Socialism Is a Useless Word and We Need to Stop Using It

[Music] what the hell even is socialism ask a 100 people and you'll get a hundred different answers check YouTube and there will be a solid dozen different interpretations of what it is many completely disagreeing with all of the others you'll get people calling Stalin a socialist Kim Jong-un a socialist Obama socialist throwing accusations left and right about who is and isn't one like we're still in the Red Scare so what the actual does the word even mean nothing the word socialist is completely and utterly us useless it is destroying what could be many different very interesting Topics by lumping tons of completely different people into one tiny red boat in this video I'm not going to be advocating for any one definition over another as I think it's actively counterproductive to the point I'm trying to make and I'd prefer it if you didn't do that in the comments much either instead I'm just going to go over how much I hate that we're still using this term that seemingly nobody can agree on the definition of before I start it's important to note that there are other words with vague definitions fascism is kind of notorious for this but to some degree it applies to every word in the English language try to come up with a concrete definition of a house that includes everything that is a house and doesn't include anything that isn't you can't you can get decently close with something like a place with multiple walls and a roof built for a small group of things to live and sleep in but that would also apply to a fox den maybe it has to house humans but then is a dog house not a house and how about a boat aren't they built for a smok grp for people to live and sleep into well maybe it has to be built on land but then is a house booat not a house and how about hotels and college dorms those those are sometimes built for a small number of people to live and sleep in two are they technically houses do the people have to be related and if so is an unmarried couple living together in a house make the house not a house also what's with this whole walls on a roof thing does Luke Skywalker not live in a house this place doesn't have walls it's a dome and why you could come up with rules to make the definition more accurate every time you add a new restriction you'll be removing some things that are houses and each time you remove a restriction you'll be letting in some things that aren't you can't really come up with a definition that will be correct 100% of the time for a house or for fascism but that's okay because everybody has a clear image in their head of what a house and fascism are and what's important is that if you get say a thousand people in a room together and ask them to all draw a generic representation of a house or fascism you'll mostly get pretty similar results the house will probably have a few walls a sloped roof some windows and a door and fascism will probably be very militaristic authoritarian isolationist and obsessed with the past and that's what makes a definition useful we can still talk about a house or Fascism and understand what the other person means without they really having to explain themselves but do this with socialism and you'll get a different picture one person will draw dictators and secret police another will draw free healthcare food stamps and taxes on the rich another will draw a farming commune where everyone exchanges Goods by bartering a few will draw work or democracy some will sketch out a Chinese businessman going to a party leadership meeting and at least one person is going to draw Hitler there's absolutely no agreement whatsoever on what the word means so is socialism when a country has an authoritarian command economy like the USSR in MA China when a country is a welfare state like the ones in Scandinavia when property is controlled by the workers when the government controls people's jobs when people democratically vote on their bosses when the government spends social money on programs like Obamacare when people want everything to be free or when a single party controls a country like an oligarchy the answer according to the general public is all of them at once but the problem is that a lot of them are mutually exclusive you can't have free healthc care and ObamaCare where have people democratically vote on their boss but also have an authoritarian government control those jobs instead it might be useful to look at all the people folks often consider socialist or people who are very open about being socialists to see if we can find some sort of pattern or at least a way to sensibly divide them out I've collected a bunch of the really famous ones and a few that are a bit more obscure just to round things out I've got Marx Stalin ma Bernie Sanders Obama Trudeau Hitler hoi Min P pot Thomas aara Nelson Mandela Martin Luther King Jr George Orwell the anarchists in Catalonia the Nordic countries Lenin even Donald Trump to some degree by those magot communist guys although I won't include him because they're such a tiny minority now you might scoff at some of these people being called socialists but that's sort of the point I'm getting at no matter who you are you will be disagreeing with a significant number of people who think that that person entirely deserves to be on the list I just showed you at least a lot of Americans and Canadians and that's what makes the word useless instead of making conversation easier what terms for complicated ideas are supposed to do it just makes things more difficult ult since you're introducing confusion and disagreement into the subject a term like authoritarianism exists as shorthand for undemocratic censorship and backward so that you don't have to say those things every time you want to refer to a country like China instead of having to Rattle off a whole bunch of adjectives you can just use this one handy dandy term to describe them all in one B group the word socialism is supposed to work like this but it doesn't since nobody can agree in what the things it describes are and since it's Humanity that constructs definitions this means socialism effectiv has eight different contradictory definitions at the same time and going back to the people I brought up this is why it's impossible to make a list of socialists that everyone will agree with and the thing about these people is that if you got them all in a room together they would hate each other they have absolutely nothing in common and many of them openly despise the others if you tried to get them to run a government together it'd fall apart in less than a week from internal conflict it's completely impossible to find any sort of common trait among them if they're heads of state were they dictators Obama and Trudeau weren't the Nordic countries haven't had a dictator in ages and the anarchists in Catalonia had a democratically elected president did they want free healthc care Hitler didn't he privatized a ton of Industries and Obama's solution to the healthcare crisis was to pay people so they could afford their private insurance did they hate the West well markx openly admired Western European democracy and Obama was a pretty big Patriot a bunch of them didn't even use the color red speaking of which if you're a good 1960s American be sure to click that subscribe button to change it from red TO gray can't let Communism spread actually it's the Subscribe button still red it's black no isn't it God damn it YouTube changing how everything looks all the time anyway if you like politics media analysis and sometimes some other random nonsense Please Subscribe and like the video all that stuff anyway even though they have very little in common maybe if we can divide out the ones people say are communists from the Socialists we can find more of a pattern but if we actually do that things aren't much better Marx Sara and the catalonians on the left all hated any form of unchecked singular Authority while Stalin ho Lenin Ma and PP were all unchecked dictators marks lenon Sara hoi Min the catalonians and Mao all improved women's rights in their countries a decent amount but stalen aggressed things back and PPT was a sexist monster in terms of genocides there were terrible ones in the USSR China North Korea and Cambodia but Vietnam Bina Faso anarchus Catalonia and Cuba are fairly clean and if you include Tito in all of this he messes things up even more he was a dictator but he also allowed a lot more autonomy in how workers managed their workplaces although Tito did have ultimate control he was much much less controlling than Ma and Stalin and most decisions were fully left up to the workers who otherwise ran their companies democratically he had a foot in about four different camps at once and then there's shiin ping who claims to be a communist and is the leader of China's Communist party yet has been fully supporting free market capitalist economics for years and has shown no sign of stopping is socialism capitalism according to China it is overall there aren't really any true patterns between this group either and it seems like all communism means is possibly authoritarian middle-aged man who likes to wear red and doesn't like the USA and that would apply to a ton of leaders who weren't Communists At All by our definition and this is a problem because if you say anything significant on the topic of socialism you have to spend the next 5 minutes making it clear what parts you support and what you don't and that's the sign of a useless term if you say you want to buy a house you don't have to explain what you mean by house cuz everyone already knows the point of a general word is to make it so you don't have to explain what you mean every time you want to say something we have the word house so we don't have to say the Walt roofed place I live where I eat sleep and cook most of my meals every time we want to talk about our house a term is supposed to make conversation Easier by shortening the amount of things you have to specify and clarify no need to use eight different adjectives if you have this one handy dandy word that includes all of them at once but by being non-specific and contradictory socialism does the exact opposite making the conversation longer due to having to specify what you mean and often turning a civil chat into an argument and on top of that it's a conversation Ender tons of people use the word socialism in place of other more concrete criticisms they might have a lot of the time we don't get to discuss the actual merits and downsides of what say Bernie Sanders proposes since we're spending that time arguing about socialism instead how many times have you seen single paay Healthcare completely dismissed because it's socialism people call Bernie Sanders a socialist in part because it's simple and easy and it means they don't have to to bring up what they actually think is bad about him if they did that'd be a complicated conversation it'd be much easier to just say the word that would make half the population dislike him if you call something fascist you might have to say something short if somebody asks because some people just use that as a perjorative to mean authoritarian or draconic but if you're talking about a government or a leader people are going to get the gist of what you mean pretty well plus authoritarian and draconic are still at least related words same thing with the words liberal conservative not authoritarian Anarchist whatever socialist and to some degree communist are the only real exceptions here you will have to specify what you mean all the time because depending on the context of the situation the topic of conversation your own political beliefs and the beliefs of the person you're talking to it could mean completely different things it could be about somebody authoritarian it could be about somebody Anarchist it could be about somebody who wants to abolish private property it could be about somebody who likes the free market it could be socially Progressive or conservative for the time a command economy or a market economy worldly or isolationist egalitarian or hierarchical open or censored and practically anything else it could be Martin Luther King or Joseph Stalin Bernie Sanders or M dong Sweden or North Korea when people talk about fascism it is almost always a hierarchical authoritarian command economy with conservative social values and rampant censorship there's a bit of wiggle room on whether or not it's isolationist or connected with with the rest of the world but generally speaking there are very strong patterns between things that are called fascist same thing with liberal Nations being worldly Democratic uncensored free market capitalist countries with fairly Progressive social values and a decently economically hierarchical Society again a bit of wickle room but there are a fair few strong boundaries socialism on the other hand depending on what you use to justify it could mean anything under the sun and this is a big reason why I think arguments about whether or not something was really socialism are kind of pointless the way it always goes is someone brings up how some country or another wasn't really socialist because it was authoritarian and was bad on workers rights then somebody else says something sarcastic about how it was totally socialist because it was authoritarian and bad on workers rights the two people agree on what the country was but the argument always goes absolutely nowhere because the people are working off of different definitions of what socialism is if both of them think socialism is something completely different then of course they're going to think different countries are and aren't social list and it just becomes an argument about the definition of the word if you define an elephant as a gray animal with a trunk and somebody else defines it as a rainbow animal without a trunk it doesn't matter who's correct about which animals or elephants you're never going to agree then you have to spend time getting your definition straight first and you almost certainly won't come to an agreement on that and so the word elephant becomes useless to you well okay this happens sometimes whether societal disagreement on what something means people have been using ironic and literally in tons of different ways for years and lots of other people have been calling them out on it and here's why I think it's important to distinguish between a cultural and Technical definition a technical definition would be a thing you find in a dictionary or chemistry textbook trying to be as specific as possible to preserve the meaning in a precise field a cultural definition on the other hand would be how people actually use a word on a daily basis in a medical textbook aold is a very specific group of about 200 viruses but when you're talking with friends it could refer to a dozen different types of completely unrelated bacteria viruses and fungi that just happen to have similar effects probably hundreds of thousands honestly I'm not a microbiologist anyway we've already seen that the cultural definition isn't very useful so maybe we can look at the technical definition for some help I think the best place to go for this would be the Communist Manifesto published by Carl Marx and friederick Engles in 1848 it was supposed to be The Abridged much less academic version of their thousand page book doopy tal if we're trying to get a Layman's technical definition for socialism the book The inventors of socialism wrote to get average people on their side seems like a good place to go now it's important to note that back in the day Marx didn't really distinguish between socialism and communism that was something lenon added so this stuff will apply more to Communism than socialism but will still be useful and can I say I Now understand why nobody actually reads the thing it's 150y old political text translated from German it's like trying to interpret Shakespeare with a sixth grade reading level in particular I want to focus on this gloriously clear and interpretable line in this sense the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence abolition of private property essentially marks and Engles are advocating for removing the concept of people being able to own any piece of property although it's very important to note that he goes on to say in the next few lines that the property of your average blacksmith or peasant is fine to keep and a bit farther down he says that he doesn't want to get rid of anything that somebody working on their own could afford so Marx wouldn't want to make you give up your house or your toothbrush those things would be personal property he only wants things like corporations and large expensive pieces of land to be owned by the community instead of a single very rich person that's why he called his ideology communism essentially marks wanted things to be controlled by the community instead of a single private owner these weren't just concerns about personal freedom it was also due to his theory of alienation basically he thought a worker who's working for someone else can never really feel satisfaction in their own labor since they don't have any control over the end product instead they have to obey the orders and commands of a manager who has a boss who has a boss who has a CEO it's why working in a lemonade Factory isn't fun but operating your own lemonade stand is it's why so many people who would hate working at McDonald's would love to open their own burger restaurant with a couple of friends because instead of coming in with a bunch of people you don't know and being forced to obey the whims of a boss you might not even like you get the chance to do something immediately productive to both you and the local community and hang up with your friends in the process this is also a big reason why I believe Marx is inherently anti-authoritarian because he strongly dislikes anybody owning something that somebody else produced as well as a single person control controlling the working life of others his whole point was that capitalism's private property ownership and that employees with no control over their work couldn't find true satisfaction in what they did it was his whole rationale for disliking capitalism but it could also be applied to authoritarianism generally one of the worst Parts about working the gulags was you had no control over how much work you did and how long you did it for a dictator would have complete control over their country which would mean that the whole country would fall under Marx's definition of private property the people working under them would have no control over their workplace is the dictator could simply force them to move at any time and so by Marx's logic he would want to get rid of the dictator and replace it with some sort of system or representative of the actual will of the people who are producing the goods in the country after all one super rich guy having total control over the working lives of an enormous number of people is exactly what Marx didn't want on the other hand a democratically elected president would be perfectly fine under his definition since they would be accountable to the working class citizens of the country at least in Theory okay so that's a pretty solid definition of what socialism is since Marx considered communism and socialism to be the same thing granted other academics definitely tried to create their own definitions later down the road but at the very least this is very useful for determining which people would be in the same ideological boat as Marx let's pull up our list of socialist leaders from earlier and see which ones would actually have socialist countries if we're using Marx's definition of private property a is something that is large and worked on by other people fully controlled by a single person then literally none of the countries these people ruled over were socialist or communist a bunch of these folks were dictators so by definition they had full control over their countries making the entire nation private property even though there might have been some democratic communes within the country the dictator created they still had ultimate control over those communes making the Democracy ultimately meaningless they were still the property of the dictator or the party as for Obama and Trudeau they didn't even really try to socialize any Industries or dissolve the state I mean Obama had Obamacare but that wasn't socialized Healthcare that was just giving people tax tax credits if they couldn't afford private insurance weirdly if he had been elected in 2016 Bernie Sanders would have probably been the one who actually tried the hardest to established Marxism since he was all about work of democracy to socialize Industries and he wanted to nationalize the private healthcare industry in a democratic country but he didn't win the nominations so he doesn't count and of course you wouldn't get any of this without reading the manifesto so people who've read markson agree with him people who have not read marks in agree with him and people who just like Stalin and mauo despite supposedly all being on the same side would disagree on a ton of stuff we can sort of divide between the straight up socialist folks and the ideological Marxist leninists and then we start to get more of a pattern all the people on the right are genocidal monsters all the people on the left aren't at least not as much although weirdly enough despite the ideology being named after them neither Marx nor Lenin were Marxist leninists since the ideology was developed by Stalin well after both of them were dead but this also puts Hitler in the same boat as Obama a black guy who would have died in the Holocaust if he had lived in Nazi Germany and not in the same boat as Stalin a guy he literally worked with in World War II for several years what I've been trying to get out for what's probably been around 20 minutes now is that the definition of Marxist theory is different from the definitions that include Stalin which is different from what people say when they call Obama socialist which is completely opposite to what people do to say Hitler is a socialist there are words with multiple definitions for sure but there are very few with so many that are used in such similar situations and that's not healthy for the word it effectively makes it useless since nobody actually knows what you're referring to when you say it a Marxist will think about the abolition of private property somebody interested in the history of the 20th century will think about Stalin and Mau a progressive in North America will probably think of Bernie Sanders and Sweden and a conservative in North America will probably think of all of the above plus Obama and maybe Hitler and their takeaways from what it is will be different too the marxists will be thinking about collectively and democratically owned lands and factories the historian will be thinking about authoritarianism and censorship the progressive will be thinking about a welfare state and the conservative will be thinking about the rejection of individuality in favor of everyone being the same as well as overspending with tax money and general authoritarianism and so the function of the term to make having a conversation about a complicated topic easier goes out the window nobody is ever going to be able to use the term without having to argue what it means and who it applies to it's like arguing theology with a Communist Manifesto as the Bible tons of it is just based on how you feel about the book and the people who followed it not what was actually written or what those people believed the only difference is Christian is still more defined than socialist since ultimately virtually all Christians still believe in Jesus Christ being the savior of humanity sent by God to wash the world clean of sin the truth is a word is only as useful as its ability to function in conversation and in this sense socialism really is a useless word it's not just broad its uses and definitions also often completely contradict each other and a complicated term like socialism is only useful to describe what would otherwise be a lengthy explanation but it doesn't work because anytime you bring it up in reference to a country or historical figure there will be someone out there to contradict you it doesn't matter if they're right or not because even if they're wrong according to how you define socialism that doesn't change the fact that there are tons of people out there who believe them and since definitions are constructed by people all of those people are working off of another definition that just so happens to be completely opposite of yours essentially everyone who argues what socialism is is using a non-falsifiable argument the fact that Marxist beliefs are completely incompatible those of Obama doesn't matter since in the heads of people who call Obama socialist they think socialism is just when the government spends money on things the word is too much baggage attached to be worth using so how do we fix this I honestly think the best thing to do would be to drop the terms socialism and communism alt together and start using alternatives there are already a bunch of established ones that would work great and are way less confusing for Marx I would just call him a Marxist he invented the ideology he can have it s Caro would probably be a straight Marxist too his only other major influence was lenon same thing with lenon and leninism although in a perfect world I would give him the Marxist leninist title instead I would personally call people like Stalin and Mau fascists or state capitalists they seem to fit the definition pretty well but I know not everyone would go along with something like that so we could call them something else like maybe something based on how they ran their country as command economies and call them commands or something Hitler can stay a Nazi that's pretty distinct from everyone else and he was never really any form of socialist in the first place the Kims used to be Marxist leninists but now they're doing their own even more insane culty thing that they're calling juch senders would probably be a Democratic Socialist but that is socialist in the name so I'd call him a syndicalist or something instead for Simplicity the Scandinavian countries would all be social democracies as they claimed to be and Obama and Trudeau would be exactly what they call themselves and what 90% of people call them liberals sometimes you have to retire a word it's not being used anymore or the uses it has are too confusing and people always have to clarify themselves and it's just not practical to keep and I honestly think this is one of those times I don't think it can happen because of how entrenched socialism and communism are in the public conscience and pop culture but I still think it would be best if it happened because at the moment socialism doesn't add anything it only acts as a CL Sation Ender

Channel: The Hayze

Views: 4,126

Keywords: is china socialist, what is socialism, socialism debate, socialism government, obama, trudeau, sanders, stalin, socialism, chinese socialism, capitalism, fascism, revolution, is china really socialist?, marxism, definition of socialism, socialist workers party, living in china, economics, deng xiaoping

Id: qIwlzQhaGyo

Length: 22min 33sec (1353 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 17 2024