The guy in the video is a professor of political science at City College of New York in NYC. The video is only 3 minutes.
Shout out to The Daily Show (or was it somebody else?) for getting an actual communist to sound off on this question and not some guy quoting the latest trendy twitter hot take.
The market mechanism follow up explanation is equally bad. Literally every Communist society that has ever existed has used market mechanisms, even if abandoning them was the eventual goal, because nobody knows how to fully abolish the markets successfully so what they’ve all done is establish state supremacy over the markets in order to direct them better than the markets naturally direct themselves.
I think that as socialism becomes less of a dirty word in American politics again this is the inevitable route a lot of people are going to take to square their lifelong anticommunist indoctrination with the obvious fact that socialist policies are popular and effective (when there isn’t a bigger country fucking yours up). Separating Socialism from Communism and watering it down even further from what it is now is the process of coopting that the capitalist system does to all reformist and revolutionary movements.
edit: we really need to frontload class struggle and property relations in our rhetoric. Marx’s book is called Capital, not “markets”.
we really need to frontload class struggle and property relations in our rhetoric. Marx’s book is called Capital, not “markets”.
Never allow people to reduce socialism to policy wonkery. The class struggle is the most important part
“Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many.”
-Adam Smith, 249 years ago
Yo I thought that whole line was some kind of deep irony-pilled meme shit; I’ve never seen a real person say that ever. Is this dude a real person? He’s a Political Science professor!? Incredable stuff.
Him being a poly sci professor somehow makes this less surprising.
Yeah that’s also true I guess.
No wonder all my liberal friends say I’d be good at poli-sci. If this is the level of incompetence in the field of a professor of it. Jeez. I may not have a formal education in the subject as a broad whole, but at least I know what socialism is.
I’ve repeatedly clashed with various family members who studied political science because their definitions are usually dumb and/or wrong. it’s a breathtakingly propagandized degree.
I’ve seen that definition from a comment on social media somewhere and just took it as a one off idiot.
A political science professor giving the same atrocious definition is crazy.
Was expecting worse. I’d say it’s a good definition of social democratic politics. Not democratic socialism because it explicitly denies socialism or communism as the end goal. Of course it abuses “democracy” as a positive thought-terminating term opposed to communism.
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
