Bhaskar Sunkara is the owner of Jacobin magazine, president of The Nation magazine, and the author of books advocating market socialism. He is a bigwig in DSA. NY Times columnist Ross Douthat did a one-hour podcast with him.
Here are a few remarks by Sunkara. You may find it helpful in conversations to take apart two fundamentals that this DSA theorist holds to: His socialism keeps private firms run for profit. And he resorts to attacking "Stalinism." Excerpts: There needs to be a motor for economic investment. There needs to be profitability in order to have something to redistribute. The added component that I would say is an important part of a socialist agenda is making sure that there are strong unions in workplaces that can advocate for higher wages even before the state gets involved with redistribution. And in my vision of a just society, of a socialist society, that private property would be controlled by ordinary workers who would get their financing from public banks, who would still operate with hard budgets. They would still need to meet [that is, produce] goods and services and meet their payroll obligations and things like that. But you don’t have a class of people who, as individuals, control investment decisions. He [Michael Harrington] was part of the organic establishment, to the left of social democracy, people who just wanted to make capitalism a little bit more humane — but also, you could say, to the right of a certain Leninism. (The columnist interjects, "To the right of Joseph Stalin.") Of course, as we should all aspire to be. There are people who self-describe as Communists in the D.S.A., but what this handful of people are doing are invoking a tradition that in other contexts we would just call anarchism. My tradition on the American left is very aware of Stalinism, of authoritarianism, of its threat. I don’t think those currents exist in even the smallest margin in D.S.A. I think you have a lot of youthful, ultra-leftist people who like the word because it’s more transgressive. But nobody is looking to the Soviet Union or anything like that. –From https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/opinion/democratic-socialist-capitalism-bhaskar-sunkara.html -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#42505): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/42505 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/120290380/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
