Bhaskar Sunkara

Right? This is, uh...

So, uh, this, uh, book, uh, The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World, which I co-wrote, uh, with, uh, my, my good friend and longtime editor, uh, Bhaskar Sunkara, and, uh, our friend Mike Beggs, uh, who's the actual, uh, economics professor in the mix.

Right? The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World, uh, is, uh, coming out a week from tomorrow, which feels, uh, almost unbelievable as, uh, to, to actually, uh, to actually say out loud, uh, because Bhaskar first pitched me the idea for that book in February 2020.

Uh, and then he and, you know, Mike, you know, like, like we got Mike on board pretty quickly, right? We realized, you know, we need an actual academic economist in, uh, the mix.

Ricky D'Ambros is executive producer.

Bhaskar Sunkara is president of The Nation.

Katrina Vanden Heuvel is editor and publisher of The Nation.

Our theme music is Barcelona Afrobeat, licensed by Creative Commons.

Thanks to producer and director Alan Minsky, and to Jacobin Radio's Micah Utrecht.

Bhaskar Sunkara is the founder and editor of Jacobin magazine, and special thanks to Robert Brenner, and thanks to you for listening.

I'm Susie Wiseman.

[upbeat music]

So, uh, the reason that, uh, we thought that it'd be a fun episode, besides the fact that, uh, people have been asking Cuba, "What, what's-- why haven't you been on GTA lately? Is, is there, is there a reason you, you haven't been on GTAA? Is, is something going on?" Uh, uh, so you know, haven't done a Cu- Cuba episode in a bit.

And beyond that, the reason that we thought it-- this would be a fun and interesting one to do, and really Cuba thought it'd be a fun and interesting one to do, it was his idea, is that I co-wrote this book, uh, shameless plug, coming out two weeks from tomorrow on September 29th, uh, with Mike Beggs and Bhaskar Sunkara called "The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World." [lip smack] And basically, it's an attempt to think through what an economically viable form of a fully socialist society could look like in the 21st century, how it can go beyond social democracy and, uh, expropriate the capitalist class without then having the kinds of economic dysfunction that plagued the state socialist experiments of the 20th century, um, [lip smack] and that stopped them from being a stable long-term alternative to capitalism.

And, um, you know, we're trying to show why those, you know, uh, lessons from the 20th century do not in fact show that we're just stuck with capitalism forever, that we can do something better.

And I've done a couple of events for the book already.

There are a couple of books that I think are coming out or have come out recently or essays that have come out that actually probably are what you're looking for.

And, um, one is from Mike McCarthy, um, one is from Bhaskar Sunkara and Mike Beggs, another is from Aaron Benanav, and then Katrina Forrester, um, all friends and guests of the pod, future and past.

So Mike McCarthy's Master's Tools came out from Verso a couple of years ago.

Mike outlines a project of what he calls sortition-based financial institutions.

And he imagines these sortition or random selection based institutions might be able to democratize and socialize the investment function within capitalist economies and chart a new course, like funding massive expenditures into housing, green transition, whatever other kinds of built infrastructure and human capacity we might elect to develop.

There's also a new book coming out, I think, relatively soon.

This is Bhaskar Sunkara and Mike Begg have this book, and I think Ben did this, right?

Yes.

But in this episode today, uh, what we are gonna play you is the very first public event that I've at least done, uh, for the book, not counting, uh, three years ago at the Socialism Conference in Chicago.

Bhaskar Sunkara, Mike Beggs, and I, right, so my two co-authors and I, uh, did a, uh, event to kind of preview it.

The book was about half done at that point.

But since it has been done, uh, at least on my end and publicly, right, uh, uh, this is the, this is the first, you know, in-person event.

No one needs me to tell them the political obstacles to transition into a socialist form of economic organization.

I think anybody who's thought about it for 30 seconds has a pretty, pretty good sense of what a steep uphill climb that would be politically.

Um, and while there is a lot to be said about thinking through the problems of socialist transition, that's not what the book is about, right? The book that, uh, Bhaskar Sunkara and Mike Baggs and I wrote, The Blueprint.

And it's not what this talk is about.

Ricky D'Ambros is executive producer.

Bhaskar Sunkara is president of The Nation.

Katrina Vanden Heuvel is editor and publisher of The Nation.

Our theme music is Barcelona Afrobeat, licensed by Creative Commons.

Thanks to producer and director Alan Minsky and to Jacobin Radio's Micah Utrecht.

Bhaskar Sunkara is the founder and editor of Jacobin Magazine.

And special thanks to Robert Brenner.

And thanks to you for listening.

If this is supposed to be targeting a left that is, I think, on the fence right now, a left that's currently negotiating what its commitments to anti-imperialism are vis-a-vis its commitments, commitments or investment in electoralism, then that's the kind of left that r- kind of, like, hates The New York Times for obvious reasons, but does read The Guardian.

The Guardian is an, is a outlet that will publish Bhaskar Sunkara, and will have l- American left voices in there from time to time.

Okay.

Let me...