Bhaskar Sunkara Will Not Call Forced Collectivization Anything but a Disaster

Bhaskar Sunkara is a democratic socialist, political writer, founding editor of Jacobin, president of The Nation, former vice chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, and author of *The Socialist Manifesto*. On Lex Fridman's podcast he spends a long stretch of the conversation drawing a line between himself and the twentieth-century regimes that ruled in socialism's name, and only then explaining what he still believes. The sequence is the point. Before the defense comes the cut.

When he reaches Soviet forced collectivization, he does not reach for a euphemism. He calls it a disaster. The policy, he says, sat on a faulty premise: that scale always equals more productivity, which is especially untrue in agriculture. The result was famine and millions of deaths. Stalinist industrialization also unbalanced the economy toward heavy industry at the expense of medium and light industry. He says this "coolly," and then names the body count anyway.

Lenin's period, in his telling, was a holding action. The working class was about three percent of the population; the peasantry was against the Bolsheviks; of that three percent, many had died in war and half had supported the Mensheviks and more moderate socialists. A small party with real support in a couple of cities, and little empire-wide, took power and decided it could not give power back. That premise, more than any single later crime, is the direction of the rest of the story.

Fridman starts with the broad question: what is socialism? Sunkara admits that socialists cannot agree on anything, so the definition is his. At the minimum, the core necessities of life — food, housing, education — are guaranteed to everyone just by virtue of being born, so those people can reach their potential. Beyond that, democratic socialism, the kind he believes in, takes democracy out of the voting booth and into economic and social life. "If we think that democracy is a good thing, why do we allow our workplaces to be run in autocratic ways?"

The philosophy underneath is intrinsic value. People have unequal talents and want different things, but that unique individuality, he argues, only comes to light where there are collective guarantees. He quotes the scientist and socialist Stephen Jay Gould on the thousands of potential Einsteins and Leonardos who died in sweatshops and on plantations, never cultivating what was unique in them, never having families to whom they could pass it on. You do not have to be an Einstein for the claim to apply.

Then it gets personal. Sunkara was born in Trinidad and Tobago. His grandmother, who later lived in East Orange, New Jersey, was illiterate until her dying days. She never wrote down her memories of life as a young woman in Trinidad. She had many children and passed some stories along, but he often thinks about what someone with her wit and intelligence could have done with a little more support. The wasted potential does not need a regression table. It has a face in the family.

Fridman asks whether helping the unlucky trades off against rewarding the skillful and hardworking. Sunkara says you can do both. Innovators who improve lives can get more consumption; people who want to work an extra ten or twenty hours can get extra benefits. The inequality just should not be the extreme disparities of today, and nobody underneath should be in poverty. The reallocation, he adds, is not only of wealth and resources. It is also of power.

On the right, in Hayek's most generous moments, socialists want to trade some of your freedom for equality. Sunkara does not say that description is false. He says the frame is wrong. The tradeoff is between freedom and freedom. Imagine a firm in Austin that makes something people want, hires twenty or thirty people at twenty dollars an hour for forty hours, in a free contract. Then the government sets a twenty-two-dollar minimum wage and a thirty-five-hour week, with time and a half after that even if the worker agrees. The entrepreneur has lost the freedom to set terms. The workers have gained hours and pay their competitors must also honor, or the firm gets undercut.

"It's really a question often of tradeoffs between whose freedom and autonomy are you going to prioritize — the entrepreneur or the capitalist, or ordinary workers." Swing too far toward one class and you get tyranny: if the state tells Fridman that because he is a capitalist he cannot vote, or seizes his private home, that is an abridgment of basic rights. Shaping how someone acts as an economic actor, Sunkara says, is within the scope of democratic politics. A lot of socialism debates stall because one side hears "freedom" as non-interference and the other hears it as having a real alternative to the twenty-dollar hour.

Fridman's practical question is about loopholes. Under any rules, someone will take advantage — the malicious, the lazy, the person who could have been an Einstein and watches the NFL instead. He puts himself in the frame: he believes he has potential, and if life is too easy his laziness will win. How do socialism and capitalism actually behave once human nature shows up?

Sunkara does not deny the premise. People will find loopholes. They will dominate and coerce others even inside systems meant to abolish domination and coercion. That is why systems have to be designed to cut those things down, and why they need democracy and freedom — the ability to reverse power. The Soviet Union grew an authoritarian bureaucracy that coerced in socialism's name. It desperately needed political democracy. When even small elements of democracy arrived, the system collapsed, because dissent finally had an outlet.

China is the contemporary version of the same warning. A few years earlier, he says, people praised Chinese authoritarianism as efficient: technocratic excellence, productivity, a harder work ethic than Americans. COVID showed the cost. Ordinary workers and doctors in Wuhan tried to get the word out; local Communist Party officials suppressed them, probably with national collusion; then came zero-COVID. Systems that look weaker because democracy makes them less technically competent are, in his view, the ones that can grow and evolve. A system that will not be criticized does not stop making errors. It stores them.

On the individual side, Sunkara thinks people should be free to spend their potential on leisure. Leisure is not only sitting at home drinking beer. It can be time with friends and family, relationships that will not invent a new medicine but will change the lives around you. Fridman says he is taking notes: for him leisure meant a lot of Skyrim, and now he has to reconsider his life. Sunkara, born in 1989, likes games too. In the last decade more of his leisure has gone back to a couple of drinks a week at the local bar, because you get random conversation and a sense of place. He cites Robert Putnam's *Bowling Alone*: civic life thinning into solitary activity, the ball still rolling, the binding gone.

The undercurrent of Fridman's question is productivity without the whip: if you cannot be destitute, do people still generate enough value? Sunkara thinks current abundance can afford more people opting out of production, and that carrots — more consumption, cooler things, social rewards — would be enough. If a democratic socialist system saw mass unemployment by choice, you would reconfigure incentives through democracy and good governance. You do not write the perfect treatise now and follow it like scripture in fifty years. Fridman notes that Sunkara said "whip" instead of "stick," putting a thumb on the scale; Sunkara does not unsay it.

Fridman pushes again. The wealthier the world, the more comfortable the nets, the less of a stick they are; life at the bottom gets easier, and the financial motive to climb weakens. Sunkara's first reply is that people stuck at the bottom of the labor market are already working — two jobs, sixty-plus hours, selling their labor at a bargain. They are, he says, the true philanthropists. Fridman's Lyft from downtown Austin was about eight dollars before the tip. Everyone in the room, and everyone listening, is indebted to people they do not see: workers in China and Taiwan who made the recording gear, farmworkers in the United States. The people at the bottom are not short of pressure. They are short of tools.

Without good public schools from age five to twelve or thirteen, Sunkara says, it is very hard to move a family off generations of manual labor. Without decent healthcare you may already be preordained to an early grave by the time, in your mid-twenties, you want to change something. He does not deny agency. He says the current society does not give people the tools to be full participants, then takes the resulting outcomes as natural.

His "excessively northeast" example is Connecticut. An average working-class person born in Hartford will have a very different life outcome from someone born the same day, the same hour, in Greenwich. Accidents of birth dictate outcomes, and everyone treats that as given. Fridman restates it: the conditions of where you grew up mean a fundamentally different experience of education and resources. Sunkara agrees. A poor city and a rich city in the same small state is the whole argument in two zip codes.

He jokes that New Yorkers and Bostonians have a colonial attitude toward Connecticut, carving it up — west to New York, east to Boston — while he is here for Connecticut nationalism. Under the joke is Gould again, and the grandmother again. A society that accepts those two birth hours as fate has already agreed to waste a lot of potential. The deepest disagreement with Fridman is not the wage floor. It is the default picture of the person: lazy unless whipped, or blocked unless given tools.

Fridman asks how democratic socialism sits in the history of Marxism, communism, and socialism as the twentieth century defined and implemented them. Sunkara's first move is to refuse a familiar dodge. He hates the No True Scotsman response: that socialism was bad, so it was not really socialism, and mine is good, so it is. Socialism and communism, he says, share a common ancestor in the turmoil of late-nineteenth-century capitalism and the workers' parties organizing across the capitalist world.

The German Social Democratic Party was the most vibrant party in Germany in the 1880s and 1890s, locked out of power in a parliamentary system that was still an undemocratic democracy with the Kaiser ruling. European socialists, who then called themselves social democrats, assumed revolution would come first in industrial Germany, not in semi-feudal Russia. World War I split the movement: parties that kept their heads down or implicitly supported the war, and parties, including in Russia and the United States, that resisted. Lenin's Bolsheviks took power in the flux after the old regime could not stand, and they dropped the name social democrat because, they said, social democracy had betrayed internationalism. They went back to Marx's older word: communist.

Elsewhere in Europe, parties from the same family took power, mostly after the war, mostly calling themselves socialists. On paper many still wanted to go beyond capitalism; in practice they managed capitalism better in workers' interests. Sunkara's three lines: social democracy inserts doses of socialism within capitalism and keeps capitalism; communism tried to build socialism outside capitalism, often in authoritarian ways, partly from ideology and partly from inheriting a tsarist country with a weak working class devastated by war; democratic socialists like a lot of what the social democrats accomplished and still believe in a world after capitalism, not only socialism inside it.

What was wrong with communism in the Soviet Union, Fridman asks, and in what ways did it succeed? Sunkara starts with the second half, and with a moral preface: he is opposed to any form of authoritarianism or dictatorship, so talking about developmental successes means abstracting from what he morally believes and looking at the record. Lenin's years were a holding action. They did not have the conditions to rule. The alternative in their minds was far-right reaction, prison, or death. The New Economic Policy let peasants do market exchange while industry in the cities stayed state-owned — "kind of a form of social democracy," he says. By the mid-to-late 1920s, after a decade of war, revolution, and civil war, enough to eat and a job was good enough for a lot of people. The Western European revolution they expected never came.

Stalin wanted rapid industrialization: socialism in one country, catch up with the West, become an industrial powerhouse. That meant forced collectivization of fragmented farms, mechanization under state ownership, and five-year plans for heavy industry. The disaster of collectivization sits on the false idea that scale always raises productivity. The five-year plans did put Russia on a different developmental trajectory. Whether that is what let the country survive the Nazi invasion, he calls a complicated question and does not settle it. By the postwar period, Russia had jumped ahead of the path many other countries stayed on. He offers Japan as an analogy: run the 1870s and 1880s a hundred times, and postwar Japan is one of the best draws. Something similar, at a certain level of catch-up with the West, can be said of Russian economic development.

Then the command system failed to adapt as the economy grew more complex and moved beyond heavy industry as its staple. By the 1970s it had fallen behind the West again. The economic picture, he says, is more complicated than the political one. Politically it is simpler: a small party without much popular support, with real support in a couple of cities, took power, felt it could not give power back, and kept holding on. The available transcript cuts off there. The judgment already on the table is enough. Once "we cannot yield power" is the premise, collectivization, the five-year plans, and the bureaucracy all grow from the same root. It is not that one man was uniquely evil. It is that error could not be admitted without undoing the reason they ruled.

Fridman opens the episode by saying what he hopes the podcast is for. He wants to talk to the left and the right, the far left and the far right, always aiming at the strongest interpretation of the ideas and the valuable arguments against them, and at the human being behind them. He trusts listeners to make up their own minds. He will often fall short: pushing too hard or not enough, skipping topics, talking too much, interrupting, being silly on a serious subject or serious on a silly one. He hopes to talk to Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ron DeSantis and Barack Obama, and others across the spectrum.

He answers a charge that he is controlled by a government or intelligence agency — CIA, FSB, Mossad — or by money, fame, power, access. All he has, he says, is his silly little words, and he gives them: he is not and will never be controlled by anyone; nothing can force him to sacrifice his integrity. People call him naive. He says he is not naive. He is optimistic, and optimism is not a passive state. It is a constant battle against a world that wants to pull you into cynicism. Optimism, to him, is freedom to think, act, build, and help, sometimes in the face of impossible odds.

He reads from Kipling's *If*: keep your head when others lose theirs; trust yourself when all men doubt you, and make allowance for their doubting too; don't deal in lies when lied about; don't give way to hating. He knows the poem is also mocking his over-romantic ridiculousness; the meta-irony is not lost on him. He is a silly little kid trying to do a bit of good. That posture is not a detour from the socialism conversation. It is the same structure Sunkara wants in a political system: let the other side's strongest case on the table, and keep a way to be wrong out loud.

Sunkara's habit in this conversation is not to finish the sentence. He will not design a perfect system in advance. He will commit to principles that let systems be perfected, and for him that principle is democracy — even when democracy looks technically clumsy. Economic life can be regulated; political rights cannot be stripped because of class. He does not exempt socialists from the warning that people will find new ways to coerce inside systems meant to end coercion. The correction mechanism has to apply to his own side.

That is why the No True Scotsman refusal matters. A movement that keeps the famine, the bureaucracy, and the party that would not yield, and still says the word socialism, is making a harder argument than one that exiles every failure. Judgment, in his telling, is not what a system calls itself. It is what it grows in practice, and whether it lets the error be spoken. Soviet authoritarianism is part of that practice. So is the social-democratic welfare state he does not want to throw away.

The remaining transcript does not reach the later chapters on the published outline — unions, speech, Marx, AI, billionaires, Bernie Sanders, AOC, 2024, China as a full topic, Jacobin, the book, advice, meaning. What it does reach is enough to see the shape of the case: a floor of necessities, a fight over whose freedom the wage law reallocates, a history he will not sanitize, and a bet that the alternative to scripture is a system you can vote out. The $8 ride, the grandmother who could not write, and the child born in Greenwich at the same hour as the child in Hartford last longer than the labels. The debate about systems ends on a few faces.