Meagan Day is a staff writer at Jacobin magazine. Her writing has been featured in The New York Times, Vox, Mother Jones and Timeline. Her forthcoming book with Micah Uetricht is Bigger than Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism. On January 28, Day spoke at the “Class Warfare: The Future of Left Politics” forum at Harvard University.
Harvard Political Review: Jacobin has been called “the closest thing to a flagship publication of the Democratic Socialists of America left” even though it doesn’t have any formal ties to the organization. How do you identify with socialism, and how has that informed your writing?
Meagan Day: There is no formal relationship between Jacobin and DSA, but Jacobin is the largest socialist publication in the United States, and the DSA is the largest socialist organization in the United States. You’ll find that a lot of DSA members will regularly read and write for Jacobin. And a lot of people like myself, who are on staff at Jacobin, are also active members of the DSA.
I started my career in media before I was a socialist, and I’m sure that I could be on a different track. Instead, in 2015, I noticed that Bernie Sanders had decided to run against Hillary Clinton. I started paying attention to his campaign, and I became extraordinarily inspired by something that I didn’t previously think was possible. It was the idea that in the United States, there would be a constituency for class politics that wasn’t the fringe or marginal, and that was instead comprised of ordinary, working-class people who wanted to transform society so they could have a better life for themselves and their loved ones. It was a shock to everybody. Anybody who tells you this wasn’t a shock to them is lying; nobody saw this coming.
I had already read Jacobin before. I knew what democratic socialism was. What happened in that moment for me was that, whereas previously I thought that socialists were correct … I had never posed the question to myself: Are you a socialist? Because I didn’t really think that it was something that I could be. Now suddenly, millions of people supported a politician who described his political ideology as democratic socialism. And so I posed the question to myself: Am I a socialist? Because the answer was yes, I went and I joined the DSA. And because I joined the DSA, I realized that if I was going to work in media, it’d be better if I could find a situation for myself where I could write what I actually wanted, to actually change the world and push it in the direction that I think it ought to go, not simply report on developments as they were unfolding. So socialism led me to Jacobin. At this point, there’s no separation between my writing and my political ideology.
HPR: Was there anything in your personal life that informed your conclusion that socialism was correct?
MD: Everything in my personal life confirmed that conclusion. You know, I did not grow up in a working-class household. I grew up in a relatively wealthy household, which can give you a glimpse of the world that is just as startling as the one that you get growing up in a working-class household. We live in a staggeringly unequal society, and it’s indefensible. It always bothered me, ever since I was conscious as a young person. I sought answers as to why it had to be that way and I found unsatisfying answers everywhere that I looked until I came to the explanation that, in fact, society is characterized by class conflict — that the capitalist class becomes wealthy and enjoys its privileges and luxuries by exploiting the working class. And the working class sells its labor to the capitalist class in exchange for a wage, which the working class uses to purchase the necessities of life. … [The capitalist class] appropriates the surplus value of that labor as profit, and that’s how people become wealthy. And these two classes are locked into struggle with each other. The capitalist class would prefer it if we did not talk about this, right? So yes, my entire personal life has confirmed for me that this is not an acceptable way to arrange a society, but it’s not necessarily a personal experience of hardship.
HPR: Why write as a means of political change?
MD: Well, I’m also an organizer with DSA, and I don’t think that we can simply write as a means of political change. I actually think that if people just write about politics, some people tend to become estranged from the challenges that face organizers on the ground. And that can warp your political perspective. So if you’re going to be a political writer, and specifically a socialist political writer, it’s important to stay connected to an organization. But that said, we need to write frequently because we need to be able to communicate our ideas to people. We need to be able to persuade people. People are already persuaded that there’s something wrong. People are persuaded that this society is grossly unequal and that the hardships that they experience are not fair. However, sometimes people do genuinely think that [their hardships are] their fault. Well, then you have to start there. You have to persuade people that it’s not their fault. But if they’ve already determined that it’s a social problem, then you have to persuade people that the social problem actually has solutions. Then you have to organize and have solidarity, and wage “class struggle,” by building the forces of the working class to engage in struggle against the capitalist class. We’re not starting a class war, we’re fighting back in the class war.
HPR: The media is grappling with questions of truth and bias and “death to bothsidesism.” Jacobin unabashedly takes sides — unlike some news sources, which claim objectivity. What do you think the role and responsibility of the media is in delivering information and truth to people?
MD: There needs to be a diverse media ecosystem. We need reporters who deliver facts to us accurately, there’s no question about it. We also need freedom of press, and we need people to be able to create organizations that allow them to communicate their political ideas. That’s a cornerstone of free expression.
I do think that in the Trump era, when there’s a lot of conversation about fake news, and there are reputable and disreputable sources, liberals will sometimes lump our magazine into the conversation and say, “This is something we don’t want. It’s extreme. It’s biased.” To me, this is a problem. We need to be able to protect the voices of political minorities in our democracy. As for the mainstream outlets that are often responsible for delivering breaking news to us, they are also responsible for advancing a political perspective, and it just so happens that the majority of the time, their political perspective lines up with the interests of the capitalist class. Sometimes they’ll give accommodations for voices from the left, but for the most part, the perspective that they’re advancing is pretty compatible with the interests of the capitalist class. To me that reads as hypocrisy, the idea that there’s no bias in the mainstream press, but bias exists in a magazine like Jacobin, and the bias in our magazine is bad and must be stamped out in order to protect democracy. This is a bizarre narrative.
HPR: You’ve been pro-Bernie for a long time. Why do we need a Sanders presidency?
MD: We need a Sanders presidency to catalyze a movement that’s even bigger than the one that’s going to put him in the White House. The movement that’s organized around Bernie Sanders right now is unlike anything that’s been seen in modern electoral history. This is just a fact. Now, people who don’t want him to win will deny that this is true up and down, but either their heads are in the sand or they just have a vested interest in denying this fact. But they know it full well, that this is completely unusual. We have a mass …. movement to … elect [Sanders]. … But it’s not big enough … to actually transform our society, to eliminate gross inequality. It’s not big enough to end poverty, to end war, to end climate change. We need a Sanders presidency for the opportunity to use the levers of power that are available to us to actually build a movement big enough to transform the world. And eventually to transform our economic system from one that not only permits but actually functions on exploitation, to one that instead functions on a basis of equality, democracy at work, and solidarity. A solidaristic economy … a phase that is less barbaric, frankly. So will it happen? I don’t know. Nobody can say. But this is the nature of class struggles. You see opportunities and you take them, and you fight as hard as you can.
HPR: Do you have any personal concerns about a Sanders presidency?
MD: Well, he’s going to face not only the ordinary constraints that all presidents face, he’ll also face extraordinary, unusual pushback, because he’ll be attempting to advance an agenda that dramatically improves the lives of the working class at the expense of the capitalist class. Medicare for All means the elimination of the private insurance industry. Large industries don’t allow themselves to be eliminated; they go out in bloody battle. And of course, they have money, influence, and formal positions of power. They also have — this is the most unfortunate and scary thing, but it’s one of capitalism’s cleverest tricks — they have the ability to have their ball and go home and tank the economy. This is typically how, when things are not going their way, the capitalist class will undermine left-wing administrations or governments. “Capital disinvestment” or “capital flight” are names for this, or a very aggressive and more coordinated version would be the “capital strike.” Workers can go on strike — well, so can the capitalist class. So yeah, something bad could happen if Bernie Sanders was President, there’s no question about it. But also something bad is happening every day when people experience medical debt because they were diagnosed with cancer. Something bad is happening every day when people face eviction because they can’t afford a roof over their head, because housing costs are spiraling upward, but their wages are staying exactly the same. In order to change the system, you have to be provocative.
HPR: What’s the role of students in this next election cycle, and in the future of left politics?
MD: Historically speaking, students have played an incredibly important role on the left. And they also typically have fewer responsibilities to attend to that would prevent them from being politically engaged. But it’s been a minute since we’ve had a strong, politically active student movement in this country. Bernie Sanders may be changing that. Students prefer Bernie by overwhelming margins. Bernie Sanders has a campaign infrastructure to incorporate every supporter as a very active volunteer, and he has no intention of demobilizing that machine after he’s elected. This is a pipeline for students with strong political feelings to become student activists and eventually become student organizers for the long haul. It does have the potential to catalyze a new left-wing student movement in this country.
Students need to decide whether they’re going to take the opportunities that are presented right now. Not opportunities simply to vote and cheerlead, but to become organizers on campuses and in their communities. It’s up to each student to decide what they want to do with their life, and what role they want to play, and whose side they want to be on.
Image Credit: Unsplash/Charisse Kenion