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[[Hey there.
This is one of those videos that will probably reach a bunch of new people, so if you’re
one of them, welcome to the channel.
My name is JT and I make videos about politics and culture from a socialist perspective.
I don’t want this to sound like a politician’s speech so this video’s going to be pretty
direct.
Many of the biggest problems in your life are either caused or worsened by capitalism.]]
And the truth is there are ways to solve these problems.
Another world, not just radically different, but better, is actually possible.
We’ve only experienced capitalism for a few hundred years at most.
So it’s not utopian to think the world could change and become a better place, and it’s
not being bitter or ungrateful to critique it in its present state.
It’s normal.
Things are bad, we know why, and we can fix them.
Capitalism has had its time in the sun, and someday it will end.
And it should.
Just as humanity progressed from feudalism to capitalism, so too will we move on from
capitalism to socialism.
[[Our whole purpose, when you really boil it down, is to leave a better future for our
children - and handing them down a broken, rapidly imploding capitalism isn’t going
to achieve that.
So let’s take a quick look at what’s wrong with capitalism, and why it’s time to accept
that we should move on.]]
Over the course of the pandemic, the ten richest people in the world doubled their wealth while
the incomes of the bottom 99% of humanity fell.
$700 billion dollars shared between only 10 people turned into $1.5 trillion in just two
years, at a rate of $1.3 billion dollars every single day or $15 grand per second.
In less time than this sentence has taken to read out, they raked in your yearly salary,
and together own more than the world’s poorest 4 billion people.
[[No one needs this reminder, but the pandemic was, and still is, brutal.
In just the first year, millions of people died and the lives of millions more got a
lot harder overnight.]]
Nearly a hundred million additional people fell below a dollar ninety a day during the
pandemic, millions of essential workers were forced back to work while their bosses bet
on how many of them would get COVID, and millions of people were laid off without warning and
just two miserable checks to stretch out and make last over two years.
While the vast, vast majority of humanity was suffering through the crisis, being told
to go back to work and risk death to “save the economy,” or generously offered the
alternative of starving at home, a handful of people with unfathomable power and privilege
profited off the chaos, hoarding the wealth that could have changed the lives of the millions
of people they share a planet with.
These 10 multi-billionaires made so much money, both before and during the pandemic, that
even if they lost 99.99% of their wealth today, they’d still be wealthier than 99% of all
the people on earth.
That’s Blade Runner levels of wealth inequality, or Altered Carbon, or Elysium - [[take your
pick of dystopian movies we all agree show an untenable future, that’s what we have,
many of us just don’t recognize it without the cyberpunk aesthetic.
Instead,]] this is our aesthetic, which frankly is even more depressing.
[[What the pandemic showed, more clearly than ever before, is that this is not a system
that works.
A system where the immense wealth of a few people comes from the suffering of everyone
else and, by its accumulation, actively prevents them from living a decent life needs to be
done away with.
And we’ve known this for a long time.]]
As Albert Einstein wrote in his essay “Why Socialism?”
capitalism is trapping us in the predatory phase of development, and preventing us from
transitioning into the collaborative phase of human progress.
While capitalism has certainly improved many aspects of human life compared to what it
used to be like under feudalism, it has done so on the terms of exploitation, coercion
by an unaccountable few, and the total destruction of our ecosystems.
Capitalism is an improvement, yes, for some, but a deeply contestable one.
And we desperately need to get out of it.
Because what Einstein could not imagine back when he wrote his case for socialism in 1949
is how much worse and even more predatory capitalism would become in the following 70
years.
Nowadays, 45% of all the new wealth created goes directly to the top 1% of the population.
CEOs of large corporations make over 350 times what their workers do, and all the while employee
wages are lower than they were 50 years ago when you account for inflation.
[[And I don’t care how hard they work.
No one works 350 times harder than anyone else.
But I could almost forgive it if half of all Americans didn’t live paycheck to paycheck,
or if a $50 trillion dollar transfer of wealth hadn’t gone from the bottom 90% of society
to the top 1% since 1975.
But they do, and it has.
And it’s not just wages, it’s everything else too.]]
28 million Americans don’t get any paid vacation or paid holidays, so they hardly
take any time off.
And who can blame them?
When wages don’t even keep up with inflation and most people can’t cover a surprise 400
dollar expense, it’s simply not possible to take time off.
And that’s hardly surprising for a country that also has no federal guaranteed paid parental
leave whatsoever.
It’s not just that we’re getting paid less, getting a smaller share of the wealth
we produce, and enriching a single percent of the population despite living in the most
productive time in human history, we’re working more for less.
And on a related note, the gender pay gap makes that even more true for about half of
the population.
Still today, women make 84 cents to a man’s dollar, and that number only gets worse for
women of color.
[[While the reasons for all these statistics are certainly varied, they all find their
root or their excess in capitalism and its logic.
All of these statistics are perfectly in line with the prime directive of our current economic
model: the accumulation of profit for the capitalist class.]]
They are all justified by the fact that in some way they have allowed for a small minority
of the population, incredibly powerful and wealthy by virtue of its ownership of the
means of production and nothing else, to squeeze more out of their workers for themselves.
In the last century we’ve seen the gradual destruction of unions, a federal tolerance
of permanent high unemployment, and a series of successive changes to the tax system that
allow more and more wealth to accumulate at the top with these owners of economic property.
Wealth is more concentrated, we are more overworked, and rampant inequality persists because this
economic system has no mechanism to fix these problems.
On the contrary, it thrives on their existence.
[[What capitalism demands above all else is profit.
And in order for the system to be profitable, someone needs to get screwed over and it certainly
won’t be those with the executive power to set the rules.
Think of it like this.]]
No boss out there, however compassionate or kind-hearted they are, will ever pay their
employee an equal or greater amount than they bring to the company.
It wouldn’t make sense.
What would be the point of hiring an extra person if all the money they generate goes
right back in their pocket?
In other words, no matter what your pay is, even if it seems incredibly generous, it’s
less than what you’re actually worth to the company.
And the money taken off the top, your surplus value, isn’t going to a company fund, or
R&D, or a collective pension scheme, nothing that benefits you or your coworkers even indirectly.
No, it’s going to the shareholders.
Otherwise, there’d be no profit, only expenses and income.
[[This is the fundamental truth of capitalism.
The employee-employer relationship is always, always in favor of the employer, because when
it isn’t, companies aren’t profitable and that’s a big no-no under capitalism.
And the rest of the economy is there to facilitate that.]]
A consistent “natural unemployment” and a minimum wage that hasn’t budged in almost
15 years together gives your boss the ability to replace you at any time, keeps you compliant
to their power under threat of poverty, and gives them leverage to steadily increase that
gap between how much money you bring the company and how much you get paid.
[[Okay, for a lot of you that was probably pretty frustrating.
I can hear you saying “well yeah it sucks, but how else would a business function?
It’s just common sense that it has to be this way or the economy wouldn’t work.”
And that right there is the point - it’s not that the economy wouldn’t work, it’s
that a capitalist economy wouldn’t work.
So what about socialism?]]
Socialists have a different perspective on how to organize society.
To summarize, capitalists and capitalism’s advocates believe that society is best served
by a market-based economy, coupled with a society divided into two classes, one that
owns and controls the productive enterprises and seeks profit, and one that does not own
this form of property and therefore needs to sell its labor for a wage.
Ultimately, fans of capitalism believe this leads to the greatest possible good because,
in their opinion, markets, even when they’re “imperfect,” are better at making decisions
than democracy is.
Socialists disagree.
We know that markets follow the money, not the collective good.
And it’s not hard to see how a society with such staggering inequality might interpret
that fact.
We know there’s no such thing as a perfect market, or a perfectly rational consumer.
We know that, given enough time, competition always means monopolies, and we know that
even if none of this were true, the whole capitalist system would still be built on
a small group of unelected people having more power than the vast majority of the population
and using it to enrich themselves.
[[So what do socialists propose instead?
Well first let me just take one second to clarify a few things we do not propose, because
I get these comments every week.
We do not call for a state-mandated all gray wardrobe, or for every person to have exactly
the same amount of stuff, that’s a very misguided notion of what socialism is about.
When we use words like “equality,” we’re not talking about forcing sameness in every
regard, we’re talking about making sure that everyone is afforded the same baseline
standard of living - that’s it.
It’s not a cap, it’s a basic guarantee.
Individuality, personal expression, the drive to do or become more - none of that will change,
that’s the best part of being human and socialists are all about it.
Now, let’s talk specifics.]]
A guaranteed standard of living.
What does that mean?
Universally free, or at the very least universally accessible, housing, education, food, water,
and healthcare for all.
The right to a life of dignity and basic security because those things are well within our means
by every measure available.
There’s too much food going to waste, too many empty houses, too much stuff being destroyed
to artificially inflate its cost, and too many people making a profit by hoarding our
basic needs.
Socialists are tired of people being pushed into grueling, punishing, or demeaning jobs
by being threatened with eviction, starvation, or death by disease.
[[Thanks to modern technology, humanity has greater material prosperity than ever before.
Why are we so intent on wasting it by keeping it locked away?
It’s not hard to imagine a world that works on positive incentives instead of negative
ones.
The knowledge that your livelihood is secure is a way better incentive to try new things
than the threat of losing everything.]]
The second thing socialists propose is democratic control over the means of production.
Large companies, factories, farms, whatever, basically an economy run democratically and
not in the search of profit.
This can take many forms, be it a centrally planned economy, a network of autonomous communes,
maybe a socialist market system even, it’s not clear what option or combination of options
will work best for different parts of the world.
What is clear is that they would all work better.
Workplaces would be run either without a boss or with one elected by the workers, and the
products of this economy would be geared towards satisfying the needs and wants of society
without having to be profitable to do so.
In other words, it’s an economy run without that artificial barrier imposed by a privileged
group taking a cut off the top.
[[If you’re having a hard time imagining what a democratic workplace would look like,
just think about your current job.
I’ll take retail as a common example.
I used to work at Best Buy as a camera expert.
My job, on paper, was to help customers pick out the camera that would best suit their
needs.
In reality, management just wanted me to upsell people on more expensive gear.]]
To make a long story short, the camera department is kind of detached from Best Buy proper - we
technically reported to the respective brands, and we didn’t have a brand manager there
most of the time.
When left to our own devices, the camera department had the lowest rate of product returns in
the store by far - because we decided amongst ourselves how best to meet the customer’s
needs.
When corporate started pressing us for higher profits and the GM started forcing us to upsell,
the return rate skyrocketed, actual profits shrank, and the department got all kinds of
negative reviews.
In this scenario, and countless others across the labor landscape, the workers know how
best to do their jobs, and meddling from an unelected manager only makes things worse.
Democracy in the workplace increases efficiency and morale and reduces waste.
It’s a no brainer.
[[Anyway, these are some basic propositions socialists have for how to change the world
for the better, but we’ll be the first to admit that they have their limitations.
For example, some amount of inequality will still exist in this society, almost inevitably,
be it in the political, social, or the economic sphere.]]
Things can always be more egalitarian, and there’s no doubt that with the proper institutions
and societal commitment to egalitarianism, socialism will tend towards that goal.
But it won’t ever be ideal, only consistently improving.
Some people will be more popular, find self-serving exploits, or may still make 5 times as much
as someone else.
But, not only will this be more strongly resisted by a society that is democratic through and
through, instead of democratic in politics and hierarchical in the economy, a 5 times
difference in compensation is hardly anything compared to the 350 times higher income of
an average CEO or the million times higher income of the world’s multi-billionaires
we have today.
Equality will undoubtedly make massive strides under a socialist system.
[[And this does not come at the cost of freedom.
A century of red-scare rhetoric has welded the word socialism to the idea of unfreedom
in most people's minds, but that is not a feature of socialist thought or practice.
Socialists only care to abolish one freedom that exists in our current society which is
the freedom to exploit others, or in other words, the freedom to take it away from someone
else.]]
Everything else, all the freedoms that make life worth living, those aren’t going anywhere.
On the contrary, with the boot of capitalism off your neck, you will be more able to enjoy
freedom in every sense of the word - personal, spiritual, economic, everything.
To quote Eugene Debs, one of the most famous American socialists, “Socialism is merely
an extension of the ideal of democracy into the economic field” and “Socialism is
not so much a cut-and-dried program as it is a method by which industry is to be operated.
It does not say what it will do or what you shall do, but only that the people, the workers
and producers, shall be master of themselves.”
[[And you know what?
Things won’t be perfect.
They never are.
Socialism will come with new problems, many of which we’ve probably never even thought
of, but it will also come with a better way to solve them.]]
Today when we face a problem, something important like climate change for example, our solutions
not only need to be filtered by what will either be most profitable or, at best, hurt
profits the least, but also the actual decisions over what solutions we do adopt are ultimately
made by industries kept out of democratic control.
Under capitalism, no government, no scientific board, no body of citizens really has the
power to step to the fossil fuel industry.
Under socialism, under a democratic economy, a climate-change-level decision may still
be incredibly hard to make, but most people care more about still having a planet to live
on than making the numbers on the screen go up every year, and this way, they’ll actually
have the power to make that decision a reality.
That is what socialists offer.
A more dignified life and the democratization of power.
And the only thing it will cost us is giving up on the outdated idea that there is always
a profit-driven solution to our problems.
There isn’t, and we can do better.
[[As one final thought before you go, let me just be as open as I can here.
I don’t make these videos to win clout online, I’m not trying to trick you with clever
rhetoric or even really convince you to see my perspective.
I make these videos because I genuinely believe that this is the way forward.
It’s time.
Deep down we all know something has to change.
I could sell out and make a “why I left the left” video and get handed a multi-million
dollar conservative talk show today.
I’d be set for life, my kids would be set for life.
But I cannot do that because with every fiber of my being I believe that socialism is the
only way forward for humanity.
It is moral, it is just, at this point it’s common sense.
We have the data, we just have a lot of work to do deprogramming ourselves from a century
of red scare propaganda.
Anyway, I hope that maybe some of this video has resonated with you and that you’ll start
asking questions about socialism yourself.
If you do, I’ve got a bunch of other videos exploring all sorts of topics.
We can do this.
We can build the world we deserve.
You should be a socialist.]]
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