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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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 surplus.
that controlled that division of labor and appropriated more of that surplus for themselves, and they weren't involved in productive labor.
In the 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 and 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, right?
It expanded production beyond our wildest imaginations, but it also no longer bound workers to their lord or manor or whatever else.
They were now free to move, free to engage in contracts with employers and so on.
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 they were created.
They got some of it back.
They were in wealthy 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 revolution or change in a socialist direction.
I think, in fact, what we saw was that, 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 to decide to change things, but also people would be afraid because they'd be dependent on their jobs for their livelihood and so on.
Showing 781–800 of 1,609 · page 40 of 81
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