[dark ambient music] I like stuff. I like this, and I like this, and I like this. [belch] I like stuff and I want more stuff. My child! Hearken to my voice! It is I, Socrates. Oh no. What do you want? I haven’t seen you at the symposium of late! Well yeah, because you kind of hate women, and
it was getting me down. My child, without my guidance you have become
a slave to mere appetite. Have you forgotten what I’ve taught you
about the true meaning of happiness, the rational contemplation of truth and justice? Look, I tried that, and honestly, I don’t
think it’s really my thing. I’m a dumb dumb and I like shiny things. Ah, but my child, these are pleasures for
the pigs! Happiness can only be acquired through the
contemplation of beauty itself, perfectly exemplified in the supple bodies of young
boys. Okay, thank you for your feedback, we’ll
take that into consideration. Ugh, Greeks. Look, we all have wants, needs, desires. And we all want happiness. But happiness—what does that word even mean? I’m just a dumb dumb who likes shiny things,
and these are questions really better left to the philosophers, which is why I’m not
going to present my original ideas in this video. Instead I will be interpreting one of the
most influential works of anti-capitalist philosophy ever produced, a series in multiple
volumes that examines deeply the concept of the fetishism of the commodity. I am of course talking about “Worth It”,
a series on BuzzFeedVideo about three men who are younger than me who travel the world
and try different foods that cost different amounts of money and then say whether it was
worth it. In each episode they taste a type of food
at three different restaurants at three drastically different price points to find out which one
is the most worth it. For example, they compare a $2 pizza to a
$2000 pizza that’s made of gold, and a $1 ice cream to a $1000 ice cream that’s made
of gold, and a $1 bagel to a $1000 bagel that’s made of gold. It is a lot of gold. “What do I do with the gold on my fingers?” “A ganjapreneur!” Now to the untrained eye, Worth It may seem
like insipid YouTube clickfodder. But we intellectuals, well, we have a taste
for insights that penetrate a little deeper. We like to take it all in. [moan] The Worth It boys—Andrew, Adam, Steven—these
are not mere content creators, mere actors, dancing monkeys performing for ad revenue. They’re philosophers, spiritual leaders
even, and what they’ve accomplished on YouTube quite honestly far surpasses the combined
insights of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Sartre, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Gramsci, Lukács, Zarathustra,
and even our dear breadmom, Kropotkin. I’ve of course read each of these great
thinkers’ complete works many, many times, but I always come away dissatisfied, and I
find myself yet again returning to the unparalleled masterworks of Andrew, Adam, and Steve. See, each episode of Worth It poses to the
viewer a fundamental question. Is it worth it? We may never know. Take for instance the case of the $2 regular
pizza vs. the $2000 gold pizza. Which is the better deal? I mean how would we even begin to answer such
a perplexing riddle? Well, according to Karl Marx the value of
a commodity must be understood in two ways. On the one hand there’s the use value, the
commodity’s capacity to satisfy some human need. And on the other hand there’s the exchange
value, the quantity determining the ratio by which a commodity is exchangeable with
every other commodity, deriving from objectified labor over time, and expressed in terms of
price. But let’s not oversimplify things. Clearly, Andrew, Adam, and Steve are inviting
us, the viewers of Worth It, to understand the use value/exchange value dichotomy not
as mere hierarchical binary but as a sort of Deleuzean rhizome, a non-arborescent multiplicity
with as many sinuous interconnections as the truffles on the pizza itself. Am I making myself clear? I’m not. It’s almost as if the philosophers are simply
burdening me with jargon and not actually helping think through this any better. So, let’s throw philosophy in the trash
and start over from the beginning. Fuck this! I like stuff. And I like shiny things. Now that’s something everyone can understand,
so let’s take that as the first axiom of the economic theory I will be developing in
this video. So given that I like stuff and I like shiny
things, let’s return to the question, is a $2000 pizza worth it? Well, it is covered in gold and gold is shiny,
so I do like that. But the pizza itself seems kind of gross. It’s got squid-ink dough smeared with foie
gras, Stilton cheese, black truffles, gold flakes, and caviar. These flavors are overwhelming, and they don’t
make any sense together, the only thing they have in common is being really expensive. It’s like the culinary equivalent of Donald
Trump’s apartment. But Andrew and Steven sit there, with New York’s
financial district for a backdrop, and they try to pretend that the pizza doesn’t taste
like golden shit. “I’m honestly speechless.” “I feel weird.” “Is it the gold?” “I just ate $250”
“I feel kind of like I’m committing a crime”
“And that’s what $1250 looks like.” There’s this kind of sadness that sets in
as they realize that the $2000 pizza isn’t worth it at all, and they start to feel
almost like they’ve done something immoral. It’s a feeling I’ve had many times myself,
after spending too much money on some gilded piece of trash in a vain attempt to fill the
hollow in my soul. Is there a name for that feeling? Well, I like to call it FUCKING NEOLIBERALISM In a post-scarcity luxury communist utopia,
a bad pizza covered in gold would just be a bad pizza covered in gold. You might be mad at the chef for making a
disappointing pizza, but you probably wouldn’t be overcome with feelings of emptiness and
guilt. To fully understand why a $2000 pizza is not
worth it, you have to understand it in the context of capitalism. The price, $2000, tells you the exchange value
of the pizza, and if you live in America, you have an instinctive sense for what that
means because you know all the other things you could buy with $2000. For a lot of people $2000 would buy a few
months of food, or healthcare, or golden nails. And there’s a lot of families who sit around
the kitchen table able every evening worrying about how they’re going to afford golden
nails. And it’s that awareness that makes the shitty
$2000 pizza seem not just aesthetically disappointing, but almost obscene, or even immoral. But of course to call it immoral is actually
to misidentify the real problem. So it’s not like those shitty YouTube comments
that go “pizzas in Africa could’ve eaten those children how dare you” because the
problem isn’t that Andrew, Adam, and Steven are bad people for buying an expensive flatbread
smeared with gilded cream cheese. The problem is that our economy fundamentally
operates in a way that makes inevitable these repulsive juxtapositions of scarcity and abundance. That’s why I don’t really agree with the
philosopher Peter Singer, who has this idea that many of the world’s problems could
be solved if privileged American college students would just become hedge fund managers and
donate most of their income to buying mosquito nets in the Congo. I mean, sure, that would probably help with
certain situations, but it’s not gonna change the fact the global economy is structured
around cheap, exploited labor at the bottom, and $2000 pizzas at the top. Another way to approach this issue might be
to ask: Who are the goddamn reptiles? Well, they’re certainly not the Jews, I
want to be clear, get everyone on the same page I’m not blaming the Jews for anything. Except, you know, cucking the white race. But to be fair, someone had to cuck them. The white race has really been getting on
my nerves lately. So the lizards are not the Jews, they’re
not reptillians from Alpha Draconis, they’re not freemasons or globalists or the gay agenda. But the key insight is that they’re not
even really the capitalists. The lizards are Capital itself. And what does that mean? Well, I don’t know. But it does make me sound like I’ve read
a lot of Marx, doesn’t it? What I’m trying to say is that the problems
with our economy are not just the product of greed or some other personal moral defect
of the wealthy. Of course some capitalists are terrible
people, but some probably aren’t, and either way the virtues or vices of the rich are sort
of beside the point. So the real point of the golden pizza is that
it’s emblematic of the fact that the extreme economic inequalities of our society are laughably
unjustifiable. If I were to translate the meaning of the golden pizza into an argument, it would
go something like this: Capitalism as we know it is a defective economic
system, because, although it’s good at creating large amounts of wealth, it distributes that
wealth in an incredibly inefficient way, where efficiency is understood not as the capacity
to maximize total wealth but as the capacity to maximize human happiness. Now I need to explain what I mean about happiness. Here’s a question: Should the economy serve humanity, or should
humanity serve the economy? It seems obvious to me that the economy should
serve humanity, so what I look for in a good economic system is that it produces the most
happiness for the people who are part of it. So if you’re willing to go along with that
idea, the first thing we should ask is, does having more wealth make people happier? And we actually have data about that, at least
within the context of our own economic system, and the data shows that more income does lead
to more happiness up to a certain point. But the happiness benefit of income plateaus
somewhere between 65 and 95 thousand dollars a year. One interpretation of the reason why happiness
increases up to the threshold is that at lower income levels, more income means less stress
about paying rent or mortgages or medical bills or college tuition, but once you pass
the threshold more income basically just translates into more disappointing golden pizzas. If that interpretation is correct, then the
current income distribution seems really irrational, at least if the goal is to maximize happiness. The income distribution in the United States
is skewed toward the upper extreme, so that national mean income is around $72,000—right
in the plateau zone—but the national median income is around $59,000—significantly below
it. Furthermore, 1% of the population are making
more than $389,000 a year, several times the peak happiness threshold. So at least to my naive eyes what it looks
like is that millions of people in this country don’t have enough money to securely afford
food, housing, education, and healthcare, while a few million others are like constantly
gorging themselves on golden pizzas or something. But I’m guessing it’s even worse than
that, because it’s not just that some people don’t have enough money to meet all their
needs—it’s that they have to be poor while other people are rich. And since people compare themselves to others,
that leads to all kinds of additional anxieties and resentments and social tensions. There’s a study of capuchin monkeys that
shows if you reward one money for a task with a delicious grape, and a monkey in the adjacent
cage with a shitty cucumber, the monkey who gets the cucumber loses his shit. And if you do this to humans for long enough,
they start building guillotines. But that’s just how it looks to me. I could be wrong. I mean, I’m not an economic theorist and
honestly I don’t really understand how the economy works. I don’t even check my own bank account balance
very often. I make the videos, I swipe the card— So look, if I’m wrong and capitalism is
good actually, just leave a comment explaining why and I’ll be happy to be proven wrong. But before you do that, let’s get some of
the more obvious objections out of the way. Income inequality exists because not everyone
does the same jobs. Some people work harder than others, and those
people deserve to make more money. Well, sweatshop workers work really hard and
they barely make any money at all. And a lot of people who work for minimum wage
have to work multiple jobs just to sustain themselves and their families. It’s actually a ton of work, and they barely
make enough money to survive. But minimum wage workers are unskilled workers. Why would anyone become an innovator or medical
researcher if they could make a good living as a janitor? Well, janitorial work is pretty important
actually. Someone has to cook and clean, and I think
people who do such necessary work deserve a decent living. But I also think a lot of people would find
janitorial work boring, and I think that the kind of personality that likes to innovate
and invent often isn’t driven mainly by profit anyway. Jonas Salk never patented his polio vaccine,
even though he could have made millions of dollars from it, because he just cared about
humanity, and he was driven by a purpose beyond personal profit. In fact a lot of great historical scientists
were upper class people who didn’t need to work for a living at all, and were just
driven by their own passion and curiosity. So let me get this straight—you criticize
capitalism and yet you yourself make money on the Internet. Hypocrite much? A few years ago I was a broke philosophy graduate
student. And when I criticized capitalism then, people used
to say Why don’t you stop whining and get a real
job and earn a living? You just resent capitalism because you’re
too lazy to put in the work it takes to succeed. So if people who are failing under capitalism
can’t criticize it because they’re just resentful, and people who are succeeding under
capitalism can’t criticize it because they’re hypocrites, then, according to you, is anyone
allowed to criticize capitalism? Capitalism may have problems, but it’s the
best economic system there is. You wouldn’t want to live in Soviet Russia
or Maoist China would you? Well, no. I wouldn’t. Hello. I’m Tatiana Tankikova, I’m here to defend
Stalin. Fuck off! Dasvidania, fascist. So granted, a lot of past communist regimes
were shitty. But that doesn’t mean that the current system
is the best and final system for all time. My approach to this topic is not to try
to resurrect Soviet communism or anything like that, but rather to identify problems
with the current system that seem to cause unhappiness and instability. Okay but… I like stuff. I like stuff too. I think a lot of people have this instinctive
fear that if capitalism goes, so does everything we love. I mean when I think of communism in particular
I think of austerity, scarcity, conformity, undrinkable Victory Gin, the end of fashion, all art required
to be propaganda—just an all around nightmare situation for a person of my persuasion. And it’s not for no reason at all that I
have these anxieties since there was an aspect of that to some past communist societies. But the stuff I’m worried about—booze,
makeup, art, baths—these things existed long before capitalism and they’ll exist
long after it. And I know different types of people will
have different things they’re concerned about. Straight guys will be like WILL THERE BE VIDEO
GAMES AFTER CAPITALISM OH GOD! And yeah, there will be. Tetris is a Soviet game, and that’s one
of the best games of the 80s. [Red Army Choir] Some of the stuff we like could probably even
be improved if it were liberated from capitalist pressures. I mean look what capitalism and the pressure
to turn a profit has done to movies. Last time I was reading the only book I’ve
ever read, Ways of Seeing by John Berger, I noticed this description of glamour in the
context of advertising: “Its promise is not of pleasure, but of
happiness: happiness as judged from the outside by others. The happiness of being envied is glamour.” And I felt kind of attacked, because glamour
is very important to us. And by us, I mean the gays. The Ls, the Gs, the Bs, the Ts, and all those
filthy, filthy Qs. But isn’t it kind of true that at least
in advertising the function of glamour is to provoke feelings of envy and inadequacy
in the beholder in the service selling you shit. But the advertising function I think is an
appropriation of glamour, not something essential to it. And maybe glamour would actually be liberated
if it weren’t constantly conflated with advertising. So I guess my message to socialists of the
world is that, actually, stuff is good. Glamour is good. Video games are good. Luxury is good. Baths are good. I mean, even gold is good, if you don't abuse it horribly. You know the most offensive thing about the
golden pizza is ultimately that the $2 pizza is actually better. The golden pizza is an affront not just to
people who’s medical bills it could have payed, but it’s an affront to gustatory
pleasure itself. So I guess my final take here is actually
champagne socialism is good. But I’m not talking about the champagne
classes becoming socialists. I’m talking about redistributing the goddamn
champagne. Alright, now that I’ve gotten these objections
out of the way I’m finally really ready to get started. Part 1, what you’ve all been waiting for: How to End Capitalism Once and For All Well I don’t know. Who do you people think I am? I’m a socially conscious YouTube entertainer,
not transsexual Gandhi. I mean according to Marxism we can’t just
start the revolution whenever we feel like it. Capitalism has to fail, and that will bring
about the conditions that make the revolution inevitable. So I guess we just try to relax and wait for
that to happen… I’m sure it’s bound to happen any day
now…. You know maybe we should do something in the
meantime. Uh so I dunno, I guess vote Labour, tweet radically,
try to eat more vegetables, uh, try not to be manipulated into waging war against other
downtrodden people, and can we please not hand more power to the absolute worst dingbats
our society has on offer. Noooo. No voting. Smashing. Well, you know what, she’s the one with
the plan apparently, I guess just do whatever she says. [“Rebel Girl” by Bikini Kill] Tabby, why don’t you go take a bath? [Meow] Mm. Good kitty. Don’t close the door! Dear comrades, the Central Catgirl Committee
has determined that ContraPoints is and always has been counterrevolutionary, bourgeois revisionism. The Department of Information has therefore
replaced the remainder of this video with a tribute to the immortal science of Tabbyism. [“L’Internationale” plays] [“Solid Goldberg” by Zoë Blade]
The JBP charts were a solid 10/10 joke.
Aww yisss new Contra <3
In all honesty I feel the point she makes near the end is the most important one. The whole revolution now approach doesn't really work in the grand scheme of things. Unless there is an obvious failing of course. Because it really doesn't attract the views you would want it to. It gives quite an easy amount of ammo to your detractors to attract those important centrists. It even goes to the point of saying what you actually are due to how certain ideas are taken in the west and well... mostly america. Saying you support X Left wing idea a lot of times will only really will result in a lot of detractors and even people that agree with you on a lot of things to become very wary. Or even pointing out what you're saying is dangerous, which is pretty much how the left has been treated for a good while now.
Maybe I'm a bit too harsh on the idea of revolutionism. But I feel it has the big problem of being seen as too drastic to everyone else. That and the fact that a lot of these views and apprehensions towards X Left wing idea come from the fact that said views and apprehensions come from decades and decades of society treating it as such. You aren't going to be able to just get to the point you want quick.
TL;DR Remember that quote from the 4chan post the Decrypting the Alt-Right video? "Don't trap yourself in an echo chamber where you can no longer relate to normies"? Thats pretty much my problem with a revolutionist view. Though please if you disagree with me go ahead and tell me why I'm interested to hear.
But yeah really happy to see this video is out now. Definitely feels worth the wait. Always a pleasure to see her get her ideas across in such an interesting and artsy way.
If anyone is interested theres a book called “the happiness industry” that talks about how capitalism sells you the idea of happiness
Rebel Girl by Bikini Kill at the end though. That was too good.
Love the shoutout to Stef Sanjati.
I was hoping for much more Tatiana after last night's tweet, but I liked what I saw and this is definitely one of her best videos yet. I also noticed the Plinkett vibes she's brought up before as being an inspiration; in this video they're almost just references I feel like
is it wrong my main takeaway from that video is that we're MASSIVELY overcharging Yanks for Stilton? not that I want it to stop, can't stand the stuff myself, and if we can make a tidy profit flogging smelly cheese to Americans who want to pretend their sophisticated, then I'm all for it
A bit weak at points. I wish she would try to understand the economics. The problem with leftists is that most seem to be incapable of criticizing capitalism from an economic perspective rather than from the perspective of Marxist philosophy.