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

If you have a bunch of people working for 40 plus hours a week and you also have some unemployed people who would like more employment, then it's not a zero sum game.

You could reduce hours to 35 hours and still maintain the same output by employing more people to kind of fill the slack in hours.

So one, I think it's a solidaristic thing in working class movements between unemployed and employed workers.

I also think that, yeah, it gives people more time.

So Marx was a big advocate in his day of a 10-hour bill in the UK that would have reduced the hours of working time and reduced child labor and other things as well.

And part of it was...

This is a radical demand because it's reducing the sphere, as you saw, of exploitation.

So it's putting limits on how much time the capitalists can take from ordinary workers and how much freedom they would have.

With healthcare, one, I just think it's a government healthcare system.

You could tell me that you don't want it in the US, but you can't tell me it doesn't work because we've seen it work in every other major industrial system in different forms.

So there's different varieties.

In the UK, for instance, they have a national health service in which medical personnels and hospitals are run directly by the state.

It's almost like a mini Soviet system, to be honest, but just for healthcare.

And it works pretty well just for healthcare.

Yeah.

And I think it's one example of the way in which you could actually take the market.

So I give you a vision of socialism that involves a lot of market, but I think there's certain spheres where you could remove the market from and still have an efficient system, in part because this is an area in which people don't have

obviously for cosmetic procedures, whatever, they have preferences.

But for most routine things that people do in healthcare, they just need to see a doctor.

You know, they need to get diagnosed.

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