Communist Professor Defends Stalin & Mao’s Legacy - Heated Debate

were taught that stalin is just an appalling monster this is utter nonsense the economy grew massively under stalin quicker than any society ever industrialized and people's lives got a whole lot better millions of people capitalism generates poverty because it concentrates wealth in a few hands what's more important living out my purpose and ambitions or living a safe and guaranteed life should you not be allowed to live out your purpose of course you should but should somebody starve so that you can do that i would say capitalism kills 14 million people each and every year i don't think that's how the world works do you i do yes i do [Music] my guest today is dr assatar baer who's an associate professor at economics of economics at riverside city college he's a self-identified communist dr bear frequently praises dictators like stalin and mao dr pair speaks and writes about meditation has written over 150 blog posts about heart-centered spiritual development he has practiced meditation since he was a small child and he holds a phd in economics from the university of massachusetts amherst doc appreciate you for being a guest on valuetainment thank you so much for having me on the show i got to tell you i was on twitter i was looking at twitter moments after i post a very positive capitalistic tweet then i see your tweet come on i gotta read it to everybody because this this kind of uh lets the audience know you know how similar a belief system you and i have and they're gonna be able to enjoy it at the end of the day here we go your tweet that just came out let me see this here speaking of debates i'm being interviewed by patrick bae david and a few should be interesting ha ha hashtag communism will win i like your spirit of competition which is a capitalistic quality i admire that a lot anyways okay so doc we got some time together if you don't mind would you mind taking a moment and kind of uh uh sharing with the audience your background upbringing you know schooling how you came about your philosophy so the audience can get a better understanding of your background sure um you know i grew up in a spiritual community my parents uh very interested in in meditation philosophy and became uh students of sufism uh and this is western sufism sufism is the esoteric tradition within islam so it's it's sort of like kabbalah for for judaism or or maybe gnosticism for for christianity you know most religions have a kind of esoteric side right so and sufism you know is often very deeply embedded in islamic culture uh but in the united states it takes a very different kind of form and the order that that my family belongs to is a very universalist uh kind of branch uh associated with a fellow named hazuna nayakan who taught sufism in the west so you know that i grew up in a very kind of alternative background but it wasn't very political you know there are there are uh political hippies and non-political hippies you know and this this is a non-political kind of strain um but i got into uh radical politics uh as a young person when i was when i was a teenager and it's at that point that i began to to study marxism and i ended up uh studying that quite seriously and i studied in college and graduate school with uh the noted marxist economist richard wolff uh and his longtime collaborator stephen resnick who has now passed away sadly so that's kind of my my training and then i had the idea that i would really like to teach at a community college uh because you know i i want to be able to speak to working class people and you know it seemed like that was the best way to do it now there's a lot of challenges that come along with that um but and that's what i've done for about the last 20 years i did take five years out of that uh and uh ran a non-profit for so i haven't always been an academic academic i left and then i returned and that's that's kind of my story currently like you mentioned teach at riverside city college in southern california very cool i appreciate that by the way if you don't mind going back you said in high school you took interest in politics and you were always you know upping in you know and what you guys were studying philosophy all that stuff but why why why marxism why karl marx was there a teacher did somebody inspire you did you watch a movie did you read a book where did that inspiration come from yeah it's a little hard to say at this point i don't think there was a single kind of source you know i i was in exploration kind of mode um definitely a book that interested me early on was was by e.f schumacher and it's called smallest beautiful this is not a part of the marxist or communist can and this is written by a sort of mainstream or maybe kind of lefty economist but it it i found it to be very kind of um freeing in terms of its outlook um and that and that was one of the one of the works that kind of set me on the path of discovery i had a lot of dissatisfaction uh with a kind of mainstream economics which seemed to me just very abstract and and very hard to use and and uh that it didn't it didn't seem to connect with the kind of real problems that seemed to be happening all around us you know it was it was very very stylized and and and so i i didn't understand like why was that the case um and but then when i would read other things i was like oh okay well these here they're talking about real stuff um so that was sort of the beginning for me so so if i'm doing the math right 14 years old uh so you're saying 1987-ish 86-ish who's president at the time i think reagan is president at the time milton friedman is probably all over the place thomas soul is probably all over the place so is it fair to say like it was maybe friedman is on phil donahue and they're debating nader ralph nader and some of that stuff just didn't sit well with you would you say friedman was one of the guys that you didn't agree with well yeah i mean friedman is somebody i studied later and somebody who certainly casts a long shadow in the field uh in the culture as a whole um uh definitely you know an important intellectual figure in terms of you know what we could call the rise of neoliberalism or the the neo-classical counter-revolution that occurs because you know what happens of course in the post-war era is that keynesian economics becomes really the dominant form of economic theory and its focus is how can the state manage and regulate capitalism right to to the benefit of society that's the kind of focus of keynesian theory and friedman in the chicago school really systematically attacked keynes in theory uh in favor of you know a a stripped down kind of free market and that's that's the neoliberal kind of philosophy right that the state should have a very minimal role uh in the economy and and they were i think broadly speaking successful at you know kind of moving the pendulum back towards a much more free market or classical liberal or neo-liberal kind of position got it and by the way just how to cure if you and i were in 10th grade together who who were you in 10th grade was i in 10th grade um you know i had in high school i was it sort of an introvert um i i did some sports but they were the sort of nerdy sports you know i i i rode crew and i ran track and you know like the sports that nobody cares about uh i didn't much like uh you know i i like i always liked athletics but i didn't like the world of athletics all that much you know why is that um it seemed like it was filled with bullies and douche bags you know and uh i i love competition i love athletic performance um you know i i do martial arts uh it's one of my hobbies i do judo and jiu jitsu and boxing you know i i enjoy competition but i don't enjoy uh the putting down of the week you know um i think competition should bring out your best not be about you know putting down somebody else and and so it but i often saw that you know in a kind of world of sports and i it turned me off yeah i don't think that can be debated i think uh uh there is a a a big part of that in sports and uh i can see that turning uh some people off because there's the smack talking the comparison you know sometimes maybe you can't compete with somebody else because they have certain abilities somebody else doesn't have certain features certain things so i can totally see that taking place okay so i kind of have an idea who you were in high school parenting got it books inspiration got it coming out of high school if you were to say like my hero if i were to say coming out of high school would probably be i don't know an arnold i wanted to be mr olympia right i looked up certain people that were you know uh people i saw maybe a military leader somebody like that who was your hero coming out of high school like in college well it'd probably be someone more like gandhi to be honest you know so you know i i looked at gandhi as a figure of of national liberation for for india as someone who was uh very informed by you know spiritual experience of spiritual views uh but also took an interest in uh you know real politics and you know things like economic development and um so you know that certainly had a big impact on me as a young person has that changed uh to today have your uh has there been an evolution to your heroes well yeah yeah yeah who would you okay today is is your hero like a m m is it a you know i don't know maybe a uh president is it a former author is it a live person is it a dead person i don't think i relate as quite so much as i did as a young person to that concept of having a hero you know i think we are too individualistic about you know the role of individuals in terms of history you know marxism is focused more on the collective mass of humanity right uh and the the philosophy of dialectics of over determination yeah is about you know how we kind of all matter right not not how oh it's just about about one great man in history or whatever you know so i i mean there's certainly lots of people that i look to and admire and say these are people who made great contributions um and let me just drop probably the most controversial one just right out of the gate and that is joseph stalin that's probably why i'm on the show uh because i had some viral tweets uh back in the end of june um where you know i celebrated the legacy of stalin and and these really sort of took over and started trending on twitter uh and that that got me a lot of attention which has been it's been interesting i bet you know what's crazy is i have family members who admire stalin i mean you got to realize my mother's side their majority of them are communists you know interesting their bible was uh karl marx uh uh communist manifesto they escaped their armenians so you figured they were in russia you have stalin you have lenin they admired these men in many different reasons and then they left came to iran met my dad my dad was an imperialist so imagine an imperialist marrying a communist you know this thing's not gonna work out right just a matter of time they got two divorces in 20 years the second time they got remarried i was born so i'm kind of glad they got divorced twice not once because if it's only one divorce i don't exist so if you don't mind i'm going to read the tweet i'm going to read the tweet and you can unpack it so uh please you're not just going to read the initial one right you're going to read that one so i'm going to go through the whole thing you tell me i'll stop so uh people say i idolize stalin not true i hold a fair and balanced view the man was neither a savior nor saint but he was at once a very successful revolutionary a great contributor to marx's theory and said to be a great listener and collaborator during discussions and then there are his successes as a leader first the foresight to fear a belligerent german fascism then the tactical ability to successfully defeat the world's greatest invading army combined with the strength to make tough decisions that have no easy answers i simply think one should read everything the man wrote and then make up your own mind i would certainly conclude that he is one of the great leaders of the 20th century though so that's what you said if you don't mind unpacking that that is the one that uh caused stalin to trend and and twitter even wrote a little a little editorial i think twitter felt that they had to explain this you know so they said stop you're trending stalin and then it said dr asitar bear riverside city college right yes has defended style and blah blah and i thought isn't that interesting somebody from twitter had to try to summarize this situation um yeah the that tweet got something like 20 million impressions um and you know i wrote this knowing that this would probably be somewhat let's say triggering right sure um uh you know we are taught in the united states uh because of anti-communist propaganda you know we're taught that stalin is just an appalling monster and there's not a single thing that he did that was good um and this is utter nonsense um you know the we look at the achievements of the soviet union and what we find is that so the soviet union improved the lives of ordinary people more rapidly than any any state has ever done in history now that's a remarkable achievement uh so we're talking about two two things here right first we're talking about a massive expansion in the size of the economy right and when i say that i'm talking about conventional measurements i'm talking about gdp right now there are some differences in terms of how gdp is is reckoned in socialist countries and so forth let's just leave that aside right the fact is that socialism under stalin massively grew the economy more than at any other point in russian history right so that's one thing now the second thing gdp doesn't mean that much though uh in terms of how the average person is doing right because the size of the economy can grow and we have no idea you know where does that wealth go right does it go to a small number of people i mean that's typically the pattern right typically i mean mark said right the history of hitherto existing society is a history of class struggle that means a small group of people tends to take the lion's share of the wealth of of an economy you know when this is going back thousands of years right um did that happen in the soviet union the answer is absolutely not right the wealth went towards improving the average person's life and and especially towards improving the lives of the very poorest that is extremely unusual right that is in fact it there there at the time there's no there's no cases of it there's no parallel there's absolutely no historical parallel so before we get into you know that this debate is carried out about oh stalin murdered this and that right stalin did this you know okay look before we even get into the details you start with the big picture you know when you're approaching something from far away right you see certain you know there's the mountain right what does it look like right this is the mountain of soviet socialism right it's a rapid economic development a and b rapid improvement very rapid right history's rat most rapid improvement in the lives of the ordinary person and i think that is a stupendous accomplishment you know now again i'm not a fan of the great man theory right so i'm not saying oh stalin we wear ships dialing like this right nonsense that's not true for any leader of any modern country right i mean you know what leaders do is supported by millions of people right um one way or the other you know um so but we can say right stalin is is the leader in in a leadership role right and and so you know he has certain responsibility both positive and negative right for what happened under that you know 28 year period or so of his leadership and i think it's a huge mistake to look at soviet history and say oh that was an economic failure and oh people suffered and whatever um well look you know people suffer in every single society um could they have done better maybe right could they have done better economically maybe but you start with the actual fact right the fact is the economy grew massively under stalin right the economy industrialized quicker than any society ever industrialized um and people's lives got a whole lot better right and and how do we know that right we can look at that in terms of you know the the tools that social science has to measure that right which are how long are people living what's the life expectancy how many babies are dying before age one right um how many calories are people taking it right how many people can read you know these are the basics right and especially when you're dealing with a relatively poor mostly agrarian society a society where 92 percent of the people work in agriculture right these are monumental achievements and that is why i celebrate that i think it's it's a huge mistake and a huge distortion to allow the anti-communists most of whom by the way are nazis to write this history now we can't we can't allow that right we have to have the true history you said most you just made a lot of uh assumptions right there some would and you said it in a confident way which is pretty impressive it's like going up to a girl at a bar and saying listen i'm gonna be the greatest man you're ever gonna take home and she doesn't know until she takes you home and then she says you know what you were like a four you were okay or you were good and you delivered so we don't know that but let me go back and uh measure a few things that you said you know one but you know i've had the richard wolf on before and we had a great time together i had him on and slavo and jiji has also been on and a few other socialists have been on i love talking to socialists it's a good conversation because i think the audience wins so you know you said you know what it did to the economy it improved the average person's life and you know yeah let's not look at the amount of people that died you know it is what it is it's you know you have to do what you have to do and then leadership there's some negative there's some positive the part i agree with you to me a leader is somebody that gets people to do something they wouldn't do on their own that could be positive or negative i think a criminal that says hey let's go rob the bank i'm like i don't want to do it i'm telling you we should go rob the bank if i end up going and robbing a bank with a criminal that guy was a leader who led me to go rob the bank now does that mean good leader or a bad leader i define him as a leader but depends what he's leading to doing but yeah but to but to go back and say you know improving the average person's life here's one of the challenges i have with that if you any history book you read it doesn't matter where you read it stalin and lenin are not seen as you know heroes or mao the only places that you will read that's positive about them is typically their own country or somebody that's maybe favoring them that was from their lineage that you know says good things about it but the biggest challenge with communism for me and i want to kind of focus on this and we can go any different angle you want to go i got different topics we can go to the the concept of force versus choice so who is the government to determine what improving means to me maybe i want to build my life at a different scale communism doesn't allow me to do that choice is eliminated under communism choice is there under capitalism communism's basic foundation is force and i know what's good for you now you're going to disagree with that so i want to know where you're going to go with disagreeing that because i don't think communism exists without a level of force do you i would say i would agree with everything that you said but we have to change the term communism to capitalism it is capitalism which gives us no choices right the average person has nothing right you cannot have freedom if you have nothing okay so now when i say the average person has nothing what does that mean right it means how much liquid wealth does that person have right okay so if we if we look at 90 percent of americans and you know richest country in the world right how much liquid wealth yeah uh do do people have um the answer is almost none right almost none now even if when we start approaching the top ten percent that answer does start to change right so the top percent ten percent has wealth but when we look at how much wealth they possess almost all of it is illiquid right so almost all of the average person's wealth is in the form of their home right now at the average person does not own a home they own a portion of a home right home equity but this is not wealth that you can use right because the most you can do with that wealth is you can borrow against it right you're using it right now right you're living in it so if you try and use it you have an immediate problem which is where do you live you know um here's the question right does the wealth that you have even if you're at the 85th percentile or whatever right even if you're sort of near the top of the of the income distribution under capitalism does it allow you to stop working and do whatever you want right imagine if you could do whatever you thought would make you the most happy and be of the greatest benefit to humanity right does it allow you to do that the answer is no absolutely not does it allow you to do that right and i can say this as a pretty privileged position right i mean like you know people can look up my income if they want you know my critics do this sometimes on twitter you know and they say look at this communist he's all privileged and they high income and whatever right like like one shouldn't or something as a phd college professor right um you know the point is right even if you're doing well on the income platter you probably have almost no wealth right and if you do have some do you have enough that allows you to live off the proceeds and do whatever you want the answer is no except unless you're in the top 1 right absolutely not so if you want to talk about freedom right that's what i think of as freedom right i think freedom means you get to control your time you get to decide what you do i mean that's the most precious resource that we have right i mean let's take that i don't know i'm taking that so let's go with that angle right there so uh you said everything you said i agree with except i would replace communism with capitalism okay so a couple different things there the average person you know wealth is measured based on liquid savings not based on uh uh the income they make fine do you think it's the choice of the individual on how they spend their money and do you think there are people that are better with their money than versus those who are not good with their money on how they spend their money some have good habits some have bad habits right like when you say i'm a uh a phd and you're making good income you earned the right to do that you went and got your phd i think you whatever you're making whether it's 120 150 200 i haven't looked up your income if you have the discipline to go i haven't looked up your income but if you have the look it up later yeah but if you have the discipline to go get a phd and you're a thought leader professor if the market pays you good money more power to you but i think that that's more based on the choice of the individual on how they spend their money i got guys in my in in sales that make a half a million dollars a year and they're killing it in income they got a hundred thousand dollars in savings because they had four lambos for what you don't need four lambos then i got guys that make seventy eight thousand dollars a year and i got two million dollars in savings so that argument gets stopped based on the habit of the individual on what they do with their money don't you agree no not at all because you know in order to in order to have the ability to save at that level you have to have income at that level you know like let's not act like the average person makes 78k or 200k or 500k right that's not those are not average incomes right so you know the the if we want to talk about who is average we need to talk about median figures right so the median household income in the united states right and this is household so that includes every member of the household right so there's about a little over two members of the household on average right in the united states 160 or so million households um so the average about you're about 60k right so that means half make below that and half above that right now income is not the whole story though right now well i should just say just to finish that point right we are dealing with masses of people who don't really have the option to save because their their cost of living is so high relative to their to their income right and because rents have been rising much faster than incomes have right there's unemployment i mean these are the the constant problems of capitalism capitalism has such an emphasis on employment but does it guarantee everyone a job not at all right do you think even under good times you have millions of people who are looking for work and can't find it do you how much of it do things on the individual to increase their market value well individuals can certainly do that right you can i mean i i'm sort of in the business of encouraging people to do that right go to school get your get get your aaa right get your get your ba get your bs you know um but is everybody gonna do that i mean i think it's it's sort of cruel to tell everyone uh hey listen we've gotta cross this river uh nine of you are gonna make it one of you is gonna drown good luck you know what yeah wow that sounds maybe you could say look you kind of eat a little too much and you put on too much weight maybe discipline yourself a little bit so you can have stamina a little bit more you can say you know what's wrong with us saying look instead of watching netflix all day and playing video games maybe spend that same amount of time learning a new skill set so the market could increase your value is there anything wrong with that is that cruel i think it's unrealistic how do you say that because we need to look at the fact it's like it's like musical chairs right musical chairs the whole point of the game is there's not enough chairs right it wouldn't be much of a game if when the music stopped everybody had a place to sit down that's a game that's a game sure but our economy is not that different from musical chairs right i mean like there's always gonna be millions of people unemployed i mean we can look at the lowest unemployment figures in the series right and what does it translate into it translates into several million people unemployed i mean that's just the reality you know every one percent of unemployment is 1.6 million people or thereabouts right so you always have millions of people unemployed in even in the richest capitalist nations you just hope it's not you right you just hope that you hustle hard enough and it's not you i call that cruel yes absolutely that's cruel because we are saying look somebody always has to suffer right that's a structural cruel do you have any kids do you have any kids i do i have two kids they are 11 and 14. 11 and 14. do do do you feel they have to contribute to society and where they're living today do they have any responsibilities or no yeah everyone has to contribute to society and i think everybody does you know you think i think when you say that you mean in a formal employment capacity no i just i got four kids i got four kids and i think about like for example like what the part i agree with is when somebody's coming up like listen you gotta kind of give me an opportunity to kind of build myself up and then like you know the culture of middle eastern culture you know sometimes in america it's like you turn 18 go figure it out on your own versus hey listen let me give you a little bit of a head start and then go and do your thing you know so but some may go out and be independent at 18 and never come back but some may go at 28 26 25 it varies i totally understand that part but to think that an individual doesn't have to contribute to society isn't that a miserable life to not have any way to contribute positively to the world i think it is i think it is okay absolutely i think there's a lot of dignity and nobility in labor right and we have been given a wrong picture of labor by capitalism in fact right we think of labor as work as toil as trouble i mean it's this is all through the economics literature by the way right this goes back to adam smith right it's toil and trouble man man lives by the sweat of his brow right this goes back to the bible in fact right so you know these are ideas about labor that says labor is intrinsically unpleasant you know now i don't think that's true yeah it doesn't i don't think that's true yeah yeah no you say it doesn't have to be right uh i think there's two different versions of that okay there's one version of that which is a kind of capitalist version that says yeah look work doesn't have to be shitty but it will be if it's low wage so don't be stuck in a low wage shitty kind of job right that's the kind of capitalist version the marxist version says no work is shitty right what makes work crappy is the exploitation the alienation the low wages the precarity the fact that you never know right is your wage actually going to even keep up with the cost of living right those are the things that make work crappy it's not the work itself right people say well who's gonna pick up the garbage this is a funny one to me because people that pick up the garbage this is tends to be a pretty good job actually right like you know sanitation workers have good unions they tend to have good wages good benefits it's a good job right lots of people would be very happy to have a good job as a sanitation worker yeah yeah so you know people always say this to me under socialism around who's going to pick up the garbage i don't know nobody wants to do that right i don't think that's true right people want to be of service to society as long as they are getting their needs met right okay so there are no unpleasant kinds of jobs but there are there are ways of structuring them that make them crappier or make them better depending on how they're structured so absolutely then what you're saying is what you're saying is there are some shitty capitalists can't debate that there are some that are very uh selfish all they care about is themselves and they don't treat their employees right what do you think of when you when you think of a capitalist like that i mean just who springs to mind i mean i'm sure you're going to say bezos you're probably going to bring up bezos or you're going to bring up probably i don't know who you're going to say who's the modern day guy you would bring up musk bezos i don't know who you would what would you say i don't know i mean those are those guys because the way i see it is in the following way i see it as if you and i are friends okay let's just say you and i are friends we have opposing a lot of friends that we have political differences i got them here i mean we we have a podcast with a guy we don't see either our politics but see you and i go to dinner together okay all right we go to dinner i got you don't worry about it doc this is on me what do you want you want wine it's on me today don't worry i got the sushi today great we go you know i treat you good we have a good friendship together i respect you i respect your 14 and your 11 year old kid i respect your family i see them hey anything i can get you is there anything you can do for great and you're respectful to me we're probably going to have a long-term relationship together friendship together and we're going to enjoy each other's company we have to agree on everything but we're going to but if i treat you shitty if i betray you if i disrespect your kids or your family we're probably not going to be friends for too long because you're not going to put up with it and i don't think 99.9 of people will put up with it so what does that mean to me the market who is filled with people who make their money and they become arrogant and mistreat people they're the ones that make others who take care of their employees well their clients well they make them look good so you almost need a little bit of that to get somebody to say you know what i gotta tell you i used to work at john's place man he treated me like crap but man i love working for mary i've been with her for 11 years every time i've done well she's given me a raise i've gotten a bonus she's good to my family i go on vacation she's giving me plenty of when i had my two kids i had my leave time i had this i had that so i think there is the good end of bad but i think the bad makes the look makes a good a win because you know like a lot of times on the socialist side or the communist side the first person they like to target is bezos and like sanders will go after them or aoc will go after them look at this guy he doesn't take care of his people and he treats them like [ __ ] and all this other stuff guess what i got a person here that's my camera girl she didn't like working at amazon she said i didn't want to work they didn't treat me good she left no one's forced to stay there in communism you don't have a choice it's pure force in capitalism if you work for a shitty boss or a shitty company you can leave them to go to a different place you can do that in capitalism you cannot do that in communism yeah but what's your fallback right let's say you don't have the money to leave a job you know let's say you don't have any savings because you're a low-wage worker right why are you a low-age worker well you don't have much skills why well because you come from a poor family you know education wasn't available to you acquiring skills wasn't available to you now this is true for a substantial portion now you could say okay hustle harder you guys okay fine you know hustling harder is going to work for a few people absolutely you know and that's great capitalism has some social mobility it is better than the brutal system of feudalism it's better than the brutal system of slavery that preceded it absolutely and marxists are you know very willing to admit that you know like like are we trying to return to the corrupt monarchies of the past no [ __ ] them [ __ ] the kings right like are we trying are we saying slavery was better absolutely not it's a great thing that humanity has abolished slavery it's fantastic right we celebrate that we always have right um but are we gonna celebrate a system of exploitation that requires that needs and it will always create a low-wage group which is on the edge of subsistence and cannot develop themselves as full human beings because how can one right when you're every almost every waking moment goes to enriching somebody else right that's the actual reality of capitalism i mean you know you could celebrate for me the relatively small number of forward-thinking woke capitalists they're they are they exist they are out there you know there are good employers there are you know you know who gets a lot of press is this guy dan price you know that's that i had them all by the way i had them all four months ago okay well you know they you know you don't then right yeah add them on go pay the workers well and they'll do well and yeah you know this is this is in enlightened capitalism right i say it's a illusion you know i say yeah there's a few of them fantastic right they make life better than it would be otherwise but it's still a brutal system you know like when i say capitalism doesn't guarantee you a job that's true right and that's not all it doesn't guarantee it doesn't guarantee you a house right so this is why we have over half a million homeless people in the united states right capitalism generates poverty it does not lift people out of poverty it generates poverty because it concentrates wealth in a few hands that is its primary mechanism i mean are there times where societies decide to go against that for whatever reason yeah there are you but they are at constant risk of getting undone and this is what we're seeing right the places that have nationalized health care let's take britain for example their health care system is quite beleaguered right yeah because they underfund it why because capitalists don't want to pay for it right because it benefits everyone rather than benefiting a select few capitalism is all about generating mechanisms that redistribute wealth toward the rich and then lying to us and telling us that's for the average person that's not for the average person so not at all here's a question for you here's a question for you so by the way dan price do you agree with his philosophy or what do you think about him well he's trying to be a good capitalist employer i think it's better to be a good capitalist employer than to be a bad capitalist employer if you ask me yeah i mean the part when i asked him i said so at the company he pays everybody seventy thousand and now it's been a different story i think he had some issues with his brother lawsuit family some things that happened wasn't pretty uh but uh i asked him i said who owns the company he said i want 100 i said that means you own a 100 million dollar company he says yes and then he changes position afterwards the guy's worth 100 million dollars his people are working for him but he owns all the equity so it's not like he's given the shares of the company so if you if your position i applaud you for sticking to your position of where you are but let me go back to it so a question what's more important living out my purpose and ambitions or living a safe and guaranteed life what's more important i don't know what you can say to that to an individual right like you know should you not be allowed to live out your purpose of course you should right but should should somebody starve so that you can do that right i mean see this is the disconnect right we need a system that truly frees people to uncover themselves and achieve right to be who they can be to develop their potential right yep think of the millions of people who are systematically denied that opportunity right because of simple stuff right hunger you know at any given moment okay there are 850 million hungry people yeah in the world right now right and nine million of them will ultimately starve right each year that's globally right that's an incredible figure right um there's another three and a half million people that die from lack of access to clean water so are you gonna tell me that you can achieve your potential in life when you don't even have clean water right i mean what happens when a person doesn't have clean water they drink dirty water and then what happens they get an infection you know i mean they're much more likely not everyone right thank god but you're much more likely to die there's a lot of ways you can die from drinking dirty water right another million and a half people die just because they don't get the most basic kind of medical care right vaccine preventable illnesses so i would say capitalism kills 14 million people each and every year that is absolutely due to capitalism all right so so then let me make the connection for you if you're interested i've seen the video i've seen the end but go ahead audience hasn't seen it go ahead all right so what capitalism does again concentrates resources in a few hands okay when did this happen we look at the period from 1870 to 1900 okay this is when capitalism conquered the world okay this took the form of now some of it had already been conquered at this point right india had already been conquered china you know is subjugated never fully colonized 1870-1900 is the scramble for africa okay this is a period of time where a lot of the world's land changes hands okay it goes from indigenous control to european control control under a few hands you end up with african countries in which 80 percent of the land is owned by the colonizers right now people want to tell me that has nothing to do with starvation today it has everything to do with starvation today what caused that imperialism well it was caused by the competition among the capitalist powers for resources for markets to keep to get access to those commodities and keep out their competition right it emerges inexorably from the logic of capitalism the world that has been created the world that we see today is the product of that right so that structural cruelty is inseparable from the system and will never be undone by capitalism according to me by the way you know that that part the only way that kind of cruelty is possible is with the power of government you cannot do it without the government you need to have the government to do that right so so for me if that did happen i guarantee you the government was involved for example monopoly of course the government you cannot create a monopoly without the help of a government it's mathematically impossible to have a monopoly without the help of a government to have some lobbyists come behind closed doors and help you out but i'm going to go a different uh direction with you on this so so i asked the question at the beginning what's more important pursuing my purpose ambition or pursuing you know uh what do you call it just a guaranteed safe life to make sure everybody else is happy and everybody else living a safe life becomes more important than my own desires that i have let's just say right now we got a 22 year old kid that's watching this conversation you and i are talking let's call him john okay let's call him jose he's watching this video and he's sitting there saying okay doctor's got a degree he's a phd patrick had a 1.8 gpa in high school he doesn't have a degree he doesn't have an eighth year not an mba not a phd not a four-year not an associate he just went in the military came out went into business and he's done well for himself in business fine this kid that's watching this has the choice and the capacity to go be the next bezos and build the next amazon hypothetically and he's in there where he has that kind of drive and intellect to be able to pull it off right the 22 year old bezos named jose okay if he goes and does this in the next 20 years doc he's going to create 1.3 million jobs which is roughly what amazon employs today they got 1.3 million jobs that means they created a market 1.3 million jobs or he can choose to go out there and become a major loyalist to marxist and communistic philosophies go into school become a professor and educate people on why capitalism is cruel and it's not the right system who's living more of a worthier life the guy that gives 20 years to build an incredible company that creates 1.3 million jobs or the guy that goes out there and says capitalism sucks and communism is the way to go who's who's making their purpose become a reality i think if we're dreaming i would like to see the uh the marxist figure be more of a revolutionary actually let's say he's a revolutionary let's say he's the next styling let's say he's the next leona let's say he's the next karl marx do you think the world's a better place if this kid chooses to become the next car marx or the next jeff bezos well we have to distinguish between these figures these historical figures right because marx is a theoretician right if we say what what are the results that mark's generated for people's lives the answer's zero right marshall's never in a position marx was never in a position to do any policy right so now stalin that's a different story right stalin is actually the leader of the soviet union right so and he is in a position to have an impact on ordinary children's lives and he did have an impact on ordinary people's lives right so these are very different figures historically right we have to distinguish between a theoretician right somebody who generates theory uh now theory is good right affects our understanding of the world right let's say basil's against stalin yeah well which one improved more people's lives you gonna ask me this the answer is unquestionably stalin you really believe questionably you really believe that oh absolutely there's no it's not even close not even close generating 1.3 million jobs is not the unambiguous good that you're making it sound like right the question is what's the life the question is what's the nature of those jobs right i could create one million internships for you right now right they're unpaid right i just create a million jobs boom paid jobs oh they they do pay jobs right no imagine if if if my internships were also paid they're just paid at a starvation level of wages right is that a net improvement these are not starvation paid jobs though you know when well when that's not what the amazon workers say is it you know well no the people the people listen the part that you're right is when the complaints come about breaks and other people have said that right but if we have to choose between the two you're saying without a debate stalin would be better for the world than a bezos absolutely yeah absolutely and the historical record is very very clear on that right now look how long were people living in the soviet union under the czar right the life expectancy in the soviet union was about 40 years right yeah so this is an average figure all right so what it means is let's take everybody who died okay and just put in their age okay you died at six months okay we'll put in 0.5 if you died at 80 we put in 80. okay diet at 40 put in 40 right the average of all those numbers okay that is unbelievable right and that shows you that this is a pretty brutal society okay so stalin improved that by about 30 years right this is almost a doubling in life expectancy and it's occurring in a very short period there's millions of people millions of people let's not deflect right let's just let's just say what happened right what happened was at the cost massive investment in health care right at the cost talking about training thousands and thousands of doctors building hospitals where they never existed before right did that save lives the cost of millions of people though well let's get to the cost in a moment right we're just on the positive side of the ledger right yeah right did that save lives is the question and the answer is there is no question that that's safely on a grand scale okay so this is a nation of about 160 million people okay so when we say that life expectancy on average increased by about three decades how many years of human life are we talking about right we're talking about hundreds of millions that is absolutely astonishing okay now people say oh maybe the czar could have done that yeah maybe but the czar didn't do that right there is in fact no capitalist nation that has seen that kind of increase in that span of time no capitalist nation right so did people's lives get better yes it's unequivocal now if we want to get into okay stalin killed millions that's a detailed argument let's let's get into it though right let's get into it because now we're on the negative side right so we've established the pro what's the cost to all this right i'm listening go ahead yeah all right so let's let's deal with the charges okay the biggest charge against stalin is that stalin intentionally caused a famine in the ukraine in 1932 okay so this is called the holodomor thesis right and you know this has been propagated uh you know since since about the 1930s so since about the time that it happened not shortly after right um and it was the story was originally created by hearst right william randolph hearst hearst sent this guy named thomas walker okay to the soviet union to go and observe right but walker never went to the ukraine right we know this right because we know we have his train tickets and stuff right he never went to the ukraine um came back and told a story which hearst was very willing to print right and then they used pictures that were from the volga famine they were from the the bengal famine i mean you know they they so they used a bunch of misleading pictures right and tried to cook up this narrative that said the soviets intentionally starved ukraine this argument never had any logic behind it what the soviets wanted to do was rapidly industrialize and they knew they had to increase agricultural productivity there is no logical basis for any soviet official anywhere ever wanting to damage agricultural productivity their entire their entire focus was increasing right so you would have to convince me right okay that's the logic well maybe somebody went bad maybe somebody like show me the order now all right here's the here's the order okay punish ukraine okay starve them right well of course there's no order right in fact what we find is the opposite right when the famine began the soviets shipped them grain they said drain the grain reserves right ship them the grain right away oh we happen to be exporting grains so that we can get foreign exchange to industrialize slash that right that's what they did there's never been any kind of good argument that said the soviets intentionally or let alone stalin intentionally starved people that is in fact the truth is the opposite the soviets ended the problem of famine which had a long history in russia you gotta be kidding me let me ask you have you ever been to russia i haven't why not i would love to go i haven't been able to travel the world because of you make pretty good money you can go you're a good looking guy you look like you could be russian why haven't you gone to russia yet oh i didn't realize that they distributed airline tickets on the basis of your appearance i should i should have i should have asked that you think i'm happy enough to be able to go to russia phd professor salary you make pretty good money but i would love to go you know how it is when you have a family and you have kids and you have a house and you know where you yeah if i love the country as much as you love russia [ __ ] i'd go live there i don't know why you don't live there you you so but but honestly let me ask you this russia is not currently a socialist country though you understand that let me ask you a question though would you rather live in a capitalistic country or a communistic country you know i don't like this question because i feel like i feel like it presupposes that the world works like this you just move wherever in the world makes you the most happy you know i don't think that's how the world works do you i do yes i do for the rich perhaps not not for the re no no for those who want freedom and they want to avoid force [ __ ] i didn't come to america to be rich my dad was a cashier at a 99 cent store we lived in germany at a refugee camp for two years we escaped iran six weeks after khomeini died i lived in tehran iran for 10 years after jimmy carter pushed out the shop saying the fact that romania was going to give everybody free housing free food free rice free phones free tv he came and he killed half a million people's lives i mean it was a treacherous type of an environment my mother's family escaped armenia and russia and baku to come to iran because of what lenin's stalin communism did to many of these guys they escaped this this is life like so for you to say people come only for money no man we came here because well i can't tell somebody my mom i was an atheist for 25 years i don't believe in god for 25 years because this stuff i saw it's very hard to believe in a god if a god it really exists why the hell would he make this kind of stuff happen but we couldn't tell people we were christians i couldn't tell people that stuff in iran you know my mother couldn't go out there and have the kind of career that men men have here you couldn't do that women were forced to be able to marry a man that's 40 years their age at 8 years old 13 years old that's not cool to do that so when you say why people leave it's just for money no people go to places because that country's values and principles match theirs i didn't come to america because i wanted handouts i mean come to america to be a billionaire we came here because i just wanted to be able to say hey doc what i disagree with you cool i disagree with you screw you screw you cool can we have dinner yeah awesome i can't do that in iran i can't do that in the communistic regions i can't do that in china i gotta zipline china hold on a minute i'm not celebrating iran here right and nor am i saying celebrate you guys that's because of money or whatever i read iran i said that the rich have the option to go wherever in the world they'd like to go we weren't rich though we weren't rich we were very poor right we were very and no doubt you guys suffered in the way that refugees suffer i mean fully you wouldn't it was not easy to move to another country i mean i think anybody knows this right unless you're very rich in which cases you were not rich no we were not we have never lived in a house before listen yeah i never lived in a house i lived in a two-bedroom apartment complex when my mom and dad and my dad were left that 5am kim at 9pm we had a very rough life i'm not i don't like sympathy i don't like that kind of stuff because i don't want you to feel bad for me i'm a very happy man lucky man all i'm saying to you is none of your values and principles that you admire are any of those that america stands for how could you live in a country that doesn't match any of your values and principles i think those are american values and here's why okay if i go i could i could talk in front of a giant stadium full of republicans and you know what i'd say to them i'd say how many of you guys have jobs yes we have jobs right i say how many of you are proud of the work that you do right yes right how many of you do you think everybody should have a job everybody who wants to work should have a job is there anything more american than working hard and being proud of what you do right sure i think we'd all be on the same page well those are the values in the united states those are the values of marxism right i mean and yet we have this dream in the united states that if we get rich enough and if we succeed then we can do what stop working right i mean when you win the lottery oh look and now i'm going to kick back and go in a hammock and do nothing right that's kind of our fantasy how hard was it to get a phd how hard was it to get a phd it was hard it was it was perhaps the most difficult thing that i did in my young life are you you know what happens when i see a guy that got a phd like let me tell you how i do a phd person i see somebody with a phd i admire them i see somebody with a phd and i say this guy must have freaking put shitload of hours into reading and studying and improving probably have to say no to a lot of parties he'd probably party a little bit but i think he had to say no to a lot of them he probably had that's true no to a lot of events he probably had a lot of friday nights and saturdays and sundays while everybody else was going kicking back he probably stayed and studied it ain't easy to get a phd so here's a question now you and i go to school together i go to college with you we're bunk let's just say we're roommates and i say hey bro what's that let's go get hammered tonight no dude i'm gonna study for my this test that's coming up screw it caroline's come in mary's coming let's go you get together with caroline i'm going to get together with mary you know caroline likes you dude i'd love to but i got a freaking who's the wingman here am i the wingman i think you would i think i'm a historically good wingman but i think you would also be a good wingman but all right the point i'm trying to make to you is you busted your ass to get your phd how about the guy that partied instead of wanting to bust his ass we need to take care of him he could have the same hours to put into it that's when i think concerned yeah i can give a very clear answer yes yes everyone should have a decent life just by but just by virtue of being alive and being human right that means everyone should have food clothing shelters they can have a job what if i'm an f up what if i some people are unfortunately right some people are gonna do drugs all day what if everyone should have a decent life that should be our minimal understanding right just like we have a very broadly shared understanding right now right which is that no one should be enslaved you know i mean ask a thousand people you get a thousand people who will agree with that statement should people be enslaved no they should not right why not is it because slavery is not profitable no slavery is incredibly profitable right for the slave master of course communists know that communism is pure slavery i mean that's the the system is well now now we're just mixing up terms of them under capitalism yeah right even in the united states just ask everyone do you think everybody should have a job do you realize right now i think you're gonna get pretty strong agreement on that david is sitting right here is a camera guy okay yeah and he he runs production if david right now comes and tells me screw you patrick you're the worst boss ever and he leaves you what can i do to him david i don't want you getting fired here yeah what i was conversant to tell you is what can i honestly do to david what can i do to you nothing he gets up and walks out if in a communistic regime he comes and puts his finger at the boss and says screw you where the hell are you going what's going to happen to this guy poor guy may go missing we may not find him by the way let's just say david works for me and he goes on but we don't find that historically though we don't find that that's not i mean just 40 million people got killed it's not that many people it's just not you know it's it's just it's just yeah but that's not a true number though it's 560 million you're right it's more like 60 million it's a bigger number no no neither of those numbers are right you know what i appreciate about you is the following here's what i appreciate about you is you you have your own thoughts on believing the data that a stalin's regime would give you to say that's the date on how things got better for somebody that is an intellect like you who's read way more books than i have and knows history probably a lot more than i do that's the world you're in that's the sport you're playing right that's why i'm interviewing you and i have you want to get your perspective on it sure you know but let me ask you this does not every government have similar motivations to lie about the numbers i mean doesn't the united states have similar motivation i don't just make yourself look good i don't think i lag about the numbers the only difference we have here here's the only difference here remember who charged this trump did tr when trump was running he made a lot of hay out of this he said the official unemployment rate is nonsense the unemployment rate is actually way higher i remember that but guess what you know what we have here's what we have you just validated my point i was about to make to you here's the point i'm going to make to you is okay ma china jeeping right they say yeah kobe came and it left and we're freaking partying our asses up well it's a big deal we're good the economy's grown we're blowing up people are so happy to be in china they just love it here it's a fantastic world but i tell you facebook twitter youtube you're not welcome in china and if somebody posts a video on any of those platforms let me tell you we're coming after you why jack ma gets up there and gives a speech an anti-government speech by this much he goes missing for 90 days how the hell does a guy worth 60 billion dollars that created a bunch of jobs disappear their elon musk disappeared their bezos disappeared just because they made a comment against the government moral the story is the following you can get up today and talk [ __ ] about biden you got a job at fox news and cnn you can get up there and talk [ __ ] about trump you definitely have a job at msnbc try getting up there and talk [ __ ] about jeep in china you have a job at the cemetery and it's six feet under you cannot talk [ __ ] over there or in russia you don't have that that's not true at all though that's not true fantastic so so so why don't they believe in freedom of speech why why don't we have facebook youtube twitter over there why can't we see what's going on why don't they go facebook live so we can see what's going on in china well you have to understand the history of china right china is a long-established civilization that was very severely humiliated and basically colonized right not exactly but basically right like the britain had its way with china it did not deign to conquer the entire territory but it shaved off the part that it wanted right hong kong you know the the port part right um uh and it got the policies that it wanted that came out of the opium wars um it subjugated china right so and you know this caused i mean you know this is part of a whole string of different defeats and humiliations in the early 20th century right that led to uh you know the downfall of the qing dynasty and the warlord period and chinese nationalism and ultimately communism right um this is china just saying to the capitalist powers of the world it's just saying no right you are not going to run our country we are going to run our country now that's a very important moment right now does the does the capitalist world say oh fine okay thanks have a great day right no they do not right they say we are gonna bring you the [ __ ] down by any means necessary okay we're gonna bring you down through infiltration we will bring you down through planting people inside your government we will bring you down through outside media we will create an entire organization called radio free asia right just designed to spread lies and propaganda right so does china ban a few as many of these things as they can yeah and should they absolutely they should right would the united states do that would the united states ban things like that if there was a massive hugely funded chinese effort to spread propaganda in the united states the u.s ban it no tick tock and zoom what i mean what else you want to say tick tock zoom go to the sites we have i can go to china's youtube website they can't go on do you think that i don't know how familiar you are with radio free asia radio free asia is a completely propaganda outfit it is funded by the state department okay do you think that tick tock is equivalent to radio free asia as a propaganda mechanism or or do you not know enough about these things to say or do you have a sense i have a sense of the fact that in china you don't have freedom of speech like we got in america in america if you disagree with trump you can go out there and talk about it you cannot do that in china you cannot do that in the ussr that you love you can't do that and under stalin do you say one no no there's plenty of criticism of xi jinping there's plenty of criticism of you you think during a stalin era i can say things about stalin get away with it come on we can't be that naive you cannot you cannot organize to bring down the state not only you have what if i just start to behind closed doors campaign and i say hey i want to run as an opposition against you and i want to run as a democrat you can't do that their red line is look you can run you can run against anybody as long as it's in the communist party right why is that well because there's a long history of capitalist powers funding oppositional candidates right trying to bring down the system again through a million different means if you study the history of u.s imperialism and u.s intervention you will find an unbelievably long list of dirty tricks right these dirty tricks have been used everywhere to bring down governments that are democratically elected right i will i'm never i'm never gonna defend a uh uh talk you know like the taliban against the afghanistan war okay listen if you go out there and get involved in everyone's business and then you all of a sudden want to step away i'm sorry america but you're gonna create a lot of enemies and america's create a lot of enemies war involvement a lot of different business you and i are probably gonna agree on that part because some of this stuff when i was in iran and they hated us and they would scream matic battle ombre call like death upon america yeah right they don't like the westernized philosophy but what i'm saying to you is all of those tactics fair yes but dude in america you and i can get up and talk in america you can be a professor at riverside you know city college and you're a full-on communist you are a full-blown communist and yeah but do you know how many people are surprised by that i mean take a guess at how many have called for my job publicly out of those stalin remarks right you know like how how powerful a person do you think it would take i don't think you get me fired i don't think you would get fired well you know thank you and i sincerely hope that you're right you know in fact i'm staking my livelihood on that no i don't think you would get fired here's why would you wouldn't do you think a congress person could get me fired do you think a senator who might get it let me ask you a question let me ask you a question let me ask you a question dude come here you know i used to work at a different university the university of southern maine and their president fired a hundred out of 400 tenured faculty members some of them right near retirement can that happen absolutely if of course i mean listen if the president of united states is silenced by twitter you could get fired so you know if the president could get fired you can definitely get fired but you know the left has a monopoly and education you know they 1341 professors lean to the left and to the right so there's a monopoly in the world you're in all i'm saying from my end is think about it this way why do i have you on this is a pro entrepreneurship pro capitalism youtube channel why do i have you on like other channels wouldn't have you on why do i have you on do you know these are my favorite conversations i think you like good conversations with people who are gonna push back a little bit because that's what creates a fire in terms of the discourse right but you know what it is also for me is as long as you're respectful no the for me you know who wins in this conversation who do you think won today the viewers that's right that's what that's what i want to do the audience is going to go walk away and say listen i i agree with what he said in this side and i agree with you pat what you said on the following side so look i i i've really enjoyed this i can go a couple different things here but i'll give you any any final positions you want to take yourself i mean one of the things i wouldn't mind reading because we haven't yet we can wrap up with this a little bit of china we got 14 more minutes and it will wrap up is mao okay you said a couple things about mao okay i'd like to get your take on mao so you said uh uh you tweeted support for chinese dictator mao uh describing him as one of the greatest revolutionary leaders of all time why don't you unpack it because you have good things to say about him you call this him uh the greatest revolutionary leaders of all time that meaning ahead of uh stalin tell me why him well yeah mao is an incredibly important figure uh you know in terms of china but also in terms of the history of marxism and communism you know i mean we what we have here if we look at the long historical frame right we look at the last 150 years okay so since you know the development of kind of modern marxism the communist manifesto etc right this is a about is 170 years old or so okay now in the at the time there's no socialist countries at all right we look at 1848 europe is emerging out of feudalism and as making a kind of the final transition away from the feudal aristocracy and toward you know liberal bourgeois kind of democracies and so forth right so socialism at the time is highly theoretical you know um and you know that's why you have this relatively long document right the the communist manifesto and it has to say like here's what we mean by it because the term is being used by lots and lots of people right um here's what we mean by it okay but when we get to by the time we get to like 1949 the time of the chinese revolution we're in a very different situation right now we've had successful socialist revolutions so mal can study these right that the the chinese communist party can study this and say what do we think has worked and what hasn't worked right now they are a little bit off the map in terms of you know marx had predicted that the contradictions of capitalism would cause workers to get together and say hey we have some similar interests here right i mean we're all working for a wage and our employers would like to pay us less they'd like us to work harder they'd like to work longer so they can have more profits our interest is overturning this system right our interest is look the wealth that we produce should go to us that's you know that that's the prediction and so marx's thought that the revolution would occur in the most developed capitalist countries now what a surprise it was to find that wasn't true right they occurred in the least developed like the the least russia is the least developed uh capitalist country capitalist feudal country uh in europe china has a very little capitalism in 1949 right it has a little bit in the cities but is again mostly an agrarian country so mao works with this right mao works with the peasantry lives with the peasants for 20 years right during a long march and wins them over i mean that is remarkable right to see a leader that emerges from constant contact with the poorest people in the society right now these are people who are exhausted by warfare right because they had the war they had the warlord period you know they had internal fighting for decades and decades and decades and so their peasants are familiar at the time with what do armies do when they come through here's what they do they steal your food they rape your daughter and they do whatever the hell they want right i mean like do they make your lives better in any way right no they don't you know the only thing that you can say that they do positively is they're fighting against another power that's trying to take you over right so and this is the time when when mao and the communists really start to become popular right they're fighting this war against this you know the the woman tang right um uh it's when the japanese invade china right that the differences between these two different armies right so we have the we have the kmt and we have the red army um but mao is insists on a different kind of conduct for his soldiers right he says you have to pay for what you take right we have to treat people you know much differently than any army has ever treated people because these are the people that we need to convince right we can't just take their stuff and you know like we we have to be different than that and he does this right he gains massive widespread the red army goes from having something like 40 000 troops having a 4 million right and that shows its unbelievable popularity right because so not only does he treat people ethically right and he's in a position of power i mean even if you have if you have 40 000 an army of forty thousand that's small relative to the kmt but that's still a lot more power than any peasant has right so you can do whatever the [ __ ] you want in that situation right but did mao no right mao treated people very very fairly because he saw it as like these are the people that we're actually fighting for you know um now does every leader do that no not at all right most most guerilla fighters are incredibly unethical you know like they mostly do whatever the hell they want right now then we could say what did mao do when he was in power right what mao did when he was in power is a very similar to stalin right he said we need to get the entire country organized the state is going to be the major employer but we're going to do something that's never been done in china which is we're going to make sure that everyone has the basics okay in china this is called the iron rice bowl right it's a bundle of guaranteed consumption goods okay that never ever existed any time in chinese history right so the fair and you know this is among the first things that are done right even while the economy is still emerging from the wreckage of you know tens of millions of people died in the fighting in the invasion of the japanese and so on right mao immediately turns toward improving the lives of the very poorest right these are things that i certainly admire and i think anybody should admire right i mean like if you care about the fate of the poor the fate of those who are the least advantaged in a society well this is a leader who put their needs very much you know near the top right now i'm not going to say at the absolute top right because every leader has the same challenge which is how do you keep power in a world of hostile nations they do do they want to eat your lunch do they want to depose you absolutely they do do they have more power than you yeah they do right we can see this you know the united states supported the kmt for decades after they fled to taiwan they said well that's the legitimate government of china right so you know we're not dealing with an equal kind of playing field here where the capitalist powers say oh yes well whoever ends up running the country is fine no not at all right we are dealing with a war right that war is the working class versus the bourgeoisie so you know what's interesting i'm sitting there thinking i'm like this guy's never written a book one you should write a book because communists would love to uh uh i hear that from people actually but thank you for saying that right now you you sound so devout to them like you're such a true believer at least when i spoke to slavoji he had some doubts and he was questioning certain areas of communism that maybe didn't produce the results that he's more skeptical today than he was before i talked to richard wolff he's more socialist he's not a full-blown communist at your level he's a little bit different than you although some similarities you know i just pulled up something right now i typed the the most evil dictators of all time okay number one is mao 49 to 78 million deaths number two is stalin 23 million that's that's what the site says now give or take you know is what it is i'm curious just just purely out of curiosity what do you think about hitler well hitler is a fascist monster you know uh somebody who committed genocide somebody who is uh a would-be imperialist yeah hitler did not focus his imperialism on africa as the other capitalist powers did in the late 1800s he focused his imperialism on russia right i mean the drive was to go east to give the german people living room laban's realm right i mean that was the that was the german phrase now they did that under the understanding that the slavs and the russian people were sub-human you know now they had a little bit of a problem ideologically because you know they had a white supremacist ideology and they did recognize that the slavs and the russians were or at least some of them were white right but they used this very old kind of mythological idea that said that the slobs had black bones and i mean it was this just utter [ __ ] right so what you have here is you have fascist nationalism which seeks to conquer territory based on racist ideology right now i think that that's pretty well established by history right the result of that is that tens of millions of people die okay that's unequivocal um now people like to draw equivalencies between anti-communists do between hitler and stalin there are no equivalencies none of the things that i mentioned apply in the slightest to the soviet union to any socialist country they don't apply to china saying hitler stalin and mao and then saying something after that just advertises your ignorance right there's there is no there's no point in saying you know anything further at this point you correct me you cracked me up now in terms of zijac i you know doubt makes a good philosopher you know and and zizek is a great philosopher so you know is it appropriate yes right and richard wolff you know look he's my mentor i love him you know um we have some maybe differences of opinion but i think we just have a different style is more like it you know i think the differences of opinion are minor actually but we have you know we have different areas of emphasis let's say right um you know i have a i have a style that's a lot more unequivocal right because i'm acting as more of a kind of ideological warrior you know than i am as a kind of sure academic and oh let me weigh each side right i do that in my written work but you know i'm here as a popular figure not as uh for what it's worth for what it's worth i thought you were going to be a lot more antagonistic than you were i have to tell you that i i thought you were you were gonna be a lot more uh uh coming from a place of this thing was gonna get zero to pissed off i did an interview with what's his name uh what is his name lucian truscott i don't know if you've ever seen it or not if you're not if you want to entertain yourself he's a great great great great grandson of thomas jefferson who wanted the statue to be removed if you want to be entertained just watch the first minute you'll crack up it's a 27-minute interview i'm gonna do a quick speed run with you i'll give you a name tell me one word that comes to mind and i will wrap it up anyway that comes to mind or you can say skip uh with any name so churchill uh what's the word that comes to mind with churchill i mean um you know i think of churchill with the the bengal famine really you know um and if we want to look at a leader who intentionally starved people i think that's that's who we're looking for we're not looking at stalin or mao we're looking at churchill bernie sanders bernie sanders i like bernie um you know he seems like a figure of of um of integrity um although i think he's burning a lot of clout right now because uh you know embracing the biden administration uh and and going towards incrementalism um you know started off saying medicare for all and now is saying lower the eligibility age you know this is the kind of thing where what i had always said about bernie is bernie is the furthest right that i'm willing to go you know wow okay i consider him to be a right-wing leftist um because he's not saying oh you know let's expropriate the rich he's not saying that right he's not saying let's end capitalism he's saying oh and tinker with it and make it work better i don't believe in that would you say the furthest right-wing or the furthest socialist you know what i mean like further socialist right-wing bernie is a social democrat right he's somebody who favors a reformed capitalism that has higher wages and more benefits or whatever right that you know i consider that to be a good result but i think the only way you're going to get to that is through socialism basically you know like i i and that that's what we've seen historically as well about aoc aoc i think you know it's a figure that a lot of us had high hopes for and you know it's exciting and whatever to see a socialist but this is somebody who is um first of all became way more famous than their than their power uh you know sort of uh merited right like aoc is a freshman congress person basically no power you know um your powers as a congressperson depends on what coalitions can you build what committees are you on and so forth right aoc had basically none of that but she became it was just catapulted to fame because she's young and oh a socialist and whatever you know fox news really made her famous um and then becomes oh this is the lion of the left um but you know leftists look at her and be like what has she actually done you know um what policies has she done that actually improve people's lives and the record there is non-existent so you know i i like aoc you know she seems like a good person whatever but you know it's like uh you throw a handful of sand at an oncoming tidal wave you're not really gonna change the result there you know elizabeth warren elizabeth warren i put in a very different position elizabeth warren is a very opportunistic uh politician in my view somebody who you know bernie's out there campaigning in 2016 talking about medical medicare for all talking about the 15 minimum wage uh talking about everyone should have a job what's elizabeth warren doing deafening silence right um then endorses clinton then comes and adopts that program without a word like what the hell is that in the 2020 campaign i mean and and the entire democratic field adopts all of bernie's proposals why don't if you if you guys support the proposals then you should be supporting bernie right but none of these people did that i just think it's opportunistic yeah and you know it's a lot of my colleagues in academia you know love elizabeth warren and so maybe i will end some friendships by by speaking but at this point i think probably nobody cares um you know i just think it's it tells you whether you really support a program though you know like do you support it rain or shine you know or just shine you know i don't think she's a true believer i think like you said she's an opportunistic that makes sense how about fidel castro well fidel castro's interesting one because fidel castro started off as a revolutionary as a nationalist revolutionary not as a socialist interestingly enough right so fidel embraces socialism later right uh he's just sort of it's on the fence for a little while right it's kind of the us's response that pushes fidel to to socialism but once he does that he very much embraces it right so you know one of the first things that i just wrote about this for a new publication called the international people are interested you can google that um i wrote about the economic achievements of of cuba uh one of the first things that they do they they uh expropriate the land right so like i mentioned in cuba similar to lots of places in africa and so forth you had most of the land being owned by a very small land owning class and you know the castro and the revolution they said look we're not gonna do that anymore we're gonna we're gonna turn the land over to the peasants it then became state property the state the state section uh went to about eighty percent of the land they also had individual peasants also owning uh their land individually so they had a kind of mixed system um but you know in general i think i am i'm very favorably uh inclined towards castro and the revolution there also generated very good results i got two other names for you noam chomsky noam chomsky um yeah big figure on the left not someone i've ever really been a fan of just because i don't see him as having a very good answer to like the question of what should be done you know noam chomsky is someone who has good critiques you know like he critiques his critiques of the media are very solid right critiques of imperialism good right he knows a lot about you at the history of u.s imperialism and that's that's very good uh but does he have a very good vision of what should be done you know you said hey noam chomsky you can write your ticket what would it look like i don't think so you know he doesn't have he doesn't system that so that only takes you so far as a critic you need to have a positive vision of your own um and last but not least our our current president your president my president joe biden well joe biden is just the next iteration of of reagan you know i mean like we've we've had a reagan government since reagan i mean that's that's what we've had you know clinton the masterpiece of clinton is that he rebranded the democrats you know he said we're eisenhower republicans now i mean this is literally what he said right so you know clinton and and the democrats since clinton have been very much in that vein the republicans have gone in a very different direction right the republicans have gone uh toward a kind of you know nationalist and fascist kind of direction um the democrats are the ones now saying we are the technocrats and we are the ones that will you know tinker with the capitalism and make it work better and whatever i personally don't believe in that i think that's the that's the kind of keynesian vision again right um but they also do this with a very aggressive militarism you know the the us military machine costs about 1.25 trillion dollars a year once you add everything up that's a stunning amount of wealth to spend on killing people i got to tell you i enjoyed having you on uh appreciate you for answering questions and working uh and going back and forth this was a blast like i said earlier i enjoy doing these things uh we're gonna put the link to both your youtube channel there's a video i think there's ten criticism you give up capitalism some i think i don't know what the title is we'll put the link to youtube channel below if somebody wants to watch it we're going to put the link to your twitter as well below if anybody wants to go send a tweet at him and i i would love to hear what she took away from today's interview having said that doc appreciate your time it's been good having you on thank you so much and you know i'd love to come back so if you want to have me back on the show let's have dinner sometime i am paying no you're not i will take you up on that off and i definitely look forward to it appreciate you we'll definitely have you back on all right thanks for watching take care bye-bye so when's the last time you saw a communist and a capitalist sit down together have a good conversation at the end one of them says hey i'd love to take you out to dinner especially the communists we made history today anyways it was a great conversation curious what you took away about what he had to say he made a lot of strange comments again if you're watching this uh doc a lot of strange comments were made would you take away from it comment below if you enjoyed it put a thumbs up if you haven't subscribed to the channel please do so i got two other videos i want you to watch one of them is with me and richard wolff if you've never watched it he's the number one socialist professor in america according to forbes click over you to watch it and the other one is an interview i told you know a satara about is lucian truscott well within a minute he got pretty upset if you haven't seen this one you want to be entertained go watch my interview here take care everybody bye [Music] you

Channel: Valuetainment

Views: 1,316,914

Keywords: Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneur Motivation, Entrepreneur Advice, Startup Entrepreneurs, valuetainment, patrick bet david

Id: Iov6jyfKtRc

Length: 90min 37sec (5437 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 25 2021