Book Review: The Socialist Manifesto by Bhaskar Sunkara (2018)

I've been working on an essay called The Money Game, where I open by mentioning that I avoid the terms "capitalist, socialist, communist" etc. This is because of how muddled these terms have become in public discourse. Consider these two thinkers—Vivek Chibber (NYU sociologist and a mentor of Sunkara's) and Heather Cox Richardson (Boston College historian) who give completely different definitions of socialism. In this interview, Sunkara opens by stating it's hard for socialists to agree on how to define "socialist." I chose this book recognizing the ambiguity in my own brain on what socialism is.

Sunkara starts at the end: by showing what socialism might look like in practice in the modern era. This first chapter—zippy, comedic, engaging—will surprise readers whose main association with socialism is the USSR, particularly the West's depiction of it. 2019's Chernobyl, for instance, depicts a bleak, sclerotic, and brutal society independent of the nuclear meltdown. This imagery is contrasted against Sunkara's first chapter, which imagines a Scandinavian-style social democracy maturing into widespread democratized workspaces. His vision is also diligently non-utopian and more believable for that.

It's fitting, then, that chapter two takes us back to the beginning, to the end of feudalism and the “apocryphal change” of enclosures, land leases, and the birth of wage labor. Wherever there was a concentration of wealth and capital, Sunkara shows, there were workers organizing for greater control over their time, and for relief from abysmal conditions. I’d have liked to have seen some attention given to the idea discussed by Silvia Federici, that capitalism itself was a counter-revolution to a post-feudal socialized reorganizing of production. Here, socialism is presented more as a response to capitalism, and at least some see the arrow in the other direction.

On a practical level, Sunkara's history of socialism lays out a vast tool kit to choose from, to apply to the modern moment. On a meta-level, it disrupts the standard history I suspect many Americans internalize. I was born five months before the dissolution of the USSR, and my American education left me with roughly this timeline:

• On day one, Marx invented socialism / communism.

• On day two: Lenin read Marx and staged a bloody revolution.

• On day three: Stalin took over from Lenin and proceeded with gulags, purges, and famine.

• On day four: the Berlin wall came down, the USSR collapsed, and capitalist democracies celebrated the end of history.

Appropriately, then, Sunkara continues with the rise of Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SDP) through the 19^th century. This chapter also helps us appreciate why Marx believed that capitalism was a necessary precursor to socialism: creating the wealth and organizational capacity of workers to stage a revolution—both of which were present with the SDP, and importantly absent in Russia and China. Sunkara shows how these assets would be undermined by the politics of WWI (the support for which divided the party) and later Hitler’s rise (who banned the party in 1933). I'd have liked to have read more about the latter, as the Nazi's also confusedly called themselves national socialists (they were not), but there's only so much time.

There are four things Sunkara does not do in his chronicling of the major experiments with socialism in the 20th century (i.e. China and Russia). He does not:

1. Sugar coat atrocities

2. Deep dive into atrocities

3. Argue the Maoist and Stalinist regimes were not "real" socialism.

4. Do what would have been easy, which is to name all the atrocities that have coexisted with or been constitutive of capitalist regimes: Pinochet's Chile, Suharto's Indonesia, American chattel slavery and genocide.

This all makes him more credible. His project here is to give an account of the history of different currents and expressions of the socialist tradition in the last 200 years. These epochs were never one thing, and the historical context mattered as much as the ideologies themselves. He's looking at the nadirs and heights (including the stunning success of social democracy in post-war Sweden) across this timeline so we can select which threads matter for the modern era—what we want to draw from, and what we never want to repeat.

His greatest contribution in this history is showing how dynamic and multiplicitous it is, that the choice is not between Iphones and Target, and what we are shown in Chernobyl. Rather, we have a choice between socialism from below and democracy at work, and the oligarchy we have.

The most interesting chapter is Sunkara’s 14 parameters for what it would take to realize socialism in the modern era. This chapter, compared to the energy spent on socialism's history, feels brief—each parameter could have been its own chapter. However, he has a new book coming out in the fall: The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World which I expect is going to expand on these points. If so, the two together will make an excellent pair.

I’d recommend Socialist Manifesto to anyone who is feeling (what Cox Richardson calls) the sloshing of power in the United States. Interest in socialism is on the rise, as it’s one response to the inequality that has surpassed the gilded age. Unlike the 1920s, however, we’re careening into an era of constant climate emergency from which those who are the most responsible are the most insulated (the rest of us left to face increased and extreme floods, fires, food shortages, hurricanes, and heat domes).

In the United States, the top 1% control more wealth than the bottom 90% of the country. They own half the stock market. In every election we watch the ruling class' wealth deployed to determine political outcomes—most brazenly with Musk injecting 200 million to Trump's 2024 campaign (along with using Twitter as a megaphone).  Across the political spectrum, voters are angry at this inequality and money in politics, as 60% of Americans can’t meet the minimum standards for a decent life and nothing seems to be changing.

In 2024, power sloshed to the right. It’s easier for many to be angry at immigrants than it is to be angry at a system, and the mostly private individuals who uphold it (public-facing Musk and Bezos types notwithstanding). But as Trump’s popularity plummets, as his corruption becomes undeniable, we're seeing power slosh again. One direction it's sloshing is towards socialism (and not for the first time, as Sunkara shows). We saw this play out last week in New York where all of Mamdani's endorsed candidates won their primaries. We should know, then, what socialism actually is, and Sunkara’s book is a great place to start.

Buy it here:

PS: What actually is socialism, then, after reading Sunkara's book? Socialism is the organized opposition to wage-labor and the private control of key resources (so, individuals might still own their cars, their houses, their computers, but maybe firms do not get to control an aquifer that provides water for millions of people).

The two are inextricably linked: if three firms (A, B, C) own, respectively, the minerals, water, and soil of a country—you need to rent your time (wage labor) to A, B, or C to get minerals, water, or food (or a medium—money—to buy those goods in the store). A socialist alternative could mean the state assumes control over key resources (nationalizes A, B, and C), or A, B, and C become democratically run firms (one way or another). Especially in the former cases, this usually also entails the planning of some aspects of the economy, as opposed to firms engaging each other and consumers unfettered in a marketplace.

That's socialism.

Communism can mean either (A) the end-state of socialism described by Marx in his manifesto as a classless, stateless society, or it can simply be (B) the parties that have historically called themselves communist (in which case, it's pretty arbitrary. Note that North Korea's full title is the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea").

Why are either attractive? A full discussion is for a future article, but Sunkara's first chapter does a good job speaking to that question. Simply put, if you value the freedoms, dignities, and protections that democracy provides in the political realm, would you not also want it in the economic realm (e.g. the power to influence what happens with a firm's profits, and who holds managerial power)? Stake-holder control over capital ties economic decisions to the people most effected by those decisions (e.g. we vote to use 2/3 of our profits to safely manage factory waste rather than open a second factory and dump the waste in a river, and 1/3 to give everyone a raise).

Sunkara's book shows the attempt to achieve anything like this has been a long, arduous struggle with a range of victories and losses, personal and colossal. But socialism is far from dead, and I'm excited to see where it goes next.