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.
