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“Socialism is great until you run out of other people’s money”.
“Socialists just want everything given to them for free”.
“Socialists want to take your stuff”.
[[How many times have you heard all these claims?
Probably a lot.
While it can be frustrating to have to debunk these misguided arguments over and over again,
a lot of the people making these claims have never had it explained to them.
In the United States in particular, the legacy of the Red Scare and McCarthyism has left
us with a heavily propagandized version of history and economics.
So, for this video, I thought we’d take a few minutes and look at one of the more
common objections to socialism - the idea that socialists just want to take your stuff.
For those of you watching, wherever you place yourself on the political spectrum, I hope
this episode will shed some light on what socialism is really about.
When we’re all on the same page about our goals for the future, we can actually have
a productive conversation.
So, why do some people think that the socialists want to take your stuff?]]
This claim likely stems from a line in the communist manifesto, in which Marx writes:
“In this sense, the theory of the communists may be summed up in the single sentence: abolition
of private property.”
[[The outrage produced by this line is simply the result of a misunderstanding of the concept
of private property.
A lot of people hear the term “private property” and think,]] oh, like my toothbrush, or my
guitar, or my life sized snorlax plush.
And while their confusion is understandable, that’s not what socialists mean by “private
property.”
[[Your toothbrush, and all your other belongings, are considered “personal property.”
Think of it as stuff you own, occupy, or otherwise use on a daily basis]] - your clothes, your
car, your furniture, even big things like your house - if you’ve paid it off, of course,
otherwise it’s technically owned by the bank.
If we magically flipped the socialism switch overnight, no one would come to repo your
stuff, I promise none of us want to share The People’s Toothbrush.
[[Private property, often referred to as the means of production, is defined as something
which generates capital for the person or firm which owns it.
Think big business.]]
Oil rigs, hotels, factories, agricultural land, restaurant chains, big box stores - things
which produce profits for the person whose name is on the important paperwork.
This private property is *owned* by one person, a capitalist, (or a family in the case of
something like Walmart,) but is *tended* by workers - people who have no say in the overall
operation, and trade their time and labor for a wage.
This wage is always less than the value they produce for the company, and this surplus
value is what generates profits for the capitalists.
[[Okay, that should be a pretty clear distinction.
But if you’re still struggling a little bit, let’s take a concrete example.]]
We’re all familiar with Henry Ford - founder of the Ford motor company, business magnate,
and pretty terrible person, but that’s beside the point.
Henry Ford was a capitalist - he owned private property, the means of production, something
that produced capital - his car factories.
He also presumably had plenty of personal property, things which he himself used on
a daily basis.
That personal stuff - his pocket watch, his tophat, his car (a ford of course), all of
these things would still be his in a socialist society, because he actually, personally uses
them.
The only thing that would be taken from him, and there’s some nuance to this, we’ll
get to that, would be his car factories, the stuff he owns in name, but is run by workers.
[[Alright, with these definitions and a real life example, you should now have a pretty
good grasp on what the distinction is between personal and private property.
The next question you might have is, well, *why* do socialists want to take this private
property?
That’s a good question, but it’s subtly worded in a way that makes socialists seem
like the bad guys.
Let’s imagine a scenario]] - you and ten of your friends are working on a farm.
Every day you get up, tend the fields, feed the animals, maintain the equipment, and so
on.
Without your labor, the farm would not produce anything.
Now imagine that once a month, some fancy city slicker comes to stand in the field and
watch you work for 20 minutes, then he goes away again.
[[In this scenario, who is producing value?
You and your friends are - the workers.
The people who actually do the work of farming.]]
But you don’t own the things you produce, nor do you own the tools, or the animals,
or the barn, or the fields - those are all owned by the guy who shows up once a month
(and that’s a generous estimate as I’m sure you know).
It doesn’t seem right that the guy who’s never there, who never picks up a shovel or
plants a single seed, has complete control of the farm and pockets all the profits himself.
[[When socialists say they want to seize the means of production - it’s not that they
want to *take* the farm from the city slicker, they want to *give* the farm to the farmers.
To the people who actually do the work.
No one is entitled to the value generated by others, which, ironically, is how people
swindled by capitalist propaganda see socialism.]]
They think, “oh those socialists are just lazy and want to benefit from the hard work
of others.”
That couldn’t be further from the truth.
Socialists recognize who’s doing the hard work, and they want to return the fruits of
that labor to those people.
It’s as simple as that.
[[Now, as always happens with topics where you’re starting from square one, I’m sure
this explanation has brought up even more questions.]]
But I hope that so far I’ve been able to articulate the philosophy of socialism - the
means of production should be held in common, not hoarded by people who simply have the
money to hold the piece of paper which says they own the property.
[[Let’s quickly tackle one more common question about ownership of private property before
looking at the real threat to your personal property.]]
One of the most common questions a socialist will get from a curious layperson is, “What
about small business owners?
What happens to my dad’s pizza place?”
And once again, good question.
[[It’s hard to give a blanket answer to things like this for a number of reasons,
one of them being that socialism is a process - the end goal of a stateless, classless,
moneyless society is a long way off, and there will be many phases along the way.]]
But to give you a general answer that I hope is at least somewhat useful - if your dad
pays his employees fairly, if he’s not exploiting their labor for greater profits, if he operates
one restaurant in your community, if he does some of the work himself, it’s probably
fine for now.
[[Would it be better if the employees received the full value of their labor and had democratic
control of their workplace?
Absolutely.
If that were the case they might even choose to democratically elect the former owner as
the operations leader of the team.]]
There are all sorts of answers to this question.
But generally speaking, what socialists believe should happen is that workers should have
a say in their work.
And that doesn’t sound unreasonable to me.
If you’ve ever worked in a big box store, I’m sure you share the common opinion that
workers have a far better grasp on running the day-to-day operations of the store than
the managers do.
And the higher up the chain you go, the more that’s the case.
Put a CEO in a Starbucks store during the morning rush, and they’ll be curled up in
a little ball in 20 minutes flat.
[[Okay, we’ve talked about how socialists don’t want to take your stuff, and in fact
want to give you back more control over your work and your financial wellbeing, but you
might still be on the fence about whether it’s a better option than capitalism.
So, let’s talk about property under capitalism.]]
Over the last several decades, as labor protections have been rolled back, unions have been gutted,
and rampant privatization has consumed more and more of our reality, conditions for the
average worker have worsened.
Wages are stagnant at best, and not even close to keeping up with inflation.
For example, if the federal minimum wage had just kept up with inflation and productivity
gains over that period, it would be over 24 dollars an hour right now.
It’s currently $7.25, just over a quarter of what it should be.
But wages aren’t the only issue.
The cost of living has skyrocketed - everything from food, to healthcare, to education, and
especially housing, has become monumentally more expensive.
It is now impossible for a worker earning the prevailing state or federal minimum wage
to afford a two bedroom apartment in any county in the US, and in over 90% of counties, those
same workers can’t even afford a one bedroom.
[[As these things have gotten worse, as workers have become progressively less able to afford
the necessities, private capital has stepped in to offer a deal - a very bad one.]]
If you can’t afford a home, just take out a loan.
Need a new car, or heck, even a used one at this point, financing is available, just don’t
read the fine print.
Things have gotten so bad in the United States that you can now finance a pizza in case the
cost is too much.
So when we’re talking about personal property - your car, your house, your cell phone - for
more and more people, you don’t own those at all.
The bank does.
And if you make one wrong move, if your boss decides you’re redundant and lets you go
and you can’t pay your installment, those things will be taken from you, leaving you
destitute and without a safety net.
[[Under capitalism, there’s no such thing as workplace democracy - the city slicker
owns the farm.
If you step out of line, you’re gone, replaced with another desperate cog ready to be plugged
into the machine.
And since you do not have access to the means of production, the only thing you have to
bargain with is your labor - either you sell that labor to a capitalist firm in exchange
for a meager wage, or you starve.
There is no freedom in this arrangement.
The entire capitalist system is built on coercion.]]
But capitalism isn’t just lethal to workers - it’s lethal to itself.
As capitalists trim more and more fat from their expenses, as they slash employee pay,
stop offering benefits, and attempt to run the leanest operation possible, they’re
shooting themselves in the foot.
What happens when the worker who produces TVs can no longer afford the very product
their labor created?
The capitalist system is built on consumption - without people to buy the products workers
produce, the economy grinds to a halt, sparking fear in the capitalists who react by trying
to cut expenses even further to ensure their profits.
There will come a breaking point.
The contradictions inherent to the capitalist system - including the primary one - labor
versus capital, will eventually lead to the collapse of this suicidal system that puts
profit over all else.
Every once in a while a war will be fabricated to give capitalism a shot in the arm and the
stamina to keep limping on another decade or two, but eventually even this effort will
fail, and the choice then will be socialism or barbarism.
[[If you ask socialists, we’d say we’re getting pretty close to that point.
Okay, I know that last section was a bit doom and gloom, but it’s really important to
understand that not only do socialists not want to take your stuff, capitalists do.
They want to squeeze every last drop of value out of you and then cast you aside when you’re
no longer profitable.
And you know what, we can’t really even blame them.]]
They’re as much a slave to this system as we are, they just happen to have a lot more
power.
But even with that power over 99% of the population, if the owner class doesn’t play the capitalist
game of cost-cutting and profit maximizing, they will be consumed by the players that
do.
Eventually this leads to Disney owning everything and all of us living in massive company towns
and getting paid in Mickey Bucks.
Not a very pleasant future.
[[As one final consideration - think about the things you own.
Your personal property.
How much of it do you have to replace way too often?]]
Under capitalism, due to the need for affordable goods that can be purchased on a worker’s
wage, we’ve seen an explosion of cheap, poorly made items, and pieces of technology
that are designed to fail or are only repairable by specific people or companies.
Capitalism encourages sweatshop labor to produce fast fashion, imported in bulk and thrown
away after a season of use.
Capitalism bricks phones with mandatory updates after a few years, artificially diminishing
their battery life or making features inoperable.
The average person can no longer work on their car, they have to take it to a shop with specialized
equipment.
Even heavy machinery like tractors have proprietary software that makes it impossible to fix on
your own.
John Deere operators just finally won a years-long crusade to be able to fix the tractors that
they paid for and supposedly own.
[[I’ve used this anecdote before, but I have a friend who has a 40 year old soviet
hairdryer that’s still working just as well as the day their dad got it.
That is the difference between the goals of socialism and capitalism.]]
Under capitalism, you don’t really “own” anything.
You rent your home and your car from the bank, your phone is tied to a provider’s plan,
your car has been made artificially difficult to access, farmers literally have to hack
their tractors to be able to work on them.
[[That seems real smart, by the way.
Oh you’re trying to grow food so our population doesn’t starve, gotta pay me to unlock the
software first.
Under socialism, none of this would be allowed to continue.]]
You’d have the right to repair the things you own.
We’d see a massive proliferation of open-source software.
Products would be designed to last because the profit motive has been done away with.
You could actually own quality personal property.
[[When you lay out the facts like this, when you really weigh what’s important and which
system values human flourishing, it’s clear that socialism wins hands down.
Every time.
And while there’s so much more to talk about, this video was nominally about answering the
question of whether socialists want to take your stuff.
I hope it’s clear by now that we do not.
In fact, we want to empower you to have more control over your stuff - including the most
important things, your work and your livelihood.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s episode.
I’ll probably do a series on these common objections to socialism, so be sure to stick
around if you’d like to see those videos.
If you’ve got friends or family who have these concerns, send them this video.
I hope they find it useful too.]]
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