A leading socialist explains what Bernie Sanders's socialism gets right — and wrong

For a speech ostensibly about the concept of "democratic socialism," Bernie Sanders's address at Georgetown on Thursday focused heavily on liberalism. He identified strongly with Franklin D. Roosevelt's call for an economic bill of rights; he hailed Lyndon B. Johnson's signing of Medicare and Medicaid into law; and he didn't mention American socialist leaders like Eugene V. Debs, Norman Thomas, or A. Philip Randolph at all.

All of which raises the question: How socialist is Bernie Sanders, really? And what do other socialists make of his platform?

To get a sense, I chatted with Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder, editor, and publisher of Jacobin, a radical socialist magazine that's become a leading outlet of the American left. This past May, Sunkara wrote a sharp piece about where Sanders succeeds in furthering the socialist tradition in America, and where he falls short. We Gchatted Thursday night about Bernie's speech and what socialism in America would ideally look like.

Dylan Matthews

Just to start off, what was your big-picture evaluation of the speech? A decent start? Not far enough?

Bhaskar Sunkara

Both of the above. It was a decent start and not far enough. Socialism has been lost in American politics for a generation, swallowed up by Cold War politics and the broader assault on the labor movement, and the defeat of even the most modest of incremental reform tendencies within liberalism, so just having someone calling themselves a socialist on the national stage is incredible. It gives people like me the chance to contrast our vision of socialism with Sanders's, while still being broadly supportive of many of the things he wants to do and the impulses of those who support him.

For example, Bernie Sanders said explicitly today that "I don’t believe government should own the means of production." I disagree with him on that one (though I don't really want government ownership so much as worker ownership), but it's incredible for someone to even mention that. I didn't even know that was on the table. What a start!

Dylan Matthews

What are the areas where he didn't go far enough?

Bhaskar Sunkara

Socialists support struggles for redistribution. They're vital. But our focus is often on ownership and control, not just these questions of distribution. So while we support things like breaking up the banks, we do so as a prelude to something like bank nationalization and socializing finance.

Sanders is, in many ways, a good social democrat. That's not a bad start, but we want to not only build a welfare state, but go beyond it. We want a society in which political democracy is extended into economic and social realms as well, where workers own and control their places of employment, not just get a decent wage.

Of course, these struggles aren't counterpoised to each other. If you can't build a movement to get a $15 minimum wage, you don't have any hope to get anything more radical than that. But that long-term vision isn't one that Sanders shares.

Ultimately, he wants a more fair system, with huge chunks of the economy taken out of the sphere of the market, like education and health care. We want many more spheres enjoyed as social rights, and ultimately a society without capitalists at all.

Rafa Rivas/AFP/Getty Images

Dylan Matthews

Sanders has expressed sympathy for workers' cooperatives and has introduced legislation to support them. That's one way for workers to control the means of production. Is it enough?

Bhaskar Sunkara

Well, workers' cooperatives are great, and I think Sanders is genuinely interested in the form, but they've been embraced by people of all sorts of political tendencies over the years — many were even created in Franco's Spain. They only take on a really radical significance if they're the product of a broader movement, and eventually a new political system. They're competitive and can potentially be exploitative, just like regular capitalist firms.

Dylan Matthews

What did you make of the foreign policy section? His insistence that the US must "destroy" ISIS felt out of line with the anti-militarist tradition in socialism.

Bhaskar Sunkara

This is where Sanders was at his absolute weakest. He's a generic liberal — actually maybe a bit better than most, but not by much — when it comes to foreign policy. I mean, here was the chance to make a real moral and ethical appeal to people, to get them familiar with socialist values, to spark the imaginations of regular Americans, and you're going to end your speech with, "ISIS must be destroyed."

Ahmad al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images

Dylan Matthews

What would an approach to ISIS that reflected socialist values have sounded like?

Bhaskar Sunkara

For starters, it wouldn't have sung the praises of King Abdullah II of Jordan. I mean, you don't even have to be as advanced as a socialist to oppose monarchs. You just have to be a small-r republican. Similarly, I think just about everyone knows that NATO was an organization created to project US power (the debate happens over whether or not that was a good or bad thing; socialists oppose it). But in Sanders's rendering, NATO is a great multilateral hope, and presumably the United States should throw in with regimes like Jordan and Saudi Arabia to unite and fight ISIS.

I think a socialist call would focus more on supporting democratic movements, on the tireless fight of the Kurds and other progressive forces in the region, and the need to build solidarity with those forces.

Dylan Matthews

Sanders often cites Nordic countries like Denmark and Sweden as models of democratic socialism in action. As a socialist, do you think those nations make good exemplars?

Bhaskar Sunkara

Sanders is certainly right that there is a lot to envy in the Nordic model. But one thing that's important to note is that many of these welfare systems are under severe attack. Socialists have often compared struggles for reforms that don't structurally put permanent power in the hands of workers to the plight of Sisyphus: At some point, the boulder starts rolling down the hill.

I also think there's a certain way in which the use of this model has reinforced a vision of socialism as a trade-off between freedom and equality. I'd rather Sanders, in addition to talking more about ownership and control, talk about social democratic reforms and socialist movements as creating freedom for the majority of workers at the expense of only a minority of owners. Full-employment policies, for example, mean the freedom for you to more freely choose the condition of your own employment. Active labor market policies mean the freedom to change sectors or retrain. Free public high education, like Sanders wants, gives the freedom for more ordinary workers to say, "Fuck off" to their boss.

If anything, I want Sanders to get more "American" with his rhetoric. Talk more about freedom, and more about the domestic history of socialist movements in the US.

Dylan Matthews

This is also an awkward time to be citing European social democrats, given how many social democratic parties have supported austerity of late.

Bhaskar Sunkara

Yes, certainly. But there is no doubt that the lot of workers in the places Sanders trumpets is better than that of most workers here, and their labor and left movements are still more vibrant. So though I agree, as a US leftist I have to be a bit humble here when looking at the European situation.

AFP/Getty Images

Dylan Matthews

You seem, implicitly, to be arguing that even though nearly 70 percent of workers in Denmark, Sweden, and Finland are in labor unions, that isn't enough to give the left and workers the structural power they need. So what would be enough? What's the path to worker ownership and control in a democratic society?

Bhaskar Sunkara

Ah, yes. If only I had a blueprint. Provisionally, I would look at the Meidner Plan — the wage-earner scheme pushed by a massive mobilization on the part of the trade union federation in Sweden, which would have gradually socialized most firms in Sweden — as one model.

Of course, the plan was far too tepid, and capitalists would never voluntarily give over that kind of power. But contrary to what you hear from some corners of the Leninist left, a cushier welfare state didn't "buy off" workers. It made them more radical and able to fight for more and more rights, to the point that workers in Sweden wanted ownership, total control, on top of a generous welfare state.

So build movements that fight for immediate demands, demands that might add up to something like a welfare state, but make sure the movement stays militant and have a longer-term horizon of total democracy and see where that leads. Chances are, a lot of your immediate victories are going to put you in a position to fight for more radical things down the road. Socialists have to win those arguments when the time comes. For now I do think we could win over most US workers to a broadly social democratic program.

Dylan Matthews

There's sort of a Catch-22 there: Swedish workers wanted more power, so they tried to seize it by buying up shares in companies until the unions had controlling interests in their members' employers. But precisely because workers didn't have as much power as capitalists, or as much power as the international bond market, the plan couldn't come to fruition. Is it possible to pass policies that would radically empower workers through electoral politics, given that workers currently lack that kind of power?

Bhaskar Sunkara

I think this brings in a false dichotomy between electoral politics and non-electoral politics. To win these demands, you need massive movements, not just people being elected with the right policy platforms. You need a mobilized and organized working class. Sometimes workers will be just voting, sometimes they'll be occupying their factories, sometimes they'll be at home, since any action is risky and seems futile. We can't answer this any more than provisionally.

But yes, it does go beyond the confines of electoral politics as me and you know it, in our lifetime, in the United States.

Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

Dylan Matthews

How do you think UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn compares with Bernie Sanders, as a politician trying to bring authentically socialist ideas into the political mainstream?

Bhaskar Sunkara

Jeremy Corbyn is something different. He's a genuine radical, working within a party that actually has had a consistently socialist and radical Labour left for a long time. I would put it this way: Jeremy Corbyn has the potential to really democratize and change the Labour Party, to provoke a split from the right and then turn the Labour Party into a vehicle for far-left politics. Maybe not a good chance, but it seems that many of the people around him want to do this, and his political background says that pursuit may be on the table.

Sanders cannot change the Democratic Party, and because of its nature and structure, no one can, even in very different conditions. So I see Sanders as a good thing, as a sign people want more left-wing ideas on the table, that many are drawn to these ideas, but not seriously as an effort to realign the Democratic Party to the left or capture it through the primary process or whatnot.

Dylan Matthews

How do you think Sanders should be balancing the outside chance he has at actually winning the nomination with his ability to articulate and popularize socialism? For instance, should he come out for the Meidner Plan and force a discussion of the merits of worker ownership of the means of production, or keep mum and try to get a socialist in the White House?

Bhaskar Sunkara

I think that Bernie Sanders should realize that he's building an opposition movement, that he's getting ideas out there, that he's engaging a lot of people whom he should not simply hand to the Hillary Clinton machine. So I'd love to see him adopt a more radical posture, while not jumping too far ahead of where most people are at: introducing them to radical ideas and encouraging the people interested in his campaign to get involved in social movements.

Will he do that? Probably not as much as he should, but the people energized by his campaign are perfectly bright, with ideas and a spirit of their own. I hope some of them come join me and the thousands of others trying to rebuild a socialist movement in the United States.

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