[Music] this episode and others like it are made possible by the generous support of my patrons on patreon my adsense revenue has completely tanked in the last couple months so if you'd like to help support this channel and get a bunch of cool perks while you're at it consider becoming a patron at patreon. com second thought who could possibly think socialism is a good thing socialism is a cocktail that never should be tried no it's turpentine none of those ingredients are good the last thing we want in the united states is socialism according to a new survey 70 of american millennials say they'll likely vote socialist and one in three of them view communism favorably the term socialist has been gaining traction for the past couple of years there's a good chance an increasing number of people around you are using that word to describe themselves more and more americans are maybe one of those people even sent you this video maybe one of those people even sent you this video this video is about what people mean when they call themselves socialists i'm going to be covering as much ground as possible in as little time as i can to give you a better understanding of a word we hear all the time but that rarely gets explained all that well and before we do i know that at least a chunk of you will be coming in with a negative opinion of socialism and that's totally fine feel free to voice that in the comments or the invisible to you but very real to me dislikebar all i ask is that you stick around for a while after you do politics is all about disagreement but to have meaningful disagreements you need to know what it is you disagree with let's get started the central idea that unites all socialists is maximizing freedom for everyone regardless of who they are generally speaking socialists want people to have the kinds of rights that ensure they have that freedom the guaranteed right to education healthcare food and shelter to participate in and constitute democratic bodies the right to free time and leisure all of these are rights that increase our freedom and the extent to which we can flourish and live a good life but it's not enough that these rights exist on paper people need to be able to exercise them if you have the freedom to an education but can't afford to spend even one hour less on the job to go to class then you don't really have the freedom to an education the law says you do but you're not actually free to enjoy it think about it like this we might have missed out on a thousand einsteins because poverty kept them from achieving their full potential having freedom and the actual ability to exercise it is critical and this central concern with freedom isn't very surprising every political theory wants to maximize or guarantee freedom in some way if the u. s had its own ideology americanism or something its advocates would also say it's all about freedom and to be fair capitalism did after all become the way of life for most people around the world at least in part because it allowed some people to be more free than they had been before because before capitalism there was something else feudalism think medieval castles with heaped tables of george rr martinez pigs with apples in their mouths and guys with cool names like torf under feudal society the people who were free made up a tiny group kings and other nobles were free everyone else lived under their control and generally had very little freedom after all nobles owned all the land in their kingdom so if you weren't a noble but you wanted a place to live to not be in total abject poverty and to have a semblance of security you were forced into working the noble's land a pretty sweet deal for the nobility because once you had done all the work farming and whatnot they would collect their taxes and force you to give up the products of your labor grain meat or the money made from trading them with others but feudalism wouldn't last forever the emergence of capitalism changed feudal society into something entirely new over a couple hundred years merchants gained more autonomy from feudal lords and became a whole new class of relatively free people nobles lost a great deal of power both gradually and in violent revolutions and the number of free people grew from just a few hundred nobles to thousands of people who weren't just born into the right family capitalism was born and we can see how this new system works today under a capitalist society your boss is part of this new group of free people he like the nobility of the previous economic era has a lot of freedom to do what he wants and a lot of the decisions he makes for himself trickle down and ultimately affect you in the relationship between the two of you it's ultimately him that has the power for example your paycheck isn't determined by how good a job you do but by what your boss decides it to be he has that freedom directly or indirectly your boss hires and fires who he wants you work for him and spend your days producing something that he can turn around and sell to someone else this allows him to make a profit regardless of whether he's a nice guy or not his profit calculation will demand that he take into account a few things like how much he needs you and how many people out there are gunning for your job the more those people are desperate for example because without your job they might end up homeless the more he can push your wage down the more homelessness or poverty there is therefore the better it is for him your salary isn't determined by how dedicated you are or how valuable what you do is but by how disposable you can be you can get up and protest him messing with your paycheck like this but in the back of your mind you know that if you push back too hard you risk ending up with everyone else who is fighting to get your job under feudalism people were made to work the noble's land and hand over the product of their labor they had no choice and very little freedom to do otherwise you work the land or you're going to be in a world of hurt now you need to work the corporate industrial or service industry gig and hand over your time and whatever you produce while you're on the clock to the capitalist in theory you have the freedom not to work or to work for whomever you want as well as to negotiate with your employer but in the same way serfs needed a place to live and food to put on their table money from employment in the capitalist industry is necessary to live and it's not like the power is balanced between the two of you not long ago during the dawn of this new economic system most workers had to hand over the majority of their life 12 hours a day six days a week to their employers often from a young age and in unspeakable conditions we only very recently made this somewhat more bearable the reason we haven't made even more improvements today is that capitalism did not actually represent much of a fundamental change from feudalism the relationship of domination and coercion isn't all that different it's just that this time the size of the group with freedom is slightly bigger a couple thousand instead of a couple hundred and you don't necessarily have to be born into it this system for all its flaws hasn't been all bad in general living standards have improved under capitalism for a lot of people capitalism is a net improvement in some ways from the society that preceded it but just like feudal society became outdated so too has capitalism there have always been problems with this narrative of rising living standards but recently capitalism has started to fail even the people who once got a decent shake out of it two or three generations ago it was a no-brainer that a job could get you a house and enough money to support a family pay your way through college and get access to health care you weren't exactly free but you weren't doing too badly either that is no longer true the few people at the top have been given so much freedom to keep the money you made for them by working in their offices at their storefronts and in their factories that there isn't much left for you high school and college graduates once guaranteed stable employment and livable wages are losing out nowadays between 40 and 50 of college grads are unemployed or working in a job that doesn't require a diploma indebted at rates that completely overshadow their salaries and the story is the same across the economy for someone working at amazon to make as much money as jeff bezos does in just one year they would have to work for 58 years and that's just with his salary if we start counting dividends you'd be working every day of every year of multiple lifetimes just to catch up to bezos single lap around the sun clearly it's time for an upgrade socialists look at this march of history and ask two questions one is there a better way to get the same results as produced under capitalism and two what is it in other words how do we keep the parts we like from capitalism rising living standards and cut out the parts we don't like the exploitation imbalances of power and massively uneven distribution of those rising living standards the big answer for socialists lies in who owns things like companies the argument goes that so long as there is just one or at the most a few people who own our society's productive enterprises they will be able to make decisions that benefit them and not us your boss because he has been given the freedom to do so will use his power to curtail yours he will always try to push your wages down as low as possible make you work the longest hours you can make your working conditions as dire as possible because it's cheaper that way and rakes in more money for him and the other people who own the company while he has to balance that with what other capitalists will do and try to offer better conditions hours or wages every step he makes in the right direction has to contend with his profit margins if something is unprofitable even just by a fraction of a percent less he can't do it he can't risk some other company being more ruthless than he is and undercutting his business the only choices that are on the table are the ones that make him wealthier even if that means making you poorer or generally worse off in the process socialists take stock of all these incentives and try to understand how we can change them instead of the most important thing being the capitalist profit how can we incentivize things that benefit all of us putting more options on the table than just the ones that make the guy at the top richer and we have a lot of ideas on how we can do this from central planning to free association between communes to work our own cooperatives to cybernetic management however varied these ideas are and truly there are a lot of them they are all united by the same conclusion that the best way to figure out which ideas benefit everybody to the fullest extent is to let people decide for themselves give everybody control over what ideas we want to see happen and how instead of a few people at the top setting the rules of the game everybody should get a say over things like their working conditions control over what gets done and how for everyone by everyone not by some self-appointed class of millionaires and billionaires who get to boss everyone else around and you intuitively know that this works how many times has your boss made a decision you know is in the wrong but you're the one who has to live with it how many times have you been told that there's just not enough in the budget for a raise or for you to take that day off but the company is raking in record profits how many decisions are kept behind closed doors until they blow up in your face you might not always have the answers to every problem your company faces but if the solutions of those at the top are so good why are their decisions made behind closed doors why do they always make them better off and not you socialists understand that this isn't a system that makes anybody more free or makes things any more fair freedom is a two-way street i can't be free to do what i want if you have the freedom to stop me from doing it i can't be free if you make all my decisions for me by all means when something only affects you you should be able to do what you please but if things like my livelihood get involved it's only fair that we all get a say and it's becoming clearer to more people growing up today that their odds of living a decent life aren't as secure as they have been in the past it's going to come down to a lot of luck whether you end up doing well for yourself and living what we might consider a normal life even if you work really hard but even though we see how our current capitalist society is leading us down this unfortunate path curtailing our freedom or more generally how the system benefits from things like high unemployment poverty and low wages it can feel scary or even just hasty to jump to socialism for the answer we can recognize the flawed incentives and inherent economic instability of capitalism and still not know what to do about it the historical record after all hasn't really proved that an alternative system works either at least that's what we've been told contrary to what is commonly believed the performance of developing countries in the period of state-led development was superior to what they've achieved during the subsequent period of market-oriented reform there were some spectacular failures of state intervention but most of these countries grew much faster with more equitable income distribution and far fewer economic crises during the bad old days than they have done in the period of market-oriented reforms moreover it is also not true that almost all rich countries have become rich through free market policies the truth is more or less the opposite with only a few exceptions all of today's rich countries including britain and the us the supposed homes of free trade and free market have become rich through the combinations of protectionism subsidies and other policies that today they advise developing countries not to adopt free market policies have made few countries rich so far and will make few rich in the future that's a quote from economist hajoon chang in his book 23 things they don't tell you about capitalism there is more interesting stuff in there and it's a pretty casual read if you're interested and he's not even a socialist so you don't have to worry about consuming kami propaganda or anything he's just honest about the shortcomings of capitalism so what does this mean is socialism just when the government does stuff the answer is no for starters that question implies a lot of really horrible things you think the dmv sucks just wait until the government takes over everything else you think the government is screwing you now just wait until they have even more power obviously a world of dmvs as dictators isn't what socialists want who in their right mind would defend something like that part of the problem is that that question is being asked in a pretty deceitful way what counts as the government doing stuff sometimes government programs are measures for wealth redistribution like social security welfare public libraries and food stamps other times it's basic stuff that every government regardless of its economic model or ideology takes care of things like fire departments garbage removal sewers or street lights in this list are also institutions like the police the military the fbi and cia courts and prisons wherever you are on the political spectrum there are going to be things on this list that you don't like and other things that you do when you imply that socialism is when the government does stuff and you're already primed to be wary of the word your mind easily jumps to whatever thing the government does that you don't like or that the present government does the worst hence the dmv and authoritarian stuff but regardless that's not what socialism is socialism is a society in which the means of production factories farms offices basically the things that produce for the economy are held by all in common and subject to democratic decision-making rather than that of a few individuals nothing more while governments are one way to coordinate this ownership it's not the only one what's more there's a deeper problem with this question the way we think of government isn't absolute empty of all context as humans we have a hard time imagining a world that isn't like the one we have now which means we also have a hard time imagining how our governments could be different from the way they exist today under capitalism and you already know what that's like companies pumping in billions to get some guy elected and in their pocket public services working on razor thin budgets and being genuinely infuriating the people you cast a ballot for not doing their jobs and getting paid quite a lot to pretend it's not their fault every election going to the lesser evil the default vision of government we all inherit is one of incompetence unresponsiveness corruption and elitism it benefits a select class of one percenters and only tosses a few crumbs to the rest of us the main promise that socialists have to keep is that we can turn this all on its head that we can truly arrive at democracy one that isn't awful and out of touch by directly involving people in the democratic process at their job and stripping all the power away from the billionaires that sit at the helm of massive corporations with the power to lobby democracy away that we can coordinate through planning or otherwise the production of things in such a way that we are producing according to our needs and desires not for the profit of a select few profit driven markets sometimes get this right in all fairness you know broken clock and all that but are still very often terrible at delivering on our wants and needs hence why housing is so unaffordable for most people why homelessness is always so high why education is out of reach for millions and why health care costs continue to skyrocket the demand is there capitalism is terrible at providing the supply the mission set out by socialists is to deliver on the promises of capitalism that capitalism can't actually provide to give you and your loved ones the security the stability and the good life that you deserve and that is within our means to provide to all or not for a few leeches taking advantage of their undue power and getting in the way of everyone getting a livable baseline to build upon in short no socialism is not when the government does stuff you get to decide what gets done you participate more directly than before in the decisions that affect your day-to-day life socialists aren't against competition we're also big fans of innovation but we don't want to see competition and innovation being used as excuses to push most people towards poverty and make the lucky remaining few ludicrously wealthy still this all sounds well and good in theory but socialism doesn't work in practice right and here we have to pause for a second and understand that socialism like capitalism exists on a continuum of policies and ideas there is no fully capitalist experiment just like there is no fully socialist experiment saying socialism doesn't work is as wrong-headed as saying capitalism doesn't work more generally though it's not like there's a good experimental method to base that conclusion off of it's not like we can take two countries control for all their differences and let them run loose with each economic model no two countries are the same start off from the same point or exist in a vacuum we can't compare country a to country b and call it a day socialist experiments often happened in countries that were poorer to start off with and generally speaking had to contend with a global economy managed by capitalist adversaries if this were a scientific experiment it wouldn't get published that being said we can look to the archives of countries that have experimented with mostly socialist economics and see how successful they were despite the circumstances one place we might look is salvador allende's socialist chile allende was a socialist who won the chilean presidential election of 1970 in his few short years as president and we'll get to why they were so short in just a minute allende brought incredible changes to chilean society he raised wages real wages increased by around 22 percent in the first full year of his presidency he lowered taxes 35 of chileans were no longer taxed at all he reigned in inflation lowering it by over 10 points he funded massive housing programs building tens of thousands of affordable homes all across the country education also got a big boost and enrollment at all educational levels grew universities in particular were made free increasing enrollment by nearly 90 percent hospitals and other medical centers were opened across the country particularly in underserved rural and poor areas allende extended maternity leave doubling it from 6 to 12 weeks chile saw a dramatic decrease in poverty and generally speaking more people could more fully enjoy their lives and interestingly enough the bulk of this new economy was organized through project cybersign a decentralized network of computers that would take anonymous self-reported and voluntary updates from workers in productive enterprises across chile to identify areas where resources needed to be redirected the democratic economy in chile was highly responsive to fluctuating changes and chileans reaped the rewards gdp grew 7 in the first year production by 13 and consumption by 11 by kicking out capitalist enterprises not only did the chilean economy work for more people it worked better period this kind of response wasn't welcomed by everyone though allow me to pull quotes from a particular document the church commission report on chile one of the only documents released by the american government to the public about the extent of its intelligence agency's intervention in a foreign country these are all things the u.
s is actually admitting to covert american activity was a factor in almost every major election in chile in the decade between 1963 and 1973 in several instances the united states intervention was massive the 1964 presidential election was the most prominent example of a large-scale election project the central intelligence agency spent more than 2. 6 million 24 million in today's dollars in support of the election of the opposition more than half of the christian democratic candidates campaign was financed by the united states the most extensive covert action activity in chile was propaganda it was relatively cheap in addition to buying propaganda piecemeal the station often purchased it wholesale by subsidizing chilean media organizations friendly to the united states the cia supported or even founded friendly media outlets which might not have existed in the absence of agency support the united states covert efforts to affect the course of chilean politics reached a peak in 1970. the cia was directed to undertake an effort to promote a military coup in chile to prevent the accession to power of salvador allende in summary the white house intelligence community multinational corporations and military wasted millions trying to stop a popular candidate getting elected in a democratic election and when it failed wasted another set of millions trying to depose the guy who had improved chile by nearly every metric their first coup attempt in 1970 would fail but three years later the u.
