Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims None Questions None Output None
Highlights
Time 0:05:40
Core of Socialism
- The core motivation for socialism is to liberate people from poverty and social domination, enabling them to fully flourish and develop their abilities.
- This stems from the belief in the moral equality of individuals, where every life holds equal value.
- Socialist view that society is unjust if a large portion of the population is consigned to struggling for basic needs due to their circumstances.
- Such unjust societies need to be changed.
- Capitalism is seen as the system that subjects people to this immoral existence. Transcript: Vivek Chibber Well, I think the core motivation for socialism has always been to free people from the shackles of poverty and social domination. That’s really at the heart of it. And that itself comes from an underlying view, which ironically a lot of socialists themselves don’t appreciate, which is a view that is associated with classical liberalism. I said this in the opening episode with Bhaskar. I think socialism is a lineal descendant of a certain kind of egalitarian liberalism. Now, I think it ended up going beyond it, but it shares the normative, the moral underpinnings, which is that everybody who’s born into this earth as a title, an entitlement to certain Rights, certain privileges, so that they can fully flourish and they can develop their abilities, which means in philosophical terms, the moral equality of individuals. Every life is equally desirable, equally valuable. Now, if that’s what you believe, it simply follows that if a large part of society is consigned at birth because of their poverty, because of their social situation, to struggling for Just the basic ends, to being at the call and under the thumb of other people, whatever society does that to them is an unjust society and needs to be changed. That’s at the heart of socialism, the view that our society is one that illicitly subordinates the huge masses of people and consigns them to a life of just struggling for basic ends.
Time 0:06:00
Socialism’s Roots in Egalitarian Liberalism
- Socialism’s core motivation is freeing people from poverty and social domination, stemming from the belief in everyone’s entitlement to rights and privileges for full flourishing.
- This belief aligns with classical liberalism’s emphasis on moral equality, where every life holds equal value.
- Socialism views capitalism as unjustly subordinating the masses, condemning them to struggle for basic needs, making anti-capitalism central to socialist thought. Transcript: Vivek Chibber I said this in the opening episode with Bhaskar. I think socialism is a lineal descendant of a certain kind of egalitarian liberalism. Now, I think it ended up going beyond it, but it shares the normative, the moral underpinnings, which is that everybody who’s born into this earth as a title, an entitlement to certain Rights, certain privileges, so that they can fully flourish and they can develop their abilities, which means in philosophical terms, the moral equality of individuals. Every life is equally desirable, equally valuable. Now, if that’s what you believe, it simply follows that if a large part of society is consigned at birth because of their poverty, because of their social situation, to struggling for Just the basic ends, to being at the call and under the thumb of other people, whatever society does that to them is an unjust society and needs to be changed. That’s at the heart of socialism, the view that our society is one that illicitly subordinates the huge masses of people and consigns them to a life of just struggling for basic ends. That society is capitalism. Now, if you feel basic elements of capitalism are what subjects people to an unjust, immoral life and conditions, then you have to be an anti-capitalist. And I think that is the essence of what socialism is, an opposition to capitalism in its pure form, in its unbridled form, so that people can have the
Time 0:14:43
Social Democracy vs. Democratic Socialism
- Bernie Sanders calls his vision “democratic socialism”, advocating for basic necessities like healthcare, a living wage, housing, and pensions as citizen rights.
- Vivek Chibber suggests a more accurate term is “social democracy” or a “welfare state”.
- This approach doesn’t aim to abolish the market but to mitigate its negative impacts on people’s lives.
- It seeks to provide basic amenities regardless of employment status or job performance.
- The core principles of a welfare state stem from a socialist critique of capitalism. Transcript: Vivek Chibber Those should be given people as rights. What do we call this? Bernie calls it democratic socialism. I think that’s a bit of a stretch. What it should be called is social democracy or a welfare state or something like that. The core principles of a welfare state are taken from an underlying socialist critique of capitalism. In that, we’re saying, a social democrat says, I’m not trying to get rid of the market altogether. What I’m trying to do is make sure
Time 0:15:23
Spectrum of Market Intervention
- There’s a spectrum of approaches to managing markets, ranging from minimal intervention to complete control.
- Social democracy seeks to mitigate the negative impacts of the market by providing basic necessities as rights, without abolishing markets altogether.
- Full economic planning, as attempted in the Soviet Union and early China, represents the most ambitious form of market control, where conscious decisions replace market forces.
- Market socialism is a theoretical middle ground that retains markets for some goods while planning others, differing from capitalism in its overall goals and mechanisms. Transcript: Vivek Chibber So that’s the weakest version, you could say, of pushing back the market. Now, the opposite, the full version of that, the most ambitious version is to say, we don’t want to have markets at all. Instead of prices and markets determining what’s going to be produced, how much of it will be produced, who’s going to get it, instead we’ll have full planning. So now the plan replaces the market. Now you’ve got no markets at all. And everything that people get, they get because of conscious decisions taken by some authorities, whether they’re central authorities or some kind of cooperative commonwealth. People have different names for it. But essentially, conscious human intervention replaces the impersonal hand of the market. That’s called planning, full planning. That was tried in countries, you could say to some degree or the other, in countries like the Soviet Union, the early stages of China. Now, I think it failed, but it was the most ambitious attempt to push back the market. Now, then there’s intermediate versions of that. We’ve not really seen it. It’s more still in the form of models, but it’s called market socialism. What market socialism is proposed to do is keep markets as allocative mechanisms, which means allow markets to have some say in what’s produced and what’s not produced. So in that sense, they’re just like, they’re like capitalism. You keep a market. Everything isn’t fully planned. Some parts of the economy will be fully planned, like say utilities, like maybe the biggest industries like healthcare, but you let markets make decisions like, okay, what kind of Soda pop are you going to get?
Time 0:16:27
Three Models of Anti-Capitalism
- There are three models of anti-capitalism.
- The weakest is Sanders-style social democracy, which retains private ownership but protects certain goods from the market, treating them as citizenship rights.
- The strongest is full planning, where all goods and services are consciously allocated, eliminating the market entirely.
- An intermediate model is market socialism, which combines markets with non-private ownership of the means of production. Enterprises compete, but profits and losses aren’t taken by private owners. Transcript: Vivek Chibber Now, then there’s intermediate versions of that. We’ve not really seen it. It’s more still in the form of models, but it’s called market socialism. What market socialism is proposed to do is keep markets as allocative mechanisms, which means allow markets to have some say in what’s produced and what’s not produced. So in that sense, they’re just like, they’re like capitalism. You keep a market. Everything isn’t fully planned. Some parts of the economy will be fully planned, like say utilities, like maybe the biggest industries like healthcare, but you let markets make decisions like, okay, what kind of Soda pop are you going to get? What kind of shirts are you going to get? So isn’t that then just a different kind of capitalism? And the answer is no, because in the models of market socialism we’ve been looking at, even though you have markets, what you won’t have is privately owned means of production. So suppose, imagine a society in which you’ve gotten rid of all private ownership. So it’s just like central planning, right? But where enterprises still compete with each other instead of being told by central authority what to produce and how much to produce. So you still have competition and you still have some firms succeeding, other firms failing maybe, but what you don’t have is the owners of those firms being the ones who take all the Profits, who take all the losses. It’s some kind of either national ownership or community ownership or workers co-ops or something like that. So now it means you have three models of what it means to be an anti-capitalist. The weakest model is Sanders-style social democracy. You still have full private ownership
Time 0:22:34
Political Leverage in Social Welfare
- Working-class parties will always improve social policies, but their impact depends on their power to enact programs.
- Besides votes in Congress, another power source is the leverage their constituents (workers) can exert on politicians.
- Businesses hold significant sway over politicians due to campaign funding and their control over the economy.
- Politicians fear economic downturns because voters blame them, not capitalists, for job losses.
- Therefore, to pass progressive legislation, it’s crucial to overcome business resistance, which requires strong worker leverage. Transcript: Vivek Chibber How far it can go will depend on how much power it has to enact those programs. Now, powers of two kinds. One is votes in Congress. How many congressmen are going to be there? How many people in the Senate? How many people in the House? Will they pass your legislation or won’t they? But there’s another source of power that governments have, which is, can the people who they’re trying to help exert some sort of leverage over the congressmen, over the senators. Why does this matter? It matters because as I think all of our listeners know, people who get elected into office aren’t free independent agents once they get into office. They have to worry about re-election and they have to worry about who they owe their election to. And every capitalist democracy business is the most powerful actor in exerting leverage over politicians. Why? Well, they fund their campaigns. They’re what’s called the donor class, but also they’re the ones who run the economy. And if they’re not happy and they start pulling out their money or they start taking their money out of this country and investing it somewhere else because they don’t like the government, If the economy goes into a tailspin, not only does it send people out onto the streets jobless, but they take it out on the politicians. They vote them out of office. As Joe Biden will tell you right now, he ran a full employment economy, but people blamed him for the price level being a third or 40% higher than it was four years ago, and they booted him Out of office. So a weak economy, ironically, punishes not the people who control the economy, which is capitalist, it punishes politicians.
Time 0:24:17
Labor Power and Welfare States
- Politicians in capitalist democracies are heavily influenced by business interests due to campaign funding and economic control.
- A weak economy often punishes politicians rather than the capitalists who control the economy.
- To overcome business resistance to progressive legislation, threats to their profit flow are needed, a role historically played by labor movements.
- Strong labor movements give politicians independence from the investor class.
- The social democratic project requires both political (parties) and economic (unions) organizations of the working class. Transcript: Vivek Chibber So when people get elected into office, try to pass these progressive legislation. One of the things they’re worrying about is how will businessmen take it? How will the business community take it? The way you overcome the resistance of the business community is you threaten them. You threaten them with stopping their flow of profits, which is what the labor movement did. So while a labor party is important inside the state. A labor movement is important outside the state to give them the power, not just over other congressmen, over other parliamentarians, but to give them some independence from the power Of the investor class, of the donor class. These are the two things you needed. So the essence of the social democratic project was building the political organizations of the working class in the form of parties and the economic organizations of