Bhaskar Sunkara is a democratic socialist, political writer, founding editor of Jacobin, president of The Nation, and author of The Socialist Manifesto. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Bhaskar's Twitter: https://twitter.com/sunraysunray
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
3:41 - Socialism
22:11 - Communism
48:48 - Class struggle
59:50 - Quality of life
1:07:46 - Unions
1:20:14 - Corruption
1:33:32 - Freedom of speech
1:41:55 - War
1:49:41 - Karl Marx
2:03:20 - Socialist vision
2:08:45 - AI and socialism
2:13:43 - Socialist policies
2:39:02 - Billionaires
2:45:01 - Bernie Sanders
2:55:27 - AOC
3:07:28 - 2024 presidential election
3:12:22 - China
3:21:23 - Jacobin
3:28:53 - The Socialist Manifesto
3:36:12 - Advice for young people
3:39:45 - Meaning of life

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The following is a conversation with Bhaskar Sankara.

He's a democratic socialist, a political writer, founding editor of Jacobin, president of the nation, former vice chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, and the author of the Socialist Manifesto, the case for radical politics in an era of extreme inequality.

As a side note, let me say that this conversation with Bhaskar Sankara, who's a brilliant socialist writer and philosopher, represents what I hope to do with this podcast.

I hope to talk to the left and the right, to the far left and the far right, always with the goal of presenting and understanding both the strongest interpretation of their ideas and valuable thought-provoking arguments against those ideas.

Also, I hope to understand the human being behind the ideas.

I trust in your intelligence as the listener to use the ideas you hear to help you learn, to think, to empathize, and to make up your own mind.

I will often fall short in pushing back too hard or not pushing back enough, of not bringing up topics I should have, of talking too much, of interrupting too much, or maybe sometimes in the rare cases not enough, of being too silly on a serious topic or being too serious on a silly topic.

I'm trying to do my best and I will keep working my ass off to improve.

In this way I hope to talk to prominent figures in the political space, even controversial ones, on both the left and the right.

For example, I hope to talk to Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to Ron DeSantis and Barack Obama, and of course many others across the political spectrum.

I sometimes hear accusations about me being controlled in some way by a government or an intelligence agency like CIA, FSB, Mossad, or perhaps that I'm controlled in some way by the very human desire for money, fame, power, access.

All I have is my silly little words, but let me give them to you.

I'm not and will never be controlled by anyone.

There's nothing in this world that can break me and force me to sacrifice my integrity.

And optimism isn't a passive state of being.

It's a constant battle against the world that wants to pull you into a downward spiral of cynicism.

Freedom to think, to act, to build, to help, at times in the face of impossible odds.

As I often do, please allow me to read a few lines from the poem, If, by Rajah Kipling.

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too.

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, or being lied about don't deal in lies, or being hated, don't give way to hating, and yet don't look too good or talk too wise.

Even this very poem is mocking my over-romantic ridiculousness as I read it.

The meta-irony is not lost on me, my friends.

I'm a silly little kid trying to do a bit of good in this world.

Thank you for having my back through all of it, all of my mistakes.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Bhaskar Sankara.

Well, there's so many socialists out there and we can't seem to agree about anything.

So my definition, I'm sure, is really just my definition, but I think at the minimum, socialism is about making sure that the core necessities of life, food, housing, education, and so on, are guaranteed to everyone just by virtue of being born so that those people can reach their potential.

And I think that's a minimum requirement of socialism.

Beyond that, I think socialism, especially democratic socialism, the type of socialism that I believe in, is about taking democracy from just the political democratic realm and extending it into economic and social spheres as well.

So if we think that democracy is a good thing, why do we allow our workplaces to be run in autocratic ways?

So economic, political, social, in all those realms, the ideas, the philosophical ideas apply.

Like what are, if you can put words to it, what are some philosophical ideas about human beings that are at the core of this?

I think at the core it's the idea that we have intrinsic value.

We are individuals that have unequal talents, of course.

We're individuals that want different things, but this unique individualness can only truly come to light in a society in which there are certain collective or social guarantees.

So we could think just like Stephen Jay Gould, the scientist and socialist used to say about how many thousands of potential Einsteins or Leonardo da Vinci's that died in sweatshops and on plantations and never got the chance to cultivate what was unique and human about themselves and also never got a chance to have families and impart what was special and important to them to future generations and to posterity.

My own grandmother was born in Trinidad and Tobago.

She was illiterate till her dying days in East Orange, New Jersey, she never had the chance to write down her memories of her life in Trinidad as a young woman and what it meant.

She, of course, had lots of children, she was able to impart some stories to her children and grandchildren.

But I often think about what someone with her wit and intelligence could have done with a little bit more support.

But if all human beings have intrinsic value, you don't have to be an Einstein for the application of some of the ideas that you're talking about, is there a tension or a trade-off between our human civilization, our society, helping the unlucky versus rewarding the skillful and the hard-working?

I think you could reward people who make innovations and and and will improve lives for everyone through their innovations by giving them let's say even more consumption, even that level of inequality, while still making sure that there's not people in poverty and suffering, and while making sure that, hey, we're gonna give these people who want to work that extra 10 hours or 20 hours or want to apply their hard work, some extra benefits, but that these benefits would be not the extreme disparities that you have today.

So at the core of socialism and maybe democratic socialism is maybe a reallocation of wealth, reallocation of resources?

I think it's wealth and resources, yes, but it's also power.

And I guess 1 way to think about this is, Some thinkers on the right, like Hayek, they would say in their most generous moments talking about socialists and socialism, they would say, socialists want to trade some of your freedom for equality.

And that's them trying to just accurately describe what socialism is trying to do.

The way that I would put it is a little bit different.

Socialists are proposing a trade-off, but it's really a trade-off between freedom and freedom.

And by that I mean, Let's say you set up a successful business.

And you set up a business right here in Austin, Texas, some sort of firm.

It's producing some widget or whatever, and it's producing a good that people really want and demand.

You decide to hire 20, 30 people to help you.

You entered into a free contract with these people, who under capitalism, of course, we're not living in feudalism, have the option to join any other firm.

But they like you, and they like this firm, and they like your offer.

And you're paying them, let's say, $20 an hour for 40 hours of work per week.

Now if the government comes along and says okay there's now a new minimum wage, the minimum wage is $22 an hour and also there's a maximum work week, 35 hour work week, And if you work someone over 35 hours, even if they agree, you have to pay them time and a half.

Now, that, of course, is now an abridgment of your freedom as an entrepreneur, your freedom to set certain terms of employment, to engage in a contract with free people.

But now your workers and other workers in the sector, because if you did it unilaterally, you'd just get undercut by your competition.

Now, these people now have a few extra hours a week.

They could spend more time with their friends or family or whatever else.

And they're still getting paid the same if not better because the wages also went up.

So it's really a question often of trade-offs between whose freedom and autonomy are you going to prioritize.

The freedom and autonomy of the entrepreneur or the capitalist in this case, or the freedom of autonomy of ordinary workers.

Now, you could create a society that swings so far in the direction of prioritizing the freedom of 1 group or 1 class or whatever else compared to another, then you end up in some sort of tyranny.

Now, if the state said, you know, you, Lex, you're a capitalist, so you don't get the right to vote, or we're going to take away your private home or your ability to do things that we think are intrinsic human rights.

Now this would be tyranny, this would be an abridgment of your rights, but shaping your ability in the economic sphere to be an economic actor is, I think, within the realm and scope of democratic politics.

Yeah, so those are the extremes you're referring to.

And 1 perspective I like to take on socialism versus capitalism is, under each system, the extremes of each systems and the moderate versions of each system, how can people take advantage of it?

So it seems like no matter what part of human nature is, whatever the rules, whatever the framework, whatever the system, somebody's gonna take advantage of it.

And that's a kind of pragmatic look at it.

Also, the incentives and the human behavior, what actually happens in practice under these systems?

So if you have a higher and higher minimum wage and people watch more and more NFL, how does that change their actual behavior as a productive member of society?

And actually at the individual level, as somebody who could be an Einstein and chooses not to because NFL is so awesome to watch.

So like, it's both how do people, malicious people that wanna take advantage, maybe not malicious, but people that, like me, are lazy and wanna take advantage.

And people that also I think like me, like I tend to believe about myself that I have potential and if I let my laziness naturally take over, which it often does, I won't materialize the potential.

So if you make life too easy for me, I feel like I will never get anything done.

Me personally, of course, there's a giant set of circumstances of the unlucky and the overburdened and so on, okay.

So how can people take advantage of each system, socialism, capitalism?

So for 1 thing, people are going to take advantage of systems, they're gonna find loopholes, they're gonna find ways around, they're gonna find ways to, at times, dominate and coerce others, even in systems meant to get rid of domination and coercion.

That's why we need to design our systems in such a way that it eliminates as many of these things as possible.

And also that's why we need democracy, we need freedom.

So in a Soviet system, for instance, you had the rise of this authoritarian bureaucracy that dominated, of course, others in the name of socialism.

Now, that system desperately could have used some political democracy and some checks on what people were doing and some ability to reverse their power, right?

And as soon as, of course, little elements of democracy was brought to that system, the system, you know, collapsed because there started to be outlets for dissent and for dissatisfaction.

So I think we can't design a priori a perfect system.

We need to be committed to certain principles that allow systems to be perfected.

And for me, that's the importance of democracy.

So even a few years ago, not to go on a tangent, but people were alluding Chinese authoritarianism.

And they're saying China's building this efficient system.

The state runs so well, there's technocratic excellence.

Plus there's just productivity and they're just working harder than Americans and whatever else.

But look at in practice what really happened with COVID, both the initial suppressing of information about what was happening in Wuhan and the outbreak where many Ordinary Chinese workers and doctors and others were trying to get the word out and they were suppressed by Communist Party officials locally in Wuhan, probably with the collusion nationally.

And now with 0 COVID policies and whatever else.

So I think that often we find that even though it seems like these are our weak systems and then democracy makes us less competent technocratically and otherwise, I think it's kind of a necessity for systems to grow and evolve to have that freedom in civil society.

But as for individuals, now, the first part of it is, yeah, I think people should be free to make their own choices.

You might have tremendous potential, but you might choose to spend it in leisure.

And leisure doesn't only mean doing, you know, sitting around at home, drinking a bunch of beers, kind of wasting your life away that way.

Leisure might mean spending more time with your friends and family, building these sort of relationships that are gonna maybe not change the world in some meta sense, but will change the lives of the people around you and will change your community for the better.

I'm taking notes here, because for me, leisure just meant playing a lot of Skyrim.

This whole family relationship thing, I'm gonna have to work on that.

I didn't realize that's also including leisure.

gonna have to reconsider my whole life here.

No, leisure should mean civic activity too, right?

I mean, there's that famous book, the Robert Putnam 1, Bowling Alone or whatever, which described that for now, I mean, I'm, it was born in 1989.

I like, you know, video and computer games, you know, so I definitely do that type of leisure too, but I found a lot more richness in my life when in the last, you know, decade a lot of my leisure has returned to like going to the local bar for the couple drinks I have a week instead of doing it at home alone watching TV or something, because you get that random conversation, that sense of a place and belonging.

But I guess what's the undercurrent maybe of your question was, now if you have a system with lots of carrots but not the whip of, hey, you might be destitute, you might be unemployed, you might not be able to support yourself unless you're working a certain amount, would we still be as productive?

Would we still be able to generate enough value for society?

And I think that that's a question that is quite interesting.

I think that we're living in a society now with enough abundance that we could afford more people deciding to opt out of the system, out of production, and that the carrots of staying in, you know, more money for consumption, more ability to do cool things, more just social rewards that comes from being successful or from providing would be enough.

But that's another thing that would have to be balanced in a system.

So if we are seeing mass unemployment by choice in a democratic socialist system, then you might need to reconfigure the incentives.

You might need to encourage people to go back into production.

But that's something that again, you could do through democracy and through good governance.

You don't have to set the perfect blueprint in motion.

Write up a treatise now and 50 years from now, try to follow it like it's scripture.

So by the way, I do like how you said whip instead of stick in Carrot and Stick.

That's putting a weight on the scale of which is better.

But yes, what I would actually argue to push back that the wealthier we get as a society, as a world, that the more comfortable the social nets become.

So the less of a whip or a stick they become.

Because 1 of the negative consequences, even if you're on welfare, is like, well, life is not gonna be that great.

But the wealthier we become, the better the social programs become, the easier life becomes at the bottom.

And so you might not have this motivation financially to get out from the bottom.

That said, the pushback on the pushback is that there is something about human nature in general, money aside, that strives for greatness, that strives to provide a great life, a great middle-class life for your family.

And so that's the motivator to get off from the bottom.

Well, I think a lot of people who are stuck at the bottom of the labor market today, 1, these are people who are kind of are true philanthropists, because a lot of them are the ones who are working 2 jobs and are working 60 plus hours and are providing in this country, it's such a bargain for their labor because they're so underpaid, so many of the things that the rest of us use to enjoy life and consumption or whatever else.

I got here from downtown Austin, and I think my Lyft, I did tip, but I think my Lyft was like $8 space or whatever else.

It's the, I think that we are all indebted to people who are working and we don't see it at various stages of the production process, from the workers in China and Taiwan producing technological things that we're recording this on, to growers and workers in agriculture in the US.

So I think that 1, working class people are already working, but as far as getting out from under poverty and desperation, we're in a society that doesn't give people a lot of tools.

So if you don't have access to good public schools from age 5 until 12, 13, it's going to be really hard to move from generations of your family being involved in manual labor to doing other forms of labor.

You're going to be stuck at a certain part of our labor market as a result.

If you don't have access to decent health care, you know, throughout your life, you might be already preordained to an early grave by the time that something kicks in, you really want to change something in your life in your mid-20s.

Obviously it's a combination of agency and all these other factors.

There's still something I think innately human, innately striving that a lot of people have, but we don't really give people in our current society the tools to really be full participants in our society.

We just take for granted, for example, and I'm from the Northeast, so I give like excessively Northeast example, but we take for granted that someone from, you know, Hartford, Connecticut is gonna have, your average working class person in Hartford is gonna have a very different life outcome than someone born on the same day, the same hour in Greenwich, Connecticut.

You know, we take for granted that accidents of birth are gonna dictate outcomes.

So you mean like, depending on the conditions of where you grew up, there's going to be fundamentally different experience in terms of education, in terms of the resources available to you to allow yourself to flourish.

Yes, a poor city and a rich city, and Connecticut is great, it's highly, highly underrated.

Both New Yorkers and people from Boston kind of have a colonial feeling about Connecticut, where we make fun of it and we try to carve it up, you know, the West belongs to New York, the East to Boston, but you know, I'm here for, you know, Connecticut nationalism, I think it's a great place.

Okay, can we actually step back a little bit on definitions, because you said that some of the ideas practically that you're playing with is democratic socialism.

We talked about the higher level, the higher kind of vision of socialism, the ideals, the philosophical ideas.

But how does it all fit into the big picture historically of ideas of Marxism, communism, and socialism as it was defined and experienced and implemented in the 20th century?

Maybe even just like socialism, communism.

Yeah, well, I hate the no true Scotsman sort of response to this, which is, oh, that socialism is bad.

And my socialism is good, so it is socialism.

But I think that socialism and communism share a common ancestor, which is they both emerged out of the turmoil and development of late 19th century capitalism and the fact that there was all these workers parties that were organizing across the capitalist world.

So in Europe, for instance, you had this mass party called the German Social Democratic Party, that became probably the most important, the most vibrant party in Germany in the 1880s and 1890s, but they were locked out of power because Germany at the time was still mostly a Tarkic.

You know, it had a parliamentary democracy, but it was a very undemocratic democracy.

These movements took root across the capitalist world, but including in Russia and in conditions of illegality.

So it was assumed for many, many years in the workers movement across Europe and among socialists of Europe, they call themselves social Democrats then, that the revolution would first probably happen in Germany, in this developed, growing hub of industrial capitalism, and not in semi-feudal Russia.

But then World War I came, the workers movement was split between parties that decided to either keep their head down or to implicitly support the war.

And then, you know, support the war for now, keep your heads down, don't get banned, don't get arrested, then we'll just take power after the war is over.

And those like Russia, and also in the United States for that matter, that chose the path of resistance to the war.

And it was the Bolshevik faction of the Russian movement, Lenin's Bolshevik party, that took power in Russia after a period of turmoil where it didn't seem, well, was it gonna go to the fascist right or was then going to go to the far left.

There was a period of flux and turmoil in Russia, but definitely the old regime was not able to stand.

And these Russian social democrats, these Bolsheviks, said social democracy has so betrayed the idea of internationalism and brotherhood and progress that was supposed to stand for that we can't call ourselves social Democrats anymore.

We're gonna go back to this old term that Marx used, we're gonna call ourselves communists.

And that's where official kind of communism out of Russia emerged.

In other parts of Europe, parties were actually able to take power, some in the interwar period, but most in the postwar period.

And they also came out of this old social democratic movement.

And these parties mostly just call themselves socialists.

And a lot of them still on paper wanted to go beyond capitalism, but in practice, they just managed capitalism better in the interest of workers.

But they all had the same common ancestor.

And in practice, to me, social democracy means trying to insert doses of socialism within capitalism but maintaining capitalism.

Communism met this attempt to build a socialism outside of capitalism in often authoritarian ways in part because of the ideology of these communists, but in part because of the conditions in which they inherited.

You know, they were inheriting a democracy.

They were inheriting a country that had been ruled by the czars for centuries and with very little condition, like a very weak working class, very poor and devastated by war and so on, where authoritarianism kind of lended itself to those conditions.

Then there's me, then there's democratic socialists.

And the way I would define it is, we like a lot of what the social Democrats accomplished, but we still believe in going beyond capitalism and not just building socialism within capitalism, but we believe in this ultimate vision of a world after capitalism.

What does that world look like and how is it different from communism?

Actually, maybe we can linger before we talk about your vision of democratic socialism, what was wrong with communism, Stalinism, implementation of communism in the Soviet Union?

Let me start with the second part of that question, and that's a very difficult 1 to answer in part because I morally and ethically am opposed to any form of authoritarianism or dictatorship.

And often when you talk about the successes of a government or what it did developmentally that might have been positive.

We have to abstract ourselves from what we morally believe and just kind of look at the record, right?

I would say that the Soviet experiment started off in Lenin's time as the attempt to kind of just hold a holding action.

Hey, we don't really have the conditions to rule this country.

We have the support of the working class or most of it, but the working class is only, you know, 3% of the population.

A lot of this 3% of the population has died in war and half of them supported the Mensheviks and the more moderate socialists anyway.

But the alternative in their minds was going to be a far-right reaction, you know, some sort of general taking power in a coup or whatever else, or just them ending up back in prison, because a lot of them were in prison under the Tsar, or just killed.

So they figured, all right, we're going to have a holding action where we maintain as much of this territory of the old Russian Empire as possible.

We'll try to slowly implement changes, restabilize the economy through something called a New Economic Program, which was kind of a form of social democracy, if you will, because it allowed market exchange for the peasants, combined with state ownership of industries in the cities.

And for a while, it seemed to be working.

The revolution never came that they were expecting in Western Europe, but in Russia itself they were able to re-stabilize things by the middle or end of the 1920s, and they were able to build more of a popular base for some of their policies because people who had seen the chaos of World War I and revolution and then civil war kind of just wanted stability.

And after a decade plus of war, if you had a government that was able to give you enough to eat and a job, that was good enough for them.

Then Stalin came into power and he wanted to rapidly industrialize.

And his logic was, the revolution's not gonna come in the West.

We need to build socialism in 1 country and we need to catch up with the West, we need to turn ourselves into industrial powerhouse as quickly as possible.

And that's where you got forced collectivization to try to increase the productivity of Russian agriculture through state ownership of previously fragmented agricultural holdings and through the implementation of mechanization, so bringing in more machines to make agriculture more productive, all under state ownership.

Plus more ambitious attempts to build heavy industry through five-year plans.

Now, I say this kind of coolly, but we know in practice what that meant.

You know, forced collectivization was a disaster.

I mean, first of all, I think it was built on the faulty premise that scale always equals more productivity when in fact, especially in agriculture, but in any field, it's a little bit more complicated than that.

And it led to millions of deaths, it led to famine, it led to a host of other problems.

Industrialization in the way that it happened under Stalin also kind of unbalanced the Soviet economy to lean too heavy towards heavy industry, not enough for medium or light industry.

But this did mean, especially the five-year plan and industrialization, did manage to put Russia on a different developmental trajectory.

So by the time the post-war period came, 1, it might have gave them the ability to survive the Nazi invasion to begin with, so that's a complicated question, and then by the time the post-war period came Russia had kind of jumped ahead of its developmental trajectory in a way that a lot of other countries didn't do.

There are a few examples, like Japan is 1, the banners too.

If you kind of ran a scenario where Japan would be in the 1870s, 1880s and ran it a hundred times, the Japan of the post-war period is kind of 1 of the best outcomes, right?

And I think that you could say that about Russian economic development, its ability to catch up at a certain level to the West.

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Bhaskar Sunkara: Socialism and Communism | Lex Fridman Podcast #349