Bhaskar Sunkara

I want to get within scoring position.

The reason why—we should really move from this analogy—but the reason why I call myself a socialist is looking through history and these examples of social democracy, you saw that

They were able to give working class people lots of rights and income and power in their society.

But at the end of the day, capitalists still had the ultimate power, which is the ability to withhold investment.

So they could say in the late 1960s and early 70s,

listen, I was fine with this arrangement 10 years ago, but now I feel like I'm going to take my money and I'm going to go move to a different country, or I'm just going to not invest because my workers are paid too much.

I'm still making money, but I feel like I could be making more.

I need more of an upper hand, right?

So their economic power

is then challenging the democratic mandate of Swedish workers that were voting for the Social Democratic Party and were behind this advance.

So to me, what socialism is, in part, is taking the means of production, where this capitalist power is coming from, and making it socially owned so that ordinary workers can control their workplaces, can make investment decisions, and so on.

Now, does that mean total state ownership of everything or a planned economy?

I don't think that makes any sense.

You know, I think that we should live in a society in which markets are harnessed and regulated and so on.

My main problem is capitalist ownership, in part on normative grounds, just because I think that it doesn't make sense that we celebrate democracy and all these other spheres, but we have workplaces that are just

Treated like tyrannies and in part because I think that ordinary workers would much prefer a system in which over time they, you know, accrued shares and ownership where they got in addition to base kind of ways they got dividends from their firm being successful.

and that they figured out how to, you know, large firms, they're not going to be making day-to-day decisions by democratic vote, right?

But maybe you would elect representatives, elected managements, once every year or two, depending on your operating agreement, and so on.

That's kind of my vision of a socialist society.

And this sounds, I hope, like agree or disagree.