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

Lex Fridman and Bhaskar Sunkara have a long, wide-ranging conversation defining socialism and distinguishing democratic socialism from 20th-century communism. Sunkara argues socialism guarantees life's necessities and extends democracy into the economic sphere, framing it as a trade-off between 'freedom and freedom' rather than freedom versus equality. He offers an unusually concrete vision: a market economy of worker-owned cooperatives funded by public banks, with planning reserved for healthcare, transit and natural monopolies, while firms still compete and can fail. They debate the failures of the Soviet Union and Mao's China, meritocracy, unions, taxation, Universal Health Care, free college, and the rise of figures like Bernie Sanders, AOC and Trump. The episode closes on Marx, history, and Sunkara's personal path to socialism.

• Sunkara admits 'yes maybe' that socialist ideology can lend itself to authoritarianism, but argues any collective ideology (including nationalism) carries the same risk.
  00:34:55
• Declares himself 'basically a free speech absolutist,' drawing the line only at direct incitement of violence.
  01:34:50
• Breaks with traditional Marxists by rejecting the inevitability and even the desirability of a fully stateless communism, insisting a democratic state must always exist to mediate disputes.
  02:03:58
• Says he holds a 'Kantian' rather than deterministic view: socialism is something that ought to happen, not something that necessarily will.
  01:57:45
• States flatly that 'nothing the Chinese Communist Party does has anything to do with socialism,' calling it a nationalist authoritarian developmental state.
  03:16:19
• Concedes billionaires like LeBron James and Elon Musk can earn wealth through genuine merit and innovation, agreeing the creator should be separated from critique of the wealth.
  02:42:55
• Admits socialism is now 'a fringe ideological current among a very small minority of the working class.'
  03:31:23

• Cites Stephen Jay Gould's line about how many potential Einsteins and Leonardo da Vincis died in sweatshops and on plantations without ever developing their gifts.
  00:05:11
• The Swedish Social Democrats governed nearly uninterrupted from the early 1930s until 1976, then peacefully left power after losing an election.
  00:44:17
• Explains Scandinavian 'pattern wage bargaining,' where unions set wages at the second-most-productive firm's level, pushing the weakest firm out and letting the strongest expand.
  01:03:30
• Martin Luther King Jr. called himself a Christian or democratic socialist, especially after his 1967 Riverside Church anti-Vietnam speech; he was killed at a workers' rally.
  01:39:33
• Albert Einstein wrote an essay titled 'Why Socialism?' for the first issue of Monthly Review in 1949.
  01:41:05
• Sunkara compared a Bernie Sanders speech from the 1970s to one from 2016 and found them virtually identical, only 'millionaires' swapped for 'millionaires and billionaires.'
  02:48:42
• Quotes Eugene Debs: 'I'm not your Moses... if I can lead you there, someone's just going to lead you straight out as soon as I'm gone.'
  03:09:09
• Sunkara was the only one of five siblings born in the US, and his own mother graduated college the same year he did.
  03:27:07
• Recounts that Marx once wrote a snarky letter calling Lassalle an asshole, then in the same month wrote Lassalle asking to borrow money.
  03:34:30
• Jacobin has roughly 70,000 print subscribers.
  03:21:33

Books, products and media the guest or host genuinely endorsed here — with the buy link.

Affiliate link — we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.