@@MechanicaMenace even as an Englishman I and everyone I knew regarded him as a horrific extremist who may have helped England but was terrible (king of like the English Hitler)
In school we were literally taught that Cromwell was a hero who overthrew the monarchy and that was it. I had no idea about anything else he did, good or bad.
"commit attrocities in northern ireland" Northern Ireland wasnt in existence back then, it also was the whole island of ireland as opposed to the north of it that suffered under cromwell. see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromwellian_conquest_of_Ireland
Although I agree with you on 95% of the video, I would say the real phenomenon who actually triggered the emergence and consolidation of capitalism as the true economic dominant system was the French, and not the English, revolution. In the French Revolution we see the actual revolutionary class, the Bourgeoisie, was the one that crippled the traditional dominant feudal class and made profound and deep changes in the society of the time. In the English revolution, although yes we saw a deep profound change, it was limited to a political spectrum. Yes, it is undeniable that England became the first modern State of the world, however no profound change was made in society because the same class kept control of the political and productive instrument. After the French Revolution we see Britain at the highest of its colonial rule and the consolidation fo capitalism at the Industrial Revolution. GREAT VIDEO BY THE WAY!
The enclosure of commons was absolutely stealing just as much as fencing a public park owned by the city without permission and starting to charge admission while still expecting city employed park workers to care for it. The Diggers and Levellers were my heroes! Anarcho-syndicalism or death!
1:30 You're misusing the term profit and this results in a factual error at 1:39. Profit is what’s left after paying all expenses, including wages. So the capitalist doesn’t sell the chair for profit. They exchange it for money and then use only some of that money to pay wages, keeping the rest as profit. So you're wrong that “the wages are always less than the total profit”. Because let’s say you sell the chair for $50, the wood cast $20 and the labor/wages $20, the profit is $10, which is less than the wages. What you meant is that the wages are always less than the value created.
Philosophy tube, I shall remain grateful to your ever for this simplified yet nuanced explanation of things. I'm a student of Sociology, and your channel has played an important role in conceptual clarity of liberalism and many such topics. Sending you love and regards from Indian occupied Kashmir.(not sure if you have ever heard of the place) 🙂
Really well done! Your videos are always so clean and easy to understand. I really appreciate this series. I eagerly anticipate the next installment. Thank you from across the pond.
this is the most important history lesson i never got from school. it literally explains how monarchy can end and leave society just as divided and oppressed
@Benni B Seems like you can't handle differing ideas from someone you don't even knlw without immediately assuming and then insulting their appearance and sexuality. Or without assuming they're a hippie who has never done any "hard work." You're insults reveal how typical and simple your worldview is.
I like to phrase a definition of capitalism thus: capitalism is any system whereby owning more than other people is in and of itself (somehow or another) a source of income; or conversely, where owning less than other people in and of itself (somehow or another) costs you. The wage labor scenario you (and Marx) describe is one "somehow or another", but I'd argue that that, and all of capitalism, really boils down to one core feature: rent, including interest which is just rent on money. If you don't have enough capital to live and work and survive yourself, you have to borrow it from someone who has more than you, and if they can charge you for that, then you have to work even more to fund both that and your own survival, while they have to work equivalently less. Why would the wage laborers possibly put up with being paid less than the actual value they are producing? Because they don't have any other alternatives: they are in debt just by living, because they have to borrow a place to live and to work, and the equipment needed to work, or else money with which to buy a place to live and work and the equipment to do that work. The whole wage labor scenario Marx goes on about is only a consequence of the usury which is the core of capitalism, and the last vestige of feudalism still remaining today: there's a reason they're called land-LORDS. Capitalism is just post-industrial feudalism, the same social arrangements at a different tech level where there are more kinds of capital than arable land.
Oh and I guess I left off the bottom line: get rid of rent (including interest) and you could have a free market that was not capitalist. In fact, I would argue that a market with capitalism in effect is by definition not free, as the extraction of rents leveraged by different amounts of capital possessed constitutes a form of coercion, much like having a gun pointed at your head makes the "choice" to hand over your wallet or not, not such a choice at all.
Capitalism is a system characterized by capitalist relations, they being wage-labor and property income (dividends, interest, rent, royalties), a pretty simple definition from classical economics, and from original (pre-marxist) socialism, which, imo, nicely captures the general intuition people have on the basis of which they will or will not consider some person a capitalist. Marx, if you read chapters 4, 5, and 6 of Capital vol 1, had some weird view about how exploitation can't exist outside the workplace, because trades even out across the economy, and "surplus value" is produced only in production, not in circulation, so according to him capitalism is found strictly in wage-labor, and rent and interest are secondary. To be precise about it, capitalism is not just post-industrial feudalism, wage-labor is renting of other people's labor, ie buying and selling of labor hours, property income is changing people for their use of something you own, whereas feudalism is ownership of other people's labor, the oath of fealty through which one became a serf was as a contract of transferring the ownership of one's labor throughout one's life to another person.
All of these isms seem to prey on weakness of the individual, whether it's an economic disadvantage or a sort of want or neediness. Owning their land, or having control of it, would go a long way towards eliminating this since the cost of living can be minimized ie having a garden, off grid power, car share, co-op buying power etc in an eco village framework. This frees the individual from the hard scrabble life to become more creative, and educated through channels like this one (thanks Ollie!) which is such a win-win situation. Why can't we use our collective buying power to form a land buying corporation, non- profit, which sets up eco villages? In Eastern Canada 200 acres can be had for $65k, and it's less than a half hour drive from town. This includes sales tax and lawyer fees. What's stopping us?
The common land (at least in England) WAS considered the property of the Lord in the feudal period. However, Lords rarely sold their land voluntarily, and were considered to have certain obligations to the people who lived on it (who, if they were serfs, were not allowed to leave that land). The farmed land was divided up into long strips scattered across the property that "belonged" to different peasant families. Other land used for pasture or forest or which was considered low value for farming could be used by any of the peasants (including those without allocated strips of land) in various ways governed by tradition or common law (which derived from traditions). Peasants often paid rent for their cottages to the Lord, those these rents were low compared to later periods. The division of farming land into long strips was relatively fair (most families had some land to grow food on, and the shape meant it wasn't all either good or bad land) but it made implementing some productivity-boosting agricultural techniques (such as crop rotation) harder. So starting as early as the 1200s (but mostly after 1600), land owners (who came to include merchant families and other proto-capitalists as well as hereditary lords) began to look for legal permission to consolidate land. Usually the use to which they wanted to put that land required fewer workers and so would involve kicking peasants out. Many thousands of such "inclosure acts" were passed by Parliament, and they mostly required landowners to pay a substantial compensation to the peasants for the loss of their traditional rights. As a result, at the time a lot of poor farmers supported these acts - the potential downsides were only realized by a few. The commonness of wage labor had also been increasing over this period, as towns and the importance of non-agricultural parts of the economy grew (a serf who made it to at town and stayed unclaimed by their lord for over a year could usually not be forced to return). It got a real boost in the aftermath of the black death, as labor was in short supply and workers discovered they now had negotiating power. But the greater the proportion of workers who had to be paid, the more landowners had a financial incentive to cut the number of workers. In any case, all these various factors did fuel the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Better sources coming if I have the time, but wikipedia version reflects what I've read in multiple other books: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_Acts en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_Black_Death
So, the thing about common land in medieval England is that it wasn’t free for everyone for everything. A lot of common land was divvied out into parcels for people of a given area, and even if you had theoretical access, you could be squeezed out by other commoners.
everything would be easier if capitalists let go of the mask and turn it into a full fledged demi-god-shaman-capitalist-rich worshipping religion. they define themselves "individuals" so there's a new terms of rule less obvious in it's totalitarian nature. in the good old days loyalist poor knew what they gave up on and looked for heaven as the payment of this exhange. now, it's "what if i get the change to exploit people too", poor are accomplices.
@@niclasjohansson5992 Then why is there such a long history of foraging tribes resisting assimilation and "development" by supposedly more "advanced" societies?
The shortest definition of the core of capitalism is just three characters representing two words: M - C - M M = Money C = Commodity Capitalism is taking money - exchanging it for a commodity - and exchange that commodity for more money.
You also need to add that there's only one commodity that can be sold for more than the value it's bought at: labour power. Otherwise the nature of capitalism is still hidden. If commodities can be reliably sold at 10 percent above their value, then when the capitalist, Mr Moneybags, buys commodity A, he buys it at 10 percent above it's value. When he sells it, he sells it at 10 percent above its value and ends up with no profit. If he wants to make a profit, he has to find a commodity that can produce value that exceeds what he pays for it. Luckily, there is such a commodity for sale: labour power. The capitalist buys tools, raw materials and labor power at their cost, which is equal to their value. But when the workers apply their labour power to the raw materials and tools, they produce a product that exceeds the value of its inputs. This surplus value is kept by the capitalist when he sells the product. Thus, the process becomes M C M' or money commodity money delta. Where delta is the profit. Where no profit is produced, the money used isn't capital. Capitalism requires profit. Therefore it requires the extraction of surplus value from workers through wage labour
@@atashikokoni You don't seem to grasp the value added by the capital put into a prlductive process, as well as the value put in by the employer who produces more efficiently as a random person without any knowledge in that branch of the economy...
Olly do an entire episode about all the fascinating groups like the diggers and levellers! Also it's atrocities in most of Ireland!, Fun fact I can see the results of the Down land survey online that Cromwell enacted after his conquest of Ireland and see the land my family farmed on being redistributed to new planters. It's pretty neat.
Lol, the image you used for the English Civil War is from a German 30 Years War reenactment. I recognized the Palatinate flag... Great video, but that made me laugh.
Your definition of ideology as a "justifier of violence" is for me a new way of seeing and concretize what an ideology is, it does give a new way to examine what the substance of an ideology is. However I believe that many people would argue that ideology is more than the justification of violence, or see this definition as a very extreme one. Many would argue that ideology would primarily be about the distribution of resources, the structure of a society etc and of course you could absolutely connect this to the control of violence especially since in this channel and Idea Channel you've discussed violence as the 'removal of choice'.
I think you're missing something important from the basic diagram of investment - labour - profit. Whoever is employing the workers to make the chairs doesn't do "nothing but provide the capital to buy the stuff needed to make the chair" they also sell them. A big part of the reason why people don't just make chairs themselves (apart from not being able to afford the necessary equipment to be as productive as necessary to compete) is that it can be really difficult to find a buyer for your product.
Interesting and uniquely framed, as always! The history of the Liberal ideology is a real sticky wicket, and the project of deconstructing its flaws is one of the most stressful jobs in political and economic philosophy today. Super jazzed for the next part!
I find it interesting that you continually mention the whiteness of the wealthy people in power. At that point in history, my understanding is that non-whites really didn't make up a significant portion of the British population - as you yourself pointed out, it wasn't until after the British Civil War that the slave trade really picked up a lot of steam. I would be curious to know what the breakdown was of those wealthy classes into a more granular analysis of their ethnicity, rather than blanketly referring to people as "white." For example, The Celts, the Welsh, people of Germanic descent, people whose family lineage was connected to prominent figures in the Roman Empire during the period of time when Britania was a part of Rome, etc. Just throwing some ideas out there. I feel like you skip over a lot of the nuance of the racial and ethnic issue, because although pretty much all of the rich people were white... the poor people were too. So really, you're putting a modern overlay of racial identity issues onto a period of time when the racial landscape was significantly different.
for the British isles it is true that it is mostly populated by 'white' races, where their power was seated. However The British did have colonies, colonies which where where a lot of which where Indian, Irish, or black. I think Olly may be referring to the people in the colonies, which did not have a say about their governance.
I wasnt even really trying ro debate anything lol more of a sitiuation of seeing a generalizarion that isnt very useful and wanting more information. Also pointing out that Ollies biases are showing a bit by the way he is presenting the information.
Paul Conti It's more in regards to the British power and influence over the British Empire's colonies I think, a good example in many cases being India.
Great video, it was very intelligent, and it raised some interesting questions. This side of the story is not taught in schools for a reason. Can you make a video about different anarchist economic systems? And what is your current political tendency?
Brilliant historical take - something that doesn't get talked about enough. I think many conversations about the advent of capitalism start far too late with the establishment of The New World leading to ideological conflict and the arguement over how 'natural' land ownership and private property is - completely ignoring the materialist and historical context
This is what I don't get about the Marxist critique of capitalism: Yes, the capitalist controls the means-of-production and takes the profit. But that's the payoff for bearing the upfront costs and the financial risk. The workers could also form a cooperative and own the means-of-production collectively themselves. Then they'd take the profit, but they'd also bear the upfront cost and risk. Both of these seem like perfectly reasonable systems, just so long as the means-of-production hasn't been appropriated by force, like it was in feudalism.
Exactly. I've had people encourage me to start my own business, and even offered to invest in starting it up. No thanks, I don't want to put in the risk and extra work/stress. I'm perfectly happy letting someone else shoulder that bullshit, just showing up to work, doing my job, and going home with a fat paycheck at the end of the week.
In your definition of the basic capitalist relationship between classes (worker-owner, owner gets profit), where does product engineering fit in? Production engineering? Process engineering? According to your definition of ideology: ideology is that which defines what facts are important (and what actions are permissable). On what grounds did you determine that the facts that workers add value is important, but the fact that engineers do isn't? Why is it important that workers apply physical labor, but the fact that engineers design isn't, considering that engineering amounts to about 80% of the qualities of the finished product, yet is only about 5% of the cost?
Hi, greetings from Brazil! I think it's important to say that wages are not always smaller then the total amount of profit, that is true only to well functioning businesses, and that is part of the reason that the owner of the means of production gets the added value to the product, because of the assumption of the risk. If things don't work out, he will be responsible for the losses, and will pay for them.
I wish people wouldn't conflate capitalism with markets. You can have a fully anarchist system of worker coops, with markets. And rich people can own the means of production and distribute goods through a central authority. They are separate concepts.
Great episode as always, but one small nitpick (because I know you were simplifyng) - the commander of Parliamentarian forces for the entirety of the First English Civil War was Lord Thomas Fairfax, not Cromwell.
Hey Olly! Great video, what else is to be expected from a great channel? Anyways, I have a small problem with how you present the shift from feudalism to capitalism. Claiming ownership of a piece of land along with the crops that grow on it and legitamizing that claim with threats of violence (thus being able to extract surplus value from those who no longer can sustain a nomadic lifestyle and have to work for the "king" of that land) seems to be in line with what you call "enclosure". The system wherein such behaviour is being perpetuated however, is what I recognize to be feudalism. You on the other hand seem to think that enclosure is at the core of the shift from feudalism to capitalism. I would instead like to claim that enclosure is a key feature of feudalism and capitalism simply works as a contniuation of this phenomenon. I may have missed the point or otherwise misunderstood you, so I would be glad to see you comment on this. Thanks for the lovely videos! - a fan ::::******
In the attempt of justifying an/our ideology that functions "like a veil of obviousness" (L. Althusser), we should consider our tendency towards "motivation reasoning" / "confirmation bias" and our lack of "negative capability". George Lakoff's "Strict Father - Nurturing Parent"-model sheds some light on the differences between the way conservatives and progressives perceive reality.
I don't tend to click 'like' on every video I watch, because if I watch the channel regularly, I like the video, and that's a given. But, for some reason, this episode seemed better than most to me, so you've got a like from me. Keep it up!
It's a good practice to get into if you have channels that you regularly watch as it increases their odds to appear higher/earlier in the YT search results and makes it more likely that their videos will appear as recommendations in other people's feeds. It's thought that the YT algorithm that handles these odds uses stats on watch time, the number of views, the number of subscribers, the popularity of a channel's videos on average and the level of "video interaction" (the number of likes, dislikes and comments). The higher the values of these factors (even dislikes) the more promotion a channel and it's videos are likely to get. I like to do as much of these as I can for channels and videos that I like as a sort of payment for the videos I watch (especially since I use an adblocker :P).
I think of capitalism as an economic system in which the medium of exchange is valued over what it buys for the sake of its convertibility. Would you rather have a 5 dollar sandwich, or 5 dollars? There are... consequences. Of course, the potential for reward is what makes my dopamine flow, not the ultimately dissatisfying moment of consumption. The money is always worth more than what it buys, because it has one value, whereas the purchases have many that can be transposed and magnified through money.
"You keep the profit for yourself, rather than give it to the people who actually put the work in." This is an odd way to frame it. Why assume the capitalist isn't putting any work in himself? He's the one that had to research different ventures and ultimately decide on making chairs (he could use his wood for something else). He's also the one that had to find the workers, organize them into a team, and tell them what to do. The profit is just another word for compensating the capitalist for his contribution. Just like "wages" are what we call the compensation the workers receive.
Mmhmm, but you can throw as much money and organisation at the wood as you want - it's only by the labour of the workers that it increases in value and becomes a chair. They're the ones who actually generate the surplus value that enables a profit to be turned, and Marx's point was that they then don't get the fruits of that.
Okay, but they only exert their labor on the wood at the direction of the capitalist. You seem to be saying that the capitalist organizes the production, but doesn't add value that needs to be compensated? That doesn't make sense to me. If you don't have the workers, you don't have a chair. At the same time, if you don't have a capitalist, you don't have wood or a firm at all, so you don't have a chair. You need both capitalists and workers "putting work in" to create a product. And if you want them to work, you need to pay them. For workers, we call that compensation wages. For capitalists, we call that compensation profit. What am I missing?
Thanks, this book looks interesting. I will check it out. However, I just want to clarify my earlier statement. You're right that people made chairs before capitalism came along. There are other ways to organize economic society. But I don't think they look too good in the light of history. Just look a medieval Europe. It wasn't very peaceful either. Or very fun. What you did for a living had more to do with who your parents were than what you wanted to do with your life (its why job titles became surnames). And then you couldn't always choose who you worked for as (depending on your station) you could be coerced into doing work for the nobility. So working for someone else isn't new. But the idea that you could choose what you do for a living and who you work for? That's actually kind of revolutionary.
"This year, the combined total revenue of all 500 companies reaches $12.1 trillion." These numbers are gross, they are BEFORE paying suppliers, workers, etc. A serious amount of that $12.1 trillion is transferred to workers' paychecks. And you think that's a bad thing. Wow. "If you gave every worker in the US (150 million people) a $40,000 raise ($6 trillion) these corporations would still have 6 trillion left over." LOL, you apparently didn't read the article you linked. You also obviously have no idea that there's a difference between revenue and profit. Just... shhh. Leave these things to people who are better educated and more intelligent.
Benni B Or we could use worker owned cooperatives, which are more efficient and have more innovative workers, but aren't competitive because they don't focus on profit as end-all-be-all.
N's Creations and Gunpla Review Can't even insult a guy without dehumanising misogyny. This is what capitalism does to you, people. Commodifying women so much, you think you can use them as punchlines against men.
Funny how everything regarding greed here is very much correct and factual, but also the very same greed led us to here today. Reminder that ending slave trading was also an economic move from the north of the US, since they didn't need slaves quite as much and more people having more money to use on their stuff made them quite a bit of cash.
Idk it is important to remember some of the so called "liberal," philosophers wrote about the importance of tolerance.. While kant, Hagel, and Marx and others...wrote about "in group vs out group." So I think we should just pick and choose what we want to follow ...it isnt like it is some religion. The idea of in group vs out group...and the ideas of collectivism, and the greater good... almost ALWAYS end up with dire consequences
Yes capitalism causes inequality and pain...but so does communism. I prefer the tolerance and liberty of an individual over the pushing of collectivism
Like the illiberal brand of progressivism we see in the US today and its praxis: segregating school kids by skin color (as happened in a local middle school) in the name of “diversity and inclusion”. If this is the praxis of the replacement ideology, give me more liberalism any day.
Brilliant video Olly, loving this series so far. There's a book that I've only thus partly read called Liberalism: A Counter-History, by Domenico Losurdo, which I think covers a lot of this territory.It might be worth checking out?
The exploitation theory of capitalism is based off the labor theory of value, which most economists have reasonably debunked with the subjective theory of value. Things that are produced do not obtain their value from labor but from the subjectivity of the buyer. Let's say I have two shakes, one chocolate one vanilla. They both used syrup from the same brand and they are of same size, made by the same fast food worker who gets payed x per hour. If I am someone who likes chocolate more than vanilla the vanilla shake has less utility and thus less value to me. I would not be willing to purchase a vanilla shake for $4 dollars, but I might if vanilla shakes were on sale for say $2 or $3. I would, however, be willing to pay $4 for the chocolate shake because it has to me, subjectively, more value.
Your background is not the one I was taught, to say the least. Land may have been unclaimed in some senses, but the cases in which aristocrats came to own large amounts of land, and in some cases, own the other people living on it, were not, as conventionally understood, capitalism. That started as economic production in towns and cities began to outclass landed nobility in influence, hence why "bourgeois", which literally just means "town-dweller", evolved into something like a synonym for capitalist.
Eh, I'm not convinced the English Civil War was such a big factor. Kings have been killed for thousands of years. Usually, they were replaced by other kings. So why was this time so different? (I don't actually know. Maybe the printing press?)
It would have been better to put more dates on the screen.Sometimes i just didn't know about what time you were talking about. It was a bit confusing. I know it was just a very short summary, but especially in such a dense video clarity is essential.
Ideology clearly isn’t just a mechanism to justify violence. That’s a pragmatic feature of many ideologies but it’s certainly not the essential definition. The goal should be to construct an ideology that doesn’t cause violence.
Oh...a anti-capitalist/liberalism english speaker?... If I am correct, may I ask your view on the alternatives to capitalism/liberalism problems? A question from one of your foreign subscribers
I'm confused by your history. Are you saying that in feudalism (the economic system of Europe before capitalism) land was commonly owned? Because that is far from the truth.
No, he was saying that there was land, called common land, that didn't have an owner, at least not recognizably so. He also discussed how that changed within feudalism. The nobility took over the common land and forced the peasants into serfdom. That is historically accurate.
The commons was land that was commonly maintained and used by everyone. For example, a village common might be a large stretch of fields that no one person owned but that everyone grazed their sheep on and took care of. If a few people wanted to use some of the common to plant some corn or something they could ask the village council, but they couldn't just do it apropos of nothing and they usually couldn't use all of what they grew for private profit.
Just if anyone's curious, there's still quite a bit of common land in the UK, though obviously the bits rich people didn't nick (yes they literally just claimed them, on the grounds that they'd put them to more efficient use).
The problem with both Liberalism and Capitalism is their exemptions, since they have no consistent, non arbitrary, truth they have moral or ethical base in which to stand. But can any human ideology stand and not be arbitrary? After millenia of living in and defending falsehoods can human live outside of them since no example has ever been seen?
I define capitalism as: Private ownership of the means of production and resources for the purpose of profit in a market economy where the autocratic employer-employee relationship is the primary means to having a livelihood for most people.
Wages are less than the income generated, in order to compensate the employer for risk taken. If it was easy to operate a business and to make a profit, the employees could do it themselves.
The common land never existed as you seem to think it did. It was always something granted in the feudal hierarchy by lords or Kings. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but there was never a point where someone DIDNT claim ownership of a piece of land in medieval society. I must not be understanding something when socialists talk about the common land as this great thing. Lords, Kings, dukes, etc. All owned land and gave fiefs to those they favored. People could USE the land they owned as they were their subjects, but ultimately they almost always had a monopoly on violence and therefore the land. Idk I’m probably just not getting something.
It's not a strong critique of liberalism to merely criticise the exceptions to its rules that are often made within it- doesn't that imply quite heavily that the rules themselves are pretty damn good, and ought to be applied more universally?
Joe Hodson I think Olly means to say that the exceptions are necessarily built into the project through its reliance on a freely choosing self abstracted from its ends. A choosing self must be rational if it is to bring justice through the promotion of order. Liberalism in Rawls, for example, requires us to abstract ourself from our personal commitments to family, friends etc. , the only thing which matters to us is that we can choose. This idea, I think Olly contends, is built into all of liberalism. Rawls even opens his book saying that "justice is the first virtue of social institutions". But why is justice necessarily and *exclusively* preferable to other virtues which society could honor? It's very important --no one disagrees there--but is really the sole virtue through which all other virtues gain their merit? To sum up my argument: Since liberalism sees all people as internally rather than externally equal(as would be the Christian imago dei conception of equality, for example) liberal anthropology is one which views humans as fundamentally abstracted from my circumstances, so in order to respect the dignity of any given person, I ought to respect the choices of that person since this is the fundamental expression of my person. However, this means that unless we want to abandon the pursuit of justice,there must be a standard by which we determine who is and is not capable of choice thus by extension, a determination of who is and is not human. Michael Sandel talks a bit about this in Democracy's discontent, also After Virtue by Alasdair Macintyre is a good resource.
WeeklyBibleTalk That's an interesting point, but I'm not sure those metaphysical assumptions about free will and internal equality that these early liberals proceeded from are inherently necessary to substantiate the general moral conclusions of liberalism, which is a very broad church indeed. Even historically, you had Locke making arguments appealing to natural law vs Mill saying similar things from a more utilitarian view (which I'm not sure is a distinction Olly's really talked about yet). I do concur with your Rawls quote that justice is the highest virtue, because justice simply is extrapolated moral obligation, whereas other virtues like courage might be just or unjust depending on the situation. I actually think virtue ethics is the more dangerous and flawed ideology here. Referring to the standard of a "good person" rather than "good action" lends itself to a tendency to attempt to solve problems by eliminating certain people rather than certain actions, which seems a much more direct justification for violence, vengeance, prejudice or oppression than a consistently applied consequentialist liberalism which starts from the goal of minimising both the amount and distribution of any such harms. But if I'm wrong on any of this, please do enlighten me.
My particular area of knowledge (and what I’m writing my thesis in) is the particular criticisms of liberalism in the kantian strand. But since kantian liberalism is perhaps its largest modern strand, these criticisms are relevant. While I do reject utilitarianism for a number of reasons which I won’t lay out here(I think Rawls did a great job here), I must plead ignorance in this area and others outside of the kantian liberal tradition. I will confess however that natural law can lead to an interesting defense of a kind of liberalism, though its reliance of teleology disqualifies it from defending liberalism in its contemporary form. But I will respond to the one point in your comment which I think I am qualified to respond to: If justice is extrapolated moral obligations, it can only account for those obligations which are universal in nature. Even if rights are the sole axioms of justice, they are not the sole axioms of 'rightness' since at least some obligations are conferred antecedent to choice. Thus justice cannot be the political virtue through which others gain their merit, since many of those obligations would be particularist. In short, Rawls conflates justice with goodness in a society vis a vis the veil of ignorance by suggesting I can conceive of a good society without knowledge about my particular family, friends etc. The ethical universe is one with agents already encumbered with numerous commitments to various groups *prior* to beginning any ethical deliberation. Relationships between persons are the basic fabric of ethics, and fundamental principles may be attached directly to these relations. I hope this makes sense. If you find any issues in my arguments, please let me know!
WeeklyBibleTalk Again, definitely some food for thought here. However, I would hesitate to concur that relationships are the ultimate "fabric" of ethics, as it seems extremely intuitive that we can and frequently do have moral obligations to complete strangers. If I see a person drowning and know how to help them, the fact that they are a complete stranger doesn't mean I owe them nothing. Also it seems quite clear that many of the world's problems are caused by people with the ability to help the global masses choosing instead to help only their own family/friends/community/country/demographic groups/selves etc. For this reason I tend to be suspicious of the valorisation of "particularism" in ethics. Sure, obligations can exist in particular situations, but don't these tend to exist for universal reasons anyway? If it's wrong to break a promise to a friend, it's because it's generally bad to break promises, not because they're a god among men who deserves special treatment. The obviously greater subjective value of the time spent with the friend as opposed to the hoi polloi I would categorise as a matter of aesthetics rather than cast iron duty- we tend to value friendship based on the presumption of its authenticity, which would be heavily compromised if it turned out that the "friend" is merely motivated by a perceived moral obligation to us. Does that add up in your opinion? Does Olly have anything to weigh in with here?
Another thought on exceptions to rules in liberalism- these aren't necessarily arbitrary or prejudiced, although obviously they can and often have been misapplied in those ways. In Mill's liberalism, any coercive act has to be justified under the harm principle, i.e it's wrong unless it's absolutely necessary to prevent a much greater harm. Yes, this was used to justify Imperialism, but I think that kind of misapplication isn't inherent to the idea. Similarly, there isn't an inherent connection between Mill's liberalism and either socialism or capitalism, an issue that Mill himself u-turned on. You can have heated debates about what level of collectivism in the economy is optimal based on Mill's liberalism and the harm principle, and the main thing these debates will come down to is how much evidence there is and where it seems to be leaning.
I wasn't clear how capitalism fits into the founding of America - perhaps you can clarify? If early America, founded on principles of Liberty, heavily rely on slavery where is the room for the wage labour model production?
I look forward to the video you make about Socialism, where you describe it's rapid slide into Authoritarianism as inherent because Socialism has historically led to Authoritarianism at scale. Not fair, you say? Because Authoritarianism is not a necessary part of the Socialist ideology? Well, I suspect exceptions to liberty is also not part of the Liberal ideal, just something shitty that always shows up because humans are shitty. So how about a video that actually talks about the Liberal ideology first, and then talks about the failures of Liberalism in practice as distinct from the ideology?
(8:38) You said that a lot of the violence that liberalism legitimizes is the violence that keeps capitalism going. But, is that so? Was the choice of keeping the slaves the best option for the U.S.? I agree that keeping a payment-free labouror(slaves) could have been shown as 'profitable', but (only considering the economical value and not considering the human rights just for now) I see that, the slavery, as a view that is very near-sighted. The U.S. could have developed its economy along with black and white people (not slaves). Letting people join in the social economy without any discrimination could have brought more growth to the country. Same goes with the example you mention about England. England is excluding immigrants, which is the violence, you said, that keeps capitalism going. But again, I don't see this as a solution, a capitalism booster to England. Rejecting immigrants can turn out to be a major flaw in the economy. My point is that the things liberalism legitimize are not always making 'the economy going'. It might be the other way around. I understand your words when you said(8:38). I wanted to check if there's people who thought the way I did and if any of my words are wrong. And keep in mind that I always watch your videos. I love your channel. It really helps.
I'm not a huge fan of Niall Ferguson. But in his "ascent of money" I was reading about how it was loans with interest that helped financed the exploration of the "new world". Interest payments on loans were very taboo hundreds of years ago (as they encouraged risk I think?... there maybe more complicated reasons why the church - in particular - were against interest on loans?). Of course now in finance people make money from debt by selling it on (or repackaging it and setting up conditions for the biggest financial crash since the 1930's great depression... and it aint over yet and no-one has learnt their lessons or been held accountable either) - though how this exactley works with student loans I don't know?... when the market value of so far unpaid student loans, from 2000 say, is a tenth or less than the cost to the debter (the student who has to pain the loan in full with interest - who isn't allowed to buy their own debt on the open market for a tenth of the value they as a debter has to pay).
Though - like with the mortgage market that caused the 2008 financial crash - it is not like the creditors who issue the student loans had the money in the first place before issuing it to students. In each case - student loan or mortgage - the 'debter' is giving the 'creditor' the money i.e. the creditor had no money.. they had no credit. So in effect, the 'debtor' (student taking out a loan or mortgage payer) is a creditor to the banks. Without 'debters' the banks - 'the creditors' - would go bust over night as they are technically insolvent.. By law the banks are supposed to keep a 10% credit in their vaults (the rest is out in the 'market' - as loans or whatever like derivatives). But that proved not to be the case during 2008 and so they were all technically bought out by central state banks... But the black hole in the economy caused by the 2008 crash was so huge that it has (I don't know for sure) made many central banks - i.e. countries - insolvent... The reality of this may well ring true this year or next year. I don't know whether I trust Jim Rickards, but he claims that the paper money we've had since the 1970's (under fiat currency when Nixon bailed out of the gold standard) could either come to an end or get bought up by the IMF and World Bank... possibly meaning an end to the reserve currency status of the dollar and pound etc (especially if they are deemed insolvent).
btw. There is so much money in the derivatives market that at todays household energy prices you could use the money in the derivatives market to boil away all the water in the english channel.
Dallas Wood Niall Ferguson criticises the economic theory the author of "Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk" came up with - "The Efficient Market Hypothesis", which is correct but falls flat if one assumes the market reflects reality, which it didn't leading up to the 2007/2008 financial crash and still doesn't today.
Could Liberalism without exceptions work? Imo the core ideas of freedom for everybody sounds good. What problems were we to face, if we tried to achieve this?
I’ve enjoyed learning your perspective on things and I appreciate it. I clicked your videos because of random events, and it’s been a pleasure, however. ha ha. I’m referring to the medieval part. As a history connoisseur with 15 years of primary focus on the high-late medieval period, the more I learn, the more I realise I don’t know nearly as much as I wish. We understandably don’t have time to search for all the evidence ourself. Our time is finite. We therefor try to extract the essence of stories we’ve heard. The problem with the video is that the medieval reference is bad and shouldn’t be taken seriously. “Here’s example A and this example, true or false, account for a continent across a time period of 1000 years, where each society was unique.” The whole notion that you can extract a kernel of truth from a diverse continent over a millennium, and somehow compare it to your idea, is childlike and wrong. Show some humility about what you understand and what you don’t understand. My primary tip, if you don’t have time to look through the ancient texts, do your own research and make your own conclusions - is to look for secondary sources to support your claim AND put your sources in the description. (You are not a source). There are several free sites where people post their free phd’s. If you don’t know how to do that, then go to askhistorians on Reddit. They’re pretty good considering their availability. I wish you all the best
Price =/= value, why conflate them? There is no price of a final good until someone agrees to pay it depending on their values which is different than the producers/workers values. So this viewing of everything like corporate factories just conflates two seperate interactions & seperate values. Skews the whole picture if you do that by assuming an "excess" of value rather than acknowledging both time preference and a difference in values leading to both profit and loss....
You might want to rethink your statement at 1:40. There are many instances where wages paid exceed profit earned. You are attempting to connect the wage paid and the profit earned but the correlation is not relevant. Perhaps you are confusing profit with gross sales price?
1:00 It could be argumented, that the capitalist in this picture is just another labourer, who has the job of buying the wood and selling the chair, therefore their profit is just their wage. Is they actually a capitalist?
Even if the man is a labourer he is still a part of a capitalist system. He may not agree with the ideology of capitalism and would be happy to see it generally overthrown, but the capitalist machine is still there, and he is working it.
I've always found the "exceptions" which you say the "ideology" of "liberalism" is intended to justify violence against certain people to be blatant contradictions of the core "ideology." That is to say, in my view, utilitarianism as John Stuart Mill presents it cannot be discredited simply by pointing out that Mill himself perhaps mistakenly applies it w/r/t the colonialism of his age. Or like, where the declaration of independence says "these truths we hold to be self-evident..." as far as I understand, it's signators are in fact HYPOCRITES for owning slaves, not actually justifying themselves in whatever is "liberal" in what they wrote. I guess what I'm asking is, since you define "ideology" as "justifying violence," where in the abstract precepts of Mill or Locke is the eurocentricism, white nationalism, imperialism, sexism, etc., justified? Isn't all this merely the personal failings/prejudices of the individual who wrote the work in question in the context of history(like, the fact that Heidegger was a nazi has nothing to do with Being and Time in itself)?
+DinoDudeDillon As far as I can tell he never said that these things are explicitly stated in the philosophy, but in practice liberalism was used and is still being used to prop up capitalism. Capitalism can justify violence because it isn't a moral system; it originated as an ideology of the wealthy and powerful in society that can justify anything on the grounds that it profits or in some way benefits the wealthy and powerful. I'm not sure if this is the POV of Philosophy Tube though.
Well (this is my best guess) liberalism is an ideology that operates under a certain conception of freedom (marked as Liberty). For instance, liberalism justified capitalist theft of common land as an expression of individual right to free opportunity (regardless of that being equal or not). This view of freedom is different than that of the communist who might argue for freedom as the ability to satisfy one's needs. Liberalism operates under a belief system that naturally de-equalises due to the justification of individual incentive regardless of greater societal effects.
It seems like simple "hypocrisy" if you take they're beliefs at face value. And not really even their "beliefs" at "face value", but the watered down version that's presented to most people. Western education and media often presents us a sanitized version of these figures. Truth is, most of these "enlightenment" figures who are held up by classical Liberals were pretty explicate in their racism and eurocentrism if you actually take the time to dig deeper into their text. The core ideals they hold up often break down under material analysis, and they break down in a way that reveals how they justified such inhumanity towards certain people in the past.
I'm with the OP on this. The liberal idea that "all men/people are created equal, with rights x, y, z" does not nessecitate the idea "[not in power group] doesn't count". The ideology works without having to justify the violence against these people.
You misunderstood him, ideology in general is about whom you you justify committing violence against and when is it permitted. Liberalism's ideology determines whom it's permissible to commit violence against and when to do so - based upon what ever is the most profitable people and instances for the capitalist class. While having all of these inconsistent exceptions built in that are then ; it does so while simultaneously defending both the rational and moral legitimacy for those exceptions. And pretending that these are all logically-consistent within the current societal norm at the time - it allows it to continue on macerating as some meritocratic vision for what our society should be and is championing the principles of "freedom" and liberty" as it's most essential building blocks.
He skipped mercantilism, in the feudalism to capitalism timeline. Also failed to acknowledge that the "exceptions" are not inherent to liberalism which is why rights movements often rightly attack the otherwise liberal society thats excluding or oppressing them by saying that it is not liberal enough or not living up to liberal values/standards. otherwise good video though.
I use my wealth to enable other people to create value. Does that make me a bad person? Is it wrong for me to enable the creation of value by turning my labor into wage into capital? Is it wrong that the people I lend the money to ask assistance, and give that assistance a stable reward? It might not look good, but working for a wage is preferable to serfdom I think that we in Europe might be heading in the right direction with capitalism. though there is a lot to be improved.
Isn't the definition from Anievas & Nisancioglu too broad? If by "Capitalist", we just mean that it facilitates the existence of currently existing productive activities, then nearly every social institution can be so defined. I'm raising children who will most likelt come to produce goods and services. Is my family thereby a Capitalist Family?
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
Speaking as an Irish person, it's always good to see someone acknowledge how much of a monster Cromwell was.
Yes. Genocidal bastard
As an English person with Irish parents I've got to ask... does anybody not do?
@@MechanicaMenace even as an Englishman I and everyone I knew regarded him as a horrific extremist who may have helped England but was terrible (king of like the English Hitler)
@@thegreatestchigone5813 exactly my point. Nobody looks at Cromwell and goes "good guy." *EVERYONE* thinks he was a monster and acknowledges it.
Cromwell did nothing wrong.
my best friend is named after Oliver Cromwell
long story short we're both anarchists now
lol
BASED AND BREADPILLED
@@ThatOneGuy7550 oh hey its that one guy!
@@unpoppablebubble Scott pilgrim reference? I hope so!
Ollie isn’t even using 1% of his power in this video
In school we were literally taught that Cromwell was a hero who overthrew the monarchy and that was it. I had no idea about anything else he did, good or bad.
That is by design.
Well that is not a good thing.
Tobo McLukewarm haha lol
@@Saoirse_don_Phalaistín Mexican here... Fuck Cromwell.
In America we were taught that Cromwell was a dictator
"...really, the economic system we have now is an *example* of capitalism. We're interested in what capitalism fundamentally *is*."
o hai Socrates
I'd like to know how your comment is relevant to socrates, i am geniuinely curious. Thanks.
The Diggers are underratted
Right?!
Philosophy Tube you know I still get massively shocked whenever a youtuber replies to me XD
I dig it 👍
+The Hunter x Hunter 2011 Dickriding Association Is Gon a libertarian?
I'll have to be THAT guy: Is this an intended Pun? because I think it is a great one.
"commit attrocities in northern ireland"
Northern Ireland wasnt in existence back then, it also was the whole island of ireland as opposed to the north of it that suffered under cromwell.
see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromwellian_conquest_of_Ireland
Fair cop!
Although I agree with you on 95% of the video, I would say the real phenomenon who actually triggered the emergence and consolidation of capitalism as the true economic dominant system was the French, and not the English, revolution. In the French Revolution we see the actual revolutionary class, the Bourgeoisie, was the one that crippled the traditional dominant feudal class and made profound and deep changes in the society of the time. In the English revolution, although yes we saw a deep profound change, it was limited to a political spectrum. Yes, it is undeniable that England became the first modern State of the world, however no profound change was made in society because the same class kept control of the political and productive instrument.
After the French Revolution we see Britain at the highest of its colonial rule and the consolidation fo capitalism at the Industrial Revolution.
GREAT VIDEO BY THE WAY!
The enclosure of commons was absolutely stealing just as much as fencing a public park owned by the city without permission and starting to charge admission while still expecting city employed park workers to care for it.
The Diggers and Levellers were my heroes! Anarcho-syndicalism or death!
I appreciate the explicit acknowledgement of how Cromwell treated Irish people, but it wasn't just in what we now call Northern Ireland.
1:30 You're misusing the term profit and this results in a factual error at 1:39.
Profit is what’s left after paying all expenses, including wages. So the capitalist doesn’t sell the chair for profit. They exchange it for money and then use only some of that money to pay wages, keeping the rest as profit.
So you're wrong that “the wages are always less than the total profit”. Because let’s say you sell the chair for $50, the wood cast $20 and the labor/wages $20, the profit is $10, which is less than the wages. What you meant is that the wages are always less than the value created.
Philosophy tube, I shall remain grateful to your ever for this simplified yet nuanced explanation of things. I'm a student of Sociology, and your channel has played an important role in conceptual clarity of liberalism and many such topics. Sending you love and regards from Indian occupied Kashmir.(not sure if you have ever heard of the place) 🙂
Really well done! Your videos are always so clean and easy to understand. I really appreciate this series. I eagerly anticipate the next installment. Thank you from across the pond.
You won my heart with that Pink Floyd reference.
I really liked the structure of this episode. This is a great series so far. Keep it up.
this is the most important history lesson i never got from school. it literally explains how monarchy can end and leave society just as divided and oppressed
The first half of the video is like everything you need to know of "The Capital" by Marx basically - only that its 4min instead of a whole book series
Your entire channel is so intelligent.
Thanks comrade.
Benni B nice bullshit fabrication And slurring of homosexuality as it has anything to do with communism..
@Benni B china is an authoritarian oligarchy. It's not communist at all
@Benni B Seems like you can't handle differing ideas from someone you don't even knlw without immediately assuming and then insulting their appearance and sexuality. Or without assuming they're a hippie who has never done any "hard work." You're insults reveal how typical and simple your worldview is.
I like to phrase a definition of capitalism thus: capitalism is any system whereby owning more than other people is in and of itself (somehow or another) a source of income; or conversely, where owning less than other people in and of itself (somehow or another) costs you. The wage labor scenario you (and Marx) describe is one "somehow or another", but I'd argue that that, and all of capitalism, really boils down to one core feature: rent, including interest which is just rent on money. If you don't have enough capital to live and work and survive yourself, you have to borrow it from someone who has more than you, and if they can charge you for that, then you have to work even more to fund both that and your own survival, while they have to work equivalently less.
Why would the wage laborers possibly put up with being paid less than the actual value they are producing? Because they don't have any other alternatives: they are in debt just by living, because they have to borrow a place to live and to work, and the equipment needed to work, or else money with which to buy a place to live and work and the equipment to do that work. The whole wage labor scenario Marx goes on about is only a consequence of the usury which is the core of capitalism, and the last vestige of feudalism still remaining today: there's a reason they're called land-LORDS. Capitalism is just post-industrial feudalism, the same social arrangements at a different tech level where there are more kinds of capital than arable land.
Oh and I guess I left off the bottom line: get rid of rent (including interest) and you could have a free market that was not capitalist. In fact, I would argue that a market with capitalism in effect is by definition not free, as the extraction of rents leveraged by different amounts of capital possessed constitutes a form of coercion, much like having a gun pointed at your head makes the "choice" to hand over your wallet or not, not such a choice at all.
david graeber basically follows this logic in his works.
Would a government be able to exist in a system where economic rent does not exist?
who would be able to enforce such a system?
Capitalism is a system characterized by capitalist relations, they being wage-labor and property income (dividends, interest, rent, royalties), a pretty simple definition from classical economics, and from original (pre-marxist) socialism, which, imo, nicely captures the general intuition people have on the basis of which they will or will not consider some person a capitalist.
Marx, if you read chapters 4, 5, and 6 of Capital vol 1, had some weird view about how exploitation can't exist outside the workplace, because trades even out across the economy, and "surplus value" is produced only in production, not in circulation, so according to him capitalism is found strictly in wage-labor, and rent and interest are secondary.
To be precise about it, capitalism is not just post-industrial feudalism, wage-labor is renting of other people's labor, ie buying and selling of labor hours, property income is changing people for their use of something you own, whereas feudalism is ownership of other people's labor, the oath of fealty through which one became a serf was as a contract of transferring the ownership of one's labor throughout one's life to another person.
All of these isms seem to prey on weakness of the individual, whether it's an economic disadvantage or a sort of want or neediness. Owning their land, or having control of it, would go a long way towards eliminating this since the cost of living can be minimized ie having a garden, off grid power, car share, co-op buying power etc in an eco village framework. This frees the individual from the hard scrabble life to become more creative, and educated through channels like this one (thanks Ollie!) which is such a win-win situation.
Why can't we use our collective buying power to form a land buying corporation, non- profit, which sets up eco villages? In Eastern Canada 200 acres can be had for $65k, and it's less than a half hour drive from town. This includes sales tax and lawyer fees. What's stopping us?
The common land (at least in England) WAS considered the property of the Lord in the feudal period. However, Lords rarely sold their land voluntarily, and were considered to have certain obligations to the people who lived on it (who, if they were serfs, were not allowed to leave that land). The farmed land was divided up into long strips scattered across the property that "belonged" to different peasant families. Other land used for pasture or forest or which was considered low value for farming could be used by any of the peasants (including those without allocated strips of land) in various ways governed by tradition or common law (which derived from traditions). Peasants often paid rent for their cottages to the Lord, those these rents were low compared to later periods.
The division of farming land into long strips was relatively fair (most families had some land to grow food on, and the shape meant it wasn't all either good or bad land) but it made implementing some productivity-boosting agricultural techniques (such as crop rotation) harder. So starting as early as the 1200s (but mostly after 1600), land owners (who came to include merchant families and other proto-capitalists as well as hereditary lords) began to look for legal permission to consolidate land. Usually the use to which they wanted to put that land required fewer workers and so would involve kicking peasants out. Many thousands of such "inclosure acts" were passed by Parliament, and they mostly required landowners to pay a substantial compensation to the peasants for the loss of their traditional rights. As a result, at the time a lot of poor farmers supported these acts - the potential downsides were only realized by a few.
The commonness of wage labor had also been increasing over this period, as towns and the importance of non-agricultural parts of the economy grew (a serf who made it to at town and stayed unclaimed by their lord for over a year could usually not be forced to return). It got a real boost in the aftermath of the black death, as labor was in short supply and workers discovered they now had negotiating power. But the greater the proportion of workers who had to be paid, the more landowners had a financial incentive to cut the number of workers.
In any case, all these various factors did fuel the transition from feudalism to capitalism.
Better sources coming if I have the time, but wikipedia version reflects what I've read in multiple other books:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_Acts
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_Black_Death
So, the thing about common land in medieval England is that it wasn’t free for everyone for everything. A lot of common land was divvied out into parcels for people of a given area, and even if you had theoretical access, you could be squeezed out by other commoners.
diggers are the wisdom of humanity.
everything would be easier if capitalists let go of the mask and turn it into a full fledged demi-god-shaman-capitalist-rich worshipping religion. they define themselves "individuals" so there's a new terms of rule less obvious in it's totalitarian nature. in the good old days loyalist poor knew what they gave up on and looked for heaven as the payment of this exhange. now, it's "what if i get the change to exploit people too", poor are accomplices.
Actually I think hunter-gatherers probably understand more wisely how to be happy, free, and to live in harmony with the world.
@@LisaBeergutHolst I'd guess their lives were also quite shit
@@LisaBeergutHolst I "dig" the anarcho-primitivism, I do.
@@niclasjohansson5992 Then why is there such a long history of foraging tribes resisting assimilation and "development" by supposedly more "advanced" societies?
The shortest definition of the core of capitalism is just three characters representing two words: M - C - M
M = Money
C = Commodity
Capitalism is taking money - exchanging it for a commodity - and exchange that commodity for more money.
You also need to add that there's only one commodity that can be sold for more than the value it's bought at: labour power. Otherwise the nature of capitalism is still hidden.
If commodities can be reliably sold at 10 percent above their value, then when the capitalist, Mr Moneybags, buys commodity A, he buys it at 10 percent above it's value. When he sells it, he sells it at 10 percent above its value and ends up with no profit.
If he wants to make a profit, he has to find a commodity that can produce value that exceeds what he pays for it. Luckily, there is such a commodity for sale: labour power.
The capitalist buys tools, raw materials and labor power at their cost, which is equal to their value. But when the workers apply their labour power to the raw materials and tools, they produce a product that exceeds the value of its inputs. This surplus value is kept by the capitalist when he sells the product.
Thus, the process becomes M C M' or money commodity money delta. Where delta is the profit. Where no profit is produced, the money used isn't capital. Capitalism requires profit. Therefore it requires the extraction of surplus value from workers through wage labour
@@atashikokoni You don't seem to grasp the value added by the capital put into a prlductive process, as well as the value put in by the employer who produces more efficiently as a random person without any knowledge in that branch of the economy...
Olly do an entire episode about all the fascinating groups like the diggers and levellers!
Also it's atrocities in most of Ireland!, Fun fact I can see the results of the Down land survey online that Cromwell enacted after his conquest of Ireland and see the land my family farmed on being redistributed to new planters. It's pretty neat.
Lol, the image you used for the English Civil War is from a German 30 Years War reenactment. I recognized the Palatinate flag...
Great video, but that made me laugh.
This is literally such a fantastic video. Sharing with my comrades.
Your definition of ideology as a "justifier of violence" is for me a new way of seeing and concretize what an ideology is, it does give a new way to examine what the substance of an ideology is. However I believe that many people would argue that ideology is more than the justification of violence, or see this definition as a very extreme one. Many would argue that ideology would primarily be about the distribution of resources, the structure of a society etc and of course you could absolutely connect this to the control of violence especially since in this channel and Idea Channel you've discussed violence as the 'removal of choice'.
I think you're missing something important from the basic diagram of investment - labour - profit. Whoever is employing the workers to make the chairs doesn't do "nothing but provide the capital to buy the stuff needed to make the chair" they also sell them. A big part of the reason why people don't just make chairs themselves (apart from not being able to afford the necessary equipment to be as productive as necessary to compete) is that it can be really difficult to find a buyer for your product.
Lol no. Other workers sell the chairs. A separate investor class is unnecessary
Interesting and uniquely framed, as always! The history of the Liberal ideology is a real sticky wicket, and the project of deconstructing its flaws is one of the most stressful jobs in political and economic philosophy today. Super jazzed for the next part!
A first rate exposition. Well done.
Really enjoying the way you convey information. Started with JP one. Now watching theses series on liberalism, Marx, etc...
I find it interesting that you continually mention the whiteness of the wealthy people in power. At that point in history, my understanding is that non-whites really didn't make up a significant portion of the British population - as you yourself pointed out, it wasn't until after the British Civil War that the slave trade really picked up a lot of steam. I would be curious to know what the breakdown was of those wealthy classes into a more granular analysis of their ethnicity, rather than blanketly referring to people as "white." For example, The Celts, the Welsh, people of Germanic descent, people whose family lineage was connected to prominent figures in the Roman Empire during the period of time when Britania was a part of Rome, etc. Just throwing some ideas out there. I feel like you skip over a lot of the nuance of the racial and ethnic issue, because although pretty much all of the rich people were white... the poor people were too. So really, you're putting a modern overlay of racial identity issues onto a period of time when the racial landscape was significantly different.
for the British isles it is true that it is mostly populated by 'white' races, where their power was seated.
However The British did have colonies, colonies which where where a lot of which where Indian, Irish, or black.
I think Olly may be referring to the people in the colonies, which did not have a say about their governance.
Just shut the fuck up.
Seán O'Nilbud Oh yes I agree, let's not let the man engage in debate on a philosophy channel. Makes fucking sense I guess.
I wasnt even really trying ro debate anything lol
more of a sitiuation of seeing a generalizarion that isnt very useful and wanting more information. Also pointing out that Ollies biases are showing a bit by the way he is presenting the information.
Paul Conti
It's more in regards to the British power and influence over the British Empire's colonies I think, a good example in many cases being India.
5:23 "OH MY GOD! The king is DEAD!" *cue Hoslt's: Mars bringer of war"*
hehehe that was fun
Great video, it was very intelligent, and it raised some interesting questions. This side of the story is not taught in schools for a reason. Can you make a video about different anarchist economic systems? And what is your current political tendency?
Brilliant historical take - something that doesn't get talked about enough. I think many conversations about the advent of capitalism start far too late with the establishment of The New World leading to ideological conflict and the arguement over how 'natural' land ownership and private property is - completely ignoring the materialist and historical context
Olly swore! Has he done that before?
This is like, Olly with 'tude. I like it :D
Historia Civilis is doing an interesting series on the Wars of the Three Kingdoms just now-a good complement to what Olly says in this video.
That PINK FLOYD reference
The way Ollie says “poor”... ❣️
This is what I don't get about the Marxist critique of capitalism:
Yes, the capitalist controls the means-of-production and takes the profit. But that's the payoff for bearing the upfront costs and the financial risk.
The workers could also form a cooperative and own the means-of-production collectively themselves. Then they'd take the profit, but they'd also bear the upfront cost and risk.
Both of these seem like perfectly reasonable systems, just so long as the means-of-production hasn't been appropriated by force, like it was in feudalism.
Exactly. I've had people encourage me to start my own business, and even offered to invest in starting it up. No thanks, I don't want to put in the risk and extra work/stress. I'm perfectly happy letting someone else shoulder that bullshit, just showing up to work, doing my job, and going home with a fat paycheck at the end of the week.
6.59 As an Irishman, I love that this was mentioned
In your definition of the basic capitalist relationship between classes (worker-owner, owner gets profit), where does product engineering fit in?
Production engineering?
Process engineering?
According to your definition of ideology: ideology is that which defines what facts are important (and what actions are permissable).
On what grounds did you determine that the facts that workers add value is important, but the fact that engineers do isn't? Why is it important that workers apply physical labor, but the fact that engineers design isn't, considering that engineering amounts to about 80% of the qualities of the finished product, yet is only about 5% of the cost?
When you mentioned the Diggers, I expected the clip to be the Monty Python scene with Dennis talking back to King Arthur.
"Help, help, I'm being repressed!"
witness the violence inherent to the system
Looking forward to Gary Edwards critique of part 2.
Hi, greetings from Brazil! I think it's important to say that wages are not always smaller then the total amount of profit, that is true only to well functioning businesses, and that is part of the reason that the owner of the means of production gets the added value to the product, because of the assumption of the risk. If things don't work out, he will be responsible for the losses, and will pay for them.
I wish people wouldn't conflate capitalism with markets. You can have a fully anarchist system of worker coops, with markets. And rich people can own the means of production and distribute goods through a central authority. They are separate concepts.
Great episode as always, but one small nitpick (because I know you were simplifyng) - the commander of Parliamentarian forces for the entirety of the First English Civil War was Lord Thomas Fairfax, not Cromwell.
Hey Olly! Great video, what else is to be expected from a great channel? Anyways, I have a small problem with how you present the shift from feudalism to capitalism. Claiming ownership of a piece of land along with the crops that grow on it and legitamizing that claim with threats of violence (thus being able to extract surplus value from those who no longer can sustain a nomadic lifestyle and have to work for the "king" of that land) seems to be in line with what you call "enclosure". The system wherein such behaviour is being perpetuated however, is what I recognize to be feudalism. You on the other hand seem to think that enclosure is at the core of the shift from feudalism to capitalism. I would instead like to claim that enclosure is a key feature of feudalism and capitalism simply works as a contniuation of this phenomenon.
I may have missed the point or otherwise misunderstood you, so I would be glad to see you comment on this.
Thanks for the lovely videos!
- a fan ::::******
In the attempt of justifying an/our ideology that functions "like a veil of obviousness" (L. Althusser), we should consider our tendency towards "motivation reasoning" / "confirmation bias" and our lack of "negative capability". George Lakoff's "Strict Father - Nurturing Parent"-model sheds some light on the differences between the way conservatives and progressives perceive reality.
I don't tend to click 'like' on every video I watch, because if I watch the channel regularly, I like the video, and that's a given. But, for some reason, this episode seemed better than most to me, so you've got a like from me. Keep it up!
It's a good practice to get into if you have channels that you regularly watch as it increases their odds to appear higher/earlier in the YT search results and makes it more likely that their videos will appear as recommendations in other people's feeds. It's thought that the YT algorithm that handles these odds uses stats on watch time, the number of views, the number of subscribers, the popularity of a channel's videos on average and the level of "video interaction" (the number of likes, dislikes and comments). The higher the values of these factors (even dislikes) the more promotion a channel and it's videos are likely to get. I like to do as much of these as I can for channels and videos that I like as a sort of payment for the videos I watch (especially since I use an adblocker :P).
I think of capitalism as an economic system in which the medium of exchange is valued over what it buys for the sake of its convertibility. Would you rather have a 5 dollar sandwich, or 5 dollars? There are... consequences. Of course, the potential for reward is what makes my dopamine flow, not the ultimately dissatisfying moment of consumption. The money is always worth more than what it buys, because it has one value, whereas the purchases have many that can be transposed and magnified through money.
fuck, i love your choice of music. pink floyd and gustav holst, can't get much better than that!
By ‘statue’, do you mean the Oliver Cromwell Memorial Urinal?
Bravo! Bravo! Brilliantly done video on Liberalism. I swear I just want to shake your hand and call you a fellow comrade.
"You keep the profit for yourself, rather than give it to the people who actually put the work in." This is an odd way to frame it. Why assume the capitalist isn't putting any work in himself? He's the one that had to research different ventures and ultimately decide on making chairs (he could use his wood for something else). He's also the one that had to find the workers, organize them into a team, and tell them what to do. The profit is just another word for compensating the capitalist for his contribution. Just like "wages" are what we call the compensation the workers receive.
Mmhmm, but you can throw as much money and organisation at the wood as you want - it's only by the labour of the workers that it increases in value and becomes a chair. They're the ones who actually generate the surplus value that enables a profit to be turned, and Marx's point was that they then don't get the fruits of that.
Okay, but they only exert their labor on the wood at the direction of the capitalist. You seem to be saying that the capitalist organizes the production, but doesn't add value that needs to be compensated? That doesn't make sense to me. If you don't have the workers, you don't have a chair. At the same time, if you don't have a capitalist, you don't have wood or a firm at all, so you don't have a chair. You need both capitalists and workers "putting work in" to create a product. And if you want them to work, you need to pay them. For workers, we call that compensation wages. For capitalists, we call that compensation profit. What am I missing?
Thanks, this book looks interesting. I will check it out. However, I just want to clarify my earlier statement. You're right that people made chairs before capitalism came along. There are other ways to organize economic society. But I don't think they look too good in the light of history. Just look a medieval Europe. It wasn't very peaceful either. Or very fun. What you did for a living had more to do with who your parents were than what you wanted to do with your life (its why job titles became surnames). And then you couldn't always choose who you worked for as (depending on your station) you could be coerced into doing work for the nobility. So working for someone else isn't new. But the idea that you could choose what you do for a living and who you work for? That's actually kind of revolutionary.
"This year, the combined total revenue of all 500 companies reaches $12.1 trillion."
These numbers are gross, they are BEFORE paying suppliers, workers, etc. A serious amount of that $12.1 trillion is transferred to workers' paychecks.
And you think that's a bad thing. Wow.
"If you gave every worker in the US (150 million people) a $40,000 raise ($6 trillion) these corporations would still have 6 trillion left over."
LOL, you apparently didn't read the article you linked. You also obviously have no idea that there's a difference between revenue and profit.
Just... shhh. Leave these things to people who are better educated and more intelligent.
fucking yes
capitalism created that blow-up doll you call your wife
No, innovation and human ingenuity created the blow up doll. Capitalism found a way to commidfy it.
Benni B Or we could use worker owned cooperatives, which are more efficient and have more innovative workers, but aren't competitive because they don't focus on profit as end-all-be-all.
N's Creations and Gunpla Review Can't even insult a guy without dehumanising misogyny.
This is what capitalism does to you, people. Commodifying women so much, you think you can use them as punchlines against men.
Funny how everything regarding greed here is very much correct and factual, but also the very same greed led us to here today.
Reminder that ending slave trading was also an economic move from the north of the US, since they didn't need slaves quite as much and more people having more money to use on their stuff made them quite a bit of cash.
Idk it is important to remember some of the so called "liberal," philosophers wrote about the importance of tolerance..
While kant, Hagel, and Marx and others...wrote about "in group vs out group."
So I think we should just pick and choose what we want to follow
...it isnt like it is some religion.
The idea of in group vs out group...and the ideas of collectivism, and the greater good... almost ALWAYS end up with dire consequences
Yes capitalism causes inequality and pain...but so does communism.
I prefer the tolerance and liberty of an individual over the pushing of collectivism
@@claudeyaz how does communism cause inequality and pain? Also how does it oppress individuals in any way?
Like the illiberal brand of progressivism we see in the US today and its praxis: segregating school kids by skin color (as happened in a local middle school) in the name of “diversity and inclusion”.
If this is the praxis of the replacement ideology, give me more liberalism any day.
Brilliant video Olly, loving this series so far. There's a book that I've only thus partly read called Liberalism: A Counter-History, by Domenico Losurdo, which I think covers a lot of this territory.It might be worth checking out?
The exploitation theory of capitalism is based off the labor theory of value, which most economists have reasonably debunked with the subjective theory of value. Things that are produced do not obtain their value from labor but from the subjectivity of the buyer. Let's say I have two shakes, one chocolate one vanilla. They both used syrup from the same brand and they are of same size, made by the same fast food worker who gets payed x per hour. If I am someone who likes chocolate more than vanilla the vanilla shake has less utility and thus less value to me. I would not be willing to purchase a vanilla shake for $4 dollars, but I might if vanilla shakes were on sale for say $2 or $3. I would, however, be willing to pay $4 for the chocolate shake because it has to me, subjectively, more value.
Your background is not the one I was taught, to say the least. Land may have been unclaimed in some senses, but the cases in which aristocrats came to own large amounts of land, and in some cases, own the other people living on it, were not, as conventionally understood, capitalism. That started as economic production in towns and cities began to outclass landed nobility in influence, hence why "bourgeois", which literally just means "town-dweller", evolved into something like a synonym for capitalist.
Eh, I'm not convinced the English Civil War was such a big factor. Kings have been killed for thousands of years. Usually, they were replaced by other kings. So why was this time so different? (I don't actually know. Maybe the printing press?)
Now we play the waiting game (for people who think that this is a jab at their political beliefs)... Ok I'm bored let's play Hungry Hungry Hippos!
I stopped watching at 2:19... please change the title to the more appropriate "Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie"...
It would have been better to put more dates on the screen.Sometimes i just didn't know about what time you were talking about. It was a bit confusing. I know it was just a very short summary, but especially in such a dense video clarity is essential.
Ideology clearly isn’t just a mechanism to justify violence. That’s a pragmatic feature of many ideologies but it’s certainly not the essential definition. The goal should be to construct an ideology that doesn’t cause violence.
Oh...a anti-capitalist/liberalism english speaker?... If I am correct, may I ask your view on the alternatives to capitalism/liberalism problems? A question from one of your foreign subscribers
I really agree with you, exceptions are very bad in liberalism, and I'm so glad we got those out of the system!
Seeing that Shakespeare book in the background is a trip.
I'm confused by your history. Are you saying that in feudalism (the economic system of Europe before capitalism) land was commonly owned? Because that is far from the truth.
That's the impression I got too. Could have done better there, I think.
No, he was saying that there was land, called common land, that didn't have an owner, at least not recognizably so. He also discussed how that changed within feudalism. The nobility took over the common land and forced the peasants into serfdom. That is historically accurate.
The commons was land that was commonly maintained and used by everyone. For example, a village common might be a large stretch of fields that no one person owned but that everyone grazed their sheep on and took care of. If a few people wanted to use some of the common to plant some corn or something they could ask the village council, but they couldn't just do it apropos of nothing and they usually couldn't use all of what they grew for private profit.
Just if anyone's curious, there's still quite a bit of common land in the UK, though obviously the bits rich people didn't nick (yes they literally just claimed them, on the grounds that they'd put them to more efficient use).
The problem with both Liberalism and Capitalism is their exemptions, since they have no consistent, non arbitrary, truth they have moral or ethical base in which to stand. But can any human ideology stand and not be arbitrary? After millenia of living in and defending falsehoods can human live outside of them since no example has ever been seen?
Very insightful thanks Ollie!! 😁👍🏼👍🏼
I define capitalism as:
Private ownership of the means of production and resources for the purpose of profit in a market economy where the autocratic employer-employee relationship is the primary means to having a livelihood for most people.
Wages are less than the income generated, in order to compensate the employer for risk taken. If it was easy to operate a business and to make a profit, the employees could do it themselves.
Thank you
The common land never existed as you seem to think it did. It was always something granted in the feudal hierarchy by lords or Kings. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but there was never a point where someone DIDNT claim ownership of a piece of land in medieval society. I must not be understanding something when socialists talk about the common land as this great thing. Lords, Kings, dukes, etc. All owned land and gave fiefs to those they favored. People could USE the land they owned as they were their subjects, but ultimately they almost always had a monopoly on violence and therefore the land. Idk I’m probably just not getting something.
It's not a strong critique of liberalism to merely criticise the exceptions to its rules that are often made within it- doesn't that imply quite heavily that the rules themselves are pretty damn good, and ought to be applied more universally?
Joe Hodson I think Olly means to say that the exceptions are necessarily built into the project through its reliance on a freely choosing self abstracted from its ends. A choosing self must be rational if it is to bring justice through the promotion of order.
Liberalism in Rawls, for example, requires us to abstract ourself from our personal commitments to family, friends etc. , the only thing which matters to us is that we can choose. This idea, I think Olly contends, is built into all of liberalism.
Rawls even opens his book saying that "justice is the first virtue of social institutions". But why is justice necessarily and *exclusively* preferable to other virtues which society could honor? It's very important --no one disagrees there--but is really the sole virtue through which all other virtues gain their merit?
To sum up my argument:
Since liberalism sees all people as internally rather than externally equal(as would be the Christian imago dei conception of equality, for example) liberal anthropology is one which views humans as fundamentally abstracted from my circumstances, so in order to respect the dignity of any given person, I ought to respect the choices of that person since this is the fundamental expression of my person. However, this means that unless we want to abandon the pursuit of justice,there must be a standard by which we determine who is and is not capable of choice thus by extension, a determination of who is and is not human.
Michael Sandel talks a bit about this in Democracy's discontent, also After Virtue by Alasdair Macintyre is a good resource.
WeeklyBibleTalk That's an interesting point, but I'm not sure those metaphysical assumptions about free will and internal equality that these early liberals proceeded from are inherently necessary to substantiate the general moral conclusions of liberalism, which is a very broad church indeed. Even historically, you had Locke making arguments appealing to natural law vs Mill saying similar things from a more utilitarian view (which I'm not sure is a distinction Olly's really talked about yet).
I do concur with your Rawls quote that justice is the highest virtue, because justice simply is extrapolated moral obligation, whereas other virtues like courage might be just or unjust depending on the situation.
I actually think virtue ethics is the more dangerous and flawed ideology here. Referring to the standard of a "good person" rather than "good action" lends itself to a tendency to attempt to solve problems by eliminating certain people rather than certain actions, which seems a much more direct justification for violence, vengeance, prejudice or oppression than a consistently applied consequentialist liberalism which starts from the goal of minimising both the amount and distribution of any such harms.
But if I'm wrong on any of this, please do enlighten me.
My particular area of knowledge (and what I’m writing my thesis in) is the particular criticisms of liberalism in the kantian strand. But since kantian liberalism is perhaps its largest modern strand, these criticisms are relevant. While I do reject utilitarianism for a number of reasons which I won’t lay out here(I think Rawls did a great job here), I must plead ignorance in this area and others outside of the kantian liberal tradition. I will confess however that natural law can lead to an interesting defense of a kind of liberalism, though its reliance of teleology disqualifies it from defending liberalism in its contemporary form.
But I will respond to the one point in your comment which I think I am qualified to respond to:
If justice is extrapolated moral obligations, it can only account for those obligations which are universal in nature. Even if rights are the sole axioms of justice, they are not the sole axioms of 'rightness' since at least some obligations are conferred antecedent to choice. Thus justice cannot be the political virtue through which others gain their merit, since many of those obligations would be particularist. In short, Rawls conflates justice with goodness in a society vis a vis the veil of ignorance by suggesting I can conceive of a good society without knowledge about my particular family, friends etc.
The ethical universe is one with agents already encumbered with numerous commitments to various groups *prior* to beginning any ethical deliberation. Relationships between persons are the basic fabric of ethics, and fundamental principles may be attached directly to these relations.
I hope this makes sense. If you find any issues in my arguments, please let me know!
WeeklyBibleTalk Again, definitely some food for thought here. However, I would hesitate to concur that relationships are the ultimate "fabric" of ethics, as it seems extremely intuitive that we can and frequently do have moral obligations to complete strangers. If I see a person drowning and know how to help them, the fact that they are a complete stranger doesn't mean I owe them nothing. Also it seems quite clear that many of the world's problems are caused by people with the ability to help the global masses choosing instead to help only their own family/friends/community/country/demographic groups/selves etc. For this reason I tend to be suspicious of the valorisation of "particularism" in ethics.
Sure, obligations can exist in particular situations, but don't these tend to exist for universal reasons anyway? If it's wrong to break a promise to a friend, it's because it's generally bad to break promises, not because they're a god among men who deserves special treatment. The obviously greater subjective value of the time spent with the friend as opposed to the hoi polloi I would categorise as a matter of aesthetics rather than cast iron duty- we tend to value friendship based on the presumption of its authenticity, which would be heavily compromised if it turned out that the "friend" is merely motivated by a perceived moral obligation to us.
Does that add up in your opinion?
Does Olly have anything to weigh in with here?
Another thought on exceptions to rules in liberalism- these aren't necessarily arbitrary or prejudiced, although obviously they can and often have been misapplied in those ways. In Mill's liberalism, any coercive act has to be justified under the harm principle, i.e it's wrong unless it's absolutely necessary to prevent a much greater harm. Yes, this was used to justify Imperialism, but I think that kind of misapplication isn't inherent to the idea. Similarly, there isn't an inherent connection between Mill's liberalism and either socialism or capitalism, an issue that Mill himself u-turned on. You can have heated debates about what level of collectivism in the economy is optimal based on Mill's liberalism and the harm principle, and the main thing these debates will come down to is how much evidence there is and where it seems to be leaning.
I wasn't clear how capitalism fits into the founding of America - perhaps you can clarify? If early America, founded on principles of Liberty, heavily rely on slavery where is the room for the wage labour model production?
I look forward to the video you make about Socialism, where you describe it's rapid slide into Authoritarianism as inherent because Socialism has historically led to Authoritarianism at scale. Not fair, you say? Because Authoritarianism is not a necessary part of the Socialist ideology? Well, I suspect exceptions to liberty is also not part of the Liberal ideal, just something shitty that always shows up because humans are shitty. So how about a video that actually talks about the Liberal ideology first, and then talks about the failures of Liberalism in practice as distinct from the ideology?
Thanks for this! I am definitely watching that Winstanley movie.
What's the relationship between liberalism and capitalism. Which one came first... Please reply sir.
'The Origin of Capitalism' by Ellen Meiksins Wood is a pretty interesting read.
Any good books about the English Civil War you would care to recommend?
iggsolo look up for Christopher Hill
(8:38) You said that a lot of the violence that liberalism legitimizes is the violence that keeps capitalism going. But, is that so?
Was the choice of keeping the slaves the best option for the U.S.? I agree that keeping a payment-free labouror(slaves) could have been shown as 'profitable', but (only considering the economical value and not considering the human rights just for now) I see that, the slavery, as a view that is very near-sighted. The U.S. could have developed its economy along with black and white people (not slaves). Letting people join in the social economy without any discrimination could have brought more growth to the country.
Same goes with the example you mention about England. England is excluding immigrants, which is the violence, you said, that keeps capitalism going. But again, I don't see this as a solution, a capitalism booster to England. Rejecting immigrants can turn out to be a major flaw in the economy.
My point is that the things liberalism legitimize are not always making 'the economy going'. It might be the other way around.
I understand your words when you said(8:38). I wanted to check if there's people who thought the way I did and if any of my words are wrong.
And keep in mind that I always watch your videos. I love your channel. It really helps.
ooh time whimey a comment from 2 months ago
Here to recommend the song "The World Turned Upside Down" by Billy Bragg
I'm not a huge fan of Niall Ferguson. But in his "ascent of money" I was reading about how it was loans with interest that helped financed the exploration of the "new world". Interest payments on loans were very taboo hundreds of years ago (as they encouraged risk I think?... there maybe more complicated reasons why the church - in particular - were against interest on loans?). Of course now in finance people make money from debt by selling it on (or repackaging it and setting up conditions for the biggest financial crash since the 1930's great depression... and it aint over yet and no-one has learnt their lessons or been held accountable either) - though how this exactley works with student loans I don't know?... when the market value of so far unpaid student loans, from 2000 say, is a tenth or less than the cost to the debter (the student who has to pain the loan in full with interest - who isn't allowed to buy their own debt on the open market for a tenth of the value they as a debter has to pay).
Though - like with the mortgage market that caused the 2008 financial crash - it is not like the creditors who issue the student loans had the money in the first place before issuing it to students. In each case - student loan or mortgage - the 'debter' is giving the 'creditor' the money i.e. the creditor had no money.. they had no credit. So in effect, the 'debtor' (student taking out a loan or mortgage payer) is a creditor to the banks. Without 'debters' the banks - 'the creditors' - would go bust over night as they are technically insolvent.. By law the banks are supposed to keep a 10% credit in their vaults (the rest is out in the 'market' - as loans or whatever like derivatives). But that proved not to be the case during 2008 and so they were all technically bought out by central state banks... But the black hole in the economy caused by the 2008 crash was so huge that it has (I don't know for sure) made many central banks - i.e. countries - insolvent... The reality of this may well ring true this year or next year. I don't know whether I trust Jim Rickards, but he claims that the paper money we've had since the 1970's (under fiat currency when Nixon bailed out of the gold standard) could either come to an end or get bought up by the IMF and World Bank... possibly meaning an end to the reserve currency status of the dollar and pound etc (especially if they are deemed insolvent).
btw. There is so much money in the derivatives market that at todays household energy prices you could use the money in the derivatives market to boil away all the water in the english channel.
I have not read the Ascent of Money, but this reminds me of some stuff I read in "Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk."
Dallas Wood Niall Ferguson criticises the economic theory the author of "Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk" came up with - "The Efficient Market Hypothesis", which is correct but falls flat if one assumes the market reflects reality, which it didn't leading up to the 2007/2008 financial crash and still doesn't today.
Could Liberalism without exceptions work? Imo the core ideas of freedom for everybody sounds good. What problems were we to face, if we tried to achieve this?
People getting angry when you call your ideology "liberalism", mostly.
I do it and it's hilarious.
I’ve enjoyed learning your perspective on things and I appreciate it. I clicked your videos because of random events, and it’s been a pleasure, however.
ha ha. I’m referring to the medieval part. As a history connoisseur with 15 years of primary focus on the high-late medieval period, the more I learn, the more I realise I don’t know nearly as much as I wish. We understandably don’t have time to search for all the evidence ourself. Our time is finite. We therefor try to extract the essence of stories we’ve heard.
The problem with the video is that the medieval reference is bad and shouldn’t be taken seriously. “Here’s example A and this example, true or false, account for a continent across a time period of 1000 years, where each society was unique.” The whole notion that you can extract a kernel of truth from a diverse continent over a millennium, and somehow compare it to your idea, is childlike and wrong. Show some humility about what you understand and what you don’t understand.
My primary tip, if you don’t have time to look through the ancient texts, do your own research and make your own conclusions - is to look for secondary sources to support your claim AND put your sources in the description. (You are not a source). There are several free sites where people post their free phd’s.
If you don’t know how to do that, then go to askhistorians on Reddit. They’re pretty good considering their availability.
I wish you all the best
Price =/= value, why conflate them?
There is no price of a final good until someone agrees to pay it depending on their values which is different than the producers/workers values. So this viewing of everything like corporate factories just conflates two seperate interactions & seperate values. Skews the whole picture if you do that by assuming an "excess" of value rather than acknowledging both time preference and a difference in values leading to both profit and loss....
2:08 Yes, it's the money from 3:27. It's a very intuitive system
I do believe that Karl Marx has defined pretty well Capitalism in his works especially in "Das Kapital". Why bother re-defining, just read it!
You might want to rethink your statement at 1:40. There are many instances where wages paid exceed profit earned. You are attempting to connect the wage paid and the profit earned but the correlation is not relevant. Perhaps you are confusing profit with gross sales price?
1:00 It could be argumented, that the capitalist in this picture is just another labourer, who has the job of buying the wood and selling the chair, therefore their profit is just their wage. Is they actually a capitalist?
Even if the man is a labourer he is still a part of a capitalist system. He may not agree with the ideology of capitalism and would be happy to see it generally overthrown, but the capitalist machine is still there, and he is working it.
I did not know those things about cromwell.
Great episode in a great series. Nice one.
I've always found the "exceptions" which you say the "ideology" of "liberalism" is intended to justify violence against certain people to be blatant contradictions of the core "ideology." That is to say, in my view, utilitarianism as John Stuart Mill presents it cannot be discredited simply by pointing out that Mill himself perhaps mistakenly applies it w/r/t the colonialism of his age. Or like, where the declaration of independence says "these truths we hold to be self-evident..." as far as I understand, it's signators are in fact HYPOCRITES for owning slaves, not actually justifying themselves in whatever is "liberal" in what they wrote. I guess what I'm asking is, since you define "ideology" as "justifying violence," where in the abstract precepts of Mill or Locke is the eurocentricism, white nationalism, imperialism, sexism, etc., justified? Isn't all this merely the personal failings/prejudices of the individual who wrote the work in question in the context of history(like, the fact that Heidegger was a nazi has nothing to do with Being and Time in itself)?
+DinoDudeDillon As far as I can tell he never said that these things are explicitly stated in the philosophy, but in practice liberalism was used and is still being used to prop up capitalism. Capitalism can justify violence because it isn't a moral system; it originated as an ideology of the wealthy and powerful in society that can justify anything on the grounds that it profits or in some way benefits the wealthy and powerful. I'm not sure if this is the POV of Philosophy Tube though.
Well (this is my best guess) liberalism is an ideology that operates under a certain conception of freedom (marked as Liberty). For instance, liberalism justified capitalist theft of common land as an expression of individual right to free opportunity (regardless of that being equal or not). This view of freedom is different than that of the communist who might argue for freedom as the ability to satisfy one's needs. Liberalism operates under a belief system that naturally de-equalises due to the justification of individual incentive regardless of greater societal effects.
It seems like simple "hypocrisy" if you take they're beliefs at face value. And not really even their "beliefs" at "face value", but the watered down version that's presented to most people. Western education and media often presents us a sanitized version of these figures. Truth is, most of these "enlightenment" figures who are held up by classical Liberals were pretty explicate in their racism and eurocentrism if you actually take the time to dig deeper into their text. The core ideals they hold up often break down under material analysis, and they break down in a way that reveals how they justified such inhumanity towards certain people in the past.
I'm with the OP on this. The liberal idea that "all men/people are created equal, with rights x, y, z" does not nessecitate the idea "[not in power group] doesn't count". The ideology works without having to justify the violence against these people.
You misunderstood him, ideology in general is about whom you you justify committing violence against and when is it permitted. Liberalism's ideology determines whom it's permissible to commit violence against and when to do so - based upon what ever is the most profitable people and instances for the capitalist class. While having all of these inconsistent exceptions built in that are then ; it does so while simultaneously defending both the rational and moral legitimacy for those exceptions. And pretending that these are all logically-consistent within the current societal norm at the time - it allows it to continue on macerating as some meritocratic vision for what our society should be and is championing the principles of "freedom" and liberty" as it's most essential building blocks.
He skipped mercantilism, in the feudalism to capitalism timeline. Also failed to acknowledge that the "exceptions" are not inherent to liberalism which is why rights movements often rightly attack the otherwise liberal society thats excluding or oppressing them by saying that it is not liberal enough or not living up to liberal values/standards. otherwise good video though.
I use my wealth to enable other people to create value.
Does that make me a bad person?
Is it wrong for me to enable the creation of value by turning my labor into wage into capital?
Is it wrong that the people I lend the money to ask assistance, and give that assistance a stable reward?
It might not look good, but working for a wage is preferable to serfdom
I think that we in Europe might be heading in the right direction with capitalism. though there is a lot to be improved.
Isn't the definition from Anievas & Nisancioglu too broad? If by "Capitalist", we just mean that it facilitates the existence of currently existing productive activities, then nearly every social institution can be so defined. I'm raising children who will most likelt come to produce goods and services. Is my family thereby a Capitalist Family?
Hell yeah Holst’s Mars during the English civil war bit was so choice