Can Socialists and Capitalists Find Middle Ground? | Middle Ground

we actually aren't looking for a middle ground with capitalism we're not looking for a lighter gentler oppression exploitation racism we are seeking revolution my name is Liberty I'm studying psychology at UCLA I'm 20 years old I'm Shawn I'm 24 years old and I'm in the Socialist Party my name's Mimi 2016 I was the Socialist Party's presidential candidate I'm shy and I'm with the Socialist Party and I'm 28 my name is Jack I'm 19 I go to Community College my name is Richard 19 I go to Cal State Long Beach as a chemistry major with a music minor I get my socialist on the left and my capitalist on the right humans are inherently selfish selfishness is sort of one word for it but looking out for yourself your own survival in your own gain and of course that includes the gain of those you love is one of the main motivators of people a really good way that we could figure out human nature is by comparing it to animal nature and stuff like that and you see you know animals doing whatever they can to survive it's just culture that has changed us but I believe at its core that yes humans just like any other animal are I selfish I work with children and my experience of working with people who haven't been acculturated or I've been in into this idea that they need to be selfish all the time are generally not every organism has to have a sense of like getting resources for itself Android survive but that's a much different than being selfish I think I mean I think even if you look at if you spend any time in a social democracy you know let's say you go to Norway and you spend time there where the people see the collective good as tied into their own personal well-being you know I think we have so many examples like that societies working collectively toward a greater good the thing about the Nordic countries in my opinion is well since there's very very ethnically homogeneous they all have very very similar culture it's not an accurate representation of you know what humans inherently are because I believe that culture can mask human nature so you think that diversity would work against working in harmony toward a collective good in diversity we have different ideas of what good is I think competition brings out the best in people especially when you know we're competing for something like let's try to create this compound that could help you know the masses in some kind of health relation form you have all these research labs trying to figure out what's the most efficient way to figure out this process what's the most efficient way to do this I think we need more that sort of sense of competition especially in the sciences and whatnot you know we frequently hear about the evils of monopolies it's because you know with when you control an entire market why even bother being better anything you've got no competition you've got nothing to strive for and no one can choose anything else I agree with you both on the examples that you gave but the thing that I'm kind of struggling with I mean if we're talking about efficiency quality then yeah I think it brings out the best in people but then again it tends to bring about greed you all do us such a great service it's it's a trip to me because as you're likely aware that there's this growing support for socialism an economic system that places people over profit that you're willing to continue to throughout the same talking points that have failed people so miserably again it's it's a benefit to us and I guess we should say thank you nice if you care about something if you're passionate about something you don't need the threat of someone doing it better than you to do the best that you can do ask any creative competition leads less to excellence and more towards doing whatever you can to edge past the other person today everyone has the opportunity for success alright if we're talking about the United States and we're talking about financial success then yes I would believe so if we're talking about the world it doesn't necessarily have to mean financial well-being or like stability I think that it really just means how you're happy and how you're okay with yourself and you know you make a goal and you pursue your goal and if you have a large exactly what I was thinking I find that there are so many resources out there that you can enact on it's just there's some people who just don't do anything about it my first thought here with this question is you got to be [ __ ] kidding me you know so many people in this country whose solely because they exist they're under threat whether it's through you know the police they're just trying to survive so everyone's very different again everyone has different opportunities to what they can even consider success in in the u.s. though there are a lot of opportunities for most people though of course you can't say all and there are always those who are extremely unfortunate and should be helped I'm sure every one of us is sat in a restaurant before Starbucks those people work their asses off any of these low income jobs are not easy and they they work for pennies if something goes wrong with their car they're done you know if they have a health problem they're done you're talking about financial success though success is extremely relative and can be defined in many different ways in a capitalist society those in financials is the most important thing no I I've worked in the food industry for a number of years and I could not say that any one of my companions was ever happy to be doing that and if they're going the stools on top of that you know so they're working full-time and on top of that they're going to school and they're paying school I would consider that successful if you can go to school and you can maintain your GPA you can also be working a part-time job and somehow afford in your school yeah you're doing well in life society should help the underprivileged that sort of saying if you give a man a fish etc it holds true and also who should do the helping and how is very important not all acts of service are equally beneficial i would agree to that i myself you know i'm sorry to use a personal anyt anecdote here but i've personally dealt with the fact that oh giving someone this much aid they become they become lazy my father is an alcoholic so we since due to an injury in his leg he gets ssi and what's and what ends up happening is he receives enough ssi to the point where he's not he's not motivated to do anything else beyond just going home drinking a beer or something like that and i think yes people should help people especially if they're under under privileged or they need the resources to push them put to what end that's that's the fine line but your personal anecdote only only covers the small demographic of the of the alcoholic most of people that that brought up has been specifically about people who are particularly poor when most of the country is middle lower middle class and up that's lots actually that's not a fact that you would focus on this in a [ __ ] in a city one that gives more than half of its budget to the police in a country that just passed the military bill a spending bill that's almost one trillion dollars that money goes to defense contractors government paying for things is not capitalism but we're in a capitalist system where the government pays huge amounts of money the military yeah those things how about instead of spending the money on the military how about putting those back into basic means health care education housing i agree we don't weren't taking our taxpayer dollars and funneling it into their paying for things that the military explicitly says that they don't mean that's not capitalism is about prices and transparency and and choices we don't even take some money and biases actually decide Louis I'm working that is not what you call capitalism but when I come here saying I'm gonna capitalist I'm not saying I'm in favor of that profit and ethics are opposing motives so I think it's core to profit you have to exploit and again there is nothing ethical about exploitation yeah I mean I can't think it I I'm really having trouble thinking of a situation where someone could profit off of something with that exploitation being the mix and I just I'm running out of ideas if you're running a business and you know you're you're the one up top you would obviously walk away with more money if you pay your employees a little bit less I think that profit and ethics can be intertwined when seen with the corporate social responsibility module when they treat their employees better they give them more benefits they raise their wages and in turn it motivates the workers to work harder and treating your employees better than [ __ ] is not necessarily as a car like raising the quality it does not mean that you've raised it to a sufficient standard of treatment because if you're paying someone less than a living wage that is unethical all I'm saying is it is to some degree more ethical and can be seen as more ethical to be beating competition by raising the wages of your employees and giving them better benefits also one must be paid slightly less than they are making an worth for a company for it to be worth it to hire them at all if you can't pay your employee the minimum amount of money that they need in order to live you have no business being in business and I think also there's a tendency from the conservative side to skew away from sort objective fact I mentioned the MIT living wage calculator right yes that's a scientific model that 2925 so as a company if you can't afford to pay your employee a living wage that's just the minimum that they need in order to live right get the [ __ ] out of business why are we even talking to you when you have all the facts and we don't know anything I don't know hardly worth my time well we were sure it's hard to really lean towards one side or the other if everyone is just sort of stating all these coherent biases and not accepting any sort of thing from any other particular side which is why I'm sort of just I'm trying to understand your side and I'm trying to understand really my side of it and again going back to sort of that mutual understanding of what can we do next that sort of mutual understanding needs to be there if if we're gonna ever continue to see what's best for for the u.s. I think one reason why you know you often see like folks on the left the socialist communist anarchists or etc they're so passionate and there's anger you know seeing the suffering and the oppression and the exploitation the racism etc you're sort of feel this urgency you know like we're constantly under sort of this self-criticism and self-reflection about like well how do you package what can be complex ideas into ways that are very palatable and I think if there's a failure on the left that would be one of them I wish that rather than having an agenda that we try to prove and we see ourselves as winning by convincing the opponent I wish that we could consider winning as finding the middle ground and finding where we're similar and finding the truth I think if you're in the pursuit of truth then you've won contrary to convincing other people that you're right you know despite that we definitely disagree on pretty much everything it's good to know that the real common ground here is we is like Millennials and Gen Z and stuff we're actually we're actually like talking about this like whether we were able to convince the other side of anything or not at least we give a [ __ ] about it you know this is stuff that we need to talk about this is stuff that we need to be aware of especially going our leaders so down all right hey guys thanks for watching that episode of middle ground here at Jubilee we believe in this idea of radical empathy and that is what middle ground is all about so we want to hear your thoughts on this topic and this discussion so let us know in the comments below please click here to subscribe and watch more of our videos and remember to live greater

Channel: Jubilee

Views: 2,081,919

Rating: 4.7472429 out of 5

Keywords: jubilee, jubilee media, jubilee project, live for something greater, blind devotion, love language, middle ground, jubilee middle ground, socialism, capitalism, socialist, capitalist, economy, economic systems, what is socialism, what is capitalism, big government, big business, social democracy, self regulation, differences between socialism and capitalism

Id: _ZDQAsvNK3E

Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 27 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

4:22 - of course the socialist candidate for president is a condescending retard asshole

but yeah anyway this is about as dumb as I would expect a debate between these two subs. except /r/neoliberal would dump a bunch of links to brookings.edu and /r/cth would just call them 'chuds' repeatedly

[u/mrmarfanman]

Why the fuck do these brainlet morons constantly bring up “ethnic homogeneity” when talking about Norway’s social democracy?

The vast majority of countries on the world are ethnically homogenous. There are like 20 countries on the planet where there isn’t a single ethnicity with 85%+ supermajority in the electorate. One of those countries is Canada. Canada has pretty good social democratic policies.

And even if they didn’t, saying “Norway has a good social democratic culture because they have ethnic homogeneity” is like saying “Norway has a good social democratic culture because all their people have hair.” Like, almost all of the countries in the world have people with hair, and in any case I don’t see how it’s relevant at all.

Anyways, as is usual - the “capitalists” are retarded and I can easily think of 10 good arguments of my own to crush every one of theirs, and the “socialists” are insufferable self-righteous scolds who plan to just browbeat the retards into submission. Total farce.

[u/Sigolon]

People are inherently selfish

Was this ever in dispute? Socialism is not about self sacrifice.

Everyone has the opportunity for success

Definitionally untrue

Profit and ethics are opposing motives

This part was just fascinating, capitalist lady explains perfectly the marxist case, you have to pay people less than they are worth to stay afloat in capitalism. What is the socialist guys response? Some liberal platitude about how if you cant pay a living wage you shouldnt even be in business. Just pathetic. Also Profits being unethical has never been the problem. (also lol at the guy who doesnt know the difference between wages and profits)

[u/Smultronstallet118]

Is she even a capitalist who owns capital or just a brainwashed supporter of capitalism who doesn't even understand that there's a YUGE difference between a capitalist and a class cuck who supports capitalism despite not owning any capital xirself?

[u/[deleted]]

scripted and overproduced

[u/Modshroom128]

none of these people are actually capitalists.

[u/The_Royal_Tea]

The capitalists in this are just liberals really, they like capitalism because it let's them buy things but haven't thought much more deeply about it than that.

Aside from the teenager who talked about "ethnic homogeneity" in Norway. He seems like the /pol type

[u/Matmil1342]

Thank you, but I don't want eye cancer.

probably liberals appealed to acetic idealism and the "socialists" did not read Marx and were unprepared.

[u/SnapshillBot]

Snapshots:

1. r/chapotraphouse vs r/neoliberal - archive.org, archive.today

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