The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome, everyone, to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we are taking you to the streets of France, where mass, student-led protests have swept the country for the past month. We’ve gotten so many requests from y’all to cover this, and we’re here to deliver. What you’re about to hear is an edited-down version of a two-hour Zoom webinar that I hosted on Sunday, October 25th. Now, the webinar was co-produced and cosponsored by the Chicago Teachers Union, Haymarket Books, The Real News Network, and the French Union Force Ouvrière, or Workers Force. The goal was to provide a space where we could actually hear and talk directly to a range of rank and file students and union members across France who are on the front lines of this massive protest movement, and to put them in conversation with working folks right here in the United States.

And that’s exactly what we did. And unless they are expressed by organization leaders, all views that are shared in this conversation are those of the speakers alone. Guests were asked to share their own thoughts and speak from their own perspectives, not to speak on behalf of any of the unions or movements that they’re a part of or any of the countries that they’re speaking from. And if you want to stay up to date on the protests in France or you want to know how you can get in touch with the people and orgs on this webinar, then use the links that we provided in the show notes or reach out to us. Okay, that’s enough from me. Let’s get to the good stuff.

Welcome everyone who is here on this call, friends and comrades and fellow workers from France and the United States and beyond. My name is Maximilian Alvarez. I’m the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Executive Director of the Real News Network in Baltimore. And I am genuinely honored to be here with all of you. And I’m grateful to be part of this vital panel discussion, an international webinar organized and produced in collaboration with the Chicago Teachers Union, Haymarket Books, the Real News Network, and the Confederacion General de Traver. Oh God, I murdered that. The General Confederation of Labor Workers Force in France. Thank you so much. Something monumental is happening in France right now. But all we’re getting here in the United States is corporate and right-wing media propaganda and skewed, selective coverage of the protests that are shutting down the country. Today, we are going to get the real news about what is happening on the ground in France, and we’re going to talk to folks who are on the front lines of the struggle.

Dennis Kosouth:

I want to welcome everybody to this forum. My name is Denis Kosuth. I work as a nurse in Chicago Public Schools and I’m the chair of the Human Rights Committee. As a little bit of background to this forum, in December of 2025, less than a year ago, Force Ouvrière, a union that represents 300,000 workers in France, invited a delegation from the Chicago Teachers Union to their convention in Nages. I’d never been to France before, and FO showed me and my partner incredible hospitality during our short stay, and we made some amazing connections, which is what’s led to today’s forum being organized. So deep thanks to FO and Devan in particular for bringing this idea of a solidarity forum to fruition. We were asked to share experiences at CTU to the FO convention when it came to connecting wider social issues with our bargaining demands, otherwise known as Bargaining for the Common Good.

FO wanted to know how we in Chicago linked together the issues of school fundings with the issues of our government’s war spending, for example, how we linked learning conditions to the attacks in our communities last year with ICE’s “Midway Blitz” on Chicago, where tear gas was being released around many of our schools and students and their families were being torn apart in a racist attempt to drive a wedge between undocumented people and those who have a piece of paper saying they’re allowed here. Because let’s be clear, no one can be illegal on stolen land built with stolen hands. The FO wanted to know how we organize alongside our students, parents, and the wider community to fight for the schools our students deserve. As we all know, there’s no shortage of taxpayer money when it comes to bombing schools in Iran, burning children alive in Gaza, or giving tax breaks to billionaires who are on their way to becoming trillionaires.

Our hosts in France showed us tremendous solidarity during our stay, and now the people of France are showing the world something even more important and amazing. As often happens in history, sometimes the educators become the students, and what the people in France are showing us in the United States is incredible. They’re showing us that we don’t have to accept the status quo; we don’t have to watch our neighbors literally be burned alive from climate change this past summer, as they witnessed in France, and accept that there’s nothing that can be done about it; that we don’t have to see our resources that we as workers create, those resources being used to kill, maim, and starve people in other countries who had nothing to do to deserve it. It’s not just in France, but the youth of Albania, India, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, to say a few, are taking to the streets.

These young people are showing us an immense lesson that we all have to learn. We have an amazing opportunity to learn from our siblings around the world as we are all facing similar conditions, as is obvious by the hundreds of thousands of people that took to the streets in Paris yesterday. Those numbers show that we outnumber those who are harming our communities while enriching themselves. We outnumber them by multiple factors and we can show our power. So thank you all for taking the time to join us today from France and those in the US who wante to learn our lessons. So I’ll be quiet with those opening remarks.

Jackson Potter:

Yeah, thanks a lot, Max, Denis. I’m Jackson Potter, Vice President of Chicago Teachers Union, expressing a tremendous amount of solidarity with our siblings in France leading this fight. We are all experiencing a similar phenomenon, the rise of extremist right wing populism, the neoliberal assault on public education across OECD countries that have really gutted the public sphere. So we’ve got a situation, for example, in the United States where the “Mississippi Miracle” model is being shown as the example we should all follow because they have high literacy scores. What they don’t tell you is they also have the highest infant mortality in the nation. So they want to deny children and their families food assistance, rights to access of healthcare, public education, lower class sizes, better food—all of the things that make a life worth living—in service of reproducing this economic system that keeps many people at the bottom and a minority in power and with all the wealth.

And so I think what France is showing us, Spain, others in this moment, Belgium, is that when we build bigger, broader, deeper movements for the common good where our demands are, “We want it all. We want housing, human rights, we want to feed and fund schools in our countries, not bomb them abroad”—that these are demands that can actually coalesce a majority and we’re seeing it right before our eyes. So really want to hear more from you all and we’ll be listening intently. Thank you for being here.

Maximillian Alvarez:

You’re about to hear from a broad range of those folks in a minute, but just to give you a sort of base of what we’re talking about here, in case you have not been getting the basic information about these protests, I want to read from a report that was published today in The Guardian to just give you that base of information and then we’re going to have our guests introduce themselves. So in The Guardian earlier today, they report,

“Hundreds of thousands marched in cities across France on Saturday in largely peaceful protests to support school children’s demands for more teachers and repairs to dilapidated buildings as Emmanuel Macron faces a social and political crisis in his final months as president. The prosecutor’s office in the southern city of Nice said on Sunday that 59 people had been taken into police custody, including 11 suspected of belonging to extreme right groups. They were alleged to have gathered with the intent of committing violence. In Paris, at least 110,000 people marched along the eastern edge of the city, according to government estimates. They supported high schoolers, but also complained of the high cost of living and the government’s heavy policing, saying riot police had been sent to target school protestors over the past month instead of the government offering political solutions. More than 70,000 police were on the streets of French cities with shops boarded up and many museums closed. The government had feared a repeat of last Saturday when despite peaceful protests taking place, France saw one of the most violent days of unrest in years with public buildings burned, hundreds of shops destroyed and looted and at least 2,700 people arrested in cities across the country. The government has been facing a crisis since the start of high school demonstrations in mid-September when children aged between 15 and 18 began protesting against staff shortages at their schools, leaking and crumbling buildings and a lack of chairs in overcrowded classrooms. It grew into the biggest youth movement in years with trade unions, teachers and parents joining. Police investigations are underway after some children and protestors were maimed and injured by explosive police weaponry.”

So that is the, again, just kind of mainstream media account of these protests. It’s one of the least bad ones I could find, but I want to give you all access to the folks who are actually on the front lines of this struggle and can tell you exactly what is happening.

Irina (French Student):

Sorry, I don’t speak English.. (Translation) My name is Irina. I am a high school student in high school in one of the poorest neighborhoods of the city of Nantes. I have participated in high school mobilizations since 2023. I participated in blockades, so I have seen the evolution of the situation.

Clément (French Student):

Hello everyone. My name is Clément. I am a student at the University of Nanterre, so near Paris, and I am also a trade unionist at SNF which is a trade union for teachers and staff members in secondary schools and six form colleges.

Léna (French Student):

Hi, I’m Léna. I’m a student in Clermont-Ferrand, which is in the middle of France. I’m a street medic and I’m also a liaison between the high schooler and the students. And I’m trying to help them. I’ve been asked to help the high schooler to assist them in the general assemblies.

Apolline (French Student):

Hi, I’m a French high school student. My name is Apolline. I’m from Clermont-Ferrand, same as Léna. I’ve been active on the blockade since the beginning of the blockade in September, and I’ve seen how the police have been treating us students and minors on those blockades.

Chloé (French Student):

Hi, my name is Chloé. I’m a PhD student in economics at Institut polytechnique de Paris, so Polytechnic Institute of Paris. I’m also a teaching assistant there for two master students, and I’m an activist for la Francois.

Clément Poullet:

Hi, I am Clément Poullet, general secretary of the FNEC FP Force Ouvrière. And I’m going to say a few words how my union see the movement in France. I would like to thank you for this international event. This is very important for us to know that what is happening in France is seen from all over the world. Something important happened yesterday. Refusing to address the demands of young people and workers, President Macron decided to ban demonstrations. He wanted to impose a State of Exception and Terror. Huge crowds responded by taking to the streets in massive, peaceful numbers, young people and workers supported by trade unions. In dozens of cities across France, 800 thousands people demonstrated for freedom and support in their demands. Paris did not burn. The cohesion of the people overcame terror. The revolt unfolding today is a consequence of 10 years of struggle and to which the only response, most of the time, has been the repression. Young people have taken the lead in this movement, and it’s now spreading across Europe—Spain, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, and beyond. And workers are beginning to take up the baton because they are facing the same policies, because fuel prices are skyrocketing and wages are no longer enough to get by. This revolt will not stop because the demands must be met and the government is attempting to push a sweeping austerity budget through the national assembly, €54 billion in cuts to public services and social spending. Meanwhile, billions are spent on war. All of this places a big responsibility upon the labor movement. My union has supported high school and university student from the beginning, and we believe that Macron and his government have left us no choice but to prepare for a total strike leading to a shutdown of production and public services by uniting our trade union confederations and standing in solidarity with the students we are preparing for a massive strike beginning on November 5th. Thank you for your attention.

Caitlyn Savado :

I’m not sure if everyone else from France went, but good morning here from America. My name is Caitlyn Savado. I am currently a second year in my undergrad at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California. I have been a organizer and a community organizer and abolitionist since I was 13. I’m from the south side of Chicago, and what sparked my organizing was our calls following the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor back in 2020. Since then, my work has focused on restoring restorative justice practices in Chicago public schools, removing police from Chicago public schools, and getting all of the things that all of our communities need. So I’m grateful to be here and have so much solidarity in my heart for all of us and all of you all.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean, there’s so much history here that is not visible to so many people. Cait, I’ve talked to Chicago Teachers Union members on our podcast, working people many times about the overcrowded schools, the crumbling school infrastructure, especially in poor black and brown parts of Chicago. So I know that the issues that are so central to the CTU are very much connected to what students and this whole movement in France is fighting for. But also to our friends and comrades in France, I know that in the grand French tradition, you guys know how to shut shit down. And I remember interviewing students and teachers and workers during the general strike of 2019, 2020, during the pension strikes of 2023. And so I say that to let the audience know that what we’re seeing now did not come from nowhere. And we are seeing it spread in Gen Z protests from Bangladesh to Nepal, the cockroach movement in India.

Something is really happening here. And so I wanted to ask again, starting with our guests from France, if you could just in taking maybe two to three minutes each, tell us what is happening there. Where did this come from? What does it look like on the ground? What are you seeing that we’re not seeing?

Karine (French Teacher):

I’m just going to focus on the demands, properly speaking, the students’ demands that Clement talked about. And they will sound very familiar to you, Chicago, because they are the basics of education. So more teachers, but just like Clemon said, Macron government keeps cutting teaching positions 4,000 last year, another 1,500 next year. And I’ll give you a concrete example. When school resumed last September after the summer break, I met with my 35 new students, the equivalent of your soft more students in America, in the American school system. And I gave them the list of their teachers, but that went quite quick because no Spanish teacher and some of them study Spanish and the major, no physics and chemistry teacher, no technology teacher. So more teachers, yeah, that’s demand number one. Well, actually, I’m not sure if it’s demand number one or number two or number three, but that’s one demand they have and that we have as teachers.

So there is a connection. We connect our fights. Another demand is you talked about the class sizes, 35, sometimes 36, and among them are students with disabilities who do not have any proper learning conditions and one-on-one aid despite their status. An example, September 2025, if I’m not mistaken, official numbers were 50,000 special needs students with no proper aid in the class, being crowded in classes of 45, 46 students. Two years ago, I had an autistic student who would hurt his head on the desk.

I felt like I needed to protect him obviously, but I also needed to protect the other students of my class. So that’s demand number two class sizes. Demand number three, you said decent buildings to study with dignity rather than with rats, as you might have been seen. You might have seen on the news in schools of various mostly old roofs collapsing, elevators not working, no soap, no toilet paper in the toilet, buildings that are way too old to face global warming issues. Here in France, we had our first episode of the heat wave back in May and some schools just shut down, just closed, just like if students could feel better at home, but we know that’s not the case either. So no fans to cool down the classes, nothing for them to feel good at school. Too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter.

I guess it’s the same for you in the US in school, in American schools, not enough desks, not enough chairs, having to ask our colleagues, coworkers next door whether they can help or not. There is another demand, a very important one, which is is our university admission platform.

The students are very angry about continuous assessment, weighing heavily in the back rate and the opacity of. Our students keep checking their phone, obsessed with their grades. So this platform basically is a tool of social sorting that left thousands and thousands of graduates without any solution after an exam, except conscription, unfortunately, except conscription because that’s one choice they have. You have to tick little squares and if you end up with nothing, you can tick this square and go to war.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Jesus. That’s bleak, man.

Karine (French Teacher):

Yeah. Last but not least, our students are also opposing, just like I said, the growing militarization of schools through official texts and legislations that require teaching on defense issues. How am I supposed to teach about defense issues? That’s not my job. I’m an English teacher. I’m just a teacher and we’re not at war, so what do you want me to do that? And the students, even when they’re 15, 16, 17, 18, they’re perfectly aware that billions of euros are going to the march to war and not to public services, just like Clemon said, and like schools and hospitals. So they are saying no to the war budgets currently under discussion.

Léna (French Student):

So first and foremost, I would like to express my regrets at the absence here of anyone from the [inaudible] which are the overseas region of France, because they are the ones who started the movements and their condition are far much worse than those of us metropolitans. So it’s something I think we should all remember that they started and that their condition are really, really hard. And it’s a shame they cannot speak here. So as I said before, I spend a lot of time with the high schoolers in Palm Film, and I’ve been able to discuss lots about what the demons are, ranging from too much pressure to having to live in a dorm with windows that cannot close in winter. I’ve heard and seen a lot of what they are feeling and one they feel multiple is anger. Anger are all the adults that have never or have stopped listening to them, to us, because what I’ve high school students have access all, especially college students.

We are already in a precarious situation and the government has only made matters worse by raising tuition, by leaving students with no choice but to live in unsanitary crouse housing and fitting to provide enough funding to renovate universities. To give you a few examples in Claremont, in 2023, the Florida storm, it’s us and the roof of Jane High School blew off. And now in 2026, there’s still no actual roof.

In my university, we have to go to class with throw blankets because there’s no insulation, but we don’t have the rights to take them to our midterms or we cannot have any codes for our midterms and it’s in December or January, so we’re basically freezing while taking our exam. So that’s cool. And I would just like to point out that I’m talking as someone privileged enough to be able to live with my parents. And even if I left, I would have a bit of financial help. So I’m not concerned about what I’m going to say, but I’ve seen friends live in housing and I seen them pay 300 euros for a small room with no real locks and sometimes no fridge. I’ve heard horror stories about watches in apartment that I’ve never been treated or inspected or even in Claremont about a girl that was held captive and raped by her downstairs neighbor in a cruise housings with thousands of people around her.

The government is responsible for all the violence inflicted on young people. That is the very reason for the high schoolers movement. We seek only to make a united voice heard. The voice has been heard by some and has brought about a convergence of struggle, but it has also been suppressed by the police and thus by the states. Even in Clamo, which isn’t a big city, I, as a street medic, I had to treat many high school students, many children. I had parents express fear that the children would be protesting for their rights. So they came to stand in front of the high schools to act as human chill. I saw teacher and elected official. And today that’s the main focus of the French media and government, political exploitation, not the demands, not the children named by the police, but the control of high school students by the far left, except that I spoke with the high schooler and I can assure you that they don’t need to be manipulated by anyone to organize a blockade.

They all have their own political opinion, but the movements belongs to themselves. I’ve heard them express their anger even at unions because sometimes even students, I’m speaking about all unions because sometimes they take a lot of space and they speak a lot for the students, but students have their own way of thinking. And in we have a lot of problems with that, especially with because sometimes they talk a lot to say nothing and they try to explain to the high schooler what they are living, which is not fair because they know exactly what the condition they live in are. They’re very, very well informed about what the Germans are. And is the far left politically collecting the movements? Possibly, but that doesn’t mean that blockades are being manipulated by them or even by or the Muslim brotherhood. Absolutely not. All governments actually is sliding towards terrorism, but the people will not stand for it and will continue to fight against injustice and for the rights [of] immigrants [and] everyone.

Irina (French Student):

(Translation) As I have said, I am in a high school from a poor neighborhood of the city of Nantes. So I have been doing blockades since 2023. And what I see is that since then there have been blockades, but the places where it was strong, where the police came was always in the high school from the poorest neighborhoods. Since six o’clock in the morning, there were already dozens of police trucks in front of the schools. Even if the blockades had not already started, what is generalized today is what What’s happening already in the poorest neighborhoods. Right now it is also happening in the city centers. So it’s something that is very shocking for the high schoolers of those neighborhoods.

So a camarade was speaking a little before of what’s happening in Green, in Guadalupe. But actually what is happening in the metropolitan France, we don’t know what is happening. Everything is silenced since… Yeah. So what is happening there does not appear in the media. Regarding the working conditions we have in my school, we don’t have any social worker in my high school. It’s been eight years. In my high school, we also have only all-time nurse. She’s also explaining that her management teacher and management in her curriculum is something that is very heavy, that is in the final diploma. It amounts a lot.

This management teacher is sick. She has been sick for years. She is never replaced. Every time she has a sick leave, the teachings don’t occur. And this year she said clearly my health will not allow me to go until the end of the year. So I have to do the curriculum very fast so that you have the master you can have for your exam. So they are pushing on the teachers to get beyond what their health allows them to. And also the students, they are over exercising us. And in any case, they’re asking us to have good results. They ask us to resist in a system which is just crumbling.

Right here in France, high school students don’t have the right to strike. They don’t have the right to vote. So their only possibility is to make things change is to blockade the schools and to go to demonstrations to shout their demands. But what they are faced with, there are so many injustices, so many problems. There is a difference between school students from poor neighborhoods and students from city centers. There is a difference between the public schools and the private ones. So this is quite normal that the younger rises among the high schoolers. What the government sends to them, it’s the police, the police which has a big role in everything. They maintain them in… Sorry. So those are the first violence that they are faced with, but they’re not the only violence. They’re faced with institutions violences. For instance, her curriculum, her high school, she didn’t have the choice of all that.

She has been sent one hour away from home. They chose her curriculum for her. They chose everything for her. This is the first violence which is not condemned in French media. They have taken 1,600 professor positions. Everything, all that is not condemned in the media. What they condemned is that some trash bins are burnt.

Maximillian Alvarez:

They do that here, too.

Irina (French Student):

(Translation) So let’s finish with something easy. Today, us, the Gen Z, the high schoolers, the students, we are allied with the workers, with our teachers, with everyone who wants to be an actor in this struggle and fester with Macron’s policies. Today we are not going to cave as long as they don’t give us the 10 billions we need.

Clément (French Student):

Yeah. So I want to intervene on what I’ve been seeing on these school blockades. I am a university student, but also a trade unionist in a union for teachers and staff members in the secondary schools and six former colleges. And I would like to make a point on the violence I’ve been seeing on these different school blockades. So for the past few weeks, I mean more than 7,000 student arrests have been made age between 14 and 18 year olds. It had already been reported that more than 170 students have been seriously injured by the police. As of a few examples, we have one secondary school student who lost the use of his right eye following a direct hit from a rubber bullet. Another suffered a double fracture to the jaw and the loss of his teeth after being hit by a rubber bullet from less than three meters away.

We had a video of a plain clothes officer arresting a secondary school student near a river before holding his head underwater for several tens of seconds. There have been cases of strangulation during arrests, for example, involving a 14-year-old girl who could no longer breathe after being put in a headlock. The violence is not limited to secondary school pupils, but it escalates when they’re left alone to face the police. And whether they’re teachers, parents, trade unionists or elected representatives, everyone has been subjected to the police violence. So I went as a trade unionist to various school blockades with other members from my trade unions to form a safety coordinate between the police and the students alongside teachers and parents. We were teargassed on numerous occasions. We were targeted with rubber bullets and faced police charges. At one point, the police positioned the sniper on a rooftop with a rubber bullet launcher who was aiming at us with his finger on the trigger in a flat line trajectory shot position, which is normally prohibited.

The roads were not blocked by the police, so there was a constant risk of students being hit by cars. And during tear gas attacks, crowd movements gave way to scenes of chaos, all in all law and order enforced in a brutal bloodthirsty manner. We had the back, an anti-crime brigade with its origins in repression in the French colonies and now notorious for its violence in working class neighborhoods, areas also known as police testing grounds that turned up at the perimeter on the school blockades with balaclavas and no way to identify them, provoking police violence between school pupils and police. We also witnessed the presence of the Bravem, a unit of ultra violent police officers who conducted manhunts on motorbikes, batons in hand, crisscrossing the narrow alleyways and knocking over students. I have to say that this unit had been disbanded following the murder of a student Manikosekin in 1986, but was subsequently reinstated by the French president Emmanuel Macron, notably during the yellow vest protest and the pension reform protest in 2023.

Apolline (French Student):

So first I wanted to talk about what Léna said. I know it’s a bit ago, sorry. The roof of [inaudible], which is the high school I’m going to, it blew off three years ago. It’s the roof above the boarding parts of the school. So currently the boarding students in the dormitories, they have molds, they have cracked walls, they have water in the walls. It smells really bad. It smells like rots basically. And the administration is telling them, “Oh yes, we have a project going on to repair it,” but it’s been three years. The state of the school, to explain why it’s not being changed as fast, the school was built at the end of the 1800s and they can’t repair it as easily. So we have large cracks in our walls with plants growing out of the walls.

We don’t have enough toilets, even though we have toilet paper. We don’t have menstrual hygiene products. Well, we have them, but they’re hidden somewhere in the school. It’s really difficult to get by because it’s really old and it’s really in a bad shape. Another thing too, what Clément was saying with the union building, that was a really good thing for us students as we are not being protected much. They help a lot, but yesterday we had a big protest, all over France, and there were less breakage of things and stealing because the army was involved and the police were much more violent. In [French] someone lost part of their fingers and was violently burned on the back of their hands due to… I don’t know how it say. It burns you and multiple people got burned, but that’s the worst of them.

Maximillian Alvarez:

The flash bang grenades?

Apolline (French Student):

Yeah, basically. And before those protests, there was a bit of an unspoken agreement between the police forces and the unions that if the unions were there to keep calm during the protests, the police wouldn’t act. And that unspoken thing has been broken. Now they gas. Last Saturday, we were supposed to protest at two on the big class in Piermoferon. Even before two, the police were already gassing us and just without problem. And people who had never been to protest and who arrived at this time, they were like, “But you can’t even protest because they’re already gassing you. You can’t march, you can do anything.” And another thing that you said about people being assaulted while they’re arrested, we also have cases of sexual assault while people are being arrested, like some policemen, they have batons to hit. They put that near someone’s ass. So yeah.

Léna (French Student):

Just to say also about this, they are also the cases of policemen calling people “sluts” and also touching. And I’m talking about underage high schoolers. I’m talking about children getting touched in their private places by cops while they’re getting arrested. And I think it’s important to just say that. Sorry.

Maximillian Alvarez:

No, that’s horrifying and infuriating. And again, I’m so angry hearing this, but I’m so appreciative that you all are informing us of this because it’s important for people to know this. And I have so many more questions, but I know we don’t have so much more time. So I did want to ask if we had other guests from France who do want to hop in and share your story and what you’re seeing. And then let’s bring in our CTU folks to respond to what you’re hearing and what you think we here in the US can learn from our comrades in France and what we can do to support them.

Chloé (French Student):

Yeah, sure. I agree with most of what has been said, but I’m going to add maybe a few numbers. The demands of the high schoolers and the students are really coming from the fact that our education system is really under strain. The public funding per university student has fallen by 20% since Macron has been elected. There are more than 10,000 teaching posts that were eliminated and so many hours that are not being towed because professors are not replaced. It’s like millions of hours lost every year for all students. And what is really striking when you go on high school blockade is that these students really know what they’re fighting for. We hear a lot on medias that when you’re 16, you just don’t know, you don’t understand politics, you don’t know what you want, you should not speak. But these students really have very current arguments.

They have precise demand. They know exactly why they’re locating their school. They have science clearly against the government, against the government’s budget, against the far right. They show support for Palestinian people. They’re really aware of all the struggles. They really want to end Pako Soup. When you go to college students, they want to put an end to Mon Mesta, which is exactly the same, mostly similar to to go to fine graduate curriculum. What I want to add is that mostly what we see is a lot of beans burning, but when you go on the ground, students, they know that burning beans work. We work against their cause. They are mostly peaceful. It’s very festive. There’s music, chants, there’s solidarity. It’s really far from what we see in the cows we see.

They’re really peaceful. They just want to be heard. I just want to add, I think it’s been said already, but what really works is when there are adults, there are teachers, there are parents, they’re on the ground to protect the students from the police. They form chains, human chains in front of the students to protect them. Has asked all the officials, all the activists to step in whenever they could. Their elected mayor who now has been on a lot of social medias because he went on the ground, protected students, protected students also doing protests by protecting them directly physically from the police. And so what the students need seems to be support to be heard, to go on the ground, speak with them, hear their demand and protect them from the police.

Devan (French Teacher):

Maybe just a word of explanation on what is Paco Soup. In the French tradition, which is very different from the US one, there is a diploma at the end of high school. We call the baccalaureate. And when you have this baccalaureate, you were entitled to go to the university in the curriculum you choose. This right has been destroyed in 2016 leading to 2018 Pacosup, which is the electronic platform through which the students are selected and some are just left with no possibility of going to higher education. And Monmaster is the same thing between the bachelor and the master in France. When you had the bachelor, you had the right to go to a master, but now this is not the case any longer.

Clément Poullet:

As I have said, Macron is determinated to continue his policy. At all costs, he needs to push through a war budget, a budget of austerity, but yet at the same time, he’s facing a historic, powerful and determinated movement mobilization. The demonstration will continue. The blockades will continue. Many are saying the government must respond or else it must go. But the elections are still six months away. That is a long time. Workers and some trade unionists have begun to join the students, only just Pegan, but in the face of the government’s strategy, the government’s strategy of attrition, waiting for the movement to run out of steam, what can be done? We have reached a point where our trade unions have a responsibility to commit all their activists in workplaces, in public administrations, to bring things to a standstill while striving for the broadest possibly unity. Success is not guaranteed, but we have no other choice because only a total strike can turn the tide.

Clément (French Student):

I’m just going to hop in for a few seconds just to talk about what’s also happening in the universities in France. So after what happened with the high school and what is happening with the high school student movement, there has been also mass mobilization different universities in France. At its peak, more than 90% of the universities in France were blocked by their students. So in my university in Montair, we also organized blockades, not only in support of the student movement, but also for problems we are facing ourselves at the university, but there are quite in common with the problems called out by the student movement. For example, a shortage in university places, buildings that have deteriorated over time and the lack of funds given to universities by the government budgets. We organized different general assemblies where we voted to send out delegations to high school blockades around the university and also delegations to different workplaces to call the workers to strike with us.

We also organized different autonomous courses on security during protests, the rise of the far right in France, the history of revolutionary movements, and also courses that were held by striking teachers for high schoolers who must pass the national exams at the end of the year.

Irina (French Student):

(Translation) We need not forget that there is a racist dimension in all that in the media, in what the medias, the politics say about what’s happening. As I already told you, I began speaking by high schools from the poor neighborhoods. All that is broken, all the bad behaviors for the state right now is assimilated to the people coming from immigration. You know that in your country, Trump is saying that the problem in France is because of the immigration, because of the Islam. The reality is that in every movement in France, the people who are pointed are the people from the poorest neighborhoods, are the people from different races, and they are called the savages, they’re taken as a representant of the unrest, of the breakages. All that is racist.

All this media, all what the media say, this is pressure from the politicians from the extreme right, but also from the right, also from the center is nurturing this hatred against the Muslims, against the people from different races. This has led to attacks, to terrorist attacks, racist attacks. We have had a few days ago an attack in Trump and the assailant explained that he wanted to avenge the shop owners who had been the subject of the looting last week and that he wanted to kill Black people, Muslims, Arabs. This is that, this has an impact on our lives, and this is why the presidential elections in 2027 are an issue of life and death for us, for us high schoolers from poor high schools, but actually for all minorities in France.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and there, again, are so many parallels to what we see here in the United States. There are crumbling schools all over this country. There are schools closing, there are hospitals closing. We too are a society crumbling under the weight of decades of rampant pillage by the capitalist class, and that has been squeezing more from working people and giving more to a handful of billionaires and oligarchs and the power hoarders and wealth hoarders of our society. And we’re seeing the effects of that all over the place. It’s in our crumbling infrastructure. It’s in our schools falling apart. It’s in our children’s health getting worse because they’re living near toxic polluting facilities or drinking polluted water. These are the kind of signs of a society in decline at the same time that we’re seeing more wealth generated and spent on war and private industry than ever.

And so I wanted to round things out by asking for our friends and comrades from Chicago and the Chicago Teachers Union and looking at all of this from the side of the United States, even if we’re experiencing a lot of what our French friends and panelists have been saying, we’re not shutting down the country and protesting the way that they are. And so why not? Or do we have to do something different? Is there something we can do to build solidarity across working class struggles around the world, not just in France, but in other parts of the planet?

Caitlyn Savado :

Yeah, I can go ahead and hop in. As I shared before, I was a high school student of Chicago Public Schools in one of the buildings that they intended on shutting down in one of the buildings that also seen the same kind of conditions that you all saw. I will speak to my experience as a Chicago public school student, but I think it’s more important to establish this understanding that the sovereign nations of the world are in a state of empire backsliding, and it’s masquerading itself as a power that is expanding, as a power that is establishing its domination. We’re seeing that in this mass production of weapons. We’re seeing this in this mass production of ideology, making sure that there are no connections between those of us who are in the United States and our comrades across the globe, whether it be in Iran or France or Belgium or Spain or Brazil, wherever it is in the world.

And so I think just to speak on the establishment and to speak towards what conclusions it’s drawing through media, what conclusions it’s drawing through your all’s demonstrations and what is communicating to the rest of the world, first is this notion that Gen Z is not only not hold the integrity to be able to challenge these powers, but it’s trying to establish this generational disconnection between us and our teachers, us and those who come before us, and it is causing this lack of support. It’s causing division and not only how we see things, but how we communicate to each other within our own communities. I mentioned I’m currently a student at the University of Southern California, and kudos to you all for all of your work in your universities because what we’re seeing in American universities is the complete opposite. People are not only totally complicit, but not even aware of what’s happening in our world.

Again, that is the efforts of this empire trying to disconnect us Americans from our understanding that we are a part of this global community. We do have responsibility and obligation to people who are halfway across the world. We do have obligation to ourselves who are too victims of this empire building. What we’ve seen in the last five years across the world, and I think your guys’ experiences all speak to it, is this new face of teacher and student solidarity. It’s an understanding that we are all growing and a comprehension that we are all holding, that it is us who are those who understand the weight of what’s happening, who understand and hold the actual weight of what it feels to be responsible for democracy, the actual weight of what it feels to be responsible for educating the next generation. And so what we are seeing across class, across race, we too are seeing with students and teachers, and I think the targets of the conditions of students’ learning conditions and teachers’ working conditions from the states and from the governments is they’re not only kind of revealing of why they’re targeting us, but they’re Kind of revealing that we are essential and important to what is to happen next in our countries and without teachers, without students, to challenge the empires—and I know that the notion here in America is typically that so many Americans are caught up in the work to be able to live. And I think where we are currently is in a space where we should be understanding that the work, the labor that we are engaging in and that we are producing is directly connected to the struggles of those of our siblings who are halfway across the world. It is directly connected at this—our taxpayer paying money is directly connected to bombs in Iran, bombs in Gaza. Our efforts towards democracy, all of these different things are directly connected and tied to struggles across the world. And so it is really, really, really important just for Americans to understand that our day-to-day practices, whether you are going to work, whether you are going to school, it almost exists this kind of linear hypocrisy.

I know I feel it myself all the time, even just understanding that I have access to drinking water, I have access to food, the choice to be able to think about what foods I want to eat in a day. All of these things are very small components of our everyday lives that we’ve been kind of structured and conditioned to be blind to, but they are now the exact components of our lives that separate us from the rest of the world: people not having access to water, people not having access to the ability to protest, to go to a protest and to know that the state that is there to protect you is not going to protect you, which we already know. But to engage in these different processes as an American is completely different than to engage in if you are a citizen of a different country in the world.

Dennis Kosouth:

It is worth remembering that the history of this country, just like the history around the world, anything that’s decent that has been won was because regular people rose up and made it happen. It wasn’t because it was handed down by someone we elected. It wasn’t because we asked nicely. It wasn’t because we wrote petitions and they were heard by the people who run our society. The international system of prioritizing profits over people is what causes the conditions that they’re experiencing in France to be felt here in the United States. And it’s an international system that wants to put the needs of the 1% over the needs of the 99%. And those connections are made for us. And that’s I think what drives these protests happening not just in France, but are happening across Europe and India and other countries as well. And will come back to here at some point.

We don’t have to go back that far in this own country’s history to look at the occupations that took place in universities like Columbia University where they renamed one of the main halls after Hin Rajab, a young Palestinian girl who was murdered by the state of Israel. Those connections are made for us when we see tear gas in the front of schools in Chicago where they attempt to divide us saying that the problem is somehow immigrants coming here to flee conditions that this country actually produced to seek a better life. And yet somehow they’re the ones who are taking resources when the fact is it’s the billionaire class that is taking the resources that we create as workers in this country and redirecting them towards war and away from the needs of regular people. Their power is the domination of the state. Elections are being bought and sold by the billionaire class.

Right here in Chicago, we’re undergoing a school board election where a billionaire Michael Sachs is spending all kinds of wealth that he has towards stopping the candidate that would actually be supportive of the needs of students in this city. We see the actions of the police in France. The same thing happened here in this country in the uprising in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd, where they attempted to shut down the protest movement using their power of the state. So I’ll just finish my own comments by saying it’s our numbers. We create the wealth in this society. We are the vast majority of people in this society in every country around the world. It’s up to us to organize ourselves to fight back and take what we created and build a world that’s worth living in.

Apolline (French Student):

There are things happening in France called [French] which means when you get arrested in the next 24 to 48 hour, I’m not sure, you get judged. And the minister of justice, Gerald Darmano, he’s been telling the magistrates we have no control over, to be extremely strict and harsh. And so some of the sentences have been to not be allowed to demonstrate or to lose the right to vote for three years. There is no separations of power in how this is happening. So that’s why I wanted to add it because I feel like it’s quite important. And to respond to your question about the 5th of November, one of the things that we’ve been telling other French people who come to protest because they’re sick or they’re mothers and they can’t come is don’t buy anything. Don’t consume anything, really just don’t buy. And that pass the message even though it’s not as good.

Léna (French Student):

So to support us, yes, we encourage to stop buying and stop participating in any way in the economics of your country for a day. We also encourage strikes, just not going to work on those days. But also a good way to help is to, if you can afford it, the streets medic, which I am part of, are in dire needs of fundings because we see more and more people hurt and it’s expensive. I am a student. I don’t have any money and I have to have a lot of stuff on me so that I can help people. And so if you can donate, there’s a lot of pages you just have to look around to donate to the streets medics of each cities. If you can afford it, it’s amazing. And then to help us just talk about it, talk about what you’ve learned today, talk about the reality of things, stop listening to mainstream media.

We have a lot of independent media in France and we have a lot of them that speaks the truth, which one of the concerning things in France right now is how all the mainstream media have stopped telling the truth and have only been there to film and talk about violence of the protestors. One of example that was trending at some point was a guy filming journalists that were all crouched down, like 10 or 15 journalists crouched down filming a bin on fire. And he went saw them and was like, “Oh, you want to interview the bin? Just interview the bin. She probably has so much to say.” And it was kind of fun. So don’t listen to the main media and we have lots of independent media and talk about what you’ve learned.

Clément (French Student):

Yeah. I just wanted to say, I mean, for the fifth one, remember what is being organized in different trade unions is, as Klimo was saying, the general strike. And honestly, the main way for support internationally would be to push this general strike on an international level. And for that, the only way is to organize. So going to organizing general assemblies in your workplace. I mean, I know it’s quite complicated and we’ve had a lot of setbacks in France, but it’s basically going to see the workers talking about the problems because a lot of problems that we are having in France are adamant in different countries in the US, in England, and as we’ve seen in Europe, in Spain, Italy, Germany. And what is happening is people are organizing together. So workers are going to students, students are going to workers, and that’s how we’re pushing through to mobilize ourselves to push for a general strike.

And for the media part, I completely rejoin what Lena has said. Don’t follow mainstream media. There’s a lot of independent media out there on social media in France, to name a few. We’ve got street press. We also have one which is. And so unfortunately, they don’t translate their videos or papers in English, but I mean, you do get a general sense of what they’re trying to push through and they are medias that are on the streets with us and who are not, as Lena said, filming burning bins for no reason.

Devan (French Teacher):

Yes, just a word because as a French teacher unionist, I have had the chance to participate some demonstrations of the CTU striking. And I’ve seen how you know how to organize a strike in the US. I mean, not a school was open in the city. There was this demonstration with demands, with signs, very square. And this is something very impressing for a French teacher because yeah, you know how to strike. I know the situation in the US is very particular. You can strike only at the end of the contract and so on. But what you are building right now, I know the CTU is part of this push towards the 2028 Mayday. It’s something that is a support for us because we see that in the US too, you are able to fight, you are able to define your demand, you are able to work towards topping off this system.

And I think this is a big help.

Chloé (French Student):

A few days ago, the Prime Minister of France has asked all the main telecommunications providers to be prepared to block access to social media such as TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat X as the huge national day of protest was being organized. It has used this previously for Kanaki or New Caledonia. So what we can do together and with you with other countries is to try and create all this alternative channels of communications that would be free from fake news, from censorship and just try and communicate more together on these struggles.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I think it is getting late there in France and we should be courteous hosts and let them go and get some rest so they can go back out on the streets and keep kicking ass for the working class. And so I just wanted to thank everyone again for being here, our friends from France, our friends from the CTU, everyone who registered and is watching and sending us questions live. Everyone who is listening to this or watching it later, thank you for caring about this. We all have a role to play here. No one can do everything, but everyone can do something and do something by helping us share this story. Share these stories and these voices from the front lines of struggle. Help us make sure that we fight the corporate media bullshit and propaganda and get the real news out there to the people.

Thank you guys so, so much for being here today. I’m sending all my love and solidarity to all of you from Ithaca, New York. And I will be back home in Baltimore tonight. But solidarity friends, now and always.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So we’re here at Red Emma’s Cooperative Bookstore and Coffee House in Baltimore, and I am really excited to be sitting with two of the three co-authors of the vital new book, The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World. Ben Burgis and Mike Beggs. Give it up, everyone. Hell yeah. Welcome to Baltimore, guys. So let’s talk about the S word, right? I mean, we’re here. The world’s on fire. Life continues to get harder and scarier year after year for working people everywhere. The masked jackbooted thugs that we were warned about are in our streets, hunting and disappearing our neighbors. Endless war and genocide and profiteering are ripping our world and our people apart. And everything is being run or taken over by these psychopathic, self-serving, greedy, society destroying, profit seeking, oligarchs, end times, fascists, authoritarians and fanatical nut jobs who are all so openly weird and corrupt and evil that it makes your head spin.

I think it’s time we start talking about doing things differently. Don’t you agree? Yeah? So let’s talk about it. Let’s get all the good faith discussions and questions about what socialism is, what it isn’t, and how it can work for us in the real world on the table. And so Ben and Mike, I wanted to start things off this way with the big question. You guys co-wrote this with Bhaskar Sankara, founder of Jacobin Magazine.What is your ideal goal in writing this book together and publishing it now? What would be the ideal definition of success for this book?

Ben Burgis:

Yeah, thank you so much for all that. And I should also say that our third co-author, Bhaskar, would be here tonight, but he has a month old baby at home, so he is on paternity leave from non-New York City events for a couple months at least.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Congrats, Bhaskar.

Ben Burgis:

But I think the way that we would see it is just this. All of those things that you were saying earlier are downstream of the fundamental way that our society is organized, the fundamental relationships and power at the heart of how things are produced in a capitalist society. And to us, the fundamental difference between capitalism and socialism is a question of whether we should have a society where some people can spend all day giving orders because they have money and some people have to spend all day taking orders because they don’t. And right now we’re having this conversation in a small island of a different way of organizing things at a worker-owned bookstore, but right now the fundamental institutions of our economy aren’t set up to support that. That’s not an option for most people that they get to work someplace where they have a democratic say in the way that it would work.

So what we want to think about is how we would have to reorganize our economy on a fundamental institutional level so that everybody can have that experience.

Mike Beggs:

Yeah. And I guess I would add that our brief for this book, what we set out to do was to kind of bracket off the question of how we get there. Strategy is a very important question, absolutely, but it’s also one that holds a lot of your potential model to… Holds it hostage. The short answer to how do we get there from here at the moment quite honestly is I wouldn’t start from here. So we are bracketing off that question. Once you have to start thinking from what is politically realistic right now, it limits what you can say. I mean, where are we starting? I mean, are we starting from current American political reality, Australian reality, reality somewhere else? So we wanted to draw a realistic vision of how a society might work, what is a plausible way that socialism could work that avoids a lot of the problems that people are familiar with.

And the point is not so much to set down a plan that people are going, we expect people to follow in the future and if they don’t, they’re doing it wrong. That’s not the point at all. The point is really to try and be part of a project of building confidence in the present that there actually is a realistic alternative, one that is feasible, one that people can imagine working in, living their daily lives in, one that they think would be a lot better than the way things currently work. And really that sort of confidence in a very different society is I think something that we have lost even on the left. We talk a lot, a lot of us call ourselves socialists, but there really is a lot of sign that a lot of people are not fully confident in articulating exactly what a realistic alternative might look like.

And that’s what we’re trying to do with this book.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, it’s like that real politic of how the fuck do I get through the day in this shitty system, let alone have time to think of what could be is the kind of trapped space that so many of us are in. But the only way out of that is through it together, I think. And so let’s kind of take that in here now, this space, Red Emma’s to sort of… I’m going to take a page from your book, Ben. I’m going to set this up kind of debate style. I want to kind of toss you guys some thoughts, claims, things we’ve all heard about socialism. First, I’m going to give you the softballs. Let’s talk about the straw man claims that are made about socialism. We grew up in America. We all heard these things, but I want to toss them to you guys and see you knock them out of the park.

And then I want us to also talk about the steel man concerns that people who are not Fox News dipshits, people who still have genuine questions about socialism and how it can work in the real world. So with that, I was going to start with kind of just the biggest and most obvious one. Capitalism, this is the straw man. Capitalism is great. Capitalism gives us freedom, individual choice, personal security, and socialism is bad, it’s breadlines, it’s non-individual, no room for the individual. Everything’s dictated to you by the state. Capitalism’s great. Why would I want socialism?

Ben Burgis:

Yeah. I would say that the book is primarily written for people in that second category, the ones who might have some level of understanding about what’s wrong with capitalism but are a bit skeptical that anything else is possible. But we do certainly want to address the first set of concerns too. We do a fair amount of that in the book. And I would just say that obviously when it comes to the kind of democratic rights that we already have, advanced liberal capitalist democracies, freedom of speech, trial by jury, all of that stuff, we like all of that. We want to keep all of that. We are sometimes terrified that the current administration is trying to take away a lot of that. But then the other half of that is what it takes to make those rights meaningful in people’s day-to-day economic lives. If you say, “Hey, legally you can do whatever you want to, but also if you want to eat, you better sign on the dotted line and agree to work for half of the day, half the time that you’re awake most days of the week and only half because of past worker struggles for a boss who is going to have dictatorial power over you at the workplace and you better not piss them off or else you’re going to lose that job and you’ll be in a much worse position,” then that doesn’t sound to me like somebody who has meaningful control over their life.

I think that having meaningful control over your life means that you should have a say in the place that you have to spend the most of your life as an adult. And ultimately also that means that we could all spend less time there anyway because if workers are in charge, when we have productivity gains, when technology advances and we have the choice, okay, do we capture those productivity gains in more stuff or do we want to work fewer hours? Then right now that decision is dictated by this class of private capitalists who aren’t doing the work themselves and it’s a very easy decision for them, right? Produce more stuff, make more money. That’s why the Fair Labor Standards Act in this country set the 40 hour work week in 1938 and has not gone down one minute since then.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Minimum wage ain’t been raised either.

Ben Burgis:

That’s certainly not because technology stopped in 1938. So I think that a society where you can have a say in what happens where you work and where you have to work less and you have more time and more material stability to do whatever the hell you want with the rest of your life sounds like much more meaningful freedom to me.

Mike Beggs:

Yeah. I mean, I would say as we put it in the book that there’s a lot of goals that socialists share with liberals and that we don’t want to give up some of the benefits of the modern complex division of labor. Personal freedom, which as Ben says, is not only partially met under capitalism, but personal freedom’s an important one. Efficiency, we make a case for efficiency as a socialist value in the book, mainly for the reason Ben’s just talking about because efficiency means not just… It’s not about more and more stuff, but about more time free of instrumental labor, but socialists also have extra goals, right? Of course, egalitarianism, care, making sure that everybody is secure and looked after, ecological sustainability. And the difficult task that socialists have that we’re trying to address in this book is making the case that those specifically socialist goals are compatible, can be made compatible with broad, liberal and personal freedom with the efficiency of the modern division of labor.

And that’s a challenge because there’s very good reasons why people think that socialism as it has been attempted in the past has failed on that account. And so we’re trying to make the case that they can be brought together.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, I want to pick up on that last point because here comes the sort of steel man concern, right? Some of the greatest crimes in human history were committed by people or regimes that called themselves socialists or that attached that word to their movement. People, regular people, working people, poor people, people who didn’t do anything wrong or mean any harm were hurt in the course of a 20th century in which the word socialism was a big thing. And so for people who come from those family lineages or who are worried about those kinds of things, how do we learn from the past without getting bogged down in it?

Ben Burgis:

Yeah. I think there’s a lot you can learn from the failures of those earlier socialist experiments, both the moral failures that you’re talking about, just the failures to live up to socialist ideals and also just the design failures, the economic dysfunctions that led to the empty grocery store shelves, even managers of state enterprises having to rely on black markets to get the inputs they needed to make their quotas, all of that stuff. I mean, that’s why we wrote the book to try to show that there is a better way of organizing this. I’m sure to the extent that time allows, we’ll get into that, what we think that better way looks like. But I would also just say on the bigger picture question, it’s like, yeah, it is absolutely true that there are all kinds of regimes that did all kinds of things that I find abhorrent that use the socialist label to justify that.

On the other hand, the war in Vietnam was justified by Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in the name of defending freedom and democracy and the knowledge of the millions of Southeast Asian peasants who were shot or burned alive with napalm or dislocated from their villages doesn’t make me like freedom and democracy any less. It just makes me hate the hypocrites who claim to stand for it more.

Mike Beggs:

Yeah. I mean, I guess I’d emphasize that this is very much a democratic vision of socialism, but also a socialism that has a lot of room for personal freedom. Our model still involves most people having an income… I mean everybody, not most people, but everybody having an income to spend and goods and services and things like that. And not just making trivial consumer choices, but that allows, of course, for all kinds of freedom in terms of lifestyle choice, where you want to live. But it also adds to that freedoms that we do not have under capitalism. Democracy is extended from the political realm to the workplace in particular. And there’s a lot of points in our model where we try and find real points of leverage for effective democratic deliberation all the way through. It’s not something that just happens at the political level. It’s something that happens at multiple points in the system.

Sometimes it’s democracy of workers at a particular workplace. Sometimes it’ll involve the community along with workers, et cetera, et cetera. So I would say that our model is one of liberalism plus, right? It’s a liberalism socialist with all the egalitarianism, security, et cetera, that gives people real freedom in their lives. And that’s really at the center of our model.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right. I got another straw man for you. So capitalism and the dynamics of the free market are the most efficient way for society to organize a system of production that meets the needs of all. Why would we want socialism, which is… Sorry, I didn’t finish the question. Why would we want socialism that’s central planning and not adaptive as the market can be?

Ben Burgis:

Yeah. Well, great news for you. The kind of socialism that’s advocated in the book is not one where everything is essentially planned. We would make a distinction between saying, okay, are there certain things about capitalist markets that do make it efficient at doing the things that capitalism is good at? It’s not good at producing material equality. It’s not good at producing stability in people’s lives. It’s not good at empowering most citizens, but it is good and it’s importantly good at things that earlier moderns of socialism were bad at, having full grocery store shelves, all that stuff.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean, selling your apples at a farmer’s market is fucking fine. We don’t have to turn that into this monstrosity that we have today.

Ben Burgis:

No, exactly. And we think that there’s nothing magic about the act of buying and selling. So there are the same way that there are some libertarians who think that the least little bit of social democratic interference with the free market, and before you know it, you’re down in the road to Stalin. There are some people who come, as we do, out of the Marxist tradition, who say that the least little bit of buying and selling going on in your society before you know it, you write down the slippery slope to capitalism. And we don’t buy that either. There have been markets, there have been buying and selling in human societies for thousands of years. Capitalism is something much more recent. Capitalism is a society where the majority of the population have to sell their working hours to private owners of the means of production. So we can still have markets, you could still have in sectors of the economy where we think you still need them.

You can still have firms setting prices based on what they think can sell, all of that stuff. But those firms are owned by the workers, they’re internally democratic, and financing can be done through the public sector, through public banks. So people aren’t forced to risk their own personal savings, which obviously for most working people under capitalism is not a rational risk. And the last thing about this before I throw it to Mike is just oftentimes people think of markets and planning as being opposed to each other. We’d say, look, these are just tools you can use. To us, the core of socialism is who runs things. Do working people themselves get to run their own workplaces or do you have the separate class of capitalists do? Everything else is just the engineering details to make that core right. So in terms of those engineering details, yeah, you could have markets, you could have planning.

We think that subcontracting out certain tasks to markets where markets make sense makes the job of planners easier where planning makes sense. If we want a socialist state to worry about things like full employment, it’d be better if they didn’t also have to worry about exactly how many toothbrushes are going to be produced in the next five years like Soviet planners did.

Mike Beggs:

Yeah. We spend a lot of time in the book going through the debates about planning and markets in the 20th century. So the socialist calculation debate, if people are familiar with that, at the mid 20th century, between the Austrian libertarian argument that socialists… You can’t have rational planning of a very complex economy with countless resources, countless squared ways of combining those resources for countless cubed possible products that people have preferences, wants and needs about. And one of the guys that made the strongest reply to that argument, a Polish economist called Oscar Langa in the late 30s, and he kind of argued he was replying to Von Mesas, who people may have heard of, one of the Austrian Libertarians. And Langa said up front, he said in the future socialist republic, we are going to want to erect the statue of von Mesas in front of our planning board because he did us a great service in actually making sure that we took this problem seriously because I think it is a serious problem and it’s obvious the experience of the 20th century is that this is not an easy problem to solve.

Our particular solution is different from Langa’s. It does, like Ben says, involve some market production, some commodity production. It also has a non-commodity sector because we’ve learned not just from the theoretical debate, but also from all kinds of experience in the Eastern block, but also under capitalism and social democracy over the latter half of the 20th century. And though we have a role for markets, I think it’s really important to be clear. I don’t think we’ve said it up front yet, but the means of production, social wealth is entirely held publicly in our model. There is no private accumulation of wealth or private accumulation of control over the means of production. People may have some private savings, but for the most part, because of the retirement system, the housing system, there’s not a huge need to even save in that way. So we see savings as being a pretty minor thing.

So it’s a society with some role for markets, but one where wealth is absolutely publicly owned and democratically managed at every level.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It makes me think of the great Fred Hampton, and I guess to paraphrase Brother Hampton, theory’s great, but theory without tangible examples ain’t shit, right? And it is important to remember that there are examples all around us. We are literally sitting in one right now. Red Emma’s is a worker owned cooperative business and other co-ops in Baltimore exist because of the workers who make all the decisions. Everyone back there is a worker owner, and they have institutions like Bread, which provides loans to other co-ops that can’t get them from a regular bank. And that’s how you see the system set up to prioritize certain businesses and kill ones like this, but organic institutions can grow and create something different. And if we participate in them, we can make it different and stick. But I also want to bring that into a steel man concern here because whether it’s great worker cooperatives like Red Emma’s or in the world of my reporting, like labor unions, these are all essential examples of what you guys are talking about, what we talk about on a day-to-day level when we’re trying to tell people about this stuff.

But you guys know as well as I do, they’re not perfect. I mean, labor unions in this country have a lot of problems with them. Labor union presidents have been thrown in jail for corruption and racketeering and all that stuff. It associates in people’s minds with the same kind of corruption they see in the Polit Bureau and Soviet times and all that stuff. So human systems will always be susceptible to human foibles. And so what do we do about the kind of day-to-day concerns people have over corruption, ways that this is going to be still just a change in title, but still a kind of shitty reality? How do we tussle with that?

Mike Beggs:

Yeah, that’s a really good question, and maybe one we can answer by talking about, since we’re here in a workers’ cooperative, how that actually works in our system and how it involves a whole lot of checks and balances that are designed to deal with that very real problem. And it also relates to another question people ask, which is if workers’ co-ops are so great, if democratic workplaces are so great, there’s nothing stopping people for forming them under capitalism. Why doesn’t that happen more often? The answer to that, I think for the most part is that there’s certain things about capitalist society that makes them difficult, but particularly financial arrangements. It’s very difficult for cooperative arrangements to work because if you don’t have an outside owner, which a cooperative cannot, it’s a collective of its worker members, if you can’t have an outside owner, you can’t have equity financing, and that means you got to get your finances from somewhere.

So what? Is that supposed to come from the individual members? So people, at the same time as they take a job, they have to take a mortgage to bring their finance with them. Alternatively, you have to borrow from a bank, and that’s very risky thing to do because bank loans come with very fixed payments on fixed dates, leaving the business very exposed to those ups and downs, uncertainties of running a business. So in our model, the financial system is not made for capitalist businesses, but specially designed around workers’ cooperatives. And this connects back to your question about corruption, how do we actually stop that kind of thing from happening? Because in this model, like we said before, the capital, the means of production, the wealth of society is publicly owned, right? The businesses are run by their workers, but they are running it in partnership with the public banks who are essentially almost renting, effectively renting part of society’s wealth, part of society’s means of production to that worker’s collective.

And so it’s always going to be done in partnership between those institutions. So that means that the workers who are running the business democratically are kind of custodians for part of social wealth. And so they don’t have complete control as it should be, right? They’re custodians of public wealth. So that’s one of the checks and balances, right? The public is represented in this case through the bank, through the public bank, but also through the need to maintain the confidence of your customers and the need to actually… That’s one of the reasons why we keep some commodity protection there because it gives direct communication, direct back and forth between the humans who are on both sides, the people who are producing, the people who are using. And so in those cooperatives, that’s the checks and balances. The other side of the economy, and I’ll pass back to Ben in a second, that we haven’t talked about yet is we also have a very large non-commodity sector where those checks and balances have to work out differently in the directly state funded sector.

Then you’ve got all kinds of different ways. The checks and balances is still there. It might be that community members are there on the board of your local aged care center or daycare center or whatever. It works differently in different spots, but there’s always those kinds of public oversight, democratic public oversight and freedom of information about everything that’s happening with the finance, with people’s wealth.

Ben Burgis:

Yeah. And to circle and underline that point, just to make sure nobody missed that last part, part of the setup about public banks includes the constitutional mandate for transparency. The books are always open to any member of the public who wants to look. That’s an example of an institutional safeguard. There are several layers of kinds of institutional safeguards that we imagine, but I want to be really clear on this because I think otherwise it’s going to seem evasive to anybody who’s paying attention, that we’re not claiming that corruption will cease to exist, that embezzlement will wither away with the end of capitalism, that nobody’s going to try to find loopholes or commit crimes because people are people and we didn’t want to make it easier for ourselves in writing the book by assuming either that there’s going to be some amazing technological progress that means that we can just have supercomputers plan the economy perfectly or that there’s going to be some sort of amazing cultural or psychological progress to remake human nature.

We are assuming all of the same technological, psychological limitations that we have right now, which means that yeah, you still need systems to police corruption, to curb people trying to take advantage of loopholes to self-enrich. But I think the question is always a comparison that they… Okay, if you’re really worried about corruption, here’s an example of something that would be super corrupt, actually kind of similar to your union example earlier, union presidents who end up in jail and all that stuff. Because in some ways, the basic units of production in our commodity sector would work a lot like unions work now, the same way you could vote in a union contract, you could vote in an operating agreement, which basically is structurally exactly like a union contract, except there’s no separate boss to negotiate with. It’s unilateral. And of course you vote for leadership, for the committee that’s running the place.

So here’s an example of something super corrupt that could happen. Somebody could rig an election for that committee to make sure that they got the spot, even though most people didn’t try to vote for them or somebody could try to do that on behalf of their son or something. Yeah, that would be terrible. Now let me tell you about capitalism where it’s entirely legal for people to continue to be the boss, even though most people who work for them don’t want them to be because they don’t get a vote in the matter and where it’s entirely legal to just leave the The business to your son as property inheritance, the same way that you’d leave your car to them. And that’s not even considered corruption. That’s just the way it’s supposed to work.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. I mean, yeah, it’s real fucking rich for the most corrupt people in the whole of human history to be saying, “Oh, socialism’s corrupt.” I mean, we know better and we got to call it out when we see it. We have to be each other’s sense of sanity and social responsibility. And it starts by calling out bullshit wherever you see it. Whoever’s saying it, doesn’t matter whose side they’re on, the truth is the truth. Mother Jones famously said, “I will tell the truth wherever I please.” We all got to have a little bit of that moxie right now. And we got to take it as a duty to go and tell the truth wherever we can together so that we crowd out all these fucking liars and all these self-serving fascists and all this AI slop they’re trying to throw into our faces to get us to forget what is right in front of us.

So there is a real social participation element to all this that I really appreciate in your guys’ book because it’s so needed with everything. I think one of the benefits of capitalism, and I can say this as kids who grew up in America post Cold War, it felt like the capitalism had won and it was all right. The future was pretty bright. The pie was going to be big enough for all of us to get some if we worked hard enough. My immigrant family felt like we made sense in that narrative. And boy, oh boy, did capitalism show over the next 25 years that all of that will be consumed under this kind of monstrous cycle of expansion and domination and consolidation, corruption. And now we’ve got what we’ve got here in 2026. So I wanted to end there, bring us back to where we are here.

Because like in the 20th century, when you had the surge of socialism and left thinking, at the same time you had the surge of fascism and far right movements, we are in a very similar moment. It’s not the same. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it’s rhyming pretty hard right now. And so we’re seeing the surge of far right governments, movements, this authoritarian international network that is now targeting the Brazilian elections, yada, yada, yada. But there are examples in parts of the world where that authoritarian message is making a better case to your average working person for why they should support the authoritarians and not listen to the people who call themselves Democrats or liberals or what have you. If it keeps the violence off their streets, if it keeps the normalcy in their day-to-day life, the sad reality is a lot of people will say it’s worth it to me to sacrifice the civil rights of others and lock people away in Bucheles like Salvadorian prisons if I don’t have to worry about gangs walking down the street.

So that is happening at the same time you guys are writing this book. So the stakes couldn’t be fucking higher. So how do we make the case for socialism work in the real world now and win with this message?

Ben Burgis:

Yeah. I mean, I think that ultimately, if everything you were just talking about, when you’re talking about Buchele and Trump and global wave of authoritarianism, if that’s going to be beaten back, it’s going to take obviously a lot of people who come from a lot of different perspectives to come together to do it. But if history is any guide, the people who are going to be the best fighters against all of that stuff are people who are motivated by this north star of a vision of a qualitatively better world because those have always been the best fighters against whatever horrible authoritarian nonsense was going on at any given time for civil rights, for labor unions, for all of that stuff. And I think that right now it’s a problem. It’s not the problem, but it is a problem that right now, even so many people who want to be socialists have lost their confidence in that qualitatively better world.

During the 20th century, a lot of people thought it was being built in the Soviet Union. Even a lot of people who are on the anti-Stalinist left who had their critiques of the Soviet Union still thought that the economic core of that system was functional and it still gave them hope that some sort of socialism was possible. And right now that’s been lost. And so I think that trying to restore confidence in the possibility of something better is important always because we don’t want to be stuck in the system forever, but I think it’s more important than ever in circumstances like the one you’re describing. I mean, I often think, I guess the last thing I’ll say before I throw to Mike to finish us up, but I often think about Manufacturing Consent. That’s a book from several decades ago by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman.

And basically what they’re talking about is the way that the borders of acceptable debate were policed. That in the American corporate media, you had this appearance of thriving debate, but it was happening within painfully narrow parameters. For better or for worse, those parameters have pretty much been blown up lately, that you have people like Nick Fuentes have become like…

He had dinner with the president and you have a DSA guy who’s the mayor of the most important city in the capitalist world. And so it seems to me that we are at a time when better things are possible than they were for most of our lifetimes, but also much worse things are possible. And I would like to bolster people’s confidence that there is a long-term vision of much better.

Mike Beggs:

Yeah. All I would add to that is that even though there’s economics and some theory in the book, but we also tried to paint a vision of a society that would be really broadly appealing beyond the left. We tried to paint a model that most people could imagine themselves living in and enjoying. We built it around the kinds of aspirations that people in general have today. I mean, it’s a model that makes room for all kinds of social experimentation, but it also is one that guarantees people security of livelihood. It guarantees income to people and services to people as they need it, not whether they can pay for it in some way or other. It’s a vision that takes a lot of things that people… It could be communicated as something that takes a lot of people’s frustrations and anxieties in life, especially in the working world and says, “Here are some solutions to them.” They don’t involve you sitting in meetings all day or anything like that.

The way that we have workplace democracy is not something that would involve people in having meetings all the time, but it is something that means you’re not going to have in general a boss that you hate. You’re not going to have a day-to-day existence where you fear being arbitrarily fired or you’re worried about your retirement or anything like that. So I think that the vision that we present is one that is really broadly appealing and could actually be something that is used to reach well beyond the kinds of people who currently think of themselves as on the left.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Let’s give it up for Ben Burgis and Mike Beggs everybody. Hell yeah.