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, I don't want to fight the hypothetical. So, I'll say equality. I am concerned with equality, but I don't think the two are necessarily always in tension. But also, when you think about all the great things that human beings”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Government wants to maintain the tax revenue that they need to pay for services. So we already, I think, have incentive structures that you could say that some people might just, I think, disagree with the normative thing of like, why would people have to own their own means of production, control their workplaces or whatever else? Why do we need this level of equality? Can't we just get by with our existing system, but just like make things a little bit easier for capitals to make money, then everyone will benefit or whatever else? I mean, that's a normative question. And my vision of socialism, there'll be plenty of, you know, multiple parties with different views and perspectives trying to either push us deeper into more radical forms of socialism or on the other hand to kind of roll back to more capitalist forms of government. So I think that, again, you can't try to make up a perfect system and try to implement it. You have to.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About it this way the workers themselves are incentivized and are shaped by market forces too, right? They're trying to respond to consumer needs and preferences. They're trying to expand market share. They're trying to make money. So it requires no kind of leap into these people are going to be more altruistic or whatever else, even on purely bourgeois terms the same way you would maybe justify competitive capitalist firms. I think you could justify this system as long as you think that people elected management can perform just as well. I think based on the experiences of cooperatives, we've seen that they can. Then at the state level, state bureaucracies have their own sort of sets of incentives. In most systems that already have extensive state bureaucracies, these people at high levels are appointed or elected. They're held to certain standards. At the national level, a national level.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do not, right? And decide for whatever reason or go down a different path. And you could say maybe among that group of the upper middle class, there is a meritocracy, right? But they're actually given those opportunities to make their own decisions and to fail, whereas many, many other people, the vast majority of American society, I would say 60 plus percent, don't really get those opportunities to make those choices to begin with. And I would aspire to the type of world, at least as a first step in which our only inequalities are based on our unequal, innate kind of distributions of talent.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have been unequal distribution of talent, of course. So if we lived in society in which there was some level of acceptable inequality and it's a normative kind of to question of how much we would say is acceptable, right? And that inequality was based on this unequal distribution of talent, then I think that would be fine with me, right? That would actually be a meritocracy. What I see in the US is often, okay, so if you are an upper middle class or rich kid and you get a good education K through 12, out of those people, there will be some that work extra hard and go on to do incredible things.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, I think in theory, maybe capitalism birds, meritocracy. But I think in practice, anyone watching this or you and me would think of some of the people we know that work the hardest and they're often working class people, working the food service industry or whatever else, right? I think we don't have, in practice, I don't think we actually live in a society that rewards people for hard work. I think we reward people for a combination of accidents of birth plus hard work.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are prosecuted and investigated, and there's internal controls, a civilian board review, and kind of an internal investigators within police departments or whatever else, there will be less corruption over time if people are punished. If you're in a system in which you're running a firm or you're the manager of a firm, an elected manager, and everyone at that firm is trying for more efficiency and trying for more excess profits or whatever else at the end of the day, you know, dividends at the end of the day, then if you try to hire your nephew and he's not good at your job, you're not going to win re-election, right? So you shouldn't, I think no system should rely on a change in culture that come naturally or some sort of individual altruism. I think the systems have to be constructed in such a way that it's not rational to behave poorly.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Getting hooked up in the bureaucracy and advancing within it and not all these were bad people. I don't think Khrushchev was that bad of a person or Gorbachev. This is their mechanism to advancement in systems like this. In the vision of democratic socialism that I propose, the state doesn't have that overriding power to begin with. But I think in either case, corruption has arose in many different systems and has been successfully dealt with. I think on the developmental trajectory of even countries today that we think of as being very corrupt, corruption will fade away as well. But you definitely need a system in which individuals actually are incentivized to act rationally. So if you're in a system in which cops who are corrupt”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it just over time it goes away. So you go from having political machines that were tied to certain, you know, had friends in certain police precincts and whatever else in the US in the 19th century and early 20th century. To now today, that would be a huge scandal and unheard of, right? So I think over time, having an independent court system, having a truly meritocratic civil service can be implemented anywhere. I think though, in the Soviet Union, the extra little bit that happened was you had a bureaucracy that just had so much power because the bureaucracy was producing and distributing everything and everyone was relying on the bureaucracy for jobs. The way to social advancement was through the bureaucracies. So you end up with people like Khrushchev, you know, people going from peasants to supreme leaders of countries just through.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think in a lot of countries it's seen as the cost of doing business, right? Now, in particular, countries built on a system of central planning or just state allocation resources where the state both produces and allocates and things run through bureaucracies, then I think you're much more apt to have corruption than in a system with just a smaller sphere for the state. So, for example, if you're in a hypothetical version of the US, you might see a lot more corruption. Like the post office, but you wouldn't have that corruption in your workplace, so you kind of learn to go around that. For one thing, even in state sectors, you can have, and this often is the case in democratic countries, you have a transparent civil service where people who are corrupt are prosecuted by judges, where it's frowned upon.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think any system has potential for corruption. I think it depends on how good your civil service is, how much oversight do you have to resolve a problem once it arises?”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things like our natural monopolies of lots of types I think can be done very well through planning. And we already have plenty of examples. But a lot of this society, I think, would be the private sphere of worker-controlled cooperatives competing against each other, weak firms failing, successful firms expanding.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think the primary mechanism in this private sector under socialism would be a market mechanism, firms competing against each other to expand, connected to a system of public financing. But even at that level, the individual bankers and public banks and so on would be operating based on their own rationality. And the state would certainly shape investment decisions, but maybe no more than they do in a lot of capitalist systems. So the state might already today in a lot of countries decide, you know, we want to invest in green technology. So it's going to be favorable rates for people or tax credits for people investing in green technology. So the state already shapes investment. I think what should be centrally planned, and this is where I'm proud to sound like an old school socialist, is things like healthcare, things like”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or something close to what a VC would offer today. So I only kind of go into these details, not because to say that a system doesn't have to in advance map out all the different possibilities, but I think it does have to be willing to accept a lot of things that we know today. You know, I can't give you a version of socialism that everything's going to be fine. We're going to live harmoniously and we won't have these sort of tensions. And, you know, you could hunt in the evening and, you know, fish in the afternoon and write criticism, whatever else. I do hope that there's horizons beyond this that we can aspire to. I do have those visions. But for now, I think our task as socialists is to imagine a, you know, five minutes after midnight, like what can we do right away within our Our lifetime vision.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How would they decide who to invest in and who to not invest in, who to give a loan for expansion to and who not to? Because you don't want it to be like, oh, I'm going to invest my nephew's firm and not this other firm, or I'm going to invest in this guy's firm because he's an Italian, but not this guy's firm because he's Albanian or whatever else. Just make it rational at the level of their goal is just like any other investment person at a bank today to maintain a certain risk profile and to have an interest yield and decide to invest on that basis. So there's a huge automotive firm that has been on business for 50 years that needs a little operating cash, like, yeah, they could get their $50 million, their 3% loan if you have some crazy blue sky idea and you manage to get it to that point. Maybe you and your friends would get it at 12%.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could be benchmarks set for different occupations or wages. And the reason why you would want to benchmark at a worker-controlled firm is that you don't want workers self-exploiting themselves in order to gobble up market share or because you don't want them collectively deciding, okay, we're going to invest in this longer-term time horizon and outcompete other people that way. So you might say, okay, if you do this sort of clerical work, you have to be paid the equivalent of $15 an hour. That's a minimum. But on top of that, you get dividends from excess profits. And I think it would also have to be combined with public financing, for expansions and for development, which could be done in quite a competitive way. So you could have a variety of banks. In my vision, you know, state-owned banks.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think that any society is going to have to make distributional choices. You could imagine a variety of capitalism in which workers are paid quite little, but there's extremely high taxation and there's redistribution after the fact. You can imagine a system in which there's less taxation after the fact, but there's more guarantees and regulations of how much people are paid before the fact. In my vision of a social society, there would be similar way that unions work in my exam, the centralized bargaining unions would work, that bargain at the sectoral level and not just at the enterprise level like our unions do today.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The state has some sort of role in fostering firms in either a my version of a socialist economy or a capitalist economy or whatever else to help with these time horizon problems. So I won't dispute that workers could play a role or wage demands could play a role in time horizon problems, but more often than that, it's coming from investors, it's coming from just a host of other market pressures that people might have. And I would say that in the real world, a lot of investment funds don't come from just retained earnings. It comes from a lot of sources. So I think this is a problem that could be solved through public policy, but definitely exists today as well.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is just a problem with a lot of capitalism, which is about short-termism, right? Because the same thing. But your investors want dividends right away. So you have to take away from your long-term R&D or other plans and deliver short-term dividends. That's often why a lot of, I think R&D is often rooted in state institutions and research and whatever else is being drawn. And also, I think that that's a reason why.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I disagree with the premise because I think even taking your example, that would be better for society. If a firm cannot pay its workers a living wage, but its competitors can, then that firm will either figure out a way to innovate, develop new techniques, new markets, new ways to be productive, or it should go out of business. And it would be better for it to go out of business than to stay in business or to be artificially kept in business in any sort of way. And”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Concede. You have to bargain collectively at any level. If you're in a ordinary worker, and there are some exceptions, but that's for certain highly skilled workers. But even in those cases, of course, all workers are skilled. I mean, just the technical definition, even in those cases, a lot of those workers have to bargain collectively as well in order to get more wealth. But they cannot make their demands so excessive that their firm gets out of business. So the workers only are workers as long as they're gainfully employed. So often unions will try to select their wage demands at such a level that it ensures that their firm will stay in business.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I was an ordinary worker like a CVS or something, if I didn't like my conditions and I went to my boss and said, hey, I need a two dollar raise and I need to be home by 8.30 because I have obligations at home. The boss would probably say, I'm sorry, that's not possible, right? You know, maybe try the ride aid down the street or the Walgreens down the street or whatever. Now, if I went to the boss at a place like CVS or even better, if all the pharmaceutical workers at Wright Aid and CVS Walgreens went to our bosses and said, listen, we collectively need to $2 more and better hours, shorter shifts or whatever else, then they would probably have no choice.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I would disagree. So I think a union's interest is in what's collectively bargaining on behalf of workers. Because in certain cases, I am right now a manager at the nation magazine. If I have a problem with my working conditions or I need a raise or whatever else, I could with my skill set, my background, my role in the company, I could go to my boss, the owner of the nation and say, okay, I need to renegotiate my contract on these terms. I can bargain, right?”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But instead, they're accepting slightly lower wages than they would have otherwise had in return for the company having excess profits, that they're through both the state, their union, and sometimes there's worker councils or whatever else, they're playing a role in saying, okay, we're going to make sure this excess profit is actually invested productively in order to expand employment and just output.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is just sectoral or actually in this case centralized wage bargaining. So setting the wages at a level that Ford can afford, but a level that would probably be too expensive to Chrysler and the automotive sector would benefit GM because they're drawing what we could call excess profits because GM If the GM itself could potentially have to deal with just the enterprise of GM workers bargaining for wages and if they saw their profitability was high they would know their leverage and they would say pay us even more or else we're going to go on strike.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These expanding sectors. So, in other words, you're now in a situation where the state has a pretty big role in your economy, taking a lot of your money and taxes. Unions are really shaping your life as a capitalist far more than would happen in a country like the United States. And yet still, despite your more limited economic freedom, you're still creating a more productive economy. So it could work. The system has to be designed right. And I think social democracies were designed the right way. I think any future democratic socialism after social democracy would have to be designed the right way.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what that would do is say to Ford, okay, Ford will stay in business because they'll be able to meet the wage demands. Chrysler might go out of business because they won't be able to meet the demands or they'll have to really adapt really quickly. They might have to lay off people. They might have to restructure. So union knows this in advance and all the auto workers know this. But the most efficient manufacturer, GM, now has excess profits because if they were negotiating with just the GM workers, the GM workers might even have been able to demand more. But instead these workers are pegging their wage demands to Ford's level and GM is, in theory, able to expand and employ more people and adopt new production techniques with their surplus. Then those Chrysler workers would be absorbed by the state by actor labor market policies and then put back to work for GM or for the”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, all these workers in your sector are all unionized. They're all Swedish UAW, whatever the equivalent is, members. And they're all paid the same. And the union is setting through marketing. The union is setting the wages across the sector. But the unions, and let's say GM is the most productive of these companies, Ford is number two. Chrysler is number three. The unions would intentionally set the wages, set their benchmark to forward in the middle.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, what would you do if your capitalist competitors in the US were able to pay workers $10 an hour and you have to pay them twenty? You would probably, and assuming you can't just flee or shut down or whatever else, you'd probably find ways to use labor-saving technology, right? That power of the high wages might encourage you to invest more in technology and to utilize people's times better so they're more productive at work. So they're not just sitting around or whatever else. So this really happened in practice in this Scandinavian countries, in part because it was combined with a certain type of pattern wage bargaining. So I'll explain this really simply, but let's pretend that you're in a Sector with three different companies, I would say an automotive sector, and I'll just say one is GM, one is Ford, one is Chrysler.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The premise of okay, economic freedom to take entrepreneurial risk, to start something new is limited. There's all sorts of factors in which it's too difficult to start a firm and it benefits no one really, except for whatever bureaucracy might be taking their 15% cut. But in general, I think in advanced economies, it doesn't really work that way. So think about it this way. If you're pretend like we're back, I'm sorry to go to Scandinavia again, but this is a good example. Let's say you're back in the 1970s in Scandinavia or whatever else, you're in a country with extremely Powerful unions. So the unions have a lot of labor rights, the state has certain high taxation, certain guarantees on you too. But you're a capitalist there.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I could definitely accept some of that premise one within capitalism, you want a bigger pie than if you divide up that pie, you know, even if the bottom 10% or the working class share, let's say, is less as a percentage, it's still more in raw terms. So it's better for everyone. The part that I would dispute is more economic freedom versus less economic freedom. So there's obviously some countries in which capitalism doesn't work and maybe economic freedom plays a role. Like if you're in a country like Egypt or India with the highly or previously highly bureaucratic system, so you need licenses to do anything and you need to run things for the state or you need to bribe someone to get an incorporation done or whatever else. That's in case in which I would accept”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cause to have you totally lose your shirt, or maybe should you just have to rebound? Maybe you have less money for consumption or whatever else, and you'll be on your way onto bigger and better things in a few months.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The state, right? And there could be active labor market policies to retrain people to go into expanding sectors. Or your sector is now obsolete, but here. Trained and hair some resources to kind of help you along your training. And then there's a bunch of firms hiring. So go on your way. Then also just with an expanded welfare state being destitute in certain countries, being unemployed in certain countries is easier than in other countries or situations. So you still can fall back on that mechanism and also in my vision of market socialism, a democratic socialism, there would be an expanded state sector. Not anything you can imagine, but the way in which there's more of a state sector in countries like Norway or Denmark than there is in the US. So there would be various forms of state employment and whatever else. So, I mean, I think that the real question is, should being bad at your job or getting fired for any reason or getting laid off, should that be a”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out, or maybe they would have progressive discipline process, which is first you have to get a verbal feedback and then maybe a written performance review. Then you could be fired. I mean, that's how it works in a lot of workplaces with either unions or with just basic job security. Most countries, that's how it works because there's not at will employment in most countries. So I think that the real tension is If you fire someone If you're condemning them to destitution then morally you'd really feel something there as you should as a human being concerned about other people but in a social system or even basic social democratic system there would be mechanisms to take care of that person so one if a firm is failing for any reason they're getting out compete or whatever else those workers would then land in the hands just for a little bit”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think there would be certain. So maybe another way to put it is think about if you're a partner at a law firm, right, I don't really know how law firms work. So I probably shouldn't use this analogy. But correct me if I'm wrong. But let's say you're a partner, you kind of have equity in your law firm or something beyond your billable hours. And let's say you're going to be fired from your law firm or they're laying off people or whatever else they could just get rid of you, but they would also have to figure out how to kind of buy you out too after a certain point. So I think that like in a cooperative firm, you probably have a system where you, after a certain point of working productively, you probably have a period where you get fired really quickly, no matter what. But once you have job security kicks in, you would be able to be a process. It would probably be like, you know, a day or two process to figure out.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think that any successful model of socialism that involves a market, you need two things. One is at the micro level, you need the ability to fire people and for them to exit firms, which might be a slower process in cooperative-based firms than it is in a capitalist firm without a union. But it would be probably akin to the process that would happen in a capitalist firm of which there are many with unions. So you need that. And then at the macro level, you need firm failure. You need to avoid a dilemma that happened in Soviet style economies, which was soft budget constraints and firms basically not being allowed to fail because the government was committed to full employment. The firms employed people. So even inefficient firms were at the end of the day, they knew they were going to be propped up by the government. And they would be given all the resources they would need no matter how.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No doubt that in workplaces, workers know how to productively do their task in ways that their manager might not know. I think we've all been in workplaces where we've had managers who kind of don't know what you do or whatever else. And I think that collectively if incentivize, we could have them, one, instead of hoarding that information, since they're getting a stake in production and so on, they'd be able to more freely share it and be able to reshape how their day-to-day work happens. And also with elected managers, you kind of take that up the chain. I think you would have perfectly efficient market-based firms that could exist without capitalists.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That if tomorrow all those regulations went away, capitalists would fight to pay people as little as possible and we'd be back in 19th century capitalism. And not because they're bad people. Because if I'm running a firm and all of a sudden my competition is able to find a labor pool and is paying people less than me, I'm going to be undercut because they'll be able to take some of that extra savings and invest into new technology or whatever else and they'll gobble up my market share before long. And then also beyond that, I do think there's a normative question here, which is, now, do we believe that ordinary people have a capacity to be able to make certain decisions about their work? Do we believe they know more about their work than their bosses? Now, I don't think that's not true at every level, but I think there's”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So maybe at some point the quantitative difference of just more and more wealth means that even if in the abstract the division between a worker and a capitalist is real, if that worker is earning a quarter million dollars a year and has a good life and only has to clock in 35 hours a week, 30 hours a week and has four weeks of vacation, then like, isn't it just like an abstract or philosophical difference? So I think you could level those two arguments. What I would say is that one. Lot of these rights that we fought for are constantly being eroded and they're under attack, in part because the economic power that capitalists have bleeds into our political democracy as well. There's constant lobbying for all sorts of labor market deregulations and so on. I fundamentally believe that.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And all those things are, in my mind, doses of socialism within capitalism. Because what you're doing is you are taking the autonomy of capitalists to do whatever they want with the people, contracted to them. And the only thing stopping them is them potentially being able to go to another employer. But even then, it's kind of potentially a race to the bottom if you can't get more than $2 an hour from any employer in your market. You're going to have to live with it. So one factor is we have built in those protections. So we've taken enough socialism into capitalism that you could say that at a certain point maybe it makes a qualitative difference and not just a quantitative difference in people's lives. The other thing is over time we've”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'll play Devil's Advocate, which is that maybe one could argue that in its purest, earliest stage, capitalism was based on a stark difference. But then since then two things have happened. One, a bunch of socialists and workers have organized to guarantee certain rights for working class people, certain protections. So then our system now, there are certain safety nets less in the US than in other countries, but in a lot of countries are pretty extensive safety nets.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the contradiction exists to begin with. And if anything, this system, which I'm proposing Democratic Socialism, would be kind of a resolution of this conflict, this dilemma, this thing that has always existed since a chieftain and follower and so on. We've had class divisions since the Neolithic Revolution. I think this is a democratic road out of that tension and that division of humanity into people who own and people who have nothing to give but their ability to work.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, in certain populist distinctions, the The division is basically arbitrary or made up. Us versus them polarization, depending who the us and who the them are. It's truly something that's manufactured. But capitalism itself as a system, as a system based on class division, whether you're supported or opposed, I think we should acknowledge it's based on class division. That is the thing creating that polarization. Now, I think what a lot of what socialists try to do is we try to take bits of working class opposition to capitalism, to their lives, to their way they're treated at work, and so on. And yes, we do try to organize on those bases to help workers take collective action, to help them organize in political parties, and so on to represent their interest economic and otherwise.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Total state ownership of production meant that the authoritarianism of the party state could go even deeper into the lives of ordinary people compared to other horrific dictatorships like Pinochet's Chile and so on, when maybe you could find some solace just at home or whatever else you didn't have the same sort of totalitarian control of people's lives. But I would say that socialism itself has yield different outcomes. Now on the question of polarization, Guess that implies that this polarization, this distinction is a distinction that isn't real in society and that is kind of being manufactured or generated.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of working class people, then they truly honored the system because when they lost power, they lost power. They left power. There's plenty of cases like that across Europe and the world and in other countries like Korea and elsewhere where the workers' movements, the most militant, the most class-centric workers. South Africa is the same way, created democratic systems. Russia, I think a lot of what happened had to do with the fact that it was never a democratic country. It was ruled by a party. And the party itself was very easy to shift from a somewhat democratic party in Lenin's Day to an authoritarian one in Russia. And there was no distinction then between the party and the state. So your authoritarian party then became authoritarian total control over the entirety of the state.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The battle in Sweden, for instance, was about establishing political democracy, establishing true representation for workers. And that's how the parties became popular. Same thing in Germany, too. Then it was the Social Democrats who were able to build political democracy. Then on top of that, add layers of economic democracy, social democracy. The Swedish Social Democrats ruled basically uninterrupted from the early 1930s until 1976. It's kind of crazy to think about, but they were just in government. They were the leading member of government that a few different coalition partners would shift. Sometimes they were with the agrarians, sometimes they were with the communists briefly, but they ruled uninterrupted and they lost an election in 1976, and they just left power, and then they got back into power in the 80s. So in other words, like they created a democratic system, of course, with mass importance.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first of all, I think it's worth remembering that the socialist movement had different outcomes across Western Europe and Eastern Europe. And in some of these countries, in Western Europe, there wasn't actually democracy before the workers movement and before the socialist movement.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A capitalist class. This class hasn't been individually these people haven't been taken to re-education camps or whatever else, but they're just no longer in this position. And they're now part of the economy in other ways. They'll probably be the first set of highly competent technocrats and managers and so on. They'll probably be very well compensated for their time and expertise and whatever else. But to me, both the practical end of things, taking away this ability to withhold investment and increasing our ability to democratically and shape investment priorities and to continue down the road of social democracy. And on normative grounds, my kind of egalitarian belief that ordinary people should have more stake in their lives in the work. Leads me beyond social democracy to socialism.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Treated like Kyrnes, and in part because I think that ordinary workers would much prefer a system in which over time they accrued shares and ownership where they got, in addition to base kind of wage, they got dividends from their firm being successful and that they figured out how to large firms, they're not going to be making day-to-day decisions by Democratic vote, right? But maybe you would elect representatives, elected management once every year or two, depending on your operating agreement and so on. That's kind of my vision of a socialist society. And this sounds, I hope, like agree or disagree, like it would not be a crazy leap into year zero, right? That this could be maybe a way in which we could take a lot of what's existing in society, but then just add this on top. But what it would mean is a society with”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I need more of an upper hand, right? So their economic power is then. Challenging the Democratic mandate of Swedish workers that were voting for the Social Democratic Party and were behind this advance. So to me, what socialism is in part is taking the means of production, right, where this capitalist power is coming from and making it socially owned so that ordinary workers can control their workplaces, can make investment decisions, and so on. Does that mean total state ownership of everything or a planned economy? I don't think that makes any sense. You know, I think that we should live in a society in which markets are harnessed and regulated and so on. My main problem is capitalist ownership, in part on normative grounds, just because I think that it doesn't make sense that we celebrate democracy and all these other spheres, but we have workplaces that are just”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source