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

Let's say me and you are trying to with different groups of people, we're trying to figure out how to build a crossing of the Hudson River.

And for various reasons, you and the people around you want to build a bridge.

Me and the people around me need want to build a tunnel.

That's a question that you will probably need a mediation for, right?

You'll need one.

It's a big project.

So there'll be a very complex division of labor and so on.

But even beyond that, just politically, you will need the state to mediate the difference.

You'll need to have a vote, have a vote that people trust, have institutions that people trust and so on to make a decision.

Society is never going to go beyond that decision making.

I just wonder why we would have to.

If the state is democratic and responsive, the state is an authoritarian state.

So it might not be called a state, but it would function as a state, right?

But why not just call it a state?

But in other words, if you don't have something like that, then don't you have a greater risk of tyranny or a tyrant emerging in the vacuum?

So I think people's fear of the state is what would happen if the state had too much power.

And I think that's a legitimate fear.

That's why we have democratic kind of checks on state power and certain guarantees of freedom and so on.

But...

Yeah, I guess I just wonder, I'm more afraid of the vacuum and not having a democratic responsive state and what the world would turn into.

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