May Day celebrates the historic power of the working class to oppose oppression and fundamentally

alter society. From union drives to anti-war protests, the workers' movement remains an indomitable force.

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the print edition. Just use the code in the episode description. You'll receive four issues plus access to the complete Jackpin archive. Thanks and happy International Workers Day. Welcome to Confronting Capitalism.

I'm Jacobin contributing editor Kale Brooks, and I'm here, as always, with Vivek Chibber,

a professor of sociology at NYU, and the editor of Catalyst, a journal of theory and strategy. How are you doing, Vivek? Great to be here, Kail. You're filling in today for Melissa, and she's missed, but hopefully we'll be back with us pretty soon. I was pretty envious seeing you guys all up on stage earlier this month, so I figured I needed to get back in the saddle. I was going to call you Melissa, but I didn't think we'd get away with it. So it's better that we just cop to what's actually happening and let everyone know. Yes, I'm not Melissa. But you know, Vivek, you me and Melissa are all fairly critical people. A lot of our episodes are criticizing this or that aspect of capitalism, but I imagine

some in our audience are wondering, hey, where's the positive vision? What do we have on offer?

So I thought today might be a good day to say what that positive vision is. And we've talked

in previous episodes about how our conception of socialism is something called market socialism.

And so I wanted to ask you a few

questions today, both in regards to why you believe market socialism is a desirable system,

and also how you think it might actually work. Right. So to start us off, why market socialism?

Why move away from a traditional conception of socialism to this other concept? That's a very good question. And I think this is where we should start. We should start by asking what was the traditional understanding of socialism, right?

And traditionally, the way Marx thought of it and his followers in the first, say, 30 to 40 years after his death,

the way they thought of socialism was the abolition of private property

and the abolition of the market, these two things. Now, what do we mean by private property?

Obviously, we don't mean things like owning cars, things like owning shoes and televisions.

It's property that is a productive asset, the control of which allows you to have control over other people,

because they now have to come to you to make their own living, right? And the reason you objected

to that was it gave capitalist enormous power over other people, their workers, and enormous

power over society as a whole, because they controlled the wealth

and the investable surplus of society.

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