Against Hipster Communism, Against NonCompete.

by the end of the film we hope that you
will be prepared to begin participating in revolutionary activity yourself there was an episode from history that really moved me emotionally when I read it the first time and it came from one of the smaller islands off the south coast of Korea refugees who were running away from the horror of what communism was in what became North Korea when they got there there were completely idealistic completely naive university students who wanted to support communism and it wanted to have a revolution on that small island and the refugees who were there and who had endured they had seen the horror of the gulag they had seen the reality of what communist revolution created in North Korea and they probably also knew about what was going on in Mao Zedong's China in communist China further north because it's just not that far away they knew how terrible communism and practice really was and those people those refugees on that island with no guidance from the government with no army support they rose up and fought on the streets and they killed people they said no they were willing to fight to the death against these communists to prevent this from happening again in South Korea to prevent this from happening on that island and you can imagine the misperception of the two sides because those communists in those Island they they weren't like secret agents working for the north they weren't really cynical include uh people they probably were just idealistic students who heard this same kind of [ __ ] that you're hearing now on YouTube promising them a better world and saying the system is broken with these vague promises of liberation and negation of everything that's wrong with the capitalist system but that's the thing about democracy democracy is ultimately not just a popularity contest there are people in the population who know and there are people in the population who do not know what they're talking about and that's one of the inequalities democracy has had to stroll the cope with since Aristotle and ancient Athens hey since the democracy in ancient Athens voted to have Socrates put to death those people in South Korea they weren't just vision between left and right between idealistic University students and refugees ultimately there was a distinction there between people who know and people who do not know revolution is serious business and it requires serious study and consideration but after you have familiarize yourself with the concepts which we are about to present we trust that you will be well on your way to waging revolution against the tyranny of capitalist depression which grips us all there are those who say that the best way to do away with capitalism is gradually over time through reform by voting for anti-capitalist candidates and working through the legislative process communists can slowly but surely implement laws and regulations that weaken capitalism and strengthen the working class at least in theory reformists are skeptical that revolution is even achievable at all in the real world and they see revolution as an unrealistic and unachievable fantasy reform is also not enough Marx and Engels touched on reformist socialism when they discussed budva socialism in the communist manifesto writing this form of socialism by no means understands abolition of the boudoir relations of production an abolition that can be effected only by a revolution rosa luxemburg further elaborated on the need for revolution and her 1899 pamphlet social reform or revolution reformists do not really choose a more tranquil calmer and slower road to the same goal but a different goal our program becomes not the realization of socialism but the reform of capitalism not the suppression of the wage labor system but the diminution of exploitation that is the suppression of the abuses of capitalism instead of suppression of capitalism itself the only way to do away with the brutal system of capitalism once and for all was to dismantle it completely which calls for revolution what is revolution revolution is quite simply the replacement of one system with another system entirely I think it's tremendously important to clarify this point revolutions change who rules they don't change what is being ruled they don't change the economic or political system in the history of ancient Rome there are numerous revolutions what do we mean when we say that there was a revolution in ancient Rome a group of people very often starting with a with a patrician house with a group of aristocrats nobility conspire and lead a revolution and take over the government they change who rules now also in history of Rome there sometimes were revolutions from below there was fighting in the streets and the plebs the commoners sometimes the slaves that were slave revolutions to club revolution slave revolutions they rose up and they changed rules but changing the person who sits on the throne or changing the people who sit in the Senate is very very different from the type of promise being made here and note how vague and how entirely negative the promise is being made here arm where reform seeks to alter and change a system in order to improve it revolution relies on abandoning a system entirely to erect a new one in its place it's deceptively simple to promise abandoning a system in Russia after 1917 did they abandon the system of where cow milk came from did they look at farming and agriculture and say oh capitalist production of milk is bad and evil and wrong let's abandon it no milk and meat and wheat and bread were all produced in exactly the same way they didn't have a new system to actually produce anything do you think they certainly say hey we have a new system of producing cars we have a new system of producing bullets and rifles oh the material that needed for no they could neither abandon the system of production they already had for these things the government relied on the government relied on food the government also relied on explosives and war material and so on right they couldn't abandon anything of the kind they could only take over a system that already existed they could change the people who ruled a new dictatorship could rise up and take over the government okay now in another sense very literally when you look at the seats of power when you have revolutions including communist revolutions but not only communist revolutions you have a parliament what happens when there's a revolution and new people take over maybe they literally erase the word parliament and replace it with the word like the Hall of the people the Great Hall of the People the People's Congress maybe they come with a new name for the fact remains there is a building with chairs and the people who sit in those chairs have power and you don't the population doesn't the population is still ruled by somebody then you look through the other sections of the economy the farms and the factories they're still ruled by someone they're hit there has been no change in management in principle the only change is in who is the manager what's changed is ownership there are new owners there are new bosses the actual system of production the actual system of social organization is the same and it's not just Lenin who struggled with this and it's not just Stalin who struggled this hilariously Mao Zedong when he got to the end of his life he was an old old man he complained about this also that he had signed up for this revolution and he thought everything was going to profoundly change but he complained as an old man the only thing that has changed is ownership now instead of it being owned by capitalists these same things were owned and operated by the state think of your car's engine if your car won't start hopefully it's just a small problem a bad sparkplug a loose belt that sort of thing if the engine is in good shape except for a bad part here or there your mechanic can reform the engine by replacing the broken part with a new one but what if it's a major problem what if the engine is in such bad shape that it would be more time consuming and expensive to fix it part by part sometimes it's a better option to just replace the entire engine even if that were true it doesn't mean that you have access to a technology that is fundamentally superior to the internal combustion engine if your car breaks down you replace the engine you're gonna replace it with another engine that obeys the same laws of physics that accomplishes the same task it may be five percent more efficient or maybe five percent less efficient but it's an illusion to suggest that just because you are replacing the engine that the act of replacement itself means that things will be fundamentally different or better that's exactly what a dishonest to used-car salesmen who tell you yeah one engine is a little bit different from another but the act of replacement doesn't entail you have some fundamentally superior technology that's much better for the environment or that's going to get you to work faster these are the types of misconceptions and kind of it's the misplaced optimism that communist revolutionaries are playing on if you think that state ownership in an authoritarian sense or even collective ownership in a so-called you know anarcho-communism if you think that's fundamentally better why don't you take a look at American Indian reservations why don't you take a look at the difference between a casino that's owned and operated by a for-profit corporation and a casino that is owned by all the members of a tribe that answers to a tribal council we have collective ownership community ownership how different are they really ultimately there's a board of directors there's a manager there's a there's some kind of hierarchy for management in one case ultimately the management answers to the shareholders as part of a for-profit corporation in the other case the casino operates and answers to a Tribal Council and has to produce a profit for those tribal people there are some differences maybe it's five percent different maybe it's ten percent different but nobody who even is a cursory bit of research into this nobody would think wow Las Vegas Nevada would be fundamentally transformed for the better if you took away the ownership of the casinos from private corporations and gave it to the community that's already been tried that's already a reality in the real world here and now you see it on Indian reservations and in practice it resembles corporate ownership ninety five percent an automobile or a cellular phone is a good bit less complex than human society however these examples do demonstrate that reforming a system is only a viable long term solution when the system itself is adequately designed a system can only be reformed if it is worthy of reform you should notice that the argument here is being made entirely in terms of claims about how bad the system is that's to be replaced and not the quality of the system that would replace it the claims are just being made that the car engine is broken there seems to be no onus on them to prove that they have a technology that is fundamentally superior to the car engine if a system is inherently unfair if power is distributed unevenly if performance potential is severely curtailed then revolution becomes the only viable long-term solution whether we're talking about the manager of a factory the management of a coal mine or the management of the house of parliament the Senate the elite level of decision-making in the government itself really ask yourself what will change when new people take over through a revolution what is going to change at the coal mine what will change is who is in charge not how they manage not even the motivations for why they will make the decisions they make it happens fairly often in capitalist democracies that a group of workers will take over the ownership of a company when the company is going out of business or even just when the original owners or original shareholders decide that they want to retire that they want to quit they want to do something else with their money when that happens so let's say stereotypically there's a factory that's going to go to business and the owners say okay look we're contractually obliged to pay out to all of the all of the employees several million dollars in some kind of severance or settlement now as part of the act of doing business and then some party steps in some outside persons wait wait wait if all the workers agree we can take this settlement money we can take these several severance packages and we can invest it back into the company and in effect there can be a kind of hostile takeover where the employees take over ownership of the company and it remains open it keeps functioning under new management but nothing really changes when workers do this it's obviously because they want to keep doing their jobs rather than taking the payout and by the way there will never be enough money just from the severance itself for that to happen some other quote unquote angel investor will come in the investment might stereotypically come from you know some retirement savings plan there's some pension plan that decides okay they can put some tens of millions of dollars into keeping this factory open you know partly on a for-profit basis and partly charile basis whatever then the workers invest this money and there's still an office there's still a manager there's still a boss and that boss is still motivated by maximizing profit they're still trying to make money they still fire people for being incompetent they still hire new people because they think they can help them make more money they still make changes they still make executive decisions like executives in a capitalist system in much the same way and here we're just talking about the workers taking over the news especially within a capitalist system the tragedy of the so-called utopian experience of experiments and communism all over the world whether it was on the scale of a small plot farm or in a huge scale factories mines a whole society the tragedy is that this same pattern plays out again and again and again you have new people sitting in Parliament you have new people sitting in the manager's office but fundamentally nothing much changes and part of the problem is exactly that these revolutionary proposals are just stated in negative ways they just talk about abolishing and getting rid of capitalism okay well when you get rid of the shareholders and replace them with public ownership how different is it really within the United States of America today look at a government-owned prison and a prison owned by a private for-profit company how different are they really there are some differences I think you can actually look at the prison system private sector versus public sector and you can come to conclusions about which one is doing a better job which one pays its employees better which one treats inmates better there are some differences but if you think you're looking at a dramatic night and day difference between the private sector operating something and the public sector sector operating something you're living in a kind of Fantasyland and reciprocally with that when you look at the disasters of companies that get taken over and run by the private not-for-profit center when you look at what happens for example in the history the Soviet Union of history of China when the government decides they can do a better job running the steel industry than private investors can there were certainly reasons to pause here in question wait wait wait wait how strong is this analogy that the engine in the car is broken and even if the engine in the car is broken shouldn't we face it for the fact that we're really just gonna replace it with another engine of the same kind shouldn't we be cognizant that finding a Fault in the engine is something very different from a blueprint for a fundamentally new way to generate electricity or generate motion within the hood of that car capitalism is an inherently and irredeemably flawed system as we can see from the incredible wealth disparity that exists in capitalist states around the world this argument is just an appeal to jealousy wealth inequality is not the same as injustice the fact that someone is more beautiful than you someone like Matt Elam Berner we've just seen on-screen you may never be as beautiful as her you may never be as fit as her you may never be as wealthy as her you may never have a kitchen that looks that nice or that opulent in your life that doesn't mean that she ever did anything to harm you that doesn't mean that she ever did anything to wrong you that doesn't mean that she ever took anything away from you people seem to be very eager to imagine both historically and presently that the aristocratic class is just a parasite on society it's not enough for me to just say here that the rich have not taken anything away from you I think it's really necessary for me to add the rich give a great deal to help the poor even in the United States of America we're not talking about Denmark here we're not talking about Sweden were not talking about Singapore or Japan look at this chart who pays the taxes who pays to make all of the good things in American society possible who pays to transfer their wealth and income to help the poor it's the rich it's the rich who pay for the poor it's the rich who pay for the sewage system and the hospitals and all the wonderful government services that taxes bring it is the rich who are paying for food stamps it's blindingly obvious okay the top 1% 1% of the population alone are paying twenty four point two percent of the taxes in the United States of America the United States of America as you know it would collapse the government would cease to exist whole everything you assume about life the existence of roads and electricity would be impossible without the richest of the rich paying that money in taxes look at that 80 first to 99th percentile forty four point six percent if you add those two together it is blindingly obvious the important positive role that the rich have in American society now what measurable difference does that make for the poorest of the poor this little bar chart from the Congressional Budget Office this is from United States government this little bar chart is showing you the poorest 20% of people in America the green bar is showing their income before transfers and taxes so their income before the government takes some away in taxes and gives them some in benefits and then the purple bar shows you the income of the poor after transfers and taxes okay the poorest 20% of Americans their wealth is more than doubled look at the size of the two bars they may be small but the poorest 20% of people in the United States of America benefit massively from the generosity of the rich specifically the money paid in taxes that is redistributed to them and this is not paradise this is not Japan this is not Denmark this is the capitalist United States of America oh and look at this this is the fourth quintile so out of the five segments of society if you split society into five segments 20% 20% 20% 30% the fourth quintile these will be people like affluent doctors optometrists architects these are wealthy people but not fabulously wealthy people okay the fourth quintile look at that the bars are almost exactly the same when you look at how much money they pay in taxes and the benefits they get from the government it's only a tiny tiny difference they're giving up just a little bit money so who's paying who's paying to more than double the welfare of the poorest to the poor there it is it's the top one percent and it's the highest quintile just as the two blue segments of the pie chart made obvious before it is not the case that the wealthy of the United States of America play no positive role in your daily life on the contrary they are underwriting the society you live in the paving of the roads the provision of electricity water heating you name it to an extent you can hardly fathom here and now if you think that the existence of your education system would be better by liquidating those two blue parts of the pie chart No No maybe you can start to imagine why it is that communist societies overall seem to have decimated their wealth once the revolution is over and done with broadly in the history of Europe you're talking about a situation where capitalism emerge after feudalism were the fundamental wealth inequalities were created by the fact that aristocrats owned the land and peasants did not simplifying history a little bit let's not get into details if you come from Canada or the United States or Australia it's more extreme because it's a history of slavery and genocide and colonial appropriation of line up very rapidly kicking all the people around and the people who ended up owning the land they formed the wealthy class they formed the ruling class that's a problem and there's a way to solve it that hasn't changed since Aristotle if ownership of land is unequal and unfair you can redistribute the ownership of land if access to education is unfair you can in effect redistribute access to education if access to medical care is unfair you can redistribute that's the medical care all of these things can be changed but that's not the argument he's making here the argument he's making here is that wealth inequality the fact that some people are richer than you is itself an injustice so deep it's eliciting your sense of jealousy that somehow the existence of that wealth out of your reach is a crime against you it's mo harms you and therefore you have to rise up in revolution and destroy the whole system I think that is fundamentally evil as well as being misleading and false because this revolution is not promising to take that money away from the rich people and give it to you the only thing the Communists are offering and the only thing even the Socialists are offering is to take that money away from the rich and for it to be kept by the state the people who are a little bit more anarchist in flavor the anarchic communist they will tell you that the wealth will be owned by the community or by everyone I you still in Canada there was a community swimming pool who do you think owned it it was owned by the state it was owned and operated by the state and powerful people in government not me decided when it would open and what it would close and who could go inside and who couldn't and how much money I'd have to pay to go inside I was in absolutely no sense an owner of that swimming pool even though it was owned by everyone it was owned by the community it was owned and operated by the state if you just pause and think that swimming pool public swimming pool how different is it really from a private for-profit attraction like Disneyland I'll tell you how it's different if something is unpopular at Disneyland they have to respond they have to they have to change it really quickly if Disneyland opens a new exhibit a new ride a new attraction and it's unpopular they respond very very quickly to public perception public interest they respond to their shareholders to yes and new manager will be assigned and people will get fired and be shuffled and new executives will take over the and there will be a new a new attraction put up as quick as can possibly be and when something works poorly in the public sector if you don't have a very transparent democracy if you don't have a system that really allows members of the public to come in and complain say no no no this swimming pool is being badly run or it's corrupt or there's something wrong with this it's very very hard to get any change why did Sega go out of business I mean any of these companies you see it happens around us all the time it's part of the norm in capitalism to such an extent that you can learn to ignore it all the time private for-profit companies respond to public interest they're incredibly sensitive right then it's it sure it's all rooted in the profit motive but it's also rooted in if you like the people pleasing behavior the crowd pleasing behavior that's built into the capitalist for-profit system and the contrast to that is the fundamentally bureaucratic fundamentally Authority Jerian fundamentally oppressive behavior of state-owned government-owned public entities okay now I'm not a libertarian I think there were all sorts of things in our society that can and should be owned by the government I'm fine with the government owning hospitals I'm fine with the government owning prisons I'm completely happy that the government owns sewage treatment plants and most of the time the government even owns the pipes that takes the sewage away from your house and there's another set of pipes that bring clean drinking water to your house and the government owns the pump house and the government owns and operates the electricity generating power station it's a wonder all of the things that the public sector owns and operates that are owned and operated by the government okay and I think it's very important to have a transparent and accountable democracy to prevent that part of the economy from becoming kleptocratic from becoming corrupt and evil and abusive okay but the discourse were being presented with here is fundamentally appealing to your jealous instincts it's telling you that it doesn't matter how well the system runs it doesn't matter how well the whole government system runs in Switzerland Sweden Denmark Japan doesn't matter because as there as long as long as there's somebody better off than you as long as there's somebody prettier than you as long as there's somebody wealthier than you if you feel jealousy you'll feel that somehow what they have was taken away from you and you now want to use the revolution and the power of the state to take it back but the sad thing is about the Communists they'll never take it back they'll never give it back to you they'll take it and then they'll keep it for themselves it'll become government property it'll become the property of a totalitarian dictator riyal communist state and the promises of the anarcho-capitalists they're only as different from that as what you see with tribal self-government on an Indian Reservation we're basically a corporation with a manager and a Board of Trustees operates a casino in the name of the community in the name of the people but it functions much the same way as any other private for-profit entity the only way to completely topple this unjust and self-preserving system is through revolution but how do we have a revolution in a capitalist state where the government has nearly limitless power how can a small group of revolutionaries ever hope to challenge the globe-spanning empires of exploitation which exist under capitalism it does seem daunting the issue of plausibility matters in another peculiar sense I said to someone the other day look these revolutions you guys are caught up on you must recognize that far less than 1% of the population the United States would support a Nazi revolution Nazis coming to power and taking over the government I say it's far less than 1% okay and not just that a huge percentage of the population would be very strongly opposed to this by the same token it's not just the problem that less than 1% of people would support this kind of communists take over the government but the well-informed opposition to it millions and millions of people the the number of people who would say no I'm not just opposed to that on the level of voting against it in a referendum but if there were an attempt to take over the government if there were a coup d'etat how a communist that they know what that means they know what the consequences would be and that they would rise up and they would fight against it to preserve democracy preserve freedom of speech however it is you want to think of what it is they want to preserve in the society they would be willing to stand up and die fighting against that communist dictatorship and communists watching this video that's hard for you to imagine think about how you would feel if there the threat of fascists of Nazis taking over the government you would say the same thing you'd say you you don't just want to sit there you don't just want to vote in a referendum you're suddenly galvanized to such an extent that you're willing to fight against a coup d'etat you're willing to fight to restore democracy and to restore freedom speech and all these other things because you know how terrible the consequences are of allowing a fascist dictatorship to take over the government well those of us who've studied the history of communism we know also just how terrible the consequences are if we allow a communist dictatorship a dictatorship of the proletariat to take over the government we know how valuable it is to preserve our democracy however flawed we know how important it is to preserve democracy in principle even in a flawed system there was an episode from history that really moved me emotionally when I read it the first time and it came from one of the smaller islands off the south coast of Korea so there's North Korea South Korea and then there were islands south of Korea and a group of refugees had arrived in this island this is kind of during the Civil War period refugees who were running away from the horror of what communism was in what became North Korea and they arrived in this island and when they got there they were completely idealistic completely naive University students who wanted to support communism and it wanted to have a revolution on that small island and the refugees who were there and who had endured they had seen the horror of the gulag they had seen the reality of what communist revolution created in North Korea and they probably also knew about what was going on in Mao Zedong's China in communist China further north because it's just not that far away they knew how terrible communism and practice really was and those people those refugees on that island with no guidance from the government with no army support they rose up and fought on the streets and they killed people they said no they were willing to fight to the death against these communists to prevent this from happening again in South Korea to prevent this from happening and you can imagine the misperception of the two sides because those communists in those Allen they they weren't like secret agents working for the north they weren't really cynical included uh people they probably were just idealistic students who heard this same kind of [ __ ] that you're hearing now on YouTube promising them a better world and saying the system is broken with these vague promises of liberation and negation of everything that's wrong with the capitalist system but that's the thing about democracy democracy is ultimately not just a popularity contest it deals with hard choices choices between things that are factually correct and factually incorrect decisions that are right and wrong ultimately democracies have to set up sewage systems that will prevent human beings from having cholera that involves technical scientific facts not just a show of hands for what 51% of people want to do with the budget to cope with the sewage system hard terrible facts and that creates both rational and irrational inequality because when it comes to making decisions about how the sewage system should operate now the education system should operate how the health care system should operate there are people in the population who know and there are people in the population who do not know what they're talking about and that's one of the inequalities democracy has had to stroll the cope with since Aristotle and ancient Athens hey since the democracy in ancient Athens voted to have Socrates put to death those people in South Korea they weren't just a division between left and right between idealistic University students and refugees ultimately there was a distinction there between people who know and people who do not know [Music]