Socialism's Editor in Chief

When Bernie Sanders launched his presidential primary bid in 2016, my worldview was totally transformed. Prior to his campaign, I was a liberal and a Democrat who spent an admittedly unhealthy amount of time arguing with friends, family, and strangers on Facebook about this or that issue. So much so that I deleted my Facebook at one point. I remember one of the last things I watched on Facebook was Hilary Clinton’s campaign announcement.

As interested in politics as I was, I had never really seen a politician like Bernie. He lacked a lot of traditional, charismatic style, but his insistent messaging about class politics combined with his willingness to go to the mat on policies that were bigger, more ambitious, and more impactful than the usual parade of polices you saw out of democrats instantly hooked me.

I was all in on Bernie, but what frustrated me was that the usual outlets I was subscribed to did not take his ideas or his campaign seriously. At the time, I remember being subscribed to the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and the NYT. None of the barrage of articles disparaging Sanders as a crank or painting his policies as unrealistic were all that convincing; they seemed about as compelling as some of the unconstructive Facebook arguments I used to engage in. I needed something else.

My friend Mike and I had always been sort of nominally interested in socialism since high school. I won’t speak for him (he is much smarter than I am), but I didn’t really know all that much about it beyond its capacity to piss off my fellow suburban classmates. At around the tail end of the Bernie campaign, he handed me a copy of a publication called Jacobin Magazine that he found at Barnes and Noble. I read it cover to cover the second he handed it to me. He ended up letting me keep it.

I’ll never forget the first piece I read: Thinking Small Won’t End Poverty. It was an effective argument about the limits of private, community-led philanthropy. The next week, I became a lifetime subscriber.

Jacobin has taught me a lot about the world and introduced me to new writers and thinkers. I often stocked up on books advertised throughout the issues, entry-level books on socialism by Danny Katch. With her book The New Prophets of Capital, Nicole Aschoff (also a Jacobin editor) was singlehandedly responsible for throwing off my classic liberal slobbering appreciation of ethical capitalists like Oprah and Bill Gates and establishments like Whole Foods. I became a single-payer activist largely because of pieces I read from healthcare writing power couple Adam Gaffney and Natalie Schur.

It would only make sense then that this year, when I want to reflect on my ten-year journey as a socialist, I start with Jacobin Editor Bhaskar Sunkara’s book The Socialist Manifesto. Ten years later, he is still teaching me things about what it means to be a socialist and what socialism means for society as I know it.

Written in 2018 after Bernie’s first loss but before the Corbyn flop, the Socialist Manifesto is separated into three parts: a conceptualization of socialism in the future, a history of what socialism has looked like in the past, and a few notes on what socialists should be doing in the present.

Most socialist writers I’ve encountered generally do a poor job conceptualizing a future under socialism, and I genuinely have to hand it to Bhaskar, he probably does one of the best jobs. The reason his hypothetical depiction seems so much better is centered on what I think the whole premise of the whole book is: that socialism is a process.

Sunkara is an editor, so his framing of socialism this way is very fitting. His depiction of a socialist future in the US asks the reader to imagine themselves working in a hot sauce bottling facility, making gains under social democracy, then transitioning towards socialism with a greater union presence, turning the factory into a worker-owned co-op, working towards a way to exist free of the need for profit.

This is far from the utopian dreams of technology-fueled, post-scarcity futures depicted elsewhere. The future Sunkara imagines, you (the reader) never see fully actualized Communism, but you do lead a dignified life free of economic burden as part of the journey towards socialism.

Similarly, in the larger section that runs the history of socialism in Europe, the global south, and the United States, Sunkara extolls the gains made by the world’s poorest people and the victories against imperialism that happen as the left begins fighting and advocating for social democracy; a better and more inclusive welfare state, decomodified basic needs, union workers and sectoral bargaining, and much more.

The really valuable lesson in the Socialist Manifesto is for every socialist at any given time to be thinking about how they can work to advance toward socialism, rather than fussing and infighting over the ideals of their imagined endgame. His last section about what socialism means today is all about how to get involved, how to talk to our neighbors about and generally socialize socialism.

The more I think about it, the more this tracks with my experience as an organizer. I led the Medicare for All group. At our most effective, we had everyone from anarchists to slightly left of center Democrats coming together to protest and host town halls and birddog politicians. It didn’t matter if single-payer was “socialism” from an anarchist or Marxist lens (it arguably isn’t either); what mattered was that we were advancing the plot.

This is socialism; a constant state of class struggle, a work in progress. All the more reason to wear it proudly.

By Any Other Name

Over the years, I've hosted a handful of Town Hall events spotlighting Medicare for All to various communities across the state, from unions to universities. One of my favorite speakers to get when I could was Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. He was knowledgeable and was absolutely electric talking about the issue. He always fired up the crowd.

I was similarly fired up when I saw he was entering a primary race to be Michigan's next senator. For years, I have birddogged his opponent, Haley Stevens, to sign onto the House M4A bill (she never has), and while Mallory McMorrow is a political talent, El-Sayed was clearly stepping into the progressive lane; declaring support for Medicare for All, calling out genocide in Gaza, and demanding we abolish ICE.

This is all to say I'm an El-Sayed supporter and likely voter, but after the last few days, he needs to clarify his position on Medicare for All.

McMorrow recently posted a snippet of an interview El-Sayed gave in which he made the claim that "if you like your employer insurance or your union insurance, those will still be there for you". She pointed out that this was more akin to a public option, which is what she has consistently supported over Medicare for All and been criticized by El-Sayed for.

I was willing to give El-Sayed the benefit of the doubt. It was very possible that he was saying coverage was going to be there regardless of losing your job, but not necessarily the specific private plan.

But then he further muddied the waters when he replied to McMorrow's tweet. He posted a snippet from his book with the last line highlighting to suggest that under Medicare for All, private insurance could exist and duplicate coverage with Medicare.

This is not a good response. The House and Senate M4A bills explicitly do not allow for duplicate coverage. They are single-payer policies, meaning the only possible private insurance would be supplemental, covering things expanded Medicare would not cover (IVF, for example). By definition, if private insurance exists and is providing duplicative coverage to the public insurer, it is not a single-payer system.

This isn't a post about the virtues of M4A, but rather to say Abdul seemed dangerously close to bailing on the policy, the way we watched almost every Democratic primary contender in the 2020 race abandon the idea, exactly because it would eliminate people's private insurance.

He was then asked to clarify his remarks, and unfortunately, not only was he more unclear, he seemed to be implying that McMorrow was just inexperienced or unintelligent on the matter. The tone itself invited a lot of dunking, but I'm concerned about his quote on the policy in which he says, "I don’t have a problem with private insurance offering some of the same services to folks, or covering some of the same services." And then adds the incoherent "It’s public guaranteed, private option." (???)

Some pundits are saying this is basically Pete Buttigieg's Medicare for All Who Want It. This is wrong. Mayor Pete's plan would have put up a new plan on the ACA exchanges for people to buy into that was like a publicly owned insurance option (this was a stupid policy). But El-Sayed defenders like Ryan Grim are also wrong in that this ALSO isn't Medicare for All. What El-Sayed seems to be alluding to and, honestly, McMorrow is supporting, is what the Center for American Progress calls Medicare for America. This is a true public option that exists to be the insurance of default for people who fall off of or simply don't/can't have employer-provided insurance. It's frankly not that bad of a policy; it's just not as good as Medicare for All.

Not to get in the weeds, but here is just a quick note on why Medicare for All is a superior policy. Even the liberal policy critics can really only serve up the political difficulty of passing it as the major problem with it (because it eliminates private, employer insurance). It solves problems in healthcare that a public option doesn't: it stops insurance churn, it ends the administrative burden of switching coverage, and reduces the cost of care with single risk pools and monopsony power over drugs. 

To be fair, Abdul also says he supports the current iteration of Sanders' M4A bill, but then he tries to imply he's middling because "we don't have the votes for that right now".

This is getting dumb. No one, even supporters like me, expects or thinks El-Sayed is going to go to Washington and make Medicare for All happen any more than McMorrow supporters think she will be able to make a public option happen. When you say you support Medicare for All, you are signaling your values. You are open to radically changing the status quo, disrupting a model that isn't working at a fundamental level. When you support the public option over M4A, you are signaling that you are compromising with the status quo. El-Sayed could simply say he would vote for the Bernie bill and his opponent won't; that is the key distinction. I would rather he lose the primary than prove even our chosen progressive champions are too chicken-shit to support it.

If this seems unfair, it's because I expect better of El-Sayed. I want to see him make the case like I have so many times at town halls, in stirring debates, and on national television. Tell people, Yes: your private insurance plan will go away and be replaced with an objectively superior plan that cannot go away by virtue of losing your job or the divine writ of your employer. This is unequivocally good and better than a public option. That is the bold El-Sayed I want as our next senator.