Interview by Meagan Day

Means of Production is a socialist film production team based in Detroit, Michigan. Last year they released their debut electoral campaign video. The candidate wasn’t your average baby-kisser. It was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The ad wasn’t played on television but still got millions of views, going viral on social media and attracting national attention far beyond the congressional race itself. On Twitter, influential activists and journalists hailed it as “the best campaign ad of 2018.”

A few months later, Means of Production dropped two ads for Hawaii congressional candidate Kaniela Ing. Again, one was crowned “the most remarkable political ad of 2018.”

Means of Production’s Naomi Burton and Nick Hayes kept their foot on the gas pedal. By the end of the year, they’d made videos to mark the Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA’s) 50,000 member milestone, for the campaign to establish a public bank in Los Angeles, for an academic labor union in Ypsilanti, for democratic-socialist candidates in Ann Arbor and Rhode Island, and for Progressive International, a joint project of Yanis Varoufakis and Bernie Sanders.

Jacobin’s Meagan Day talked with Burton and Hayes about busting American class myths, creating a new socialist vocabulary, preparing for Bernie 2020, and about Means TV — a “post-capitalist subscription-based streaming service” coming in 2019.