The Circular Logic of Bhaskar Sunkara

Will Stratford

July 20, 2022

Bhaskar Sunkara is the founding editor of Jacobin and, as of February, president of The Nation. He has appeared on two interviews this June, “Socialism is Supposed to Be a Working-Class Movement. Why Isn’t It?” on the Ezra Klein Show, and “Jacobin after Bernie” on Doug Lain’s Sublation Media Youtube channel. In both, the interviewers prompt Sunkara to take stock of the current moment and address the question, what is the long-term political strategy of America’s leading “socialist” publisher? In response, Sunkara attempts to delineate a plausible strategy centered around canvassing for a Sanders-like Democrat to win the presidency and implement an expansion of the welfare state, which will in turn create the necessary political space for socialist organizing to begin. Whether Sunkara puts on his progressive face when interviewed by the liberal Ezra Klein or his populist face when talking to the leftist Doug Lain, both masks represent two aspects of leftist embeddedness in the Democratic Party at the heart of his strategy for socialism. Thus, he remains uncritical of the Sanders campaigns, whose tactical outlook of stacking the progressive-populist pole of the Democratic Party he shares. The missed opportunity for leftist self-reassessment that these interviews represent must not go unnoticed. Not only does Sunkara obscure how Sanders’ campaigns have crippled the Left by absorbing them into the Democratic Party, he also relinquishes historical socialist strategy, which understood the need to organize the working class independently from the state and, especially, non-socialist (capitalist) parties. Through this abuse of history, Sunkara, as the most prominent face of American “socialism” today, obscures consciousness of the repressed necessity of the present: (re)building a mass socialist Left.

First, we must clarify Sunkara’s long-term strategy for reaching socialism, which involves taking his comments more seriously than he may want to. The most charitable reconstruction of his vision goes something like this: a “populist” leftist campaign (Bernie) generates a new cadre of leaders, made up of progressive activists steeped in “class-first” sensibilities, who themselves serve to “create a Left with actual rootedness in the working class” and the “keeping alive [of] socialist ideas for a new generation to be useful many years in the future,” that is, until the next Bernie-like figure, who will hopefully win the presidency and then use their office as a bully pulpit to “unblock the state” and finally unleash the conditions for organizing the working class for socialism. In this manner, Sunkara envisions a step-wise path to socialism and not simply a leftward shift of the Democratic Party as a final goal. Therefore, he frames mobilizing activists within the Democratic Party as a tactical means for getting beyond electoralism, “to connect with and build a base and move them along to more progressive policies and rhetoric.” The question is, if the Left ties its socialist hopes to the vicissitudes of the Democratic Party, how do we make sure that it is we who are taking advantage of the Democrats and not the other way around?

Within his schema, Sunkara sees us today as somewhere along phase two, insofar as the Sanders movement constituted an upsurge of leftist politics. “The state of the Left is far better than I could have imagined where it would be ten years ago,” he tells Klein, since now “the Left is a presence in American life.” According to Sunkara’s game plan, funneling the Left into the Democratic Party has gotten us closer to socialism, since the extra-electoral organizing necessary for socialism cannot really begin until certain progressive-populist conditions of the state have been met. In other words, only by making headway through a capitalist party is a socialist party possible. Thus, Sunkara submits, Sanders advanced us along our way, since he helped the Left win the requisite political legitimacy necessary for organizing the working class for socialism. But the question is, in pursuing this strategy have we normalized the Left’s status as the loyal opposition to the Democrats to such a degree that we do not even treat it as a strategic decision? And, if so, doesn’t this run directly against the long-term strategies of the historical Left? According to the Socialist Party of America (SPA), which constituted a mass socialist movement in the first two decades of the twentieth century, workers needed their own organizational vehicle, the socialist party. They needed this to politically represent their class interests, as distinct from the bourgeois and petit bourgeois interests of non-socialist parties, and they could not afford to wait to build it.

Against historical socialism, which distinguished itself sharply from American Progressivism and Populism, Sunkara redefines socialist politics as populism plus progressivism, that is, identity-indifferent welfare statism. This dimension of Sunkara’s strategy comes out especially clearly in his interview with Ezra Klein. At one point in that conversation, in what can only be described as a confab between Democrat-minded technocrats, Klein and Sunkara digress into a lengthy exchange about how to make the federal government more efficient with the funds allocated to infrastructure. For Sunkara, the infrastructure problem comes down to a tension between “expertise and democracy,” in part “a matter of trusting the experts.” As he assured his listeners, “it doesn’t mean that the model of having an empowered bureaucracy is wrong. It means that the bureaucracy was not conducting the right sort of reviews.” That is, we simply need “better trained, more empowered experts.” Part of the political problem, Sunkara suggests, is what he terms “a rooted distrust in the state.” “In other countries,” he says, “there is a lot more trust there.” Today in the US, he says, “it’s all a far cry from what we used to do,” reminiscing about “the original Tennessee Valley Authority” of the New Deal. The whole dialogue suggests that liberation from capital is unachievable but state-administered wealth redistribution is. A similar logic comes up in Sunkara’s occasional lament over the college-educated (downwardly mobile middle-class) “activist base” of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which only obscures more fundamental questions of ideology and strategy.

Historically, Socialists firmly opposed Progressives on the issue of obstructing versus propping up the state. Rather than appealing to the state for progressive reforms to improve the condition of working people, Socialists proposed that the working class should organize itself to take state power. They objected to welfare measures, believing there was nothing leftist, much less socialist, about rendering workers dependent upon the state rather than upon their movement, their union, and their party. The stronger the American welfare state grew through the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the weaker the political movement for socialism became. The right to dissent, whether through speech or strikes, eroded under the enlarged role of the state, which prioritized the fostering of American national community above citizens’ civil liberties. The substitution of regulatory state policies for the struggle to overcome capitalism, beginning with the Left’s dissolution into the New Deal coalition in the West and the Stalinist Communist parties in the East, spelled the end of the socialist Left. But for Sunkara, it marks the jumping-off point. In effect, he reduces a century of workers’ struggle for socialism from the 1840s to the 1940s to its final decades, when its goal of socialist revolution receded out of sight. Sunkara’s political vision essentially comprises nostalgia for mid-century Fordist capitalism.

In the other interview, Doug Lain starts to press him on the issue of socialists’ meaningful distinction from progressives. Here, Sunkara’s responses appeal to the populist aspects of his Democratic Party-based strategy, centering on the figure of Bernie Sanders. When Lain asks what made Sanders different from past Democrats who used the language of the New Deal, Sunkara replies, “I think there was a far sharper level of class delineation in what he was expressing…The fact that he called himself a socialist. I think that was actually significant.” But what makes the return of the word “socialism” substantive and not simply a dilution of its historical meaning? On this front, Sunkara is more honest in his interview with Klein. There he cites the “huge amounts of volunteers to do canvassing” for progressive-populist Democrats in 2022 as the fruits of Bernie 2016 and 2020. Ostensibly, then, what counts as class politics is determined from within Democratic electioneering. Otherwise, Sunkara would have to agree with those, like Adolph Reed Jr., who have faced up to the failure of the Sanders movement to create lasting institutions for class struggle. When Lain asks him how to avoid mobilizing a movement that simply gets absorbed into the Democrats, Sunkara denies that this has been the case: “My goal was for him [Sanders] to be a voice in kind of a left populist sense for discontentment with inequality and to help us organize on the outside as a result, and I think we actually accomplished those tasks.” The Sanders movement allegedly achieved phase one of Sunkara’s strategy, namely, “distancing ourselves…from the mainstream of the Democratic Party.” But did the Sanders movement distinguish a Left from the Democrats or within them? Sunkara wants to say the former, but is this warranted?

In seeking an answer, our only reference point for mass socialist organizing is the past. What Sunkara praises as the “populist” credentials of the Sanders movement — mobilizing declassé young people to canvas for a Democratic presidential candidate — were precisely those that violated historical Populism’s emphasis on civil activism. Populism, represented by The People’s Party (1892–1909), disavowed elections as the site of politics and focused instead on social action. In fact, midwestern Populist organizations like the American Society of Equity (1902) called to completely eliminate political parties as vehicles for electing state officials, as they viewed parties as hopelessly corrupt. Socialists saw Populists’ abandonment of party politics as naïve and instead proclaimed the need for an independent socialist party based on class, with the goal of socialist revolution. Still, they recognized that the Populists were at least tactically correct to prioritize civil-social endeavors over electioneering. In fact, Socialist Party activity mainly consisted of building a robust network of working-class organizations within civil society — publishing houses, childcare, youth clubs, adult education centers, legal counsel, Socialist Sunday Schools, drinking groups, choirs, sports clubs, and more — which contributed to the goal of self-organizing the working class as an autonomous force in society, eventually united to take over the state. The party ran all of these activities in a way that was completely independent of the state. Therefore, to suggest that a socialist movement must start from within a capitalist party, as Sunkara does, is to replace historical socialist strategy with a constricted political imagination from the neoliberal era, encompassing appeals to the state and largely circumscribed to electoral canvassing and single-issue policy advocacy. In a word, it is to expunge historical socialist politics altogether.

Klein’s interview with Sunkara draws out the growing estrangement between the professional classes and the majority of workers, citing a survey carried out by Jacobin in 2021 that challenges the assumption of convergent white- and blue-collar interests. One part of the survey, Klein points out, shows that the working masses do not hold significantly more redistributionist preferences than other segments of the population, and often less than highly educated voters. The Left, Sunkara replies, must cater to the “populist baseline” in the US, an audience who “cares about more or less the same things. They care about having good health care, they care about jobs, they care about security in their neighborhoods.” But what about workers’ interest in greater autonomy, much less their ultimate class interest in abolishing capitalism? “It’s easy to focus on what government action gets wrong and mistakes made in the past through government action,” says Sunkara. “But we often don’t think about the cost of inaction.” With such invocations of Democratic talking points, essentially New Deal-ism contra Reaganism, Sunkara makes the socialist critique of capitalism hard to distinguish from the anti-Republicanism of the Democrats. And insofar as leftists echo the Democrats’ framing of the Trump movement, they obscure its political substance, namely, that most workers feel completely alienated by Washington politics and the capitalist state represented by the Democrats.

When Klein brings up how the survey demonstrates the working class’ attraction to bread-and-butter issues, Sunkara responds, “That doesn’t mean that we have to ignore issues of race and racism. We can even use words like structural racism.” But why pay lip service to such Democrat Party platitudes at all? The reflex is striking. While Sunkara generally avoids criticism of Bernie — “my favorite politician in the world” — the conclusions he draws mirror Democrats’ anti-Trumpism and “woke” identity politics: “Bernie didn’t incorporate gender and race into his worldview,” which cost him support, since “identity really does matter.” Certainly Trump, like Sanders, was never going to help build an independent socialist Left, but his supporters registered a mass discontent with neoliberal elitism that the Jacobin­ Left have failed to distinguish themselves from. Instead, the DSA have followed the Democrats’ descent into the culture war, especially around race, which has systematically divided the working class and impeded the consolidation of a “social base” for a left politics such as Sunkara purportedly desires.

Where Sunkara’s strategic outlook does the most harm is in its promotion of a narrowed conception of the Left itself. At the core of this view lies a resignation to the regressed political conditions of the present, along with an erasure of historical socialist strategy as a possible resource to draw from. Like Cold War liberals who equated socialism with Stalinism, Sunkara’s framework of socialist politics skips over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the only period when mass revolutionary socialist parties existed in core capitalist countries. His political imagination thus assumes the hollowed-out twentieth-century landscape as the only possible one. In the same way, the very idea that a substantial Left exists today only serves to accommodate a new generation to a lowered horizon of possibility. Hence, Sunkara criticizes the “political worldview that I think for many people on the Left is too focused on expanding the Overton window, the window of what’s possible.” Thus, he suppresses our capacity to recognize and move beyond progressive-populist conceptions of the Left, themselves degraded versions of mass movements going back through the Jesse Jackson, McGovern, and RFK coalitions, to the Popular Front and beyond into Gilded Age Progressivism. Sunkara certainly asks the right question when he poses, “The Left that we are trying to create is not the actually existing Left, but what we are doing as publishers, as individuals, as activists, as organizers, to create the left of the future. So, are we engaging in opportunism today that might undermine our project tomorrow?” But if we are to attempt an answer for him, based on his commentary and editorial judgment, then we must reckon honestly with his own political strategy of tying socialist hopes to progressive-populist swings within the Democratic Party. Does this constitute an opportunism that helps or impedes the formation of a new American socialism?

“We are not lost,” Rosa Luxemburg reminds us, “and we will be victorious if we have not unlearned how to learn.” Bhaskar Sunkara’s strategic leadership threatens to deprive us of that capacity (again) today. Learning from and overcoming the Left’s defeat requires admitting it in the first place. As long as we continue to champion progressive electioneering and “populist” Democrats like Bernie as socialist politics, we avoid confronting our historical condition and specifying when and how it developed historically. While Sunkara gestures toward a change of tack down the road, placing the present impasse within a stepwise blueprint, what he claims as a means to an end seems poised to become (if it isn’t already) an end in itself. This will likely continue so long as social discontent is channeled into a capitalist party rather than fueling an independent socialist one. To really “unblock and reenergize politics in the country,” the Left would need to be reimagined as not simply a progressive-populist appendage of the Democrats. In the last seven years, the continued equation of socialism to the welfare state, led by the DSA practically and Jacobin ideologically, has served to justify the Left’s consolidation into the Democratic Party and keep a lid on any detractors exposing the distortion of history involved. In a word, the conflation of socialism with its historical opponent, the welfare state, is the defeat of the Left. For Sunkara to call for it explicitly is to flog the Left’s stinking corpse.

Sunkara’s denial of the Left’s current paralysis amounts to a form of self-sabotage. Celebration of socialism’s supposed return to public discourse only perpetuates the dilution of its historical meaning. Many self-avowed radicals have been shepherded into such “leftwing” politics through friend networks, activist campaigns, and well-meaning NGOS without ever receiving an education on the history of the Left. Sunkara, on the other hand, has read his Marxism. Therefore, when he binds the politics of the Left to those circumscribed by the Democratic Party — canvassing for progressive candidates, improving infrastructure, and bolstering the welfare state — he does not simply make an honest mistake but actively misleads. As the Pied Piper of “socialism” in America, for Millennials and now Zoomers, Sunkara threatens to lure new generations into the woods. It is up to us to stop him, to offer an alternative to electing Democrats as a way of rebooting socialist politics in America.