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What is socialism?
If you answered “sticking it to your dad,” you’re absolutely right.
That’s what really matters.
Never lose track of that.
But believe it or not, there is more to it.
Socialism is a fundamentally different project for society.
A society organized around a different economic model.
With that much at stake, it’s natural to wonder how such a society would work, and
because it’s the topic of this video, how this society would work.
Currently we don’t live under that economic model, of course, we live under capitalism,
a system in which a small minority of people privately own the vast majority of all productive
resources: companies, factories, stuff like that.
They own the tools, so to speak, to make stuff.
This ownership over the so-called “means of production,” the means required to produce,
allows capitalists to put other people to work.
That way they make a nice little profit, or a big, humongous “I feel like buying twitter
today” kind of profit, regardless of whether they work or not.
Sometimes they just don’t.
Good for them.
Socialists have a different idea of how things should be run.
Instead of concentrated and individual ownership over the means of production, ownership should
be collective.
That way whatever we produce by working we could redistribute amongst ourselves or use
to do cool stuff like, I don’t know, what if nobody lived on a concrete slab right next
to cars and sewer water.
Crazy ideas like that.
But capitalists like to keep their profits more than they like doing cool stuff, so that’s
pretty much where the story ends.
After all, where does it end with you socialists?
First you want to treat the homeless like they’re people, now you’re telling me
you want everyone to have guaranteed shelter, food, medical care, and education?
I don’t think so.
If people aren’t fearing for their life at least once a day, why would anyone ever
want to work?
How would we get anything done and guarantee these things you’re promising to everyone?
And that’s actually a really good question.
Let’s spend about 15 minutes trying to answer it.
The first piece of the puzzle we need to look at is work under our current system: capitalism.
That’s because socialism is not a perfect, utopian, society where everyone is happy all
the time.
Socialism will have its limitations, and in order to properly assess those limitations
we have to compare them to the kinds of limitations we are currently facing in our resplendent
capitalist economy.
For starters, how does capitalism incentivize work?
A big way capitalists incentivize people to do stuff is by imbuing work with innate value.
You might’ve heard this called “the Protestant Work Ethic” before.
Capitalist cultures have all assimilated the idea that work is good in and of itself.
No matter how degrading, punitive, boring, or evil, it’s morally good to work and morally
bad not to work.
Better to be the CEO of a company dumping waste into a local river than to be one of
those lazy poor people.
At least the CEO is out there doing something.
This innate belief in the value of work is what makes the sentence “get a job” so
universally recognizable to all of us.
But there are a lot of people for whom this kind of cultural pressure doesn’t work very
well.
So the other, most significant way capitalism gets people to work is through material coercion.
You are not guaranteed a minimum standard of living under capitalism, so it’s either
you work or you starve.
You work or you can’t make rent.
You work, or you’re at the mercy of an unfortunate medical surprise.
It’s a brutal way to organize labor in a society, but the theory is that even though
it’s bad, at least it’ll get our society to be as productive as possible, and overall,
that will mean that we will maximize human potential.
Millions may be destitute, but, hey, we got the lines to touch.
Except it doesn’t work.
Capitalism doesn’t maximize productivity or human potential.
Even by its own standards.
In the US, there are more people that are unemployed than there are jobs for them to
do.
While you may have heard that there are more jobs in the economy than people to fill them,
especially during quote “The Great Resignation” that’s not strictly speaking, what’s the
word?
True?
Most news outlets use the government’s preferred data on unemployment.
A number that is usually pretty low because when that number is low, it looks good.
The most commonly used number on unemployment is called the U-3, and the reason it shows
a relatively low rate of unemployment, one that makes Americans look lazy when there
are all those good jobs out there, is because it flat out doesn’t include a lot of people
that it really should.
Excluded from the U-3 unemployment rate are people who are underemployed, marginally attached
to the workforce (meaning they want to and can work but aren’t looking anymore), or
that are categorized as “discouraged.”
All people who in one way or another easily fall into the unemployment category, but aren’t
counted as such.
But that’s not all.
Sometimes, the unemployment number will be even lower than that because the government
just counts wrong.
As a result, when you try to actually count up how many people are really unemployed by
adding up those who are miscategorized, unemployed, and underemployed you get a much bigger number:
26.8 million people.
Way more people than there are jobs to fill.
What does this mean?
Well it means that millions of people are being hit with a stick and promised a carrot
that many of them will mathematically never get the chance to eat.
We are subjecting millions of people to crushing poverty, without guaranteed housing, healthcare,
or adequate food on the theory that it’ll get them to work, despite knowing full well
that we don’t have the room in our job market to accommodate them all.
It’s misery for misery’s sake.
And this is completely contradicting the idea that capitalism can maximize human potential.
That’s because maximizing human potential doesn’t maximize profits.
It is more profitable for our companies to overwork some people, according to one study,
about 1 in 3 Americans, and have a separate, unemployed pool of people in a desperate living
situation, ready to accept just about any job for very low pay.
Our governments care more about how profitable an economy is than putting that profit to
good use, so this reserve army of labor is perpetually maintained.
If governments solved poverty they would hurt profits, and that’s what’s more important
to them.
But that’s for the unemployed.
Those who escape unemployment aren’t making it into some hallowed sanctuary of regalian
pleasure.
Most Americans don’t like their jobs.
That may seem subjective, but according to Gallup 66% of Americans are either “not
engaged” or “actively disengaged” from their job.
We might call that kind of feeling “alienation.”
The way Gallup comes up with these numbers is by getting yes or no responses to basic
statements like “At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day” or “At
work, my opinions seem to count” or “The mission or purpose of my company makes me
feel my job is important” and even, basic, bottom of the barrel statements like “My
supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person.”
Why are so many people unable to answer these questions in the affirmative?
It’s because the jobs we’re working, and the context in which we’re working them,
aren’t built with human needs in mind.
We aren’t working for ourselves or our community.
We are working to make someone else wealthier, not to become more fulfilled people, not to
make the lives of the people we love better, just to put another buck in someone else’s
pocket and get enough of a kickback to pay for the things we need and maybe a couple
things we want.
We are alienated from work, and that means we can only ever see it as a sacrifice of
our time.
For the thing that takes up most of our waking hours, that’s a problem.
So what about socialism?
As a refresher, socialism is a society where the means of production are owned collectively
and basic needs are guaranteed to all unconditionally.
For any theory heads in the crowd, here we’re talking specifically about lower-phase communism
just to make our case as difficult as possible to defend.
Anyway, how do you get people to work if all their basic needs are met?
For starters, there’s just going to be less work that needs to be done by everyone.
Convincing people to spend 4 or 5 hours on the job instead of 8 is already making things
easier.
With fewer jobs that exist only to drive up profit for capital owners and by eliminating
the artificial work scarcity capitalism produces, we can greatly reduce the amount of time people
spend working.
The incentives a capitalist society follows lead it to overwork one chunk of society,
while sustaining another group of immiserated people who do not work despite wanting to.
In contrast, in a society where everyone has democratic power over economic decisions,
the most likely outcome is to divide work equitably.
Hence, less work per person.
This reduction in working hours would also be helped by automation, which wouldn’t
face the same resistance as it does under capitalism.
Under capitalism, workers are disincentivized from advocating for more automation because
it threatens to rob them of their job, which they need to live.
Capitalists are also disincentivized from automating jobs away because it’s not very
difficult to find someone desperate enough to do it for lower pay.
Building robots is expensive.
Moving a job outside the imperial core is not.
Under socialism, if a decent existence is not conditional on work, having machines take
over your job or at least alleviate the time and effort it takes is a no brainer.
With a democratic model of economic decision-making, automation has much more room to develop since
it’s in everyone’s interest to reduce the amount of work being done.
Here again, the appeal of a shorter workday or workweek comes back into focus.
In general, this logic of lower working hours can be applied to all sorts of jobs in a more
targeted way.
If a job is particularly unappealing, because it’s especially physically demanding, for
example, the number of hours spent on the job can be reduced in order to make it more
appealing.
Once again, this kind of logic runs counter to what we experience in capitalist society.
Capitalism has, in most parts of the world, drifted towards a standardization of work
around the 8 hour day and the 40 hour work week.
That is because the driving force of work under capitalism is always maximizing the
exploitation of human capacity up to the point where the law steps in.
What this means is that jobs that have no business being 8 hours long are just because
they legally can be.
Less time working is already great, but there are even better ways in which work under socialism
gets incentivized.
One of the big reasons your job can suck is because of who your boss is.
Usually, they aren’t accountable to you, there is a strict hierarchy and odds are you’re
near the bottom.
If you have a bad boss, there's very little you can do about it, and there’s a lot they
can do to make your time on the job a lot worse.
As a result of the common ownership of the means of production, this kind of thing would
not be a feature of socialism.
Either your company’s hierarchy is completely dissolved, or if some amount of hierarchy
is necessary to make things run smoothly, your management would be elected by the entire
body of workers like you can see in some co-ops today.
So, you either no longer have a boss, or your boss is accountable to you, not the other
way around.
A better work environment, where your voice counts just as much as anybody’s is a lot
more pleasant than one where you are told what to do and you can only resist by threatening
to leave the job entirely, an ultimatum that more often than not is not worth making.
Overall, a less alienating job, that takes up a lot less of your time, and treats you
like a human being with agency and not like an interchangeable cog, will inevitably entice
people into working in ways that current capitalist labor doesn’t.
After all, everything we do is work.
If we can make the unpleasant things we do pleasant, we will do them because that’s
how we treat everything else.
That’s why we cook for ourselves, make our beds, and clean the counters.
It's why 1 in 4 Americans volunteers.
We make necessary things pleasant.
Doing work with a clear result, that has a demonstrable impact, where you can see progress,
and where you work with other people makes people happy.
Work that takes this into account, not just the bottom line, is work that is attractive.
We can do that for a whole economy once we stop prioritizing profits.
But admittedly, all this might not be enough.
All these factors may not be sufficient incentives to produce all of our collective needs and
wants.
If that’s the case, we might choose to add an extra incentive by rewarding some jobs
better than others.
Even if all your basic needs are met, you might still benefit from doing a job very
few people want to do themselves.
This would never lead to the staggering inequality we face today, after all, nobody makes billions
of dollars off of a higher wage, but it would still produce some benefits for those who
are willing to sacrifice more.
In this lower phase of communism, the guiding principle would be “from each according
to their ability, to each according to their contribution” as opposed to the more classic
“from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” we would expect
from a later stage communism.
It’s not an ideal scenario, but again, we’re not even sure it’s necessary.
While you’ll often hear things like “why would a doctor take on such a grueling job
if they could make as much as a janitor?”
that’s not as rock solid of an argument as some may think it is.
In a lower stage socialist country like Cuba, where doctors do not make particularly high
wages but the health sector has been properly funded, there’s an abundance of doctors.
So much so that the country deploys physicians to its neighboring, oftentimes wealthier,
capitalist countries when they’re in need.
Reality does not support the idea that because a task is unpleasant or difficult, people
are not drawn to it.
People like doing things that matter in conditions that fulfill their needs and desires.
Not only that, people don’t like not doing things.
If you’re still wondering why people would work despite having all their basic needs
met, think about what it's actually like not to work.
Within just a few days, doing nothing is unbearable.
We are hardwired to want to do things.
Sitting passively in front of a computer screen all day is more punishing than it is relaxing,
and with an abundance of things to do around you that benefit you directly and your community
as a whole, staying inside all day is almost certainly going to be the worse option of
the two.
But I briefly touched on the idea of limitations earlier, so it’s probably good that I actually
address it before the video ends.
Socialism would not be a perfect society.
For example, would there still be coercion?
The honest answer is maybe.
So long as there is scarcity, there will almost always need to be a way to resolve disputes
over how scarce resources are divided up.
Scarce resources can be physical, material things, but also more abstract ideas like
leisure time.
Under capitalism, the decisions over how to distribute these scarce resources are made
by capital owners and markets, by the competition of all against all, with the consequences
of vast inequality and mass poverty we see today.
Under socialism, these disputes would either be resolved through democratic means, within
a company, community, or throughout society at large in some form of national assembly,
or self-imposed, with the recognition that there is a want that is not met and with individuals
taking it upon themselves to satisfy it.
It’s not clear how much of a role scarcity would play under socialism, given how much
of the scarcity we experience today is artificial or exacerbated in order to drive up profits,
but even if we imagine scarcity to be just as important of a feature as it is in our
current lives, there’s no doubt that the socialist model is more legitimate in settling
the disputes scarcity would produce.
Ok, but can this system work perfectly?
Here again, the honest answer is probably not.
But it doesn’t need to.
It just needs to work better than what we have now.
And better than brutal poverty, massive unwanted unemployment, and a general dissatisfaction
with how we spend the bulk of our days isn’t that hard to do.
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