A few weeks ago, I recorded a lengthy conversation with Bhaskar Sunkara: founding editor of Jacobin (where I’ve been publishing since 2014) and president of The Nation magazine. Bhaskar was in town to deliver the 2026 Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture, which you can watch in full here, and this conversation — filmed and recorded the next day at Toronto Metropolitan University — gave us the opportunity to dig more deeply into the past, present, and future of the socialist project.
In September, Bhaskar and two his coauthors (Ben Burgis and Mike Beggs) will publish The Blueprint, which offers a remarkable sketch of what socialist economics might look like in the 21st century. The book is quite hard-headed about the failures of the socialist project in the 20th, particularly when it came to the question of economic planning. In different ways, this was true of both major strains of socialism: the social democratic model that became dominant across much of Europe and the Leninist variant that held power throughout the Eastern Bloc. It proved especially true of central planning, whose limitations you’ll hear Bhaskar and I discuss at length.
How should the left approach the question of economic organization? Is it still possible or necessary to embrace a political horizon that reaches beyond not only liberal capitalism but also traditional social democracy? How might a socialist economy achieve an efficient allocation of labour and resources while avoiding the maldistribution of wealth and power inevitably engendered by the market system?
In this conversation, you’ll hear us engage both questions like these and less abstract topics like the resurgence of socialist ideas among millennials, the electoral successes of the Democratic Socialists of America, and the nascent mayoral administration of Zohran Mamdani. I’d like to thank my partners at the Broadbent Institute and Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung and I hope you enjoy the discussion — included here in full in both podcast and video form.
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-Luke
