract other people to it. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where you’re because you hold the the um the light of revolutionary purity. You’re small at any given moment and you see that the rest of the people who succeeded in getting power became corrupted because they got power and then you say okay so now we’re going to not seek that power now. We’re going to continue to be the movement against the power. The problem is because your demands are so crazy, you never get beyond a very small section. Some of them therefore lose interest in that very tiny thing. The others actually see that as a vindication of the correctness of their views because they’re always so far ahead of the masses. They just need to bring them along in some way. So when somebody says, “Well, this is unrealistic,” they’ll say, “Ah, but Martin Luther King said that his thing was unrealistic, too.” Lenin also thought what he was doing was unrealistic. But look, they tried and it worked. We just have to keep trying. And that becomes this neverending ongoing embrace of marginality and politically useless. On this topic of the ultralleft, um people will, you know, undecided swing voters, for example. Um they’ll come up to someone on the left and they’ll say, “Well, I’m interested. You know, I’m suffering in my workplace. I’d like to have an increase in my wages. What is the program that you’re proposing?” And people will sometimes say, “Well, in the new society, it’s going to be so good. We can’t even imagine what it’s going to be like. I can’t describe it because it’s beyond our comprehension. Our our ideas of what we can do is constrained by capitalism already. Yeah. We’ve been talking pretty nitty-gritty about social democracy. One of the things I’d like to cover is the Midner plan for people who are unfamiliar with that. Can you give us an introduction to what the Midner plan was, how that might be similar to some of the proposals on the table today? The Miter plan was proposed by a Swedish economist uh named Maidner in the mid 1970s and it was basically a plan to gradually use union funds to take over the stock ownership of publicly traded corporations. So at the end of it, the unions would own the corporations. That was the idea. You might call it kind of a slow walk into socialism. And honestly, it wasn’t so much driven by a far-left ideological agenda. They were trying to solve a practical problem, which is that Swedish firms, but partly because of the success of the social democratic model were a wash in investable surpluses. And they the those surpluses were going to be used in ways that undermined the the political strategy of the unions over time. And they were also driving the the trade union movement apart because some of those investable funds would go against what was collectively bargain between workers and the firms that it would be funneled as extra wage increases for the workers in those firms which would then undermine what the wage collective bargaining had initially been the exanti bargains. So the the idea was to to make those funds publicly available and to use the pension funds of the the unions to take over them. And um what it ended up doing was triggering a massive response on the part of the Swedish capitalist class who saw this as in fact what it was which is a slow walk into socializing property and it was rolled back very rapidly thereafter. Nothing like it is on the agenda right now on the left. There’s nothing. Well, [laughter] if you take it a you know, it’s on my agenda in the narrow sense. It required unions using their monies to take over stocks. And you know, you need unions for that. Mhm. Mhm. In the I the unions that do exist in the US have billions, hundreds of billions, but that’s a trivial amount of money compared to the size of the US economy. So I I think what’s positive in that is what I would like to retain is this idea that there needs to be a significant um capture of the economy by public institutions and specifically in my opinion to get investment going again. I I really think they will not be we I don’t see any any mechanism that allows us to get the rate of investment up again in this economy unless a public institution directly starts investing on its own. You know what nationalizations do is they take over existing assets. Okay, that’s fine. You should do that. But what you need to do is create new assets. That’s investment. And that’s what public institutions need to do. So we gave this definition for capitalism before. I think this comes from Boscar Sara, a writer I admire very much. He’ll say it’s got three main points, right? Private ownership and the means of production. Yes. Wage labor and sometimes there’s ways around this, but generally reliance on markets to obtain the necessary goods for survival. this aspect of the Midner plan that was going to use pension funds to buy uh basically the stocks of like the biggest companies. Um does that begin to dilute private ownership and that’s why the proposal was threatening to capitalism as a whole and that it was finding a way for the workers to at least in part collectively own uh the means of production. And just to be very very clear about this, this was a progressive uh uh process that every year they’d purchase I think 1% more and it had a road to um I don’t know how high they expected to get it, but like incrementally clawing back uh ownership of the means of production from the capitalists. Yeah. And that’s why there’s no reason to get too hung up on the miner plan itself. Did they did they throttle it at a certain like oh at 40% we’re going to stop? No. I mean in in the plan in the proposed plan. Yeah. No. The idea was that we’ll just it’s going to be a permanent part of our political economy. Sick. Yeah. [laughter] That’s why it killed uh 50 years of social democracy. I mean, it definitely put it on the back foot. To be fair, it’s it’s still around and you’d much rather be in Sweden today if you’re a worker than in the United States. And that’s positive. You know, if it were the case, Josh, that in the course of neoliberalism in the past 40 years, the right had been able to dismantle social democracy altogether. so that we were back to where we had been in the 1920s. That would be pretty depressing because what that would mean is, you know, the the tale of Seisphus, it would mean that like Seephus, when conditions are good, you you organize, you mobilize, and you build institutions, and you’re pushing that boulder up the hill. M but when economic growth slows down like we talked about earlier and the um capitalist class is less tolerant if it’s able to roll that ball back all the way to the foot of the hill then there is no aggregative process over time where we might transform capitalism permanently towards something else. We would just be in this seessaw of organizing being defeated starting over again being defeated starting over again. It’s really important that when the left gets going again, it’s really important to to to see whether or not it’s getting going from zero. Mhm. Mhm. Or whether starting at say 100 where social democracy was, it had been rolled back to say 40. Yeah. And we’re starting from 40. Yeah. If if we’re able to stanch the dismantling of the welfare state so that when we get going again, we’re not starting from zero, but starting from a plateau. Now, you can have a long-term strategy even through the ups and downs of the capitalist economy. knowing that there will be times when we suffer defeats and things are dismantled. But if we build the right institutions which are anchored deeply enough in the population, they can’t dismantle everything and we’ll be able to every cycle of reorganizing will be able to build on the residue of the defeats that came through a neoliberal period or something like that. And I I think that’s where we are. I think what we’re seeing is that in Europe and the United States, even in the United States, they weren’t able to push it back to zero, right? Social Security is still around. Medicare is still around and Medicaid is going to survive Trump pretty hard. They’ve been trying for 40 years and they have not been able to. If we just get going again now, we have something to build on. And I think it’ll attract most of the population. One of the one of the reasons why I like to dunk on these anarchists, I mean engage in uh rigorous discourse. Um [laughter] well, you’re in the part of the world where you come across them more most often, which is the culture industry. uh culture, industry, and also the timeline. Yeah, [laughter] it’s true. You have a wonderful phrase, we’re all social democrats in the short term. Yeah. Even if our individual aspirations reach much further than that, what do we mean by this phrase, we’re all social democrats in the short term? It means that even if you are somebody who aspires to full-on socialism or even communism at the way small C communism, the way Markx defined it, um there is no leap into it. It’s going to come through a aggregative process. That’s because the leaps from capitalism into socialism or communism came through what’s called revolutionary ruptures. Revolutions where they actually through one forcible act dismantled the private ownership and substantially transformed the state. That’s the Russian revolution of 1917 or the Vietnamese revolution after 1975, the Chinese revolution, things like that. And uh I just think that’s not on the cards anywhere anywhere in the there has never I say this a lot and people should come to terms with there has never been a revolution in a democratic country. Um people point to Finland. Okay fine Finland. But the and that was you know that was 100 years ago. there’s just kind of too many mechanisms for whenever a substantially large coalition forms that you can kind of absorb a few of those planks, a few pieces of the platform in a democratic context. There’s that. So, one, first of all, democracy gives people ways to express their unhappiness short of taking up arms, right? And all you need is enough people to be absorbed like that. And you know, it’s the vast majority that’s going to be absorbed. The second thing is though that um there’s a misconception on the left as to how revolutions happen and they think revolutions happen when a lot of people come together and overthrow the state and that’s never how it happens. There’s a fundamental precondition. Lenin said it and it was I I think this is the most brilliant single sentence in the history of social science which is revolutions happen when the ruled can no longer take their conditions and the rulers can no longer rule. I’m paraphrasing, but it’s something like that. But basically what he’s saying, it’s not enough to get a lot of people together who are really pissed off and want to change. You also have to have a breakdown of the state. There has to be a significant break in the cohesiveness of the ruling class, the economic ruling class, but also in the repressive apparatus of the state. And you cannot create those. They come through a combination of other circumstances. And that means that in essence, revolutionary openings happen. They’re not created by you. If they happen, then of course you have to be in a position to take advantage of it the way the Bolsheviks were. Sure. Okay. So what then causes that? It’s the reason it happened in the early parts of the 20th century and not later is that everywhere these breakdowns happened was in situations where state formation had not really gone very far or the states that were there were on very very very unsure moorings. You know, most of them happened after wars when states were extremely fragile because of the the fiscal uh debts that they taken on because the unhappiness of the army and huge huge battles between a landed class and a capitalist class. Yeah. Because landed class resented being taxed. All these were agrarian countries where it happened. So you need to have a population that sees nowhere else to go. You need to have a ruling class that’s split. so split that it is paralyzed in the face of a mobilized revolution, right? And you have to have a state that cannot mobilize its apparatus of repression because the say the army is defected or something like that. Mhm. That’s just I’m sorry. I’m sorry people. It’s inconceivable in today’s world in the west. You can engage in magical thinking. You can cook up scenarios, but you have to also say the odds of that happening are so so small. Which means you cannot build a strategy based on extremely unlikely event. Strategies by definition are in this world as we know it today instead of locking yourself up up in a basement and waiting for the world to come to you. Okay? If you’re not going to be able to leap into communism or socialism through a revolutionary rupture, you have to walk there. That means you have to have aggregative social reforms that do two things. that help cohhere and bring together your constituency over a long period of time because they see real gains. They see a real reason to remain committed to you. And the second thing that you’ve got to do is you got to weaken the enemy, which is capital. How do you do that? You chip away at the real source of its power, which is its unilateral control over investment. So the first step is nationalizations. The first step is taking away a big chunk of the economy from them. So that if they do try to have an investment strike tanking the economy, it’s not the whole economy, it’s only a certain section of it. Then within the workplace, you remove some of their freedoms and their powers. And then in the macro e economy, you develop instruments to curb like maybe capital controls if it’s possible to control their to curb their autonomy and their power. That’s going to be an iterative aggregative process. That process is social democracy, [laughter] right? We redistribute to keep bring the workers in. We build unions to empower them. We have a state that actually gives people real goodies, which is what the uh social democracy did. And we curb the power of capital. That’s what it’s going to have to be. The rest is magical thinking. The reason why we’re a little in the weeds on these topics today is because I think there’s a general boilerplate common sense on the left that as you said, you get a bunch of people in a square and then something’s gonna happen, right? And so uh my experience as an adult is that there is a kind of increasing scale of the people who come out to protest things like Occupy Wall Street, the Iraq war, women’s march for example, all of these different things. And each time people come out, it’s quantitatively larger than any previous protest. Like this is the biggest one in history. We hear that time after time after time. And yet each time there’s a power vacuum that opens politically, it seems capitalized by these right now right-wing populist elements. And so getting a lot of people out into a square has not necessarily been successful for us. We have to kind of go back to the drawing board with some of these slow, patient, deliberate institutional strategies. One of the last things I wanted to talk about uh for this episode is that there are many there’s um a kind of infinite scale of different proposals for market socialism. On my own syllabus, I have a great book by David Schwikard called After Capitalism. I think I I give the one that’s in 1997. He’s written a few different versions of it. Um can we just run through a list of like if people want to further enrich themselves about what is exactly the proposal for a post-c capitalist society, a transitional society, something that bridges the gap between our current iteration of capitalism to eventually a utopian socialism. Where can they find those resources? Who should they be reading? Um the the most of the people these days who are promoting some kind of socialist vision are advocates of market socialism. There are still some advocates of planning. Um Michael Albert and Robin Hanell have written a book on participatory planning and Pat Divine has written another one on democratic planning and those are very much worth looking at. Um Schweikert is another person uh and then there’s also elements of market socialism or proponents of market socialism um that you might be able to John Romer has written a book on um a it’s called a a future for socialism. Um there’s a nice collection that was edited by Roar and Pernab Bardan on different models of market socialism. Um and then there’s uh there’s a new book about to be released I think in about eight or 10 months that Basker Sinara and Mike Begs are writing uh that’s going to be a new and I to my in my opinion it’s the most compelling mark model that I’ve seen of market that’s also it’s a it’s market socialism with workers democracy. So maybe it’ll make both camps happy. Okay. Uh but workers control, let’s just say. Uh there’s a very nice little book which is a debate between um Robin Hell and Eric Eric Olen Wright on socialism. I’ve forgotten the exact title of it. Also a verso book and that goes through two sides where Wright is advocating for more market oriented socialism and Hanel is arguing for more of a fully planned economy. And you can see what’s at stake in those. M speaking of Verso, uh we’ve been discussing your book, Confronting Capitalism today. Well, we’ve gotten very laser focused on certain topics that appeal to me and overlooking the generality uh of the book, exploring some of these themes. Uh before we sign off today, where can people find your work um if they want to read more of it or they want to hear you on a podcast? Um so the immediate place for the most um frequent interventions is this podcast and it’s called Confronting Capitalism. Excellent show. And thank you. And uh it’s um it’s on the Jacobin feed, but you can find it on Spotify or on iTunes. Then um I’ve just actually finally I I found I had signed on to Substack so I could read other people like yourself. [laughter] And I never posted anything for two years, but finally uh Baser and and the co-producers of the podcast prevailed upon me that we should actually try to make use of the Substack. So I’m going to start start posting things in the Substack. Basically, it’s going to be transcripts of the podcast and the occasional thing that I write. I I don’t want to be wedded to it because I need to be writing other things. Sure. Uh and then of course there’s a lot of my written work which you can find if you just go to the my faculty website on NYU. I I’m not really on social media. I don’t do Twitter or uh Facebook or any of the uh um any of those other things. So, sounds like a good choice. Yeah, it consumes you and it breaks you eventually. The way I’ve seen it, it just breaks people. So, no Instagram, uh, no Tik Tok, no, uh, none of that stuff. It’s just the the podcast and my written work. HC, thank you so much. I’m a huge fan of your work. It’s great to see you again. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for listening to watch part two of this episode. You can support the show on Patreon.