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

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 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 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. People call me naive. I'm not naive. I'm optimistic. 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. To me, optimism is freedom. 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 Rudyard 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, nor 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. Thank you for the love. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends, and here's Bhaskar Sankara. Let's start with a big broad question. What is socialism? How do you like to define it? How do you like to think about it?

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 as 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, 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 Vincis 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 do both. There's always a balance between the two. I think you could reward people who make innovations and who 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 one 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. But you have some competition. 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 this sector, because if you did it unilaterally, you just get undercut by your competition. Now, these people now have a few extra hours a week they could do whatever they want with. They could watch more NFL with it. 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, autonomy of ordinary workers. Now, you could create a society that swings so far in the direction of prioritizing the freedom of one group or one class or whatever else compared to another that you end up in some sort of tyranny. Now if the state said, you know, you Lex, you're, 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 we think are intrinsic human rights, now this would be tyranny. This would be an abridgement 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.

Yes. So those are the extremes you're referring to. And one 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 going to take advantage of it. And that's a kind of pragmatic look at it in practice. What actually happens? 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, as somebody who could be an Einstein and chooses not to because NFL is so awesome to watch. So, like is both. How do people malicious People that want to take advantage, maybe not malicious, but people that, like me, are lazy and want to 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 one thing, people are going to take advantage of systems. They're going to find loopholes, they're going to find ways around. They're going to 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 and coerced 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 into that system, the system, you know, collapsed because there started to be outlets for. 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. On a tangent, but people are lauding Chinese authoritarianism, and they're saying China is building this efficient system. This state runs so well. There's technocratic excellence, excellence, plus there's just productivity, and they're just working harder than Americans and whatever else. But look at it 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 occlusion, naturally nationally, and now with zero COVID policies and whatever else. So I think that often we find that even though it seems like these are weak systems and 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 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 going to 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. Cause I'm gonna have to reconsider my whole life here anyway.

No, leisure should mean civic activity too, right? I mean, there's that famous book, the Robert Putnam one, Bowling Alone or whatever, which described it for now. I mean, I was born in 1989. I like video and computer games, so I definitely do that type of leisure too. But I found a lot more richness in my life when in the last decade, a lot of my leisure has returned to like going to the local bar for like the couple drinks I have a week instead of doing it at home alone, watching TV or something, you know, 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, but 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 one of the negative consequences even if you're on welfare is like, well, life is not going to 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. And the pushback is that there's 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. 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, one, these are people who are kind of are true philanthropists because a lot of them are the ones who are working two jobs and are working 60 plus hours and are providing in this country, it's such a, 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 lift, I did tip, but I think my lift was like 8 bucks base or whatever else. Know, 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, you know, the workers in China and Taiwan producing, you know, technological things that we're recording this on to, you know, growers and workers in agriculture in the US So I think that one working class people are already working. But as far as, you know, 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, you know, age five until, you know, 12, 13, it's gonna 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 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 examples. We take for granted that someone from Hartford, Connecticut is going to have. Your average working class person in Hartford is going to have a very different life outcome than someone born on the same day, the same hour in Greenwich, Connecticut. We take for granted that accidents of birth are going to dictate outcomes.

So you mean 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. I'm 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. The west belongs to New York, the east to Boston. But I'm here for 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. So what's your key differences? Maybe even just like socialism, communism.

Yeah, Well, I hate the no truth Scotsman sort of response to this, which is, oh, that socialism was bad. So it wasn't really socialism. 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 target. It had a parliamentary democracy, but it was a very undemocratic democracy. The Kaiser still ruled. 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 called 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 you know, support the war for now or 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 going to go to the fascist right or wasn't 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 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 going to go back to this old term that Marx used. We're going to 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 post war period. And they also came out of this old social democratic movement. And these parties mostly just called 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 interests 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. They weren't 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? Why did it go wrong, and in what ways did it not go wrong? In what ways did it succeed?

Let me start with the second part of that question, and that's a very difficult one 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. Just kind of look at the record, right? I would say that the Soviet experiment started off by, 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. You know, the peasantry is really against us. 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 restabilize 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, you know, 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 going to come in the West. We need to build socialism in one country and we need to catch up with the West. We need to turn ourselves into an 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 bring 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. 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 a 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, the five year plan. Industrialization did manage to put Russia on a different developmental trajectory. So by the time the post war period came, one, it might have gave them the ability to survive the Nazi invasion to begin with. 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 one that managed to, if you kind of refer to, ran a scenario where Japan would be in the 1870s, 1880s and ran it 100 times. That Japan of the post war period is kind of one of the best outcomes. Right. And I think that, that you could say that about Russian economic development. Its ability to catch up at a certain level to the west. And then after that, of course, later on, as economies got more complex, as they kind of move beyond Russia, regular heavy industry and as the main stable of the economy, the Russian economy in its command system was unable to adapt and cope and ended up falling back behind the west again by the 1970s. So all this is a very long story. To say that a lot went wrong in Russia. The economic picture is actually a little bit more complicated politically. I think it's just a small party without much popular support, but with real popular support in a couple cities without a lot of popular support. Empire Wide took power and they felt they couldn't give back power and they kept holding on to power. And eventually among their ranks in these conditions, one of history's great tyrants took power and was able to justify what he was doing in the context of the Russian nation and development. But also all the threats that came from abroad through, you know, the civil war wasn't just a civil war. It was really an invasion by, by many imperial powers all around the world as well. So I think a lot of it was conditions and circumstance. And I guess the, the question really is to what role ideology played. Was there something within the socialist tradition that might have lent itself to authoritarianism? And that's, that's something we should, you know, talk about.

And that's a really complicated human question. It does seem that the rhetoric, the populism of workers unite, we've been over for way too long. Let's stand together. Somehow that message allows flawed or evil people to take power. It seems like the rhetoric, the idea is so good, maybe the utopian nature of the idea is so good that allows a great speaker to take power. It's almost like if the mission, like, come with me, friends, beyond the horizon a great land is waiting for us that encourages sort of, yeah, dictators, authoritarians to take power. Is there something within that ideology that allows for that, for the sort of, for lying to people, essentially?

Well, I might surprise you with my answer because I would say yes, maybe, But I think that it's not just socialism, any sort of ideology that appeals to the collective and appeals to our long term destiny, either as a species or as a nation or as a class or whatever else can lend itself to authoritarianism. So you can see this in many of the nationalisms of the 20th century. Now, some of these nationalisms use incredibly lofty collective rhetoric, like in Sweden, the rhetoric of we're going to create the people's home. We're going to make this a country with dignity for all Swedes. We're going to make this a country that's more developed, more free and so on. And they managed to build a pretty excellent society in my estimation from that. You know, in countries like fascist Germany and Italy, they managed to do horrendous things in Japan and horrendous things with that in the US with national popular appeals, FDR was able to unite a nation to elevate ordinary working class people into a position where they felt like they had a real stake in the country and I think did great things with the New Deal. In Russia, of course, this language was used to trample upon individual rights and to justify hardship and abuses of ordinary individual people in the name of a collective destiny. A destiny, of course, that was just decided by the party in power and during the 30s and 40s by just Stalin himself, really. Now I think that that's really the case for making sure that we have a bedrock of civil rights and democracy. Then on top of that, we could debate. We could debate different national destinies, we could debate different appeals, different visions of the world. But as long as people have a say in what sacrifices they're being asked to do, and as long as those sacrifices don't take away what's fundamentally ours, which is our life, you know, which is our, you know, our basic rights and voice.

Our voice. So this complicated picture because. Help me understand, you mentioned that social democracy is trying to have social policies within a capitalist system. In part. But your vision, your hope for a social democracy is one that goes beyond that. How do you give everybody a voice while not becoming the Soviet Union, while not becoming where basically people are silenced either directly through violence or through the implied threat of violence and therefore fear.

So I think you need to limit the scope of where the state is and what the state can do and how the state functions. First of all, now, for me, social democracy was like the equivalent of. I'll give a football analogy. It was the equivalent of getting to the red zone and then kicking a field goal. You'll take the three points, but. But you would have rather got a touchdown. And for me, socialism would be the touchdown. It's not a separate. Different playing field.

Some people would say socialism would be an interception.

Sure, sure. No. And they would, they would have the right to, to again to say that and to say we shouldn't go, go further.

And most coaches would take. Would take the safe route.

Right.

So you're going, you're going against the decision anyway. She's taking too far. Yeah, yeah, but I understand, I understand. So for you, the goal is full socialism.

But I'll take the three points. You know, it's a part of. I just want to march down the field. I want to get within scoring position. The reason why we should really move from this analogy, but the reason why I call myself a socialist is looking through history and these examples of Social democracy. You saw that they were able to give working class people lots of rights and, and income and power in their society. But at the end of the day, capitalists still had the ultimate power, which is the ability to withhold investment. So they could say in the late 1960s and the early 70s, listen, I was fine with this arrangement 10 years ago, but now I feel like I'm going to take my money and I'm going to go move to a different country or I'm just going to not invest because my workers are paid too much. I'm still making money, but I feel like I could be making more. I need more of an upper hand. Right, so their economic power is then challenging the democratic mandate of Swedish workers that we're voting for the Social Democratic Party and we're behind this advance. So to me what socialism is in part is taking the means of production, where this capitalist power is coming from, and, and making it socially owned so that ordinary workers can control their workplaces, can make investment decisions and so on. Now does that mean total state ownership of everything or a planned economy? I don't think that makes any sense. I think that we should live in a society in which markets are harnessed and regulated and so on. My main problem is capitalist ownership in part on normative grounds. Just because I think that it doesn't make sense that we celebrate democracy and all these other spheres, but we have workplaces that are just treated like tyrannies. And in part because I think that ordinary workers would much prefer a system in which over time they accrued shares and ownership where they got, in addition to base kind of ways, they got dividends from their firm being successful and that they figured out how to, you know, large firms, they're not going to be making day to day decisions by democratic vote, right? But maybe you would elect representatives, elected managements once every year or two, depending on your operating agreement and so on. That's kind of my, my vision of a socialist society. And this sounds, I hope, like agree or disagree. It would not be a crazy leap into year zero, right? This could be maybe a way in which we could take a lot of what's existing in society but then just add this on top. But what it would mean is a society without a capitalist class. This class hasn't been individually, these people haven't been taken to re education camps or whatever else, but they're just no longer in this position and they're now part of the economy in other ways. Like they'll probably be the first set of highly Competent technocrats and managers and so on, they'll probably be very well compensated for their. For their time and expertise and whatever, whatever else. But to me, both the practical end of things like taking away this ability to withhold investment, and I'm increasing our ability to democratically shape investment priorities and to continue down the road of social democracy and on normative grounds, my kind of egalitarian belief that ordinary people should have more stake in their lives in the workplace leads me beyond social democracy to socialism.

So there's a tricky thing here. So in Ukraine especially, but in the Soviet Union, there's the kulaks. The possible trajectory of fighting for the beautiful message of respecting workers rights has this dynamic of making an enemy of the capitalist class too easily, making an enemy of the capitalist class with a central leader, populist leader, that says, the rich and the powerful, they're taking advantage of you. We need to remove them, we need to put them in camps. Perhaps not said explicitly until it happens, it can happen overnight, but just putting a giant pressure on that capitalist class. And again, the Stalin type figure takes hold. I'm trying to understand how the mechanism can prevent that. And perhaps I'll sort of reveal my bias here. As I've been reading, I was going to say too much, maybe not enough, but a lot about books like Stalin's war in Ukraine. And just I've been reading a lot about the 30s and the 40s for personal reasons related to my travels in Ukraine and all that kind of stuff. So I have a little bit of focus on the historical implementations of communism currently without kind of an updated view of all the possible future implementations. So lay that out there. But I worry about the slippery slope into the authoritarian figure that takes the sexy message, destroys everyone who's powerful in the name of the working class, and then fucks the working class afterwards.

So first of all, I think it's worth remembering that the socialist movement had different outcomes across Western Europe and Eastern Europe. And in some of these countries in Western Europe, there wasn't actually democracy before the workers movement and before the socialist movement. So the battle in Sweden, for instance, was about establishing political democracy, establishing troop representation for workers. And that's how the parties became popular. Same thing in Germany too. Then it was the Social democrats who were able to build political democracy. Then on top of that, add layers of economic democracy, social democracy. The Swedish Social Democrats ruled basically uninterrupted from the early 1930s until 1976. It's kind of crazy to think about, but they were just in government. They were the leading member of government. Then a few different coalition partners would shift. Sometimes they were with the agrarians, sometimes they were with the communists briefly. But they ruled uninterrupted and they lost an election in 1976 and they just left power. And then they got back into power in the 80s. So in other words, they created a democratic system, of course, with mass support of working class people. Then they truly honored the system because when they lost power, they lost power, they left power. There's plenty of cases like that across Europe and the world and in other countries like Korea and elsewhere, where the workers movements, the most militant, the most class centric workers, South Africa is the same way, created democratic systems. Now Russia, I think a lot of what happened had to do with the fact that it was never a democratic country. It was ruled by a party. And the party itself was very easy to shift from a somewhat democratic party in Lenin's day to day to an authoritarian one in Russia. And there was no distinction then between the party and the state. So your authoritarian party then became authoritarian. Total control over the entirety of the state. Now the fact that the Soviet system involved total state ownership of production meant that the authoritarianism of the party state could go even deeper into the lives of ordinary people. Compared to other horrific dictatorships like Pinochet's, Chile and so on, when maybe you could find some solace just at home or whatever else, you didn't have the same sort of totalitarian control of people's lives. But I would say that socialism itself has yield different outcomes. Now, on the question of polarization, I guess that implies that this polarization, this distinction is a distinction that isn't real in society and that is kind of being manufactured, generated.

So you mean the capitalist class and the working class? Just to clarify. Yeah, okay.

So in certain populist distinctions, the, the division is basically arbitrary or made up. The us versus them polarization, depending who the us and who the them are. You know, it's truly a, a something that's manufactured. But capitalism itself as a system, as a system based on class division, whether you're you supporter or oppose it, I think you should, we should acknowledge it's based on class division. That is the thing creating that polarization. Now, I think what a lot of what socialists try to do is we try to take bits of working class opposition to capitalism to their lives, to the way they're treated at work and so on. And yes, we do try to organize on those basis to help workers take collective action to help them organize. And political parties and so on, to represent their, their interests, economic and otherwise. But the contradiction exists to begin with. And if anything, this system which I'm proposing, democratic socialism, would be kind of a resolution of this conflict, this dilemma, this thing that has always existed since chieftain and follower and so on. We've had class division since the Neolithic revolution. I think this is a democratic road out of that tension and that division of humanity into people who own and people who have nothing to give but their ability to work.

So that idea is grounded in going all the way back to Marx, that all of human history can be told through the lens of class struggle. Is there some sense, can you steal man the case that this class difference is over exaggerated, that there's a difference, but it's not the difference of the abuser and the abused. It's more of a difference of people that were successful and people that were less successful.

So I'll play devil's advocate, which is they, that maybe one could argue that in its purest earliest stage, capitalism was based on a stark difference. But then, since then, two things have happened. One, a bunch of socialists and workers have organized to guarantee certain rights for working class people, certain protections. So then our system, now there are certain safety nets, less in the US than in other countries, but in a lot of countries are pretty extensive safety nets, you know, even like 40 hour.

Work week, minimum wage, safety regulations, all that kind of stuff.

And all those things are in my mind, doses of socialism within capitalism. Because what you're doing is you are taking the autonomy of capitalists to do whatever they want with the people contracted to them. And the only thing stopping them is, you know, them potentially being able to go to another employer. But even then it's kind of a potentially a race to the bottom. If you know, you can't get more than $2 an hour from any employer in your, in your market, you're going to have to, you know, live with it. So one factor is we have built in those protections. So we've taken enough socialism into capitalism that you could say that at a certain point maybe it makes a qualitative difference and not just a quantitative difference in people's lives. The other thing is over time we've gotten wealthier and more productive as a society. So maybe at some point the quantitative difference of just more and more wealth means that even if in the abstract the division between a worker and a capitalist is real, if that worker is earning a quarter million dollars a year and has a good life and only has to clock in 35 hours a week, 30 hours a week and has four weeks of vacation, then isn't it just an abstract or philosophical difference? So I think you could level those two arguments. What I would say is that one, a lot of these rights that we have fought for are constantly being eroded and they're under attacked in part because the economic power that capitalists have bleeds into our political democracy as well. There's constant lobbying for all sorts of labor market deregulations and so on. I fundamentally believe that if tomorrow all those regulations went away, capitalists would fight to pay people as little as possible and we'd be back in 19th century capitalism. And not because they're bad people. Because if I'm running a firm and all of a sudden my competition is paying, is, is able to find a labor pool and is paying people less than me, I'm going to be undercut because they'll be able to take some of that extra savings and invest into new technology or whatever else and they'll gobble up my market share before long. And then also beyond that, I do think there's a normative question here which is now, do we believe that we ordinary people have a capacity to be able to make certain decisions about their work? Do we believe they know more about their work than their bosses? Now I don't think that's not true at every level. But I think there's no doubt that in workplaces workers know how to productively do their task in ways that their manager might not know. I think we've all been in workplaces where we've had managers who kind of don't know what you do or whatever else. And I think that collectively, if incentivized, we could have them one instead of hoarding that information since they're getting a stake in production and so on, they'd be able to more freely share it and be able to reshape how their day to day work happens. And also with elective managers, you kind of take that up the chain. I think you'd have perfectly efficient market based firms that, that could exist without capitalists.

So there's a, I mean there's a lot of things to say. Maybe within just very, very low level question of if the workers are running the show. There's a brutal truth to the fact that some people are better and the workers know this. This is the Steve Jobs A players. You want to have all the A players in the room because one B player can poison the pool because then everybody gets demotivated by like, by the nature of that lack of excellence and competence. This is just to take sort of a crude, devil's advocate perspective. Are the workers going to be able to remove the.