Bhaskar Sunkara

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, you know, them potentially being able to go to another employer.

But even then, it's kind of a potentially a race to the bottom if, you know, you can't get more than $2 an hour from any employer in your 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 gotten wealthier and more productive as a society.

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, you know, 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, you know, 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, a lot of these rights that we have 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 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?