Anti-Capitalism is the Stupidest Ideology Ever.
18 October 2016 [link youtube]
Youtube Automatic Transcription
unlike many of my viewers I am old
enough to remember the year 1989 and amoled enough to have witnessed the disintegration and reintegration of communist ideology in the years after 1989 after 1989 many different political tendencies in schools of thought took the bits and pieces of what had been communism what had been previously openly called Marxism and socialism and tried to reformulate them under various headings I think the only heading that's really lasted has been anti capitalism and I really do regard anti capitalism as the stupidest the least worthy of rebuttal the most worthless of the air sets ideologies of our era and as a political program that has nothing positive to offer in Canada it has nothing positive offer in Taiwan I mean I've lived in and I've examined and researched so many diverse countries and settings and anti capitalism sadly has emerged from the rubble of communism as this sort of very peculiar worst of all worlds mixed bag of you know ideological bits and pieces many of you if you watch this and you identify as anti-capitalist will feel that the critique I'm about to offer it doesn't apply to you and that in itself is part of the problem here if you have an entirely nebulous and negatively defined political movement then it is very easy for people to shirk responsibility for people to evade any form of debate discussion or accountability by simply saying oh well that doesn't apply to me whereas communism or Marxism had a clear definition had foundational texts you could very clearly delineate who was and wasn't a real communist or of course there are various specific categories with the in communism that people either did or did not adhere to and so on for the purpose of this video I'm gonna address two categories of anti-capitalist on the one hand there are the anti capitalists who have retained their adherents to the concept of class war it would be fair to say that the most important light motif of Marxism that continued through all forms of communism was the idea of class war or class warfare as a famous phrase no war but the class war the reality of what class war is you can read it in a purely theoretical sense you can read it in mark so you can read it in Lenin you can read it in Stalin you can read about the dog I think it's crucially important for people to take the time to read the horrifying accounts of door-to-door house-to-house violence of robbery of rape of torture of murder of what class warfare really meant in practice in any one example whether that's in Russia in 1917 or it's in Cambodia in the 1970s class war simply put is not class reeducation it's not class Socratic debate it's not class democracy it's not class mutual representation in house of parliament class war is a violent struggle of one group of people to snuff out silenced murder another and history has shown that again and again in the history of communism there are anti capitalists and I have seen them and met them and heard them speak and face-to-face and others talking about YouTube or rum you know in published form there are anti-capitalist who still support class war and those anti capitalists have basically held on to the most violent most destructive most immoral aspects of communism while oddly giving up the structured system building elements that you know both provide a rationale for that violence provide a sort of philosophical series of excuses for it and also provide other elements that might be of some use to somebody somewhere elements related to I don't know organizing labor dissent in this kind of thing so that really is a sort of remarkable worst of all worlds form of anti capitalism and many of you watching this video just given who my viewers are will say that they are anti-capitalist but they don't believe in anything like that they don't believe in class war they don't believe that as Marx sat down and so many comments believed over after that the laws of history require a violent struggle between social classes to achieve progress of any kind okay that's the second category of anti capitalists or the anti capitalists who identify with this concept but who do not endorse violence and who have definitely distanced themselves in a more meaningful sense to a greater extent from the legacy of communism when I speak to people in the second category face to face to make anti capitalism less nebulous I often talk to them about what the definition of capitalism really is because they very often are interested knowing why I am NOT an anti capitalist anti-capitalism unlike communism does not have a clear and coherent contrast to offer to capitalism obviously communists were not just anti capitalist they were Pro communist and they could point to one of several real systems social organization in which banking did not operate in which private property did not exist in which various forms of heavy-handed state control of enterprise replace the role of private sector investors and so on so they could say okay this is capitalism and this is anti capitalism it's needless to say that those experiments were by and large disasters almost none of those people would choose to live in the Soviet Union under Stalin or even in East Germany etc etc nevertheless let's not digress they did have a contrast to posed and the vast majority of anti capitalists in the current era and in the second category of basically being nonviolent and they're often unable to articulate what it is in the definition of capitalism they object to and of course they do not want to rely on for example a contrast between capitalism and feudalism the reality is the capitalism in Europe is the system that emerged from the disintegration of the system we had in the Dark Ages a you know system of feudal control of land and property and wealth and production you know during the era of feudalism we actually did have factories we did have some remarkably advanced technology there are very inspiring and well illustrated books about you know how the world worked in again its can it's impressive in some ways and the Roman Empire it's impressive in ancient China and yes actually in the in the Middle Ages in Europe you can look at remarkable examples of how you know without electricity people did organize large scale industries large-scale factories glass factories for example but you know creation of textiles under many many headings in many ways human organization was complex but in Europe in Western Europe specifically there was a system that banned the buying and selling of land there was a system that tied the ownership of land to people's names tables hereditary rights and for the most part not for everyone inside you before huge numbers of people tied their job where they were allowed to live what kind of work they were allowed to do to the land to serfdom of various kinds capitalism simply put is what emerged from the disintegration of that system and as you may be aware it disintegrated in places like Holland the Netherlands more rapidly than it disintegrated in places like Russia in Russia the abolition of serfdom was embarrassingly late and it was for that reason that in the Netherlands you had the first emergence of the corporation as a real entity a corporation that had voting rights for investors and this again was part of the progress towards modern democracy not democracy as we knew in ancient Athens shareholder democracy as it's called voting within corporations actually came about before modern democracy in a meaningful it is not worth my dressing into the history of that many people in England especially really misunderstand just how late and how recent the features of modern democracy were in their parliamentary system okay I won't I'm tempted to say more about that but anyway the function of the Parliament itself changed tremendously at a later date than most people want to admit even though the name of the Parliament existed there was a time when it did not at all serve the public function that we we now associate with it um in any case this peculiar progress towards a concept of semi democratic government capitalist democracy is certainly badly flawed in many ways and of accountability of companies to their shareholders and if the buying and selling of land as something that anyone can own not tied to your name to your birthright not tied to favours granted to you by a king because your ancestors fought in a war and not for any other reason you know capitalism in some ways it's easy to define if you work against the checklist can you buy and sell land is there a private and independent operation of banks or businesses started up by private individuals who get a bank loan etc etc you can put together this checklist and it's very useful to contrast that to how communism operated or to how feudalism operated and in some countries around the world still today there are aspects of feudalism that still exist there are some countries where indigenous peoples still own land through a king or a chiefdom and then grant the right to farm that land in a in a feudal manors feudalism here and there around the world is still a significant way of organizing land organizing people and organising an economy in some places sadly of course slavery still exists too um but when I invite people to express to me precisely what it is that they dislike about capitalism I very often find that the people who define themselves as anti-capitalist are not in fact anti-capitalist at all they're simply people who lack an education in economics 101 and I do realize that some of you watching this video will be deeply offended by that um however if it makes you feel any better believe me the vast majority of people I met who were diehard communists utterly lacked an education and economics 101 for them if anything they found you know a certain mystique to any kind of economic claim and the magical thinking surrounding economics and communism was often something that drew them in something made them feel powerful made them feel that they understood truly how the world's economy worked well others did not now one of the peculiar ironies within anti capitalism today is that the driving sentiment is often a sense of horror at the exploitation of workers in factories for example the exploitation of child labour and they're unaware that Karl Marx was Pro child labor read volume one ad s capital if you don't believe me and that Karl Marx was incredibly optimistic about factory labor itself and this is a contrast to the bizarre guilt over a factory labor of any kind or exploitation of labor of any kind that tends to be the sort of bottom most sentiment animating people who consider themselves anti capitalists they feel guilt about the fact that the products they buy are made in factories in conditions that they imagined are terrible and in some cases not all this is true I mean in some cases that clothes you wear may be made by prisoners this wasn't I've met the tailor face to face I know exactly who made this I've seen the room he works in I've met his wife I know what conditions he lives in so believe me not all clothing is paid by slave labor not everyone's working in a sweatshop um anyway nice guy too so you know it's possible to know exactly where your clothes come from or where your shoes come from and it's not all bad news my point here is not just to draw attention to the contrasting the tremendous optimism Colt Marx had all of society would be regenerated by factory labor he optimistically says in des Capital Marx believed that child labour would empower children to become independent from their parents and this would be part of the breakdown of the oppressive and feudal nature of the nuclear family that this new era of factory labor was going to right everyone because kids would have their own income in early age so the parents couldn't push them around so much anymore he was recklessly optimistic about factory labor in contrast to the conditions of peasants he thought this was the end of an era of you know peasants toiling in ignorance and being dependent on the state and this was instead an era of independent factory workers in the withering away of the states there's all kinds of bizarre idealism Karl Marx said that's incompatible with the baseline assumptions of the sort of white guilt based ad capitalism that I see being somewhat popular today it's only a moderately popular ideology many many months ago maybe a couple of years ago on this channel I did talk about this under some headings if you are sincerely concerned about factory conditions do research visit factories learn real facts move beyond ambiguous and nebulous moral claims to understand how the factories really work because I tell you something in Cambodia where I did actually do research on factory conditions but in Cambodia as an example you can visit one factory where conditions are wonderful and where people are living really good lives and earning good money etc etc and you can visit another factory where the conditions are much worse and the workers are unhappy er and the pay is too low and so on and the difference between those two factories is not the difference between capitalism and anti capitalism it's not the difference between libertarianism and socialism it's not the difference between conservative and liberal the difference between a good workplace and a bad workplace does not lend itself to any of the polarizing ideologies of our era but so many polarizing ideologies have tried to fasten onto these things have tried to take a hold of the concept of exploitation itself and to cynically make it into a justification for their personal strokes or their party struggle to take over power to take over government to take over the state and the reality is that exploits and melee rating or ending exploitation of improving exploitative practices whether it's in farming or in factories or in the coffee shop down the street is not linked to any one ideology um you can go to a wonderful factory that's run by a conservative Catholic you can go to a wonderful factor that's run by a left wing person you can go to a wonderful factory that's run by some right-wing libertarian person but who really cares about his workers having good conditions and you can learn all their bizarre management philosophies or what kind of education they had or how they came to run their particular factory in the way that they did and you can look at the material conditions and the political conditions and why it is that sometimes you have two factories that are across the street from each other and the conditions are so very different so in a sense the alternative to from my perspective the alternative to anti capitalism as an ideology is anti ideology the alternative is to really care to have sincere humanitarian engagement whether it's with the reality of the factories that make your clothes or the factors that make toys the factories that make iPhones whatever it is you can do the work these things are knowable and you can't know everything but at some stage in that process of forming of having an informed opinion about how the stuff we buy is made you're going to realize that there is no simple ideological fissure between right and wrong good and evil and it's simply not the case that socialists or communists or left-wingers or anti capitalists have a magic bullet solution that would improve factory conditions for everyone on the contrary all of us are left with a tremendously complex world a tremendously nuanced world of government regulation of labor activism of various free market forces and of you know the other reality being that at any given time there are millions and millions of people who do live dignified lives who do earn a good honest living whether it's working in factories or making this jacket a tailor shop down the road it isn't the case that there's a simple class of the oppressed to be contrast to a class of the oppressors instead the world is full of gray areas of conflicting and complex information between good working conditions bad working conditions mediocre working conditions and a direction --less struggle of human beings trying to live lives of dignity and of different political forces trying to improve the lot of different classes of workers at any given time that in no sense conforms to Karl Marx's simplified view of class war it neither justifies class war nor is justified by
enough to remember the year 1989 and amoled enough to have witnessed the disintegration and reintegration of communist ideology in the years after 1989 after 1989 many different political tendencies in schools of thought took the bits and pieces of what had been communism what had been previously openly called Marxism and socialism and tried to reformulate them under various headings I think the only heading that's really lasted has been anti capitalism and I really do regard anti capitalism as the stupidest the least worthy of rebuttal the most worthless of the air sets ideologies of our era and as a political program that has nothing positive to offer in Canada it has nothing positive offer in Taiwan I mean I've lived in and I've examined and researched so many diverse countries and settings and anti capitalism sadly has emerged from the rubble of communism as this sort of very peculiar worst of all worlds mixed bag of you know ideological bits and pieces many of you if you watch this and you identify as anti-capitalist will feel that the critique I'm about to offer it doesn't apply to you and that in itself is part of the problem here if you have an entirely nebulous and negatively defined political movement then it is very easy for people to shirk responsibility for people to evade any form of debate discussion or accountability by simply saying oh well that doesn't apply to me whereas communism or Marxism had a clear definition had foundational texts you could very clearly delineate who was and wasn't a real communist or of course there are various specific categories with the in communism that people either did or did not adhere to and so on for the purpose of this video I'm gonna address two categories of anti-capitalist on the one hand there are the anti capitalists who have retained their adherents to the concept of class war it would be fair to say that the most important light motif of Marxism that continued through all forms of communism was the idea of class war or class warfare as a famous phrase no war but the class war the reality of what class war is you can read it in a purely theoretical sense you can read it in mark so you can read it in Lenin you can read it in Stalin you can read about the dog I think it's crucially important for people to take the time to read the horrifying accounts of door-to-door house-to-house violence of robbery of rape of torture of murder of what class warfare really meant in practice in any one example whether that's in Russia in 1917 or it's in Cambodia in the 1970s class war simply put is not class reeducation it's not class Socratic debate it's not class democracy it's not class mutual representation in house of parliament class war is a violent struggle of one group of people to snuff out silenced murder another and history has shown that again and again in the history of communism there are anti capitalists and I have seen them and met them and heard them speak and face-to-face and others talking about YouTube or rum you know in published form there are anti-capitalist who still support class war and those anti capitalists have basically held on to the most violent most destructive most immoral aspects of communism while oddly giving up the structured system building elements that you know both provide a rationale for that violence provide a sort of philosophical series of excuses for it and also provide other elements that might be of some use to somebody somewhere elements related to I don't know organizing labor dissent in this kind of thing so that really is a sort of remarkable worst of all worlds form of anti capitalism and many of you watching this video just given who my viewers are will say that they are anti-capitalist but they don't believe in anything like that they don't believe in class war they don't believe that as Marx sat down and so many comments believed over after that the laws of history require a violent struggle between social classes to achieve progress of any kind okay that's the second category of anti capitalists or the anti capitalists who identify with this concept but who do not endorse violence and who have definitely distanced themselves in a more meaningful sense to a greater extent from the legacy of communism when I speak to people in the second category face to face to make anti capitalism less nebulous I often talk to them about what the definition of capitalism really is because they very often are interested knowing why I am NOT an anti capitalist anti-capitalism unlike communism does not have a clear and coherent contrast to offer to capitalism obviously communists were not just anti capitalist they were Pro communist and they could point to one of several real systems social organization in which banking did not operate in which private property did not exist in which various forms of heavy-handed state control of enterprise replace the role of private sector investors and so on so they could say okay this is capitalism and this is anti capitalism it's needless to say that those experiments were by and large disasters almost none of those people would choose to live in the Soviet Union under Stalin or even in East Germany etc etc nevertheless let's not digress they did have a contrast to posed and the vast majority of anti capitalists in the current era and in the second category of basically being nonviolent and they're often unable to articulate what it is in the definition of capitalism they object to and of course they do not want to rely on for example a contrast between capitalism and feudalism the reality is the capitalism in Europe is the system that emerged from the disintegration of the system we had in the Dark Ages a you know system of feudal control of land and property and wealth and production you know during the era of feudalism we actually did have factories we did have some remarkably advanced technology there are very inspiring and well illustrated books about you know how the world worked in again its can it's impressive in some ways and the Roman Empire it's impressive in ancient China and yes actually in the in the Middle Ages in Europe you can look at remarkable examples of how you know without electricity people did organize large scale industries large-scale factories glass factories for example but you know creation of textiles under many many headings in many ways human organization was complex but in Europe in Western Europe specifically there was a system that banned the buying and selling of land there was a system that tied the ownership of land to people's names tables hereditary rights and for the most part not for everyone inside you before huge numbers of people tied their job where they were allowed to live what kind of work they were allowed to do to the land to serfdom of various kinds capitalism simply put is what emerged from the disintegration of that system and as you may be aware it disintegrated in places like Holland the Netherlands more rapidly than it disintegrated in places like Russia in Russia the abolition of serfdom was embarrassingly late and it was for that reason that in the Netherlands you had the first emergence of the corporation as a real entity a corporation that had voting rights for investors and this again was part of the progress towards modern democracy not democracy as we knew in ancient Athens shareholder democracy as it's called voting within corporations actually came about before modern democracy in a meaningful it is not worth my dressing into the history of that many people in England especially really misunderstand just how late and how recent the features of modern democracy were in their parliamentary system okay I won't I'm tempted to say more about that but anyway the function of the Parliament itself changed tremendously at a later date than most people want to admit even though the name of the Parliament existed there was a time when it did not at all serve the public function that we we now associate with it um in any case this peculiar progress towards a concept of semi democratic government capitalist democracy is certainly badly flawed in many ways and of accountability of companies to their shareholders and if the buying and selling of land as something that anyone can own not tied to your name to your birthright not tied to favours granted to you by a king because your ancestors fought in a war and not for any other reason you know capitalism in some ways it's easy to define if you work against the checklist can you buy and sell land is there a private and independent operation of banks or businesses started up by private individuals who get a bank loan etc etc you can put together this checklist and it's very useful to contrast that to how communism operated or to how feudalism operated and in some countries around the world still today there are aspects of feudalism that still exist there are some countries where indigenous peoples still own land through a king or a chiefdom and then grant the right to farm that land in a in a feudal manors feudalism here and there around the world is still a significant way of organizing land organizing people and organising an economy in some places sadly of course slavery still exists too um but when I invite people to express to me precisely what it is that they dislike about capitalism I very often find that the people who define themselves as anti-capitalist are not in fact anti-capitalist at all they're simply people who lack an education in economics 101 and I do realize that some of you watching this video will be deeply offended by that um however if it makes you feel any better believe me the vast majority of people I met who were diehard communists utterly lacked an education and economics 101 for them if anything they found you know a certain mystique to any kind of economic claim and the magical thinking surrounding economics and communism was often something that drew them in something made them feel powerful made them feel that they understood truly how the world's economy worked well others did not now one of the peculiar ironies within anti capitalism today is that the driving sentiment is often a sense of horror at the exploitation of workers in factories for example the exploitation of child labour and they're unaware that Karl Marx was Pro child labor read volume one ad s capital if you don't believe me and that Karl Marx was incredibly optimistic about factory labor itself and this is a contrast to the bizarre guilt over a factory labor of any kind or exploitation of labor of any kind that tends to be the sort of bottom most sentiment animating people who consider themselves anti capitalists they feel guilt about the fact that the products they buy are made in factories in conditions that they imagined are terrible and in some cases not all this is true I mean in some cases that clothes you wear may be made by prisoners this wasn't I've met the tailor face to face I know exactly who made this I've seen the room he works in I've met his wife I know what conditions he lives in so believe me not all clothing is paid by slave labor not everyone's working in a sweatshop um anyway nice guy too so you know it's possible to know exactly where your clothes come from or where your shoes come from and it's not all bad news my point here is not just to draw attention to the contrasting the tremendous optimism Colt Marx had all of society would be regenerated by factory labor he optimistically says in des Capital Marx believed that child labour would empower children to become independent from their parents and this would be part of the breakdown of the oppressive and feudal nature of the nuclear family that this new era of factory labor was going to right everyone because kids would have their own income in early age so the parents couldn't push them around so much anymore he was recklessly optimistic about factory labor in contrast to the conditions of peasants he thought this was the end of an era of you know peasants toiling in ignorance and being dependent on the state and this was instead an era of independent factory workers in the withering away of the states there's all kinds of bizarre idealism Karl Marx said that's incompatible with the baseline assumptions of the sort of white guilt based ad capitalism that I see being somewhat popular today it's only a moderately popular ideology many many months ago maybe a couple of years ago on this channel I did talk about this under some headings if you are sincerely concerned about factory conditions do research visit factories learn real facts move beyond ambiguous and nebulous moral claims to understand how the factories really work because I tell you something in Cambodia where I did actually do research on factory conditions but in Cambodia as an example you can visit one factory where conditions are wonderful and where people are living really good lives and earning good money etc etc and you can visit another factory where the conditions are much worse and the workers are unhappy er and the pay is too low and so on and the difference between those two factories is not the difference between capitalism and anti capitalism it's not the difference between libertarianism and socialism it's not the difference between conservative and liberal the difference between a good workplace and a bad workplace does not lend itself to any of the polarizing ideologies of our era but so many polarizing ideologies have tried to fasten onto these things have tried to take a hold of the concept of exploitation itself and to cynically make it into a justification for their personal strokes or their party struggle to take over power to take over government to take over the state and the reality is that exploits and melee rating or ending exploitation of improving exploitative practices whether it's in farming or in factories or in the coffee shop down the street is not linked to any one ideology um you can go to a wonderful factory that's run by a conservative Catholic you can go to a wonderful factor that's run by a left wing person you can go to a wonderful factory that's run by some right-wing libertarian person but who really cares about his workers having good conditions and you can learn all their bizarre management philosophies or what kind of education they had or how they came to run their particular factory in the way that they did and you can look at the material conditions and the political conditions and why it is that sometimes you have two factories that are across the street from each other and the conditions are so very different so in a sense the alternative to from my perspective the alternative to anti capitalism as an ideology is anti ideology the alternative is to really care to have sincere humanitarian engagement whether it's with the reality of the factories that make your clothes or the factors that make toys the factories that make iPhones whatever it is you can do the work these things are knowable and you can't know everything but at some stage in that process of forming of having an informed opinion about how the stuff we buy is made you're going to realize that there is no simple ideological fissure between right and wrong good and evil and it's simply not the case that socialists or communists or left-wingers or anti capitalists have a magic bullet solution that would improve factory conditions for everyone on the contrary all of us are left with a tremendously complex world a tremendously nuanced world of government regulation of labor activism of various free market forces and of you know the other reality being that at any given time there are millions and millions of people who do live dignified lives who do earn a good honest living whether it's working in factories or making this jacket a tailor shop down the road it isn't the case that there's a simple class of the oppressed to be contrast to a class of the oppressors instead the world is full of gray areas of conflicting and complex information between good working conditions bad working conditions mediocre working conditions and a direction --less struggle of human beings trying to live lives of dignity and of different political forces trying to improve the lot of different classes of workers at any given time that in no sense conforms to Karl Marx's simplified view of class war it neither justifies class war nor is justified by