Bhaskar Sunkara Thinks the Market Has a Place Under Socialism

0:02 Bloomberg Audio Studios.

0:04 Podcasts. Radio. News.

0:18 Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

0:23 And I'm Tracy Allaway.

0:25 Tracy, I have a.

0:25 Question for you.

0:26 Do you ever get angry tweets from people? I mean, I know you get angry. We all do get angry tweets from people. Do you ever get angry tweets from people who say that Zoran is our fault?

0:38 Oh, yes. I do too. Yes.

0:40 So for those who don't know, Zoran Mamdani came on before he became mayor of New York when he was campaigning.

0:46 He was at like 5% in the polls.

0:48 Yeah.

0:48 And then within a week or two of his all thoughts appearance, he started gaining some real momentum.

0:55 I regularly get these tweets, usually from people who are very, do not like the fellow, who are like, oh yeah, you platformed Zoran and now he's our mayor, et cetera. But that's not really the point. The point is, that obviously in New York and across the country in various primaries and in the public's imagination, socialism is on the rise.

1:17 There's a big fight about the future of the Democratic Party about the degree to which DSA or socialism in general will be the direction of the party going forward. I don't know what that means, but no one knows what that means exactly.

1:32 DSA, definitely a hot buzzword at the moment. And you see lots of people talking about various flavors of socialism. Or actually, I should say, what tends to happen is DSA gets thrown around quite a lot. And then you discover once you start digging into it that actually there are different flavors.

1:50 Within the party.

1:51 And those don't necessarily get discussed as much as they should.

1:55 You know, I was in Greece during the 2012 election.

1:57 Mm-hmm.

1:59 And one of the things is that in the main square in the center of Athens, every party that's running gets a tent where they hand out flyers and also like sometimes like beer or water bottles, etc. And then there was the main parties and then there are these small parties.

2:12 Do some of them have bigger tents than others?

2:14 They do.

2:14 That was a joke.

2:15 Yeah, but it's true. But also, you know, so like the main when I was there in 2012, Syriza, the main socialist party or the left party, they had a tent and then there was a communist tent. And then there were two other communist tents. And they're both right across the street from each other. They both had like the hammer and sickle on their logo. And I was like, what's the deal? Like, why are you like not? And they're like, well, that's the internationalist Communist Party. And we're the ones who don't want to. So when you say there's different flavors of socialism, this is like the classic thing on the left, which is just this extraordinary ability to splinter itself over small differences.

2:49 Absolutely.

2:50 What does even left politics mean is a fight in itself. regardless of then the broader fight about whether the left will gain influence in the Democratic Party and then perhaps the United States.

3:02 But we're going to talk about a very specific flavor of socialism. One that's kind of controversial among a lot of other socialists, right?

3:10 That's right.

3:11 Let's just get right to it. I'm very excited to say we really do have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Bhaskar Sankara, co-author of The Blueprint, How Socialism Can Work in the Real World. He's a longtime DSA member. founding editor of Jacobin Magazine and currently president of The Nation. So truly the perfect guest to talk about all these topics. So, Bhaskar, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

3:34 Thanks for having me.

3:35 So this book that you've co-authored with Ben Burgess and Mike Beggs, The Blueprint, we'll get into what The Blueprint is. But I'm curious, like, who the audience is and by which I mean, is this sort of like the left's answer to abundance in which it's trying to sort of influence where the Democratic Party goes? Or is your argument to fellow socialists about what social, what flavor, what socialism should be and how it can work?

4:03 I think the argument is broadly to egalitarians. It doesn't necessarily have to be socialist, but I remember I first became interested in socialist ideas when I was 14 years old or so.

4:14 Many such cases, but usually they don't follow through, right?

4:17 I'm very stubborn. I kept my commitments. It took me until I was 17 to join the Democratic Socialists of America. But my first question was, wouldn't this just lead to bread lines? And the response I got when I sought out socialists was often really bad responses. It was, isn't it better that there's a line for bread than no bread at all? Which is like a plausible answer if you're living in China in the 1930s, you're living in, you know, but not in the wealthiest societies known to men.

4:51 And I really was needed convincing. And it took me actually encountering other models of socialism, mostly market socialist models, to be like, okay, this could in fact work. And I think a lot of socialists just say, we start with our critique of the present and we start with our demands and our demands, our immediate demands, our demands that a lot of people who are liberals or even moderates might find agreeable. Like, let's say we should have a single payer health insurance like they have in much of Europe or things like that. But to me, when the left was at its strongest in the 1930s, later on in the 60s and 70s, we had a model to look for. And we now know that the model was pretty bad. We now know the Soviet economy wasn't

5:37 really working in the 1930s. And we now know the depth of the authoritarianism. But the communists could point to that. In the 60s and 70s, there was people on campus that could point to what was going on in Cuba, and they could join the Venceremos Brigade. And in a way, I thought it was necessary now, and my co-authors did as well, to really dive into the argument of is socialism technically possible? then we can debate whether or not it's desirable. So I think you have to be an egalitarian to get that far with me. But if you are, I think you should be confident that there is a different model in capitalism.

6:14 So what's market socialism then?

6:16 And how does it, I guess, differ from more traditional definitions of socialism?

6:22 Well, I think to start with, you could say that we're taking a look at what already exists in the real world, and we're trying to create a coherent model around it. So we know that today's capitalism is a lot different than the capitalism of the 19th century. I think it was Ezra Klein who had the line that the United States is an insurance company with a military, which I think, whether he knows it or not, was a play on the line about the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is like a gas station with a military or something that was a common refrain in the 80s.

6:55 So we know that there can be extensive welfare states. There can be certain guarantees. We know that there's tools of demand management that you don't have to be a socialist to believe in. We know there's this huge role for the state. We also know from experience that labor managed firms actually work in practice. There's all sorts of reasons why people wouldn't want to start or participate in a labor managed firm. In part, it often requires putting in your own money. so you're putting in both your labor and your savings, all your eggs are in one basket.

7:27 But we do know that once those firms do start- So.

7:30 For example, Goldman Sachs.

7:33 There's actually, yeah, there's plenty of models in which there's partner-based firms that exist and that they work. Mondragon, the Spanish cooperative that at one point was the fifth or sixth largest entity in Spain is the example that I like to use. But Now that I'm venturing further afield from the left to places like the Bloomberg offices, I might pull that one out of my hat too. But we know that those two work. So how can they work together? Can you have, in fact, a sphere for commodity production where consumer goods and services are produced, run by cooperatives? And can you still have an expansive public sector?

8:10 And we already have public banks from small public banks to development banks, which serve a different purpose. And can you connect the three together into a system that is more egalitarian than capitalism, but is at least reasonably close to its efficiency? I would argue more efficient, but let's say reasonably close to its efficiency.

8:29 So you mentioned the fact that, OK, we could have entities, organizations, companies that are labor owned and sort of internally egalitarian. Another thing that you talk about in the book is you think like basically consumer choice is good. Or that consumer choice is important. And one way that you sort of maximizing welfare is to not just tell people like you get your fixed allocation of kale and Dr. Bronner soap and almond butter and all this stuff that actually there is an important role for like a market for goods.

9:04 Yeah, I normally don't drink coffee.

9:06 It would be insane if a demand for a social society was that all three of us should have an equal allocation of coffee. My co-authors are more careful in how they articulate this argument than me. They get along better with people on the left at times.

9:21 We like having the least careful person on the podcast.

9:25 But, you know, markets are great. I think they're an objective good. And the socialist problem with markets boils down to, one, the uneven distribution of income, which means if we are voting with our dollars... Then, you know, someone else has a lot more dollars than me and they're going to skew the economy towards luxury goods. And yes, there is a trickle down effect from that spending on luxury goods, but it's less useful than an economy rooted towards where the median person is. So they have that criticism. They also have the criticism that the things that we're consuming in markets are produced under conditions of exploitation. And this is obviously a normative argument to use this word, exploitation.

10:05 Like junior analysts at a bank.

10:07 Junior analysts at a bank are absolutely... exploited.

10:11 Paralegals and law firms are exploited. Mid-levels, you know, partners, I imagine like you're a true dream.

10:18 They've gone through the exploitation to become partners.

10:21 Exactly. Exactly.

10:22 That's kind of a extreme example, but there's also just the exploitation that people feel on factory floors and things like that. So in this model, there is a more equal distribution of income. There is also a condition in which if the firms are controlled by its workers, if management is elected, if people not only receive a wage, but receive a share of residual profits, like a dividend, then it's hard to say that this is a condition of exploitation. Then there's a broader set of criticism that has to do with more philosophical alienation from production and things like that. And honestly, I think that Those can maybe be abated if you're really an egalitarian. If you're a member of the far left in a future social society,

11:09 I might be a member of the center left or maybe even center right.

11:12 Of this future society. And you could say, well, we're.

11:14 Going to have mandatory job rotations and things like that to reduce alienation. But I think that's just a product of living in a society with a very complex division of labor.

11:40 So just to help us conceptualize the idea of market socialism and the blueprint that you lay out in your book, can you maybe describe if I'm a would-be restaurateur, I want to open a restaurant, where does the financing actually come from? How am I hiring my employees? How am I distributing, I guess, the profits from my business? Although it is a restaurant, so there probably won't be money, but let's just assume there are some. Because when I think about the traditional economy, you know, open up a new business, you go to a bank, maybe you inherit the money if you're lucky.

12:12 Increasingly.

12:13 You keep the profits.

12:14 You probably exploit some of your low paid, you know, cooks and linemen and things like that. But walk us through step by step the process of starting a new business in a market socialist economy and where the money actually goes.

12:28 And does Tracy get to keep the profits for the risk of opening up the restaurant?

12:31 Well, I think this gets to the useful things that capitalists do. And I mean useful in the sense that As a socialist, it's very easy to just fall into the hyperbole of calling capitalists parasites or whatever else, at least in the old 20th century language. But capitalists contribute entrepreneurial risk and obviously their own managerial labor. In this case, with new firm creation in the book, The Blueprint, we lay out a vision, which is obviously an abstract stylized vision in which there is no wage labor.

13:03 And we sort of explain that.

13:04 Why we believe this to be an exploitative relationship at a normative level. We draw actually on kind of Rawlsian liberalism to do so, which I'm sure will win many favors with me on some parts of the actually existing far left. But when you start this firm, you would be applying for financing from a public bank the same way you would apply for financing today. You would have to have a business plan. You would have to receive a loan that would be at a interest rate that the bank feels comfortable with. A loan for a restaurant would probably be set at a higher interest rate than a loan for the expansion of an already profitable, successful business.

13:45 And you would then at that point form.

13:47 With other people who are looking to join your firm a first operating agreement. This first operating agreement would probably set you up as a manager. It'd probably allow you a large differentiation potentially in income, a four to one differentiation, a six to one differentiation, whatever it might be. And you would set up your firm. But from the start, the people who are working at the firm would be partners in the firm.

14:14 So they're paid in equity, not income.

14:17 They would be member owners, but they would be paid both a base rate and paid residuals. And there's many reasons why you have to have this sort of benchmark wage system. And as far as I know, the blueprint is the first sort of model of market socialism that includes this. But for one, when I think about what I would do if I was in this future society, you know, I've started a bunch of entities in the past.

14:42 I sort of like.

14:43 You're an entrepreneur. I definitely like entrepreneurialism. I thought of the example of, and I don't know how much of this is of apocryphal. I hope I'm not going to offend any listeners. I believe this is an accurate story of like, the first Indian American who decided to buy a motel in New Jersey. And as far as I know, he encountered a motel that had a very, very low profit rate, maybe like 1%, 2%, barely surviving. And what he did was essentially fire most of the staff and work 60 to 80 hour days a and bring in his children, his wife, and others into the business. And they turned it around to make enough profit that he's able to buy the next place. Then he brought over his nephew to go run it along the same line.

15:31 And now an extraordinary amount of hotels and motels.

15:35 In the U.S.

15:36 Are run by Indian Americans, particularly Gujaratis. That is exactly what I would do in a socialist society. I would sweat out my own labor. I like work. I like entrepreneurialism. I have a large extended family. I have lots of first cousins that I could solicit into any odd task. And I would pursue this low road of development. The question is, like, do we really want any society, much less a socialist society, to be structured that way? So this system has benchmark wages, which you consider sort of minimum wages for broad categories of professions. And this is not unlike the old award system in Australia. It's not unlike the dynamics of centralized bargaining like you had in Northern Europe and places like Sweden. So basically you're saying, okay,

16:24 a line cook must be paid $ 15 an hour. It's not an extraordinary amount of money, but it ensures that a business pursues the high road of more efficiency. And in other firms, it's investment and labor-saving technology.

16:37 It's these capital investments.

16:39 In a restaurant, it would just be better management techniques and maybe having a better product And if not, the firm would go under, which also resolves one of the main problems that socialist economies had in the 20th century. These state socialist economies suffered from what Yanis Kournay called soft budget constraints, right? So their political legitimacy came from maintaining full employment. So you would have these very inefficient firms that were kept alive and also an inefficient firm.

17:06 That was producing screws.

17:08 If you got rid of it and try to restructure it, you would end up jeopardizing your computing sector that relied on those because of the nature of command economy. So I think you would need this base to encourage firm failure, which is a good in itself. It's a sign of like health that firms go under. Obviously, there's always the risk of hard budgets, right? You know, there's always a risk of there's a pandemic and all the restaurants go away.

17:30 Wait, so who gets the upside? Because my employees now have some stake in the company. I did take out a loan from the bank, but it's a public bank and the interest rate might be relatively high. And then presumably as an entrepreneur, I would like to see some upside as well.

17:47 You get the upside just merely in terms of what you're being paid for your labor. If you are in fact a competent manager, if you are the person who should be running this, then workers will agree to pay differentiation. So after your first operating agreement, when that expires and getting ready to get another operating.

18:06 Agreement, you'd be paid more than your peers.

18:09 All those entrepreneurial projects that I mentioned before that I've started are either nonprofits or they're subject to a board, right? I think a lot of people actually operate in these conditions. You can think of a CEO of a big company where obviously they have some equity, right? but they're compensated in large part by their incomes, which are justified and voted for by shareholders under capitalism.

18:30 It's not so different here.

18:32 Speaking of hotels, I saw the July 4th, 1999, one of my favorite all-time headlines from the New York Times, a Patel Motel cartel to describe the prevalence of Indian Americans. It was so good. I remember reading that in the house. I was like, oh, it's really good. And it's interesting, you talk about the importance of firm failure in We associate that importance with Joseph Schumpeter, who many on the sort of capitalist embrace him. But he himself was much more ambiguous in terms of where he fell in the sort of ideological spectrum than the sort of pure laissez-faire failure is good that many people now reduce him to.

19:08 Talk to us about like the big one or a big one is housing and the provision. So we have like some public housing in America, but not that much, etc., Talk to us about like a vision of housing because this is much more important probably than restaurants.

19:24 It's very funny because I just knew immediately that this would be the hardest sell because this was even a hard sell for me because this is one of the most radical parts of the book. You know, I'm from the suburbs of New York. My dream is home ownership, you know, maybe a nice place in Long Island, escape the city, put some of my savings into home.

19:43 But when I think about what I.

19:44 Actually want from a home, what I actually want from a home is some level of security. I don't want my landlord to be able to say, tomorrow you're slightly under market rent.

19:55 Hopefully he's not a listener. Slightly under market.

19:57 Rent goes up by a thousand bucks a month because I'm on a month to month lease. So in my vision of a just housing market, All housing, all the land is socialized. I am a socialist. There has to be some room to kind of get under the skin of your listeners.

20:14 Yeah, that's how they do it in Singapore, and our listeners probably love Singapore.

20:18 All the land and housing is public, but there's still a market for rents. So if you want to live on Manhattan Beach or something like that, and I'm comfortable as I am living on very loud roads, that's been my trick to surviving rent in New York. then it makes sense that you would pay more for your house.

20:40 And then if construction is all kind of commissioned by the public sector itself, even if individual firms are all worker-owned, but the state itself is triggering housing construction, then they just start building where there's high demand and rents are getting higher. There would have to be some smoothing because I do believe in secure tenure. So if the market value of your area that you're living in goes up by 20, 30, 40%, like some of our friends in the Hudson Valley had happen around the pandemic, then I think that would have to be smoothed out by the state.

21:14 So there is some element of administrative price setting, which does create distortions. But the state is making up for it with rapid construction. So there's no zoning barriers. There's no community board barriers. So in a way, it is a very statist vision, but it is, I also think, a very gimby vision.

21:30 I was a renter for a very long time. The reason I decided eventually like, okay, I'm going to bite the bullet and buy a home is because I have two children. And at that point, it really becomes difficult to move. And so for your point of like secure, I never really cared about homeownership per se until I wanted to solve that problem of, I just don't want to be forced to be in a position to move again.

21:54 And a couple of times in my previous rentals, the landlord sold the house and the person wanted to move in. And so like, I had to move. So I, in theory, if I could just have a stable place to live, I would be totally fine with just like being a renter for a very long time. But when we think about like sort of the public provision of housing, one issue that comes up is sometimes your neighbors really suck.

22:17 You're apparently okay with like really loud noises. I don't like loud noise. I like to get sleep.

22:23 I live next to a violinist now.

22:25 That's fun.

22:26 That doesn't sound too bad. I live near.

22:28 She's learning.

22:29 Okay. Oh, that's different.

22:30 So I live three nights a year. Someone in the neighboring house will just have like these insane raves and like, I can't sleep those nights. And I can accept three nights, but sometimes neighbors are not good. And sometimes the answer is police in terms of like, okay, there's just, drug use or just insanely loud parties, et cetera. And some people on the left are very uncomfortable. Clearly, there was a big abolish the police movement. I know you've criticized police abolition, but sometimes for public goods, whether we're talking about public housing, public transportation, et cetera, in order for them to be nice, in order for them to be desirable, there has to be like a role for like, we're

23:12 going to like remove or penalize miscreants. And I'm curious in your vision of like the public provision of goods, how we deal with like, this is not going to be desirable if like I'm in the vicinity of miscreants.

23:28 Well, I think you have to address antisocial behavior. So I'd probably address them the same way as you would want to address it. I would maybe put my emphasis a little differently on the actual person doing the antisocial behavior and say, is the person engaging in drug use really putting themselves in a position where they're going to reach their God-given potentials, right? Like, I think the social democratic response is basically the same. And I think the democratic socialist response is basically the same. But it's one that centers a little bit more the lives and experience of those engaging in antisocial behavior rather than bystanders. Same thing with if you're passing an encampment on your way

24:10 to work. I think we hear a lot of concerns about the people passing the encampment. we don't hear as much about the need to actually criminalize the behavior, not to punish people, but to actually get them into state programs where they could kind of get healthy and reach their potential. But I think the toolkit would be much the same.

24:30 Okay.

24:30 But, you know, the subway. And I actually think the problems of the subway are way overrated. The subway is very good. I really like the subway. But like, there are two things. There are some people who Different from me. They perceive, oh, there's a bunch of lunatics on the subway. And then there are other people who just say like, oh, the lunatics aren't bothering you. It's fine, et cetera. And this is where I'm trying to get like this is the intra the left fight, which is like if we're going to have public provision of these goods, like how do we make them good and desirable?

25:02 Yeah, I think Americans tend to vacillate between libertarianism and fascism. It becomes like, oh, just put your headphones on, who cares? And then it becomes a very violent response to it. I would say, obviously, public goods have to be protected. For one, in a more egalitarian society, at least a portion of these problems would be solved by just people having access to more resources and there being a larger social safety net. It doesn't solve everything, but I think there is a degree to which in the United States...

25:30 reinvested more heavily in policing and prisons rather than the social welfare state. And that is a very typical leftist line. But the traditional leftist line would imply that the costs are equal, or if anything, policing and prisons are more expensive, when in fact, they are actually much cheaper than the amount of, you know, let's say if you're going to have a good prison system in a more progressive society, your staffing ratios would have to be completely different. You would have to, instead of training prison guards for a month or three weeks, you would have to train them for over a year and then put them in a probationary period. It's incredibly expensive to do these things. But I think that would resolve at least a portion.

26:10 Of the problems.

26:11 Other than that, it just is a matter of, yes, there is a role for policing. There is a role for enforcing standards of decorum. I lean on the more conservative side of some of these questions in terms of, I have a vision of what the good life is. I think there are limits to a majoritarian vision of a good life and trampling on the rights of others who want to have a good time and want to smoke a joint or whatever else.

26:36 But I would lean.

26:37 Towards, let's say, banning any shop that is selling weed from, oh, first of all, I would just stop there. But let's say from especially putting up a big sign outside their shop that says, you know, weed for sale.

26:49 Yeah.

26:49 I have a different concern to antisocial behavior and drug use, which is interior decorating. And I actually mean this kind of seriously because I take the point that one of the reasons you buy a home is for security so your landlord can't force you out with rent increases. But another reason to buy a home is you get to make it your own. You don't have to live in a white box apartment. You know, with plain walls, you can install a really cool kitchen. If you're a cook, you can really customize it. You can improve it. And so the question when it comes to public provision of housing is, A, can I still do that? Can I customize it and make home improvements? And then B, if I make the apartment or the house a lot better,

27:33 who captures that upsides? Does some of that value come back to me or does it just fall into, I guess, the public pool of housing?

27:42 Yeah, I think investments can and should be requested and approved. So there is an administrative level.

27:50 And someone has to approve my wallpaper?

27:52 There's a difference between investments.

27:54 Let's say today, if you were to make an investment of your home, like a wallpaper change, you would be able to do that yourself. You could do that in a rental. I get you're being obviously a little hyperbolic in that example. But a lot of these changes to your home you could do. But I think a good test would be, is it taxable or not? I'm not a homeowner, so I only vaguely know this. But if I were to, let's say, install a HVAC system in my home or a big boiler or something like that, I would not be taxed on at least the labor to install in a state like New York, right? It would be sales tax free. To me, that's like sort of a capital improvement. That's the thing that would probably have to be approved beyond like normal maintenance, right? That

28:36 capital improvement, you should be reimbursed for reasonable capital improvement. Other changes that you're making that are more eccentric, I think that people should be allowed to make those changes. They're secure tenures, so there's probably going to be less turnover of homes unless people are moving or moving job markets.

28:55 And in those cases, I think people should have to pay out of pocket. But there are, you know, I think functional examples. Singapore is a good one. Places with really extensive public housing where this works in history. And obviously, this is the one part of the book that does lean into the more status end. And it does lead into even some of the things I was saying before about rental changes being smoothed out and so on. Obviously, there are both distortions and layers of bureaucracy that come up as a result of this, which leads to inefficiencies.

29:30 But I think overall, unleashing the power of the state to encourage construction. And that effect will grossly, grossly grossly outweigh any of these inefficiency. And the rest of the book is largely focused on, I think, a role for the state that doesn't necessarily play this sort of gatekeeping way.

30:07 Let's talk about another important service that the government already provides, and that's education. You probably read the big Nicole Hannah-Jones piece about her daughter going to school. I was very dismayed, I think, actually, by a lot of the discourse it spawned because I saw basically people taking one of two sides.

30:26 People were like, oh, this is why school choice is important and people should not have to have their children stuck in a failing school, etc. And then I saw a lot of people on the left basically saying, like, it's inegalitarian and counter-left to sort of be so obsessed with, like, the success of your particular child. What's so special about the daughter of a New York Times journalist that they have to be, you know, better educated than their peers, etc.?

30:56 And I did not see many people respond, which is how I responded with like, let's just make every school excellent. Like my son goes to an excellent public school. And when I went to his curriculum night, I got saddened by the fact that this was not the default school in New York City, that it's actually kind of rare.

31:14 And I'm curious why we don't hear more just like, let's just have all schools be great. And let's hold the schools to high standards for educating all children.

31:25 The tricky thing is in a place like New York, the bad schools are better funded per pupil than the good schools. So it's not a funding problem, but it's a wider problem in society. If people are going into school and they're in unstable living conditions at home, if their parents are struggling with maintaining a job, if there's other issues in their wider community, if there's safety issues and they feel unsafe walking from school, If in the name of egalitarianism, which I believe in, we have that kid traveling across town because we have some form of busing and equalization. All these things, I think, create factors of disparities that people want to resolve purely through public education,

32:11 where I think, you know, the roots are obviously deeper and a more egalitarian society with an extensive social safety net, with employment guarantees and with a more equal distribution of income, I think a lot of these things would resolve themselves. But the problem isn't really, in my mind, the school choice end of it.

32:30 I share the skepticism of education as the solution to inequality. I'm skeptical that there's some obvious link. But also, I think education is good in its own right. It's good to learn things. we're given this brain and it's like good to like exercise it. So yeah, sure. Maybe we could have a society in which the schools you get into are less important for your ultimate economic outcome. But that doesn't necessarily satisfy me if one of my concerns is, no, people should expect that they can get a good education.

33:04 Yeah.

33:04 I mean, I think to begin with, we should say that public education in the U.S., is radically better than it was 100 years ago. It's radically better than it was for most of human history. We live in a society with universal literacy. We live in a society where we protect children and they're not in the labor market unless they're in voluntarily from age 15 to 18, but they're not in the labor market until they graduate from high school. And I kind of think that if you solve the background issues and you have similarly well-invested schools, If you have societies in which the state has a bigger role and the state is able to maybe play a heavier hand dealing with special interests, like, let's say,

33:49 a community group that says we don't want our children to have to travel 30 minutes away for school or this sort of local community pressures on education or people in you know, deep red districts that want particular tailored curriculum. They don't want a national curriculum. They want to do their own reading on the virtues of this, that, you know, eccentric belief or the other. I think you would solve part of that problem. And also, obviously, there's the overarching question of public sector employees. And public sector employees now are in a huge battle often when they make contracts because they feel like they're underpaid, which they often are.

34:30 they feel like the thing that they get for being underpaid is security of tenure. And in a different sort of society where you have full employment guarantees, where you have broadly more abundance, you could probably tell teachers you're going to be paid a lot more, but 10% of you are going to be fired every year. And I think that resolved at least some of the questions that actually went unresolved. I think actually the correct right-wing opposition to that piece centered around the questions of what are the teachers doing are they performing and why do we have summer breaks you know that are this long instead of just breaks longer and how much holidays oh my god yeah and also now it's like you know i

35:12 actually i'm you know five years until my kid is ready to enter the the public school system and i'm going to launch a campaign against kids getting diwali off and you know what it's a big.

35:24 Problem you and i make a trade here which is that i'm jewish I will lobby for like, let's chill with the number of Jewish holidays that we take off. And you campaign for getting rid of day off for Diwali. And then we can have this united thing where all of us agree that some of our holidays don't have to be days off.

35:44 I think South Asians and Jews can definitely band together to value education over communalism.

35:49 Great. Let's do it.

35:50 This is terrible.

35:51 No, we don't.

35:52 No, no, no, no, no.

35:53 There's so many holidays. It's crazy. And I think everyone should just voluntarily say, you know what? Maybe I'll take my student out that day, but the entire school district does not have to shut down for all of our holidays.

36:06 Moving swiftly on.

36:08 People are going to love this part of the segment.

36:10 I have a sort of backup big picture question, but you've mentioned a stronger social safety net a number of times in this conversation. Why is the answer to a more egalitarian society? Why is it necessarily market socialism versus just your sort of classic? higher taxes on the wealthy and more government spending and, you know, health care for all, better education, et cetera.

36:36 So at least part of this is normative. I'm a socialist. I think that wage labor is a condition of exploitation. I think that it's an inequality that a good society should not have. I think the more practical reason why We've already seen plenty of societies that have gone down the road of building bigger and bigger welfare states. These societies have often had to stop at a certain point.

37:07 They've had a lot of their gains eroded. In part, this was because of the political power of capitalists who get to make the decision whether or not to invest. When you have a condition of full employment like you did in, let's say, Sweden in the 1960s, you have an economy that's actually functioning with full employment. It doesn't have runaway inflation as a result of full employment. There's all sorts of tools, macroeconomic tools that the government is doing to keep that into check. But what you do have is workers who feel really comfortable and really secure, and they start demanding higher and higher wages and also more industrial democracy. So you're a Swedish capitalist who could say, yes,

37:50 I have to deal with this really strong state and these powerful unions, but at least I have production 300-something days a year instead of my colleagues in France where there's strikes all the time, or in Britain, not nearly as social democratic as a country, but a country with a really deep militant workers' movement. At least I have my stability. That capitalist can say, you know, I'm getting squeezed.

38:12 I'm going to stop investing, and especially at contingent things like the OPEC shock and greater globalization starting in the 70s and onward. But it actually turned out to be a system that was economically possible, but politically unstable. And as a result, you know, the smart social Democrats realized that they had to pursue a different road. I think there was a left-wing, more socialist resolution to this crisis that involved worker ownership. It was tried, like the Minder Plan and other attempts to move shares from capitalist to ordinary workers, but the common route it went in was the route of the third way that said, you know, we're going to maintain redistribution. We're going to maintain these

38:56 existing welfare states, but we're going to stop the deeper advance of the welfare state. And we're also going to have to restore, you know, slightly higher unemployment and sort of other constraints on the ability of workers to bargain. So these are certainly better societies than we have now, but I think it is fundamentally a different sort of model.

39:16 And especially for me, I believe that workers should not have just the power of exit and production. So what social democracy does is, unlike feudalism, we're not serfs. Workers can leave production. In reality, in a country with a weak welfare state, or really just like a poorly structured welfare state, I should say, like the US, you're often tied to your employer in such a way that your power of exit is limited. Like maybe I could find a job with comparable salary, but I can't find the benefits or there'll be a disruption or whatever else.

39:47 Your power of.

39:47 Exit is weakened. but you also really have limited voice in the workplace as well. And in my view, there's all sorts of radical economic benefits that could come from giving people more voice as well. We're making a very soft claim that we think the system could be comparable to capitalist development. But when I think about these battles over, let's say, AI and labor-saving technology, a workplace filled with people who get residual profits, who get dividends, are less likely, these ordinary workers would be less likely to hide their knowledge from their employer. They'd be less likely to resist the automation of elements of their work. I actually think there's huge advantages in an economy in which workers have

40:37 more voice. But obviously for me, even if there wasn't, I should say, I would be in favor of that on egalitarian grounds.

40:45 You have interesting politics because you're a socialist. You also have some liberal tendencies in which you believe in the sort of premise of consumer choice, et cetera. And you're also a conservative because you're sort of like, let's get rid of the weed shops and police are important. It's interesting.

41:04 I don't usually read a lot of like French, European continental theorists, et cetera. But I saw this ad. It was on the Verso Books website. This guy, Frédéric Lordon. who wrote a book in 2020, it came out in 2022, Imperium Structures and Effects of Political Bodies. And I thought I loved it. I was surprised. But he argued that the solution to like, I like coffee and you like almond milk, or that basically like he said, like, we can't have like, once we start with the premise of sort of like, voluntary association, voluntary goods, we can see that the unit of society is the individual and that's liberal and that the solution to that is changing people, that actually like the solution is modification. And if we

41:54 like different things, then the answer is like we have to modify people so that they all like the same things. And that is the sort of key step on the path to he's a communist, but that is the step Why not just like embark on an effort to just make everyone the same or to to aspire in a direction of this sort of what he the word he uses modification such that we know the individual no longer has to be the unit of politics or society.

42:24 Well, in part, I believe in a reconciliation of liberalism and socialism. I think actually most democratic socialists today have already made that reconciliation. That reconciliation is actually in the bones of its tradition. So by saying the state doesn't have the right to, let's say, direct your labor, why?

42:42 Why doesn't it? If there's a utilitarian end, why doesn't the state have the right? Because it just doesn't, right? I think there's all sorts of ways in which we should trumpet the defense of the individual as something that's very important. The question is, though, should the state be involved in the project of shaping behavior? Well, states are, and I think it's a good thing, right? I think it makes sense that the state should create the very least friction in antisocial behavior.

43:07 So I would.

43:08 Love tomorrow, the state said, even if we're not going to ban sports betting, we at least are going to put a ban on sports betting apps notifying you on your phone even. Even that is, well, maybe I want to be notified if the line changes on the Giants game. Well, no, the state is saying that there's an end. We're shaping behavior.

43:26 We have a lot less smoking now than we did when I was growing up.

43:31 But it's coming back. Zoomers are smoking.

43:34 Yeah, well, we need to create more friction, right? And we also need to maybe tax other nicotine products. So that's a little bit less expensive.

43:40 So if you are going to smoke, Wait, can I just, I'm stuck on the school holiday thing for a second.

43:46 This is the most controversial thing I said.

43:49 No, but I think it relates to some of what we're discussing. So I'm assuming that both of you want to spend quality time with your children. And so your opposition to school holidays is it's a hassle for people who are working. You have to arrange child care. It's a friction that you have to deal with. In a socialist society, could we not just have more worker holidays that line up with school holidays? Wouldn't that be the solution rather than getting rid of the school holidays?

44:15 Well, like anything, there's going to be a trade-off, right? We have more worker holidays, then there's obviously less being produced. There's less surplus for society. So obviously, if society wants to make that trade-off, be a little bit poorer, have a little more holidays, that's fine. Actually, I believe in those trade-offs, I guess, to some degree. I do believe that like a pursuit, a good society would have more leisure time. And we should just make sure like I work 60 hour plus weeks and if there was a law really mandating that everyone really sticks to 35, I guess I would find things to do and I would enjoy it. Well, I think education is like a particular thing where, you know, our children need education. There's obviously

44:52 been slippage in educational outcomes at the very least since the pandemic. I would actually argue that some of the better parts of No Child Left Behind have been abandoned and we've kept some of the annoying parts. So, I mean, this isn't even really a political argument, but my vision is Kids in school, nine to five. High frequency of low-stakes standardized testing. I don't even know how this is a socialist argument, but that's just my vision. And no Diwali off. Diwali really starts in the evening anyway.

45:23 It doesn't make sense.

45:26 Like I said, I'll trade. I'll take one of mine off the board. I just have one last question. OK, DSA, I've never been to a DSA meeting. I don't know, really, like the left in this country is so broad and some of it to me seems less left and more like hyper liberal. There could be anything from like someone is advocating Medicare for all. and someone is advocating for abolished landlords, and someone else is advocating for decriminalizing sex work.

45:57 And there are many things that seem to fall under what people call the left in this country. And I don't really know, like, how many people who self-characterize as the left are sort of, like, class-based leftists per se. Like, if I were to go to a DSA meeting, never been to one, I don't think they'd want me in there.

46:15 How small or big is your contention? Where do you how you know how much like with just fighting the intrafight of the left, how much do you have to grow yet in order for the Bosker view to be the view that is the left?

46:30 And what's the general perception of market socialism? I guess classical DSAs.

46:35 I think market socialism is now the norm on the socialist left. But the question is how much people say. oh, we need markets now, but maybe in the future, AI will solve calculation problems. And then my response- Well, this is true.

46:51 The Soviets didn't have the kind of pricing data that you could get nowadays, right?

46:55 Yeah, I mean, I think it still doesn't make sense. I think AI can help form a better plan but it wouldn't actually help you execute that plan. Then if something changes, you would then have to reform the plan. It kind of would be the worst of both worlds in many ways. But my normal response there is to point to incentive problems, and that normally wins the argument, though I am actually a pure believer. I'm on the Von Mises-Hayek side of the calculation debate. And I also believe in the inherent good of the market as a coordinating mechanism. But I would say this is probably the largest problem grouping of a very fragmented set of beliefs.

47:33 But serious interrogation with the history of socialist economies and also just thinking and laying out. We spend a lot of the book laying out the normative case for a very radical form of egalitarianism.

47:46 But kind of starting.

47:47 With the here's what we believe actually helps lay the groundwork for making the technical argument. But, you know, Jacobin, for all its heterodox views, is the largest publication on the socialist left in generations since Appeal to Reason, since over a hundred years.

48:04 You know, I got to the socialist calculation debate. It reminds me of the early, I've been reading a lot about AI lately because it seems pretty important. The early AI pioneers tried to embed intelligence in the form of an algorithm and it didn't work. They tried to like write down what intelligence is and teach it to a computer and it didn't work. It only worked after, let's just collect a lot of data, And it was very different from the early AI pioneers. And my expectation is that as AI gets better and better, it will get better at predicting the results of experiments so you don't have to run the experiment. And if you perceive capitalism as a series of entrepreneurs making hypotheses and then testing

48:43 them with the firm, I actually not only do I think it's possible, I think there's a very good chance that AI leads to essentially a form of communism by which we no longer need the firm to As a hypothesis of.

48:57 What will work.

48:58 Anyway.

48:58 The AI thing does not work because there's not like a data set to collect. Like people's wants and needs change constantly. And also then it doesn't explain.

49:08 But if you believe in a super intelligent AI, we are. You know what? Let's revisit this in 10 years.

49:15 Even the trade-offs are so constantly.

49:19 You could answer the calculation problem of the most efficient way for the state to build a railroad and the correct allocation. But the reason why we have market-driven prices is obviously for the trade-off end of it. I think AI can create a static perfect plan, but I think it would fail in execution.

49:37 But We will see.

49:38 We'll see.

49:39 Oscar, thank you so much for coming on Outlaws.

49:41 Thanks for having me.

49:42 Congrats on the book.

49:56 Tracy, I thought that was a really fun conversation. I have to say my guess is like if the quote broad left in the United States, or just represented by Bosker and Zoran, that would be an upgrade from many of the voices that you hear across the lab.

50:11 It's still, as you said, a very interesting mix of politics. No weed shops, but, you know, public provision.

50:19 Consumer choice.

50:20 You have to apply to the public bank to get your restaurant and then no weed shops.

50:25 And less exploitation of workers, but fewer school holidays.

50:29 Fewer school holidays and lots of options at the bread line. Or lots of options at the bread aisle, not in a bread line.

50:36 That $ 70 sourdough loaf that's on sale in New York. Well, the other thing, and we didn't get into it because the book purposefully doesn't get into it, is.

50:46 The transition, right? How do you go from.

50:48 An ultra-capitalist society to something that resembles market socialism. People own their houses right now. They own, you know, publicly traded stocks and things like that.

50:59 How do you manage that process? Because you would imagine there would be quite a lot of opposition.

51:03 And then what happens also, I think this is a really important point, is what happens when you transition to socialism and then four years later, the voters don't like it. Do you transition back to like that's like so like part of like the question of like democracy as it's structured is like, all right, you know what? We're going to elect Bernie Sanders president and we're going to embark on this road to socialism. And then it's like four years later, it's like, OK, now we're going to elect Donald Trump, whatever. Like there are many, you know, I think as a blueprint, it's like very interesting. It's very interesting to think about these things getting there. I guess that's always been the challenge, but getting there and then

51:40 maintaining there so that actually like we have to like stick with it and follow through on it. That strikes me as difficult in a country that has elections every two years.

51:49 Yeah, for sure. Shall we leave it there?

51:51 Let's leave it there.

51:52 This has been another episode of the Odd Thoughts Podcast. I'm Traci Allaway. You can follow me at Traci Allaway.

51:57 And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow our guest, Bhaskar Sankara, at Sunray Sunray. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Arman, Dashiell Bennett at Dashbot, Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks, and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano. And you can chat about all of these topics 24-7 in our Discord, discord.gg slash oddlods. And for even more Oddlods content, check out our daily newsletter, which you can find at bloomberg.com slash oddlods.

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52:50 Thanks for joining.

53:00 So so