Bhaskar Sunkara
speaker
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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No economic system.
But socialism, in the Soviet sense, when it was turned into...
You 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.
You know, 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 because
on normative grounds, because I have certain beliefs about the equality of people, because I believe 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 unscientific or unserious thing to say, this is my framework from beginning to end, you know, for the rest of my life.
I 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 it to socially create wealth on a mass scale.
But that wealth is that process 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 a socialist society.
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, right?
Showing 761–780 of 1,609 · page 39 of 81
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