Thank you so much! This is great :)

excellent, that final quote by Marx in the last minute is just fantastic,

He really learned to dumb down for a public audience over the years 😂

Wow! He was as eloquent in the defense of Socialism as he was in later years disowning it. I’m with him all the way.

@ifsowhynot

11 күн бұрын

I was about to say (as someone who holds socialism/communism in fairly low regard): this is by far the most articulate and well-reasoned defense of socialism that I have ever heard. In the same breath: I am relieved that he did see the light eventually. (:

@user-su1om2bb1t

11 күн бұрын

⁠​⁠@@ifsowhynot”see the light” lol. Shows how deluded you are. It is incredibly disappointing he did not consistently uphold this line. But go ahead and assure everyone that an economic system where the wealthiest 26 people own approximately as much as the bottom 3.8 billion is justified.

@ifsowhynot

10 күн бұрын

@@user-su1om2bb1t I'm not going to adopt the same insulting tone that you took with me. I don't really need to. My case is a much easier one to make. Twenty-five to thirty fully non-capitalist regimes have existed in human history. (There will be some variation depending upon what you consider "non-capitalist.") Only two of those regimes remain today: Cuba, a country known for imprisoning dissidents and sending forth a stream of emigrants to the United States year after year. The other is North Korea. I don't really need to explain what is happening there. All other non-capitalist states have not only failed, but failed spectacularly. When I say "failed spectacularly," I mean that they seldom failed without giving rise to mass death in the form of famine, deaths in wars of aggression, death in the form of persecution from the state, and death from general mismanagement. Both China and the USSR experienced mass casualty communist reform events (the Holodomor in the USSR, to name one example that killed millions; the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution in China, each of which claimed millions of lives). My argument is not that capitalism is perfect or that wealth is distributed with perfect justice or equity; neither of these are the cases that I need to make. All that I need to show is that capitalism is better than all non-capitalist alternatives on the market, so to speak -- and communism was the only ideological alternative to capitalism that has ever been tried at scale. I just need to show that capitalism generally satisfies most of the people living under it, without giving rise to domestic atrocities on the scale of the Great Terror or the Holodomor or the Cultural Revolution. Since your concern lies with the global poor, let's talk about the global poor. Question: How many people are in extreme poverty today? Answer: The same number of people who were in extreme poverty in 1820. Note that the world population in 1820 was approximately 1 billion souls. Today, the world population is approximately 8 billion. There are eight times as many people on earth today as there were in 1820. I repeat: the same number of people are in extreme poverty. World population has exploded, but the number of global poor has remained static. Another way of saying this: 80% of the world's population was in extreme poverty in 1820; today, that figure sits under 10%. This is a remarkable achievement. If you take poverty seriously -- and I would assume that you do -- I should think that you would a) take this achievement seriously and b) rate it among the greatest of human achievements. How was it done? What changed things? Rather obviously: the Industrial Revolution. Global trade made all of this possible. Without much-maligned capitalism, *none* of this progress -- whether in food production, technological advancement, or advancements in medicine -- would have been possible with the scale and efficiency that capitalism has achieved. Again, it is not a perfect system. But we know, at the very least, that it keeps the lights on -- the same cannot be said for communism. Again, 28 of those 30 regimes are dead; two of them continue to hobble along. Consider China: since 1989, they have lifted *at least* 400 million of their 1.3 billion-or-so inhabitants out of poverty. The late 1980s are precisely when Deng Xiaoping began to implement market reforms and to allow for the sale of goods on the open Chinese market. (I'm sure this is perfectly coincidental.) I welcome your scorn, but I will not reciprocate it. I will note, however: my argument is not complicated in the least by the fact that all of the means and implements and benefits that I am using to write this post -- the technology, the consumer goods, the university education, the internet, the freely available information I just consulted -- are made possible only through a modern market economy. Your counterargument, whatever it might be -- arguing against the system that brought you those same benefits -- rather *is,* I should think.

@user-su1om2bb1t

10 күн бұрын

@@ifsowhynot lol, good job assuming, without any argument or reasoning whatsoever, that all you need to do is show that capitalism is still in power and that it has more capacity to satisfy human need than hitherto existing social structures while also not discussing any of the catastrophes that it has caused, including continual mass starvation, both world wars, global colonization, mass impoverishment, etc. In other words: The first problem is you do not discuss what capitalism is as such, which is a mode of expropriating surplus value from the global working class. You might be able to point out that thus far in history it has more ability to satisfy human need that hitherto existing modes of production, but if the system itself is exploitative, then that is a sufficient basis to oppose it. This is especially true since alternatives are obviously possible. Difficult to realize, but possible. The second problem is that you are not sufficiently aware of the catastrophic nature of the capitalist mode of production, some examples of which are discussed above.

@tatreides8425

9 күн бұрын

He never disowned socialism - he remained a dialectical and historical materialist until his death. It was the political representation of the left he objected to - as do many dialectical and historical materialists including a lot of Physicists who remain materilists (i.e conform to Marx's historical materilist conception of humanity and history.

What year was this filmed please? I thought I'd seen everything about Christopher Hitchens on KZread. But no, this is new to me. What a phenomenal intellectual vocabulary that seems to flummox the students in the audience.

@DebateCentrals

16 күн бұрын

1986 on cspan. Here is the rest www.c-span.org/video/?150777-1/socialism-versus-capitalism

@turntablesrockmyworld9315

14 күн бұрын

I am fairly well-read and it flummoxed me!

Anybody else here because the thumbnail looked like Terry Jones?

Eloquent but deceptive. Freedom is the last word.

@flankspeed

9 күн бұрын

The last word in your sentence was 'word'.

@drg111yt

9 күн бұрын

@@flankspeed Yes, ie the most important thing.

Gosh he was so cute!

I'm a social modularist, socialism is control without order or individualism while (liberal)capitalism is order and individualism without meaning, we need to realize that we're all meaningful gears grinding towards the ultimate struggle of prosperity and no one should be left behind for the profit incentives, NOR should cultural cohesion be compromised for pathologically individualistic expectations of conduct due to high competition environments like liberalism.

The poor students look bored to tears....(Don't tell my wife, she loves hitchens and dawkins with his outdated views on genetics) I'm an anarchosyndicalist btw and Hitchens was just the sort of person to be at Henley regatta on the wrong side (i.e. not Class War).

@duderyandude9515

12 күн бұрын

Fellow anarcho-syndicalist! Solidarity, comrade ✊✊✊ And I agree. I liked Hitch when I was younger because he claimed to be a socialist against religion which is how I saw myself but he ended up driving me into the hands of fascists with his rhetoric on Islam and Muslims being some unique threat. Luckily, I ended up getting out of that, learning what socialism is, and turning my life around. Now when I view old Hitch clips for nostalgia, I can see just how wrong he was. But this old clip of him defending socialism is at least nice.

Yep.

I love that "There is no God" was only 4th lmao

Hitchens is young enough here to be enchanted by ideas rather than realities.

@jaybee9269

12 күн бұрын

Very trenchant.

@vendettaconfetti5292

12 күн бұрын

And lived old enough to grow into them. No political demographic is more intellectually, ethically and emotionally stagnated than conservatives (or far right reactionaries). Even liberals are much more likely than the left to resign to arrested development and convenient immature absolutes. Leftists are flawed humans. But for any one informed, wise & independent thinking con/lib you can name - there are twenty brilliant socialist contributors to science, journalism, law, philosophy, art, history, activism, etc.

@PopularDemand1000

12 күн бұрын

Well said. He is carried away with his own verbosity, carried well away from the shores of wisdom.

@jaybee9269

12 күн бұрын

One’s psyche is a reflection of age. Good and bad, that.

@meshzzizk

12 күн бұрын

marx’s fundamental philosophical project was to reorient hegelianism around the aristotelian principle that ideas follow from material reality and not the other way around (“to stand hegelian idealism on its head”), but go off i guess

What has gone wrong here, is that Hitchens is depending on some rational presentation of his views. None of the hundreds or thousands of his fans who usually swoon over him are interested in that. He does much better when he is spewing poorly reasoned bile at Christianity.

@errolkim1334

12 күн бұрын

Exactly . He's a rockstar atheist neocon,not an actual socialist or true intellectual. Just a poshboy who knew his audience.

He's smart but politically dumb

So disappointing that he had socialist leanings. Carried away with his own intellectual verbosity, carried well away from the shores of wisdom.

@johncurtis7186

12 күн бұрын

His identity as a socialist, largely drifted away, after 2001.

@duderyandude9515

12 күн бұрын

It was exactly his socialist leanings that got me to listen to him in the first place (back when I didn't know what socialism was but it sounded nice). Little did I know that he had no socialist analysis and ended up driving me to the far-right with his rhetoric about Muslims and Islam mirroring those of actual fascists. The only thing that stopped me from going full fash was the opprobrium that such figures had due to the attacks from the left. Then I actually started listening to the left rather than dishonestly dismissing them as a bunch of emotional babies, and what would you know, they actually had intelligent things to say and the strawmen arguments I had heard throughout my youth from the right were because right-wing beliefs can only survive when opposed with strawmen. This is why some repurposing of "political correctness", "SJW", "woke", "DEI", "cultural Marxist" has to be used to dismiss the left. Coming back many years later as an actual socialist, Hitchens is just a disappointment. Had he stayed as a socialist, I'd have a lot more respect for him.

@johncurtis7186

12 күн бұрын

@@duderyandude9515 : If you were driven to the “far right”, the problem is you, not Hitchens.

@siian

12 күн бұрын

He didn't have socialist 'leanings', hij *was* a socialist, albeit one with curiously little interest in economics. Yet, at his best he was still an articulate and thoughtful advocate for the left. That he later achieved his greatest fame by aligning with neo-conservatives (many of whom were former socialists) is a tragedy.

@duderyandude9515

12 күн бұрын

@@johncurtis7186 Oh, I accept responsibility for my former bigotries. My point was that Hitchens played a part in that. His Islamophobic rhetoric mirrored that of actual fascists and so when I, by chance, heard crypto-fascist Tommy Robinson talking, he used the same talking points that I was already primed to agree with from Hitchens. I knew (or at least thought) that Hitchens wasn’t a racist and so someone saying things along a similar vain couldn’t be a racist either. I was caught in a weird doublethink where I was being racist whilst not thinking I was a racist. Much like Hitchens at the end of his life.