A Future Beyond Capitalism? Socialism Explained, by Second Thought
Video desciption
A Future Beyond Capitalism? Socialism Explained. | |
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| Created by | Second Thought |
| Created in | 11 December 2020 |
| Content length | 26:25 |
| Link | Video |
Considering how frequently the media and public figures misuse the words Marxism, Socialism, and Communism, I thought it would be useful to correct the record. In this episode I go over a brief history of capitalism, why socialism is the best way forward, and correct a few misconceptions.
Transcipt (Unfinished)
This episode was made in collaboration with AzureScapegoat. They cover they run a fantastic channel covering all sorts of leftist topics, so be sure to check out their video after this.
[Music]
"[Clip of Fox news commentator] This is Marxism, and Marxism is based on the belief that no person has any value as an individual."
"[Clip of Skynews commentator] I believe I was one of the first commentators to point out that [Anti-racist protests in the United States] was a very Marxist movement, and the organization is part of a global movement to destroy life as well know it in America and, probably, in the rest of the Western World."
"[Clip of Fox news commentator] [Anti-racist movement in the United States are] just bad. I believe in free enterprise, they're Marxists. I believe in equal opportunity, they believe in government-guaranteed equal outcome."
"[Clip of Donald Trump] We will honor will courage with my administrations' determination to defeat Communism and Socialism, and we will do that in our own country to. We are in the process of doing it right now. The courageous veterans here today bear witness to how Socialism, radical mobs, and violent Communists ruin a nation."
If there's one thing America has down to a science, it's twisting the meaning of words and using them to terrify the population. Evey since the Soviet Union rose to prominence, to the point of completing with the US for global supremacy, the power that be have fought hard to burn the image of Communism and Socialism as great evils into the mind of the average American.
In this episode, we're going to correct the record. There's nothing wrong with criticizing ideas you disagree with, but in order to do that, you have to engage with accurate depictions of those ideas. So, let's talk about America favorite boogeyman – Marxism.
But, before we do that, we need to briefly discuss the history of Capitalism.
Once upon a time, there existed an economic system that was neither Capitalism, nor Communism. Shocking, right? Under this arrangement, lords granted parcels of land to the lower echelons of society, and the recipients, known as vassals, in exchange woud work the land and vow to fight for their lord, should he call upon them.
This was a pretty sweet deal for the nobility, because they got laborers to work their land, grow them food, and fight in their wars. The vassals had little choice other than to enter into these agreements in order to stave off starvation and abject poverty.
This type of arrangement became known as feudalism, and from a modern perspective, it seems outdated and cruel. Fast foward several centuries and we begin to see a fledgling new economic system take its first steps. Somewhere between the 14th and 15th centuries, feudalism lost ground to a market-based system, one that elevated some of the lower tiers of society, creating a new merchant class; not quite peasant but certainly not nobility.
Since that time, various interpretations of market-based economies have been implemented with varying degrees of success around the world.
When proponents of Capitalism say that is raised the standards of living for millions of living people, they're correct: Capitalism has its place in history, and has unquestionably increased global production many times over since the days of feudalism. But just like technology keeps advancing, so too does history need to keep moving, and just like feudalism was overtaken when it became outdated, so too will Capitalism need to be replaced by a superior system.
We have a tendency to believe that history is only something that happened in the past; that we've reached the "end of history." This perspective makes it difficult to see that life and progress are ongoing processes, and that there will come a time when Capitalism seemed just as outdated as feudalism. I believe we're at a point where large portions of the world population are beginning to realize that global-Capitalism is actively making their lives worse. The system having generated such vast oceans of capital in the hands of the powerful that it's left the majority to suffer needlessly, even in tremendously wealthy countries.
This inflection point, the shift in public perception to viewing Capitalism less than favorably, signals the beginning of a massive societal change. Capitalism is falling out of favor, just as feudalism did those hundreds of years ago.
So what exactly is wrong with Capitalism?
This is the part where you may have to grit your teeth and sit throught some things you don't wanna hear.
In America, we've gotten our self-identity so wrapped up in our economic system that we see Capitalism and America as the same thing. Capitalism is our national identity, and therefore any criticism of Capitalism is an attack of the nation itself.
This should not be the case – an economic system is just one way to structure the monetary relations of a country. It's not a national culture. Capitalism is a tool which, in theory, should elevate the people of said country and materially improve their lives.
Let's look at some examples of why this is no longer the case.
We'll start with the most obvious problem, the massive discrepancy between worker and executive compensation and power. Your paycheck isn't actually on how good a job you do, not really. Your boss is in a position of power where he chooses which people to hire and which to fire. The people who work for him produce goods or services which then become his property, and which he then sells to make a profit. Your paycheck is, in reality, determined by your minimum needs and your boss's requirement for labor power in relation to the amount of people competing for jobs.
The more people who are unemployed, that is, the amount of people who are looking for jobs, the easier it is for companies to hire desperate poor people for minimum wage.
In this way, unemployment in society is actually beneficial for capitalists, and having a large reserve of people ready to step-in and work for minimum wage means that the average employee is always living in fear of losing their job. If you make a fuss, if you complain, if you try to get a union involved, there is always someone to take your place.
To the Capitalist, you are expendable; just another cog in the machine, to be replaced at their convenience. It is in your boss's interest to make your paycheck as small as possible, while increasing the prices of goods and services. This maximizes profits for him, but forces you to tighten your belt.
When your boss pays you crumbs compared to what you could be making, and your landlord raises your rent, that leaves you with a low quality of life and less financial mobility.
This all works out beautifully for the owner class, their profits increase year-after-year.
There is, however, a flaw in this system, well, you know, besides the blatant disregard for human life. Unemployed and poorly-paid workers don't make for a profitable market. When workers are paid so little that they can barely afford rent, how can we expect them to buy goods and services on the market? Companies produce more-and-more consumer products, but what happens when the consumers can no longer afford the very goods their labor produces? This creates a snow-ball effect, low wages and precarity lead to an unprofitable market. An unprofitable market means that the production of consumer goods is limited, which inevitably leads to economic depression.
Have you ever noticed that there seems to be an economic crisis, like, once every 10 years? Well, that's actually not by accident. These crises have been happening ever since the very beginning of Capitalism. This upward and downward motion of the market is known as the business cycle, boom and bust, yoyoing from extreme to the other every decade or so. The "boom" comes from the accumulation of wealth; when prices go up and wages go down, companies make money. But if the people are squeezed too hard and the market becomes unprofitable, it then leads to a depression; businesses close, people lose their jobs, debts aren't paid, banks collapse, governments run out of money.
That's an economic crisis, and they're just gonna keep coming, even though every one of them will be dressed up as "once in a lifetime" and "sure to never happen again" just as we heard in 2008 and just like we heard during the corona-crash, which, not to be overly pessimistic, is only a teaser for what we'll see in the next couple of years.
Don't be fooled, Capitalism is unstable by its very nature. The system encourages greed, and because of this, Capitalism will always shoot itself in the foot in the name of short-term gains over long-term stability. Just look at the financial crisis of 2008, the largest upward transfer of wealth in modern American history, until of Covid pandemic, of course.
In short, the stock-market crash was caused because predatory institutions became too greedy. They began offering unstable housing loans to people who would not normally have qualified. This led to millions of people taking on loans that would implode and that they would be unable to pay back. Housing prices went up, creating what is known as a speculative real estate bubble, and, as bubbles do, it burst, triggering the single largest single-day stock market drop in history, up until that point.
Millions of Americans lost their homes, their jobs, their healthcare, and many of them never recovered from the financial devastation. In the wake of millions of evictions and foreclosures, huge corporate real-estate firms and banks snapped up the empty houses at bargin-bin prices, and many of them are held captive at the rental market to this day.
In the end, the average American bore the brunt of the fallout, and the executives and capitalists behind the disaster got off scot-free.
The housing crash is a huge, complicated topic and I would encourage you to read more about it, but the most important thing to realize is that what should have been a completely avoidable catastrophe was inevitable because of our rabid devotion to ever-increasing profits.
We've seen a similar occurrence since the beginning of the pandemic. The richest people in the country have increased their wealth at a staggering rate, while average Americans have again lost their livelihoods and their healthcare, which is a pretty bad thing to lose in the middle of a plague.
But, since providing our citizens with universal healthcare isn't profitable to insurance companies, our healthcare is tied to our employment. When we lose our job, we also lose the right to live in the eyes of our corporate overlords. To them, a human life has no value except for what profits can be extracted from it.
This isn't due to some inherent evil in every corporate executive – it's simply a byproduct of Capitalism.
Capitalists are very much conditioned into being cruel because cutting wages and others actions to workers rewards them with greater profits, and giving their workers benefits like maternity leave punishes them with reduced profits. Even otherwise good people are effected by this. The problem isn't rich people as individuals but Capitalism as a system.
Business leaders learn to see everything in terms of revenue and expenditure; taxes are an expense, rent is an expense, raw materials and machines are expenses, and that means labor is seen as just another expense. Human beings are reduced to numbers on a spreadsheet.
This brings us to our next point: Capitalism does not care about human well-being. The primary concern of every nation should be the well-being of its citizens, but in modern hyper-capitalist countries, the only factor worth considering is the almighty dollar; Profit is the sole driver.
Contrary to what we're taught about classical economics, Capitalism does not follow the law of supply-and-demand. Housing is in huge demand, but it's not profitable to supply it, so people go homeless.
As of 2019, the US had a homeless population of nearly 600,000 people, we also have over 17,000,000 vacant homes. We could house nearly the entire population of the New York Metro area; that's the nearby cities in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. But we won't house just 600,000 people just because it's not profitable, we'd rather have then die of exposure because, under Capitalism, their lives have no inherent value. And remember, those homelessness and empty homes figures are from before the pandemic. We currently have somewhere in the ballpark of 50 million Americans facing eviction or foreclosure because of our toxic system's inablity to handle crises like the Covid pandemic.
This will never change unless we are able to move beyond Capitalism and assert that, yes, humans do have innate value beyond what Capitalists extract from their labor.
And, of course, the problems at home pale in comparison to how wealthy Capitalist nations treat the rest of the world, especially smaller or weaker nations that we can bully. Just about every instance of American foreign intervention in the last 70 years has been in the name of Capital. Whether we're securing oil fields, deposing leaders who want to escape the stranglehold of Imperial rule, or creating environments favorable to US corporations, we're not affraid to use our military to destabilize and destroy other nations and regions in order to make a quick buck.
The Middle East is the most recent example. We've been meddling in the Middle East for decades, we've entered Iraq under false pretenses, propagandizing the American population with false intelligence reports. The global community knew there were no weapons of mass-destruction in Iraq, but it sure made for convenient cover to start a war that was unjustifiable otherwise.
The tendrils of capitalism don't stop at the borders of our nation. They unjustly influence the daily lives of innocent people around the world, not because America is necessarily and wants to kill people, but because our Capitalist system demands it, there is no alternative if we want to maintain complete global supremacy.
Okay, so what's the alternative?
I know that a lot of people are frustrated that videos like this often don't provide anything beyond criticism of the current system. I'll do my best to explain why Socialism is a necessary next step.
Under Capitalism, your paycheck is made as small as possible, unemployment is a positive for the ruling class, there being more homes than homeless people is simply a profitable housing market, automation leaves people without jobs, and healthcare is a luxury rather than a human right.
Socialism turns all those negatives on their head.
Your paycheck is fairly scaled in accordance with the quality and quantity of your work, there's never a shortage of new jobs, homelessness can easliy be eliminated, and automation allows people to spend their time pursuing their actual passions instead of toiling away in factories. The struggling artists that wanted to write symphonies but counldn't due to their financial situation will be afforded the opportunity to pursue their aspirations.
It's like the American dream, only real. The fundamental difference between Capitalism and Socialism is that Capitalism puts the interest of the market before the interest of the people, and Socialism is just the opposite.
One of the most fundamental flaws of Capitalism (including Scandinavian Social Democracy, although it may seem like a nice compromise between Capitalism and Socialism) is that Capitalism and markets fundamentally rely on profit. Every year, a company's profit has to increase, every year, a country's GDP has to increase, for ever and ever, for the rest of time, we always have to keep growing, keep expanding our economies, keep building new factories, keep producing more comsumer goods.
On a finite Earth, infinite growth is a recipe for disaster – a disaster of which we are already seeing the beginings, not to metion the fact that we already produce more than we need.
The issue of poverty, or homelessness, or starvation isn't that there isn't enought to go around; the issue isn't scarcity, it's artificial scarcity. We produce plenty, but we don't distribute to those in need.
Capitalism tells us that the market follows the laws of suppy-and-demand, that the market is simply the most efficient way of distributing goods to a large number of people. But if that was the case, then with our current level of production, then we could give every human on the planet their own house, their own car, free access to education from kindergarten to university, and free universal healthcare. We could do that at any time, but we actively choose not to, or rather, Jeff Bezos and his ultra-rich buddies actively choose not to.
Jeff Bezos has the power to end world hunger on a whim, he wakes up every morning and makes the decision not to, if the thought even crosses his mind at all.
The world collectively produces enought food to feed all of humanity, in fact, the world produces more than enought food. And yet, the number of people undernourished in the world has been on the rise since 2014, reaching an estimated 815 million in 2016.
Reach countries not only have problems with obesity, but are also throwing away metric tons of food everyday.
Private corporations have deemed the food which can not be sold; milk that's out of date, tomatioes which aren't red or shiny enought, bananas that aren't crooked enought, are to be thrown into dumpsters and bleach is to be poured on top so that the hungry and homeless don't it eat. To not only deny food to the hungry when you have plentry, but to go out of your way to ensure that the hungry won't even eat your trash is a barbaric and inhumane practice.