Krystal Kyle & Friends

For our second episode, as we learn who will control the Senate and the political landscape of the next four years comes more clearly into focus, we’ll sit down with Bhaskar Sunkara, founding editor of Jacobin magazine, and author of the book “The Socialist Manifesto.” Bhaskar has been instrumental in the rise of the American left and has charted it’s post Bernie trajectory. So with a neoliberal administration firmly entrenched where does the left go from here? What’s in the realm of the possible for a Biden administration? What’s the role of left media?

The full video of Krystal Kyle & Friends with Bhaskar will post here on Substack as well as on Kyle’s YouTube Channel, Secular Talk at 9 pm on Friday. The full audio with no advertisements will be available the next day.

Can’t wait until Friday? Neither could we, which is why we had a brief conversation with Bhaskar to answer a few quick questions before the interview. Let us know what you think. And thank you for the incredible response to Episode 1 with Marianne Williamson! We appreciate you all so much and are delighted you loved hearing from her as much as we did. Alright here’s Bhaskar!

Krystal Kyle & Friends: What inspired you to found Jacobin?

Bhaskar Sunkara: In 2010, a lot of people on the left were searching for something to the left of liberalism. We saw the triumph of liberalism with the election of Obama, but it was clear that this politics could not change people's lives in significant ways. We saw epidemics of hunger, despair, and unemployment, especially after the 2008 recession. And for these problems, we got a weak stimulus — Obamacare, which is essentially a giant subsidy for the insurance industry. This, plus a tax credit, would be considered enough — it would be billed as historic progress. The U.S. was missing an organized working-class movement and an ideological current left of liberalism. Obviously, we couldn't organize and spontaneously generate a movement from scratch. But at the very least we knew that there was a need to create a pole of attraction to the left of liberalism, and then to make it easily accessible.

The project was to get the left behind a politics that took electoral politics more seriously, that took more traditional trade union organizing more seriously, and that moved away from some of the more spontaneous politics of the Nineties. It was meant to be outwardly facing, to look to ordinary people who might share more egalitarian impulses but didn't have a language for it and didn't know how to turn the sentiments into coherent politics. Jacobin lent a ready-made language and politics to the newly radicalized. I think it can claim credit for helping to rejuvenate DSA in its early days. Having the shell of an institution in DSA and Jacobin meant that there was some place for people to gravitate to, and it wasn't just reinventing the wheel.

KK&F: When someone opens an issue of Jacobin or visits the site, what can they expect to find?

BS: Jacobin is partly meant to create polarization and to weave together individual outrages into a broader politics, because the alternative is the slow grind of people being in tough economic situations and feeling oppressed while the world continues on — not just despite their situation but because of it. We want to create polarization so that business as usual can't continue until these things are resolved.

It’s not just enough to be outraged. We have to think about what our goal is, and what our alternative is. [Jacobin’s] writing points to the alternative to liberalism — the alternative that would mean a broader welfare state, more worker protections, and at the very least, securing basics for people in the here and now. And we also pose the reasons — both moral and ideological, but also practical — why you would want to go beyond social democracy to a system based upon worker ownership, based upon social and economic rights, that we call socialism. 

KK&F: Can you tell me a bit about the place that Jacobin occupies in the landscape of the left right now? Has this changed at all since its inception?

BS: We’re carving out a path on the left that is meant to be accessible and materialist. I think there are still a lot of attempts on the left to take things to an abstract level of theory that is inaccessible, or to use language taken from academic seminars. Jacobin tries to make things more accessible. The ideas are still sometimes difficult, but the barriers to understand the ideas should not come from language itself. There's room for an intermediate level between the dense academic journals and the more propagandistic day-to-day broadsheets. I think Jacobin fills that middle ground. 

Today, our audience is broader than the existing left, so we have to think about how we get people from passively reading a couple of Jacobin articles a month and agreeing with them, to considering themselves socialists and knowing what to do with that realization. Getting people politicized, getting them engaged, is not something we can do ourselves as a publication, but we see it as part of the mission. 

KK&F: What new development at Jacobin are you most proud of? 

BS: What I'm most proud of is the longevity of Jacobin, as well as the fact that we've been able to reach so many people, and publish so many people, and have so many people working on the project. Scale is one of the most important things; we want to reach people through every channel possible. Through online, print, video, and podcast content, we've been reaching more and more people. I think that's really important at this stage, because the left is now large enough in America that journals can survive with just the base of the existing left, but we don't really want that. We don't want a left that just has a few thousand people, or even a hundred thousand people, and just survives. We want a left that has an impact on day-to-day American life. 

KK&F: Jacobin ran an issue this summer titled After Bernie — what kinds of ideas does the magazine offer about what the left should do with the lessons of the Sanders campaign, and with the current political situation?

BS: The American left is in a situation where we are much weaker than our task. There's no easy, quick fix to it. So I think that there's two ways to approach the fact that there is no quick fix. One is very conservative — that we need to slowly organize and build, and keep on keeping on. But I think impatience is a virtue, too. We need new, big, and bold campaigns for demands that will reflect the popular mandate, and that will catalyze institutions that already exist. We need a mixture of the stable organizing of institutions like DSA with the spirit of new, possibly more populist initiatives. One of the problems with our current debate is that it sets up a dichotomy between the two strategies, and I think that they should work hand in hand.

I am not of the opinion that we're on the route to a left that wins. We're on the route to a left that continues to exist. And the victory of the past ten years — the victory that Jacobin has had a part in — is creating a left that exists in America, but for the next step, I don't think that electing two or three AOCs every few years will put us at the cusp of power. I think it's going to take gambles. We can't lose sight of a spirit that is anti-institutionalist even as it tries to build institutions.

KK&F: Thousands of people have joined DSA in the past year. You've been part of DSA for a while. If you could share an insight with those who have joined DSA recently, what would it be?

BS: It's good to be a part of the democratic socialist caucus of DSA — there's a reason why DSA has survived as an organization, and was the only organization that could act as a pole of attraction to people. Part of this is the fact that DSA is really diffuse in a good way. It doesn't require a whole lot of ideological rigidity, but it does have defined morals and values, and a lot of that involves an embrace of democracy, anti-authoritarianism, and a view that socialism will come about through the fight for day-to-day reforms and changes, not just by saying the most radical things possible at all times, even though, given all of the injustices around us, we should be very impatient. There's a reason that it's survived, and we should be proud of it.