"Why Socialism, Communism & Marxism are not solutions" [Segment from Revolution Now! w/Peter Joseph]

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Before I jump into the integral stuff, I want to come back to a subject I've talked about before regarding the problem of poorly defined alternative economic theory. I've already gotten some feedback on the complexity of the integral paper, and while a complexity for a complexity's sake is never good and pretentious, I would hope it is obvious that if we are serious about system change, being detailed and specific is obviously critical. It seems silly to even say that, but hear me out. The casualness of so much of the conversation that has underpinned the post-capitalist and post-scarcity community has been an unspoken problem. What we do not need are more superficial proposals rooted in abstraction, stats on how we can achieve abundance, new city system designs, or colorful descriptions of a new good-feeling world while simultaneously expressing no means to get there or understanding of how the system dynamics of that system are to work.

[00:01:07]For example, you often hear people describe something like, say, a circular economy. This is common with normal environmentalist talk. They talk about reuse, recycling, closed loops, minimal waste. And yes, that is all conceptually sound. Everything needs a starting point, but such description is not interaction. It only expresses potential. It doesn't tell you how decisions are made, how conflicts are resolved, how priorities are set, how constraints are created, or how complexity is processed when real human variety enters the system.

[00:01:42]And when proposed alternatives remain abstracted or aspirational, they don't just fail to materialize into true utility.

[00:01:50]They actively condition people to accept a weak framework of discussion and association that appears sufficient when it really is not.

[00:02:03]And this placates and slows progress while generally confusing everything.

[00:02:08]And again, you may say to yourself, "Well, we all know this, Peter." I'm sure most of you do. It sounds utterly needless to say. But the problem is deeper and more widespread and nuanced than most realize, rooted once again in extreme systems illiteracy going back centuries. And the result of this lapse is highly regressive. So poor, in fact, that people might as well say nothing at all. In fact, I'd prefer they did say nothing at all. And I think the best example, of course, in this flawed discourse concerns those three infamous, yet functionally meaningless terms, communism, socialism, and Marxism.

[00:02:47]These three terms could be flushed down the toilet tomorrow and it would make no difference to social progress. In fact, it would deeply improve clarity if they could be deleted from the consciousness of global society. And my objection here isn't rooted in wanting to ignore the academic or historical observations or philosophical ponderances associated to Marx or related theorists. All that's fine.

[00:03:11]Rather, it's rooted in the fact that those terms give no viable inference into how a non-capitalist economy is actually organized. And yet people pretend that they do. That's what I mean about this vague conditioning. As I have written about many times when it comes to how these symbols and what they seemingly represent are really just reactionary when it comes to solutions.

[00:03:35]And yet people continue to talk about them as if they describe a defined method of socioeconomic organization.

[00:03:42]Just take a glance around you in modern economic debate. Not only in pop culture, such as on social media or talk shows, but also with major academic institutions and figures expressing repeatedly this ridiculous lexicon.

[00:03:57]Notably, of course, the classic false duality of capitalism versus socialism.

[00:04:04]On one side, you have the self-professed socialists holding up their quotes by Karl Marx, repeating slogans, equating Marx's detailed analysis of capitalism, which was 95% of what Marx talked about, with the assumed rise of some revolutionary yet undefined model of socioeconomic organization.

[00:04:25]Well, on the other side, proponents of capitalism endlessly rant as to why this socialism has not and can never work.

[00:04:34]Saturated and abstracted, belligerent and purely void propaganda that has germinated for probably 200 years.

[00:04:42]Hence, a view that also presupposes a recognizable system called socialism, which once again doesn't actually exist as a structure in the real world.

[00:04:53]And the only meaningful outcome of it all is the preservation of market capitalism. I'll say that again. If you are a self-professed socialist, Marxist, or communist railing against the woes of capitalism in the promotion of an assumed new model ready to be applied or has already existed, the only thing you're doing is reinforcing the stability of market capitalism. Why?

[00:05:19]Because there is no model. And the whole thing becomes cultural scarecrow, an anti-capitalist Rorschach. Aside, of course, for such terms being used merely as a heuristic, common-minded people may use to profess certain shared familiarities related to critiques of capitalism. If people wish to sit around a fire with corncob pipes and pontificate agreeing with the various ponderings of Karl Marx, one could heuristically call that a Marxist conversation. But beyond that, there's no such thing as a Marxist conception of non-capitalist alternative system, aside from the few contrarian statements he made which basically inverted the capitalist construct, forging this very loose idea of so-called socialism or more ideally communism as some later stage.

[00:06:07]And those reactionary elements do not define a system model, nor do they plant the seeds for one in any defining way.

[00:06:14]Communism, socialism, and Marxism are not systems of organization or management. They are generalized, vague, philosophical frameworks with endless interpretations and no consistent operational mechanics between them. They are belief constructs, and belief constructs are not measurable systems of dynamic coordination.

[00:06:34]And that's again what I mean by systems literacy. You can call them systems if you want, just as you can call a rock a system, but when it comes to the actual operation of something, a structured process that can be identified and replicated, they're not systems at all.

[00:06:50]Meaning it is baseless to say something like socialist results in XYZ from any observational standpoint.

[00:06:58]Now, can loose forms of belief inform a social system's design? Sure, sure they can. But that's not sufficient to take on the definition. In the same way environmental concern and the interest in sustainability may also inform social policy, institutions, economic incentives, and even social structure to a degree. But environmentalism isn't a social system. Environmentalism, just like socialism, is a generalized position toward a general goal, and implies nothing in regard to how such goals are to be achieved, once again.

[00:07:32]Can you imagine someone saying something ridiculous like, "Environmentalism doesn't work."?

[00:07:37]Well, that is precisely the same as when people say socialism doesn't work.

[00:07:43]In fact, it's even worse with the term socialism because the term environmentalism environmentalism actually has a specific body of reference. Environmentalism environmentalism is clearly about making sure some kind of consideration is occurring for the environment, reducing waste and pollution and so on. When people hear the word environmentalism, most immediately grasp what is being referenced. That is not the case with the term socialism. To run this into the ground even more, if you ask 20 people on the street what socialism means, you will likely receive 20 different answers.

[00:08:16]And I'll go even further in this rant to say that in this context appeals to a true or correct definition of socialism is also completely irrelevant. The utility of any shared term depends on the existence of a grounded shared referent. Without that the term cannot be useful. And of course, the exact same goes for this idea of Marxism. Claims such as Marxism killed 100 million people in the 20th century completely logically incoherent. The proposition treats Marxism as a singular causal agent capable of directly producing such outcomes. It is not.

[00:09:00]Marxism is not a concrete actor, institution, not a policy framework, or decision-making system. It cannot act, choose, implement, or kill. If we want to be annoyingly technical from the standpoint of predicate logic, the error is even more basic.

[00:09:19]A vast multivariable set of historical processes involving states, leaders, institutions, material conditions, wars, famines, and other power-related structures are being collapsed into a single predicate attached to an abstract, semantically unstable term. It is classic category error once again that flattens causality into absurdity.

[00:09:45]The subject term cannot support the predicate being assigned to it. And what makes this especially damaging is that the self-identified Marxists will respond to such a thing by attempting to defend against the claim itself on its own terms, rather than rejecting it outright as absurd. But I guess they have to if they're calling themselves Marxist. And in doing so, they tacitly accept the false linguistic nonsense logical framing, conceding legitimacy to an idiotic proposition that should never enter analysis in the first place. It's like if I call you a jerk, and instead of dismissing the obvious insult, you give in to it, and you say something like, "Well, but you know, jerks, they've done a lot of good things for the world, haven't they?"

[00:10:31]And this is what I mean when I say such discourse folds back into reinforcing market capitalism. The language itself is rigged, and it's something people need to think about. The tyranny of words, the tyranny of syntax.

[00:10:46]People think in language. To say Marxism killed 100 million people, or socialism, or whatever, is just like saying leftism as even greater generality, killed 100 million people, which I've actually heard people say out there. That's how bad this kind of framing is.

[00:11:03]Unspecific abstractions posing as explanations. And whether invoked by opponents, or defensively engaged by proponents, the result is the same once again, a propagandistic lexicon that replaces analysis with ideological shutting down serious examination of real historical mechanisms and reality itself.

[00:11:28]Did Lenin organize the Soviet Union according to any detailed system? Any detailed system design dictated by Marx?

[00:11:37]Did Marx or Engels extract from dialectical and historical materialism a technical architecture for governance, coordination, production, distribution?

[00:11:47]Was there an objective mechanism that converted Marx's descriptive account of capitalism and its speculative historical trajectory into an operational model for post-capitalist society?

[00:11:59]The answer in all cases is no.

[00:12:02]Marx didn't specify structures, decision-making protocols, he didn't specify feedback mechanisms, didn't specify allocation methods, or governance processes from which a functional social system could be derived. His work consisted primarily of philosophical critique, historical analysis, and very broad theoreticals, trends he saw, primarily related, if not exclusively related, to market capitalism.

[00:12:29]No technical prescriptions for a new societal organization were firmly established at all. Maybe a few ponderances here in the Communist Manifesto, but nothing truly structural.

[00:12:41]And, you know, you have to ask, did anti-Marx propaganda really rise due to fear of a new system outright?

[00:12:50]Or was it more about trying to get people to just reject his analysis of capitalism, his damning analysis of capitalism as a whole, which became very, very popular even during his time.

[00:13:02]While those two ideas are linked, the latter seems more probable to me, in fact. So, someone comes along and says, "Oh, that surplus theory of value, exploitation, by which owners extract more value from workers than they're paid for it to ensure profit for the owners, that seems really structurally true."

[00:13:22]And they they say that to somebody, and And other person says, "Yeah, well, that's Marxism. And Marxism killed 100 million people in the 20th century, so who cares?"

[00:13:33]It's a crude hack, a crude trick, but it's clearly worked to a degree to diffuse any initiative uh and protect the assumed integrity of capitalism.

[00:13:45]But, back to my point, attributing the structure and behavior of the Soviet state to Marxist writings is simply untenable, regardless of how frequently its leaders cite him or claim lineage.

[00:13:57]And this includes superficial characteristics associated, such as nationalization of industries.

[00:14:04]There's another truly belligerent one.

[00:14:07]Nationalized sectors exist across many countries that are unambiguously capitalist overall in the modern day and historically.

[00:14:15]Are they just secret socialist societies in disguise because they have some nationalization? As a case study, consider Venezuela. In early January 2026, this month, the US executive branch kidnapped the self-proclaimed socialist president Nicolás Maduro.

[00:14:33]Since the time of Hugo Chávez, Venezuela has been condemned as socialist by the West, of course, in a familiar derisive fashion that applies to any state that effectively resists imperial alignment. And while the dominant party is indeed the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, the PSUV, does that label make Venezuela instantly socialist? Of course not. It is ideological advertising born from an anti-imperialist posture rooted in what they call Bolivarianism, which is just another referential political philosophy, generally anti-imperial, generally anti-capitalist, generally anti-the United States from a historical perspective. And this is really no different in form than the term Marxism.

[00:15:20]Be that as it may, what is actually the hood of Venezuela that supposedly makes it socialist? The country has rampant private enterprise alongside state intervention and redistribution, yes.

[00:15:31]There are price controls and regulatory interventions atypical of a country like the United States, I suppose. But once again, regulation is not representative of a systemic economic transition.

[00:15:45]Venezuela also has a very significant income and wealth gap due to the same mechanisms you see in the United States, which is interesting considering Western propaganda that insists that the outcome of socialism is that everyone is equally poor.

[00:16:03]So, why does the West condemn Venezuela as an archetypal evil socialist state?

[00:16:09]The real answer is nationalization, and even that is selective. If nationalization is the defining feature of socialism, then Norway is just as socialist as Venezuela since it also maintains state ownership of its oil sector, which is the real concern of Western power in Venezuela. For decades, the United States has strangled Venezuela through sanctions and economic warfare. In the early 2000s, the US backed a major coup attempt against Chavez in which the military kidnapped him, flew him out of the country, and installed a handpicked replacement president. That coup did fail because the the Venezuelan military reversed course in the middle of the entire thing in response to mass public demand that wanted Chavez back.

[00:16:56]With Maduro, the US finished the job exploiting the instability its own sanctions produced. And did people express relief when Maduro was removed?

[00:17:05]Some did, yes. But that relief exists largely because they do not understand the long-term dynamics at play. This is colonial destabilization 101. You strangle a country you want to control, or has resources you want, flood it with ideological propaganda, wait for the population to internalize the narrative, absorbing the destabilization you've created, and then you use that dissatisfaction to justify regime change. And Venezuela is just one of numerous demonized socialist states because of their nationalization opening the door for imperial conquest after this destabilization process commences. And I wrote a substack on this particular point. Anyone wants to read it, it's called capitalism's crowbar.

[00:17:53]Okay, back on point. This all brings me back to the inference of what a system is and what a system is not.

[00:18:03]No coherent social system can be constructed solely on the basis of what it rejects.

[00:18:10]A rejection of capitalist forms by itself provides no positive architecture for organization. It provides things you don't want to do, but tells you no way how to do them. Imagine hypothetically handing 10 newly formed nation states the complete works of Marx and asking them to derive from them a functional socialist socioeconomic system.

[00:18:34]The result would be 10 fundamentally different systems, I can assure you, sharing only one vague commonality, an attempt to distinguish itself in some way from market capitalism and the states that promote it and embrace it.

[00:18:49]That's literally it.

[00:18:51]Now, contrast that to what markets are and do. Market economics, institutionalized as capitalism once again, is a measurable structure of feedback processes driven by mass trade, property rights, monetary exchange, and competitive incentives. It produces predictable endogenous outcomes. You can model it, you can analyze it, you can observe its reoccurring pathologies, you can predict its outcomes. It is recursive. You can start with a seed of it small and watch it self-organize and scale rooted in a inferential logic like a toxic sick organism growing. You could start a market economy on two separate island populations that have never met and the system will evolve in generally the same way in both areas just as it has across the world and the variations that we see.

[00:19:42]This thing, socialism on the other hand, is not even in the same reality as the system dynamics of market economics. It is just a vague reinterpretive theory.

[00:19:53]No nation in history, whether accused of being socialist or self-proclaimed as such, has ever presented a consistent model.

[00:20:02]And just to be clear, this has nothing to do with appealing to some true Marx's intention argument, which I despise as well. You know, people that say, "But but but that's not really what Marx intended." As if they could know. As if it even matters, in fact. I mean, since by Marx's own admission, he didn't even profess to know how it would culminate into a new social system implicitly. The Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, North Korea, they could all label their social systems however they want. The labels themselves are analytically meaningless.

[00:20:38]It's all advertising once again. What matters is how systems actually function. And when examined operationally, none of those societies function in the same way at all, except again in the very loose sense that they derive themselves in opposition to classical market capitalism. What existed were historically contingent power structures improvising governance under specific political, cultural, and material conditions.

[00:21:05]In the specific case of the Soviet Union, many theorists have rightly argued that its economy actually retained the most core features associated with capitalism. The USSR employed commodity production, wage labor, price systems, monetary accounting, and yes, surplus extraction.

[00:21:23]Production was oriented toward exchange values rather than direct use value optimization, and economic activity was mediated through abstract accounting units rather than direct material planning alone.

[00:21:34]In this sense, the system preserved arguably key dynamics that appear across all capitalist economies, albeit under heavy state control. The variation. Now, I'm not saying you can simply reduce the USSR down to what we commonly generalize as a market economy. The USSR certainly lacked competitive markets, traditional price discovery, and profit-seeking firms operating under those competitive pressures. And for these reasons, many economists would classify the Soviet system as an administrative command economy rather than a market-based one.

[00:22:08]Yet, the idea that holds up as a dividing line that separates two distinctions is extremely dubious, for both descriptions capture partial qualitative truths, which underscores the inadequacy of rigid ideological labels. Why not just consider the actual detailed dynamics of these countries and their systems rather than rapidly stereotyping and generalizing them, trying to create binaries and differentiation, when really you should be looking toward similarities. If you're going to talk about the flaws of the USSR, you have hundreds of variables to consider in terms of its effectiveness or not. I would argue that lowest common denominator that meaningfully defines capitalism from a system's perspective is the use of generalized market-mediated exchange as the primary coordination mechanism, which the USSR essentially had. And once such market logic remains operative, variations in ownership structure, means of production, or intervention does not by themselves constitute a fundamentally different system, as stated before. This is also why common definitions, such as "Socialism is public ownership of the means of production," collapse under scrutiny as well. What does public ownership mean in operational terms? How are decisions made? By what processes are resources allocated? How are priorities set, errors corrected, incentives structured? Without specifying such mechanisms, the phrase has no explanatory meaning. There's nothing inside of it. Moreover, the concept is referential. It is intelligible only in contrast to capitalism's private ownership model, revealing its derivative nature. So, returning to my core point, the mere political perception of difference between two states does not establish that they constitute fundamentally different economic systems. One may emphasize private ownership of production assets, while another may emphasize state ownership, but this alone does not answer the essential question. What makes these two arrangements structurally, heterogeneously different systems, rather than variations within the same systemic logic?

[00:24:27]At what point does a variation in governance or ownership cross a threshold and become a different system altogether?

[00:24:35]No one answers that question in this absurd, long-running debate. Even if one accepts the traditional dichotomy on its own terms, capitalism versus socialism, why is ownership of the means of production treated as the decisive dividing line in definition? Who decided that? In both cases, people still sell their labor, receive income, purchase goods, and participate in commodity exchange. These continuities indicate that the underlying coordination logic remains largely intact despite differences in administrative form.

[00:25:08]So, seen this way, the conventional debate over capitalism versus socialism collapses into a confusion of surface distinctions mistaken for systemic transformation.

[00:25:20]And I know I'm hideously running this into the ground, but I really can't help myself.

[00:25:24]Socialism, communism, or Marxism did not kill 100 million people in the 20th century. What repeatedly produced mass death was authoritarianism.

[00:25:34]That word we can understand. Highly centralized power structures insulated from accountability operating under conditions of coercion and repression.

[00:25:45]And authoritarian systems have emerged under all banners, including explicitly pro-market and neoliberal ones. The historical record is unambiguous on this point. Numerous right-wing market-oriented dictatorships in the 20th century engaged in widespread repression and mass violence.

[00:26:06]The Pinochet regime in Chile, something I feature in my new film, implemented under the guidance of neoliberal economic doctrine with the literal help of freedom advocate Milton Friedman, stands as a clear singular example of authoritarian governance paired with market fundamentalism. And that broad list of all those examples is very, very, very long.

[00:26:30]And also, I want to make sure this this point is clear. The distinction of the term socialism or communism by a self-identified state or what have you is really just a form of branding. Nazi Germany's national socialism is a great example, a deliberate act of political branding, not as an expression of socialist organization by whatever theory. You know, I don't know how many times I've gone through this diatribe and people say things like, "Well, Nazi Germany was just another example of the violent failures of socialism." Why? Because the word is there? That's pretty much all they have. Hitler explicitly opposed the socialists and Marxist.

[00:27:11]And his use of the label, I think it's even documented in some of the writings, served only to consolidate power, to bring people under the wing.

[00:27:21]Same with contemporary use of the term communist in party names, like in the case of China. Once again, it all functions primarily as symbolic continuity and ideological signaling.

[00:27:30]This ostensible differentiation to make people feel like something's different rather than as an actual description of an alternative non-capitalistic socioeconomic system. And back to the broad semantic emptiness of it all is another variation on this madness becomes even more apparent when we turn to the endless incremental variants used in everyday political language, that term socialization.

[00:27:56]Socialized medicine.

[00:27:58]At first glance, socialized medicine may appear to be a concrete application of the word socialism in an operational sense. In and of itself, this clearly doesn't really mold with any of the Marxist stuff, but you know, you know what I'm saying. Everyone knows what you're saying when you say this stuff, but they don't take it to the length of all this other category of nonsense.

[00:28:17]Socialized medicine, the standard definition describing a healthcare system which the state funds >> [snorts] >> or administers medical services through taxation typically, while employing maybe healthcare professionals themselves, but usually contracting private enterprise providers.

[00:28:35]Stripped of any ideological framing, this arrangement is straightforward.

[00:28:39]People work, they pay taxes, those taxes are pooled funds together, and they're used to distribute healthcare services or access to them across society.

[00:28:50]From a systems perspective, this is not a rejection of market economics, but merely a variation within it. The act of exchange has not disappeared. It has been displaced. Individuals are still paying for their health care, just not through direct point of service transactions, but through a collective payment mechanism mediated by the state.

[00:29:11]In this sense, so-called socialized medicine is simply a kind of procedural variation of market coordination. Labor is compensated, resources are allocated, costs are managed, and efficiency constraints remain like anything else.

[00:29:25]The underlying market logic persists.

[00:29:28]And viewed this way, the United States already operates a wide array of socialized systems. Education, fire protection, transport infrastructure, policing and courts, the postal service, water and sewer systems, portions of energy and utilities in fact, disaster response, public research and innovation of course, and even the monetary system itself functions through a kind of collective state orchestration and collective funding.

[00:29:57]Yet, none of these are cited as evidence that the United States is a socialist society. In fact, we could conjure all sorts of variations that just based on that pattern make the US more socialist than anything, especially when it bails out the rich over and over again upon every major economic crisis. It is absolutely true that the US maintains socialism for the rich and free market brutality for the poor on average. So, what point exactly, once again, does a country cross from capitalism into socialism when so much of its essential infrastructure behavior is already socialized? There's no coherent answer because the question itself is faulty.

[00:30:36]The language is rigged. What is being called socialization here is not a system change, but a variation in business process and governance structure related. And then the question becomes, well, why is anyone doing this?

[00:30:48]Well, it's not ideological, I can assure you. It's pragmatic, it's practical.

[00:30:52]Why? Because it is empirically proven that unconstrained competitive market dynamics are too unstable or misaligned with broad social needs to reliably provide certain needed services well.

[00:31:05]And without such regulatory intervention, these functions either fail outright or generate outcomes that undermine social stability, which no one can tolerate. At least not to the degree that allows it to persist um without riots in the street. Market capitalism does not merely produce undesirable externalities in so many domains, it fails to function even on its own stated terms as well.

[00:31:30]The fact that large portions of modern society depend on non-market or quasi-market coordination is not an anomaly, it is a structural necessity because markets suck.

[00:31:41]In fact, if it wasn't for this perpetual socialization, market capitalism probably would have been overthrown long ago. It is the regulatory socialist intervention that has literally saved the perceived integrity of market capitalism. It is literally propping it up everywhere around you, even though people refuse to acknowledge it if they're part of the cult. Speaking personally, if I didn't have health care insurance subsidized by the state due to my income, I would not have health insurance at all. It's that simple. The United States medical establishment is a classic case study in the failure of markets because of the competitive element primarily.

[00:32:20]It's a It's as It's as bloated and corrupt as possible with extreme prices for everything essentially picked out of thin air because of the competitive dynamics inherent. And suddenly you go to the hospital, you get an aspirin and it's 20 bucks for the pill.

[00:32:38]I had an issue with my wrist a while back, went to physical therapy, and the therapist asked if I wanted a simple little foam brace that they throw together in 5 minutes by curving a piece of plastic foam and water and then wrapping it around your hand and applying some Velcro. The labor time on that item was 5 minutes, and the material costs could not have been more than $50 if that. A couple weeks later, I got a bill from the hospital for about $200, which is what I had to pay on my behalf because my insurance company simply couldn't cover the full amount, you know, the piece of plastic and Velcro made in 5 minutes, which was $650.

[00:33:17]Anyone that thinks markets are being efficient are delusional, and this is a classic example. Markets always move to the exploitative cost extreme to the degree it can get away with. That's how it calculates itself primarily, always.

[00:33:33]Nothing is really priced based on resource use or labor value.

[00:33:38]Everything is priced on the calculation that maximizes what the public will endure, especially with things like healthcare. If you get cancer and might die in 6 months, you're not going to be in caring what the cost is. You'll spend 70 grand for some 3-month treatment, which is just the first of many rounds, and people are going to go into extreme debt just to do it. It's their lives at stake. It is so insidious and parasitic. And since the cult religion of the market clan says in its commandments, "Thou shalt not interfere with market prices, they are the word of God."

[00:34:16]The only thing the state can then do is to subsidize, which is exactly what they do if they don't want riots effectively in the street or run the risk of being condemned as an evil socialist state.

[00:34:27]In the end, what is remarkable is not the prevalence of these so-called socializations or interventions, but the effectiveness of the propaganda and obscuring their necessity and normalizing the myth of market self-regulation and self-sufficiency when the market is not self-sufficient at all.

[00:34:48]I will conclude this section with the [snorts] following clarification. If one insists on preserving a binary in all of this, you know, capitalism versus socialism, the only term that meaningfully encompasses what are commonly labeled socialism, communism, Marxism is simply anti-capitalist.

[00:35:08]It's just anti-capitalist thought to whatever relative degree. That is the only category broad enough to accommodate the vast internal variations across historical cases without falsely implying the existence of some coherent alternative social model shared amongst all of these self-described socialist societies or the societies that are being derisively condemned as socialist societies. And what this obscures, which is never, ever stated explicitly, at least very rarely, is the counter-claim that underlies the true nature of the discourse, that any society not rooted in market economics or capitalism will fail. You see, directly expressed, that claim sounds extreme, dogmatic, and unscientific. It would be comparable to asserting that the rotary telephone represented the peak of communication technology or that the automobile is the final and ultimate form of transportation. Such absolutism is intuitively absurd when applied to any other domain of human development. So, instead, the claim that nothing will work but market capitalism is smuggled in indirectly through these referential categorical condemnations that don't exist. Socialism never works. Central planning never works. Collectivism never works.

[00:36:31]These phrases differ in wording, but converge on the exact same unexamined assertion. Each is simply a displaced version of the statement that nothing but markets can function as a viable organizing system.

[00:36:46]Psychological slight of hand, right? By condemning a vague abstraction rather than defending an explicit claim. Put another way, whether people recognize it or not, every instance of the phrase, it doesn't even matter who says it or what they believe, every instance you hear of the phrase "socialism doesn't work" reduces, decoded, to the claim that capitalism is the only possible functional system. An assumption that painfully circulates through public discourse today. And hence the consequence is that any proposal for economic reform or or or alternative coordination can be dismissed in advance. That's the beauty of this propaganda. Simply by associating it with one of these ideologically loaded, semantically empty terms.

[00:37:31]Rejected not because it's been evaluated and found wanting, but because it has been rhetorically categorized as something that has supposedly already failed.

[00:37:43]Okay.

[00:37:45]Now, the reason I ran that into the ground so severely is cuz I don't ever want to talk about that subject again.

[00:37:50]I've written about it in numerous substacks, but please, try your best to get people to snap out of this trance. I can't go a week without someone bringing up this crap to me. Aren't you just talking about what Marx talked about?

[00:38:04]Isn't this just the the moneyless society? No. Yeah.

[00:38:07]Ah.