Socialism for the 21st Century

in the United States socialism has for decades been a term thrown around to disparage and dismiss ideas and opponents on the left of the political spectrum until recently witness Bernie Sanders incredible run in the 2016 Democratic primary and again right now but that didn't come out of nowhere and it isn't just about feeling the Bern bhaskar Sankara is the founding editor of Jacobin magazine his new book explains how the once ridiculed set of ideas has been resuscitated in the u.s. the book is called the socialist manifesto the case for radical politics in an era of extreme inequality and he joins us now on the line from new york new york bah starts Cadabby on our program again how you doing thanks for having me again I really appreciate the opportunity not at all how old were you before we talk about the book just a bit about you how old were you when you first discovered the idea of socialism I was around 14 years old and I just turned 30 so I've been a socialist for not only the majority of my adult life but the majority of my life life don't take this the wrong way but what kind of family produces a 14-year old socialist well my parents were immigrants we came to the to the US I was youngest of five so I saw in my life how much of life was an accident birth you know how much public goods and other things I had access to living in a nice suburb in New York compared to my siblings that were born in Trinidad and Tobago I compared to my parents who were born abroad and and I really saw how much of life is depend on having access to these great social goods you know a lot of people from the Caribbean end up in in Ontario and I imagine that you'd be better off ending up in Ontario than ending up in New Jersey or in New York like a lot of the rest of us do in a beautiful Caribbean and I think the baseline socialist aspiration is a world in which life is not an accident of birth in which we all have the opportunity to reach our creative potentials having said that I have seen you quoted in the past as having said you know there was a certain randomness to the fact that I ended up being a socialist and I wonder if you ever wonder I mean what if he'd stumbled on Milton Friedman first do you think I'd be talking a very different person here well I think the baseline sensibility for my life experience was the social-democratic sensibility seeing the value of public goods being an immigrant all that entails in the u.s. especially when our right wing a Republican Party is quite right-wing and now increasingly xenophobic you know kind of leads you to the center or the center left of the bare minimum but I do think becoming a Marxist becoming a more radical socialist now that was a product of reading and that was random and I guess I'm lucky that I didn't stumble for in hein Rand or anything else but I think I was predisposed to least some sort of egalitarian vision of worldview we'll talk more about that vision in a moment I do want to ask you about your magazine though because it is a pretty amazing success story given that you were a I gather a 21 year old undergrad student when you launched Jacobin magazine there there is sort of the curiosity of your naming it after a group which is remembered for a reign of terror during the French Revolution so why that name well actually the initial inspiration of the name came from the black jacket but the CLR James the great Trinidadian journalist and the scholar who wrote a book about the Haitian uprising and what really stuck to us about that name love the black Jacobins of the the JAC that sort of Jackman tradition was that these Enlightenment ideas even though they were born in Europe just through an accident of history belonged to the whole world and we want to say well with liberty with equality with fraternity with these Enlightenment ideals actually realized of course we're Democratic socialists we don't you know justify or support any act of political violence small or large or the reign of terror of the French jacobins but I would say that we talk often about the reign of terror by the French Jackman's we don't talk about the decades and decades and centuries and centuries of feudalism and oppression and the rule of the clergy and and and so on I think we're living in a profoundly better world as a result of the French and American revolutions we should say to our viewers here in Canada that that your numbers and I'll share them now 40,000 print subscribers a million monthly online readers more than a million dollars of year in revenue for people who don't know the magazine business those are very very strong numbers and I wonder how you experience it better than that okay actually have 50,000 now in print circulation but you know III would explain this is s through for two reasons one is we were articulating a set of ideas to left the mainstream liberalism and in the u.s. our politics just ended at you know American liberalism which isn't even social democracy it just ended there and we were told all right Barack Obama's far left because he's proposing some very minor expansions to the welfare state and you know this is the Road to Serfdom and Americans hate this their individualist they love you know war in guns and so on this was the mentality when jacket members was starting and we knew there was an audience for a set of ideas to the left of liberalism and we cohered together this critique of liberalism and thus critique of the right and we put it under this democratic socialist umbrella we revived traditions that were alive and well in the US for many decades but had disappeared in the years following the decline of the new left in the sixties and seventies and I think this was this was it I think we had a sense that people weren't happy that people wanted something better for themselves and that people were starting to blame not them just themselves in a very individualistic way but they were starting to blame the corporate and political elite that runs this country for some of the problems facing them you know we live in a country with infant mortality with people who can't afford insulin pills who have to go across the border if you're living in Detroit have to go across the border to Windsor try to get insulin pills you know this is life in the wealthiest country in the history of the world and people are getting fed up in it let us just clarify something though that you are because you referenced it in your last answer you are not if I can put it this way a kind of a run-of-the-mill progressive or Center leftish kind of a guy you are a socialist and I wonder if you would help us understand what you see is the distinction between those two well I think socialists believe in two things now one thing is we believe in these core necessities of life shouldn't be determined on your ability to pay so we should take away these coordinates that is life from the market like health insurance for instance taking away from the market and guaranteed is a social right so in other words D can modify these social goods but very good you know old-school social democrat but say the same - so what makes me a more radical socialist to the left of social democracy I think that's the aspiration to take democracy and extend it from just the political realm into the economic realm so if you think that democracy is a good thing in the ballot box once every couple years and they're voting now you should think the democracy is a good thing at the workplace where we spend most of our waking hours why can't an ordinary worker have a say in elect their management why are we paid wages instead of getting paid dividends why can't we collectively run these these industries because at all levels workers of all types being white-collar blue-collar workers we actually know how to design coordinate and implement a production so even if we need a market to continue in the sphere of consumer goods you know why not have democratic workplaces and I think asking that radical question about ownership asking that radical about do we need capitalists I think that's that's what makes you a radical and that's what makes you a a socialist fear to call you a Marxist as well yeah I'm a Marxist I'm a socialist because of my ethical values I'm a Marxist because I think it's a framework that explains much that is pertinent in the world I'm willing to kymaro not be a Marxist if I finally the framework is not explaining things in the world then you know I'll be no longer a Marxist but I'll be a socialist forever what does it mean to be a Marxist you know this many years 171 years after the publication of the communist manifesto well I think to be Marxist is to simply say that well I material understanding of what's going on society this this cleavage between the people who owned the places in which goods and services are produced and the vast majority of people who have to work for them who have to have nothing else but to sell our ability to work to those those people that explains a lot of the inequities in our society today and from this inequity at the point of production flows a lot of other inequities and I think being a Marxist just means you're using the framework of Marx to understand some things about the pace and development of production to understand a few things about how society is is functions and structures and so on but it can't explain everything you know Marxism can't explain the sex appeal of blue Jeep Jeanne's you know it can't explain facts about you know moral quandaries of life and so on you know so it's not an all-encompassing science like like it was treated in some of these countries in there the old Eastern Bloc and how would you say that differs from again another movement will you hear about these days the intersectional left well I mean I think that if you buy intersectional people mean that there are many different forms of oppression and we need to combat them all and we might experience different forms of oppression so a black woman in the United States might experience oppression on the basis of being woman being black and being a worker then of course it's just common sense it's just descriptive but I would say that we on the Socialist Left tend to place a bigger emphasis on this person's activity as though as a worker because you know if you are working for a living you're not only being oppressed you actually have a point of leverage right there where you and your co-workers can band together you could withhold your your labor you could go on strike you could set forward demands and you could actually fight against not only you know for better wages and benefits but also fight against other forms of oppression so I guess is just a matter of emphasis but I certainly am opposed to all forms of oppression know I get that but it just it felt as I was reading the book it seemed to me that you you cared more about or you're more focused let me put it that way on class as an area of concern as opposed to say gender or sexual orientation and I wonder I wonder how come well one way to put it is this if you actually want to fight against racism and you actually want an anti racism that goes deeper than just symbolic issues of representation and so on then you have to be talking about the redistribution of power and resources to the most marginalized and Exploited groups but if you're talking about a redistribution of power and resources you have to be talking about class so I think it's not just an abstract thing where I just happen to pick team class and other people pick team race or so on I actually think that by organizing the basis of our commonality of class oppression we can build the types of coalition's that could actually more adequately fight against racism sex so even an example of sexism in a country like the United States where we don't even have universal health care what does it mean if you're a woman and you're in a bad relationship and it's hard enough to leave this bad relationship for all sorts of other reasons but we're also tied to your spouse's employer based health insurance policy so if you leave your spouse you also have to deal with not having health insurance so in other words if we win Medicare for all you could talk about really Medicare for all as a anti-sexist victory even though it's not framed in in those explicit terms often and I think often if you're talking about these fights over power and wealth and and redistributing power and resources then you know you're often are going to be able to achieve a great amount of outcomes and will diminish the amount of sexism racism and other forms of oppression and the world today understood okay you you you just talked about Medicare for all which essentially we have in Canada and have for 50-plus years let me let me get a better understanding beyond that what you as a Democratic Socialist would want to see happen and and for example do you want to be nationalizing all the banks do you want to be nationalizing all the steel companies do you want to be nationalizing all the the mining companies help us on that mm-hmm well I think that there are certain spheres of society in which you would actually want the state to to run things in a plan coordinated way with some Democratic inputs from the population at large so I think the health insurance industry is definitely one the railways and certain forms of mass communication definitely so there's certain things that the state does well I think health care at mass administrating vaccines and Cuba hurricane evacuation all my other complaints about the Cuban state it does that pretty well compared to Haiti and Jamaica and other other surrounding Island Asians but when it comes to the production of forks or telephones or things like that you know it seems kind of ridiculous to expect us to do this in a in a planned way and to expect that the state will be able to overcome both incentive problems and just the old price calculation problem you know how do you respond to consumer feedback how do you know what to produce and how much produce how do you weed out weak in efficient products and people don't like and so on so I think there's a needs to be a role for the market but I do wonder whether these firms have to be run by private capitalist so I think socializing our finance and it doesn't have to be one big state bank it could be smaller local and regional banks - it could be one way in which we could provide financing for firms that are operated on a cooperative basis that are operated and owned by their their employees so instead of just having workers will have worker owners and I think if you're really committed to society in which we all can plant our flag and we all have a little bit of stake a little bit equity in society and we're not just divide between ruled and and rulers then I think you should be in favor of this kind of evolution towards democratic ownership as well now this this no doubt is not what you're talking about but I can see the argument coming forward that well wait a second we tried socialism in the Soviet Union it was a massive disaster they're still trying it in China it's not really socialism anymore and we certainly wouldn't want to live in that kind of a society you mentioned some of the positive things about Cuba my hunch is unbalanced most people who live in the province of Ontario or in the state of New York would rather live in one of those provinces or States than in Cuba so what do you think American socialism would have to do differently in order that it not turn out as badly as some of those other examples I just gave well we're living in in not the worst of all possible worlds we're living in great countries that have huge degrees of civil liberties and freedoms and so on but I think one thing we have to keep in mind is a lot of the reasons why we live in decent places and I would I would venture to say that at least the standard of treating workers and citizens at a different at a better level that Canada is better off in the US on a whole is because of the struggles of radicals and socialists and the labor movement and so on so we fought for we won the eight-hour day in Canada Social Democrats and and and nd peers were a big part of winning and expanding your universal health care system in the United States we still have a host of reforms and regulations we have basic rights to literacy and so on so in other words these aren't natural outcomes of capitalism these were victories won by the workers movement I would imagine that most capitalists would rather we live in a kind of benign dictatorship like Singapore or something like that where it's an authoritarian form of capitalism where there's not much dissent there's not much pesky unions and so on but you know there's still a base level of freedom so I think we could say that that the societies we live in today are in fact better and more free than the societies of the Eastern Bloc for instance but these are victories largely of the broad workers movement and many of socialists were were involved in creating these societies yeah I'm sorry I'm just going to jump in with having said that frequently when I hear this discussed in the United States and for example Bernie Sanders he'll say things like yeah but they do it in Sweden this way or they do it in Finland that way or they do it in Denmark this way and the outcomes are better and it's more equal and you know you've heard that argument numerous times and yet and yet we also hear that the sort of end of the road for socialism has come to many of the Scandinavian countries which are now embracing more populist and conservative governments so help us understand that if you would well I think that an in these countries what you're seeing is the after-effects of austerity so since the 1970s an onward these great Nordic model states and and by the way these are states in case of Sweden for instance was administered by a socialist government by democratic socialists in charge of a party that created a new regime of accumulation based on sectoral bargaining based on having a really generous welfare state based on having a real dynamic economy and be able to harness that towards social ends we've seen that's that system roll back in the last 20-30 years and I think some of the rise of the right and still a relative rise you know the Social Democrats are still in charge in an and Sweden there's a grand coalition of sorts in Finland and the right the far right the true Finn's as they call themselves are locked out in Denmark their Social Democrats an alliance with the left the far left are are in power in Norway their welfare state is pretty much in hacked I mean and part of that is because they have vast oil reserves but you know I would say the narrative retrenchment is sometimes overstated these are still for our better societies to live in the ones we live in today as far as like life outcomes you know if you're born in Buffalo New York you're gonna have a different life outcome than if you're born in Westchester County New York you know that's that's a fact that we live with as as New Yorkers and as as Americans but it's it's not the same in these other these other countries so I would say that social democracy is still alive but it has been rolled back and that's why we needed not just win social-democratic before and we need to think about how do you make these reforms more durable that's why I think we need to not only bring up the old social democratic questions of redistribution we need to go back even further to the even older social democratic questions of redistribution of power and ownership well one of the guys who's been trying to do that for a very long time is Bernie Sanders and he did extremely well when he ran against Hillary Clinton a few years ago for the Democratic presidential nomination he's trying again you know how's he doing in your view well it's a wide-open race ah Bernie Sanders is not ahead but he's in the top flight of candidates and the race is not cohering around one candidate and he's looking pretty strong in Iowa he is a great infrastructure in Iowa we'll see how things are going in the other battleground states but right now it's anyone's race and by anyone I really mean it's Warren Biden or Sanders race so I'll take a one-in-three chance to have a Democratic Socialist be the nominee of a major party in the United States that's not something I ever imagined I'd be able to see in my lifetime do you think Elizabeth Warren's a Democratic Socialist no she's not she's not she's a progressive liberal and I think as terrible as I believe the Trump administration is as terrible as a lot of these right-wing administrations have been in recent US history I think it's nice to have a progressive liberal in in convention but there's a there's a huge difference between Morin and Sanders as far as how they approach their worldview and also I think there's gonna be a question of compromise so I think you'll see this sometimes in in Canada - were often you'll have a major party moving to the left and adopting a certain platform but the question is will they be able to carry it out are they really committed to it compared to you know the grassroots and social movements pushing for these demands and with Warren I have more hesitation about her her willingness to stick in the fight on certain issues but there's no doubt that she's a far far better candidate than we've come to expect from the Democratic field as a whole President Obama weighed in last week and he didn't exactly give your side of the debate some oxygen he said even as we push the envelope and we are bold in our vision we also have to be rooted in reality the average American doesn't think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it what's your reaction to that well I think it's perfectly right and the the average American doesn't think we need to tear down the system we want to keep what's good in our society what good in our communities but we also want to radically reform a lot of what's unjust so I think he's he's pretending like people in the Democratic Party are demanding some sort of crazy years you're break which is just not true people are demanding health care people are demanding an environmental program that will give a world for them to bequeath to their children and grandchildren you know these are basic demands so a lot of even the abstract things I talk about in my book these questions of worker ownership and so on you know this isn't on the table in the Democratic primary what is on the on the table is a common-sense agenda about banding together and fighting for our interests in a greater welfare state greater security and really making sure that our communities are not ravaged like they are right now by unemployment by drugs by all these other ills and these are common-sense things to fix and I think a lot of the Democratic candidates at the forefront Bernie Sanders are coming up with solutions to these these problems so I think Obama is really miss reading this situation within his own party it's not an extremist current at all well I'm hoping you can this to me as well because if you look at the polling in the United Kingdom the Conservatives have now almost twice as many working-class voters as Labour does and if you look at the just completed election here in Canada there were many people who might define themselves as democratic socialists who voted for the Liberal Party as opposed to the new democratic party you know for other reasons as well does it does it sometimes feel to you like like the Socialist Movement is made up mostly of University graduates as opposed to the traditional working class who are supposed to be the backbone of the movement well I think if you I would actually question that data in the United Kingdom I think if you look at people who I do our wage earners so not just the old industrial working class but people who in the service industries nurses teachers and whatnot you'll find that labour has a polarity of those voters so it is very important that Labour not abandoned constituencies in the north of England constituencies that might have voted for leave but are still behind the core labour agenda of defending the NHS and staying out of Wars and really just have a cultural dislike for the Tories and in Britain in Canada I mean a lot of this can be explained by just tactical voting in a first-past-the-post system but I do think that it is important that we expand the base of our appeals and that we make sure that we're speaking in a way and we're speaking to issues that are actually impacting ordinary working people but working people doesn't just mean a certain type of old industrial worker though obviously you know we want to win them over - it means people and logistics nurses teachers people in the service industry and so on we need to get these people to think of themselves as not just atomized individuals but people who can only get ahead if they band together with their sisters and brothers around them join a union take part in campaigns for a living wage and so on Bhaskar I have one last question for you and I'm reminded of a former Prime Minister of Canada named Brian Mulroney who always used to say don't compare me to the Almighty compare me to the alternative to that end if the next election is between Donald Trump and say Joe Biden or Michael Bloomberg who you voting for I would vote for anyone against Donald Trump in a in a swing state I'm not sure I would campaign for them but I would definitely vote for anyone against Donald Trump because the real question for us at that point would be who would you rather be in opposition to and I'd rather be in opposition to a Joe Biden who has to sign on to a pretty center-left Democratic platform than in opposition to Donald Trump and the really nasty forces of xenophobia and right populism that surround him sounds like you agree with mr. Mulrooney then I will happily let people know that the name of your book is called the socialist manifesto the case for radical politics in an era of extreme inequality we're so glad bus Garson Cara you could spare some time for us here on TV Oh tonight thanks very much it was a pleasure thank you the agenda with Steve Paikin is brought to you by the chartered professional accountants of Ontario CPA Ontario is a regulator an educator a thought leader and an advocate we protect the public we advance our profession we guide our CPAs we are CPA Ontario and by viewers like you thank you

Channel: The Agenda with Steve Paikin

Views: 10,349

Rating: 3.4634147 out of 5

Keywords: The Agenda with Steve Paikin, current affairs, analysis, debate, politics, policy, socialism

Id: c0MB4KNc1CU

Length: 25min 51sec (1551 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 25 2019