Bhaskar Sunkara

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1,609 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2022 last heard Dec 2022

Bhaskar Sunkara’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · 22 Dec 2022 podcast

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 transit, things like our natural monopolies of lots of types, you know, 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

would be the private sphere of worker-controlled cooperatives competing against each other, weak firms failing, successful firms expanded.

I 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.

No, 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 of 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 U.S., you might see a lot more corruption in 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, 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 precincts and whatever else in the U.S.

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 a...

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 with jobs.

The way to social advancement was through the bureaucracies.

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