EVERYONE! I want to apologize for something I may have implied at 17:31, "All of the people on the right [side] are genocidal monsters, all of the people on the left aren't, at least not as much." This was phrased HORRIBLY and inadvertently implied that Hitler was not a genocidal monster. He absolutely was, and was one of the worst. I'm sorry.
Hitler was NOT a Socialist - simply because it was "National Socialists" doesn't mean it WAS socialist - Hitler even CONFIRMED AS MUCH. the Nazi party was named "National Socialist" to appeal to the heavy left sentiment within Germany after the depression and so on - but you can not call the Party in which, the FIRST THING THEY DID WAS ABOLISHING ALL SOCIALISTS AND PROSECUTIONS OF ANYONE WHO THEYE EVEN BELIEVED TO BE SOCIALIST to be Socialist, the Nazi were Right Wing, Far-Right.
Hitler wasn’t left wing dude the fuck? All of his policies were right wing. He was socialist in name only, with him outright admitting in an interview that he didn’t believe in anything actual socialists believed in.
@@pieofchartare you okay? She divided the screen into two parts, and the people on the left side of the screen are the people she's referring to by "on the left".
Oh yeah, 100%. A lot of it was completely intentional as a means of defaming socialists, but it definitely didn't help that they were self-identifying as being part of the same political group as several genocidal dictators.
Oxford politics grad here with a thesis on “Ideological Political Discourse Within the Anglosphere.” I mainly focused on the term “liberalism”, which I posit is even more vague than “socialism”, but I think I can still add something. Please try not to infer my own political ideology from this, as I am attempting to be as academic as possible here, at least within the confines of a YT comment. TLDR, don’t get hung up on absolutes. Firstly, socialists have been infighting among themselves about what the word means since at least the mid 19th century. The term is, at this point, almost intentionally vague, especially when used by the media. They have a lot of strings attached to them. Broadly speaking, socialism can be defined as “collective ownership”, but the issue is what exactly that constitutes, and how far it should go. It definitely defines what socialism ISN’T to some extent - for example anarcho-capitalism is 100% not socialism. Usually, a more democratic political system will have some form of what CAN BE described as socialism as part of its political system, since the leaders would be chosen literally by the collective. Marx was pretty into that, and things like the weekend, progressive taxation and the minimum wage come straight from his writings. If you hear the word “socialism” by itself in the modern day, you should probably ignore it, as it’s likely more or less part of a piece of agitprop, especially in the US. However, when certain *forms* of what are commonly considered socialism are mentioned, eg Stalinism, Maoism, Marxism-Leninism, Democratic Socialism, etc, it’s likely worth paying more attention to. These ideas often have more clear ideological definitions and histories, but can still be lumped in with the VERY broad tent that is the word “socialism.” It’s not a useless term, it’s just overused by people who don’t know better. I know that you tell commenters not to get hung up on definitions, but… that’s what your video is about, so you’re pretty much telling us not to comment at that point. I also take issue with your statement that “Marx didn’t get hung up on the difference between socialism and communism.” He did. His “Manifesto” lays it out pretty clearly - he saw socialism as part of the transition from a market economy to a theoretical communist utopia. This would’ve involved what he called the “vanguard state”, which is how most self-styled communist governments justify their authoritarianism. I hope this comment sparks some positive discussion.
Thank you, this was a very interesting comment. Really appreciate the input! And yes, I generally agree. "Socialism" on its own doesn't really reveal much - it reveals that the person ISN'T a few things, like you mentioned, but they might even still be a capitalist social democrat who calls themself a socialist. It's really more valuable when they give themselves a specific label like Maoist or Democratic Socialist, like you mentioned. I do think the term is still functionally useless in a ton of contexts, although it might still work in academia or in certain interpersonal interactions. I do have a question about the last paragraph, however. From what I understand, the idea of a vanguard state and vanguard party was mostly spurred by Lenin, and Marx was generally quite vague about the transition from capitalism to communism. Wikipedia wasn't my end source for this of course, but if you look at the Foundations section of this article, I think you can get an idea for what I mean: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguardism Thank you again for giving such a well thought out comment.
@@thehayze259 Thank you for your positive and surprisingly prompt response! Glad to contribute! No one single label will ever perfectly describe the political (or theological, philosophical) views of any one individual. These are all loose boxes, and we all effectively cherrypick to form our own views. These labels can be useful in *generally* describing a political opinion, but not in any detail. The only way to avoid that is to name your personal ideology after yourself, such as “Smufflegruntism” (lol) in my case. Beyond that, a full essay or even book would be required for any measure of definition. Marx was intentionally vague and viewed himself as asking questions / pointing out flaws in the capitalist system of his day than anything else. That’s why a lot of room was left for people such as Lenin to put their own spin on it, and also why the word is so ill-defined, despite Marx not being the first person to use the term. However he does lay out his theory of historical materialism, which describes socialism as part of the transition towards communism. According to Marx, socialism would involve a government run by workers that would “wither away.” So yes, you are correct in the sense that Lenin spurred the idea and fleshed it out, but it wasn’t his original idea. Personally I’m of the opinion that Lenin (although a man of MANY faults) genuinely believed that his state would “wither away”, but that it would take a lot longer due to the largely agricultural (frankly, feudal) nature of Russia’s economy at the time. Marx assumed that only an industrial capitalist state would be capable of moving to socialism, so Lenin attempted to modify that to effectively skip a stage of historical materialism theory. Again, nothing should be inferred from this comment with regard to my own political opinions. (I’m not actually a Marx fan tbqh, particularly on a personal level, although I have some respect for a few of his ideas.)
Hey everyone, some of you might be wondering why you're seeing this video pop up as "new" again. I took it down because it was doing really poorly and I thought I did a terrible job in promoting it. The title was boring and the thumbnail was too, which kind of snubbed it early. However, I haven't changed the content of the video at all.
It's a big reason for it for sure, I think we should use those terms more. They're just more specific and descriptive than "socialism" is. Well, Anarchism can have some different connotations, but that's the exception.
@@thehayze259people use those terms a lot lol. Lenin was a Marxist, Stalin was a Marxist-Leninist who followed the path Lenin laid out, Mao was a Marxist-Leninist with anarchist leanings and those anarchist leanings formed Mao Zedong Thought. The Black Panther Party was greatly influenced by Mao Zedong Thought and were some of the first people outside of China to apply Mao's ideas to their conditions, which made them early Marxist-Leninist-Maoists. Xi Jinping claims to be a follower of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought but he's more of a follower of Dengism. Socialism means the workers own the means of production, communism means a classless, moneyless, stateless society. It's like how Christianity means you believe in Jesus as the savior of humanity but depending on your location, culture and a ton of other things, you may be part of a different denomination. That doesn't make Christianity a meaningless term.
So, I see your point and could potentially agree, but I find the solution to be a bit half baked. It seems unwise to take a term that already has social cachet and get rid of it just because it is being confused and misinterpreted in all of these different ways (the correct definition being one based in the ideas of Marxism). To me, the issue to solve is not to change the term because it is too broad but to retake the term and continue educating and spreading the word. I think there could be a slightly deceptive notion forming here that if everybody's beliefs were easily understood with terms that made sense that we could do a better job of bringing people to our side and I don't think that's true. We can bring people to our side but not like that. Conservatives in our culture use 'socialism' as a boogey man because the term has built a kind of cultural shorthand, like how classical music in the background of a movie communicates wealth without you even needing to see any visuals. Isn't it interesting that to them, socialism isn't a term with any kind of blurriness or confusion? Just 'socialism bad'. They have been spreading this message and building upon it ever since Marx first hit the scene because the ideas are SO POTENT. Conservatism as a general set of beliefs is so shitty and toxic that it needs every bit of help it can get to prop itself up. Rich people funnel billions of dollars every year to make sure the people don't realize conservatism and the ideas connected to it suck ass. We don't need a new term. We need a NEW STRATEGY TO SPREAD THE WORD. Instead of how we seem to have let conservatives have the word woke, we should fight for the term socialism. Fight for it tooth and nail. In the process of fighting and explaining the word we will be teaching those around us about what Marxism is about and why it will lead to a better world for all of us. This is an opportunity.
This is another perfectly fine strategy to have. Personally, honestly, I think it's generally a good idea to label yourself as little as possible, and just talk about policy. If you have good, convincing policy takes, then people will come to your side. "Socialism" is sort of a poison there, as it reframes all of your popular economic and social policy as being bad and authoritarian.
Socialism is used as an umbrella term to refer to an economic system of collective ownership, and a state controlled by the proletariat (as opposed to the bourgeoisie, aristocracy, etc.). As a comparison, the point of this video is like complaining about the word "fruit" since it can apply to so many different things that don't always have things in common, although you also include various figures and systems which are just blatantly mischaracterised and act as though the label still applies. This video felt to me like if you were to list grapefruit, grapes, then a bunch of berries, vegetables and a grain, then went on to make the claim that the word fruit is useless since it means so many things. You can correctly identify which political movements aren't socialist when labelling them as social democrats and liberals, as well as the individual example of Hitler - all of these are identified correctly as not being socialist, due to all of them being fundamentally bourgeois ideologies (in the comments you accurately pointed this out, but inaccurately pointed out the reason for why Nazis aren't socialist - the reason is due to them literally coining the term "privatisation" and working in close co-operation with private firms, gutting unions and workers' rights, etc.). Whether one wants to condemn them or not, you cannot exclude the USSR or China from being socialist (unless you're a left com, in which case my condolences), as they both eliminated the class divide and established a proletarian-led government under a collectivised economy (less so in the case of modern China, but that's another point entirely). You can dispute it based on them operating under a vanguard party, but that feels like unnecessary exclusion of projects that have, in some cases, managed to meaningfully improve the quality of life of the people (like in the example of Cuba). In the same way one should not exclude Jacobins from liberal history, due to the Great Terror under the 1st French Republic; you should not exclude the first socialist projects due to them not perfectly fitting the idealistic example of what we hope to achieve. When we on the left use the term socialism - or Marxism, we MEAN to use it as an umbrella term; some people refer to themselves as no-label Marxists/socialists, meaning that they support any workers' movement that aims to bring about the establishment of a proletarian government - regardless of specific policies. The word is therefore useful as a unifying term for those on the left who view it as more important to bring about the end of bourgeois rule, rather than establish a specific form of socialism. It is also extremely useful due to it being more recognisable than specific terms like Luxemburgism, and while it carries heavy baggage in some places in the world, it is nevertheless useful for that purpose.
Also, the Communist Manifesto was published before Marx even began work on the first volume of Capital - it's flat-out wrong to call it an 'abridged version' of Capital. The Manifesto was a hastily-composed official document for the Communist League, whereas Capital is a laborious and systematic examination of the workings of the capitalist mode of production. Marx and Engels were also not the 'inventors of socialism' but I guess that's just useless trivia.
I'm so tired of hearing this term used to describe everything from social democracy and welfare programs to state controlled planned economies to just capitalism except you get to vote for your boss so thank you for making this
Yeah. I feel like everyone, regardless of if they support one of those systems or not, should be able to recognize that the term is way too broad at this point.
socialism has a pretty specific meaning, its just americans who lack the political bandwidth to understand the fundamental difference between the socialism as a description of policy rather than a distinct ideology... socialism ISNT a political ideology, unlike fascism, which fundamentally isnt inherently tied to the functioning of a state (as "strong man authoritarianism" and everything that tends to follow isnt a requirement for a state to function), "socialism" (aka socialist policy aka the "state does stuff on behalf of the people") is in some ways vital for anything that doesnt consider itself an anarchist commune, or atleast for a state when run by people who consider themselves united in some broad yet relatively specific way, i understand that being culturally united in the US is somewhat of an overstatement (at least if u ask some americans), and that particularly in the us state run education is downright neglected... yet still it amazes me just how ridiculous the political landscape tends to be
This is a really good example of the point that the video is trying to make. This is just one very heavily disputed definitiom of socialism, which sounds along the lines of "socialism is when the government does stuff". The definition i've heard the most personally is that socialism is when the means of production is owned by everyone, (not by the state as some other people would argue) and even that definition is pretty much useless as that would probably fall under marxism or anarchism anyway.
The issue isn't that "Socialism" doesn't have a good definition, it's that the very usage of the word causes dismissal, which is counter to the very thing it tries to achieve.
the definitions of the words we use are based on the context we hear them used or defined. if my definition of a term stems from disinformation from the group of people who have provably reshaped geopolitics in order to distort that term, or people who have openly ignored the original meaning to coopt the terms aesthetics, should my use of the word be allowed to end the conversation around it for all of the people who actually engage with the original meaning?
No. Unfortunately, however, that's something that's currently happening, and I don't really see a good solution at the moment. In terms of another possible way to fix this situation, we could just stop considering certain people to be socialists or communists, or as I suggested at the end, simply adopt a more specific term.
@@thehayze259 communists and socialists already exclude people they believe to be communists or socialists, and people have plenty of more specific terms for ways of approaching it, or misuses of it. this doesnt stop people from misusing it, and it doesnt need to.
This sort of discussion about the concreteness of concepts is especially crucial for leftists to grasp and have. I've seen way too many self-proclaimed "marxist" claim that a minute deviation/aspect of capitalism is socialist if it was renamed to something vaguely populist ("The people's commissar"), which is frankly preposterous and abhorrent, as it leaves room for misunderstanding and abusing of theory to fit personal goals.
Great video. Some things I wanted to mention, though. The term communist, as opposed to socialist is absolutely more concrete than even fascist. I think that (correct me if I'm wrong) you are left leaning and have an ingroup bias to notice more complexity in the left than right. It's also worth noting that the furthest politically relevant left is social democracy in America
First I need to say it was a really nicely made video. One critique is that when it came to technical definitions, there was a definition for socialism pre-Marx. It is simply the "collective ownership of the means of production". This is why Hitler was actually a national socialist, "[ethno]national collective means of production". Marx and Engels also meant that they needed to implement socialism (by the definition i gave) before they could reach communism (abolishment of private ownership) {at least this is my interpretation}
As for the definition of socialism pre-Marx, that still would not apply to Hitler. The means of production were not collectively owned, they were privately owned by the state (which was undemocratic), and Hitler never took steps toward the collective ownership of the means of production, even if that only included people he would consider Aryan.
@@thehayze259I guess it counts in a weird way? I mean socialism for the but not for them was essentially what the Nazis spouted, as they were ethno nationalist racists
What it means to be a "Marxist" has nothing to do with what Marx did or did not think of Authoritarianism or even really what his definition of Socialism and Communism was, it's about viewing history as Class Conflict. Hitler like all Fascists was a Class Collaborationist.
The funny thing is "Capitalism" is an even more vague and utterly meaningless term because it is entirely defined by its contrast against Socialism, which as established does not itself have a genuine concrete colloquial meaning.
I disagree. Capitalism began as a concept well before Socialism, and has existed for a much longer time. And as for which nations are considered capitalist and which people are considered capitalist, it's fairly well defined; I would say most people think it's something like, "a market economy based on the employment of citizens to work on the private property of other citizens." My experience is the opposite, I think people tend to define socialism (at least in their heads) as any system which is not capitalism, feudalism, and anarchism. I think this is why so many people can think of Bernie Sanders, Stalin, Mao, Marx, and Sankara as sharing the same ideology; because although they don't have many traits in common, there is one: they are all anti-capitalists.
@@thehayze259 A Capitalist may have existed as a concept before Socialism but the idea of Capitalism as any kind of coherent model of structuring a society or economy did not exist until it was invented as a contrast to Socialism. A term for which now just means anything good or anything bad about the world depending on how you personally feel about what Socialism means. It is meaningless.
@@fireyams3460since the west is the most democratic, many people will tie capitalism to democracy. in reality, capitalism in its purest form inherently contradicts democracy
@@lzbscalle7943idk what this has to do though with their comment. Plus technically both are free in their own way. However taken to the extreme they can led to oppression
Honestly it’s similar with words like Woke or Fascist. They are just buzz words use to strawman people half the time. It’s increasingly annoying since it makes any topic that has some modern political elements be irritating
The bit with the definition of the house reminds me of a video from Jessie Gender on biological sex and how to categorise things. She made a point on how these things cannot be defined strictly - like you said, every time you add a new restriction you will be removing some things that are houses and each time you remove a restriction you will be letting in some things that aren’t - so they have to run on a more thing-ishness system. A house is a house if it has enough house-ish qualities. Fascism is called out for being fascism because it displays enough fascist-ish qualities. It has enough fascist-ness to it. Socialism should be retired because it has no functional purpose, and it has no functional purpose because the things that imply socialism-ness are so far apart you can never really find any patterns, no matter which way you group those qualities. There’s not much point to this, just adding on a small thought to the conversation. Keep up the good work :)
To add the right-libertarian definition (mainly to explain it), it is the state ownership/control over the means of production and private property. Other definitions basically stem from it, like any community that is collectively taking your property is a state in any way a right-libertarian would know it, and censorship is just inevitable with this concentration of power (you can't guarantee freedom of speech if one group controls the printing press). To go further, the n@zis (need to dodge censorship) did all of the above by any libertarian standard, even privatization was giving to to friends in service of the government, though the reasoning was different. You can disagree, that's fine, but wanted to add the one my side of politics uses. (except the austro-mutualists, but they are weird and use left-wing definitions for a lot of stuff)
Yeah, this is what I mean! Thank you. See, I would just call that fascism (combination of corporate and state power, all that), but a lot of people consider it to be socialism too.
@@thehayze259 I know, i was more-so explaining it. Definitions are probably the hardest part of lib-left and lib-right have when speaking to each other. Same as "capitalism" (which just means a free market and private property to lib-right, but is so much more loaded on the left) and now "Liberal" (with many lib-right wanting to take it back).
@@thehayze259imo fascism is just having all interest group serve under a government. Basically Nationalistic corporatism (basically interest groups controlling a nation)
if i ask 10 people to draw the earth and 5 hand me back flat earths, does globe no longer work as a word? words are taught to people by other people, intentionally or not, so they can be heard and used outside of their original context. by your logic, no word works if it evokes different images in people with varying levels of information on the concept.
The Earth being round is a measurable and provable fact, whereas political terms like Capitalism and Fascism are purposely a lot more vague. A better comparison would be if half of the population woke up one day and thought that the word "globe" meant "triangular." Even if everyone still agreed that the Earth was spherical, the word "globe" itself wouldn't be useful anymore, as you would have to clarify that you meant "spherical" and not "triangular" every time you used it.
@@thehayze259 this isnt a good example because people wake up thinking something, whereas in reality people are taught things. the logic within this analogy barely even works in a vacuum, and the only outcome of your argument is giving up on the use of words if the definitions of those words are sufficiently obfuscated.
Hey! Neat video, I want to build on your house example, Words are weird. As I understand them, words are the labels of the concepts they describe. Kind of like pointers in computer code. These concepts probably differ from person-to-person. You might like the conlang Toki Pona. It is a language of only about 120 words. I haven't dove into it too much, but I believe it's an art project to try to describe concepts in the world bottom-up, in a minimalist way. To paraphrase the intro of the book, it defines "friend" as "jan pona" or "good person". Again, these definitions are subjective, and people have different lenses that they view the world in, what exactly a friend is depends on the person. But if we accept that "friend" is a "good person", what is a bad friend? A bad person? Under this definition, "bad friend" is an oxymoron. So while people can generally see an example of a house and agree it is a house, people might differ in what utility a house gives, or how big a house is, for ex. So I'm not exactly sure if describing ourselves as Anarchists, Syndicalists, or Democratic Socialists is all that productive. It's useful for people who are "in the know" and generally agree on what these labels mean, but to a foreigner the obvious next question (if they are curious) is, "What is a ___?". I am guilty of using labels myself, but I think people respond better when you break down these complex concepts. Instead of "free healthcare", maybe it would be better to say "public hospitals and public doctors without private insurance". But these definitions can get lengthy, same with Toki Pona, it's not very good at describing complex things in a compact way. That's why we have so many words, to describe our complex world.
21:00 Small neat pick, in a 1882 letter, Engels (the other guy of the manifesto) assured that Marx declared to Lafargue ''One thing is certain, I am not marxist'' (It's a pretty interesting letter btw, I think it was called ''letter to Bernstein'' or something like that)
Presenting it like that makes it out of context. Marx wrote that as a jab at the French Workers Party for doing "revolutionary phrase-mongering" and so: "what is certain is that [if they are Marxists, then] I myself am not a Marxist". Basically, "if they use that word for their tactics/politics, then I would not want to associate with that word"
if i start calling you by someone elses name do they have to change their name? how many people would need to stop calling you your name before it isnt your name anymore? lmk if im missing something abt your logic
This isn't a super accurate interpretation of my point. A closer one would be if there were twenty people in a room discussing a politician, and there are four or five camps that each think the person is named something different. Some argue using the birth certificate or the legal papers showing they changed their name at age 23, but if that doesn't convince the other four groups, at a certain point, it just becomes people shouting, "Their name is Ashley!" "No, it's Sarah!" "No, it's Frank!" And it doesn't go anywhere. It's not a discussion of the politician's policies or the things they've done, it's just a bunch of groups of people arguing back and forth about what their name is.
@@thehayze259if some people are misinformed or lying about the name of the politician, the people with evidence are the only ones who can even claim to know enough about the politician to be for or against them. you’re listening to too many people.
I find that people hate it when you point out that the signifiers they use to categorise and simplify politics don't actually mean anything lol. 'Socialism' is a great example, but 'liberal', 'progressive' and 'reactionary' are also used by lots of people to mean lots of different (and incompatible) things. Even the left-right political spectrum itself doesn't really work if you venture beyond news articles about electoral politics. It seems like the American media's use of words gradually filters out into the rest of the English speaking world, though, so I tend to just accept that 'socialism' can now mean anything other than free-market fundamentalism.
I think the premise itself is wrong. The premise kind of is, nothing can be defined. Not true. Things can be defined perfectly analytically. Depends on the intellectual integrity of the one who's defining.
6:24 i get where youre coming from, but we really have to seperate lenin the politician and lenin the theoritician. if you read state and revolution it becomes very hard to paint him as an authoritarian
So, is socialism: 1. When a country is authoritarian and anti free speech? no, but this isn’t incompatible with socialist ideology 2. When the country functions off of welfare? no, socialism is not when the country functions off of welfare, that would be social democracy, it’s equity that usually appears In capitalist systems, although welfare isn’t incompatible with socialism, socialism ≠ welfare. 3. When the workers own / control the means of production? yes, this is the definition of socialism, this can happen in many ways whether it be the workers owning / controlling their workplaces directly, or that happening through a democratic government, but this is socialism at its core. 4. When the government controls the workplace? As long as there’s no private ownership, and the government is actually allowing the workers autonomy over the industry, this can qualify as socialism. 5. When there's democracy in the workplace? Yes, this can be a type of socialism as the workers are controlling their workplace, and there’s no private ownership. 6. When the government spends tax money to help pay for private programs? no, absolutely not, private ownership is the antithesis of socialism. 7. When everything is free and there's no government? this is closer to ideological communism / anarcho communism (a stateless, classless, moneyless, communal society) 8. When a single party controls the country. This technically isn’t incompatible with socialism, as long as there’s no private ownership, and workers have autonomy over their labor, although i disagree with the idea of a one party state, or state socialism in general, its not incompatible with socialism ms the term socialism has a definition, and it’s a useful term, the issue is people adopt and bastardize the term, or don’t do their research and misuse it, the same could be said for the word democracy, but no one advocates for the erasure of the word democracy. also obama and hitler were definitively not socialists, it doesn’t matter who calls them socialist, or if they claimed to be socialists, they we’re never socialists. neither is the Nordic model socialist, if it allows for private ownership of the means of production, it’s not socialist. people might disagree, but there’s an objective definition, and standard that they don’t meet to qualify as socialists, people can be wrong. it’s not even that people disagree on what the definition of socialism is, most people who have actually researched know the real definition, and everyone else is either being deceptive, pulling shit out of their ass, or straight up didn’t do any research at all.
That was sort of my point. Even if you consider the word to have a pretty set definition (which I do, and intentionally did not include in the video), the fact that literally nobody can ever agree on what that definition is makes communication using it excessively difficult. Democracy has a vague definition, yes, but you can call any country, "democratic" and people will understand what you mean. The same is not true for socialism, which was my point. And lastly, yeah of course, Obama and Hitler were never socialists. But again, that wasn't my point, my point was that you will have to clarify that you think that very, very often, because if you don't, then a significant portion of your audience is going to make a lot of untrue assumptions about what you believe. Definitions are objective to some degree and constructed to some degree. If everybody woke up one day and decided that a "tree" was a small, six inch long furry animal, then it wouldn't matter if technically it's a large group of plants made of wood, since nobody would be using the word that way. And that's fine! ...so long as people can agree on what the word means. If half of the population thinks it's a big wooden plant and the other half thinks it's a small furry animal, then it doesn't matter who's "technically correct," nobody can effectively communicate using the word.
@@thehayze259 Ohhhh mb dude, you’re actually right, it’s like what’s the point in using the term if no one even knows the definition because it’s been bastardized so much. i just wish there was a way to clarify the definitions of things for people so we don’t have to get rid of the term
Hitler was by definition socialist. He abolished private property and brought all business under the arm of the state (social ownership of the means of production).
I have quite a lot of issues with this video regarding historic aspects, but let's just engage with your main argument, which is that we should use different terms instead of socialism for different people who, according to different people, all fit the label of socialism You then propose we should use label Marx & Sankara as Marxists, Lenin as Leninist or Marxist-Leninist, etc. but this doesn't actually hold up when you go so far as to wanting to consider the conservative (& sometimes liberal perspective) too, because for most conservatives/right-wingers the terms Marxist, Socialist, Communist, Leninist etc all mean the same, while you may differentiate between a Marxist, a Communist and a Leninist, to the conservative, and to many liberals too, all of these just mean authoritarian, radical leftism, at best just in some different flavors, generally speaking, the further right wing you go, the more inclined you are to lump everything to the left of yours as the same bullshit with different labels, even if it has substantial differences that one simply may not be aware of You say for example Mao or Stalin should be called "Commandists" or something similar to that, but to the American conservative Obama's liberal policies were already way too "commandist", don't you think? When engaging with these people you'll eventually have to define everything you mean too, nullifying the effect of getting rid of the terms "socialist" (& "communist") for the purpose of a more constructive discussion without agreeing on definitions first People, especially generally right-wingers, are simply wrong on what they think it means, you're treating all these definitions as if they were actually all equally valid, when if one would scrutinize them individually at the very least the Obama, Nordics, Hitler & Bernie ones would certainly not hold up, as the people labeling these as "socialist" are conflating multiple definitions & concepts at once The most accepted & agreed upon definition in academia for socialism is the public ownership of the means of production, and (generally) right-wingers being wrong on not accepting this doesn't make the word useless, it just makes them wrong
In terms of people using terms interchangeably, it's mostly because we see those words as being related. Socialist, Marxist, and Communist are terms that are socially seen as all originating from one united philosophy, so people uneducated in what they actually mean will use them as synonyms. This would not apply to words like "commandist." Bernie Sanders wouldn't call himself a "commandist," and there would be very few left wing political parties explicitly supporting "commandist" governing, so it would a lot more difficult for their opposition to link them to Stalin and Mao. They would be social democrats, something completely unrelated. Nowadays it's very easy, since both Sanders and Stalin called themselves socialists, even though they had fundamentally opposing views.
Bro you could not generalize more if you tried. To assume that the right as a whole cannot distinguish between distinct leftist ideologies is a ridiculous assumption and at best ignorant. This is a big problem with political discourse nowadays. The idea that one’s political ‘enemy’ is wrong and therefore always liable to act out whatever egregious thing one can imagine just to prove some point is ridiculous and unfortunately trite.
so·cial·ism /ˈsōSHəˌliz(ə)m/ noun a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole. that's the definition. what it was, what it is, and what it always will be. educate the ignorant, shame the willfully ignorant, fight the fascists.
2:52 If I were in that room I would draw an uninterpretable mess. Not because that’s what I think socialism is, but because I need drawing classes if you want anything more than a stick figure.
More seriously, I think this is true but not at unique to communism and socialism as you say. I think “capitalism” is probably at least as poorly defined. Depending on who you ask, I can be a capitalist, a socialist, both, or neither.
Fascism is more of a mental sickness than an cohesive ideology with a clear definition. Authoritarians like Stalin and Hitler are pretty much all fascists.
I would actually make this arguement against the world “authoritarian”. It’s an entirely biased word that is just used by especially western liberals at countries that aren’t American friendly liberal “democracies”. Just as China has aspects of censorship, the west has just as much just to different concepts. Also calling China undemocratic or backward just reflects ignorance and a hint of Sinophobia as well as western hegemony. Just as you describe the word socialist as a word entirely dependent on personal beliefs, so is the word authoritarian, it is just that liberals in the west are just so used to hearing that China and other countries are “authoritarian” and so it must be true. I hope you end up reading this.
This is just not true. It's true that the west has aspects of censorship, but they are NOTHING compared to what China has. Western countries still provide the right to freedom of speech and the press, with even state-funded media companies like NPR writing (mostly) unbiased and often critical articles about the president. While America definitely isn't super democratic-the electoral college is objectively pretty bad, for example-at least the citizens of the country have SOME amount of say over their own federal government. This was not true in the USSR and is not true in China today. In China, you can only vote for one party, and the only candidates that can run in that party are the ones approved by that party. It's an Oligarchy. The word Authoritarian is actually remarkable consistent compared to most political terms. You ask anybody what "authoritarianism" means and you'll almost certainly get similar answers. It's about censorship, undemocratic governance, and draconic law. It's better defined than basically any other political term. And just one more thing... I know the type of person you are, dude. Probably a Marxist-Leninist, I would say a Tankie. I've dealt with folks like you before and I've already heard your arguments. Don't think you can just spout nonsense in my comments section without me responding.
@thehayze259 As soon as I saw the line about "authoritarian" I predicted what the rest of the post would be. And I wasn't wrong 😂 Tankies try to hide their power level challenge (impossible)
Instant like! I've been thinking about the same thing but for "The Left" and "Feminism" adulterated words that muddy the discourse and make discussion impossible. Thank you!
The issue isn't the terms, it's the people muddying the water, using new terms will result in the same problem because they'll just muddy the waters again, after you fight the massive uphill battle of teaching everyone a new term. We're dealing with misinfo, the way to handle that is to correct it, not start over and fight to produce the same ends.
I mean, you can just define it as public sector control of the MOP and name specific variants. You can have a country exist in complete anarchy and one where the state has absolute authority. One is left anarchy and the other totalitarianism. Both are socialist but they aren't the same.
your conclusion is great, yes absolutely refer to people and yourself by the most succinct, useful term possible. but, the proposed 'solution' of abandoning the word 'socialist' altogether feels rather silly to me. whether you are a Marxist, ML, anarchist or syndicalist, so long as you are principaled and educated in the politics and the history, I want to work with you. the intricacies of whether or not democratic centralism is true to Marx, or if capitalism must first be abolished before the state can be or vice-versa, or if a revolutionary vanguard will inevitably degenerate into a bureaucratic class, or if such a class existed in the Soviet Union-- none of that matters right now! I don't care if you're a 4th wave Marxist-Leninist-Maoist (traditional) who refuses to work with a 4th wave Marxist-Leninist-Maoist (progressive), (those are not real, defined subdivisions), you have ought to still be able to work together for the first three adjectives. a socialist is merely someone who wants to build socialism. it is much better to fight for that very well established word with such a glorious history of love and kindness behind it than to throw it all away because we're still scared by the red scare. as for me, my blood will stay red even after I'm dead ;)
Main takeaway: Trump bad, Biden good. You should let Biden raise your taxes, open the border, keep inflation high, and keep our corrupt justice system.
Yeahhh socialism is a headache to identify, I personally always liked how Kropotkin went about it but I don’t think it’s the perfect Marxist definition either
As someone who studies Marxist theory and politics in general, this video kinda isn't very good. Firstly it's based on the premise that Socialism being a vague word is a bad thing. Which, I don't see any issue with and the video certainly didn't convince me this is a problem. Socialsim just means anti capitalism really, anti capitalism in favor of some form collectivism where the community is in charge not private individuals, that's it. Umbrella terms like this are not an issue and exist everywhere. What is an issue is the lack of knowledge about socialism and the decades of propoganda about it obscuring what it actually is, so any non socialist cannot tell you what it really means. You criticize the actual common belief about socialism (relative to North America) without really going in depth as to why this is and why it's even an issue. The clear solution to me is just demystifying what socialism is to more people, and educate people on it. Your proposed solution just makes things even more confusing and divides what should be a unified anti capitalist force. Now instead of being socialists all fighting for the same thing, we now are even more opposed to one another and divided which is already the single largest issue with leftist politics, it doesn't need to be worse. Furthermore it is incredibly biased and really seems to only exist to exclude forms of socialist thought you disagree with, with Marx keeping Marxism (an aleady established term that Marxists are very open about) but excluding people like Lenin from being Marxists and instead their own seperate thing entirely which is just not true at all. And now if we hypothetically stop using the word Socialist or Communist we are now using even more words to describe things which shouldnt be divided in the first place, and now the average non socialist has even more stuff to learn in order to become an anti capitalist. The learning hurdle, which is another problem with leftism, is even more confusing and harder. And even so, it is just going to create more sectionalism and pressures new people to leftism to commit to a sect even earlier when they should be learning and educating themselves, not picking a side. This "solution" fixes a problem that isn't real and just makes things even worse. Even so you completely misunderstand Marxism or any of these other ideologies. It is true Marx used Communism and Socialism interchangeably when talking about a stage of societal development, but when referring to ideology this is false. A Communist to Marx was a Marxist, he didn't use the term Marxist because at the time it was being stolen by opportunists. To Marx, a Communist was a Socialist who followed Marxist theories, as opposed to Socialists who did not, such as the Anarchists. Lenin did distinguish the two in the context of societal development, to Lenin Communism specifically refers to the stage of societal development wherein all class struggle has been resolved, and as such all class institutions on gone as well, such as money and the state. Communism still as an ideology refers to the same thing, that being a Socialist who follows Marxism, but Communism the societal stage is an extension of the ideas presented by Marx. It's an analysis of where society is headed, not an actual ideology. Lenin's works actually do not contradict Marxism at all, if you read anything he writes he just expands upon Marxism, mostly to expand it's analysis to the "modern" day (modern for the early 20th century anyway) and he never refutes any Marxist theory. To distinguish Marx and Lenin is honestly silly, since to only read Marx and not Lenin would mean to limit your understanding to 19th century political economy, or to develop new ideas yourself (which were probably already developed by Lenin in all honesty). You did not read any actual works by Marx, Engels, or co, only the Manifesto which is fairly surface level with no additional supplementary material. And while I'm not telling you to read Capital, you could definately do more research before making such large claims about any of these ideologies and theories. Same goes for Lenin. Stalin and Mao were both Marxist-Leninists, that is true, but they aren't at all different from Lenin. Lenin didn't use the term but neither Stalin nor Mao made any substantial contributions to Marxist theory, and just applied Lenin and Marx's work (hence the name). Pol Pot was not a Marxist at all, he was from a Marxist organization but himself admitted that he had no idea about anything related to Socialism, he was a uniquely awful individual who no one on the left defends and was only stopped by Vietnam, which you group together as the same ideology. And that isn't even going into what they thought Socialism was, which is not simply the absence of private property, you took that one sentence and used that as a sole definition while ignoring anything else (presumably because it was a hard read, as you admit and just missed it. In which case your research should be more rigorous. Also you claim that's why no one reads it, well yes, we do read it. Leftist spaces you are in might not care about reading and vigorous research but that is not by any means universal) There is such an awful anti communist bias here as well, like how you equate Lenin and Hitler. Lenin fought for equality and better lives for the poor while Hitler was genocidal which you don't even mention. Actually you put Hitler in the category of people who weren't genocidal. You are saying Stalin and Mao are worse than Hitler, as if the USSR under Stalin wasn't what ultimately defeated the Nazis, and made large denazification efforts post war whereas the West hired the former Nazis for NATO, NASA, and in the case of West Germany back into the government. It feels like such little research was done and you are going based off of vibes, and it isn't helped by the lack of sources anywhere at all at best and at worst its Nazi apologia. Your definition of authoritarianism is also problematic, specifically the word "backward". What you described there is, essentially, anything that isn't western liberalism. Anything that isn't western liberalism is problematic and should be denounced as "authoritarian" without any further nuance or discussion. Even then your examples of non authoritarian Socialists are western European, Orwell (who was a huge racist, Hitler sympathizer, etc), Marx, the anarchists in Catalonia, and the clearly liberal nations of Scandinavia are all clearly supported. The only exceptions to this are western leaders of Trudeau and Obama, and Sankara, who was not Western at all. Towards the end of the video you even lump Hitler into these people, albeit in a different context, but you still focus more on denouncing non western socialists than you do the Nazis, whom you still keep in the discussion of socialism until the end for some reason. You give nuance to the western leftists, and don't criticize them much at all, but then have nothing positive to say about the non western ones. It's a very obvious bias to the West, which is itself the result of propaganda. You completely ignore the question of propaganda the entire video, propaganda is why people don't know what socialism means, this isn't mentioned and instead you attribute the cause to there being different kinds of socialists, and then completely accept all western propaganda without question and then wonder why socialism is so hard to define. Honestly this video just seems like an attempt to solve a personal issue you have by enforcing new rules on a large community. It seems like you struggle discussing socialism to non socialists due to propaganda, and don't like how there are socialists who you don't like, so try to separate them all for personal convenience. If we are going to actually fight for socialism we need solidarity, not even more sectionalism. I cannot think of any other reason why this is such a problem for you, and instead of labelling entire ideologies without even talking to them first to see what they think and then creating those labels not based on ideological content or historical premise but your own personal perception is really shallow. I would encourage you to talk to more leftists outside your personal bubble and do more research. A lot more research. And cite sources. Having 0 sources cited in a video like this is crazy. It is always good to cite sources and provide links in the description or a comment or whatever, even if you don't say anything you feel needs justified with a source (which is rarely a good mindset to have) providing further reading for those still interested instead of framing this as a self contained end all be all of the issue is more academically honest and transparent which is always good and makes discussions easier.
Classical fascism is properly understood as national syndicalism with a philosophy of actualist idealism, it was a utopian socialist movement not a reactionary one. The original syndicalist aims were co-opted by fascism's ties to big business and finance as they would prefer to have their unregulated laissez faire private control of industry, commerce, and finance be subjugated to the control of the fascist corporative state than to risk a communist revolution. The corporative or rather occupational state did exist in fascist Italy as was promised by national syndicalism however worker's control of industry which was the core syndicalist demand didn't come about until the socialization policy of the communist Bombacci. There was also no "obsession with the past" as you claim, they had the futurist movement and their nationalism was predicated on palingenesis or rebirth, with an orientation towards the future. Mussolini unlike Hitler was a progressive semi-bourgeois nationalist figure rather than a reactionary one like Hitler, and I say this as a Marxist who opposes what fascism became. Your understanding of fascism is very poor.
@@RaptieFeathers Ethiopia was a feudal slave state before Italy invaded. Obviously, the fascists did heinous shit like use chemical weapons but still. I think freeing half a million slaves outweighs that.
This is issue only because of (mainly American and neoliberal) idiotism, that will apply such tag to anything that doesn't complement neoliberal philosophy - Bernie, socdems and others being called socialist, meanwhile Trump, nationalist and others being callrd fascistic etc Both, Fascism and Socialism has clear-cut definitions if the people you ask - are not fools. Socialism usually means something like "collectively owned means of production" [be it directly as in workers democracy, or via state as in command economies] Same as any other definition used in politics, it is variable to an extent And the issue towards the end with classifying Stalin and Mao as fascistic? It's non-issue, really as neither of them followed fascistic doctrine Being authoritarian or despotic simply doesn't make one fascist => Would this misuse of the term "fascist" make it somehow obsolete? Definetly not! :-)
Everybody dose dream about there own definition ( including stuff like: we have an all-knowing and absolute leader AND everyone in equal) And Exactly that makes it a useful term for people that are searching for power.
17:36 video was pretty good until here. Did you really put hitler and obama on the marxist side. IK you clearly dont think obama and hitler are the same but still, what
The nazis didn't ever call themselves nazis. They called themselves the National Socialist German Worker's Party. It was pretty much a socialist worker's revolution thing, just with a racist bent to it. Nazi was a shorthand name for them that their political opponents used when making fun of them, and since the nazis lost ww2 that's the name that stuck.
Yes, it's true that "Nazi" is a derogatory term their opponents came up with. However, what do you mean by a socialist revolution? Are you equating him to Stalin? If so, I would agree. To Rosa Luxembourg? Absolutely not. I feel like you missed the point of the video, which is that I don't particularly care what people call themselves if that is antithetical to what they actually are. North Korea, Algeria, Ethiopia, Laos, and the DRC call themselves democratic, and they aren't. And similarly I don't think that just because the Nazis called themselves socialist, that that means we should rope them in with the vast majority of other people who call themselves socialist, seeing as most of those people hated the Nazis.
I think the general rule is that if the name includes "Democratic", "Communist", or "Socialist" then it's almost definitely an authoritarian oppressive regime.
This is not true. The Nazis used the word Socialist as a political tactic. At the time, many Germans were leftist and a Communist revolution almost actually succeeded, and then in the following decades the Communist Party became one of the largest. The Nazis stole that and made it about nationalism and true "german socialism". Socialism to the Nazis was not about equality it was a buzzword people liked back then stolen to mean something worse. It wasn't out of ideology it was a tactic. When the Nazis came to power they did everything they could to help and support the Capitalists, because they were never Socialists. Hitler even has a famous quote, "If I stand here as a revolutionary, it is a revolutionary against the revolution." There you go he said it himself.
@@thehayze259 You are using a western liberal definition of democratic and are trying to apply it to countries who do not care about western ideology. Your ideological standards are different from theirs and on that basis are denouncing them and are trying to seperate the "good" western socialists and the unpure eastern or southern socialists. This lack of nuance is quite frankly racist (of course I don't mean actual hostility to minorities that is not the extent of what racism is but this is a clear bias for western society and ideology). The people in those places had a revolution and that is what they established. And the material conditions of all of those places are far better than they were before said revolution. They don't perfectly meet your standard and are therefore bad with no further nuance. Even so the things you actually hate are mostly based on western pro capitalist propaganda and aren't real, this video is filled with said propaganda. And the more harsher policies are often in the name of safety against the West, the US alone is responsible for countless government coups because they dared to be anti capitalist. The Russian White Army was aided by so many western powers who began by default hostile to the Red Army, and I could go on. Expecting any of these places to make a utopia when there is constatn threat of western invasion and influence is naive. What would you rather these countries do? Take a chance and risk have fascists take over (see Chile) all over an ideological standard the West created in the first place? I'm not saying these places were perfect by any means and all past Socialist nations needed improvement but it is clear the actual material conditions of Socialist countries were always better than capitalist ones when there is equal economic development. And every socialist country who didn't take these harsh measures were overthrown by the west, the moment the USSR had multiparty parlimentary elections they were overthrown and replaced with Modern Russia for example. To these people, they will sacrifice this in exchange for the undoubtable matierial improvements. These are people who previously could not have healthcare, education, land, etc and now can have all those things. This is the kind of nuance this topic demands and you ignore all of it for the sake of your own ideological purity which is based on western standards and idealism. So I ask you, what is your solution? What is your alternative? What alternative do you propose the countries have taken? I aclnowledge they could have done better but genuinely from their perspective what is the alternative when you have the single largest empire ever in human existence breathing down your neck what else should have been done.
Socialism is a category of thoughts around economics. Misinformation, and the perjorative use of socialism only dilutes the meaning to those ignorant of the history. The groups represented in the internationals were focused on the relation to the means of production and allocation/organization of state power. Liberal democracies with governments that do something for the common man do nothing towards those core issues. You need some demarcation to make clear your seperation from those trends, and unless you make a new system not drawing directly from socialist ideas, you should probably retain the pedigree. The level of awareness of the general public isnt a measure of utility of terms. They dont even understand the orthodoxy in their own countries.
if u factor in the use of a word by people who cant tell you a definition of a word with any reliable sourcing into the definition of that word then u definitely dont need to use it lol
Socialism just means that the means of production are owned by the community. Just because people use it differently doesn't mean the meaning is different.
They sure as hell weren't owned by the community under Stalin or Mao, and neither of them took any steps to make sure that was true. Were they not socialists? It's fine if you think they weren't.
@@thehayze259 I'd say that this was probably an attempt at getting as close to being "owned by the community" as possible, but of course their ideal of how to achieve that isn't the same as other socialists. I guess to expand upon my comment, socialism has one set definition, but there are multiple ways people try to achieve it.
No, that's why I added in the, "at least not as much." Hitler was probably the single worst leader in world history. I realized in post that it could come off as me not saying that though, sorry lol
@@thehayze259 alright, i kinda figured. they were all responsible for millions of deaths so it was a little surprising that you downgraded him just because he had fewer millions than the others. solid video otherwise.
Your explanation of Marxism is flawed. He wasn't "anti-authoritatianism." In fact, he frequently criticicized anarchism, and criticized the Parisian communards for not constructing a proletarian state. Marx was never concerned with the morality of capitalism. He never made any moral arguments against it. Marx also didn't advocate for worker ownership of property. He advocated for the abolition of property ownership. Finally, Stalin, Mao, Lenin, and Sankara were not dictators, but that's an entirely different conversation
I'm an anarcho-communist, and I'm just glad I can talk about the praxis without ever having to use either of those words, haha I've lately been thinking about calling myself a "Kropotkinist." It's not nearly as loaded a term, and his views on it are actually very different from a lot of other ancom stuff
ok ok last one. im in a room with 100 people, and i ask them what happens in the movie kung fu panda. some of them tell me the plot, some of them tell me about a characters arc, some of them just describe their favorite or least favorite parts of the movie. some people have only seen small parts of it or images of characters. some people havent seen the movie at all. some of the people among all of those groups lie about the movie. whether for fun, or because they hate the movie, or because they love it. considering answers from those who have differing opinions on the movie is a good idea because any of them can give you accurate information. however, considering answers from those who are proven to be lying about the movie, and especially those who have never seen it, would be decreasing the likelihood of getting any accurate information. if i considered everyones summary equally and uncritically, of course i wont have a clear picture of what happened in it. but since i have the ability to watch the movie myself, or even just confirm whether the people i asked had seen it, i would know that the other summaries arent worth considering at all. so if i were to say “stop talking about kung fu panda that movie has no coherent plot” because too many people told me that Po killed himself, i would just be wrong.
This isn't super accurate either, because we have copies of the movie Kung Fu Panda. Even if everyone were to tell you different things, you can all still sit down together and watch the same movie. It's a physical, material thing that you can all observe the same way (assuming none of them are deaf or blind). However, a term like Socialism is not a material thing, so there is nothing about it to observe other than how the term is used. We have the Communist Manifesto, but to some degree, Marx even contradicted himself a few times, and changed his opinions over time. And ONLY using the manifesto would discount the writing of all of the self described socialists who came after, like Lenin, Luxembourg, Orwell, etc. If everybody uses it in different, mutually exclusive ways, then the word loses its functionality. Kung Fu Panda would not.
@@thehayze259 terms are concrete in the sense that they’re made by people and used by people. everyone in the world cant all sit down and watch the real kung fu panda any more than they can watch the development of the actual concept of socialism. but 20 people, 5 people, even 1 person can sit down and actually engage with the discourse. see what evidence people have, see who’s blatantly lying (for example, George Orwell, a self proclaimed democratic socialist, gave the UK a list of suspected communists, and the Nazis famously began their reign of terror by rounding up socialists and communists, while using the term, “national socialism” to appeal to the working class population who had just lost a war). it takes more time but thats true of anything controversial. your argument is that controversy makes words meaningless. not that it makes academic rigor crucial.
5:23 He didn't really hate bIack people, for there was basically none of them in Germany, they were the least of his corncers. In fact he showed more respect to Jesse owens than Roosevelt did.
No, he REALLY hated Black people. Here's a quote from a wikipedia article: In Mein Kampf, Hitler described children resulting from marriages to African occupation soldiers as a contamination of the white race "by negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe."[8] He thought that "Jews were responsible for bringing Negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of bastardizing the White race which they hate and thus lowering its cultural and political level so that the Jew might dominate."[9] He also implied that this was a plot on the part of the French since the population of France was being increasingly "negrified".[10] The only reason he didn't focus on black people more was that there were only a very small number in a country with tens of millions of people. Didn't mean he didn't hate em.
EVERYONE! I want to apologize for something I may have implied at 17:31, "All of the people on the right [side] are genocidal monsters, all of the people on the left aren't, at least not as much." This was phrased HORRIBLY and inadvertently implied that Hitler was not a genocidal monster. He absolutely was, and was one of the worst. I'm sorry.
????
Implying Hitler is on the left
my guy, what the f
Hitler was NOT a Socialist - simply because it was "National Socialists" doesn't mean it WAS socialist - Hitler even CONFIRMED AS MUCH.
the Nazi party was named "National Socialist" to appeal to the heavy left sentiment within Germany after the depression and so on - but you can not call the Party in which, the FIRST THING THEY DID WAS ABOLISHING ALL SOCIALISTS AND PROSECUTIONS OF ANYONE WHO THEYE EVEN BELIEVED TO BE SOCIALIST to be Socialist, the Nazi were Right Wing, Far-Right.
Hitler wasn’t left wing dude the fuck?
All of his policies were right wing. He was socialist in name only, with him outright admitting in an interview that he didn’t believe in anything actual socialists believed in.
@@pieofchartare you okay? She divided the screen into two parts, and the people on the left side of the screen are the people she's referring to by "on the left".
Of course, a big part of the reason for the vagueness is deliberate misinformation over a large period of time.
Oh yeah, 100%. A lot of it was completely intentional as a means of defaming socialists, but it definitely didn't help that they were self-identifying as being part of the same political group as several genocidal dictators.
Exactly what I was just about to comment. Thank you.
@@thehayze259is there any ideology a person could hold that only has a morally pure following and completely undisputed definition?
th-cam.com/video/4RIFgoVNVUQ/w-d-xo.html@@thehayze259
Maga communism real
Oxford politics grad here with a thesis on “Ideological Political Discourse Within the Anglosphere.” I mainly focused on the term “liberalism”, which I posit is even more vague than “socialism”, but I think I can still add something. Please try not to infer my own political ideology from this, as I am attempting to be as academic as possible here, at least within the confines of a YT comment. TLDR, don’t get hung up on absolutes.
Firstly, socialists have been infighting among themselves about what the word means since at least the mid 19th century. The term is, at this point, almost intentionally vague, especially when used by the media. They have a lot of strings attached to them. Broadly speaking, socialism can be defined as “collective ownership”, but the issue is what exactly that constitutes, and how far it should go. It definitely defines what socialism ISN’T to some extent - for example anarcho-capitalism is 100% not socialism. Usually, a more democratic political system will have some form of what CAN BE described as socialism as part of its political system, since the leaders would be chosen literally by the collective. Marx was pretty into that, and things like the weekend, progressive taxation and the minimum wage come straight from his writings.
If you hear the word “socialism” by itself in the modern day, you should probably ignore it, as it’s likely more or less part of a piece of agitprop, especially in the US. However, when certain *forms* of what are commonly considered socialism are mentioned, eg Stalinism, Maoism, Marxism-Leninism, Democratic Socialism, etc, it’s likely worth paying more attention to. These ideas often have more clear ideological definitions and histories, but can still be lumped in with the VERY broad tent that is the word “socialism.” It’s not a useless term, it’s just overused by people who don’t know better.
I know that you tell commenters not to get hung up on definitions, but… that’s what your video is about, so you’re pretty much telling us not to comment at that point.
I also take issue with your statement that “Marx didn’t get hung up on the difference between socialism and communism.” He did. His “Manifesto” lays it out pretty clearly - he saw socialism as part of the transition from a market economy to a theoretical communist utopia. This would’ve involved what he called the “vanguard state”, which is how most self-styled communist governments justify their authoritarianism.
I hope this comment sparks some positive discussion.
Thank you, this was a very interesting comment. Really appreciate the input! And yes, I generally agree. "Socialism" on its own doesn't really reveal much - it reveals that the person ISN'T a few things, like you mentioned, but they might even still be a capitalist social democrat who calls themself a socialist. It's really more valuable when they give themselves a specific label like Maoist or Democratic Socialist, like you mentioned. I do think the term is still functionally useless in a ton of contexts, although it might still work in academia or in certain interpersonal interactions.
I do have a question about the last paragraph, however. From what I understand, the idea of a vanguard state and vanguard party was mostly spurred by Lenin, and Marx was generally quite vague about the transition from capitalism to communism. Wikipedia wasn't my end source for this of course, but if you look at the Foundations section of this article, I think you can get an idea for what I mean: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguardism
Thank you again for giving such a well thought out comment.
@@thehayze259 Thank you for your positive and surprisingly prompt response! Glad to contribute!
No one single label will ever perfectly describe the political (or theological, philosophical) views of any one individual. These are all loose boxes, and we all effectively cherrypick to form our own views. These labels can be useful in *generally* describing a political opinion, but not in any detail. The only way to avoid that is to name your personal ideology after yourself, such as “Smufflegruntism” (lol) in my case. Beyond that, a full essay or even book would be required for any measure of definition.
Marx was intentionally vague and viewed himself as asking questions / pointing out flaws in the capitalist system of his day than anything else. That’s why a lot of room was left for people such as Lenin to put their own spin on it, and also why the word is so ill-defined, despite Marx not being the first person to use the term. However he does lay out his theory of historical materialism, which describes socialism as part of the transition towards communism. According to Marx, socialism would involve a government run by workers that would “wither away.” So yes, you are correct in the sense that Lenin spurred the idea and fleshed it out, but it wasn’t his original idea. Personally I’m of the opinion that Lenin (although a man of MANY faults) genuinely believed that his state would “wither away”, but that it would take a lot longer due to the largely agricultural (frankly, feudal) nature of Russia’s economy at the time. Marx assumed that only an industrial capitalist state would be capable of moving to socialism, so Lenin attempted to modify that to effectively skip a stage of historical materialism theory.
Again, nothing should be inferred from this comment with regard to my own political opinions. (I’m not actually a Marx fan tbqh, particularly on a personal level, although I have some respect for a few of his ideas.)
@@thehayze259 th-cam.com/video/WboggjN_G-4/w-d-xo.htmlsi=QxoJirZhklgvt1hS
Hey everyone, some of you might be wondering why you're seeing this video pop up as "new" again. I took it down because it was doing really poorly and I thought I did a terrible job in promoting it. The title was boring and the thumbnail was too, which kind of snubbed it early. However, I haven't changed the content of the video at all.
I mean, isn't it why we use anarchism, syndicalism, Trotskyism, social democracy, Maoism and friends?
It's a big reason for it for sure, I think we should use those terms more. They're just more specific and descriptive than "socialism" is. Well, Anarchism can have some different connotations, but that's the exception.
@@thehayze259people use those terms a lot lol. Lenin was a Marxist, Stalin was a Marxist-Leninist who followed the path Lenin laid out, Mao was a Marxist-Leninist with anarchist leanings and those anarchist leanings formed Mao Zedong Thought. The Black Panther Party was greatly influenced by Mao Zedong Thought and were some of the first people outside of China to apply Mao's ideas to their conditions, which made them early Marxist-Leninist-Maoists. Xi Jinping claims to be a follower of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought but he's more of a follower of Dengism.
Socialism means the workers own the means of production, communism means a classless, moneyless, stateless society. It's like how Christianity means you believe in Jesus as the savior of humanity but depending on your location, culture and a ton of other things, you may be part of a different denomination. That doesn't make Christianity a meaningless term.
So, I see your point and could potentially agree, but I find the solution to be a bit half baked. It seems unwise to take a term that already has social cachet and get rid of it just because it is being confused and misinterpreted in all of these different ways (the correct definition being one based in the ideas of Marxism). To me, the issue to solve is not to change the term because it is too broad but to retake the term and continue educating and spreading the word. I think there could be a slightly deceptive notion forming here that if everybody's beliefs were easily understood with terms that made sense that we could do a better job of bringing people to our side and I don't think that's true. We can bring people to our side but not like that.
Conservatives in our culture use 'socialism' as a boogey man because the term has built a kind of cultural shorthand, like how classical music in the background of a movie communicates wealth without you even needing to see any visuals. Isn't it interesting that to them, socialism isn't a term with any kind of blurriness or confusion? Just 'socialism bad'. They have been spreading this message and building upon it ever since Marx first hit the scene because the ideas are SO POTENT. Conservatism as a general set of beliefs is so shitty and toxic that it needs every bit of help it can get to prop itself up. Rich people funnel billions of dollars every year to make sure the people don't realize conservatism and the ideas connected to it suck ass. We don't need a new term. We need a NEW STRATEGY TO SPREAD THE WORD.
Instead of how we seem to have let conservatives have the word woke, we should fight for the term socialism. Fight for it tooth and nail. In the process of fighting and explaining the word we will be teaching those around us about what Marxism is about and why it will lead to a better world for all of us. This is an opportunity.
This is another perfectly fine strategy to have. Personally, honestly, I think it's generally a good idea to label yourself as little as possible, and just talk about policy. If you have good, convincing policy takes, then people will come to your side. "Socialism" is sort of a poison there, as it reframes all of your popular economic and social policy as being bad and authoritarian.
@@thehayze259If you see this comment, can you respond to start a conversation? I have some things I'd want to tell you about the word "Socialism".
13:19
When a writer from 1895 writes like that, it’s acceptable and understandable
But when I write like that in English class in 2014, I get berated
Socialism is used as an umbrella term to refer to an economic system of collective ownership, and a state controlled by the proletariat (as opposed to the bourgeoisie, aristocracy, etc.).
As a comparison, the point of this video is like complaining about the word "fruit" since it can apply to so many different things that don't always have things in common, although you also include various figures and systems which are just blatantly mischaracterised and act as though the label still applies. This video felt to me like if you were to list grapefruit, grapes, then a bunch of berries, vegetables and a grain, then went on to make the claim that the word fruit is useless since it means so many things.
You can correctly identify which political movements aren't socialist when labelling them as social democrats and liberals, as well as the individual example of Hitler - all of these are identified correctly as not being socialist, due to all of them being fundamentally bourgeois ideologies (in the comments you accurately pointed this out, but inaccurately pointed out the reason for why Nazis aren't socialist - the reason is due to them literally coining the term "privatisation" and working in close co-operation with private firms, gutting unions and workers' rights, etc.).
Whether one wants to condemn them or not, you cannot exclude the USSR or China from being socialist (unless you're a left com, in which case my condolences), as they both eliminated the class divide and established a proletarian-led government under a collectivised economy (less so in the case of modern China, but that's another point entirely). You can dispute it based on them operating under a vanguard party, but that feels like unnecessary exclusion of projects that have, in some cases, managed to meaningfully improve the quality of life of the people (like in the example of Cuba). In the same way one should not exclude Jacobins from liberal history, due to the Great Terror under the 1st French Republic; you should not exclude the first socialist projects due to them not perfectly fitting the idealistic example of what we hope to achieve.
When we on the left use the term socialism - or Marxism, we MEAN to use it as an umbrella term; some people refer to themselves as no-label Marxists/socialists, meaning that they support any workers' movement that aims to bring about the establishment of a proletarian government - regardless of specific policies. The word is therefore useful as a unifying term for those on the left who view it as more important to bring about the end of bourgeois rule, rather than establish a specific form of socialism. It is also extremely useful due to it being more recognisable than specific terms like Luxemburgism, and while it carries heavy baggage in some places in the world, it is nevertheless useful for that purpose.
Also, the Communist Manifesto was published before Marx even began work on the first volume of Capital - it's flat-out wrong to call it an 'abridged version' of Capital. The Manifesto was a hastily-composed official document for the Communist League, whereas Capital is a laborious and systematic examination of the workings of the capitalist mode of production. Marx and Engels were also not the 'inventors of socialism' but I guess that's just useless trivia.
I'm so tired of hearing this term used to describe everything from social democracy and welfare programs to state controlled planned economies to just capitalism except you get to vote for your boss so thank you for making this
Yeah. I feel like everyone, regardless of if they support one of those systems or not, should be able to recognize that the term is way too broad at this point.
socialism has a pretty specific meaning, its just americans who lack the political bandwidth to understand the fundamental difference between the socialism as a description of policy rather than a distinct ideology... socialism ISNT a political ideology, unlike fascism, which fundamentally isnt inherently tied to the functioning of a state (as "strong man authoritarianism" and everything that tends to follow isnt a requirement for a state to function), "socialism" (aka socialist policy aka the "state does stuff on behalf of the people") is in some ways vital for anything that doesnt consider itself an anarchist commune, or atleast for a state when run by people who consider themselves united in some broad yet relatively specific way, i understand that being culturally united in the US is somewhat of an overstatement (at least if u ask some americans), and that particularly in the us state run education is downright neglected... yet still it amazes me just how ridiculous the political landscape tends to be
This is a really good example of the point that the video is trying to make. This is just one very heavily disputed definitiom of socialism, which sounds along the lines of "socialism is when the government does stuff". The definition i've heard the most personally is that socialism is when the means of production is owned by everyone, (not by the state as some other people would argue) and even that definition is pretty much useless as that would probably fall under marxism or anarchism anyway.
The issue isn't that "Socialism" doesn't have a good definition, it's that the very usage of the word causes dismissal, which is counter to the very thing it tries to achieve.
4:30 by that logic correcting people on anything inherently degrades it
the definitions of the words we use are based on the context we hear them used or defined. if my definition of a term stems from disinformation from the group of people who have provably reshaped geopolitics in order to distort that term, or people who have openly ignored the original meaning to coopt the terms aesthetics, should my use of the word be allowed to end the conversation around it for all of the people who actually engage with the original meaning?
No. Unfortunately, however, that's something that's currently happening, and I don't really see a good solution at the moment. In terms of another possible way to fix this situation, we could just stop considering certain people to be socialists or communists, or as I suggested at the end, simply adopt a more specific term.
@@thehayze259 communists and socialists already exclude people they believe to be communists or socialists, and people have plenty of more specific terms for ways of approaching it, or misuses of it. this doesnt stop people from misusing it, and it doesnt need to.
This sort of discussion about the concreteness of concepts is especially crucial for leftists to grasp and have. I've seen way too many self-proclaimed "marxist" claim that a minute deviation/aspect of capitalism is socialist if it was renamed to something vaguely populist ("The people's commissar"), which is frankly preposterous and abhorrent, as it leaves room for misunderstanding and abusing of theory to fit personal goals.
Great video. Some things I wanted to mention, though. The term communist, as opposed to socialist is absolutely more concrete than even fascist. I think that (correct me if I'm wrong) you are left leaning and have an ingroup bias to notice more complexity in the left than right. It's also worth noting that the furthest politically relevant left is social democracy in America
First I need to say it was a really nicely made video. One critique is that when it came to technical definitions, there was a definition for socialism pre-Marx. It is simply the "collective ownership of the means of production". This is why Hitler was actually a national socialist, "[ethno]national collective means of production". Marx and Engels also meant that they needed to implement socialism (by the definition i gave) before they could reach communism (abolishment of private ownership) {at least this is my interpretation}
As for the definition of socialism pre-Marx, that still would not apply to Hitler. The means of production were not collectively owned, they were privately owned by the state (which was undemocratic), and Hitler never took steps toward the collective ownership of the means of production, even if that only included people he would consider Aryan.
@@thehayze259I guess it counts in a weird way? I mean socialism for the but not for them was essentially what the Nazis spouted, as they were ethno nationalist racists
Part of the problem is that there is a no-true Scotsman fallacy with Socialism
That is absolutely a huge part of it, from a bunch of different sides.
What it means to be a "Marxist" has nothing to do with what Marx did or did not think of Authoritarianism or even really what his definition of Socialism and Communism was, it's about viewing history as Class Conflict. Hitler like all Fascists was a Class Collaborationist.
The funny thing is "Capitalism" is an even more vague and utterly meaningless term because it is entirely defined by its contrast against Socialism, which as established does not itself have a genuine concrete colloquial meaning.
I disagree. Capitalism began as a concept well before Socialism, and has existed for a much longer time. And as for which nations are considered capitalist and which people are considered capitalist, it's fairly well defined; I would say most people think it's something like, "a market economy based on the employment of citizens to work on the private property of other citizens."
My experience is the opposite, I think people tend to define socialism (at least in their heads) as any system which is not capitalism, feudalism, and anarchism. I think this is why so many people can think of Bernie Sanders, Stalin, Mao, Marx, and Sankara as sharing the same ideology; because although they don't have many traits in common, there is one: they are all anti-capitalists.
@@thehayze259 A Capitalist may have existed as a concept before Socialism but the idea of Capitalism as any kind of coherent model of structuring a society or economy did not exist until it was invented as a contrast to Socialism. A term for which now just means anything good or anything bad about the world depending on how you personally feel about what Socialism means. It is meaningless.
@@fireyams3460since the west is the most democratic, many people will tie capitalism to democracy. in reality, capitalism in its purest form inherently contradicts democracy
@@lzbscalle7943idk what this has to do though with their comment. Plus technically both are free in their own way. However taken to the extreme they can led to oppression
5:09 why do i need to be able to agree with the CIA and the Klan on what socialism is
Well, personally, I think that socialism is when the government does stuff, so clearly it’s still a very useful term
Of course your pfp is a Reddit logo
Honestly it’s similar with words like Woke or Fascist. They are just buzz words use to strawman people half the time. It’s increasingly annoying since it makes any topic that has some modern political elements be irritating
Oh definitely, but fascism is very much an actual thing in the american republican party. Have you read project 2025?
The bit with the definition of the house reminds me of a video from Jessie Gender on biological sex and how to categorise things. She made a point on how these things cannot be defined strictly - like you said, every time you add a new restriction you will be removing some things that are houses and each time you remove a restriction you will be letting in some things that aren’t - so they have to run on a more thing-ishness system. A house is a house if it has enough house-ish qualities. Fascism is called out for being fascism because it displays enough fascist-ish qualities. It has enough fascist-ness to it.
Socialism should be retired because it has no functional purpose, and it has no functional purpose because the things that imply socialism-ness are so far apart you can never really find any patterns, no matter which way you group those qualities.
There’s not much point to this, just adding on a small thought to the conversation. Keep up the good work :)
To add the right-libertarian definition (mainly to explain it), it is the state ownership/control over the means of production and private property.
Other definitions basically stem from it, like any community that is collectively taking your property is a state in any way a right-libertarian would know it, and censorship is just inevitable with this concentration of power (you can't guarantee freedom of speech if one group controls the printing press). To go further, the n@zis (need to dodge censorship) did all of the above by any libertarian standard, even privatization was giving to to friends in service of the government, though the reasoning was different.
You can disagree, that's fine, but wanted to add the one my side of politics uses. (except the austro-mutualists, but they are weird and use left-wing definitions for a lot of stuff)
Yeah, this is what I mean! Thank you. See, I would just call that fascism (combination of corporate and state power, all that), but a lot of people consider it to be socialism too.
@@thehayze259 I know, i was more-so explaining it. Definitions are probably the hardest part of lib-left and lib-right have when speaking to each other.
Same as "capitalism" (which just means a free market and private property to lib-right, but is so much more loaded on the left) and now "Liberal" (with many lib-right wanting to take it back).
@@thehayze259imo fascism is just having all interest group serve under a government. Basically Nationalistic corporatism (basically interest groups controlling a nation)
if i ask 10 people to draw the earth and 5 hand me back flat earths, does globe no longer work as a word? words are taught to people by other people, intentionally or not, so they can be heard and used outside of their original context. by your logic, no word works if it evokes different images in people with varying levels of information on the concept.
The Earth being round is a measurable and provable fact, whereas political terms like Capitalism and Fascism are purposely a lot more vague.
A better comparison would be if half of the population woke up one day and thought that the word "globe" meant "triangular." Even if everyone still agreed that the Earth was spherical, the word "globe" itself wouldn't be useful anymore, as you would have to clarify that you meant "spherical" and not "triangular" every time you used it.
@@thehayze259 this isnt a good example because people wake up thinking something, whereas in reality people are taught things. the logic within this analogy barely even works in a vacuum, and the only outcome of your argument is giving up on the use of words if the definitions of those words are sufficiently obfuscated.
Hey! Neat video, I want to build on your house example,
Words are weird. As I understand them, words are the labels of the concepts they describe. Kind of like pointers in computer code. These concepts probably differ from person-to-person.
You might like the conlang Toki Pona. It is a language of only about 120 words. I haven't dove into it too much, but I believe it's an art project to try to describe concepts in the world bottom-up, in a minimalist way. To paraphrase the intro of the book, it defines "friend" as "jan pona" or "good person". Again, these definitions are subjective, and people have different lenses that they view the world in, what exactly a friend is depends on the person. But if we accept that "friend" is a "good person", what is a bad friend? A bad person? Under this definition, "bad friend" is an oxymoron.
So while people can generally see an example of a house and agree it is a house, people might differ in what utility a house gives, or how big a house is, for ex.
So I'm not exactly sure if describing ourselves as Anarchists, Syndicalists, or Democratic Socialists is all that productive. It's useful for people who are "in the know" and generally agree on what these labels mean, but to a foreigner the obvious next question (if they are curious) is, "What is a ___?". I am guilty of using labels myself, but I think people respond better when you break down these complex concepts. Instead of "free healthcare", maybe it would be better to say "public hospitals and public doctors without private insurance". But these definitions can get lengthy, same with Toki Pona, it's not very good at describing complex things in a compact way. That's why we have so many words, to describe our complex world.
21:00
Small neat pick, in a 1882 letter, Engels (the other guy of the manifesto) assured that Marx declared to Lafargue ''One thing is certain, I am not marxist''
(It's a pretty interesting letter btw, I think it was called ''letter to Bernstein'' or something like that)
Presenting it like that makes it out of context. Marx wrote that as a jab at the French Workers Party for doing "revolutionary phrase-mongering" and so: "what is certain is that [if they are Marxists, then] I myself am not a Marxist". Basically, "if they use that word for their tactics/politics, then I would not want to associate with that word"
if i start calling you by someone elses name do they have to change their name? how many people would need to stop calling you your name before it isnt your name anymore? lmk if im missing something abt your logic
This isn't a super accurate interpretation of my point. A closer one would be if there were twenty people in a room discussing a politician, and there are four or five camps that each think the person is named something different. Some argue using the birth certificate or the legal papers showing they changed their name at age 23, but if that doesn't convince the other four groups, at a certain point, it just becomes people shouting,
"Their name is Ashley!"
"No, it's Sarah!"
"No, it's Frank!"
And it doesn't go anywhere. It's not a discussion of the politician's policies or the things they've done, it's just a bunch of groups of people arguing back and forth about what their name is.
@@thehayze259if some people are misinformed or lying about the name of the politician, the people with evidence are the only ones who can even claim to know enough about the politician to be for or against them. you’re listening to too many people.
I find that people hate it when you point out that the signifiers they use to categorise and simplify politics don't actually mean anything lol. 'Socialism' is a great example, but 'liberal', 'progressive' and 'reactionary' are also used by lots of people to mean lots of different (and incompatible) things. Even the left-right political spectrum itself doesn't really work if you venture beyond news articles about electoral politics.
It seems like the American media's use of words gradually filters out into the rest of the English speaking world, though, so I tend to just accept that 'socialism' can now mean anything other than free-market fundamentalism.
I think the premise itself is wrong. The premise kind of is, nothing can be defined. Not true. Things can be defined perfectly analytically. Depends on the intellectual integrity of the one who's defining.
6:24 i get where youre coming from, but we really have to seperate lenin the politician and lenin the theoritician. if you read state and revolution it becomes very hard to paint him as an authoritarian
So, is socialism:
1. When a country is authoritarian and anti free speech? no, but this isn’t incompatible with socialist ideology
2. When the country functions off of welfare? no, socialism is not when the country functions off of welfare, that would be social democracy, it’s equity that usually appears In capitalist systems, although welfare isn’t incompatible with socialism, socialism ≠ welfare.
3. When the workers own / control the means of production? yes, this is the definition of socialism, this can happen in many ways whether it be the workers owning / controlling their workplaces directly, or that happening through a democratic government, but this is socialism at its core.
4. When the government controls the workplace? As long as there’s no private ownership, and the government is actually allowing the workers autonomy over the industry, this can qualify as socialism.
5. When there's democracy in the workplace? Yes, this can be a type of socialism as the workers are controlling their workplace, and there’s no private ownership.
6. When the government spends tax money to help pay for private programs? no, absolutely not, private ownership is the antithesis of socialism.
7. When everything is free and there's no government? this is closer to ideological communism / anarcho communism (a stateless, classless, moneyless, communal society)
8. When a single party controls the country. This technically isn’t incompatible with socialism, as long as there’s no private ownership, and workers have autonomy over their labor, although i disagree with the idea of a one party state, or state socialism in general, its not incompatible with socialism ms
the term socialism has a definition, and it’s a useful term, the issue is people adopt and bastardize the term, or don’t do their research and misuse it, the same could be said for the word democracy, but no one advocates for the erasure of the word democracy.
also obama and hitler were definitively not socialists, it doesn’t matter who calls them socialist, or if they claimed to be socialists, they we’re never socialists. neither is the Nordic model socialist, if it allows for private ownership of the means of production, it’s not socialist. people might disagree, but there’s an objective definition, and standard that they don’t meet to qualify as socialists, people can be wrong.
it’s not even that people disagree on what the definition of socialism is, most people who have actually researched know the real definition, and everyone else is either being deceptive, pulling shit out of their ass, or straight up didn’t do any research at all.
That was sort of my point. Even if you consider the word to have a pretty set definition (which I do, and intentionally did not include in the video), the fact that literally nobody can ever agree on what that definition is makes communication using it excessively difficult.
Democracy has a vague definition, yes, but you can call any country, "democratic" and people will understand what you mean. The same is not true for socialism, which was my point.
And lastly, yeah of course, Obama and Hitler were never socialists. But again, that wasn't my point, my point was that you will have to clarify that you think that very, very often, because if you don't, then a significant portion of your audience is going to make a lot of untrue assumptions about what you believe.
Definitions are objective to some degree and constructed to some degree. If everybody woke up one day and decided that a "tree" was a small, six inch long furry animal, then it wouldn't matter if technically it's a large group of plants made of wood, since nobody would be using the word that way. And that's fine! ...so long as people can agree on what the word means. If half of the population thinks it's a big wooden plant and the other half thinks it's a small furry animal, then it doesn't matter who's "technically correct," nobody can effectively communicate using the word.
@@thehayze259 Ohhhh mb dude, you’re actually right, it’s like what’s the point in using the term if no one even knows the definition because it’s been bastardized so much. i just wish there was a way to clarify the definitions of things for people so we don’t have to get rid of the term
Hitler was by definition socialist. He abolished private property and brought all business under the arm of the state (social ownership of the means of production).
0:25 "Nothing."
Words have meaning. Quite sure a lexicon would help with that opinion.
I only skipped to 18:30. It's 3 and 5
Unfortunate reupload, extremely common TH-cam L. Still gonna watch it twice 😤😤🔥🔥🗣️💯
Sorry, I think I really screwed up promoting it the first time :|
I have quite a lot of issues with this video regarding historic aspects, but let's just engage with your main argument, which is that we should use different terms instead of socialism for different people who, according to different people, all fit the label of socialism
You then propose we should use label Marx & Sankara as Marxists, Lenin as Leninist or Marxist-Leninist, etc. but this doesn't actually hold up when you go so far as to wanting to consider the conservative (& sometimes liberal perspective) too, because for most conservatives/right-wingers the terms Marxist, Socialist, Communist, Leninist etc all mean the same, while you may differentiate between a Marxist, a Communist and a Leninist, to the conservative, and to many liberals too, all of these just mean authoritarian, radical leftism, at best just in some different flavors, generally speaking, the further right wing you go, the more inclined you are to lump everything to the left of yours as the same bullshit with different labels, even if it has substantial differences that one simply may not be aware of
You say for example Mao or Stalin should be called "Commandists" or something similar to that, but to the American conservative Obama's liberal policies were already way too "commandist", don't you think? When engaging with these people you'll eventually have to define everything you mean too, nullifying the effect of getting rid of the terms "socialist" (& "communist") for the purpose of a more constructive discussion without agreeing on definitions first
People, especially generally right-wingers, are simply wrong on what they think it means, you're treating all these definitions as if they were actually all equally valid, when if one would scrutinize them individually at the very least the Obama, Nordics, Hitler & Bernie ones would certainly not hold up, as the people labeling these as "socialist" are conflating multiple definitions & concepts at once
The most accepted & agreed upon definition in academia for socialism is the public ownership of the means of production, and (generally) right-wingers being wrong on not accepting this doesn't make the word useless, it just makes them wrong
In terms of people using terms interchangeably, it's mostly because we see those words as being related. Socialist, Marxist, and Communist are terms that are socially seen as all originating from one united philosophy, so people uneducated in what they actually mean will use them as synonyms.
This would not apply to words like "commandist." Bernie Sanders wouldn't call himself a "commandist," and there would be very few left wing political parties explicitly supporting "commandist" governing, so it would a lot more difficult for their opposition to link them to Stalin and Mao. They would be social democrats, something completely unrelated. Nowadays it's very easy, since both Sanders and Stalin called themselves socialists, even though they had fundamentally opposing views.
Bro you could not generalize more if you tried. To assume that the right as a whole cannot distinguish between distinct leftist ideologies is a ridiculous assumption and at best ignorant. This is a big problem with political discourse nowadays. The idea that one’s political ‘enemy’ is wrong and therefore always liable to act out whatever egregious thing one can imagine just to prove some point is ridiculous and unfortunately trite.
so·cial·ism
/ˈsōSHəˌliz(ə)m/
noun
a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
that's the definition. what it was, what it is, and what it always will be. educate the ignorant, shame the willfully ignorant, fight the fascists.
2:52 If I were in that room I would draw an uninterpretable mess. Not because that’s what I think socialism is, but because I need drawing classes if you want anything more than a stick figure.
More seriously, I think this is true but not at unique to communism and socialism as you say. I think “capitalism” is probably at least as poorly defined. Depending on who you ask, I can be a capitalist, a socialist, both, or neither.
Could literally switch the word socialism with fascism here and it’s still poignant
Fascism is more of a mental sickness than an cohesive ideology with a clear definition.
Authoritarians like Stalin and Hitler are pretty much all fascists.
I would actually make this arguement against the world “authoritarian”. It’s an entirely biased word that is just used by especially western liberals at countries that aren’t American friendly liberal “democracies”. Just as China has aspects of censorship, the west has just as much just to different concepts. Also calling China undemocratic or backward just reflects ignorance and a hint of Sinophobia as well as western hegemony. Just as you describe the word socialist as a word entirely dependent on personal beliefs, so is the word authoritarian, it is just that liberals in the west are just so used to hearing that China and other countries are “authoritarian” and so it must be true. I hope you end up reading this.
This is just not true. It's true that the west has aspects of censorship, but they are NOTHING compared to what China has. Western countries still provide the right to freedom of speech and the press, with even state-funded media companies like NPR writing (mostly) unbiased and often critical articles about the president.
While America definitely isn't super democratic-the electoral college is objectively pretty bad, for example-at least the citizens of the country have SOME amount of say over their own federal government. This was not true in the USSR and is not true in China today. In China, you can only vote for one party, and the only candidates that can run in that party are the ones approved by that party. It's an Oligarchy.
The word Authoritarian is actually remarkable consistent compared to most political terms. You ask anybody what "authoritarianism" means and you'll almost certainly get similar answers. It's about censorship, undemocratic governance, and draconic law. It's better defined than basically any other political term.
And just one more thing... I know the type of person you are, dude. Probably a Marxist-Leninist, I would say a Tankie. I've dealt with folks like you before and I've already heard your arguments. Don't think you can just spout nonsense in my comments section without me responding.
@thehayze259 As soon as I saw the line about "authoritarian" I predicted what the rest of the post would be.
And I wasn't wrong 😂
Tankies try to hide their power level challenge (impossible)
Instant like! I've been thinking about the same thing but for "The Left" and "Feminism" adulterated words that muddy the discourse and make discussion impossible. Thank you!
The issue isn't the terms, it's the people muddying the water, using new terms will result in the same problem because they'll just muddy the waters again, after you fight the massive uphill battle of teaching everyone a new term. We're dealing with misinfo, the way to handle that is to correct it, not start over and fight to produce the same ends.
Anarchist catalonia mentioned !!!!
i totally agree but heres another issue marxist has the same issue as socialist and communist as of late
I feel like some people in the comments are intentionally missing the Forrest for the tree for the sake of having an argument.
100%
I mean, you can just define it as public sector control of the MOP and name specific variants. You can have a country exist in complete anarchy and one where the state has absolute authority. One is left anarchy and the other totalitarianism. Both are socialist but they aren't the same.
Fantastic video
Thanks
your conclusion is great, yes absolutely refer to people and yourself by the most succinct, useful term possible. but, the proposed 'solution' of abandoning the word 'socialist' altogether feels rather silly to me. whether you are a Marxist, ML, anarchist or syndicalist, so long as you are principaled and educated in the politics and the history, I want to work with you. the intricacies of whether or not democratic centralism is true to Marx, or if capitalism must first be abolished before the state can be or vice-versa, or if a revolutionary vanguard will inevitably degenerate into a bureaucratic class, or if such a class existed in the Soviet Union-- none of that matters right now! I don't care if you're a 4th wave Marxist-Leninist-Maoist (traditional) who refuses to work with a 4th wave Marxist-Leninist-Maoist (progressive), (those are not real, defined subdivisions), you have ought to still be able to work together for the first three adjectives.
a socialist is merely someone who wants to build socialism. it is much better to fight for that very well established word with such a glorious history of love and kindness behind it than to throw it all away because we're still scared by the red scare.
as for me, my blood will stay red even after I'm dead ;)
This video is so real
If Socialism is to be replaced by its closest equivalent, then we have to go with Marxism but certainly not Leninism.
Leninism is the more realistic approach due to it having its ideology change with how it adapted to the world
Socialism is what republicans call anything that actually helps people.
Maybe you should study economics first, instead of politics.
@@chrisnoctskie5869 capitalism is just as bad as the white conservative male definition of “socialism”
@@borginburkes1819What??
Main takeaway: Trump bad, Biden good. You should let Biden raise your taxes, open the border, keep inflation high, and keep our corrupt justice system.
@@borginburkes1819 and what is “helping people” in your eyes?
Sorry but like no educated person would think that Trudeau or Obama or Hitler are socialist 💀💀💀
Yeahhh socialism is a headache to identify, I personally always liked how Kropotkin went about it but I don’t think it’s the perfect Marxist definition either
Most systems are focused on hierarchies. Socialism justifies anything in the name of equity.
As someone who studies Marxist theory and politics in general, this video kinda isn't very good. Firstly it's based on the premise that Socialism being a vague word is a bad thing. Which, I don't see any issue with and the video certainly didn't convince me this is a problem. Socialsim just means anti capitalism really, anti capitalism in favor of some form collectivism where the community is in charge not private individuals, that's it. Umbrella terms like this are not an issue and exist everywhere. What is an issue is the lack of knowledge about socialism and the decades of propoganda about it obscuring what it actually is, so any non socialist cannot tell you what it really means. You criticize the actual common belief about socialism (relative to North America) without really going in depth as to why this is and why it's even an issue. The clear solution to me is just demystifying what socialism is to more people, and educate people on it. Your proposed solution just makes things even more confusing and divides what should be a unified anti capitalist force. Now instead of being socialists all fighting for the same thing, we now are even more opposed to one another and divided which is already the single largest issue with leftist politics, it doesn't need to be worse. Furthermore it is incredibly biased and really seems to only exist to exclude forms of socialist thought you disagree with, with Marx keeping Marxism (an aleady established term that Marxists are very open about) but excluding people like Lenin from being Marxists and instead their own seperate thing entirely which is just not true at all. And now if we hypothetically stop using the word Socialist or Communist we are now using even more words to describe things which shouldnt be divided in the first place, and now the average non socialist has even more stuff to learn in order to become an anti capitalist. The learning hurdle, which is another problem with leftism, is even more confusing and harder. And even so, it is just going to create more sectionalism and pressures new people to leftism to commit to a sect even earlier when they should be learning and educating themselves, not picking a side. This "solution" fixes a problem that isn't real and just makes things even worse.
Even so you completely misunderstand Marxism or any of these other ideologies. It is true Marx used Communism and Socialism interchangeably when talking about a stage of societal development, but when referring to ideology this is false. A Communist to Marx was a Marxist, he didn't use the term Marxist because at the time it was being stolen by opportunists. To Marx, a Communist was a Socialist who followed Marxist theories, as opposed to Socialists who did not, such as the Anarchists. Lenin did distinguish the two in the context of societal development, to Lenin Communism specifically refers to the stage of societal development wherein all class struggle has been resolved, and as such all class institutions on gone as well, such as money and the state. Communism still as an ideology refers to the same thing, that being a Socialist who follows Marxism, but Communism the societal stage is an extension of the ideas presented by Marx. It's an analysis of where society is headed, not an actual ideology. Lenin's works actually do not contradict Marxism at all, if you read anything he writes he just expands upon Marxism, mostly to expand it's analysis to the "modern" day (modern for the early 20th century anyway) and he never refutes any Marxist theory. To distinguish Marx and Lenin is honestly silly, since to only read Marx and not Lenin would mean to limit your understanding to 19th century political economy, or to develop new ideas yourself (which were probably already developed by Lenin in all honesty). You did not read any actual works by Marx, Engels, or co, only the Manifesto which is fairly surface level with no additional supplementary material. And while I'm not telling you to read Capital, you could definately do more research before making such large claims about any of these ideologies and theories. Same goes for Lenin. Stalin and Mao were both Marxist-Leninists, that is true, but they aren't at all different from Lenin. Lenin didn't use the term but neither Stalin nor Mao made any substantial contributions to Marxist theory, and just applied Lenin and Marx's work (hence the name). Pol Pot was not a Marxist at all, he was from a Marxist organization but himself admitted that he had no idea about anything related to Socialism, he was a uniquely awful individual who no one on the left defends and was only stopped by Vietnam, which you group together as the same ideology. And that isn't even going into what they thought Socialism was, which is not simply the absence of private property, you took that one sentence and used that as a sole definition while ignoring anything else (presumably because it was a hard read, as you admit and just missed it. In which case your research should be more rigorous. Also you claim that's why no one reads it, well yes, we do read it. Leftist spaces you are in might not care about reading and vigorous research but that is not by any means universal)
There is such an awful anti communist bias here as well, like how you equate Lenin and Hitler. Lenin fought for equality and better lives for the poor while Hitler was genocidal which you don't even mention. Actually you put Hitler in the category of people who weren't genocidal. You are saying Stalin and Mao are worse than Hitler, as if the USSR under Stalin wasn't what ultimately defeated the Nazis, and made large denazification efforts post war whereas the West hired the former Nazis for NATO, NASA, and in the case of West Germany back into the government. It feels like such little research was done and you are going based off of vibes, and it isn't helped by the lack of sources anywhere at all at best and at worst its Nazi apologia. Your definition of authoritarianism is also problematic, specifically the word "backward". What you described there is, essentially, anything that isn't western liberalism. Anything that isn't western liberalism is problematic and should be denounced as "authoritarian" without any further nuance or discussion. Even then your examples of non authoritarian Socialists are western European, Orwell (who was a huge racist, Hitler sympathizer, etc), Marx, the anarchists in Catalonia, and the clearly liberal nations of Scandinavia are all clearly supported. The only exceptions to this are western leaders of Trudeau and Obama, and Sankara, who was not Western at all. Towards the end of the video you even lump Hitler into these people, albeit in a different context, but you still focus more on denouncing non western socialists than you do the Nazis, whom you still keep in the discussion of socialism until the end for some reason. You give nuance to the western leftists, and don't criticize them much at all, but then have nothing positive to say about the non western ones. It's a very obvious bias to the West, which is itself the result of propaganda. You completely ignore the question of propaganda the entire video, propaganda is why people don't know what socialism means, this isn't mentioned and instead you attribute the cause to there being different kinds of socialists, and then completely accept all western propaganda without question and then wonder why socialism is so hard to define.
Honestly this video just seems like an attempt to solve a personal issue you have by enforcing new rules on a large community. It seems like you struggle discussing socialism to non socialists due to propaganda, and don't like how there are socialists who you don't like, so try to separate them all for personal convenience. If we are going to actually fight for socialism we need solidarity, not even more sectionalism. I cannot think of any other reason why this is such a problem for you, and instead of labelling entire ideologies without even talking to them first to see what they think and then creating those labels not based on ideological content or historical premise but your own personal perception is really shallow. I would encourage you to talk to more leftists outside your personal bubble and do more research. A lot more research. And cite sources. Having 0 sources cited in a video like this is crazy. It is always good to cite sources and provide links in the description or a comment or whatever, even if you don't say anything you feel needs justified with a source (which is rarely a good mindset to have) providing further reading for those still interested instead of framing this as a self contained end all be all of the issue is more academically honest and transparent which is always good and makes discussions easier.
This guy does Minecraft AND politics? Subscribing rn
Classical fascism is properly understood as national syndicalism with a philosophy of actualist idealism, it was a utopian socialist movement not a reactionary one. The original syndicalist aims were co-opted by fascism's ties to big business and finance as they would prefer to have their unregulated laissez faire private control of industry, commerce, and finance be subjugated to the control of the fascist corporative state than to risk a communist revolution. The corporative or rather occupational state did exist in fascist Italy as was promised by national syndicalism however worker's control of industry which was the core syndicalist demand didn't come about until the socialization policy of the communist Bombacci. There was also no "obsession with the past" as you claim, they had the futurist movement and their nationalism was predicated on palingenesis or rebirth, with an orientation towards the future. Mussolini unlike Hitler was a progressive semi-bourgeois nationalist figure rather than a reactionary one like Hitler, and I say this as a Marxist who opposes what fascism became. Your understanding of fascism is very poor.
I'm sure Ethiopia would be happy to learn all of this 😂
holy shit a definition of fascism made by someone who knows what the fuck they are talking about? I feel like i won the lottery
@@RaptieFeathers Ethiopia was a feudal slave state before Italy invaded. Obviously, the fascists did heinous shit like use chemical weapons but still. I think freeing half a million slaves outweighs that.
This is issue only because of (mainly American and neoliberal) idiotism, that will apply such tag to anything that doesn't complement neoliberal philosophy - Bernie, socdems and others being called socialist, meanwhile Trump, nationalist and others being callrd fascistic etc
Both, Fascism and Socialism has clear-cut definitions if the people you ask - are not fools.
Socialism usually means something like "collectively owned means of production" [be it directly as in workers democracy, or via state as in command economies]
Same as any other definition used in politics, it is variable to an extent
And the issue towards the end with classifying Stalin and Mao as fascistic? It's non-issue, really as neither of them followed fascistic doctrine
Being authoritarian or despotic simply doesn't make one fascist
=> Would this misuse of the term "fascist" make it somehow obsolete? Definetly not! :-)
very well done video keep up the good work bro. def deserve more attention
Everybody dose dream about there own definition ( including stuff like: we have an all-knowing and absolute leader AND everyone in equal)
And Exactly that makes it a useful term for people that are searching for power.
Still a great video, but this is a way better title.
Thanks! That why I felt I had to reupload it :\
17:36 video was pretty good until here. Did you really put hitler and obama on the marxist side. IK you clearly dont think obama and hitler are the same but still, what
That's why I added in the, "some other random stuff" text. I'm sorry if I implied that, it was accidental.
also i love that a channel i found bc of my minecraft obssession now caters to my other obssession as well
The nazis didn't ever call themselves nazis. They called themselves the National Socialist German Worker's Party. It was pretty much a socialist worker's revolution thing, just with a racist bent to it. Nazi was a shorthand name for them that their political opponents used when making fun of them, and since the nazis lost ww2 that's the name that stuck.
Yes, it's true that "Nazi" is a derogatory term their opponents came up with. However, what do you mean by a socialist revolution? Are you equating him to Stalin? If so, I would agree. To Rosa Luxembourg? Absolutely not.
I feel like you missed the point of the video, which is that I don't particularly care what people call themselves if that is antithetical to what they actually are. North Korea, Algeria, Ethiopia, Laos, and the DRC call themselves democratic, and they aren't. And similarly I don't think that just because the Nazis called themselves socialist, that that means we should rope them in with the vast majority of other people who call themselves socialist, seeing as most of those people hated the Nazis.
I think the general rule is that if the name includes "Democratic", "Communist", or "Socialist" then it's almost definitely an authoritarian oppressive regime.
@@thehayze259Socialism will never work.
This is not true. The Nazis used the word Socialist as a political tactic. At the time, many Germans were leftist and a Communist revolution almost actually succeeded, and then in the following decades the Communist Party became one of the largest. The Nazis stole that and made it about nationalism and true "german socialism". Socialism to the Nazis was not about equality it was a buzzword people liked back then stolen to mean something worse. It wasn't out of ideology it was a tactic. When the Nazis came to power they did everything they could to help and support the Capitalists, because they were never Socialists. Hitler even has a famous quote, "If I stand here as a revolutionary, it is a revolutionary against the revolution." There you go he said it himself.
@@thehayze259 You are using a western liberal definition of democratic and are trying to apply it to countries who do not care about western ideology. Your ideological standards are different from theirs and on that basis are denouncing them and are trying to seperate the "good" western socialists and the unpure eastern or southern socialists. This lack of nuance is quite frankly racist (of course I don't mean actual hostility to minorities that is not the extent of what racism is but this is a clear bias for western society and ideology). The people in those places had a revolution and that is what they established. And the material conditions of all of those places are far better than they were before said revolution. They don't perfectly meet your standard and are therefore bad with no further nuance. Even so the things you actually hate are mostly based on western pro capitalist propaganda and aren't real, this video is filled with said propaganda. And the more harsher policies are often in the name of safety against the West, the US alone is responsible for countless government coups because they dared to be anti capitalist. The Russian White Army was aided by so many western powers who began by default hostile to the Red Army, and I could go on. Expecting any of these places to make a utopia when there is constatn threat of western invasion and influence is naive. What would you rather these countries do? Take a chance and risk have fascists take over (see Chile) all over an ideological standard the West created in the first place? I'm not saying these places were perfect by any means and all past Socialist nations needed improvement but it is clear the actual material conditions of Socialist countries were always better than capitalist ones when there is equal economic development. And every socialist country who didn't take these harsh measures were overthrown by the west, the moment the USSR had multiparty parlimentary elections they were overthrown and replaced with Modern Russia for example. To these people, they will sacrifice this in exchange for the undoubtable matierial improvements. These are people who previously could not have healthcare, education, land, etc and now can have all those things. This is the kind of nuance this topic demands and you ignore all of it for the sake of your own ideological purity which is based on western standards and idealism. So I ask you, what is your solution? What is your alternative? What alternative do you propose the countries have taken? I aclnowledge they could have done better but genuinely from their perspective what is the alternative when you have the single largest empire ever in human existence breathing down your neck what else should have been done.
Socialism is a category of thoughts around economics. Misinformation, and the perjorative use of socialism only dilutes the meaning to those ignorant of the history. The groups represented in the internationals were focused on the relation to the means of production and allocation/organization of state power. Liberal democracies with governments that do something for the common man do nothing towards those core issues. You need some demarcation to make clear your seperation from those trends, and unless you make a new system not drawing directly from socialist ideas, you should probably retain the pedigree. The level of awareness of the general public isnt a measure of utility of terms. They dont even understand the orthodoxy in their own countries.
if u factor in the use of a word by people who cant tell you a definition of a word with any reliable sourcing into the definition of that word then u definitely dont need to use it lol
It's not that Marx was the first socialist
Socialism just means that the means of production are owned by the community. Just because people use it differently doesn't mean the meaning is different.
They sure as hell weren't owned by the community under Stalin or Mao, and neither of them took any steps to make sure that was true. Were they not socialists? It's fine if you think they weren't.
Under the state Not the community.
@@thehayze259 I'd say that this was probably an attempt at getting as close to being "owned by the community" as possible, but of course their ideal of how to achieve that isn't the same as other socialists. I guess to expand upon my comment, socialism has one set definition, but there are multiple ways people try to achieve it.
bro did you just call Hitler "not a genocidal monster"?
No, that's why I added in the, "at least not as much." Hitler was probably the single worst leader in world history. I realized in post that it could come off as me not saying that though, sorry lol
@@thehayze259 alright, i kinda figured. they were all responsible for millions of deaths so it was a little surprising that you downgraded him just because he had fewer millions than the others. solid video otherwise.
Great work!
Good points all around.
Your explanation of Marxism is flawed. He wasn't "anti-authoritatianism." In fact, he frequently criticicized anarchism, and criticized the Parisian communards for not constructing a proletarian state. Marx was never concerned with the morality of capitalism. He never made any moral arguments against it. Marx also didn't advocate for worker ownership of property. He advocated for the abolition of property ownership. Finally, Stalin, Mao, Lenin, and Sankara were not dictators, but that's an entirely different conversation
are you a socialist and if so what school of thought ? im a leftcom/council communist
This is what anti-communism does to definitions
I'm an anarcho-communist, and I'm just glad I can talk about the praxis without ever having to use either of those words, haha
I've lately been thinking about calling myself a "Kropotkinist." It's not nearly as loaded a term, and his views on it are actually very different from a lot of other ancom stuff
Communism doesn’t work.
ok ok last one. im in a room with 100 people, and i ask them what happens in the movie kung fu panda. some of them tell me the plot, some of them tell me about a characters arc, some of them just describe their favorite or least favorite parts of the movie. some people have only seen small parts of it or images of characters. some people havent seen the movie at all. some of the people among all of those groups lie about the movie. whether for fun, or because they hate the movie, or because they love it. considering answers from those who have differing opinions on the movie is a good idea because any of them can give you accurate information. however, considering answers from those who are proven to be lying about the movie, and especially those who have never seen it, would be decreasing the likelihood of getting any accurate information. if i considered everyones summary equally and uncritically, of course i wont have a clear picture of what happened in it. but since i have the ability to watch the movie myself, or even just confirm whether the people i asked had seen it, i would know that the other summaries arent worth considering at all. so if i were to say “stop talking about kung fu panda that movie has no coherent plot” because too many people told me that Po killed himself, i would just be wrong.
This isn't super accurate either, because we have copies of the movie Kung Fu Panda. Even if everyone were to tell you different things, you can all still sit down together and watch the same movie. It's a physical, material thing that you can all observe the same way (assuming none of them are deaf or blind).
However, a term like Socialism is not a material thing, so there is nothing about it to observe other than how the term is used. We have the Communist Manifesto, but to some degree, Marx even contradicted himself a few times, and changed his opinions over time. And ONLY using the manifesto would discount the writing of all of the self described socialists who came after, like Lenin, Luxembourg, Orwell, etc. If everybody uses it in different, mutually exclusive ways, then the word loses its functionality. Kung Fu Panda would not.
@@thehayze259 terms are concrete in the sense that they’re made by people and used by people. everyone in the world cant all sit down and watch the real kung fu panda any more than they can watch the development of the actual concept of socialism. but 20 people, 5 people, even 1 person can sit down and actually engage with the discourse. see what evidence people have, see who’s blatantly lying (for example, George Orwell, a self proclaimed democratic socialist, gave the UK a list of suspected communists, and the Nazis famously began their reign of terror by rounding up socialists and communists, while using the term, “national socialism” to appeal to the working class population who had just lost a war). it takes more time but thats true of anything controversial. your argument is that controversy makes words meaningless. not that it makes academic rigor crucial.
I like mutualism
Naw u trippin bruv
5:23 He didn't really hate bIack people, for there was basically none of them in Germany, they were the least of his corncers. In fact he showed more respect to Jesse owens than Roosevelt did.
No, he REALLY hated Black people. Here's a quote from a wikipedia article:
In Mein Kampf, Hitler described children resulting from marriages to African occupation soldiers as a contamination of the white race "by negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe."[8] He thought that "Jews were responsible for bringing Negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of bastardizing the White race which they hate and thus lowering its cultural and political level so that the Jew might dominate."[9] He also implied that this was a plot on the part of the French since the population of France was being increasingly "negrified".[10]
The only reason he didn't focus on black people more was that there were only a very small number in a country with tens of millions of people. Didn't mean he didn't hate em.
@@thehayze259true he definitely didn’t like them but he saw them just a tiny bit better than Jewish people
This is some bulkshit
So from the title and looking through the comments, I know already that this video is full of shit.
Ah well, that's too bad.
The word socialism, just like the concept, doesn't work in real life.