Que the “but that wasn’t REAL socialism” crowd in 3…2…1.

"The vice of capitalism is that it distributes blessings unequally. The virtue of socialism is that it distributes miseries equally". ~ Churchill

When anybody says "But that wasn't real socialism" or "Real socialism has never been tried", what they really mean is "They never put ME in charge of everything"

I had a relative who lived on a commune for a time. He left because he was tired of working his butt off to keep it running while many of the others refused to do anything but write poetry and pursue intellectual interests. They felt that they were contributing by enlightening themselves and others. He disagreed. From his account the community fell apart when the physical labor force left. The sad part is that to this day he thinks that the key to making it work would have been to force everyone to share the physical work load more equally. All while enjoying a retirement earned by working for 40+ years for a major manufacturer and being wise with his earnings.

I had a dear friend who lived in one of those socialist communities you mentioned. He grew up on a family farm, did landscaping, was very mechanically gifted and a basic jack of all trades. He desperately wanted to live in a community of people who supported each other’s needs while living peacefully and happily with each other. He left after six months in extreme disappointment and physical exhaustion. He was constantly doing the tasks other people were assigned because he was more experienced than they, their back hurt, they didn’t like pulling weeds as much as he did, one man frequently used the excuse that he didn’t sleep all night because he was traumatized as someone cooked meat for dinner and he was forced to smell it. Those few who worked became resentful and started hiding food so they’d have enough to eat to keep working. When people who received without working discovered he was taking a larger portion, they accused him of being greedy and stealing from them. He took his dog and left, the community collapsed.

Imagine someone in Russia under Stalin or in China under Mao saying, "But this isn't real socialism - real socialism has never been tried." They would have been dealt with quickly and rather harshly.

I worked for a former College Professor who was a Sociologist. Every semester he gave the very same opening assignment: Create the Monopoly game to where all the money is redistributed, and nobody is allowed to be so rich that they own the vast majority of property. Same result year after year after year...yes, it can easily be done; however, the end result is, "It's boring." You remove the reward of capitalism and basically, you're left with nothing that anyone wants to play. There is no purpose, there is no reward for working harder, there is no mountain to climb, there isn't a means by which to get ahead. And in reality, everyone except the 1% who run the country are equally poor.

When you have to use threats of violence or death to keep your society running, no wonder it's doomed to fail.

Socialism is attractive to people who lack the motivation to make money and is seen as a way to spread wealth equally which to them means everyone being equally well taken care of. What they don’t realize is the reality of a society full of people being equally unmotivated to work hard enough to meet the most basic needs of the people will mean that everyone is equally destitute and that society will break down. Of course there is always an exception with socialist supporters, always an excuse.

There is no utopia. Dystopia is the result.

What your average socialist means when they say "Real socialism hasn't been tried!" What they mean is that socialism with them in charge hasn't been tried.

But it has been tried, and every time with the same disastrous results. There's no way to do a wrong thing the right way.

My step mother was raised and served in the USSR. She was in charge of a hospital and an infectious disease specialist. She is brilliant and was a top scientist for years. She had to manage an apartment building to make enough money to live. Her family was located in Siberia and they were issued a motorcycle for their sole family vehicle. If your food rations weren’t enough, which they never were, and you decided to grow a garden to make up the gap, you could only get away with growing a certain small amount before the government would come in and confiscate it. People were regularly “disappeared” and sent off to gulags and everyone just moved on with life like they never existed. The scary thing is, even now, 34 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, she is still indoctrinated into believing it was a viable system of governance. Whole wards of her hospital were full of patients left to die because they simply didn’t have medicine. Entire families were vanished to a gulag. Dozens of villages had every scrap of food taken so often they resorted to eating sawdust and eventually their own children. The absolute poverty caused by socialism cannot be overstated.

Worth noting: The original Mayflower compact was a collective with communally owned farming land and with foodstuffs distributed on a basis of need regardless of individual production effort. This failed after one season. They had to bum off the neighbors (Native Americans) to avoid starvation.

I had a teacher that used to tell me about the how's and whys of his resistance to, and eventual escape from, the Communist takeover of Hungary. True accounts of someone who lived through it. No whiny pipsqueak defending socialism could ever hold the same gravitas as an old, and respected, teacher reminiscing about watching soldiers seize control of his people.

The real socialism had never been and will never be tried because it is impossible to do so. You can't have a stateless society as humans progress, you need structure, you need social classes, you need laws and orders, a society without state is anarchy. The ideology is kinda doomed from the start.

This was the simplest, and best, refutation of the argument that "real socialism has never been tried" that I have ever seen. Just excellent. The inclusion of utopian communes was the real linchpin of this video.

Do one on "why nuclear is the only viable energy source" cleanest, safest, most reliable source of energy. Or you can do one on "why over regulation is not protecting us but preventing progress".

I have lived in a Socialist country, Soviet Union and participated in the underground movement that destroyed it. Everyone was equally poor just like slaves on the plantations are poor. Equality: check. O wait, actually no, that's not true. There was a tiny tiny ruling elite, the upper echelon of the Communist Party, about few thousand strong, that controlled every last resource, every factory, all the land, police, armed forces and entire army of undercover KGB agents. Those people were the true elites if there ever was one. Not the 1% like in US, but 0.0001%. Much better! They had luxurious villas (we called them "safe houses", idk how they called them themselves) that officially didn't exist. I've seen one of those myself, it was hidden behind the trees, surrounded with high fences with the barbed wire on top, patrolled by armed guards with attack dogs 24/7 and if you waited long enough you could eventually see a black limousine going in or leaving. Soviet Union imported the best French vines during all of it's existence, and none of it ever reached the shops open for the general population. Are you kidding, you want to give the good stuff to the slaves? It all ended up in those villas. In the normal shops you were lucky if you could buy butter or watery sausages. On a normal day you couldn't, not for any money... which you didn't have anyway. Goes without saying nobody had any means of production just like Marx prescribed. To even think about that was a serious crime. What an ordinary citizen had was a tiny bug infested flat, usually kitchen and one small room, or kitchen and two small rooms if you had a bigger family. You couldn't own your flat though, it was a property of the state, just like the land it was built upon, and you were renting it from the state. Just like slaves on the American south had those tiny huts which were provided for them by the slaveowner. You had to work in Soviet Union, that was the law. Like a good little slave you had to work your whole life, you could not leave Soviet Union, which was one big slave plantation, until you died in there. If you didn't like this reality and tried to rebel against it, you'll end up in the prison camps in Siberia called _Gulag_ -- where they forced you to work on the mines, anyway. Yes there has been true Socialism, even long before Marx. All that Marx did was giving it a new name and ideological justification. Under the hood, nothing changed. You can see today how popular Socialism is among the American blacks. All the people who created BLM were hardcore Marxists. Shows you how desperately those people hate their freedom. They want to go back to slavery, where you are taken care of by the slaveowner, life is simple, no need to make hard decisions, everything's already decided for you. Ofc people want it... just give it a different name and some kind of ideological justification and you'll have millions signing up. It's hard to be free, that's the problem with mankind. Most of us prefer the safe life of a slave. Nobody wants to admit that thou, makes us look bad...

Let me simplify it. Someone has to be in charge. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

My issue is that the successful capitalists are financing socalist politicians in both political parties, to the detriment of their newer capitalist competition.

The main problem with a (socialist) society whose govt centrally controls all the means of production and aims to distribute everything produced equaly is that (assuming that it could be done) you basically remove the biggest driving force of every economy, which is the human desire to improve each day by reaping the fruits of his labor using his own work, initiative, risk and ingenuity. If you're suddenly become a worker that is rewarded an x amount payment either in cash or goods, regardless of what you produce or how much you work, several things will happen, 3 of which: 1) You'll start wanting to work as less as possible in order to get your benefits without punishment 2) You'll start comparing yourself to others and ask why do you have to work more than other people if they're making the same as you and getting by managing to work less. 3) there is also the problem of "quality of work". How much does an engineer deserve to earn compared to a farmer? Why? How to keep people satisfied with that? (spoiler alert: you cant) The economy then enters a viscious downward spiral cycle where everyone will start to work less and less because the benefits are the same, and the result is that the GDP of the economy falls, in other words, the size of the cake to be sliced and distributed shrinks more and more, meaning that there is less and less for everybody. This will require an even more tyrannical government to monitor people and enforce they are doing their share of work, which is not only impractical but oppressive and extremely unmotivating for workers, which only adds further inneficiency to the system. You can think of any economy as the sum of all relations of production and exchange of value as a result of people's desire to improve himself day by day. Once the government renders that desire, the whole foundation of the economy falls. There are many other problems like for example price setting, a recurrent problem in the former USSR, but I will not get into that as I already typed in too much.

I remember Poland in the 80's Miserable place. People were miserable, the shops were empty, black market was rife. Today, beautiful country. Lots of development, clean, wealthy, a very desirable place to live. Socialists hate these examples, especially former socialists hell holes that embrace Western Freemarket capitalism. It's direct evidence against their crappy arguments and ideology.

They say it wasn't real socialism to give them an excuse to do it again, its just that simple.

There's a book out there, 'California's Utopian Colonies' written by Robert Hine, that chronicles attempts at idealistic communities in the Golden State. All of them were variations of socialism, all of them failed. The ones that lasted the longest, sometimes decades, were religious, based around a strong charismatic leader that inspired the core members. They invariably collapsed when the leader died or was exposed as a fraud.

Ludwig Von Mises demonstrated the other fatal flaw of socialism: Its inability to rationally calculate, ie without a market to set prices, socialism cannot know WHAT to produce and how MUCH of it to produce. That is why you have mass deprivation under socialism. Here is a recording of a lecture I attended in 1981: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/mNiFhNN1lp6me5s.html

Socialism isn't an end. It's the means to acquiring something else. Power.

Socialists clearly don't think through basic economics. The desire for socialism seems to stem from a desire of individuals to receive resources they don't own that they view as plentiful. I hear talk of 'universal income' without any consideration for the basics of production/consumption of products and services (i.e. generating and receiving 'value'). That paradigm also directly implies that forced labor *must* happen.

I have a great appreciation for knowing you people at the Why Minutes are aware of the Roblox Death sound. If you missed it, 2:39

The problem is people in power, regardless of system, they are not infallible, or always noble.

In Canada, we paid good money for our socialist industries but found they couldn't turn a profit but instead were a big drag on the public purse.

At some point the population gets too large for all to participate at the council meetings. After that point it is no longer a social society with all participating in the planning. At that point you have chiefs and councils, They decide who gets what and when.

Please dont stop. These videos are amazing in my homeschool.

Socialism - great system, wrong species.

I appreciate your insights to this topic. It really helps me in debates with social democrats and communists outright. Could you possibly make a short expanding on why the communes failed so horribly? I fully expect they failed because people left but in debates if I just say they failed because people left it would be a weak argument

The settlement that gave us thankgiving tried it. The plan was that everyone would contribute to the community, and that everyone would get an equal share of the resources that were produced. It did not matter what you provided. So, there were a lot of families that had not produced enough for thier own survival, but they were provided an equal share out of the communities resources. It became obvious that they were going to starve long before spring came. So they asked the natives for help. The natives had some extra, but that was intended in case the winter was long. But the gave it anyways. They settlers revised their rules, everyone was to be responsible for producing their own resources. The following harvest, they had an excess of food, and decided to thank those that had risked survival do that the settlers could survive. So one of the lessons of thanksgiving is that socialism doesn't care if you survive, as long as you die with everyone else. At least you'll die equal.

Knocking it out of the ballpark yet again, Nick. Thank you.

By siezing the means of production and redistributing it, you are creating a government that has to manually control for every resource and service needed for society (at the minimum), this is an issue for one main reason. Economies are incredibly intricate ecosystems that often fluctuate based on a myriad of factors. Something seemingly as simple as a pencil has to have multiple proceeses and resources to make it mass produced. Now expand that to everything, and you see why it might be an issue- hell even the epitome of hubris to assume any bureaucracy, however intelligent, could ever be capable of effectively commanding a national economy.

Really doesn't matter, all of these systems involve humans so expect: greed, lies, violence, etc.

Its been tried, you do realise that the KIBBUTZ system was the most beautiful version of it.... borne out of tragedy. Alas, it took two generations for it to fail. Strange how its NEVER used as an example.

So the government must control the means of production. What is the ultimate means of production? The individual person is the ultimate means of production.

The author of this video failed to include many things, such as: 1. Karl Max, He was the son of millionaires, after spending his inheritance on alcohol and women, he married a rich widow where he again spent her fortune, but before that he impregnated one of his maids. It was at that moment when he had nothing that he began his political role of asking the government to provide everything to its citizens, but when he had money he never helped anyone. 2. Nor was it mentioned how Karl Max wrote a manifesto in which he said that all loyalty of the individual should be to the government and attacked the structures of the family and churches. In addition to saying that the government should have the power to eliminate inferior and undesirable races from its territory. These ideas caught the attention of a young Adolf Hitler who used them to create his own political party called: Socialist Party of German Workers, also known as NAZIS. 3. He also said the final goal of socialism is communism, taking into account that many aspires to a system that murdered more than 120 million people, 70 million more if you count the dead of WWII since Nazism is a form of socialism to create their ideal society is somewhat worrying. 4. It is also worrying that young people do not realize that the only way to apply the ideas of that idiot Karl Max is by taking away all their rights and leaving them at the mercy of the government. There are socialist countries where they send you to prison for 7 years in prison for displaying a poster that criticizes the government. 5. Nor is it mentioned how socialist/communist leaders live in palaces like emperors while their people starve.

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” was so seductive that it helped inspire communists for over a century, and still appeals to those whose needs exceed their abilities.

The problem is that in an extremist society the distinction of left and right is pointless, the outcome is the same.

“From each according to their ability, to each according to their need” is the credo of plantation slavery.

I would have liked to see you delve more on exactly why the US communes failed, and if any succeeded for any length of time. Let's steelman the argument. What does the *most successful* socialist experiment look like, and what can we learn from that? Because, I imagine it might be possible to have 30 like-minded people in a close-knit community all helping each other. But the moment the commune is big enough to not know, *and explicitly trust,* your neighbors, is the point where force would have to come in.

The kind of government you have is extremely important. A dictatorship with a socialist economic system and a democracy with a socialist economic system would look very different. "Real" socialism has never been tried, neither has a real democracy. We have the technology to actually have a real, direct democracy, but just like real socialism and a real democracy, the greedy powerful people at the top will never let that happen. A republic is a compromise. It affords the people with some assemblance of power, but allows for the rich to bribe and influence the lawmakers.

The Soviet Union called themselves "CCCP", The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" for a reason. They KNEW Communism was the extreme version of Socialism. In the early Americas, the Virginia Compact was inacted. It pooled the labor of all, and each member of the Compact would share in the bounty. That first year, the people taking part nearly starved to death because the people forgot to work with their fellows, and ended up rescued by the nearby Indian Tribe. The compact was abolished, private property was inacted by the Group, and.individual effort went towards families and their posterity. The end of the second year, the members of the original compact did so well, they invited the Indian Tribe to a meal. The beginnings of what we call today "Thanksgiving". Socialism has never worked, and never will, because some will never agree to share... You know, like Klaus Schwab.

You know what’s nice? Working hard for what you can get, getting it and keeping it. That’s about as good as life gets.

Funny story, I don't have cable but I recently was gifted a DVD of "The Handmaid's Tale" as a Christmas present. Yes, I opened it early and watched some of it because I don't have that many hours to waste in a day. One thing I did notice when this old video popped up for some reason on my youtube was a stark similarity. At first I was confused but it made complete sense that the link is complete and total with the two following phrases" 1. From each according to their ability and to each according to their needs. 2. The abolition of the private ownership of the means of production. In short, "The Handmaid's Tale" is literally the embodiment of a socialist utopia.

Nick Freitas without a beard is nightmare fuel. You're great Nick... don't lose the beard. It looks too good.

No one rules alone, even if you can be the benevolent dictator, can you really be sure that everyone who works for you is also going to be benevolent?

About a year or two ago, my parents made friends with an old couple who had escaped the Castro regime in Cuba at a church they visited. Both of them had gone into the US military after they became citizens here, and were proud patriotic veterans by the time of the meeting. The Cuban woman told my parents, in roughly these words, “I just don’t understand how young people in this nation are so brainwashed. Whenever they say ‘it wasn’t real Socialism,’ my response is always ‘I and my husband have lived in it, and let me tell you, yes it was and always is.’ The young people of Cuba back then are a mirror of you young Socialists in America today. And you will always get the same result.” Bottom line my family took from the mouth of experienced wisdom: Socialism will always create totalitarianism and poverty. There is no right way to do it. It’s all wrong all the time.

Wow. Nick looks so different without the beard.

When i was poor and homeless i never once received a dime from anyone. When i made low wages but had a place i never once received a dime or help from anyone. When i made average pay and had a nice house people started needing help and a place to stay...every last one betrayed me in one way or another. Now, i make great money after working my ass off all those years and dreaming, i rent, not own...at least once a week i hear a comment about my income being high or how i have nice things i should share the wealth. No. I was told as a 15 year old kid in school working a full time job and living on my own that " i need to do for myself, because its a life lesson, its not anyones responsibility but your own to feed you or put a roof over your head" and i took that to heart. Now that im successful, i find people think the opposite is true. And its not the poor that want in my experience, nor the wealthy...the ones that want the most from you for nothing are the ones most capable of doing it themselves but to lazy to do it, the middle class.

"Real Socialism" is impossible. People generally talk about two variations of the same thing... either all property is communally owned, or nothing is owned. The problem with that is that "ownership", from a practical sense, is basically determined by who makes the decisions for what to do with a given piece of property (whether that property is land, goods, or resources). We can't democratically determine what to do with a given piece of property because there are millions, probably even billions, of "pieces of property" in the United States alone... if everyone had to vote on how to use everything, we would spend all our time voting, never actually finish, and never have time to actually enact any of the things we voted on. Therefore, what always ends up happening is either the property is split up into a bunch of local areas where each local area is the only one who gets a say over what happens with "their" property (which leads to tribalism, conflicts between groups when one group needs to use another group's property, and disparate outcomes when some groups' property is more valuable than others, eventually ending the whole point of socialism) or we let the government decide what gets done with "everybody's" property, and pretend that voting for the government makes them the embodiment of the will of the people and thus the will of the people is still driving the decisions of what to do with "everybody's" property... except they're not actually the embodiment of the will of the people, they are instead... people. They're people that now own everything, that now make the decisions for what to do with everything. And you've successfully replaced the CEOs of Capitalism with an elite political class that often simply chooses to do away with troublesome things like elections that might otherwise interrupt their "owning everything" gig that you've so kindly voted them into. It still ends up being a small, elite group owning "everything"... the difference being that in Capitalism you (yes you!) can still own things and, by owning things, invest those things until you manage to work up to become one of those CEOs... whereas in these government-controlled "socialist" countries... you can't. Not only can you not own things, but if you try and "work your way up" and the elites don't like it, they tend to do away with you... exiled to the gulag archipelago, disappeared in the sloped floors of Treblinka, starved to death in the communal farms or work camps in China, or just straight-up shot in broad daylight in Cambodia.

From each according to their abilities means someone else will test and determine what you MUST do. To each according to their needs means someone else will tell you what you need. Historically there's a select few that tell you what to do and need everything to compensate them for their exhausting work deciding for everyone else.

Marx: "All production of value comes from labor" Also Marx: "We must seize the means of production"

A documentary I watched about an American commune ended with its last member sighing and saying "The thing is, people like to own stuff."

There is a very important part Marx left out of his original statement. Here is a much clearer version: _THE STATE WILL TAKE_ From each according to their ability, _THE STATE WILL GIVE_ To each according to their need. Much clearer.

Tell it like it is!

The best channel on the internet! Can’t wait til more people start catching on and word spreads!

I've always felt that "true" socialism is the greatest utopia, a fair society where everyone gives everything they can and only takes what they need. However, "true" is subjective and unachievable without extreme force. One bad agent will bring the entire system down simply with greed or laziness. Capitalism is the fairest solution in a democratic society, where fairness is akin to karma.

Communism applies the gnostic doctrine of flux (worship of change) in a materialistic sphere, as in, it continuously “progresses” to new states and doctrines to appear revolutionary no matter who or what is in power, hence why many communists fight against each other, and the definition of “true” communism varies.

One strange modern creation as a consequence of feminism in western society is plenty of career women in high positions of power in government who have no children. Their desire to "mother" however has not gone away, instead channelled into a desire to "protect" something else, mainly the poor and immigrant culture who do not work, with endless socialist handouts. This has been pushed into more extremes in recent years to unsustainable levels, however arguing against it results in being labelled as a classist, bigot or racist, all illogical but effective methods of sending your public persona straight to gulag.

Great channel, Nick. Instead of creating an egalitarian society, socialism invariably ends up benefiting only the Ruling Class, with the rest of us their bondservants in serfdom. The idealists and utopians presume (or at least say) that the noble attributes of humankind will prevail to make the perfect society -- except that they forget the fact that human nature is inherently flawed, and left to itself will always seek its own gain.

The funniest part to me is that all the people that say socialism hasn't been tried don't really want socialism, what they want is for the government to pay for everything. What they really mostly want is for some type of minimum cost of living to be paid by the government to all of the citizens, along with funding most things like roads and schools, and they think this has never been done. If this was done then they wouldn't care if the government owns the production or if private citizens do, just as long as everyone gets their basic needs covered. It's not socialism, but it is what they want. The hilarious part is that they have no idea this is actually being tried out and experimented with in various parts of the world. Probably the most visible being Saudi Arabia with the citizens account program which pays the citizens of Saudi Arabia money each month. The common theme in most of these places is that it is funded by oil sales. Considering most of the people that want socialism also want fossil fuels to go away they aren't huge fans of these countries. But for the rest of us it's a great experiment in what happens when you give money to people and they don't need to work to survive. One of the interesting thins is that they have around 6 million foreign workers, around 20% of the population and something like 40% of the people working. These are people that don't get that money from the government since they aren't citizens. To put it in perspective the US has nearly 30 million foreign workers, but that is around half as many per capita. Part of that could be because of oil workers coming to the country, but I think at least some has to be because they don't have enough labor force participation to meet their needs internally. Anyway it's kind of interesting to see that just paying people a minimum living amount from the government results in labor participation falling enough that you need to import labor. Although it also means that we have reached a point where it's possible as long as you are relying on foreign workers and the government has the funds available. The US and most countries don't have the funds available, but as technology continues to progress maybe we will. Personally I think that is the biggest thing proponents of socialism are missing, as technology advances you need fewer and fewer people devoted to manual labor to keep everyone alive and everything running. At one point at least 90% of society was laboring just to keep us all alive, either by getting food, building shelter, making clothing, etc. Even children were involved during most of human history. Now labor force participation rates only need to be 50-60% of the total population, and that includes a ton of people that are involved in healthcare, research, entertainment, etc. Eventually we will probably reach a point that so few people need to be involved that the government will be able to provide the basic necessities to people, even without the government needing to control the means of production. We could reach that point in just a couple of decades with the right technological breakthroughs, although I'm guessing it's probably at least a couple of hundred years off before the entire world reaches that point.

we have a joke in Poland. Never ask woman for her age, man for his wages and Party leaders how many hours they've worked in a factory.

Cool video glad i came across this channel

Since there are no rewards for excellence, there is none. Kind of a death to society thing.

Socialism, communism and facism ALL limit creativity and possibilities. Then there's the why should some work so hard to have it taken away. They tried Socialism in VA, and it failed horribly. We weren't taught this in history class.

Wasn't the Jim Jones sanctuary in French Guyana a commune? How did that turn out?

Socialism/communism remind me a great deal of an M. C. Escher engraving. Looks really awesome on paper, but can never be accomplished in reality.

The gov’t tried this in the 1930’s & it prolonged the Great Depression. We would have lost WWII had the Roosevelt administration not changed its policies towards capitalist markets. Hitler hoped we would keep the authoritarian socialist & non aggressive views of the Roosevelt admin toward our markets...

Let's be honest here. "Real" Socialism is a great idea, but it can only work in a society that fully embraces the idea. And, unfortunately, the Human Animal isn't able to do that. why? because we have this annoying concept of "Individuality". we still think of ourselves as "I", and "Me". And that's just how we are. For Socialism to work, there needs to be a society that has no individuality, but only a "Group" identity. And there are lots of those in the world. Bee hives, ant colonies, termite colonies, and the list goes on. But they are all what's known as a "Hive mind". And Humans are not a "Hive Mind".

I actually got around to reading Marx one day, and I was surprised to see that not much of what he actually thought was an actionable plan for political change. He actually said that given the conditions of the time, the rule had to be "From each according to his ability, to each according to his work," and that they actually should only be paid if they work because of the problem of scarcity. The more popular motto was apparently intended for a post-scarcity society where human labor isn't needed to produce an abundance of goods... but it sounded nice and became the rallying cry of leftists everywhere, who tried to promise people something that even Marx didn't think was realistic in the present day when he wrote. If they actually understood Marx, they would have understood that capitalism was mostly a result of the Industrial Revolution and was an improvement over feudalism. And that the next phase will only be possible with another revolution that makes human labor unnecessary. As long as people have to work to produce goods, capitalism will be needed. But if, say, humans become obsolete due to AI, what else can we really do? Let all the tech companies who invented it get richer and richer while everyone else lives on subsidies or starves to death because their labor isn't needed anymore? That would be the point at which we'd just have to reconsider our whole economic system... when it's no longer possible for people to add value to society through their own labor and get paid because there is nothing left the average person can do. I don't think communism is achievable with 20th or 19th century technology where scarcity and human labor are still big issues. But I also am not sure how we can continue capitalism in a society where goods are not scarce and the average human is incapable of contributing anything because AI and robots are doing all the work. I think if an arrangement like communism ever comes about, it will come about more naturally, like the transition from feudalism to capitalism, mostly because the technology is ready, and not because someone tried to force progress through the state. Sometimes I think the old feudalists who lost power back then took "communism" as inspiration to rebrand themselves for a new era, rehash all their old talking points against capitalism from a pro-worker lens, and then tried to recreate a more modern feudalism with rhetoric more appealing to a new age and a bit more idealism. The timeline would make sense... there would have still been a lot of people who remembered the pre-Industrial ways and thought capitalism and industrialization were causing society to lose something, and the new communism/socialism might have seemed like the answer to getting it back.

Why hasn’t real capitalism ever been tried?

In capitalism you can become rich if you have the drive and motivation to do great things that deliver value to others. In socialism they want everyone to be equally poor and reliant on the government.

Factories and farms don't produce by themselves, they require human labor to do it. So when they say "seize the means of production", realize that YOU are the means of production they're hoping to seize.

In Chicago the current mayor is proposing a government-run grocery to take the place of the private stores that have closed due to thievery and threats to employee safety.

I escaped socialist Soviet Union into the West. I wish those who claim it wasn't "Real Socialism" would say it back then to KGB... Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under socialism, it's just the opposite. -Old Soviet joke

The video is spot on. There are many kinds of socialism, socialism is designed to fail, and then naive socialists complain that real socialism has never been tried... Socialism is doomed from the start. 1) The "appeal" of socialism only exists for people who don't know what it (or capitalism) is. Those people conflate capitalism with "corporate philosophy", assuming it is greedy and profit-focused, instead of it as a system of economic organization with private banks and personal property protections. 2) Socialists were children who suddenly turned against their own childish selfishness, and assumed that socialism had a big-picture, moral, community-focused agenda for the betterment of the community. 3) Socialism is for people who are bad at math. They see two numbers, say that one is bigger than the other, and add this is not egalitarian for those numbers. Socialists disregard government's role in increasing inflation, and the floating-point math that requires flexibility and exponential increases over time. Maintaining socialism requires continuous monitoring and wealth redistribution. I've been to 26 countries outside the US, and socialism is disappearing everywhere that people are allowed to be educated. 4) If we were to be on a plane that crashed in the Amazon, money would be worthless and we'd have an immediate need for survival. We'd try a temporary socialism, and then go to specialization of function later. You only find the threat of socialism where there is gloom and doom, and an irrational fear for survival.

Humans are not built for altruism...they are built to achieve and work together for a common good, that is to say when people choose to work together, everybody gets "something" out of the work product. If one person wants to give away what they earned....fine. But don't try to force others to give away what they gained.

Some of the early settlers to the North American east coast, tried a commune, and after no one wanted to work(since weather you worked or not, you would get the same). I believe the Native Americans took pity on the fools and gave them some food so that they didn't starve to death.

“Under capitalism, man exploits and oppresses man. Under Socialism, those roles are reversed.” -Old eastern bloc joke

Well produced , well said.

man, isn't it amazing that we live in an economic system where we're free to try the opposite system without being afraid of being tortured in a gulag. It's almost like it's not bad to live here

Plenty of people will watch this and still say, "those weren't real attempts at socialism..."

There are approximately - 4.5 million federal civilian employees - 20 million state civilian employees - 40 million civilians working in the aerospace/defense industry (MIC) - 4 million civilian contract workers that service government contracts - 1.4 million military personnel - 99 million people in the social safety net About half of the civilian employees are paper shufflers. If they didn't do their jobs at all, nobody would notice. Given all this, America IS the most successful socialist country of all time, though the government keeps telling the people it's based on capitalism. It's strange that the people calling for socialism in America seem to hate this socialist system. The end of capitalism in America started in 1913 when Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act into law. If we liquidated the wealth of every billionaire in America, we could use their wealth to pay all government spending for about 1 year. Thereafter, the vast majority of American product would be agricultural. We allow billionaires to exist so we can continue to misrepresent America as a capitalist country, but even openly socialist countries like China have their billionaires.

The short answer is that they include being a perfect utopia in the definition of "real socialism", which will obviously never happen

My dad MET SOMEONE who was in a hippy commune in the 70s. Long story short, new members would join to have sex with all the women, be lazy and have no worthwhile input, eat the food, smoke the weed, and use the stuff like heating and accommodation. In the end the original members had had enough and most of those left and I assume before long the resources ran out and it all just collapsed.

This is one of the few explanations that at least is accurate as to the definition of socialism.

According to “them” we will “own nothing and be happy” by the end of this decade. We’ll just rent everything we need, including clothes, and have the items delivered to us. If we’re not allowed to own personal property, and we’re forced to rent things we need, SOMEONE HAS RIGHTS TO OWN PERSONAL PROPERTY, because they will be who WE rent things from. So, who is the “they” who WILL have rights to property ownership? Well, it’s the same ones trying to sell US the idea that not owning personal property, and renting everything we need instead, will make us all very happy. Now, I ask you this, if not owning personal property is such a joyous experience, why don’t THEY want to join in on all this happiness? I’d say it’s because the only ones who benefit from such a scheme, and the only ones who will be happy with such a way of life, are those who own the property, and are making a boatload of money off of renting it to the saps who believed their scam. THEY can go somewhere with their corrupt schemes too, because only a dolt would submit themselves to such a system. I’ll die standing before I live on my knees as a bondservant to “them”.

Political and economic systems can't just be sorted into neat and tidy boxes, and socialism is a term so vague it's nearly meaningless, because different people have such different definitions of it, ranging from making healthcare accessible to everyone to the government controlling and running absolutely everything. Communism doesn't work, but capitalism is not the answer either - the right system is somewhere along that continuum

Question: if you can only take "according to your needs", what does this entail exactly? Does it allow you to pursue hobbies such as learning a musical instrument, for example? If the idea is that you have no disposable income because you only take what you need, where are you going to get a musical instrument from? Or suppose you want to paint, or take up a sport, or learn a language, how are you supposed to source the equipment and training materials required? What about work - who decides what your "best ability" is, and what if you aspire to something else, and wish to source training to allow you to do that instead? Can somebody explain this to me, or does "true socialism" really only work if everyone has no aspirations beyond do whatever job they're "supposed" to do and waste any free time (and talent) they may have?

Ted Kennedy actually made the comment that "real socialism" would work if he were in charge of it. You know, if he was like (an extremely drunk all the time) Dr. Doom or Hitler.

Socialism doesn't work because it has an inherent fatal paradox. An idealism of equality needs to be enforced but the enforcers are in a position of control over the system creating the Orwell's 'more equal than others' issue. That said, unfettered capitalism pretty much creates an equally shitty outcome as politics and free market are too easily manipulated if corporations are allowed to become too big and powerful. The best is a non-ideology driven approach mixing the best of both capitalism and socialism combined and not acting like 'one is wrong so the other is automatically right'.

So, you conflated people owning the means of production with people taking and redistributing property. You blatantly misrepresent what socialism is, and your skewing of history does everybody harm.

The failures of socialism are always blamed on "wreckers", "deviationists", "class enemies", "reactionaries", "agents of imperialism", etc.

The problem is that socialism and the governmental power it needs is like a wet dream for aspiring dictators. Even if it starts off well and good, it's only a matter of time before a Joseph Stalin type of guy comes along.