Hey Everybody, in my last video I talked about the UBI and
it attracted a bunch of centrists to my channel so I though I’d do the only natural thing
and scare them off by talking about a violent revolution to overthrow EVERYTHING.
I think on this channel we can all agree that
capitalism has more downsides than upsides and that the time has come to look at establishing
a better system for us to live in.
How exactly that better system would look like is not yet clear and up for debate.
As it should be, we can’t just pretend that our favourite system is flawless and that
all others are bad.
That OUR system will fix literally every problem on earth with some niche mechanic which barely
makes sense in theory.
We are socialists not neoliberals.
So, how exactly a post-capitalist society would look like has yet to be established.
If you are curious about some of the options, my series called Ideology explained goes into
a few of them.
But in this video, we will not look at how the society after capitalism will work but
at the question of how to get there in the first place.
The two main ways are reform and revolution.
Of course, that’s a simplification since both an Anarchist and a Marxist-Leninist might
use a revolution but they would go about it in very different ways.
But let’s stick with the simplified version.
There is only reform and revolution.
Naturally I will have to speak about them quite broadly since your ideology or what
you want the post-capitalist world to look like will influence how you go about establishing
it.
If you are a syndicalist you will use different methods than an eco-Marxist would.
In this video I will go over the ideas behind as well as the up- and downsides of both reform
and revolution and at the end I’ll give you my opinion on the question and what I
think the best thing to do right now it.
Let’s start with reform because alphabetically that’s first.
Reform The biggest upside of reform is that it’s
relatively easy to do.
You can get yourself elected and begin to establish worker co-ops or to nationalize
important industries.
That’s a whole lot easier than somehow persuading thousands of people to join your leftist militia
and then arming them and somehow defeating an actual standing army while being slandered
as terrorists by… well everyone.
The biggest advantage really is that it is legal.
You can run for election, usually with whatever base you choose to go with.
Most of us live in neoliberal democracies which means we, theoretically, have freedom
of speech and freedom of thought and expression.
I say theoretically because of course if let’s say you form a socialist party and you want
to use reform to establish worker co-ops or similar you will have a lot of trouble getting
your message to the people.
Newspapers and TV shows may simply choose not to mention your party.
That is of course because you are probably anti-big business so you won’t take donations
from the super-rich and the big media corporations may dislike you since you threaten their profits.
That means you have no advertisement budget and no free exposure.
Seems like a challenge.
But let’s say you get over that and you get a whole lot of votes.
At some point your voters will expect you to do something.
If you get 40% of the votes what do you do?
Do you go into a coalition working with other parties to have a part in how the country
is run?
It would allow you some power, but you’d have to make compromises with the other parties.
And if you don’t you may lose voters since they’d prefer to vote for a party that actually
governs when it has the chance.
That’s an important decision.
Do you work with the neoliberal parties?
And while we are at it, do you fuse your party with similar socialist parties?
That way you could create a united leftist party like the “Socialist Unity Party of
Germany” which was in power in the GDR?
How will you deal with the far-right parties that get funded by the rich as they are afraid
of loosing their privilege?
Those are questions you need to deal with.
Questions that can be answered but not easy questions.
In the end you will have to achieve change but that’s actually harder than it seems.
For the kind of big structural changes, we want to achieve you will not only have to
change a few laws.
You will need to change the structure, the foundations of a country.
The constitution.
If you reach let’s say 60% of the votes that may still not be enough depending on
where you are.
For example, in Austria you’d need a simple majority to write regular laws like fucking
over unemployment benefits or re-introducing the 12-hour workday.
But if you want to change the constitution, you will need a two thirds majority.
In the US the constitution straight up can’t be changed only amended.
And if you even get as much as the thought to touch the second amendment, you’ll have
half of the country trying to assassinate you.
You could say that an armed populace is good since it prevents a government from becoming
tyrannical and yea that’s a fair point.
Just keep in mind that an armed populace is a two-sided blade and the same guns might
allow workers to defend the means of productions or fascists to murder minorities.
And since we are on the side of reformism right now, we’ll take the stance of the
state which is that an armed population is pretty dangerous.
Just imagine what a bunch of angry Trumpists would do if they feared that you might want
to collectivize the farm their grandparents built on stolen Indian land.
It would probably be just as ugly as the time Stalin tried to remove the Kulaks from their
land.
But Stalin is not the topic here.
My point was that it is extremely hard to gain the popular support you’d need to get
a sizable enough majority to change the very foundations of a country.
Hell, the UK doesn’t even have a constitution to change.
And even worse let’s say you take power in Austria you’d still not be able to change
anything since the European Union controls Austrian economic policy not Austria itself.
If you as much as try to touch private property your country will be completely destroyed
by tariffs.
And because of the 4 freedoms of the EU you can’t even confiscate the property of emigrants
which was one of the things the communist manifesto said.
The same is true for all EU nations, we can’t do anything if we don’t fundamentally change
the way the European union works.
And if you now think that going Brexit is the solution and that everyone should just
abandon the EU I have another bad surprise for you.
The World Trade organisation is just as capitalist as the EU.
If your country is in violation of what they consider to be the correct property laws,
you’ll pay for it.
They will mess up your credibility and if your country ever needs to borrow anything,
as it happens if you industrialize or modernise or do anything to improve your country, then
they’ll make you pay interest you can’t afford.
That’s why countries like Venezuela have such a shit time.
The World trade organisation tries to fuck them over until they turn capitalist again.
North Korea is basically being embargoed by the entire world right now.
They can’t import or export anything.
That’s why life in the DPRK is so shitty.
They have to make everything themselves, cars, trains, guns, roads, buildings, TVs, Mobile
Phones everything there has to be made in Korea.
And not to insult Koreans but Korea just isn’t known for making good Cars.
Cars are made in Germany, Electronics are made in Japan, Oil comes from Arabia and crippling
medical debt comes from the US.
That’s how our modern world works.
The world is specialized.
No country can produce everything to the same standard as the entire global economy.
This means getting cut off from the world trade means a lot of problems and eventually
your country might just end up like North Korea.
But let’s ignore that for now.
Let’s got back to the elections.
At some point, before you take power you will have to take part in the usual democratic
statesmanship.
Holding speeches, collecting donations, building understanding about what you stand for, putting
out ads, stuff like that.
And all that time you will be visited by lobbyists and influencers trying to get you on their
side.
Offering you all of the money you’d ever need if only you supported policy xy and z.
And you might think that “Yea, I do need money to buy adverts to eventually reach the
revolution.
Why not take a little donation now?
Why not use it to advance the cause?
After all as long as it helps the people in the long run it can’t be that bad?”
Of course, you’d say no.
I would do the same.
But how many times would you say no?
And how many times would you be able to watch the polls stagnate before you’d consider
it again?
After all everyone is corrupt in politics, and at least your corruption might change
the system.
As you can see corruption is easy to form in politics.
It’s a very big problem in all parties of all countries.
And that’s provided you don’t just get kicked out by a US backed fascist coup which
tends to happen a lot for some reason.
And even if not, your people can just get rid of you.
Let’s say you make an unpopular land reform which would help in the long run.
All it takes for you to be removed from office is a few weeks of bad press before an election.
And then what?
The people will vote in a neoliberal who will reverse your changes or even worse, a cooperate
backed-fascist who will make sure you don’t get elected again.
Let me recap.
The advantage of reform is that it is easy and realistic and most importantly legal.
This makes it a good tool for people who want to achieve socialism without putting much
effort into it.
Just put your cross in the right place every 4 years or so and you’ve done your part
and can feel good about it.
Not that I want to trash talk people like that, after all that’s sort of what I’ve
been doing.
But there are downsides.
Many downsides.
One can just be trouble getting funding or exposure.
Getting coup-ed by the USA, corruption, international sanctions, having to work with neoliberals,
balancing the needs of the revolution with the desire to get re-elected.
Those are a lot of downsides and it might make me seem biased which would be a fair
complaint.
Maybe I am just better at finding problems than solutions.
Now let us turn to revolution to see if that is easier.
Revolution Revolution, for our purposes is a radical
overthrow of the state.
I will speak in general because I want to cover both anarchist revolutions like syndicalism
and Maoist or Leninist revolutions which aren’t quite as anarchist.
Let’s start with the advantages.
You can build up a state out of nothing.
You don’t need to worry if the constitution allows collectivization, you can just write
one that does.
You don’t have to worry about Bourgeois parties getting elected in your place because
you can just ban them for being counterrevolutionaries.
Of course, that sounds pretty authoritarian and it is to some extent, but you can’t
have a dictatorship of the proletariat without banning a few Bourgeois Parties can you?
After all their interests are opposed to the interests of the people so it can be seen
as moral to remove them from the government.
And this way you can have a basically free reign which can be pretty good.
Provided that you as a genuine revolutionary only want the best for the people you do not
need to put checks and balances in place.
Why have a high court decided if your law is good?
You already know it helps the people.
If it didn’t you wouldn’t have proposed it.
And if you are worried of people having that much power you can just build up a syndicalist
confederation instead.
Without leaders at all.
My point is that after a revolution the state can be whatever you want it to be.
Hell there could be no state.
You don’t have to inherit a country that has been around or a few hundred years and
which has antiquated amendments to it’s constitution *cough* you can just build up
a new state.
But of course, there are downsides.
One is that it’s illegal.
If you say that you want to overthrow the government, you’ll probably have the police
knocking on your door in a short time.
So please remember that while we may talk about revolution because of free speech, as
soon as you begin to stash guns it might or might not be illegal depending on where you
live.
Just be careful.
And that’s only the beginning of the downsides.
The next is that a revolution needs popular support if you want to know what happens to
a revolution/coup that doesn’t have popular support look at what happened to the red army
coup at the end of the Soviet Union.
It was stopped in it’s tracks by the people of Moscow blocking the streets.
So, you somehow need to get the people on your side so they will support, or at lest
ignore your revolution.
And of course you’ll need many people to fight for you.
Be it soldiers in a 1917-style revolutionary army or be it unionized workers who are ready
to be shot for their rights.
You need people and you need them to be loyal and not just jump ship after the bullets begin
to fly.
And the next problem is, how do you arm them?
This might be easier or harder depending on where you live.
If you live in the USA you can buy an assault-style weapon with surprising ease while in Germany
it’s a bureaucratic nightmare.
You could use party funds or require soldiers to arm themselves.
But of course assault rifles are a quite useless against modern fighter jets and M1 Abrams
so you’ll need to get some heavy weapons.
How do you get them?
I don’t know.
You could buy them from the capitalists with money you got from… somewhere.
Or you could say screw this and go for a guerrilla war like in Vietnam or Afghanistan.
Both of which seem to have defeated the US so far.
But if that’s your plan you have to consider the unique geography of those places.
It’s easy to hide in an Afghan cave or a Vietnamese Jungle but that’s a lot harder
to do in the English midlands or in Kansas.
On top of that there is the trouble of organising an army like that.
You need to muster a huge army on a national level to even stand a chance at revolution
and at defeating the old order.
You could do it decentrally and hope it works out or you could organise them in a more traditional
army hierarchy.
Though if you do that you need to figure out how to train all of the Privates and Corporals
and Sergeants and Staff Sergeants and Master Sergeants and so on.
And of course, as I talked about in my video “What fascism is capitalism in decay means”
you will probably have to face a fascist reaction from other countries if your revolution only
takes place in one country.
And that’s on top of the international organisations like the EU and the WTO fucking over your
economy with tariffs.
And if you are unlucky NATO might attack you as well.
All of those things mean that a revolution sort of has to happen globally.
If it doesn’t happen everywhere the Bourgeoisie of the other countries will simply turn to
fascism to destroy the revolution again.
And I haven’t even started with how corruption can form just as well if you are at the head
of a revolution.
It has happened many times.
And what if you lead a revolution with the best of intentions and someone with less good
intentions takes over?
What is to say you don’t slide into authoritarianism or even fascism?
Centralizing power opens the door for things like that.
So, to recap: Revolution has the advantage that it allows us to more or less directly
implement the changes we want to implement.
But it has many downsides.
The international community will stand against you, you will face sanctions, you need to
organise it, you need to army the people, you need to somehow win against the united
neoliberal armies of the world and you need to overcome the possibility of corruption
and the temptations of power.
Conclusion So now that we’ve gone over the up and downsides
of reform and revolution I think it’s time I say what I think the best way to go forward
is.
As Richard D. Wolff puts it in his video on the topic.
It’s always mixed.
You might think you are preparing for a revolution but causing reform in the process.
For example, for the revolution you might need looser gun laws.
To achieve that you need to reform the laws.
And if you want to achieve reform you need to build understanding about what socialism
is and why we need it.
And that may very well inspire the people to take part in a revolution.
Reform and revolution go hand in hand, and you can’t just pick one to support.
It’s always sorts of both of them.
Keeping that in mind, I think that the better way, at least right now is reform.
There are many reasons.
A main one is that it’s easier but the most important one is that there is basically no
popular support for socialism.
And for a revolution we need the people to support us.
The best way to do that is to form parties within neoliberal states and to do advertisements
and hold speeches.
Tell the people that a better world is possible and get them on your side.
For that reason, I joined the “Wandel”.
It’s an Austrian socialist party that pretty much uses no socialist lingo.
If you are form Austria my advice is to vote for them and to tell everyone else to do the
same.
Right now we, from the “Wandel”, suffer from the reformist problems I talked about
before.
We get no TV interviews, we got ignored by the Newspapers and we didn’t even get invited
to the national debates before the election.
And on top of that the party is extremely low on money since all money they get is raised
by individuals.
We take no donations from corporations or the rich which means that we can’t afford
adverts which means we have few members which means we reach fewer people who might donate.
You see, reform is very tough to achieve and it’s a lot of work.
And even right now in making this video my goal is to attract more people to my channel
so that socialist ideas may spread further.
That’s the ultimate goal I try to achieve.
But don’t get me wrong.
I am under no illusion that reform is extremely limited.
I like to put it this way.
Our state is sort of like a sandbox.
You can play in it all you want.
You can change laws and play around with taxes but that’s it.
If you want to break out of the box and achieve change other than what it allows you need
a revolution.
So, I guess you could say that I would prefer reform, if just to avert the bloodshed but
I am afraid that neoliberal democracies just aren’t built in a way to allow the kind
of changes we need at this point.
And maybe the next economic crisis will turn millions into socialists, and maybe it will
bring about the conditions that allow a revolution.
But right now the conditions aren’t ripe.
So, I think we should be flexible.
Work on spreading socialism and waiting for the right conditions for revolution to come
about.
Though don’t just expect it to come up on it’s own.
As Che Guevara put it: “The revolution is not an apple that falls when it’s ripe,
it must be brought to fall” so I suggest we do what we can to make it fall as soon
as possible.
And for now that means biding out time and educating the people.
If you want to read more on this very issue read the book titled “Reform or revolution”
by Rosa Luxembourg.
I’ll leave a link in the description for you.