YouSaid · the spoken record

Bhaskar Sunkara

lines on the record: 237
first: 2022-12-22
most recent: 2022-12-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So, there's different varieties. In the UK, for instance, they have a national health service in which medical personnel and hospitals are run directly by the state. It's almost like a mini-Soviet system, to be honest, but just for healthcare. And it works pretty well just for healthcare. And I think it's one example of the way in which you could actually take the market. So I gave you a vision of socialism that involves a lot of market, but I think there are certain spheres where you could remove the market from and still have an efficient system, in part because, you know, this is a Area in which People don't”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And reduce child or eliminated reduce child labor and other things as well. And part of it was this is a radical demand because it's reducing the sphere, as you saw, of exploitation. So it's putting limits on how much time the capitalists can take for ordinary workers and how much freedom they would have. With healthcare, one, I just think it's a government healthcare system. You could tell me that you don't want it in the US, but you can't tell me it doesn't work because we've seen it work in every other major industrial system in different forms.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think that hours reduction has always been an important demand for socialists. So, I mean, it's been a reality in certain countries like France in recent decades, where part of the logic is if you have a bunch of people working for 40 plus hours a week and you also have some unemployed people who would like more employment, then it's not a zero-sum game. You could reduce hours to 35 hours and still maintain the same output by employing more people to kind of fill the slack in hours. So one, I think it's a solidaristic thing in working class movements between unemployed and employed workers. I also think that, yeah, it gives people more time. So Marx was a big advocate in his day of a 10 hour bill in the UK that would reduce. The hours of working time.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And also, our preferences might change. So, in AI system, might say the goal of humanity is to just increase infinitely efficiency or increase output, whereas we might collectively decide. We have enough and we want to have a trade off, right? And I think that we need a system that allows for people to make certain trade-offs.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, kind of like I kind of think that the agency part requires Human beings and conscious human activity. So I think if you have a sort of planning system that works, and let's say the technology is there for it to work, I would want it to be democratic planning in such a way that there is a human element, there is some debate and deliberation society. And also even in my vision of socialism with the state sector and state investments and so on, I'd want there to be more public discussion and debate about certain things so it's not just left to technocrats because you'd want to live in society where you just find out the next day that there's some massive infrastructure project that you haven't had a chance to think about or debate or feel like you're participating in.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Solving the calculation problem solves some of these questions, but not all of them. But that's kind of a who knows. But if you're a vision of the future, requires some sort of leap into a technological unknown, that's very hard to advocate for it today.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe in the future you can imagine certain calculation problems that arose during central planning solve through advanced computing. But I would say that there's another whole set of problems with the system that were incentive problems, and I'm not sure how that advance computing would solve the incentive problems of how do you get people to actually produce things that other people want, kind of that informational question and how do you communicate without endless meetings or someone reading your brain. What you actually want. So there's that kind of informational question, but then there's the incentive of how do you get people to work efficiently at work and how do you get firms to use their resources that they're getting more efficiently. And I think.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whereas, if there is going to be a place within a monopoly on violence, let's just say temporarily take that for granted, should it not be a place with a skilled, elected, accountable, transparent civil service with a democratic mandate, and so on?”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That I want Shakespeare under socialism. I want a lot of things that I think we should be grateful for. There's a part of tradition that I think that exists that's hierarchical and exploitative and whatever else, but there's another part of tradition that's our sense of place and belonging and our connection with the past and hopefully the future. And I want to keep that.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like to think that I'm an egalitarian thinker. I'm a socialist, but my mind just goes to, you know, I could see a vision of the future that I would like like 50, 60 years from now. Maybe there's some sort of future of superabundance and automation and there's some sort of techno-utopian future. We don't want some of those things that would exist in my five minutes from now vision of socialism, but I just don't see it. And in general, I'm kind of wary of visions of change that seem like they're not built off little thing pieces that we have now and not built off history and experience and whatever else. I don't want a year zero. I don't even like the term prehistory because I think there's a lot in history.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why not just call it a state? But in other words, if you don't have something like that, then don't you have a greater risk of tyranny or a tyrant emerging in the vacuum? So I think people's fear of the state is what would happen if the state had too much power. And I think that's a legitimate fear. That's why we have democratic kind of checks on state power and certain guarantees of freedom and so on. I guess I just wonder, I'm more afraid of the vacuum and not having a democratic responsive state and what the world would turn into. And also, I'm just not a utopian thinker, if that makes sense.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, mean the people around me need to build a tunnel. That's a question that you will probably need a mediation for, right? You'll need one. It's a big project. 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”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, a 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 the other, 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.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From the working class. And if you look at the class composition during the glory days of the European Socialist Parties, I mean, this was very much a working class parties and organizations. It's only been in the last like 30 years that it's been taken over by professionals and not uncoincidentally. They have accomplished very little in those 30 years.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Part that I think wasn't spelled out properly. But I think in either case, as socialists, we can assume that history is working in our favor. We just need to kind of hold out and wait for the inevitable revolution. We have to convince people of both, one, the struggle for day-to-day reforms and why it's important to be politically organized, why it's important to be a member of a union or to advocate for things like universal healthcare or whatever else, try to kind of build the cohesion and sense of self of the class. Then ultimately for the desirability, once we accomplish it, once we build social democracy, I've going beyond social democracy, which is, of course, the challenge. Now, I don't think it requires leadership from the outside. I think there are plenty of organic leaders that have emerged from the working class and have advocated for socialism.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. It's easy to see the contradictions in the system, but can you see its mechanisms of stability, the way in which mass collective action or revolutions, more the exception or the norm? Could you imagine if you're Marx not only how much wealth the system would produce over time, which I think he could have imagined, but also developments like the welfare state and mass democracy and universal suffrage, which might have changed how workers relate to the system or operate within it? So I think it's just a transition.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, two things. One is, I do broadly believe in Marxist theory of history because it 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 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 Angles especially oversaw and was the mentor to all these rising socialist parties. So he was very close.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Familiar with this, but I have 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. So they definitely would not agree with that. But I am not familiar enough. Anarchism runs a gamut from left to right in interesting work.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 getting hopefully three, four or five percent of the vote, maybe a lot more in the same way that in the US or Republic, we could right now have a monarchist party. No one's going to support a monarchist party in the US in serious numbers.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“States trying to merge out of colonialism. They were in places like China and Russia, autocratic countries, and never in an advanced capitalist country. Now, In Marxist theory of history, even as interpreted by a lot of smart Marxists, like G.A. Cohen and others, 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. I think socialism is something that ought to happen.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, workers are dependent on, capitalists are dependent on workers, but the dependency is obviously symmetrical in the sense that workers are also dependent on capitalists, but in fact it's an asymmetrical dependency in that ordinary workers need their jobs more than capitalists need the contribution of individual workers. So it became kind of a collective action problem where you would need the mass of workers to get together decide to change things, but also people would be afraid because they'd be dependent on their jobs for their livelihood and so on. So revolution became a lot harder than people thought, especially in democratic countries where workers had certain outlets and certain powers and rights and responsibility. You know, it's no surprise that where you did have socialist revolutions that were in places like the third world post-colonial”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But even though workers are now producing all this tremendous wealth, and even though productive forces had been matured in such a way, they were ultimately taken away from all the wealth that they were created. They got some of it back. They were in wealthier societies, but they were all there collectively together producing this wealth. And that was a potent force. So Marx theorized that would lead to a revolutionary change in a socialist direction. I think, in fact, what we saw was that”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of lecture people all day, right? And you had kings and rulers and bureaucrats and traders and so on. You have a more complex division of labor, but also more inequity driving out of that. Capitalism was a revolutionary system because it took away, one, it made us tremendously more productive. It expanded production beyond our wildest imaginations, but it also no longer bound workers to their lord or manner or whatever else. They were now free to move, free to engage in contracts with employers and so on.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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 division of labor and appropriated more of the surplus for themselves. And they weren't involved in productive labor. In early print of society, everybody's involved in productive labor. Later on, you had castes of priests who did nothing but kind of pray and write.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 us to socially create wealth on a mass scale, but that wealth 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 socialist society.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No economic system, but socialism in the Soviet sense, and it was turned into. 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. 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 on normative grounds because I have certain beliefs about the equality of people because I believe in it 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 un”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly What it can tell us is, as a friend put it, the sex appeal of blue jeans or whatever else, you know, that's beyond what Marxism is meant to do.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, fundamentally, I'm a Marxist. I fundamentally believe in the broad contours of historical materialism. But I think we should be clear what Marxist theory tells us and what it doesn't tell us. I think Marxist theory tells us pertinent things about how societies evolve, about how the distribution of resources work in any given society, who owns, who doesn't, how the conflict, distributional conflicts, and so on. I think Marxism can tell us a lot.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Conflict be eradicated? And in part, you could say that. Why? I think it's because of popular pressure in organizations. So you could say kind of the pro worker socialist organizing part of it, making it less normal. If you're a capitalist, you could say, well, markets are more interlinked. So war is even more irrational. I don't really have a firm answer, whatever it is. I think it's a good thing.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a very Marxist idea that I both appreciate in one way, but on the other hand, it's kind of scary, which is that, you know, human history is only now beginning before we were in prehistory. But in the future, we'll be in kind of real history. I think that a lot of really important history has already happened. And I think posterity will remember it. And I think that it will be easier to sign certain people the role of villains, the people not to engage in the contentious topic off topic of Ukraine or whatever else, but the idea that one government or man would launch a war to recover or to take several hundred square miles of territory and tens of thousands of people die, I think seems absurd to us many people today, luckily. But it would not have seemed absurd 56 years ago. It would have just been a normal thing, right? These kind of territorial disputes and so on. And I think, you know, projecting in the future, I think within our lifetimes, we'll live to see that kind of”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like Liverpool and a bunch of peasants will die, you know, just kind of on the face of it, it just seems kind of ridiculous that these different places would have their own banners and lords and armies. I think in the long run, you might have to zoom out a thousand years, but in the long run, people will say the same about nation states and standing armies and battles over specks of dirt that mean nothing in a cosmic sense.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, definitely. And I think that part of what being a socialist is about dreaming in the long term about a different sort of world without, in my mind, needless divisions of people into nations with standing armies. I'm sure we'll still have pride about where we're from and there'll still be distinctive cultural features and so on about where we're from. We definitely would, at least for the foreseeable future, be divided into places as administrative units, but the idea that there should be a Mexican army and an American army and a Russian army, an Ukrainian army is just on the face of it. I think in the long run will be seen as ridiculous, just like we see it as ridiculous today looking back at the idea that, you know, a lord from London would be engaged in civil strife with a lord from”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And no amount of advanced fighter jets is going to make a difference. But I try to avoid crude or causal connections, even though there are relationships. It's kind of like the old slogan, which was quite an effective slogan in the early 2000s. And my first anti-war marches when I was a teenager, I definitely have shouted at the kind of no war for oil. correct in that it gets to what people's senses of like what's going on how it's bad but also like analytically it's kind of wanting to explain what really happened or why we ended up in the you know in the middle east which is like a much more complex geopolitical story”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of it's government contracts, but it's privately produced, right? My company's like Lockheed Martin and things like that. You could draw a very crude materialist connection between any of these things and to kind of prove an ideological point. But we could produce just as many arms and then just bury them or never fire them off or whatever else. Obviously, there are companies that have a vested interest in heightening up tensions or saying that we need to buy a new weapon system to be prepared for a conventional war with China, Russia. Meanwhile, I think we all know that if there's going to be conventional war between these countries, it's going to lead to something worse.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Countries have gotten more developed as the world has changed. We've actually seen less and less war. Like I won't dispute Pinker on this. I think it's true. Obviously, Putin's invasion of Ukraine and the conflict in Ethiopia is kind of an exception. But on the whole, I think we're going in that direction. But I think it's always been a major organizing plank of socialists against a war and against just kind of this sense of right-wing nationalism and national identity that often leads to war. And obviously not everyone on the right has embraced that. A lot of libertarians are consistently anti-war as well. But I think the right ideologically has been associated with war, even if some advocates of capitalism have not been.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More, I'm opposed to imperialism, the domination of strong nations dominating smaller nations. I wouldn't call myself a pacifist. I think most socialists wouldn't call themselves pacifists because there are some struggles that are worth fighting for. You know, there's national liberation struggles and so on where if there's no democratic avenue for change, positive change has been made through armed revolts around colonialism and whatnot. But we're living in an age where hopefully, you know, I know neither of us have children, our children or children children in the future won't have to live through war. And that is one thing.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think that traditionally in the socialist movement, war was associated with capitalist competition and inter-national competition. And you can look at World War I as very much a case where different nations were competing with each other and developing quite violent rivalries that was in part based on competition in the periphery over access to markets and colonies and whatever else. So it was very easy to draw a direct correlation. I am opposed to”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Honestly, it's been so many years since I read it. I think it was more about, I think it was actually more economically focused, but I would need to go back and is.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Albert Einstein wrote an article for the first issue of this left-wing magazine that's actually still publishing today called Monthly Review in I think 1949 and his article is called Why Socialism I don't think it's paywalled so people should check it out but yeah Einstein was one”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Working with the left as it was constructed then and building some sort of mass space for not just rights but redistribution.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Martin Luther King, I think, broadly called himself at various points in his life a Christian socialist or a Democratic socialist, especially after his speech against the Vietnam War and the Riverside Church, I think that was 67, the last years of his life, he became much more involved in struggles against the war and also struggles for workers' rights. He was assassinated when he was at a rally at workers' rights. So he thought the next battle was going to be an economic battle. He had this famous line where he said, I don't just want to integrate the lunch counter if it means that we can't afford to order a burger while we're there. That was a line along those lines. And I think that got to his point where the civil rights struggle was part of a step building some sort of wider movement. So he and these other civil rights leaders were very much interested in working with organized labor.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even though they weren't themselves socialists, but it was a very materialistic struggle. And I think a lot of this has been co-opted into just some sort of vague and just disconcerting complaints about language or culture and so on.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, because anti-racism was really about the struggle of people for equal rights and voting. It was about the struggle for people who were trapped into bad neighborhoods because they couldn't get decent jobs and their neighborhoods were redlined or whatever else. It was really like a struggle for survival. And what was the main demands, like the language of this one, it was the march for jobs and freedom. It was the slogan, I am a man, you know, asserting the kind of universal dignity of people. This is what the civil rights movement was about. And it wasn't surprised there was a lot of self-described socialists, people like Baird, Baird Rustin, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr. I mean, these were people who were Ella Baker. They were socialists, you know, and I think a lot of Americans agree with them with their immediate demand.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Agree or disagree with it. It's a very material plane. So instead, they look at comedians who said the wrong thing, or they look at all sorts of other ways to make change. It's not really making a change. It's just making them look bad and making our culture worse. And I think that that's where a lot of it comes from. I think that a lot of the left, even the left that's much more into battles over race and lots of other stuff, like real serious, anti-racist on the left. Of course, I'm an anti-racist, but a lot of my work is focused on the primacy of class. But even these people are very concerned about material struggles and issues, and they don't really care about they think are ephemeral kind of issues.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, for me, now that we've won those rights, a lot of our battle for change needs to go beyond the representational realm and needs to really reground itself in the material bread and butter struggles of ordinary people trying to survive, the battle for good healthcare for all Americans and so on. These are my immediate demands. I think there's a segment of American liberalism that doesn't want to go in that confrontational economic direction and wants a scared away from battles over things like universal healthcare and so on and really are just still caught at this battle over rights and representation. And it's devolved in such a way that they feel like they need to make change the way they make change is only through interventions and culture because they don't really have the same sense of class and class struggle.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we might need to just take it case by case for an example by example because honestly I would have to think about a particular case but let's just say generally that a lot of American liberalism Rightly sees the revolution around the civil rights and later the extension of this rights revolution for gay rights and so on as being a very positive achievement in the last half century. And I completely agree.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I mean, not people who know my work. I mean, more generally, I think a lot of people on the right, even in the center, I think might have the idea that a lot of the far left wants to censor them. I think some of the center-left wants to censor them. But I think on the far left, on the Marxists or socialist left, I think that free speech is more or less the norm.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's no tension. And in part, I think that it is very condescending or patronizing to assume that people can't take debate, that people can't either as a society or individual visually be engaged in the exchange of ideas without, or even very vigorous debate without being broken by it. It's just not the case. I'm basically a free speech absolutist. I mean, I would draw the line, and obviously direct incitements of violence or certain other speech like that, but in general.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What Stalin did actually too it's not just capitalists, but what Stalin did was he sacrificed whole generations because he thought that he was building something for the future, for future Russians to enjoy and for future people of the world to enjoy. And actually that analogy that I just gave by the pyramids was written by Karl Kotsky, the German socialist, anti-Stalinist critic, when he was complaining about US journalists and others going to Russia in the 1930s and marveling at all the new industries. Are these people blind to the suffering behind these things that they're marveling about?”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have produced often, I think people today just look at the end outcome. Like we go to the pyramids and we'll marvel at the pyramids and the human achievement that it took to make it happen, but we won't stop to think about all the suffering that went into the making of that thing. So I think we kind of lean in the opposite direction where we marvel at our achievements, but we don't often think about the suffering or exploitation that went into certain human achievements. I would love a society in which we could marvel at things and not have to worry about the exploitation that was involved because there was no exploitation or oppression involved. There was just human engineer and creativity and collaboration.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source