Bhaskar Sunkara

Like, it would not be a crazy leap into year zero, right?

This could be maybe a way in which we could take a lot of what's existing in society, but then just add this on top.

But what it would mean is a society without a capitalist class.

This class hasn't been, you know, individually, these people, you know, haven't been taken to re-education camps or whatever else, but they're just no longer in this position.

and they're now part of the economy in other ways.

They'll probably be the first set of highly competent technocrats and managers and so on.

They'll probably be very well compensated for their time and expertise and whatever else.

But to me...

both the practical end of things, like taking away this ability to withhold investment and increasing our ability to democratically shape investment priorities and to continue down the road of social democracy.

And on normative grounds, my kind of egalitarian belief that ordinary people should have more stake in their lives in the workplace leads me beyond social democracy to socialism.

So first of all, I think it's worth remembering that the socialist movement had different outcomes across Western Europe and Eastern Europe.

And in some of these countries in Western Europe, there wasn't actually democracy before the workers' movement and before the socialist movement.

So...

The battle in Sweden, for instance, was about establishing political democracy, establishing true representation for workers.

And that's how the parties became popular.

Same thing in Germany, too.

Then it was the Social Democrats who were able to build political democracy.

Then on top of that, add layers of economic democracy, social democracy.

The Swedish Social Democrats ruled basically uninterrupted from the early 1930s until 1976.

It's kind of crazy to think about, but they were just in government.