What is Socialism? | Socialism Explained

I provide a top-level overview of socialism covering orthodox traditional socialism and briefly, Leninism, Stalinism, and Mao.

Related Videos:

[Oirausu]

02:03 Materialism
02:32 Modes of production
04:52 Means of production
06:10 Clases sociales
07:23 Idealism
09:10 Labor
10:00 The marxist critique of Capitalism: Explotación laboral
10:26 Trabajo necesario
11:00 Surplus labor
15:30 Comunism
17:05 Privae property
17:28 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
19:00 Orthodox comunism

19:55 From capitalism to Socialism
20:02 Unions
22:22 Seize political power and stablish a (true) democracy
23:52 Use the political power to implement socialist policies
----
24:57 Stages of Comunism
26:32 "vulgar socialism"
----
31:32 La evolución de la ideología socialista

[Octoberfurst]

Outstanding presentation! This was a very fair and open talk. Loved it!

[Ashin_Kusher]

Thank you for putting this out there. Im new to anarchism and marxism, and im adhd so i cant focus long enough to read. So this is my main way of obtaining knowledge. Thank you sir, id like to smoke a joint with you sometime.

[pseudonamed]

very nice overview. helped me to understand the different types of communism, the differing opinions amongst communists, and also how it has actually played out in nations that tried to implement it

[rhorizon]

21:55 Once we realize that we are all proletariat before we are black or white or Christian or Muslim, etc. Once we realize that we are first and foremost proletariat and we have that in common, we will begin to recognize our power in numbers.

[dilekuz]

Thank you. Is it possible to get rid of the background noise? There is a high pitch metallic sound coming from the back.

[ruhaimahamed]

It was informative and benefitted me immensely. Thank you

[JohnSmith-vmrx]

Excellent video dude! Have you made any additional videos that are more in depth?

[volfangoverdi]

Actually it's not true that the United States was focused mostly on the Pacific Theatre in WWII. There was an explicit American war policy called "Germany First" that ensured the primary focus and priority of the U.S. Army was the defeat of Germany. In fact, about three quarters of U.S. casualties in WWII occurred in the European Theatre while the remaining quarter resulted from the clash with Japan. Also, while it is true that the Red Army took the brunt of the German Wehrmacht, it is reductive to only look at casualties to determine each country's contribution in defeating the Axis. The Lend-lease agreement and the resulting shipments of enormous amounts of supplies and materiel to the Soviet Union was crucial in the victory, along with the provision of key intel and direct military support through the intense bombing of German cities and infrastructure. Without Lend-lease supplies, the USSR would not have survived the Second World War.

[ThuNguyen-jint]

just a Vietnamese who actually live through “socialism” u are asking for, the “freedom” you expecting there is something “Citizen, u have broke the law but if u give me 500k Dong(25dollars), i will allow u to go cause my monthly wage is so fucking low that i can only feed my family through corruption”-Police or Military personnel in Viet Nam till today

[WOoka]

Thank you - good video.

Can you touch on whether the famine that happened in North Korea is for the same reason it happened in Soviet and China?

Also, why didn’t this famine happen in South Korea, which also industrialized rapidly?

[sofia.eris.bauhaus]

what is this "not a moral argument" supposed to mean, exactly? was Marx not morally opposed to the exploitation he speaks of? what kind of "beef" does he have, if not moral? aestetic? are there marxists who think that exploitation is morally neutral or good?

i hear that line repeated so often, yet people seem never seem to explain why they say it or do anything with that statement.

[RexWu]

one of the better explanations on socialism. most of the vids online are just 30 minutes of dumpster burning on capitalism.

But a few things.

who deserves the surplus?

a - the business owner who took out risk, created systems of management, poured their own capital onto a venture with no guarantee it will work out or that they'll even get their money back
b - person who gets hired to do some work and gets paid no matter what, even if the company goes bust.
c - 3rd option i'm not considering?

If a person is scheduled for 8 hours, but only works 6 hours, they still get those 2 hours of labor in the form of an 8 hour paycheck. Am i missing something here?

If you abolish personal property, that removes the very innate human desire to constantly work towards gain. is that not directly opposite to the materialism that marx speaks on?

I've never heard anyone accuse Stalin or Mao or any Communist leader of intentionally causing famines and starvation. where is the literature on this? Isn't it fundamentally agreed that those were results of the policies that they and their regimes put forth?

Would you say that the rapid industrialization that led to widespread starvation was not the result of the rapid control that mao and stalin and their regimes trying to control a system that they had no business trying to control?

[lalala-ltfe]

I don't understand why rapid industrialization causes famine. Where can I find a full explanation?

[seth]

God forbid people who are stark capitalist fans would want to watch this video

[Zakdayak]

Where's the link on class consciousness?

[jeromyrutter]

Marx didn't invent the Labor Theory of Value, he only expanded it. People like Adam Smith and John Locke, both, used a version of the LTV. Locke also used a Labor Theory of Property, while arguing that the earth was given to all mankind for subsistence....aka, the commons...aka socialism. Thomas Jefferson is an American who would argue the same thing (in a letter to Madison). Both Locke and Jefferson should be seen as Free Market Socialists (libertarian socialists). The LTP is invoked by everyone, from Ricardian Socialists, like Thomas Hodgeskin, to modern day "libertarians"...the people who scream "taxation is theft!". An argument based on earning something is tantamount to the LTP. What this does in capitalism is create one of Marx's capitalist contradictions. if the LVP is applied universally, then the Ricardian Socialists were correct: wage labor is theft. The surplus value is earned by the laborers, who should be entitled to the full extent of their labor. instead, they are denied the very principle that allows the capitalist to own the factory. Owning something is not labor. The idea of profit only applies to owning something, because laborers don't see profit. the profit motive is disconnected from labor. that changes under worker cooperatives, when workers eliminate the middleman, and are entitled to whatever the product sells for on the market. According to Mutualist theory, competition (without things like patents) would drive prices down to cost. the modern version of cost contains at least part of the LTV, otherwise, labor cannot be included in cost. by eliminating the capitalist owner(s), the distinction between owner and producer (labor) is eliminated. wealth automatically gets distributed on a wider scale, according to participants, and the necessity of the state wanes. Social Liberalism and Social Democracy become less of a necessity to redistribute already redistributed wealth (wage labor redistributes wealth to the owning class). If you took Immanuel Kant's universal principle in deontological ethics (the categorical imperative), it becomes clear that capitalism cannot work. not everyone CAN be an owner of capital, and this, necessarily, means there will be superiors/inferiors in power. the universal principal is a principal of equality in a sense. it has to apply to everyone equally. the consequence is wealth/poverty that creates class antagonism, as well as revolution and crime, because the one universal law that cannot be overruled is the first rule of life: survive.

Personal property includes things like the land/house you live on. it's usually based on occupancy and use, or usufruct (from the community, which, in the more private version, would include a land value tax for private use). some version of personal property are treated as private property. the biggest problem with capitalist private property is known as absentee property, property you own but do not use or occupy yourself. this is what allows the capitalist to own the factory, and it's also what allows absentee landlordism to exist. barring absentee property, no one would rent houses anymore. they would own them.

The division is also carried out by what's known as cultural marxism. The slogan of Marx was "workers of the world, unite!". The cultural shift has worked to divide people even more. the workers on the right, for example, see CRT as a divisive tactic equivalent to what Marx and Engles say about the bourgois. This is why i've tried to ignore the cultural wars and focus on the workers recognizing that they have the same problem, and it's not each other.

Dictatorship of the Proletariat - centralized democracy. direct democracy, by it's very nature, is decentralized. to someone like Bakunin, centralized democracy is not so different from the Dictatorship of the Bourgoisie. The anarchists foresaw Lenin coming. The same point of contention would exist between Marx and the anarchists: The dictatorship would be misunderstood. Lenin achieved power via a coup d'etat after the Bolsheviks lost an election. essentially, he stole the russian provisional government. There is an individualism that still exists in decentralization that kind of vanishes in centralization. Benjamin Tucker, who was an individualist anarchist (a Proudhonian/Stirner socialist against communism, so the distinction existed before lenin, just not in Marxism) wrote of the state not being able to wither away, as it is the tendency of the state to grow, not recognizing any boundaries. a state religion would be the result, and the dictatorship of the majority would, essentially, wipe out individualism. it's an argument against excessive democracy as well as centralized. from the ground up cannot be properly achieved if individuals lose their agency and autonomy via the majority. you cannot have a majority without first having individuals that comprise it. society has to start with the individual, the citizen, the most fundamental piece of any society.

[nnnrr]

not me trying to figure out how to make this happen in the US-

[gordonhyatt]

This video is mislabeled it is about Marxism not socialism!

[WolfRaven-jmcm]

Lmfao! Did 11:00 did you really just say that you are not paid for the hours you work?

Uhh, that's not how that works.

If you sign a contract to work for a wage then you get paid per hour.

If you sign a contract for a salary then your pay is based on that contract. You said, "working this amount of time for this amount of money is what I need."

It's hard to consider anything else you will say after this point will be meaningful.