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: - House of Macadamias: https://houseofmacadamias.com/lex and use code LEX to get 20% of your first order - Linode: https://linode.com/lex to get $100 free credit - Onnit: https://lexfridman.com/onnit to get up to 10% off - InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex to get 20% off - ExpressVPN: https://expressvpn.com/lexpod to get 3 months free EPISODE LINKS: Bhaskar's Twitter: https://twitter.com/sunraysunray Jacobin: https://jacobin.com Jacobin's Twitter: https://twitter.com/jacobin The Nation: https://thenation.com The Socialist Manifesto (book): https://amzn.to/3hKpt2p PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (13:24) - Socialism (31:54) - Communism (58:31) - Class struggle (1:09:33) - Quality of life (1:17:29) - Unions (1:29:57) - Corruption (1:43:15) - Freedom of speech (1:51:38) - War (1:59:24) - Karl Marx (2:13:03) - Socialist vision (2:18:28) - AI and socialism (2:23:26) - Socialist policies (2:48:45) - Billionaires (2:54:43) - Bernie Sanders (3:05:10) - AOC (3:17:11) - 2024 presidential election (3:22:05) - China (3:31:06) - Jacobin (3:38:35) - The Socialist Manifesto (3:45:55) - Advice for young people (3:49:28) - Meaning of life
Chapter 1: What is socialism?
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. 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.
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Chapter 2: How does Bhaskar Sunkara define socialism?
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 Roger 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. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got House of Macadamias for snacks, Linode for Linux systems, Onnit for supplements, Insight Tracker for biomonitoring, and ExpressVPN for security and privacy.
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Chapter 3: What are the philosophical ideas behind socialism?
I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by a relatively new and a absolutely, it's not even relative, it's absolutely, objectively delicious sponsor, House of Macadamias.
It's a company that ships delicious, high quality and healthy macadamia nuts directly to your door and all kinds of snacks based on macadamia nuts. The first shipment they sent me was just a source of a lot of happiness for me. I was going through some tough times in my life. Recently, there's been a lot of ups and downs. It's been a wild ride. It's been a wild ride.
And there's something about sitting in that couch I have, which I got so I can feel like an adult, and contemplating the ups and downs of life and just letting my mind become still. empty it of thought, and then just slowly, with a stupid smile on my face, consume macadamia snacks. There's a lot of sexual innuendos I can do here, by the way. If you doubt my ability to do sexual innuendos,
How dare you? But I'm gonna keep it respectful and say that it's 30% less carbs than almonds. Oh man, I don't even know. I think I've been always criticized in my life. One of the harshest criticisms throughout my life is I don't know how to pronounce almonds. Is it almond? Almonds, almonds, almonds, almonds. It's almonds, right? Yeah, it's almonds.
Anyway, what matters is the snacks are delicious. And actually as a sponsor, they're awesome. They're with us for the long haul, and they've just been so kind and respectful, big fans, and I'm just a big fan of theirs. So anything you could do to support them, I would love it. It just means a lot to me when there's great companies doing great stuff and just being great people.
Forget all the products and all that. I love it. So support them. They're really good people. Anyway, speaking of really good people and a really good company that you should definitely support is Linode. And this episode is brought to you by it. It's Linux virtual machines. I use it a lot.
It's an awesome computer infrastructure that lets you develop, deploy, and scale what applications you build faster and easier. There's nothing better than than Linux. And here, you don't have to have Linux in your machine.
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Chapter 4: How does socialism relate to democracy and economic systems?
You can have it in the cloud. You can have it, not just a little baby machine. You can scale. You can launch a giant machine. You can launch... Many machines. By the way, they do have really good customer service 24-7, 365. But that's not what matters. What matters is Linux is awesome. Did I say that? Linus Torvald is definitely somebody I need to talk to.
Somebody posted on Reddit, why have you not talked to Linus Torvald yet? And that's a good question. I'm not sure I know exactly how to reach him, which sounds kind of funny. And I think he's a difficult person to get to to do a long-form interview with.
I think his source of happiness is in doing the work, in serving the Linux community, just doing the low-level kernel development and managing the community and all that. I don't know how much he enjoys conversation or educating or inspiring others about the work going on in Linux.
I think it's really important, because I think the world, I mean, so many important things in the world run on Linux. And... I don't know why we don't always celebrate that. I mean, it's one of the things I really love doing with this podcast is just celebrating amazing people using technology or using whatever skill they have to try to build a better world.
And I think that's what Linus is doing. That's what people working on Linux, all through the stacks, whether it's the different distributions or the different packages and all that kind of stuff. There's the open source movement in general. It's just beautiful to see all the stuff you see on GitHub.
It warms my heart to see all these brilliant engineers just building stuff, small stuff and big stuff. And many of it helps make the world a better place. It really, I believe, and honestly does. Anyway, visit linode.com slash lex for a free credit. This episode is brought to you by Onnit, a nutrition supplement and fitness company.
They make AlphaBrain, a nootropic that helps support memory, mental speed, and focus. I sometimes take AlphaBrain if I know I have a very difficult design or programming task at hand. It's going to take several hours of just focused work, and I'm not quite feeling it.
So if I know there's a deep work session that's going to involve some mental blocks, mental struggle, where it's going to be dead ends and so on, I'll take it out for brain to help me out. I've recently been trying to adjust ways in which I slice my day. I really do find that I'm exceptionally productive and mentally sharp and focused in the morning.
for several hours, so two, three, four, five, six, seven hours in the morning, as long as it's uninterrupted, as long as I don't talk or see other human beings, or see is okay, see and smile, you know, like the warmth of humanity is great, but there's something about talking that really drains me, especially in the morning. And then in the evening, the same.
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Chapter 5: How does Bhaskar Sunkara define his socialism?
You know, the Soviet-style dialectical materialism was meant to tell us everything from, you know, explain genetics and agriculture and whatever else in a very disastrous way. You know, so I definitely don't believe in the... application of these ideas in an extremely wide way. And also, I'm a Marxist because it's a framework that helps me understand pertinent facts about the world.
If at some point I no longer think the framework is doing that, I will not be a Marxist. But I'm a socialist because on normative grounds, because I have certain beliefs about the equality of people, because I believe we should have a society with liberty, with equality, with fraternity.
And that I hope I'll always be a socialist until the day I die, but it's kind of a very unscientific or unserious thing to say, this is my framework from beginning to end, you know, for the rest of my life.
Chapter 6: What are the contradictions of capitalism according to Sunkara?
But from a perspective of history, you should say that Sir Mark says that you go through, societies go through different stages. It could be crudely summarized as primitive communism, imperialism, maybe slave society, feudalism, defined by mercantilism, then capitalism, then socialism, and finally, stateless communism. Did I miss something there?
I mean, I think that was close enough. I mean, I think that's definitely true of Marxist theory, that the contradictions of capitalism, the fact that it has brought together all these workers, all these materials and whatever else, and it's now allowing it to socially create wealth on a mass scale. But that wealth is that process is being privately directed.
And also the surplus is being privately kind of appropriated is a contradiction. And that would lead to some sort of rebellion or revolution or change. And eventually this contradiction would be a fetter on production too. So we would have to move into a socialist society.
But actually, just to backtrack, so in terms of contradiction, so it starts when we're in a village, hunter-gatherers, that's what you call primitive communism, where everyone's kind of equal. It's kind of a collective, right? All right, maybe you could, just let me, hold on a second. And then inequality's form of different flavors.
So that's what imperialism is, is one dude rises to the top and has some control of different flavor. That's what feudalism with, when you have one dude at the top, and you have merchants doing some trading and so on, and then that leads to capitalism when you have private ownership of companies and they do some, they result in some kind of class inequality.
And eventually that results in a revolution that says no, this inequality is not okay, it's not natural, it doesn't respect the value of human beings and therefore it goes to socialism, where there is, under Marx's view, I guess, some role for the state.
The state is doing some redistribution, and then the pure communism at the end is when it's a collective where there's no state centralized power. So what part of that is wrong?
No, I think broadly the Marxist theory of history is about different types, different modes of production that exist at various times based on material conditions. So in the early times in this theory, there was not much surplus being generated, right? And there was generally egalitarian societies, right?
Then, as we became agricultural, as society developed, there was more surplus being produced. Then there was a group of people, the ruling classes of their age, that controlled and distributed that surplus. that controlled that division of labor and appropriated more of that surplus for themselves, and they weren't involved in productive labor.
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Chapter 7: What are the key socialist policies that Sunkara advocates?
Cohen and others, Um, there is a certain inevitability to socialism after capitalism. The way that I would put it myself is I kind of have a more, I guess you could say like Kantian view of it. Like I think socialism is something that ought to happen. but it's not something that necessarily will happen and we'll need to organize and persuade.
And also potentially, again, the key part of any social system that's democratic is you have to allow for the possibility of a democratic revision to a different sort of system. So I'd be more than happy in my vision of socialism for there to be capitalist parties, um, Getting, you know, hopefully three, four or five percent of the vote, maybe a lot more in the same way that in the U.S.
or Republic, we could right now have a monarchist party. No one's going to support a monarchist party in the in the U.S. in serious numbers. Although that's gaining popularity.
In Europe or elsewhere? No, isn't there, in the anarchist tradition, aren't they saying that one of the ways you could have a leader is in monarchy because they're more directly responsible to the citizens, if you have a leader. It's healthier to have a monarch. Anyway, I'm not familiar with this, but I have heard this stated multiple times.
In the left-wing anarchist traditions, like anarcho-syndicalism or whatever else, their slogan is kind of no kings, no gods, no masters or whatever, so no bosses. They definitely would not agree with that, but I'm... Not familiar enough. Anarchism runs a gamut from left to right in interesting ways.
I'll have to ask you about that. But yeah, okay. So you don't believe Marx's theory of history in the sense that every stage is a natural consequence of every other stage. Of course, he would predict that somebody like you must exist in order for those stages to go from one to the next. Because you have to believe ought. in order for action to be taken to inspire the populace to take action.
So two things. One is I do broadly believe in Marxist theory of history because it's just explaining how productive forces develop and the relations of production in any given system. I guess there's a theory of transition from capitalism to socialism that Marx didn't really spell out, but it was kind of implied that it would naturally happen. And Marx was living in an era of tremendous upheaval.
You know, Marx himself actually saw, when he was living in London in the 1870s, the Paris Commune. When workers took over for just a few months, but they took over, the producers of Paris took over the city, basically created their own government, their own system, and so on. So he was living through an era of upheaval. And Engels, especially...
oversaw and was the mentor to all these rising socialist parties. So he was very closely collaborating with socialists in places like Britain and Germany when they were drafting their first programs for the Social Democratic Party. So It felt like this was going to happen. It felt like this rising working class would take power. But I think the stability of the system was underestimated.
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Chapter 8: What is Sunkara's vision for the future of socialism?
Can we actually jump to the horizon? As you mentioned, as a social democrat, you focus on the policies of today, but you also have a vision and dream of a future. And so Marx did as well, so the perfect communism at the end. Can you describe that world? Also, is there elements to that world that has elements of anarchism? Like I said, there's Michael Malice next door.
So like anarcho-communism, I don't even know if I'm using that term correctly. but basically no central control. Can you describe what that world looks like?
I think the traditional socialist vision of kind of, if you want to call it full communism, would be very similar to the anarchist vision of a world without coercion, mass abundance, and so on. I myself don't share that vision. I believe that we will always need to have a state in some form. As a way to, one, even just mediate difference.
I think traditionally a lot of Marxists have thought that after you remove the primary contradiction, quote unquote, of class, that all other political questions would be resolved. And I think that's a lot behind a lot of the thinking of we're going to have a full communism after politics. Mm-hmm. I don't think there will be an after politics.
I think for one thing, let's say I'll give you another Northeast example. Let's say me and you are trying to with different groups of people, we're trying to figure out how to build a crossing of the Hudson River. And for various reasons, you and the people around you want to build a bridge. Me and the people around me need want to build a tunnel.
Mm hmm.
That's a question that you will probably need a mediation for, right? You'll need one. It's a big project. So there'll be a very complex division of labor and so on. But even beyond that, just politically, you will need the state to mediate the difference. You'll need to have a vote, have a vote that people trust, have institutions that people trust and so on to make a decision.
Society is never going to go beyond that decision making.
You don't think it's possible outside of the state to create stable voting mechanisms? Or is human nature going to always seep into that?
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