A viewer asks why did Paul say that capitalism led to World War I, and another viewer asks if humane capitalism is the answer to today’s problems – Paul Jay joins Taya Graham
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It is because they're bad people. When the mafiosi say that a hit isn't personal, its just business, thats equivalent to the capitalist saying "I'm not a bad person for trying to run you out of business, or because I just jacked your rent by 60%. It’s just the nature of capitalism."
Bull. Shit.
But try to mess with Social Security(socialist) or Medicare(also socialist) and people want to lynch you!
People are idiot's. Capitalism world war are best friends. Have been for every war.
does Paul still own The real news network?
i would not say that capitalism led to WW1. capitalism neither causes or prevents wars. democracy neither causes or prevents wars. trade neither causes or prevents wars. I would say that human nature led to ww1. there have always been wars. this was just the first one where the players had better machines and weapons.
I SUBSCRIBED FIRST BECAUSE OF THE CONTENT,AND SECONDLY BECAUSE I AM CRAZY ABOUT TAYA…
Great analysis by Paul Jay as usual.
You CAN get to Humane Capitalism by supporting and reinvigorating labor unions. That way, there is compromise. Without them, people are at the mercy of maximum profits. It's actually quite ludicrous to believe that such profit could exist without both producers and consumers of the products and services that produce them.
I'm now doing three jobs in my one. My last pay raise is 3.2% to an annual average inflation rate written into our products of 3.3%. This process of creeping "intellectual work" concentrated for the purpose of reducing labor costs is what's wrong with unfettered Capitalism. I'm of course free to explore employment elsewhere, but in reality, with the same trend happening everywhere, my next job might be better today, but it'll follow the same path eventually. That's why job movement has become so common. It's not upward mobility like climbing the ladder as much as it is running in place like climbing the Down escalator.
Capitalism restructured to better benefit the people participating in the process benefit enough to have a good life and for our society to benefit sufficiently to maintain its infrastructure and services to the benefit of all of us. This isn't pure socialism and we need to stop referring to a society funded by and for the benefit of us all by an economic model built on capital. That is how it's done. The New Deal was a tax structure that extracted big money from the people and companies that collected it and redistributed it back into the economy by incentive to invest in workers, in wages and benefits, in order to stimulate spending. If you push all the money into a a pile outside the economy, it ceases to provide growth, to benefit a standard of living that makes America what it is and worth working for. Money doesn't make people lazy. Severe lack of it does. There is no motivation to work when the payoff is only that you will have done it. There is no pride in doing the right thing when doing the wrong thing clearly pays off better, even if the risk of loss is much greater.
We don't give a shit about anyone else, anymore, because we've suffered the indignity of not being cared for by our employers and our government for far too long. The biggest benefit of FDRs New Deal wasn't measurable just in dollars, but in pride and productivity, too. We were proud because we were secure in the idea that our leaders in both public and private aspects of our lives, had our backs, worked for us, valued us as contributors enough to invest heavily in our success. The most devastating loss we've suffered in the past 50 years is the betrayal of our companies and government of our sacrifices to both.
That's why conservatives don't want to pay higher taxes. Not because it would hurt them to do so, but because they don't feel their doing so would make any appreciable difference in the quality of life in America. We need desperately to refund public education, to get private industry out of for-profit provider roles to public programs (a kind of parasitism that has bloated business at the expense of our country) and get back to keeping our word in all things. Politicians should be reviled for making promises they can't keep, companies should be vilified for putting their CEOs in front of their rank and file employees, and the common good should hold a greater value of measure for corporate success than the enrichment and protection of the board of directors.
Business knows this. But don't wait for them to volunteer. Thinking business will do anything to benefit anything that can't be measured on a balance sheet is folly. And Trickle Down Economics is proof.
The best part of all of these types of conversations is now this.
We have raped the planet. Over populated to infinity.
Polluted the air water and land to oblivion and are now quickly checking off every item on the checklist to extinction.!
So in reality , we might as well just bend over and kiss our sorry asses good bye !. We will not survive our own vanity.and arrogance !
Why would you limit your length of your videos ???
Are people so distracted that even a 15 minute video is too long ???
If the content is informative and Important , there should be no limit to the time it takes !
I will make time to concentrate and listen !!
Putting back into place the corporate regulations , the banking regulations and giving the people back their rights and constitution, ! Would be a huge step in solving current issues !. Make every person and corporation pay their fair share of taxes !!!!
RESIPROSITY is what we really need to reign in the corruption !!
We are well into 2020. Where is Paul Jay???
We need more of Paul Jay
"You have to look at the principles of socialism and not the adherence to those principles. Most christians do not adhere to principles of Christianity but that does not mean throw the religion out" Kwame Ture
A major problem with the (if not the one)capitalist socio-economic system is the ideological framework and various philosophical constructs undergirding its implementation, thus guiding the rationale of the body politic. Example Social Darwinism i.e. survival of the fittest, faith in unimpeded market forces i.e. by neoliberal economic ideology doing double-duty as a moralizing social philosophy, after all the market forces do not fail., people do.
Free Range Capitalism will destroy the world.
A very interesting yet brief recounting of the history of "humane capitalism". One extremely important and ignored moment in US capitalism's history is its reaction to The New Deal that FDR implemented. The major industrialists in the US attempted to stage a violent coup. The retired general they approached to lead that coup, Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, was a patriot to the people of America and turned in the perpetrators. After investigation they were not tried and that moment in American history was swept under the carpet, hidden to the point that most Americans are not aware of how far Capitalists are prepared to act to maintain their power over wealth. To see this history check out the following documentaries:
"1932 – A True History of the United States"
https://youtu.be/PDKUc3-CWU0
This is an in-depth examination beginning with the lead up to the American Civil War and carries through to the death of FDR and glimpse to what followed.
For a more brief documentary specifically examining the attempted coup see
"The 1933 Coup Attempt in the USA"
https://youtu.be/o1KwaLa8zTQ
Thanks real news for this. Very cogent. Humane capitalism isn't altruistic but expedient IMO. If they don’t have to do it, they won't because it costs. Nb the US labour unions negotiated with FDR over new deal. It was a compromise to rescue capitalism.
Socialism has never worked because capitalists have always undermined it, up to and including creating coupes.
Paul Jay, your knowledge of history and how it informs your reporting of the United States and the world of today leaves me in awe and confirms my respect for your professionalism in the craft of journalism. Not only do we need accuracy in reporting in America today but your ability to place current events in the light of their proper historical context is invaluable and rare. My humble thanks to you and your colleagues and please keep up the good work.
Go check out Democracy at Work on Youtube! They have good information about socialism in the workplace. 🙂
My grandfather fought in WW2 and Korea, He was a foremost Industrial Arts professor and metallurgist, as American as Apple Pie and he was a socialist to the core. He got through the McCarthyism period with a lot of Fuck you's (Do you know who I am and what I do) If he was alive today to see the nonsense in this world; he would be disgusted. Things only change with #revolutions
I think in the end it's corruption that does us in,not idology.
Greed seems to be at the root of all our problems. Despite what Paul Jay posits I feel greed is still the huge sickness of the oligarchs. Enough is just never enough. The need to feel powerful and always in control and believing that enough is just never enough. Creating and being innovative takes a backseat to always winning. Respect for other humans disappears. Respect for self disappears. Winning is all that matters. It is a sickness.
People wrongly equate all types of socialism with Stalins and China's communism. At the same time in many people's minds everything gone wrong in today's world has nothing to do with capitalism, it was just a few people's fault or something like that. Why the double standard?
i always learn so much from these interviews you do among each other. thank you.
Paul Jay is a hero. He just gave a measured thoughtful response to what were essentially trolls. Just a quality human being and journalist all the way through.
The formula for socialism is "From each according to their ability and to each according to their need", a bit like a nice family camping trip.
The formula for capitalism is "You produce x amount of wealth, I take y amount in surplus value and let you keep x-y to buy back x", a bit like a recipe for economic catastrophe, until we have world war 3 and start all over again.
Ha Ha. Lets all clench our rectums and salute humane capitalism!
These people aren't "your viewers"; they're the usual ignorant and/or reactionary trolls taking control of the conversation. They simply can't bear the idea that any point of view, other than their own narrow interpretation of everything, might be heard or discussed. (That many of them support the essential inequities that have led us precisely to where we are now is self-evident.)
Paul Jay, this is a very difficult thing to explain to a population that has been propagandized against any form of socialism since the New Deal. Remember when capitalism and corporations were on the nose after the 1929 crash, the New Deal was introduced and immediately the capitalists tried to overthrow the Roosevelt government in a coup in 1933. Thanks to Smedley Butler the coup failed but then the capitalists tried a subtler approach. The plutocrats through institutions such the National Association of Manufacturers introduced religion nationally and linked capitalism to Christianity using the skills of religious leaders such as James W. Fifield Jr. and later the Reverend Billy Graham to sell capitalism to the masses. If capitalism was related to Christianity then Anti-Christian behavior must be related to communism and the Soviet Union was used as the pejorative and sold to the people as those godless hoards. Even though the US plutocrats were actually attacking Washington, Moscow was a good stand-in for the people's wrath.
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So the plutocrats continued to propagandize the US population through Hollywood, their media empire, and their engineered CIA culture narrative used to support capitalism and the Cold War from which the Congressional Military Industrial Complex prospered. The plutocrats continued to propagandize the population through their puppets Reagan and Thatcher. They used these puppets to push nationalism, Neoliberalism, freedom and liberty and the fools lapped it up. The cretins never realized their tax burden was increasing and the corporate and plutocrat tax burden was decreasing while the cost of the plutocrats’ imperial aggression was rising. At the same time these fools never realized the plutocrats were working against them as they destroyed any peoples’ voice in democracy, destroyed labor’s negotiation power by crushing the union movement and exported their jobs.
So the people were left funding the plutocrats’ wars while the plutocrats sold the wars as “National Securityâ€; the people suffered rising prices with zero real income growth while being told they lived in the wealthiest, strongest, and freest country on Earth; they then saw the plutocrats extract even more wealth from the public purse with “Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Jailâ€, and most of these cretins never asked the inconvenient questions but just accept it like good little plutocratic sycophants. So the question you need to ask is; what can be done for those in the population who are so easily manipulated they still, and must believe Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction? These fools have been programmed well by plutocratic institutions such as the Libertarian Mises Institute, Americans for Prosperity, the Heritage Foundation, or the ironically named Institute for Humane Studies. So is there any hope for these Useful Idiots of Empire who will never question capitalism? I think not!
"Humane" capitalism is to the political economy as "benign" pancreatic cancer is to the body.
Captialism is US is horrible now but that doesn''t mean all private business is evil. It needs to be heavily regulated plus socialist programs. I have said go back to FDR New Deal +++ keep adding more socialist programs – listen to Bernie – Democratic Socialism
Co-ops & Ma/ Pa stores make money, profit shared is a good thing. Manufacturing jobs with strong unions & profit sharing is good. Monopolies are not good! Trade is good, Globalization is not – scam for the rich like Bezos & Apple.
Paul is right, we went backwards. I think the most egregious offender was Reagan, each succeeding admin was worse for people. Now we live in a class system. War is our only business! Amoral society.
Here's a comment for you. Pure socialism doesn't work because it denies people individuality, and pure capitalism doesn't work because it denies people equality. In order to have a more stable economy, then capitalism and socialism need to support each other. Side note: as I understand it, there was a very successful primarily socialist society, the Incas.
Capitalist relations of social production prevent the owners of
capital from acting in a humane way. Competing capitalists treat each
other as foes. The economic/political interests of capital are 180
degrees opposite the economic/political interests of workers. The
worker wants wages and benefits as high as possible, capital, the lowest.
Workers want shorter working hours, capital, longer. Competing industries
desire to drive competitors out of markets or even destroy their
competitors outright through war.
If one wants to learn biology one will surely study Darwin. If one wants to
study physics one will study Newton. If one wants to learn about socialism
one will study Marx and Engels. Host and guest do not seem to have studied
the history of socialism.
Socialist economy, in the scientific socialist sense, is one in which the workers
themselves control the production processes and the products of their
collective labour. Socialism is an economy where the workers themselves
determine what's produced, how the production process is organised, when
and where production takes place, hours of work, how the products produced
are distributed, etc.
If one ð˜³ð˜¦ð˜¢ð˜ð˜ð˜º wants to learn about modern socialism one might start with this classic:
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Frederick Engels 1880
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm
Socialism in the modern sense has yet to exist in the history of humanity.
Here's how Vladimir Lenin characterised the economy in the USSR in 1921:
Purport Of The New Economic Policy
*
The New Economic Policy means substituting a tax for the requisitioning of food; it means reverting to capitalism to a considerable extent—to what extent we do not know. Concessions to foreign capitalists (true, only very few have been accepted, especially when compared with the number we have offered) and leasing enterprises to private capitalists definitely mean restoring capitalism, and this is part and parcel of the New Economic Policy;…
V. I. Lenin – The New Economic Policy And The Tasks Of The Political Education Departments – Report To The Second All-Russia Congress Of Political Education Departments October 17, 1921[1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/oct/17.htm
And Mao on China's economy circa 1953:
ON STATE CAPITALISM
Mao tse- Tung – July 9, 1953
[Written comment on a document of the National Conference on Financial and Economic Work held in the summer of 1953.] "The present-day capitalist economy in China is a capitalist economy which for the most part is under the control of the People's Government and which is linked with the state-owned socialist economy in various forms and supervised by the workers. It is not an ordinary but a particular kind of capitalist economy, namely, a state-capitalist economy of a new type. It exists not chiefly to make profits for the capitalists but to meet the needs of the people and the state. True, a share of the profits produced by the workers goes to the capitalists, but that is only a small part, about one quarter, of the total. The remaining three quarters are produced for the workers (in the form of the welfare fund), for the state (in the form of income tax) and for expanding productive capacity (a small part of which produces profits for the capitalists). Therefore, this state-capitalist economy of a new type takes on a socialist character to a very great extent and benefits the workers and the state." https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-5/mswv5_30.htm
Paul Jay believes that avarice isn’t a major motivator behind many of the 1% and their acolytes actions?
I respect a lot of his views, but I’m sorry, on that statement he is WAY off base.
“If I don’t do it, someone else will†might be thee NUMBER ONE rationalization of greedy b*st*rds, imo. 🔥💰ðŸ·ðŸ’°ðŸ”¥
Thank you Paul, great conversation. Love this channel.
I think it would be true to say that all western European countries since WWII have lived, more decades than not, with social democratic governments. These brought healthcare, day care, mandated vacation days, maternity leave, etc. One consequence is that the US has sunk to 17 or lower mobility, i.e. the American Dream is doing better in Europe.
Most people are completely ignorant when it comes to Capitalism, Communism, and Socialism. Most people don't know shit about any of this.
The title <UGH!> Humane Capitalism is an oxymoron. As Noam Chomsky says, you cannot have a capitalist democracy.
I don't even earn enough to eat right now, but I've been watching you guys for years and I'm going to donate to when I get my next paycheck. The discussions you guys have and the REAL news you report is invaluable to turning public discourse toward tangible change. Thank you guys for all the hard work you put in on behalf of the little people who's voices go ignored in congress while the world falls apart around us.
"Humane" capitalism always leads to fascism. All capitalism does.
Look at the US. The New Deal was nice, but it had to be changed to get voted in as a bill in the first place. From the moment it was voted in the rich capitalists started to try to kill it and they have mostly gotten their way. The oligarchs always destroy what might be humane when competition is required (all capitalism even the "humane" kind requires competition) and when money equals power (Money did equal power even when the New Deal was around, that's why we don't have it anymore).
The New Deal wouldn't work now due to international and transnational corporations, offshore-banking or money hoarding, and the way global trade works now. This neoliberal/Chicago boys/Austrian economics/Ayn Rand type economics we are doing now won't mix with a New Deal.
This time it won't take nearly as long for them to dismantle as it did last time because they have the workers from all over the world in competition with each other over the scraps.
It's in the nature of the Beast. The success of capitalism, in the end, might be its undoing. Either by being a contributory cause for world wars, as Jay suggests or because of it being the main driver to climate change disaster as Naomi Klein and others have written about. And then there are other contributing causes.
Interestingly, at the biological level, there is a co-existence of so-called “selfish and cooperative genes.†But we also see this usually gives rise at higher organizational levels to the expression of one, over the expense of other (=exploitation), to the detriment of all in the long run.
Dawkins is quoted as writing that “selfish genes†that don’t cooperate don’t survive. So here, at a late stage, we struggle to find the right balance, where the “selfish genes†appear to dominate to our detriment.
Note:
For a related world science festival video, see (especially beginning at 1:21:56): Why We Prevailed: Evolution and the Battle for Dominance
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GEloPVEh-8
Humane capitalism is a myth. Because the root of what makes capitalism function is profit. Maximum profit. Not about meeting human needs. And how does the owner class maximize profit? Cheap labor, ecological negligence, automation, and much more. All of these things hurt the working class. Regulate them? They'll use their endless piles of cash to lobby legislators to block it, weaken it, or undo it. And if that doesn't work, they'll take their business to a country that wont regulate them. Or in many cases, they'll fund coups to force the government to do what they want. You are only fueling the class warfare. The goal needs to be ending their power over our economy, which is what socialism aims to do
Humane capitalism is an oxymoron. The policies and adjustments to the system that soften the edges of capitalism are not part of capitalism. E.g. healthcare for all, paid maternity leave, free tuition. Capitalism on its own is without checks and balances is what libertarians want. Neoliberalism is close to libertarian capitalism but with a state that actively collludes, if you will, with the capitalist class, as we saw in 2008 and just now when Canada (the gutless wonder) and the US ran interference for Boeing.
What many people don't want to accept is that we can't just turn the clock back and have a rerun of postwar Keynesianism, green or otherwise. The economy and geopolitics have changed too much. My prediction: We will not be able to get out of the present crisis by tweaking the system. AOC, Sanders, Corbyn etc. are all genuine people with good hearts but their proposals are far too tame to make a dent in the neoliberal behemoth. But even more importantly, the establishment will fight tooth and nail to keep these folks and like minded colleagues out of power. The witch hunt against Corbyn is a taste of what is in store for Bernie if he gets close to power. But Bernie will pull a 2016 and support whichever neoliberal goon the Democrats field…and he will urge his supporters to do the same. Because Trump. He even said this is what he is going to do. The left is setting itself up for another disappointing burn out (or Bern out hahar) because it doesn't have a sustaining vision to give it momentum…basically Sanders and Corbyn are it. And if they crash and burn or are taken down…what's Plan B?
The left desperately needs to organize around a uniting vision at a grassroots level. With all the infighting and liberal infiltration I sometimes wonder if this is even possible.
Socialism of the Labour party and PM Clem Attlee rebuilt Britain after WW2 and established the NHS not Winston Churchills Conservatives. Socialism of the Labour party of Harold Wilson made Britain the centre of the world in the 1960s for culture and the arts. I would say European socialist countries have proven socialism can work however Europe is failing since Thatcher and Reagan came to power a majority of European countries have been ruled by Liberal Conservatives and Neoliberals.
If you started anew, and initiated a completely revamped 'humane capitalism' tomorrow, by the end of the summer you'd be back in the situation we are in now. In this neoliberal era, CEOs are enjoined to screw as much out of their workers as possible, at the lowest wage rates they can, and to degrade conditions of work to the greatest extent they can – all of which raises profits and thus stock prices and ensures the CEO is very well remunerated. Capitalism isn't built to be humane. Capitalism is an abusive relationship.
Both Capitalism and Socialism is obsolete and dysfunctional in the face of modern technologies that make almost all jobs performed by human beings redundant and obsolete.