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In a recent Michael Smerconish interview, Bhaskar Sunkara sketched out what democratic socialism could look like in practice. He told Smerconish that a company like Apple “would probably be owned 100 percent by the employees,” with public banks providing credit and workers voting on company policy. That short sentence matters. It moves democratic socialism from a slogan into a real plan for ownership, finance, and governance.
What Sunkara Told Smerconish
Sunkara, president of The Nation and founding editor of Jacobin, was clear: workers would hold the shares and the financing would come from public banking. On its face, this sounds fair. Who wouldn’t like the idea of workers owning what they build? But ideas that sound good in a studio often look very different when you try to make them work for a trillion-dollar company. Saying Apple would be “owned 100 percent by the employees” raises big questions about money, markets, and law.
How worker ownership could actually be done
There are real tools for employee ownership, like ESOPs, worker cooperatives, and employee ownership trusts. ESOPs let employees own company stock over time. Worker co-ops give workers voting power but are usually much smaller. Mondragon, the Basque cooperative network, is the famous example people point to. Public banks, like the Bank of North Dakota, are sometimes held up as models for financing. But converting a public, global firm into a worker-owned firm would mean huge buyouts, complex legal moves, and years of restructuring. It’s not a neat policy checklist — it’s a full-on financial and legal project.
Why this would change Apple — and not always for the better
Big tech like Apple runs on fast decision-making, massive R&D budgets, and global capital. If every worker votes on every policy, choices slow down. If financing shifts from private markets to public banks, access to international capital markets and venture money changes. Intellectual property, cross-border subsidiaries, and securities laws complicate any plan to “socialize” ownership. Proponents say public banks and internal capital allocation can keep innovation going. Maybe on paper. But tradeoffs matter: speed, risk-taking, and incentives for entrepreneurs and engineers are real things — you can’t paper them over with nice-sounding words.
Bottom line: watch the pitch, not the promise
The Smerconish interview made a useful thing: it turned an abstract label into a concrete image — worker ownership, public financing, and worker democracy running Apple. Conservatives should not reflexively dismiss the idea that employees can have a stake in firms. ESOPs and some co-ops work in certain settings. But turning every corporate giant into a worker-run enterprise would be costly, messy, and risky for innovation and jobs. Voters deserve to hear the full trade-offs before polite slogans become policy experiments that reshape how America invents and sells the things the world wants.
