Bhaskar Sunkara

Communism meant this attempt to build a socialism that

outside of capitalism and 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, you know, 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.

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 kind of look at the record, right?

Yeah.

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