Transcripts / What's Wrong with Capitalism (Part 2)

Natalie: I like stuff. I like this, and I like this, and I like this. 🍾 I like stuff and I want more stuff.

Socrates: My child! Hearken to my voice! It is I, Socrates. 

Natalie: Oh no. What do you want? 

Socrates: I haven’t seen you at the symposium of late! 

Natalie: Well yeah, because you kind of hate women, and it was getting me down. 

Socrates: My child, without my guidance you have become a slave to mere appetite. Have you forgotten what I’ve taught you about the true meaning of happiness, the rational contemplation of truth and justice? 

Natalie: Look, I tried that, and honestly, I don’t think it’s really my thing. I’m a dumb dumb and I like shiny things. 

Socrates: Ah, but my child, these are pleasures for the pigs! Happiness can only be acquired through the contemplation of beauty itself, perfectly exemplified in the supple bodies of young boys. 

Natalie: Okay, thank you for your feedback, we’ll take that into consideration. 

Ugh, Greeks. Look, we all have wants, needs, desires. And we all want happiness. But happiness, what does that word even mean? I’m just a dumb dumb who likes shiny things, and these are questions really better left to the philosophers, which is why I’m not going to present my original ideas in this video. Instead I will be interpreting one of the most influential works of anti-capitalist philosophy ever produced, a series in multiple volumes that examines deeply the concept of the fetishism of the commodity. 

I am of course talking about “Worth It”, a series on BuzzFeedVideo about three men who are younger than me who travel the world and try different foods that cost different amounts of money, and then say whether it was worth it. In each episode they taste a type of food at three different restaurants at three drastically different price points to find out which one is the most worth it. 

For example, they compare a $2 pizza to a $2000 pizza that’s made of gold, and a $1 ice cream to a $1000 ice cream that’s made of gold, and a $1 bagel to a $1000 bagel that’s made of gold. It is a lot of gold.

Now to the untrained eye, "Worth It" may seem like insipid YouTube click-fodder. But we intellectuals, well, we have a taste for insights that penetrate a little deeper. We like to take it  all in. The "Worth It" boys– Andrew, Adam, Steven– these are not mere content creators, mere actors, dancing monkeys performing for ad revenue. They’re philosophers, spiritual leaders even, and what they’ve accomplished on YouTube quite honestly far surpasses the combined insights of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Sartre, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Gramsci, Lukács, Zarathustra, and even our dear breadmom Kropotkin. 

I’ve of course read each of these great thinkers’ complete works many, many times. But I always come away dissatisfied, and I find myself yet again returning to the unparalleled masterworks of Andrew, Adam, and Steve. See, each episode of "Worth It" poses to the viewer a fundamental question. Is it worth it? We may never know. Take for instance, the case of the $2 regular pizza vs. the $2000 gold pizza. Which is the better deal? I mean how would we even begin to answer such a perplexing riddle? 

Well, according to Karl Marx the value of a commodity must be understood in two ways. On the one hand there’s the use value, the commodity’s capacity to satisfy some human need. And on the other hand there’s the exchange value, the quantity determining the ratio by which a commodity is exchangeable with every other commodity, deriving from objectified labor over time and expressed in terms of price. But let’s not oversimplify things. Clearly, Andrew, Adam, and Steve are inviting us, the viewers of "Worth It", to understand the use value/exchange value dichotomy not as mere hierarchical binary but as a sort of Deleuzian rhizome, a non-arborescent multiplicity with as many sinuous interconnections as the truffles on the pizza itself. 

Am I making myself clear? I’m not. It’s almost as if the philosophers are simply burdening me with jargon and not actually helping think through this any better. So, let’s throw philosophy in the trash and start over from the beginning. Fuck this! 📕🗑

I like stuff. And I like shiny things. Now that’s something everyone can understand, so let’s take that as the first axiom of the economic theory I will be developing in this video. So given that I like stuff and I like shiny things, let’s return to the question. Is a $2000 pizza worth it? Well, it is covered in gold and gold is shiny, so I do like that. But the pizza itself seems kind of gross. It’s got squid-ink dough smeared with foie gras, Stilton cheese, black truffles, gold flakes, and caviar. These flavors are overwhelming and they don’t make any sense together, the only thing they have in common is being really expensive. It’s like the culinary equivalent of Donald Trump’s apartment. But Andrew and Steven sit there, with New York’s financial district for a backdrop and they try to pretend that the pizza doesn’t taste like golden shit:

Steven: “I’m honestly speechless… I feel weird.”

Andrew: “Is it the gold?”

…

Steven: “I just ate $250… I feel kind of like, like I’m committing a crime”

…

Andrew: “And that’s what $1250 looks like.”

There’s this kind of sadness that sets in as they realize that the $2000 pizza isn’t worth it at all, and they start to feel almost like they’ve done something immoral. It’s a feeling I’ve had many times myself, after spending too much money on some gilded piece of trash in a vain attempt to fill the hollow in my soul. Is there a name for that feeling? Well, I like to call it FUCKING NEOLIBERALISM. In a post-scarcity luxury communist utopia, a bad pizza covered in gold would just be a bad pizza covered in gold. You might be mad at the chef for making a disappointing pizza, but you probably wouldn’t be overcome with feelings of emptiness and guilt. 

To fully understand why a $2000 pizza is not worth it, you have to understand it in the context of capitalism. The price, $2000, tells you the exchange value of the pizza. And if you live in America you have an instinctive sense for what that means, because you know all the other things you could buy with $2000. For a lot of people $2000 would buy a few months of food, or healthcare, or golden nails. And there’s a lot of families who sit around the kitchen table every evening worrying about how they’re going to afford golden nails.

And it’s that awareness that makes the shitty $2000 pizza seem not just aesthetically disappointing, but almost obscene or even immoral. But of course to call it immoral is actually to misidentify the real problem. So it’s not like those shitty YouTube comments that go “pizzas in Africa could’ve eaten those children how dare you”. Because the problem isn’t that Andrew, Adam, and Steven are bad people for buying an expensive flatbread smeared with gilded cream cheese. The problem is that our economy fundamentally operates in a way that makes inevitable these repulsive juxtapositions of scarcity and abundance. 

That’s why I don’t really agree with the philosopher Peter Singer, who has this idea that many of the world’s problems could be solved if privileged American college students would just become hedge fund managers, and donate most of their income to buying mosquito nets in the Congo. I mean sure, that would probably help with certain situations, but it’s not gonna change the fact that the global economy is structured around cheap exploited labor at the bottom, and $2000 pizzas at the top. 

Another way to approach this issue might be to ask, who are the goddamn reptiles? Well, they’re certainly not the Jews, I want to be clear, get everyone on the same page that I’m not blaming the Jews for anything. Except you know, cucking the white race. But to be fair, someone had to cuck them. The white race has really been getting on my nerves lately. 

So the lizards are not the Jews, they’re not reptillians from Alpha Draconis, they’re not freemasons, or globalists, or the gay agenda. But the key insight is that they’re not even really the capitalists. The lizards are Capital itself. And what does that mean? Well, I don’t know. But it does make me sound like I’ve read a lot of Marx, doesn’t it? 

What I’m trying to say is that the problems with our economy are not just the product of greed or some other personal moral defect of the wealthy. Of course some capitalists are terrible people, but some probably aren’t. And either way the virtues or vices of the rich are sort of beside the point. So the real point of the golden pizza is that it’s emblematic of the fact that the extreme economic inequalities of our society are laughably unjustifiable.

If I were to translate the meaning of the golden pizza into an argument, it would go something like this: Capitalism as we know it is a defective economic system because, although it’s good at creating large amounts of wealth, it distributes that wealth in an incredibly inefficient way. Where efficiency is understood not as the capacity to maximize total wealth, but as the capacity to maximize human happiness. Now I need to explain what I mean about happiness. Here’s a question: Should the economy serve humanity, or should humanity serve the economy? It seems obvious to me that the economy should serve humanity, so what I look for in a good economic system is that it produces the most happiness for the people who are a part of it. 

So if you’re willing to go along with this the first question we should ask is, does having more wealth make people happier? And we actually have data about that, at least within the context of our own economic system. And the data shows that more income does lead to more happiness up to a certain point. But the happiness benefit of increased income plateaus somewhere between 65 and 95 thousand dollars a year.

One interpretation of the reason why happiness increases up to the threshold is that at lower income levels, more income means less stress about paying rent, or mortgages, or medical bills, or college tuition. But once you pass the threshold more income basically just translates into more disappointing golden pizzas. If that interpretation is correct then the current income distribution seems really irrational, at least if the goal is to maximize happiness. The income distribution in the United States is skewed toward the upper extreme, so that national mean income is around $72,000, right in the plateau zone. But the national median income is around $59,000, significantly below it. Furthermore, 1% of the population are making more than $389,000 a year, several times the peak happiness threshold. 

So at least to my naive eyes what it looks like is that millions of people in this country don’t have enough money to securely afford food, housing, education, and healthcare, while a few million others are like constantly gorging themselves on golden pizzas or something. But I’m guessing it’s even worse than that, because it’s not just that some people don’t have enough money to meet all their needs, it’s that they have to be poor while other people are rich. And since people compare themselves to others, that leads to all kinds of additional anxieties and resentments and social tensions. 

There’s a study of capuchin monkeys that shows if you reward one money for a task with a delicious grape, and a monkey in the adjacent cage with a shitty cucumber, the monkey who gets the cucumber loses his shit. And if you do this to humans for long enough, they start building guillotines. But that’s just how it looks to me. I could be wrong. I mean, I’m not an economic theorist, and honestly I don’t really understand how the economy works. I don’t even check my own bank account balance very often. I make the videos, I swipe the card–

So look, if I’m wrong and capitalism is good actually, just leave a comment and I’ll be happy to be proven wrong. But before you do that, let’s get some of the more obvious objections out of the way. 

Income inequality exists because not everyone does the same jobs. Some people work harder than others, and those people deserve to make more money. ⌨️

Well, sweatshop workers work really hard and they barely make any money at all. And a lot of people who work for minimum wage have to work multiple jobs just to sustain themselves and their families. It’s actually a ton of work, and they barely make enough money to survive. 

But minimum wage workers are unskilled workers. Why would anyone become an innovator or medical researcher if they could make a good living as a janitor? ⌨️

Well, janitorial work is pretty important actually. Someone has to cook and clean, and I think people who do such necessary work deserve a decent living. But I also think a lot of people would find janitorial work boring, and I think that the kind of personality that likes to innovate and invent often isn’t driven mainly by profit anyway. Jonas Salk never patented his polio vaccine, even though he could have made millions of dollars from it; because he just cared about humanity, and he was driven by a purpose beyond personal profit. In fact a lot of great historical scientists were upper class people who didn’t need to work for a living at all, and were just driven by their own passion and curiosity. 

So let me get this straight–you criticize capitalism and yet you yourself make money on the Internet. Hypocrite much? ⌨️

A few years ago I was a broke philosophy graduate student. And when I criticized capitalism then, people used to say: 

Why don’t you stop whining and get a real job and earn a living? You just resent capitalism because you’re too lazy to put in the work it takes to succeed. ⌨️

So if people who are failing under capitalism can’t criticize it because they’re just resentful, and people who are succeeding under capitalism can’t criticize it because they’re hypocrites, then… according to you, is anyone allowed to criticize capitalism? 

Capitalism may have problems, but it’s the best economic system there is. You wouldn’t want to live in Soviet Russia or Maoist China would you? ⌨️

Well, no. I wouldn’t. 

Tatiana: Hello. I’m Tatiana Tankikova, I’m here to defend Stalin.

Natalie: Fuck off!

Tatiana: Dasvidaniya, fascist ☭.

So granted, a lot of past communist regimes were shitty. But that doesn’t mean that the current system is the best and final system for all time. My approach to this topic is not to try to resurrect Soviet communism or anything like that, but rather to identify problems with the current system that seem to cause unhappiness and instability. 

Ok but… I like stuff. ⌨️

I like stuff too. I think a lot of people have this instinctive fear that if capitalism goes, so does everything we love. I mean when I think of communism in particular I think of austerity, scarcity, conformity, undrinkable Victory Gin, the end of fashion, all art required to be propaganda– just an all around nightmare situation for a person of my persuasion. And it’s not for no reason at all that I have these anxieties, since there was an aspect of that to some past communist societies. But the stuff I’m worried about, booze, makeup, art, baths, these things existed long before capitalism and they’ll exist long after it. And I know different types of people will have different things they’re concerned about. Straight guys will be like "WILL THERE BE VIDEO GAMES AFTER CAPITALISM OH GOD!" And yeah, there will be. Tetris is a Soviet game and that’s one of the best games of the 80s. ☭

Some of the stuff we like could probably even be improved if it were liberated from capitalist pressures. I mean look what capitalism and the pressure to turn a profit has done to movies. The last time I was reading the only book I’ve ever read– "Ways of Seeing" by John Berger– I noticed this description of glamour in the context of advertising:

“Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness: happiness as judged from the outside by others. The happiness of being envied is glamour.”

And I felt kind of attacked, because glamour is very important to us. And by us, I mean the gays. The Ls, the Gs, the Bs, the Ts, and all those filthy, filthy Qs. But isn’t it kind of true that at least in advertising, the function of glamour is to provoke feelings of envy and inadequacy in the beholder in the service selling you shit. But the advertising function I think is an appropriation of glamour, not something essential to it. And maybe glamour would actually be liberated if it weren’t constantly conflated with advertising. 

So I guess my message to socialists of the world is that, actually stuff is good. Glamour is good. Video games are good. Luxury is good. Baths are good. I mean, even gold is good if you don't abuse it horribly. You know the most offensive thing about the golden pizza is ultimately that the $2 pizza is actually better. The golden pizza is an affront not just to people who’s medical bills it could have paid, but it’s an affront to gustatory pleasure itself. 

So I guess my final take here is, actually champagne socialism is good. But I’m not talking about the champagne classes becoming socialists. I’m talking about redistributing the goddamn champagne. Alright, now that I’ve gotten these objections out of the way I’m finally ready to get started.

Part 1– what you’ve all been waiting for– How to End Capitalism Once and For All.

Well, I don’t know. Who do you people think I am? I’m a socially conscious YouTube entertainer, not transsexual Gandhi. I mean according to Marxism we can’t just start the revolution whenever we feel like it. Capitalism has to fail, and that will bring about the conditions that make the revolution inevitable. So I guess we just try to relax and wait for that to happen… I’m sure it’s bound to happen any day now…… 

You know maybe we should do something in the meantime. Uhh so I dunno, I guess vote Labour, tweet radically, try to eat more vegetables, uhh… Try not to be manipulated into waging war against other downtrodden people, and can we please not hand more power to the absolute worst dingbats our society has on offer. 

Tabby: Noooo. No voting. Smashing. 😾

Natalie: Well you know what, since she’s the one with the plan apparently, I guess just do whatever she says. Tabby, why don’t you go take a bath? Mmm. Good kitty. Don’t close the door!

📺 Dear comrades, the Central Catgirl Committee has determined that ContraPoints is and always has been counterrevolutionary, bourgeois revisionism. The Department of Information has therefore replaced the remainder of this video with a tribute to the immortal science of Tabbyism. ✊😼☭