Nathan Robinson
Okay, so, hello. Thank you all so much for coming. I’m Nathan, and so I came to you from New Orleans, Louisiana, where our magazine is based, and I operate out of the United States, so I’m coming at this very much from a US perspective. My book, Why You Should Be a Socialist, is targeted at a US audience and is about democratic socialism in the United States. So, this is kind of interesting for me, because this is my first ever talk to a British audience, and democratic socialism might mean something, kind of, different in different contexts.
In the United States, the term has come into much more prominent use because of the Bernie Sanders campaign. You know, Bernie Sanders has just gotten the most votes in the first two of our Democratic primaries, and is currently favoured to – in fact, to be the Democratic nominee, which would be the first ever time, in American history, not just that a Democratic socialist has won a major party nomination, but that a democratic socialist has come anywhere close to having anything other than a fringe candidacy. So, Sanders – and after 2016, you really saw – his first campaign against Hillary Clinton, you really saw a take off in the use of this term. There was an explosion in membership of the democratic socialists of America, and if you look at public polling nowadays, especially of Millennials, the word ‘socialism’ really has changed in the degree of public acceptability.
The, sort of, prior history in the United States was that socialism was really considered the – you know, a term that you couldn’t go anywhere near. In their famous books, you know, It Didn’t Happen Here: Why There’s No Socialism in the United States, talking about the fact that unlike many European countries, we never really had a robust socialist movement. That’s not quite true, but it is certainly true that by contrast with European countries, it is obvious, and there’s, sort of, been this collapse of the centre in American politics. This has very much been noted. You know, Donald Trump is far to the right, Bernie Sanders very much far to the left, and centrists in the US Democratic Party are really struggling to find a candidate to unify behind at the moment, and it seems right now, as if they’re not going to.
But what does it all mean? What does the word ‘socialism’ mean to us in the United States? Why is this happening? Why is there this – why was Sanders so unexpectedly successful, after decades of being on the fringes in Congress, really having no allies at all, running many, sort of, very marginal campaigns in the 70s? And, you know, so I’ve been – I not only am, sort of, a – I run a magazine that considers itself socialist, but I also do study and interview socialists for my academic research, and, you know, it is true that a lot of the rises people have noted is among young people, who overwhelmingly have more favourable dispositions towards the term and are very critical of capitalism, what it – however they define that term. And it is, in many ways, because of the perceived failures of the United States Democratic Party because it is, as many people have noted, linked to the rise in inequality.
Occupy Wall Street in 2011 occurred under the Obama administration, right? This was a giant movement of young people who were angered by the Presidency of someone who called himself a Progressive Democrat. So, there very much was this sense that even those who considered themselves Progressive Democrats were failing to adequately address the economic situation that young people found themselves in and that we needed some more radical term to describe us. And it may be, in many ways, as if – it may be that the embrace of the term has just purely been because we need something more radical than Progressive or Democrat in that country to capture what we feel is – needs to be done.
It is true that for the entire history of socialism, there has been no definition of socialism that could be agreed on by every socialist, every person who embraces that label, right? I mean, there are common definitions like, you know, well, you know, worker control means, you know, means of production, but these things don’t really capture it. If you talk to contemporary young people, who describe themselves as democratic socialists, they don’t say, you know, they don’t say control. They don’t often use the phrase ‘means of production’, I’ve interviewed lots of them. They, you know, they describe – but I don’t think it’s meaningless, right? I don’t think – there’s a lot of conservative criticism of young people, says, well, they don’t understand the term. If you look at Senator Rand Paul’s new book, The Case Against Socialism, he says, “Young people don’t understand what socialism means.” I think that’s, sort of, a – I think that’s a mistake. I think if we don’t – if what they mean by the term is not what we assume the term to mean, I think it might mean that we just don’t understand what they mean by it. So, what I’ve done, as I interview them, is try to understand what the, sort of, common threads are in how people talk about what they mean by applying that label to themselves. And in this book I talk about how I think what a lot of people today in the United States, who embrace this label have, is they share this kind of socialistic ethic, and I kind of distinguish that from a socialised economy, right? If we think of a socialised economy, we do think of those classic traits of socialism like, you know, common ownership, nationalisation, worker democracy, co-ops, these sorts of things. You know, the institutions, ways of arranging economic production that are considered socialist and, you know, central planning, right?
This is what people often associate with socialism, but it certainly has to be more than that, because when you talk to young socialists, they often describe anti-racism and feminism and environmentalism as part of their socialism. And I talk about how there is this socialist ethic, and I think it comes from – a lot of them talk about the principle of solidarity, and you – and the principle of solidarity is best described by Eugene Debs, the great American socialist, in his famous quote, “While there is a lower class, I am in it. While there is a soul in prison, I am not free,” and it’s this very strong sense, it’s a very radical sentiment, because, “While there is a soul in prison, I’m not free,” means until there is the full abolition of prisons, I cannot feel full freedom myself, and you hear very strong echoes of that in Bernie Sanders’ speeches.
He had his speech in Queensbridge Park recently where he said, you know, “I want you to think of a person who doesn’t share your particular struggles and commit to fight for them.” You know, fight for immigrants, even if you’re not an immigrant, people with debt, even if you don’t have debt yourself, and I think that sentiment echoes from Debs to Sanders. It’s true of a lot of – so, a lot of socialists, they have a principle that is identifying with the underclass.
Now, I – you know, Hubert Humphrey, the 1960s US Vice President said, you know, “Sympathy for the underclass is not in itself socialism,” but I actually think that there is something that all socialists have in common, which is that they look at people who are on the bottom and they are outraged by class division especially. So, if we – I think a very strong place to start is not to look at how the optimal socialist economy would be arranged, because socialists have disagreed over that, but at class and outrage at distinctions of class, some people having a lot and other people not having a lot. And that makes socialism anti-racist, it makes it feminist, and it makes it internationalist, it makes it workers of the world unite. We have to – if you do take that kind of framework seriously, that belief in solidarity, it does mean that inequalities between countries are just as profoundly unsettling to you, and I do think – one of the things I discuss in the book is the way socialists historically have been distinguished by the volume of their outrage. And I think that’s actually an important part of it, right, because a lot of people affirm rhetorically commitments to these things. A lot of people are discomforted by class, but I think one of the things that the socialists distinguish themselves from the contemporary US Democratic Party by is the fact that they are more viscerally enraged by certain features of the society they see before them. They feel a very stronger – a much stronger sense of urgency.
Martin Luther King identified as a democratic socialist, and Martin Luther King also, and I don’t think this is a coincidence, wrote the book Why We Can’t Wait. There’s a very strong sense that injustices are – it’s almost an acute sensitivity to injustice, there’s a heightened sensitivity. And so, I, sort of, distinguish that kind of thing, which I – is, I think, very important to understanding contemporary socialists from the socialised economy, and we could imagine what a socialised economy has. Again, there are differences between socialists, but, sort of, characterised by public and worker ownership of major industries, low wealth and equality, labour protections, and that socialised economy is related to it, flows from the socialist ethic. The reason that socialists believe in public ownership is because they have this identification with everyone, right? The reason that they’re unsettled by private ownership is that private ownership serves narrow interests. It serves the interests of a few people, and common ownership is supposed to theoretically – of course, as we know, you know, there plenty of criticisms to the way socialised economies operate, but theoretically, supposed to capture or represent all interests.
So, socialism versus capitalism, right, ‘cause I haven’t talked really about capitalism yet, and there is a debate, there’s a very – I mean, we’re constantly talking about whether these terms are even useful anymore. It is the case that every major contemporary economy really in the world is some kind of mixed economy, some – exists somewhere on the spectrum between public – full public ownership and full private ownership, you know, Americans like to talk about, you know, American capitalism, but we have a nationalised rail service and a nationalised postal service, and Britain doesn’t. So, you know, even countries that consider themselves capitalist countries are sometimes more socialist in that economic sense of greater public ownership. So, then, in that case, you know, what are we really discussing? And there are, sort of, debates like can capitalism be fixed? Well, what does that mean, can capitalism be fixed? If every country is going to have some degree of markets, is socialism – is that a meaningful concept? And of course, there are Market socialists who believe that, in fact, socialism isn’t anti-market, it’s just about – it is just about who controls wealth.
So, I wonder if these things are best conceived of not as systems where something is either one completely or another completely, but as, sort of, contrasting sets of values and principles and societies where one or the other of those values and principles predominates. You do hear – there – so, the reason the terms are meaningful is because people who describe themselves as capitalist describe a common – often use a common set of arguments. You hear – if you read, you know, United States conservatives, you read people like Ayn Rand, you read Murray Rothbard, you read Friedrich Hayek, you know, you do see common threads that make, I think, a capitalist philosophy that we could discuss coherently, and oftentimes, it contains within it some kind of extreme form of Adam Smith’s famous phrase about, “The Butcher doesn’t give me what – he doesn’t operate out of benevolence, but out of regard for his own self-interest,” and the capitalist philosophy is a sort of radical belief that if we each all pursue our own individual self-interest, the sum total of that will work out. And that market outcomes if the market is properly preserved will be just, and that range – and so, you see that even in – so, for example, Elizabeth Warren, the US presidential candidate and Senator, describes herself as a capitalist, and what she means by that, if you ask her what she means by that, she says, “Well, what it means is when markets are properly regulated they produce just outcomes.” So, people who describe themselves as capitalist believe in the justice of what markets produce.
They tend to believe in the superior efficiency of the private sector over the public sector. They tend to believe that inequality is – wealth inequality is not inherently a problem, or at least is not – is only a problem insofar as it contains other problems within it. You see this in, for example, Steven Pinker’s book, Enlightenment Now, where he talks about how inequality – we shouldn’t care about inequality, we should care about poverty, but it doesn’t matter if you have billionaires. There’s not really a cap – people who describe themselves as capitalist don’t usually critique the hierarchies, the internal hierarchies of corporate structure. They don’t tend to critique private waste. Usually what you do with your money is up to you. You know, Bill Gates just bought a $500 million hydrogen-powered yacht. There’s not really a way to criticise that kind of consumption division, and at its most extreme, I think, we have this man here who’s our President, and he articulates what I think is a very radical conception of the – if each of us pursue our self-interests the good will flow out of it, almost a social Darwinism that says, basically, “I do what I want and you do what you want, and whoever wins, that’s justice.” I think you really do see Donald Trump embodying that kind of philosophy, and you can see it in his governance.
Now, of course, there are socialist critiques of all these points. I won’t go through them at length. One of them is that, you know, market preferences are obviously weighted by wealth, the reason they can’t be just is because if I have a billion dollars and you have one dollar, I can – you know, things – my wealth is less meaning and $10 to me is much less meaningful than it is to you. You see – we had – we sold in Miami a $130,000 banana taped to a wall. It was a piece of art. At the same time as people were seeking in the United States to fund their insulin through crowdfunding in the – and so, the suggestion here is that price is not value and that there have been these conflations of price and value, and inequalities of wealth are inequalities of power.
If I – you’re seeing this in the campaign of Michael Bloomberg for President in America, where he has $50 billion, and with the money that his money makes in a year, he can fund a billion dollar Presidential campaign. So, inequalities of wealth really translate into something. So, that’s – that would be the response to someone like Pinker, who says that only poverty matters. The answer is, well, actually, if you have people who are at the very top, they just have so much power, through virtue of having this wealth. The socialists have always used the phrase ‘freedom to toil’. You know, my freedom in a marketplace is the freedom only to sell what I am able to get value for, so people who are disabled, people who are children, they don’t have, you know, they don’t have as much market value for their labour, and people – and anyone else whose skills aren’t marketable suffers, and that is a critique of market justice.
The idea of the private sector being more efficient, well, the private sector really – Elizabeth Anderson, the philosopher, has a book called Private Government that is about the way that corporations function as what she calls Communist dictatorships, because a – because the corporate structure is directly hierarchical because there tends to be no internal democracy, certainly not in the American corporate model. And there’s a sort of logic of who is served, right, and what I mean by that is socialists, as I say, constantly concerned with the commons, with serving all people, with universal programmes. That’s why you see universal free public college, you know, universal high school, universal healthcare, where – versus serving a narrow set of interests.
I think about socialists and every time I’m at an airport I wonder whether it’s publicly owned or privately owned. When I was at Heathrow Airport I noticed that there were many, many luxury goods stores in the terminal and not so much common space for people to sit, and it didn’t surprise me to find that it was a privately owned and operated airport, whereas I am in New Orleans and we have an airport that is operated by the City of New Orleans, has lots of common space, and I feel like there is – so, there is a certain logic of institutional design that is different between socialist and capitalist. We emphasise a lot free at the point of use services, right, and that is because free at point of use services are things that allow ordinary people to live in the world the way the people who have the most live. When you have a lot of money, you never have to think about money. When I went from not having any money to suddenly having enough money to where when I went to the grocery store I didn’t have to think about whether I could afford my groceries, it was very liberating, which is one reason that socialists have always emphasised that medicine should operate the same way.
Is socialism radical? I was asked to answer this question. Well, that depends on what we – how we end up answering that question of what socialism is and what radicalism is. It’s certainly true that in the United States, people who use this label are fringe politically, because, you know, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Congress is, you know, one of only a couple of people in Congress, who uses this label, Bernie Sanders is fighting, really, the entire institutional Democratic Party. So, there – it certainly is radical, in the sense that in the United States it departs very strongly from the political consensus. At the same time, that might be because the political consensus is just so far to the right in the United States. I mean, in the US we are really – it’s a radical position to advocate for a nationalised – a national health insurance programme, right? That is considered very fringe. So, you know, is – and, of course, the Obama administration was very pro-charter schools, and Nancy Pelosi, the Head of the Democratic Party, is very sceptical of a national insurance programme. So, it may be that people like Obama and Pelosi are just so, you know, so far away from the vision of a robust commons, that it makes things that are not actually that radical seem radical.
If we look at US socialists in power historically, they weren’t actually that radical. There have been revolutionary socialists, but we had 1,000 socialists in elected office in the United States in the early 1900s. They really were mostly progressive reformers. They did workplace safety legislation, the sewer socialists were about city-owned public utilities, and they were quite known for running cities very well. Bernie Sanders was the Mayor of Burlington, Vermont. He did not establish a, sort of, concentrated centralised dictatorship, he mostly focused on equitable development. So, probably not radical, and yet many socialists talk about things like prison abolition and they talk about fully open borders, they talk about the elimination of billionaires as a class, and in some ways, socialism is radical in the long-term, but not the short-term. And I think you see that – this is a quote from How socialists Changed America by Peter Dreier and Michael Kazin, it’s found in this new book We Own the Future: Democratic Socialism – American Style, which is a collection of essays by US Democratic Socialists, and basically, they’re just saying that things like social security, the minimum wage, workplace safety, civil rights, these were all things that were radical when socialists advocated them, but now don’t seem radical. A fire department doesn’t seem radical to anyone in the United States, but for some reason, running healthcare the way we run the fire department does seem radical at the moment. So, it really depends on what you consider, and he – and they say, “How did these ideas move from the margins to the mainstream? Well, socialists played a major role,” which is often true.
Now, the United States – so, if you want to get a sense, you know, what does socialism mean? What is the socialist – is socialism radical? Well, you can look at what US Democratic Socialists right now are advocating. Of course, the signature policies are Medicare for all, Green New Deal, which combines a giant climate investment programme, with a jobs programme for what they call a just transition, free public colleges, the fight for $15 minimum wage. I just talked to democratic socialists in Austin Texas, they’re fighting for paid sick leave, which doesn’t exist in Texas. In Texas, if you’re sick and you take a day off work, you don’t get paid and so, that’s not particularly radical. It would be considered, kind of, standard progressivism, but it’s something that only the socialists in Texas are fighting for.
In Chicago, municipal utilities, trying to bring utilities under city ownership. If you look at the socialist agenda, one thing on it is postal banking, or having the Post Office offer banking services. Doesn’t seem that radical, but in the United States, it’s considered to be an attack on free enterprise, or a national payment system that operates similar, has the state in place of PayPal. Public internet, even voter rights are something – even having automatic voter registration in the United States is an issue that only the socialists are really fighting very hard for. Reparations for slavery, which are quite a clear issue of justice, given the black-white wealth gap, again are considered quite radical, and if you look at Bernie Sanders’ day one agenda, you can also get a sense of – he’s said the executive orders he’ll pass, and they’re things like banning crude oil exportation, allowing drug importation from Canada, contracting standards to make sure every contractor pays the minimum wage, legalising marijuana, and his legislative agenda is doubling union membership for giving student and medical debt, police oversight, worker ownership – some degree of worker ownership and immigration reforms. So, you know, it depends on what you consider radical, but that’s the sort of thing that democratic socialists in the United States are pushing for right now.
There is this discussion that happens that is quite frustrating and I try and avoid in the book, but inevitably get into, which is the question, is it socialism? Are these things socialism? Because they – oftentimes, people say, “Well, is Bernie Sanders a socialist or is he a mere New Deal Social Democrat?” and the radical Marxists say, “He’s a mere New Deal Social Democrat,” and the people who are democratic socialists who support him say, “No, he’s a full-fledged socialist,” and I think, again, the answer depends on how you want to define those terms, and they’re defined differently, and there’s no actual answer, it’s just a political tendency that has many threads.
Our public libraries, are they socialist? Well, in many ways, they are quite radical in that if other areas of life operated on the model of a free public library, they might start to look like socialism. If we had public gyms, people would call them socialist very quickly. People, as I say, call a – call nationalised hospitals, call that socialism. You know, the NHS, you know, is it socialism? Well, of course, Nye Bevan said that, “A free health service is pure socialism, and as such is opposed to the hedonism of capitalist societies,” and the socialist Medical Association was pushing for the NHS, in the early days, and considered it a – considered social medicine, considered nationalised hospitals that are free at the point of use, considered that to be an embodiment of at least socialist principles. And it does sort of conform with what we think of as both socialist principle and the often workings of a socialist economy.
People – the United States socialists who want to get away from the Venezuela criticism, well, we cited the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund to say that, in fact, Norway is more socialist than Venezuela. Is it? Is a sovereign wealth fund automatically socialism? I don’t know. You can make the argument. The United States Armed Forces, of course, have a healthcare system that is far more nationalised than anything else in the United States and there are many aspects – you know, that is a real – it is a – people who are in the Armed Forces that live on bases, which are government controlled land, government controlled houses, government controlled healthcare, government controlled canteens. In a way, if you take the, sort of, crude definition of socialism as things that are publicly provided, there are elements of it there, but as I say – but I don’t think it quite captures what many socialists are fighting for if you say, “The United States Armed Forces are socialist,” then if you say that a lot of socialists in the US get mad, because they say, “Well, the United States Armed Forces are, you know, the enforcers of imperial aggression, so how can you call them the embodiment of socialist principles?” and they have a point.
German co-determination, is worker – is workplace, to some degree of increased workplace democracy? Is that socialism? Well, it does embody some of the principles. The USSR, right? I mean, you have central planning, but do you have worker participation? If you take participation as a crucial part of the socialist project then you don’t quite have an embodiment of the socialist ethic, and this is what I think – this is how I always respond to people who cite things like Venezuela and North Korea and Nazism and say, “Ah, that’s socialism.” I say, “Well, is there worker participation,” right? “Is there a robust culture? Is there solidarity with the underclass, or is there just a, sort of, fake equality,” right? “Is there – are – is there the true embodiment of egalitarian principles, or are these places actually dictatorships? And if they are actually dictatorships, well, then, they embody socialism only to the same degree that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea embodies democracy.” That is to say it doesn’t, it doesn’t actually conform to what we are aspiring to, and that’s why socialists reject these things and that’s why socialists laugh off the idea that Hitler was a socialist when their, sort of, anti-racism is such a core part of their socialist identity.
I do think though that the democratic in democratic socialism is so, so important if you’re going to have a socialism that is worth respecting. There have always been conflicts within the socialist tradition. There have been the Marxists versus the anarchists. There have been decentralists versus centralists, and I think people who have been on the more democratic or more libertarian socialist side of things have had a valid critique that is essential to internalise, if we are to avoid the mistakes of socialism’s past and the horrors of some governments that have been introduced in the name of socialism. That is to say, we must have an equal regard for liberty as we do for equality, and Mikhail Bakunin said, one of a quote, “Liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice. Socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.” That is, if you just have the liberty of employers to, you know, treat their employees however they like, that becomes a kind of privilege and injustice, but if you have pure egalitarianism, but you don’t have civil liberties, you don’t have democratic freedoms, that’s no good either, so it – you, sort of, merge your desire, and that’s why I like the libertarian socialist framework.
And I think we also need to conceive of democracy as a form of participation, rather than just majority rule. The conservative criticism of democratic socialism is, “Ah, well then, 51% of people vote to take away all your things then, you know, you have no liberty.” Well, you know, I think democracy is more robust than that. I think democracy actually involves protecting minority rights. I think democracy actually involves making sure that each person, each individual is represented, and that that which is not – which is undemocratic doesn’t deserve to call itself socialism for the simple reason that it doesn’t embody that ultimate socialist ethic that is the – that is so core to what animates people who have – who today march under the banner of socialism.
I was also asked to answer the question, can socialism offer solutions to problems created, exacerbated and unaddressed by market economy driven capitalism? Well, I think it does, certainly in the United States. I think the socialists are doing very, very valuable work because we are currently under the government of a man who, as I say, embodies, sort of, the – all of the worst tendencies of that radical capitalist philosophy of self-interest. And the socialists offer a really powerful and important critique of that, a really important alternative, and they really are the only ones offering, sort of, the prospect of a more humane society. And what I mean by that, to be concrete about that, well, as I say, the leadership of the contemporary Democratic Party sees universal health coverage, with medical care that is free at the point of use, as off the table completely, right?
Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are the only people who actually advocate that. Every other candidate says, “No, we don’t – we can’t have something as radical as a national free health insurance system,” and so I think it is the case, then, that if that is so radical that only the socialists advocate it, if the only serious climate change proposal in the Democratic Party today, which is the Green New Deal, that is being offered solely by the socialists. Nancy Pelosi, who is a progressive Liberal, says it’s the Green New Dream, it’ll never happen, whatever, and that means that the socialists are the ones who take climate change seriously enough.
The socialists are the ones who are taking the lack of medical care in the United States seriously enough, and I’d say that actually, on the whole, if you look at it in the United States, the historical record of our socialists is a pretty strong one. It is people like Helen Keller and Martin Luther King, it is people like Albert Einstein, it is people who got us the eight hour day and the weekend and workplace safety legislation and who did all of the things that Kazin and Dreier said in the quote I used earlier. So, I think if you look at, you know, what is going to bring about fairer workplaces and what is going to fix Amazon, what is it going to be ba – what is going to make it, like, better to work in an Amazon fulfilment centre? I think the socialists are the ones who say, “Look, we actually care about that, we are pushing for a minimum – we are pushing for a $15 minimum wage. We’re pushing for better protections against being arbitrarily fired,” which, by the way, there are no protections in most of the United States against being arbitrarily fired, and it’s only the socialists who are talking about that.
So, I do think that today’s democratic socialists in the US actually have a pretty strong agenda, and that’s why I wrote a book called Why You Should Be a socialist. So, just final thoughts, I’d like to avoid, if possible, endless terminological debates over what is social democracy, what is socialism, because as I say, you can’t really find answers to those things because people disagree so strongly. The German Social Democratic Party was a socialist party. Today you have parties that are called socialist parties that are actually not very socialist, you know, around Europe, often. So, it is difficult to answer these questions, but what we can look at is what are the things that people who call themselves socialists, who rally under that banner, what do they believe?
I don’t like to talk too much about central planning, which is the classic, kind of, question of socialism versus capitalism, because I think it’s a side issue, in that socialists themselves have very strong debates about this, between the market socialists and the, sort of, state-led socialists, and so that’s an intra-socialist debate over how you would arrange a democratic and fair economy. Would it be through markets or can there be a state that is intelligent enough to manage production well?
I think that philosophy of solidarity that I started with has a lot of value, I really do. I think it’s very, very powerful. I think it’s so needed, especially in the US, where nobody – I mean, the situation of unauthorised immigrants in the United States is just brutal and horrible, and I think it’s so powerful and so valuable to have people coming along who say that – who give the radical notion that you ought to actually care about other people. And I do think that our society – in the US we have been – become more humane, over the course of our history, for having had a socialist in our society.
So, that’s all I have, and now we’ll move onto the Q&A [applause]. So, I have been asked just to read the following, before we start, which is please raise your hands high in the air. I will endeavour to take questions from all parts of the room, and a good cross-section of the audience. The staff are in the room with microphones. Once I’ve pointed at you, please stand or keep your hand raised, so they’ll see you, and then wait for the microphone to reach you, and then we’d ask you to stand, speaking clearly and to give your name, and if you wish, affiliation. Please try and keep questions concise and avoid making lengthy statements. That way we can get through as many questions as possible, and I don’t like this part, everyone feel free to ask any question, no matter how – but no matter how basic they believe it to be. I want to stress that no question is too obvious or foundational. I do believe that, no question is too obvious. So, with that, yes, on the right there.
Advak Gumaraji
Oh, is it me? Oh, okay. Was it me? Yeah.
Nathan Robinson
Well, we’ll do both of you. We’ll do one, two.
Advak Gumaraji
Alright. Hi, my name’s Advak Gumaraji, I’m a Chatham House Member. I just wanted to ask that – well, it might be a bit of a basic question, but nowadays, there’s so much, sort of – so many polarised views when it comes to socialism versus capitalism or versus – say, socialism versus conservativism, and there seems to be a lack of open debate in that you mentioned earlier that a lot of socialists have really, sort of – have sense of urgency about the issues that face them, and I think, to a certain extent, there is a lot of urgency among those issues. So, how do you think that we can have meaningful dialogue between, say, people from a more socialistic stance and those from a more conservative stance, without getting – without alienating each other and getting each other’s backs up against the wall?
Nathan Robinson
You know, it’s – I like that question a lot, because one of the things that I have actually tried to do in writing this is write for – I really called this Socialism For People Who Are Really Sceptical Of It, and my publisher changed it to Why You Should Be a socialist, but the reason that was, was because I actually believe very strongly in the value of speaking to audiences that are sceptical and that disagree. The magazine that I write, I tend to think of Conservative readers, rather than left ones. So, I think one of the things that I am certainly trying to do is build left media that address the objections of people on the other side.
I mean, I do find that it’s true that we’re polarised and it’s true that sometimes it’s difficult to get discussions to begin because people react so badly to a term. But I’ve also found that we have a lot of Conservative readers, and one reason is because we don’t disrespect the intelligence of those readers. We review Conservative books because we believe in taking their arguments seriously, and a lot of people find value just in the fact that you’ve been willing to take their argument seriously, because so many on the left just dismiss this. They say, “Oh, well that’s too stupid to be worth addressing.” Well, I think if you set that aside and you say, “No, well, it’s not actually too stupid, we should have a” – so, the first point is – the first step, of course, is to desire to have the conversation, and if you do that, I mean, we have Republicans who read our magazine and go, “You know, you made a few good points, I disagree,” and actually, I like the way Bernie Sanders does this, because Bernie Sanders is capable of speaking to Trump voters. He goes to Trump’s own strongholds and he talks to people and he treats them like human beings and he listens to their concerns, and actually, he finds that they are more responsive to his socialism than they are to certain brands of liberalism that they feel – are more contemptuous of, so…
Yes, you had a question.
Member
Thank you. I’ve got two questions, if that’s okay? First one’s about foreign policy and what a democratic socialist foreign policy might look like. I think AOC has spoken about, kind of, emphasising worker’s rights in trade deals and things like that, but just more generally whether it would be interventionist, non-interventionist, what you think? And then the second one is regarding Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, they’ve obviously been, kind of, pitched as the more left-leaning, compared to the other moderates. But what you said today actually, kind of, brings out the differences between them, and if perhaps the whole field was slightly further to the left, do you think that they actually have some significant differences on policy?
Nathan Robinson
Yeah, so, on the foreign policy question, this is actually a lot of important discussion is going on right now on the US left about the fact that this is a real weak spot for democratic socialists, articulating a vision of how the United States should interact with the world, because if you take your socialist principles seriously, the United States, as the, sort of, the 1% of the entire world, you know, how do you deal with, for example, the question of the fact that the United States has been the gre – the single greatest cumulative contributor to carbon emissions, and that pro – and the resulting problem affects people in less developed nations disproportionately? How do you deal with what the United States owes the world as a socialist, as an egalitarian? How do you approach the question of whether there could be humanitarian intervention? socialists disagree on these things. I think there is an effort right now to say, “Well, the first principle of the so – of a democratic socialist foreign policy is solidarity and the equal value of all people.” In the United States, that is a radical, radical statement, because United States foreign policy has never been based on the equal value of all people. It has actually been based on the principle that the pursuit of our own self-interest is completely legitimate, regardless of the effect it has on non-American lives, and that’s why the, you know, the – we had such monstrous casualties in Iraq, was because the United States didn’t, sort of, value Iraqi lives, the same way it values its own lives. So, introducing the radical principle that people in other countries matter equally to people in our country, that changes immigration policy completely, because it does – it means that you don’t choose your immigrants, on the basis of who would be good for you, but you also think about people – you also think about setting policies that would actually be good for the people themselves. It does change your entire thinking, and as you said, you know, thinking about, well, how do we incorporate other people’s rights into trade deals that we make and not just the maximisation of our own growth? And I think you see the beginnings of that in the foreign policy that Bernie Sanders has been putting forward.
Yes, as you say, there are significant differences between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. I’ve written about a lot of them, actually, especially on foreign policy, as a matter of fact, because Elizabeth Warren has been much to the right of Bernie Sanders on foreign policy, and this is actually one – that’s another one of the areas where the difference between having a democratic socialist and having someone who doesn’t adopt those principles and values as their own does, kind of, come out, but you also see it in Warren’s strong focus on corruption, rather than class, right? Socialists begin with that class analysis that say the problem is having a small class of people who control so much wealth, whereas, Warren says, and she was asked, “Should there be billionaires?” and she said, “Yeah, billionaires are fine,” because her progressive Theodore Roosevelt-derived approach is, it’s okay to have extremely wealthy people, so long as you limit their influence on the political system. It’s okay to have a Michael Bloomberg, so long as you, kind of, limit his spending. So, that’s a major difference and, I think, yeah, I think you do see that. That has come out a lot over the course of this primary.
Other questions? Yes.
Member
Thank you for the talk. I was just wondering, with the rising phenomenon of left behind voters, particularly amongst the working class in America, do you think perhaps some of the success of Trumpism and other far-right movements is actually because they’ve been entering a territory of typically left-wing movements? So, for instance, bringing jobs back to America, non-interventionism and being against the establishment?
Nathan Robinson
Well, yes. I mean, that is certainly – it’s – we might have a test of this theory, right, in this election, because if it turns out that Bernie Sanders is the Democratic nominee, this is his theory of what has happened with Trump voters, is that – and it’s – first, it’s – there’s a – there’s two problems. There’s Trump voters, people who have been drawn to the right, and then there are non-voters, disaffected people who have not been drawn to the right, but have been alienated from the political process, and oftentimes, although these voters are discussed less, this is often, like – this is, like, the black population of Milwaukee, right? You know, this is people in Rust Belt states, often people of colour, who certainly are not drawn to Trump, but are put off, and Bernie – the Bernie Sanders theory is that what has happened indeed is that the Democratic Party has – and there’s a great history of the Democratic Party, Listen, Liberal, by Thomas Frank, who talks – and the subtitle is What Happened to the Party of the People? and the way that, sort of, populism, which used to be a very noble term, the populists in the United States were people – were progressive reformers, the way that populism was come to see as a dirty word, the way that, you know, Wall Street Bankers and Lawyers became far more influential in the Democratic Party. The Sanders theory is that this is a big part of why the Democratic Party has failed, why you saw under Obama, so many fewer Democrats in office. They lost 100s and 100s of congressional seats, and we don’t quite know whether this theory is true yet. There are – because there are people who dispute it and who say, “No, that’s not what’s going on.” You know, “Trump is animating people with racism, but you’re not going to get people back with economically populist appeals,” and if we had a general election between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, we would really see a test. The left has never managed to put its theory to the test of whether you could actually build this kind of broad working class movement that they always say would happen, if you put someone with socialist values at the front of the party. So, I can’t answer it, but we might have a real world answer to that question soon. Yes.
Member
Hi, I’m [inaudible – 44:18], King’s College student. I was wondering, do you believe that the relatively angry and radical rhetoric of some socialists such as AOC is turning off the general population towards moderate socialist policies?
Nathan Robinson
It’s hard to say, although – you know, because you might get as many people as you lose, because when people are feeling angry and intensely emotional, sometimes it is very cathartic to have someone come and express your anger for you, and the – I don’t necessarily think that anger turns people off. I think, if it manages to express what people are feeling. So, you do turn people off if you have something that they don’t identify with, but if someone comes along, you know, there’s this beautiful essay that just came out by a – by Kate Willett, who’s a Comedian, it’s in Elle Magazine about how in 2016 she hated – she was a Hillary Clinton fan, she hated Bernie bros, and now – and then she dated someone who was a Bernie bro, and he died. He was depressed and he took his life, and couldn’t get medical treatment and – in the United States, and how now, after that loss, she talks about how she used to hate that Bernie Sanders used to yell all the time. Why was he so angry? She hated it. It really grated on her, but after she lost her boyfriend, she began to see that he was yelling for her boyfriend, and she began to actually, kind of, like the fact that he was angry enough about things that you ought to be angry about. So, she really came to actually, kind of, more appreciate that level of anger. So, I think it varies a lot from person-to-person, because there are some people who go, “Finally, someone who is angry enough about things that should make you angry,” and then there are some people who say, “Ooh, you know, can’t we tone it down?” And, you know, Martin Luther King wrote a letter from Birmingham Jail to, in many ways, to address people who say, “Well, can’t you tone it down a little? Can’t you take some baby steps? Can’t you stop, you know, condemning so vigorously?” So, I think as a tactical question it’s kind of an open one, but I think for people who really are truly emotionally enraged it feels like the only thing that you can do.
Yes, other questions, yes, yes.
Eron
Thank you. Hello, my name is Eron. I’m a student, and I wanted to ask you, so, how – what – you talked about the solutions socialism offers, but it’s very state centred. How does socialist solutions appear in the international system? You know, like a socialist UN, how does that look like?
Nathan Robinson
Yeah, I think that’s a fantastic question, because I think it’s actually a weakness of the contemporary socialist movement, it’s another one of these, and it’s not just the international dimension, but it’s also the private sphere. One of the things that I actually kind of distinguish myself from some other socialists on is the question, well, yes, we can see what kinds of policies socialists make. We can see that they would institute a national health insurance programme, but how does being a socialist require you to act in your day-to-day life? Is there a socialist morality, right?
On the small scale, not everything occurs in the realm of the state. How does socialism – how would you organise, you know, a group of people, in accordance with the – that – those egalitarian principles? There’s a wonderful book called If You’re an Egalitarian, Why Are You So Rich?’ and many socialists have avoided that question, that question of what it requires of us as individuals to have that kind of socialist ethic. So, I feel like that’s an important underdeveloped question, and my answer would be that it is at least a question worth – that is very, very important to take seriously, because I think it does give demands on our personal morality. And as you raised the international dimension of what would it mean, well, I think, actually, the most solid articulation of socialist principles internationally is still the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is still, when you actually read through it, an incredibly radical document that has never been fully lived up to. And if it were taken seriously, I think – I don’t think many people describe it as a socialist document, but it is certainly a document that embodies many of the principles that socialists are fighting for, and there has been, kind of, a turn away from thinking about a – and I think in part, because people do fear global government and it has become kind of – yeah, we’ve – we sort of lost the language with which to discuss, you know, a better world, even though socialists do so often invoke a better world is possible, and then we still talk about, “Well, what are we going to do about the United States Congress?” But I think – I really hope that a lot of them – a lot more people in the contemporary Democratic Socialists develop that kind of international orientation.
Yes, you at the back, sir.
Member
Yes, thank you very much, Nathan, and it’s been an absolutely fascinating talk, and I really appreciate all this lovely outrage, and I think it’s a very correct outrage, that government is about pragmatism and it’s about achieving results. How can you convince me as a sceptical with some socialistic views that socialism actually has the capacity to actually deliver on time and on budget?
Nathan Robinson
Yes, well, I think it’s actually – yeah, I think that’s a very fair question to ask, and in fact, one of the things I talk about in this book is what I call pragmatic utopianism, and it’s the utopianism creates the dream and then our pragmatic selves say, “Okay, but what is accomplishable in the here and now?” I actually think that the policies that contemporary democratic socialists are putting forward in the United States are fairly doable, fairly reasonable. I mean, the $15 minimum – $15 an hour minimum wage, for example. They didn’t pick 50, they picked 15 because they felt that 15 was a target that was high enough to be very ambitious, the US minimum wage is – federal minimum wage is still 7.25, so it’s double, and it was far more than was ever considered at the beginning, but it was ambitious. But it was also something within the realm of feasibility, and in fact, I think there’s some very high proportion of United States workers that are now covered by a $15 minimum wage because of the fight for 15. I think it was actually a very – it was a very pragmatic approach, and it hasn’t caused mass job loss, as was predicted in the places, because it was the right kind of target, the right kind of policy.
Medicare for all is not proposing a nationalised health service delivery system, it is not proposing an NHS. The reason Medicare for all was picked was because it was considered politically pragmatic and doable, which is to say we already have the existing Medicare programme in the United States, it already covers millions of people and it does it well. So, what – how do you embody socialist principles in a pragmatic policy in the United States? Well, you don’t advocate nationalising all the hospitals, so the democratic socialists aren’t advocating nationalising all the hospitals. What you advocate is expanding the existing programme to cover everyone. And so, I think that’s an example of something that can attract the support of Doctors and that you can see happening because we already have the infrastructure to do it. So, I actually think that, at the moment, democratic socialists in the US are doing a pretty good job of thinking about what’s achievable and going for things that they think will actually work, and that working is such an important part of what distinguishes successful socialism from unsuccessful socialism. It’s what distinguished the sewer socialists who took over city governments in the early part of the 20th Century from some revolutionary socialists, who did not think clearly enough about the answer to the question, “What happens on day two after you’ve seized power?” So, I think it – I think there are socialists who think very intensely about these pragmatic questions.
And let’s see, yes.
Nick
Hi, I’m Nick. I’m a Member here at Chatham House. I was just wondering, one of the pillars you’ve talked about democratic socialism is it being international, an international idea, and obviously, with America being seemingly, sort of, one of the most, sort of, nationalist countries in the world, how do you address that paradox? How do you address the idea of democratic socialists being anti-American? How – where’s that middle ground with talking to, like, the ordinary American?
Nathan Robinson
Well, there is a fascinating question about how on earth you can critique nationalism effectively in the United States, because it is so – you are very quickly accused of being anti-American if you, as you say, if you start too viciously criticising United States foreign policy. There is – there – and, you know, United States nationalism manifests itself in ways subtle and unsubtle. I was – when I originally proposed this book to my publisher, they sent me the cover and it had a giant American flag on it, big American flag made of roses, ‘cause rose is one of the symbols of socialists, and I said, “I don’t really want to put an American flag on it because to some people, American flags don’t symbolise things – don’t symbolise the values that I’m trying to convey.” But of course, my publisher picked it because they didn’t want me – they wanted, ultimately, to be conceived as being an all-American socialist, and in fact, this book says American socialism. So, socialists today in the United States are, kind of, walking this fine line between how do we say, “Well, socialism is as American as apple pie,” and then how do we also say, “But also, America is not a country that has historically had a role in the world that we truly respect.”
I actually think this is, again, something that has been, kind of, insufficiently grappled with so far, because it is true that there hasn’t been a very internationalist orientation. The democratic socialists of America are not the democratic socialists of the World. They’re the democratic socialists of America, and, you know, I don’t have an answer for you because I think this is a very weak spot in our contemporary movement and something that’s being worked on and in its infancy. Yes.
Hilde Rapp
Hilde Rapp, Centre for International Peacebuilding. If I weren’t a socialist already, I would be very convinced by your arguments, thank you very much. I have one quibble, and that is the word ‘socialism’, because I think your whole project is – it is not an ideology. It is actually a set of principles that’s based on values and leads to practices, and that the whole point of it is because solidarity among people, you need to have public discussion and participation in discussion about decision-making, which means that different views will come to the fore and people will hammer them out, if they believe in hammers, but they will talk them out with a degree of kindness and affection, and, you know, and in your state you will have to also be a patriot, not a nationalist, but a patriot. In other words, it’s your citizens, who your taxpayers pay to provide services for. Blah, blah, blah, and I think this sounds to me like what you’ve been telling us. Is this true?
Nathan Robinson
Well, I – there – you know, there are – there – historically, there have been socialists who make this argument. I think Bernstein had a quote, “The,” you know, “The endpoint of socialism is nothing. The movement is everything,” and this idea that we should get away from the utopian vision of socialism to think about, and I talk about socialism as a set of principles that you put into practice, and the question is are we living up to our socialist principles? However, I also believe strongly in the value of utopias, and I write a lot about utopias in the book, and I like thinking about – you know, so people still – young people today say, “You know, well, under socialism this will happen,” and you go, “What does under socialism mean?” ‘cause we are getting away from thinking about it as a particular defined system. But I do think thinking about the possibility, what a world would look like that embodied all of those principles, what end state we would have reached, by the time all of those things had been implemented, that people operated by them, I think that is actually quite valuable. And if we just look individually at what does it mean to act in accordance with socialist values? We do, sort of – we run too much of a risk of going too much in the other direction of we want to get away from, you know, idle utopian dreaming, but we also need long-term visions. We also need things where we think – where we do think about systems, we do think about new kinds of societies, different worlds. And so, I would agree with the challenge that you pose me, but I also don’t want to get away too much from thinking about the socialist world.
Hilde Rapp
[Inaudible – 57:08] would be the complete death of the imagination, which is what it’s all about.
Nathan Robinson
Yes, good, I – and with that, I think we have exhausted the period of time that we have available together, but I will be around if anybody wants to come and talk to me. Thank you so much, and there’s – the reception is upstairs, appreciate you listening to me [applause].
