In 2010, amid the wreckage of an economic crisis, Bhaskar Sunkara, then twenty-one years old, started the magazine Jacobin. Democratic socialist in outlook and aimed at replicating the success that magazines such as National Review had had in spurring on the conservative revolution, Jacobin grew into a sometimes doctrinaire but frequently engaging and thought-provoking journal. And when Bernie Sanders’s 2016 Presidential campaign surpassed almost everyone’s expectations, it became clear that the ideas that Jacobin had been pushing had wider support than was generally understood. Two years later, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez emerged as a Democratic star; Sanders became a 2020 front-runner, and portraits of young socialists appeared in a cover story in New York.

Now comes Sunkara’s first book, “The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality,” which is both a history of socialism in the twentieth century and a blueprint for how democratic-socialist ideas might succeed in the twenty-first century. Taking in everything from Lenin’s rise to Sweden’s status as “the most livable society in history,” the book does not defend the failures of Marxist-inspired societies. Nevertheless, Sunkara scorns the idea that those failures should limit the ambitions of reformers and revolutionaries intent on creating a fairer society.

I recently spoke by phone with Sunkara, who, in addition to his work on Jacobin, is a columnist for the Guardian US. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the different approaches that Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have taken to progressive reform, why Americans vote against their economic interests, and whether liberals are too focussed on the explanatory power of race.

How do you see the difference between democratic socialism and social democracy, and why do you think that difference is so crucial to the future of radical politics?

Great question. We obviously have a common ancestor, Karl Marx.

Not you and me, just to be clear.

Right, not us. Karl Marx and [Friedrich] Engels both called themselves social democrats. It was a united movement in the big workers’ parties in the late nineteenth century. Then the movement kind of switched. Nowadays, what you would call social democracy is the movement that seeks to expand the welfare state, but within the confines of capitalism. It’s a kind of functional socialism. We’re going to cede ownership, but we’re going to tax those productive enterprises and make sure at least there’s a base level of security and rights for people.

A democratic socialist would say, “That’s great. Let’s fight for all those things, let’s have that kind of society.” Then we also want to ask deeper questions about ownership. One is, in a society where things are getting better for workers, but the ability to hold investment is still in the hand of capitalists, capitalists could always rebel against the social-democratic agreement. In Sweden, for example, capital by the late nineteen-seventies is basically saying, “All right, this agreement was working for us before, but now we’re not making enough profit. We need to roll back the welfare state.” If you can finally socialize investment and find a way to transfer production toward coöperatives and toward these other forms of socialized ownership, then maybe we can avoid that.

The second reason is just moral and ethical. I think that wage labor constitutes a form of hierarchy and exploitation that we could do without.

Your book also evinces a certain respect for reformist, rather than radical, politics, and you write that you are aware of “how profound the gains of reform can be.” So why is Sweden insufficient? I think a lot of people would look at Sweden and say, “O.K., it’s not perfect. It can get better. But it’s about as good as any society that humans have been able to construct.”

Part of the reason why my tone is that way is I believe that a mass base of people pushing for things, like Medicare for All and all these other reforms we need in the United States, will be people who will be just like what you described, liberals and progressives. If we, as socialists, adopt this kind of too-snarky, radicaler-than-thou mentality, which obviously we can all slip into at times, we’ll alienate the potential base that could actually make a better country and a better world.

In Sweden, we have to look at what’s happened in the last twenty or thirty years. If you could freeze Sweden in 1974 or 1975, it’s a pretty damned good society. For the last twenty, thirty years, there’s been a rightward lurch in Swedish politics. There’s been ground opened for the populist, racist right. A lot of the welfare state has deteriorated.

I’m not sure that social democracy is sustainable in the long run. Eventually workers will start demanding things that will make inroads into the profitability of capitalist firms, and these capitalists will then turn on the social-democratic compromise. Is there a social-democratic road to socialism? I don’t see them as separate roads. I see one as kind of stopping short, stopping at the five-yard line or ten-yard line.

It seems like you’re trying to make a practical argument, essentially saying that social democracy is always going to fall short and that there are structural reasons why it is likely to. Would that be fair to say?

Yes, exactly.

There aren’t really any antecedents of what you are advocating for. And so, if we want to argue practically about what can work, does that make you anxious or wary?

Yeah, definitely. I think that’s one reason why I like to say, “Let’s go to social democracy. Let’s see what works.” But at some level I just believe that democracy is a good thing, and that we should have a certain set of ideals for our society, which is as much democracy as possible, as little hierarchy as possible. Now, there might be limits to that. Maybe a complex society with a complex division of labor does require some sort of hierarchy. I’m not sure how far we can go, but I do think it’s useful to have the social horizon.

Postwar Sweden was not a multiethnic, multicultural society in the way that modern America is. Are you worried that there’s an inherent contradiction between what we’re talking about and a society that is multicultural and multiethnic—that many people are unwilling to be a part of democratic socialism when people look different from them?

I’m not completely concerned. In Sweden’s case, they were organizing in a deeply unequal country. Now, are there certain organizing barriers in the U.S., a country with a really deep history of racism and racial inequity? Yes. But I think those barriers can be overcome by politics. I think human beings all want the same things. We all want to take care of ourselves, take care of our families. We know when we’re being oppressed. We know when we’re being exploited. We’ll always look for a way out of that situation if it were to arise.

What makes you think that human beings all want the same thing?

We’re animals, right?