(反共產) "The End of Exploitation" Promised by the Left. 🧐

this video may be the bookend or final
part to a series of videos both consisting of me directly debating communists left-wing extremists and some of them be my reflections on analysis of responses to those discussions a little bit more a little bit more indirectly um it's definitely not a type of content I want to keep making for ever and ever in part because most of those people come to the discussions with a conviction that they have absolutely nothing to learn from the interaction for the most part they they feel like those conversations are just an opportunity for them to demonstrate how committed they are to the cause it was ultimately kind of futile and frankly depressing and not all debates are like that I really noticed the difference lately when I've debated with people who are conservatives or right-wingers I noticed that they all respect book-learning on my part when it's demonstrated so it's talking to a right-winger and he mentioned something from a particular book by Aristotle and I said to him you know that is interesting but there's this other book by Aristotle that discusses it from a different angle have you also looked at that he said oh no he hadn't read that and right away the way he responded to me the way he interacted with me changed or he you know even though he and I disagreed about politics I was far to the left of him but nevertheless he could recognize okay I've done this reading I know something about this and he was gonna respect my opinion even if only provisionally he was gonna be interested in what I had to say on the basis of having read that book and and the kind of conversation could proceed in a respectful way from there in talking to the far or left-wingers by Conte the contrast they come into the conversation with the attitude you can't teach me nothing they'll deny that you've done any reading if you've read something they'll claim you haven't really read it I think I know which table you boat but they'll insist that you haven't read Karl Marx when you have or whatever and even when you catch them on historical facts or you know when it's obvious you know something they don't know they'll never have a kind of humble and appreciative attitude like oh okay thanks you talk you taught me something or reminded me of something I did no or hadn't thought up for years there I've gotten absolutely no positive appreciation from from the far left that way which I have gotten from conservatives and the far right even though in some ways the difference between me and a conservative might be more difficult to negotiate so with ottoman said today I had a really interesting and a really rewarding conversation with a far left winger and there were other people in the room I was at the gym lifting weights so for a large part of the conversation I just listened as there was a sort of Socratic dialogue address to the question of what is the meaning of exploitation from this kind of far left perspective so it's an interesting problem a lot of people on the far left this is really how this this part of the conversation began a lot of people on the far left used the word exploitation in such a broad sense that any employment is exploitation so there's this long Socratic dialogue getting at look if one man owns a lemon tree and grows the lemons and makes it into lemonade is that exploitation he's doing it all himself it's one man who owns one lemon tree and owns a lemonade stand owns a laminated press do you consider that exploitation and then the sort of long sequence of questions to get down to the root of what is it you define as exploitation and what is it that you are really promising when you say that the end of capitalism will mean the end of exploitation the end of the exploitation of man by man so the particular guy this debate happened with a particular representative of socialism and to some extent communism he's not a typical communist he was really aware of the extent to which communism tends to make misleading promises by saying that they will take away private property ownership from the millionaire class from the aristocrats from the plutocrats from the capitalist elite everyone say um he's aware of the extent to which there's a misleading promise that communists will take away that ownership and then give it to the people but in reality the people means the state the government that basically a government bureaucracy or even a military dictatorship some totalitarian regime takes over the role of the owners and the managers of you know what used to be free enterprise private industry head so he was really aware of that and that was that was not the model of communism that he endorsed of the model of socialism that he endorsed is it the guy was to some extent a commenter so instead of socialist um what he defended was exclusively the replacement of capitalist ownership capitalist investment even the replacement of that with coop ownership cooperative so workers co-ops workers cooperatives life so this led to a really interesting little dialogue to him not I mean again a lot of this conversation I was just lifting weights of the gyms listening in I occasionally put in a work to then at this point I step in and say okay well now why I'm interested I'm interested in in challenging you a bit or disambiguating what your position is and I said to him the following ok when you look at a co-op grocery store and a private sector corporate owned grocery stores that's a real-world example a lot of us know maybe in the city you're living in there are co-op grocery stores what is the difference now I'm not claiming there's no difference but you have to admit for you as a customer if you go into a co-op cooperatively owned workers coop owned grocery store the prices are maybe 10% higher and the salaries paid to the workers are maybe 5% higher and the variety this selection of products and offer is narrower there are fewer fewer different boxes of cereal there especially with fresh fruits with things that go bad that have a short the the coop has to manage things more tightly so all right there are some there are some differences but the difference between doing my grocery shopping at a co-op and doing mcourser shopping at a for-profit corporate owned grocery store it's really not that dramatic and especially if you compare many of them you know some corporate owned grocery stores well some are better than others to make long story short I mean where I was in Victoria Victoria Canada you know there was one chain and they were really open that about the fact that even though they were a corporate for-profit corporation they they had this Charter or this Constitution where they were really committed to paying good wages to their employees and to having low prices for their customers they had this sort of you know set of set of guidelines and I met and spoke to people who have been employed by more than Montrose to store in the city yeah there's a real difference these guys treat their employees differently from those guys a lot of sectors of the economy see that so the point being there isn't some kind of simple stark contrast between a co-op owned business and you know and the private for-profit on business now this is following up on something I discussed in an earlier video here if you look at so an example might be at university if you look at a public university a government-owned university and you'll get a private for-profit university there are some differences but we don't see in that contrast the sort of night and day difference that communists seem to be promising when they talk about abolishing man's exploitation event that somehow you know capital is with the with the end of capitalism there will be this tremendous emancipation in the start of a new era like if you say ok so if what you guys are promising is you're gonna go to all the private for-profit universities and colleges and shut them down and have the government take them over and then the government will run those universities like the public sector university so the government the universities some universities we already have in the West are run by the government sometime that's that's not really gonna be liberation well you know there there will be some differences you know probably you know tuitions gonna be a little bit lower and maybe this the salaries professors are gonna be a little bit higher and you know you can look at some of the differences when you compare you know what look in the United States of state-owned college versus kind of Ivy League college you know maybe there will be less money wasted on lavish football stadiums or something you know you know there are some differences though a great example in assists look at Navy University when the military when the US military runs a university that's a 100% government-run thing and the budget is completely provided by taxpayers I think they still have a football team and a basketball team and stuff but sure this is different from the US Navy University and you know Yale or you know some of these some of these Ivy League endowment based okay there's a differences another difference about the university would be the role of donors the role of you know soliciting donations and patronage okay there are some differences but we're not looking at a stark difference here between the exploitation of man and this new era this new F hawk of the exploitation of man now by contrast if you look back in history not just in North America not just in Europe if you compare the epoch of slavery to the abolition of slavery it's a huge fundamental change in society there's a much understudied history of the abolition of slavery in China by the way I think there is no good book in English then there's never been a book in English well-written well-researched really dealing with how China abolished slavery fascinating history and everything changed everything fundamentally change in people's lives with the emancipation of the slaves to the abolition of slavery so that that's a big huge change in society it's like a but you look around I gave all kinds of examples and other videos but you see okay so this is what this type of business is like when it's run by the government whether it's a prison or you know whatever and you know this is what it's like when a private sector contractor takes it over okay so this is what a public swimming pool is like when it's owned by the government and run on a kind of nonprofit government taxpayer-funded basis and this is a public swimming pool when it's a for-profit corporation there are differences there are advantages and disadvantages but this is not the kind of pep talk making transition people say a new time but and now in this specific dialogue with this guy we're getting even more specifically more narrow because we're not dealing with public sector versus private sector he's very narrowly endorsing a switch from corporate owned capitalist owned - a paradigm of co-op workers co-op owned businesses after well some different examples of workers coops one another guy in the call throughout the example of coop dairy farming it's a great simple so you know in New Zealand they have this history of workers coop dairy farms and like guess what you look at the workers coop dairy farms if you look at everything how the animals are treated exploitation of animals exploitation of the laborers ecological impacts and market look back you can look at that and then you can look at a for-profit corporation and how it runs the dairy farms like ok I'm not saying there are zero differences here but this is this is a pretty slight difference we're looking at the difference between corporate ownership and the coop ownership so the main example I discussed at length and probably in the city where you live you've seen this is the difference between a private for-profit taxi company so a corporation let's say that owns taxis and then employs people as taxi drivers compared to a workers co-op taxi company that's very common many cities at least in Canada the United States they have a co-op tat a co-op taxi company I mean from the customers perspective there is no visible difference what's whipper and if you look into it from the employees perspective is there maybe a five percent difference so we talked about that example at some length and I said okay so what your whole theory comes down to is this if that his theory was his perspective was if a company is earning a five percent profit then that five percent is a fundamental injustice and if they make a transition to a workers coop work everything's the same everything's the same except that five percent gets redistributed to the the workers or not even registered it's handed out to the workers as a bonus at the end of the year then that's that's this paradise that's the worker's paradise oh it's the five percent difference the he difference you see between going to a whole foods a for-profit corporation grocery store going to a workers cooperative that's the difference he wants to achieve disability now I very briefly said some okay look you know what I'm it's a difference it's a difference it's a difference the difference of whether the profits are shared by the employees workers co-op basis as opposed to the profits being concentrated in the hands of the owners or the hands of the executives or whatever the situation is with this with this corporation but then you have to recognize also when you concentrate profits in the answer the owners they have the opportunity to take those profits and put it into research and development they have they can take those profits and invest it in buying a new machinery they can take those profits and invest it in advertising I think there were actually big fundamental advantages to the profits being held onto whether that's five percent or seven percent or ten percent I've been told most grocery stores operate with like a two percent profit margin I think they turn over a lot of money but still they hold on to a pretty pretty small margin in terms of profitability so but if you take that away from the grocery store obviously the grocery store for example has no budget for advertising anymore you know they have no no budget for innovation or making investment in new new equipment and new things home so when you when you just space this out over the medium term when you're just looking at ten years of 20 years like you can see a lot of the vendors but even more short-term than that and this came up with the example of the the coop the dairy co-op I notice you presume that there's a five percent profit to be shared what happens when it's a five percent loss it's a lot harder for a workers cooperative when doer when you have the kinds of challenges that are inevitable not just in capitalism but in real life when there were winners and losers when risks get taken and when sometimes at the end of the year it's that you're handing other bonus do you really think that the taxi company can look at the taxi driver versus hey guys we need to take some of your money away because this year it's not a profit at all we're in the red in conclusion I said this to the guy in the conversation - when communists talk about inching the exploitation of man by man when they make these promises of a new epic of a new era they do so with pointedly vague phrases especially phrases surrounding the painfully vague concept of exploitation they do so by vilifying profit itself by vilifying capitalist ownership itself but if you can talk to someone on the far left who was as honest as this guy if you can move past those vague exaggerated history auto claims all it is they're really promising is something like a 5% difference a difference that really cannot justify a revolution