Magazine discusses the left under president trump. Jacobin offers socialist perspectives for the future. Welcome to the center speaking series. My name is nico mele, director of the center, and our guest today is bhaskar sunkara, Founding Editor and publishing editor of jacobin magazine a left wing quarterly magazine based in new york, it describes itself leading voice of the american left, offering socialist perspective on politics, economics and culture. He is the editor of the abcs of socialism and coed for of the future we want radical ideas for the new century. You can also i encourage you to pick up and subscribe to jacobin. I came across jacojacobin be i was looking for new ideas, new ways of thinking about where the country is going. I think its kind of clear this is a moment of significant transition for our politics and our media and i was looking for fresh voices in that. And i just want to read to you, i printed out the headlines from the jacobin website today. Lipstick fascism, women of the alt right and the feminization of fascism, your bosss little secret, you have a right to know how much your coworkers are played, ignoring elite, how not to think about politics in the age of trump, work to death, the american pension crisis, capitalism versus privacy. A number of interesting and compelling arguments and ideas. Im looking forward to a vigorous discussion. Bhaskar, welcome to harvard. Thank you for having me. So i want to start and ask you for your diagnosis of the politics in this country right now. Wow, youre starting big. Yes. I was a little disappointed i got the invitation to harvard i was expecting oak and mahogany, this, you know, its all right but next time. Theres cubicles even. Im looking for the cigar afterwards. I think the present situation is this. You have a lot of people who are alienated and disgruntled with politics as usual, and were in danger of having the only antiestablishment voice be one coming from the populist right. The swaition igsituation is me depressing one. Trump doesnt have a huge mandate yet. He quind of squeaked by in the election. Im afraid if democrats continue on their current course he could develop one over time. It doesnt take much. It doesnt even take trump and the populist right convincing people they have a much better alternative. All it takes is a little bit of deficit financing and them being smart enough and paul ryan allowing a big infrastructure and jobs program and something to slightly ameliorate the feeling a lot of people are having. What gives me some hope is that B Bernie Sanders showed there is a potential for maoritarian Politics Around a democratic program, not 10, 20 years down the road but immediately. The kind of rhetoric of the Sanders Campaign basically saying you work hard. You sacrifice a lot. Youre trying to do right. And you deserve more, and not only that, but we know the people responsible for you not having enough, and its a millionaire and billionaire class. I think broadly thats the only fighting alternative to the rhetoric were having from the populist right. Were in this situation now what seems to be a pretty, you know, dire one, with the rise of the right, and this is with them having trump at the helm. Obviously trump has certain things to his credit, as aboppositional figure, embodies some of this at least in rhetoric antiestablishment pose. He feeds his base with red meat but also is pretty bungling and made a lot of crucial errors like around trumpcare and other things and the way in which some of his concrete proposals have been laid out. Imagine how dangerous the situation would be if the populist right had someone with more acumen and vision. Im afraid not just now but after we defeat trump, and i also thought he didnt have a chance in the 2016, so who am i to say but it seems like he can easily be defeated electorally in 2020, but what about trumpism . Could we be in a situation where u. S. Politics starts to resemble french politics where you have, you know, a populist right thats constant fixture in politics, pushing every measure and every idea to the right, and even if they cant win in the french case in the second round of the president ial election theyre still there as a major force. I really think the only alternative is, im not saying its socialism or bar barism, but better thanner sanders welfareism or capitalist trumpism. The pragmatism of the Democratic Center is just, you know, i think in extremely unpragmatic way just allowing this rightward drift in american politics. Talk a little bit about how you view the Democratic Party today . You mentioned Bernie Sanders, but you know, hes approaching 80, and in fact many of the leaders of the Democratic Party are approaching 80, if not older. Yes, i mean, i think the Democratic Party, and this is not the fault of this generation of democratic leaders. I think this is often framed in a way, fdr and lbj were of a certain character and disposition and Hillary Clinton is of another, in a personalized way which i dont think makes sense. I would say the Democratic Party has always been a party of capital, and i dont mean that pejoratively. Its always represented certain business interests within its tent. Big oil, we now associate with george w. Bush and the republicans, but in fact big oil was a major part, lots of historical reasons for this, the Democratic Coalition from the 1930s up until the 80s. If youre the party that represents popular labor interests and the interests of capital at the same time it means that when times are going well, and theres a boom, you could actually say that the pie is growing because of this businessled growth, and were going to make sure that some of the share of this growing pie is going to workers. Now when the pie is at best staying the same size or if anything is shrinking, the best of the Democratic Party can say from the 1970s onwards the same workers is that were going to give you more of the pie, more of this pie than the republicans could, and also to historically oppress and marginalize groups. Well make sure this pie is more equitably split up, so in other words they could promise social inclusion, but they now promise social inclusion without any of the economic kind of gains that went with it. Even up to the Great Society they could offer both. Could you obviously see the way in which not just white workers but whole segments of the population it feels like things have been going wrong for them. Now correlate the fact that the pie is growing and there has been social gains for oppressed groups together as being one is responsible for the other, and i think the approach of this populist left that emerged around sanders, also represented by keith ellison, to some degree Elizabeth Warren to fight against the idea the house is full or the pie is going to. To strengthen in this direction. My view of the party because of the structural factors that emerged since the 1970s, there needs to be a strong affirmative program of redistribution, and alternative modeled growth. Theyve been unable to provide it. I think often on the left, we personalize this inability, but you know the fact is, unless you actually have the will and the capability to actually mobilize a different source of power than the Traditional Democratic base, and i dont mean people voting for the Democratic Party, i mean the business interest attached to it today. Lot of it is in the finance industry, Silicon Valley and whatnot, unless youre able to conceive of politics in a different more popular way i think were doomed to have the democrats continue along this path. In that framework, why did you start this magazine . I have lots of reasons why i could see. Two or three years or in this case five or six years after the fact come by with this narrative and vision. I started the magazine because i had some extra spare time, and it was between my sophomore and junior year as an undergrad, so i didnt have a lot of social obligations. The world wasnt asking much of me at the time. And i thought that i had developed a network on the socialist left, and i knew plenty of smart people, and i had a bit of business acumen, so i figured why not take these smart people and facilitate a project so were not just talking amongst ourselves. I think it was based on this idea that socialist ideas ive been a member of the democratic socialist of america for ten years, since i was like 17 years old, and for me, these ideas, the moral and ethical ideas at the core of the socialist project, the idea we should live in a World Without exploitation, without oppression, these are ideas that should have appeal beyond the 5,000 or 6,000 then in discussion with the ideas. So i think jacobin what set it apart from the rest of the socialist left, at a time of historic defeat, we were trying to kind of evangelicalize among this broader public, and try to win over people unpoliticized and liberals to this moral and ethical vision. Also, the one hand combine this earnest purpose with some degrees of humor and levity and whatnot, and i think thats where it started. It was an easy project at first. At first it was an online magazine. It was an utter failure. My first day we had 636 visitors on the site, and the reason why i went to print is i figured how many of them were your mother . Yes, my mother, my aunt, and they were probably refreshing throughout the day a little bit. So my thinking was, though, that i needed an actual revenue mechanism and a mechanism to make jacobin perceived as more serious and that meant going to print. I doubled down on something that was failing and it continued to fail for a while, and then it stopped failing but no one was really watching. Thats the thing, when youre doing a project in private, or in semiprivate, i mean 636 people is basically private, you have time to learn and develop and grow skills and whatnot, whereas right now i am far more conservative, hopefully not in my politics but the way i approach jacobin just because the failure would be even more humiliating in public. So what do you make of hillbillyology and strangers in their own land, this kind of narrative that we have to more deeply understand the trump voter and the Democratic Party . So i actually have only read about half of hillbillyology and it seemed to me from that half, thats basically more than most books i read, i do the grad student read, read the introduction, skim to the end, see if theres interesting footnotes and i say i read the book, but, you know, if youre an editor, all i need is general knowledge to get to two to three minutes of a conversation. This is going to be tough for me. This is a whole hour. But hillbillyology is almost like the cultural poverty arguments throughout the 80s and 90s that were obviously very racist and prop fwagated b the new republic, but poor white people and here is a potential native informant whoi thi i this in his community in the summer and whatnot, like now pushing this narrative of theres something wrong with the roots of the culture of these communities that reinforce poverty and all these other things. So i mean, sure, i think there should be a level of understanding the situation, the people live in, but if, the thing youre diagnosing people should be more flexible and able to adapt to the economy and willing to move to the cities and Everything Else i think thats a wrong conclusion. When i see poverty i see something very simple. People who need money, and i see people who need goods and services and when i think of the state, i think of the state as the only vehicle large enough to efficiently deliver these goods and services. If we have an epidemic of heroin addiction in huge parts of the country, i see people in need of High Quality Services to get over these addictions, counseling, medical services and whatnot. I also see people who probably need jobs, i think as a last resort the state should be a provider of those jobs and whatnot. I see the problems i think more simply than a lot of people. What im even proposing isnt a leap into the unknown. What im proposing in the short term is nothing more than a scandinavian welfare state, which in a country as wealthy as the u. S. Should be common sense. And i think thats part of our immediate project and part of the project that Bernie Sanders contributed so much to, to try to get people to expect more of the state. Were not asking for the state to alleviate heartbreak and suffering and angst or whatever. Even communism wouldnt do that, right . Certain things are parts of the human condition. But we are asking for the states to provide a basic level of Human Dignity to allow people to reach their potential and so on, and i think often theres this kind of voyeuristic view of poverty. Whether in the Africanamerican Community or among poor whites would people make it seem like these are impossible to decipher solutions. I see 60,000 Homeless People in new york and i think hey, maybe we should build more high quality Public Housing instead of letting the Public Housing that we have deteriorate. I see poor people i think we should build homes. Obviously at the level of policy, this becomes more complicated and nuanced, but at the level of politics, i think its common sense what direction our policies should be driven and thats in a lot of ways is immoral and unethical vision. What role do you see technology playing in that and kind of the direction of our economy . So on technology, this is one place where i cant really even feign through two or three minutes. I think like a lot of people im convinced by the last thing i read. Something will say like Driverless Cars and mass automation of existing jobs is coming in like ten years, another article says 20 years and i just agree with the last thing i read generally. I would say that if you think about places in which, like why does in europe why are they more capital intensive and why are they slightly on the more innovative edge than American Companies and factories . The answer is simple. Like they have more wage pressure. So when i look at the low wage workforce in the u. S. , i kind of think why would capital even want to automate some of these jobs, being paid almost nothing and theres risk in introducing new technologies and so on. So to some degree im a skeptic about how fast some of these automation will be pushed through. I also think that generally youre a skeptic because you think theres the potential that automation will increase pressure on the no im skeptic just because i think as far as these things are going to be introduced but as far as the pace of introduction, if we had even a social democracy in the u. S. I think wed have a quicker pace of job displacement through automation because thered be more wage pressure and more incentive for companies to invest in capital, this capital intensive technology. As it is, i think its more important than ever to actually develop a mode of politics that foregrounds the interests of workers. That doesnt necessarily mean this society will be less on the cutting edge of technology or whatnot. It might again create wage pressures that will increase the pace of technological innovation, but then at the same time be able to protect these workers through active labor market policies and jobs retraining and welfare state in case theyre displaced and put them in a different sector of the economy and whatnot. I think we have to start from the premise the most important thing isnt the bottom line. The most important thing is social welfare, so when we think for example about 1970s sweden, i hate to point to it. Its not my model, the just Society Falls short of it but the closest weve gotten in the human endiscover. This is a society that had free trade, right . This is a society that had lots of firm failure and things like that. So i think in other words whats key is that we develop the politics that foreground working class interests, then from there we could, you know, see technology is a thing that helps rather than hurt. Certain jobs should, in fact, be automated, right . The people in those sectors might want to do something else, but if its on the present course, or the working class has less and less power, but also theyre more and more at the whims of globalization, and technological change i think thats dangerous. The best way ive heard this described was by a british member of parliament, the labor party, John Trickett and he was trying to explain why in his district, almost 90 plus of the population voted leave. He said that youre on a runaway train and you dont know what direction the train is going, and its going faster and faster. So he said people in his district did what was pretty logical, especially if they didnt know there was a conductor or not. They looked around, the people in their car, and they decided to link hands with the people in their car. Obviously theres a different alternative, right . Theres a socialist vision of maybe trying to communicate with people in other cars and joining together and trying to take control of the train, but in the present environment, i think for a lot of people theyre not against technology for the sake of being against technology. Theyre against, you know, a train that they dont know where the direction is and they dont know what their fate will be in the future, but to contrast discussion bringing politics into this sphere of technology, i think we could have both. We could have technological advance. We could embrace actually the positive aspect of automation, so im 27 years old. I am not planning to have kid any time soon. I would hope the Driverless Cars i wouldnt have the worries my parents had when i was 17 and 18 and trying to learn how to drive and so on, of you know, maybe in fact it will be nice living in a society where human beings arent in the control of vehicles. Maybe there will be certain social goods we could think about it. But i am more apt to envisi