Veganism vs. "Anti-Capitalism" (vs. The Vegan Anarchist)

the type of people who have been drawn
to veganism disproportionately are believers in crazy conspiracy theories crackpot economics extreme left-wing hyper and there's a lot of very lazy anti-capitalist thinking going on in Venus and veganism is not alone in this it's not unique or isolated Cambridge University as the soul is illusion yo what up many of the problems we have within the intellectual ghetto of 21st century vegan politics are basically the same as the problems you have in the larger intellectual ghetto of planet Earth or western academia or what have you I'm gonna play you some clips from a guy called the vegan anarchists who I know watches this channel and he sent me some messages in the past he is saying many of the same things that I have heard presented in formal academic contexts by people with PhDs at Cambridge University at Oxford University in Cambodia white people with PhDs in Cambodia who are still pro-communist etc and he does say it in a somewhat more blunt and ill-mannered way however the ideas really are the same and he is a young man who openly identifies as being diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome so I just say do not fault him too much for his manner of speaking and let's have the good grace to focus instead on the content of what he's saying and first wanna make is do you know that for every homeless person there are six of battered houses so we have no bed how's the opponent people six houses in America for us a country that has over bunnies of homes and yet active homeless people homes what get you to see me calm would give you confidence that it would won't give let's say more people are starting to food so this is a great example of how in politics the type of thinking we have to do is often counterintuitive there is logic in the social sciences there is the use of logic but it is also very easy to be led astray by logic alone or by looking at a social science statistic in isolation that way taking for granted that the number he's given is correct it doesn't really matter there is a very large number of empty houses in the United States there is also a very large number of houses empty houses abandoned houses in Canada why is it that we can't simply solve homelessness through utilizing those abandoned houses the answer is very simple access to employment in a country like Canada or the United States which in some ways these are different from you know Luxembourg the different from small densely populated countries in Europe more so there similarities places like Australia we have huge parts of Canada that have declining populations a factory closes down a mine closes down you have a small town in the middle of Saskatchewan in Canada and when the mine closes all the houses become abandoned there is no way you can look at the unemployed population poor people homeless people in the city of Chicago and just say oh we're gonna give you the ownership of these abandoned houses that are in a small town that used to have a mine or you set up a factory and where that is now closed down it may seem logical it may seem intuitively obvious by looking at a number on a piece of paper that you can just solve the dilemma of homelessness by reassigning abandoned houses to poor people but you can't now this is only one reason why the other reality is if you actually get into it and look at what an abandoned house is you have to have quite a lot of wealth stored up to be able to take an abandoned house and make it habitable in the vast majority of cases yes there are exceptions you might find one or two abandoned houses in downtown Chicago that could be repurposed for this type of use and that does happen all the time charities within capitalist societies buy up abandoned houses and use them to help poor people that's been going in cities like Detroit that's been going on since forever you know it's a very common form of religious outreach once the house has become abandoned and very cheap charities get involved with doing exactly that however on a large scale when you're talking about hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of abandoned houses um if you walk up to a homeless person who's in downtown Chicago and say hey we're gonna give you on paper the ownership of an abandoned house in a former industrial town or a former mining town in the middle of Saskatchewan or the middle of Ohio where you have no ability to earn a living you have no ability to improve yourself in any way oh and before you can move into that house currently there's no running water you know you'll actually have to spend thousands of dollars improving the the plumbing getting the water working again getting the electricity working again improving the fixtures you know getting rid of the rats and other problems possibly fixing the roof abandoned houses take capital take large amounts of money to be invested in them to make them habitable again this is a generalization but any of you have practical experience will know this is true and the cost to refurbish an abandoned house is in many cases higher than providing a homeless person with a subsidized apartment or access to housing and housing project or access to a shelter in the downtown core of a city and in the downtown core of that city they may have access to education programs an unemployment office employment opportunities what have you so already with these very very few observations you see why in countries like the United States and Canada social outreach generally has followed the pattern that's already familiar to us and why we haven't been reassigning abandoned houses that are themselves again when you get into large numbers tell you what thousands of event houses we yeah Canada's fold that we have failed uranium mining towns that used to be a uranium mine uranium mining stop being profitable the whole town turns into abandoned housing what do you want to do with it it's a chronic problem for the government of Canada I know Australia and the United States also have this ghost town phenomenon on an enormous scale and even when you're not talking about remote rural locations or small towns when you look within one city uh-huh yeah United States today I think you still have a huge number of abandoned houses in the happy city of New Orleans we're finding at finding employment is is difficult the best of times what do you want to do with those houses if you give them to people who are destitute people are homeless and poor those people you can hand them the ownership of a house in New Orleans on paper the only thing they can do with that piece of paper is go to a bank and try to sell it to someone else who has the money to take that abandoned house and make it habitable again so these the dynamics in understanding politics in thinking politically there's a very peculiar form of counterintuitive thinking that has to go on which is not just unique to the social sciences it's unique to the overlap between politics and economics and I'm not boasting to say I'm one of the small number of people who is really good at this mode of thinking because I listen to lectures from elite institutions not just by going down visited elite universities but you know London School of Economics you can download academic lectures directly from their website every so often London School of Economics has people with PhDs who are on the far left who are communists or anarchists leftist anarchists making these same sorts of arguments and they're just as easily refuted I mean again this young man you know doesn't have all the the advantages of those people given those lectures at Cambridge Oxford London School of Economics but the arguments are the same they are I've heard these same arguments from people wearing fancy suits speaking with fancy accents and they're just as easily refuted the orgy of ignorance that was Occupy Wall Street brought all this crackpot pseudo economic theory to the fore and this is still what's haunting the Internet and it's still haunting the community of what I call early adopters within veganism today but I mean this this is the type of misconception that Shores up anti capitalism as a sort of air SATs ideology basically supply-demand going to mention the fact that capitals must show neither merely give homeless people homes despite the fact that you only have ability gives us six abandoned houses for the one homeless guy and yeah and the people waste food so veganism it's so for and war hunger but we abolish capitalism and animal in the animal industry then we defeat the world hunger so um many of the weaknesses here stem from the core concept of anti capitalism itself now it's certainly fine to offer a critique of capitalism without posing an alternative the same way I can offer a critique of a diet without proposing a better diet I can simply point out what's wrong with somebody's diet and say hey whether or not I'm not a dietary expert myself but I can see some problems this so you know critique is always welcome however the real historical alternatives to capitalism that are being kind of veiled here are for example communism and feudalism and it is false to problematize capitalism as if by removing capitalism from this equation the problems he's describing will disappear ok apply and demand do you actually think that was not a problem under communism it was with disastrous results do you think waste was not a problem under communism it was with disastrous results including millions of people starving simultaneous with that same waste it is very sobering for anyone on the Left to look at the real economic and social history of Agriculture of agricultural production in Russia in China even in small-scale examples of communist societies like Laos Cuba or what have you there are many sobering and indeed terrifying lessons to be learned so there there's a real intellectual laziness in just talking about anti capitalism here and of presuming that by removing capitalism from the equation you will revert to a system that solves all these problems well even under feudalism feudalism in a meaningful sense is not capitalism and is not communism it's a fundamentally different social system including that it's fundamentally different in relation to agriculture uhm these problems you're iterating do you think they they're absent in historical feudalism which is a pretty well documented you know easy to study easy to examine social system yes the problem of government subsidy to meat production and dairy production are you familiar at all with the history of the Soviet this is an enormous aspect of Soviet cultural and economic identity at the same time that people were were literally starving to death in terrible numbers totally follow me go bean and balls catabolism too started using Africa I want you to see a piece of grain that's been saved um well there's really quite a lot of evidence to the contrary and again you can look at the historical reality of communism you can look at the historical reality of communism providing aid in Africa which happened not just Russia but China also in a big way was involved in in aid to Africa um it's simply not true now and never has been true that there is a paucity of grain going to starving people in Africa from capitalist countries on the contrary enormous quantities of grain have been sent to Africa from capitalist countries under the heading of charity very simply charity is an aspect of capitalism capitalism produces wealth it also produces poverty and it also produces charity both nationally both within one country and internationally so no it's not a perfect system and unlike communism it doesn't pretend to be however communists were in the deplorable situation of covering up mass starvation of covering up the horrendous use of violence especially in agriculture in food production and of pretending that a perfect system when what they had was actually worse than feudalism the polite term for the alternative to the capitalist economy that left-wingers endorsed is called a command economy if you read ground-level descriptions of how that command economy actually worked as early as 1918 in Russia of you know the Russian army being sent to villages to you know extract food from the peasants the bullying the violence the use of murder torture rape and the ways in which peasants had to struggle to try to feed themselves of course it was especially terrible in the Ukraine but throughout Russia throughout the Soviet Union unbelievably horrible situations during the periods plural when the Soviet Union tried to have full communism a full command economy and tried to command not just the production of industrial goods but the functioning of the farms the result was a humanitarian disaster and mass starvation was only one element of that disaster one of the responses to that even while Lenin was still alive Lenin you know ultimately having to recognize the total economic collapse of communism switched to what was called the new economic policy NEP and that was basically a return to capitalism and then under that policy the Soviet Union had all the disadvantages of a dictatorship and also all the disadvantages of capitalism and they called it communism but at least when they switch to the NEP the problem of starvation abated and everyone all the so Vedic economists had to deal with this seemingly incongruous fact that capitalism fed people even within Russia even within Russia's communist period so much more effectively than communism that and you have to remember a lot of people sincerely believed as this young man did that as soon as as capitalism was abolished starvation would disappear from the world starvation and poverty would cease to be problems now that is stupid that is naive but it was often sincere wasn't a cynical ploy for people who believed at the time today in 2016 it is easier than ever to learn the lessons of history and one of the ways that people avoid learning those lessons of history avoid facing up to the unbelievably terrible legacy of what communism did in the past is by using these intentionally vague terms like anti capitalism and not really talking through what it is they're asserting if you want another anti-capitalist movement that exists in 2016 take a good hard look at Isis the Islamic state they want to abolish banking they want to abolish usury in some ways that would entail a return to feudalism not in others I don't think they're trying to return to feudalism in every sense but it's certainly that would be the end of capitalism capitalism without banking and interest is not capitalism so that's a very different kind social experiment that's going on under Isis and you can look at of course commune based societies most of them are religious some of them left-wing where people set up small farms on a non profit communist basis and I actually know of one an anarchists coming in like that in Japan the results look a lot like feudalism actually the results can be quite scary and quite hard to endure for the people involved in them even when they have all the benefits of living in a capitalist society because they've created a little you know utopia or dystopia within a capitalist society so they have the benefits of having access to a hospital of being protected by an army of actually having all the benefits of a larger capital society around them but then of trying to create a commune a communist society a non-profit non-semantic so what is the significance here in this context for vegans of being so-called anti-capitalist of breaking the cow shackles of capitalism you know this very peculiar way you have to learn to think in dealing with politics and economics Karl Marx much to the horror of some of his modern fans was actually in fever of child labor child labor in factories I can't say that's a little-known fact it's seated in desk a Patel Karl Marx's most famous book that apparently nobody reads Marx says in effect that in the future the family will be forever changed by industrialization by by communism but otherwise just by the progress of history because he saw a future in which children would be able to work part-time in factories and go to school part-time and at an early age children would become financially independent from their parents by doing this kind of part-time factory labor now there can be no doubt that Marx was influenced in this by just visiting in person going on foot to factories in England and France Germany at a time when Europe was in an industrial boom however of course it's only was only particular cities within Europe that had this kind of mass employment available for children or even for adults the problem with Marx is that his his form of economics is never based on actually running the numbers today almost nobody believes this or or thinks that it's a good idea but you know it's plausible someone could read that in Karl Marx and think it's a great idea all right now look at a country like Canada even if the government supported this what percentage of children could actually be employed in part-time jobs and factories there are many many problems I mean Karl Marx he may have visited a major center of Industry like Liverpool in England and had this idea that the whole world could be transformed this way he never sat down and tried to make an estimate even within England at that time sort of the booming of the Industrial Revolution in England what percentage of England's children could actually be provided with employment housing and education in this way it's a lot less than a hundred percent in a country like Canada the amount of industrial employment factory employment is tiny to begin with the percentage of those jobs that could be done by a child on a part-time basis by child labour is even smaller most people are shocked when they simply look at the raw statistic for what percentage of Americans are actually employed in agriculture it's it's almost zero considered as a percentage agriculture course is tremendously important you know being a surgeon is also tremendously important but a very small percentage of people are employed as surgeons the fact that something is important doesn't mean it provides mass a mass economic phenomenon in this way a relatively large number of people actually do engage in part-time agricultural labour they work on a farm part-time as children while they're going to school you can meet some people like that I've known some people like that um but again if you had a utopian idea about this like Karl Marx did and then you sit down and do the math and ask yourself okay how many children could act would it be feasible to employ in this way economically socially etc you come to a totally different set of conclusions so I'm using this to contrast there were is this sort of double blindness here in a sense what Karl Marx was refusing to do was to look forward was to do do projections that's an economic projection pure and simple where you don't just look around say oh hey a lot of kids are working in factories in the future the family unit will be transformed children will not be dependent on their parents there will be mass employment everything will change this reason you sit down and actually how many jobs how many children under what circumstances is that form of employment actually profitable for the factory or for the child not every fact what wages will be paid what what minimum wages will need to be paid you know what are all the other elements of the package today we talk about cluster analysis in economics um obviously the school and the government would all have to be involved in making this possible you'd probably have to ride a bus that goes from the school to the factory or vice-versa again it's it's more than zero I mean today for high school students like a very small number of Susan as' but refusing to do the projections to look forward and do the math this is one kind of blindness and on the other hand there's refusing to look backward and learn from history today that's especially dramatic and we're talking about the failures of communism but you could even say it in Karl Marx his own life he wasn't learning from the the lessons of the century before him either now among the many forms of stupidity in the Occupy Wall Street movement say this orgy of self-righteous ignorance that poured out in the streets I met many many people who you know and they were on the Internet and huge numbers - who temporarily convinced themselves that all of the problems with capitalism could be solved by changing the currency back to a gold standard okay terms of economics you could test this theory with projections okay you think going back to the gold standard is gonna make a big difference in different categories why don't you run the numbers why don't you come up with percentages how much is gonna change over how many years and what are the real outcomes you're expecting from searching petracles in and this also refusal to learn from history the the period of the gold standard is incredibly well documented in economic history it wasn't paradise there were unbelievably terrible economic problems some of them different from the economic problems we have today with with fiat currency go back and look at the history of the United States Europe etc and how economies and markets operated with a gold standard currency the type of people who have been drawn to veganism disproportionately are believers in crazy conspiracy theories crackpot economics extreme left-wing hype and there's a lot of very lazy anti-capitalist thinking going on within veganism and veganism is not alone in this it's not unique or isolated Cambridge University has the same problem Cambridge University England is full of the same intellectually lazy self-righteous over-the-top left-wing extremism and Cambridge University is not unique I think there probably many other universities where the humanities departments are so left-wing it's insane and were these types of pseudoscience ideas this is within the social sciences this is pseudoscience like the idea that you can look at how many houses are empty and solve homelessness by just comparing the number of abandoned houses to the number one with people that is pseudoscience but if it's pseudoscience within the social science yeah those ideas take off and are taken seriously and are presented at academic conferences by people wearing ties and people with PhDs these problems are not unique to veganism right now they are over-represented in veganism I had a couple emails with a young woman who is actually conservative and vegan she is a religious conservative and watching her videos talking about veganism and talking about her life and so on I've got to say it was a little bit thrilling for me I'm seeing the other side because I wrote her we have to be he comes back and forth I said to her look you know I'm really accustomed to the type of critique I get from left-wing people um I I think I'm kind of in the center in most countries I'm not left-wing I'm not right I'm you know I don't fit into the political spectrum here at all I said but actually no I have no idea how conservatives feel about me and what I have say about politics because I never meet any of them you know I never hear from any of them as like you know boy it's sort of mildly fascinating to see the world from the perspective of a vegan conservative you know you know both religious conservative American if you believe that veganism is for everyone then it's not just for socialists it's not just for anarchists it's really for everyone and those voices are gonna come into play and conversely you know it's no surprise to me that the same debates that go on within decadent white Western academia are going on within veganism also it's not a surprise to me but I guess it is a bit of a disappointment I would like to imagine that the the type of realism that unites us as vegans the type of realism that doesn't just look at a farm with cows standing around happily and say this is fine there's no problem here the type of realism says no there's more to the situation there's a whole cycle of suffering there's a whole cycle of production there's a whole cycle of exploit a there's an ecological and ethical problem here if you can do that and that's what makes us vegan that's what united says is vegan right if you can look at industrialized animal agriculture and respond in that way with that kind of critical thinking I would like to think you're more likely or more likely to or more capable of looking at other problems in society with that same sort of lifecycle analysis ethically ecologically and otherwise I don't see a lot of signs of that yet I guess I'm still hopeful that veganism is not going to turn out to be a disaster in the same way that a narco primitivism was that the old-fashioned anarchist ecology was of just 15 years ago or so back in the year 2001