Lex Fridman Podcast #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism
Machine transcription by Qwen3-ASR 0.6B (MLX, local, Apache-2.0). May contain recognition errors.

The following is a conversation with Bascar Sancara, he's a democratic socialist, a political writer, founding editor of Jacobin, president of the nation, former vice chair of the Democratic Socialist 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 Bascar Sancara, 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 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, 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 on dealing lies or being hated, don't give way to hating, and yet don't look too good or 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, Onit for supplements, Inside Tracker for biomonitoring and ExpressVPN for security and privacy. Choose wisely, my friends. And now onto the full latitudes. Never any ads in the middle. I hate those. 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 in 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 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 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 going to 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? The 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 there 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. I mean forget all the like the products and all that just 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 a lot. It's an awesome computer infrastructure that lets you develop, deploy, and scale with applications you build faster and easier. There is nothing better than Linux. And here you don't have to have Linux in your machine, you can have it in the cloud, and 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 seven 365. But that's not what matters. What matters is Linux is awesome. Did I say that? Linus Torvald is definitely somebody he needs to talk to. Somebody posted on Reddit, why have you not talked to Linus Torvald yet? And it'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 not he's a difficult person to get to to do a long form interview. 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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 in honesty does. Anyway, visit linode dot com slash lex for free credit. This episode is brought to you by Onit, a nutrition supplement and fitness company. They make Alpha Brain, a nutropic that helps support memory, mental speed and focus. I sometimes take Alpha Brain if I know I have a very difficult design or programming task at hand that'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 I'll take an Alpha Brain to help me out. I 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 sees 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. I just am exceptionally productive and can really focus for long periods of time. But it's that afternoon time that I think is best for more like exercise and naps and. More relaxing or like tasks that don't require much much brain power. Anyway, it's kind of funny how each of us probably have our own little optimization problem that we're trying to solve about what makes us feel good, what makes us. What enables us to interact with other human beings in our lives that we love and make them feel good and just be a productive member of society. You know, reach for the stars, be the best version of yourself, but also just enjoy it. I mean, it's it's a it's a weird optimization problem that involves nutrition that involves exercise. And I think in part at least at some point in your life it involves a kind of strict analysis of your schedule of how you spend the the minutes in your day, and then I think part of that process is to then let it go. Similar with diet, you can have a strict diet once you understand the nature of calories and nutrition and so on that you can let go of that and have an. Instinctual understanding of food and then you can start to really enjoy food. Anyway, you can get a special discount on Alpha Brain at lexfreeman dot com slash Onit. This show is also brought to you by Inside Tracker, a service I use to track biological data that comes from my body and gives me suggestions about what I should do in my life. Now those suggestions are basic lifestyle decisions and diet decisions, but I can't wait until we have something like. 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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 you know 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 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. 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 the ideas, the philosophical ideas apply. Like what what are 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 are 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 J Gould, the scientist and socialist used to say. About how many thousands of potential Einstein's or Leonardo da Vinci's that died, you know 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. I was born in Trinidad de Bago. She was illiterate till her dying days. She in 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 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 tradeoff 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 would reward people who make innovations and and 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 in poverty and suffering, and while making sure that hey, we're going to give these people who want to work that extra 10 hours or 20 hours or want to apply their their hard work some 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 a 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 socialism 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 tradeoff, but it's really a tradeoff 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 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 can do whatever they want with you know they could watch more NFL with it they could you know spend more time with their friends or family or whatever else and they're still getting paid the same if not better because because the wages also. Went up, so it's really a question often of tradeoffs between who 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 and 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 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 are 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 to do things we think are intrinsic human rights. Now, this would be tyranny, this would be an abridgment of of your your rights, but shaping your ability in the economic sphere to be an an economic actor is, I think, within the realm and scope of democratic politics. Yeah, so those are the extremes you are referring to, and one perspective I like to take on socialism versus capitalism is. Under each system, the extremes of each system 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 the 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 if you make life too easy for me, I feel like I will never get anything done. Me personally, of course, there is 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 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 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 check 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 to 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 our priority 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 allowing Chinese authoritarianism and they're saying China is building this efficient system, the state runs so well, there is technocratic excellence, plus there is just productivity, and they're just working harder than Americans and whatever else. But look at in practice what really happened with COVID, both the initial suppressing of information about what was happening in 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 in Wuhan, probably with the collusion naturally nationally. And now now with zero COVID policies and whatever else, so I think that that often we find that even though it seems like these are are weak systems and then 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 doing you know 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 some medicines, but will change the lives of the people around you and will change your community for the for the better. I am taking notes here because I for me leisure just meant playing a lot of Skyrim. This whole family relationship that I am going to have to work on that I didn't realize that's also including leisure because I am going to have to reconsider my whole life here. Hey, no leisure should mean civic activity too, right? I mean, there is that famous book the the Robert Putnam one Bowling Alone or whatever which described that for now. I mean, I am I was born nineteen eighty nine. I like you know video and computer games, you know, so I definitely do that type of leisure too. But I found a lot more richness in my life when in the last you know 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 television or something, you know because you get that random conversation, that sense of a place and 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 you might not be able to support yourself unless you are you are 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 that is is quite 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 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 in motion. You know, write up a treatise now and fifty years from now, you know, try to follow 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 societies as a world, that the more comfortable the social nets become. The so the less of a whip or a stick they become, because one of the negative consequences even if you are on welfare is like well life is not going to be that great, but the 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 on the pushback is that there is 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, and 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 are true philanthropists because a lot of them are the ones who are working two jobs and are working sixty plus hours and are providing in this country at such a such a bargain for their labor because they're so underpaid. So many of the things that the rest of us use up to to enjoy life and consumption or whatever else like I I got here from downtown Austin and I think my lift you know I did tip but I think my lift was like eight bucks base or whatever else you know it's it's it's it's it's the I think that we are all indebted to people who are are working and we don't see at various stages of the the production process from you know the workers in China and Taiwan producing you know technological things that that we're recording this on to you know growers and and and and workers in agriculture in the US. So so I think that one working class people are already working, but as far as you know getting out from under poverty and 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 twelve thirteen, it's going to be really hard to move from generations of of your your family being involved in manual labor to doing other forms of of labor. You are going to be stuck at a certain part of our of our labor market as a as a result. If you don't have access to decent healthcare, you know throughout your life, you might be already preordained to an early grave by the time that something kicks in. You really want to to change something in your life in the the your your mid twenties. Obviously, it's a combination of agency and all these other factors. There is 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, you know from the northeast. I give like excessively northeast example. We take for granted that that someone from you know Hartford Connecticut is going to have your average working class person Hartford is going to have a very different life outcome than someone born on the same day the same hour in in Greenwich Connecticut. You know we we we take for granted that accidents of birth are going to dictate outcomes. So you mean like depending on the conditions of where you grew up, there is going to be fundamentally different experience in terms of education, in terms of the resources available to you to allow yourself to flourish. Yes, a poor city and a rich city in Connecticut is 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. You know the West belongs to New York, the East to Boston, but you know I am I am here for you know Connecticut nationalism. I think it's 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 are playing with is 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 as it was defined and experienced and implemented in the twentieth century? So what are your key differences? Maybe even just like socialism communism. Yeah, well I hate the no true Scotsman sort of response to this, which is oh that socialism is 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 nineteenth 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 in the that became probably the most important the most vibrant party in Germany in the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties. But they were locked out of power because Germany at the time was was still mostly autarkic. You know it had parliamentary democracy, but it was a very undemocratic democracy. The Kaiser still 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 One came, the workers movement was split between parties that decided to either keep their head down or to implicitly support the war, and then you know support the war for now 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 the the of the Russian movement, Lenin's Bolshevik party that took power in in Russia after a period of turmoil where it didn't seem. What was it going to go to the fascist right or was it going to go to the far left? There was a period of flux and turmoil in 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 it 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 postwar 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 meant this attempt to build 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. 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, you know very you know poor and devastated by war and so on, where authoritarianism kind of landed itself to those conditions. Then there is me, you know. Then there is 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? So 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 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 three percent of the the population. You know the peasantry is really against us. A lot of this three percent 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 czar 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, re stabilize the economy through something called a new economic program, which was kind of a a form of social democracy if you 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 re stabilize things by the middle or end of the the nineteen twenties 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 One 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 is 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 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 bringing 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. You know, forced collectivization was a disaster. I mean, first of all, I think 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. You know, it led to 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 of medium or light industry. But this did mean, especially the the five-year plan and 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, they managed to. If you kind of ran a scenario where Japan would be in the eighteen seventies, eighteen eighties, and ran it a hundred times, the 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 moved beyond a regular heavy industry and as 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 by the nineteen seventies. So 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 when a lot 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