 Let's start with what is socialism, and this of course is, you know, the guy defending it the other night, Richard Wolff, never defined it, never defined socialism. It's evolving, it's changing, it keeps experimenting, it's just this co-ops, co-ops with socialism. Now we all know he doesn't believe that, we all know that he has a much more expansive view of socialism. He's actually got books about this topic, and those books, he has a much bigger role for the state, he has much bigger role for coercion than just, let's put a few co-ops together, and, you know, so what is socialism? He never defined it. Well socialism traditionally, okay I'll give him the evolution, traditionally has been the, where the state controls the means of production, where the means of production, that is business, industry, services, what produces the stuff that we consume, is owned, controlled, completely, without any semblance of private property by the state. All right, so Richard said, no it's evolving, we're not that, we're not that interested in the state anymore. Well then you could expand this to be where the means of production are owned by the state or by the workers by mandate, because if it's the case that workers own the means of production when they buy them, or when they, you know, when they take control over them by peaceful voluntary means, so that's capitalism. Workers can indeed own the means of production, you know, at the startup, arguably, you could say that the owners own the means of production. They are shareholders, all of them, you know, you get options, you get stock when you, when you go work for a startup. Everybody who works there is participating. Now they don't get a vote democratically about who is CEO and stuff, but they do in a sense that they vote based on how much ownership they have. They get elected board of directors, theoretically. At least if they have stock, not options. So it's not business has never been one man, one vote. It's not always even one share of ownership, one vote. It's often, it's always, right, either your share of ownership and then some shares have more voting rights than others. That's part of the voluntary arrangement set up within some corporations. For example, the Ford family still controls Ford from a voting perspective, even though it is a minority shareholder in Ford. They have special category of shares that, you know, that they vote and it gives them supermajority rights. And the same with at Facebook, Zuckerberg has supermajority rights. Okay, so those are two potential definitions of socialism. State owns the means of production. The workers own the means of production. That's typically been the standard. But socialism has meant much more broad things like that. Where the state is redistributed wealth on a massive scale. Where the state maybe owns, what do they call it? Democratic socialism is where the state owns some of the means of production. Owners own some and there is some semblance of private property. But generally I would say, you know, a broader definition of socialism would focus on private property. And you could define socialism as that system in which there is no private property over the means of production. That is, there's no recognition of private property over the means of production. So if you remember, I've debated these socialists and say, well, you own your clothes. You might even own your home. You have private property over those things, but not over big things. I don't know what big things mean. But I think what they mean is the means of production. Some Marx and Richard Wolff are primarily concerned about means of production. They're primarily concerned about business, about how stuff is produced. And of course, Marx was a materialist. So for him, production is muscle. Production, this is why he elevates the workers the way he does, because they're the ones who use muscle. And Wolff, it's the same thing. There's no mind in a Wolff, a Marx universe. That's why the CEO is not a meaningful position. That's why a planning strategy are not important. None of these things have significance because the mind, anything that has to do with the mind has no significance. It's brute force. And indeed, because the mind, there's no need to specialize. So you don't need to specialize with regard to those realms that involve the mind, management, for example. And that's why rotating jobs and anybody can be a manager. Because real production, the real work is all muscle. And we all can do muscle work. And management is no different. So socialism is concerned primarily with the means of production. And modern leftism is different because modern leftism is much more concerned about other aspects of human life or culture more broadly. And you can see that in the resistance on CRT and wokeism, which is much broader than kind of the materialistic framework, the economic materialistic framework that Marx created. Modern leftists are influenced by many, many more people than just Marx. They heavily influenced by Rousseau. They heavily influenced by Hegel. They heavily influenced by the postmoderns and by critical theory. And of course, so were the Maoists and the Stalinists. It wasn't just about the means of production. Everything was controlled. Thought was controlled. Speech was controlled. I mean, what is the cultural revolution? The cultural revolution in Maoist China, a revolution that I guess Wolf denies or at least he denies any negative consequences for it, where millions and millions of people were slaughtered by the Red God. Where people's lives would turn upside down even when they weren't slaughtered. It was all about thought control. It was all about sending people to reeducation camps. You can see a very similar trend today in China with the Uighurs in reeducation camps. And I wouldn't be surprised if we soon will see reeducation camps for high-tech entrepreneurs. So you get from Marx, you get an ever-growing and implicit in Marx, is the necessity to not just deny private property, but ultimately to deny private thought because what is property, right? The Marxists think, well, we're just denying private property. And I've debated Marxist to say, oh, no, we believe in free speech. We believe in free thought. We believe in open debate. We believe in all. No, no, not at the end of the day. Because the negation of private property is the negation of thought. The negation of private property is the negation of the individual's mind. The negation of private property is the recognition that the only thing that matters is not the individual and is life, but the group. Why? Well, because the right to life, making life your standard implies property. It implies life acquires effort. Life acquires the production of goods. To say my life is mine is to say that the things I produce are mine. The things that I produce in order to survive, the things that I produce in order to thrive, the things that I produce in order to be a human being. You cannot separate the things that I produce from my life. My life requires material and that material requires production and that production is done by individuals and they own what it is that they produce. If they salaried, what they produce is the salary, salary or reflection of their value to the business, to the value added that they contributed to the production of whatever they're working on. So you cannot separate the right to life. You cannot separate the ability of individual to live his life from property rights. Property rights are essential. They're not a derivative. They're not just a secondary issue. They're not, oh, well, we can do without them. You can't do without them. And the rejection of property rights, therefore, is a rejection of an individual's life. It's a rejection of his striving to achieve. It's a rejection, ultimately, therefore, of his mind, the tool of production. And it's a rejection of immorality, of a code of ethics that says that the purpose of individual's life is to live and ultimately to achieve happiness, to live the best life that he can based on the judgment of his own mind, based in pursuit of his own values, values he has chosen using his rational mind. So socialism rejects the morality of individualism. And of course, it has to, because the whole idea of socialism, the whole idea of a group, any group controlling, owning in quotes, because they don't literally own, owning in quotes, the means of production is, at the base of it, the foundation of it, at its core is collectivism. Is it the idea that individual's life doesn't matter? The individual's life is just a means to an end. That the end is the collective. The end is the so-called well-being of the collective. And of course, it's also a recognition that there is no such thing, certainly there's no meaningful thing associated with individual thinking. The thinking is fundamentally, is fundamentally, thinking is fundamentally, not an individual's thing. The thinking is a group activity. What socialists do is they reject individualism in all of its aspects. They reject the morality of individualism. They reject the thinking behind, the idea that the individual is the thinker. They reject the idea that reason is man's basic means of survival, but it's man's, a man's, that there is no group think, that there is no group consciousness. Socialism is fundamentally collectivist. It's fundamentally views the individual not as an ending himself, not as the unit of morality, but as a means to an end. And in that sense, I don't care what kind of socialist you are. I don't care what variety or what evolved notion of socialism we have. The philosophy is evil because collectivism is evil. The philosophy is evil. Socialism is evil because the idea that man is nothing but a cog, that man is nothing but a means is an evil end. It is the idea behind slavery. It is the idea behind surfdom. Now, socialists believe that they are an evolution beyond capitalism. That is yet fluidism, which then capitalism replaced as a superior, superior feudalism, and then they would replace capitalism. But no, see, they were placing capitalism basically turns us into feudalism. The feudalist your life didn't matter. You were means to an end to some group, the aristocrats, the king, the God, whatever. They want to replace it with the individualism means to the end of the well-being of fill in the blank, the proletarian, the workers, the state, the group, Mao Stalin depends on your version of socialism. And this is the point. It doesn't matter. Even the softest form of socialism, the social democrats, social democracy, ultimately has the view that you as an individual must serve others. You as an individual are not an end to yourself. Your production is not yours. You don't get to keep it. You don't get to decide what to do with it. You are just a means in Scandinavia. You're the means to an end of a large welfare state, let's say. It's still you as a means. It's still collectivism. It's still somebody else is more important than you. You as an individual don't matter now. In Scandinavia, they try to balance this out by, in other ways, respecting you as an individual free speech and for the most part, and some private property, maybe as much as the United States private property. But you can see that even there, even a system that is mixed, or America of today, that is mixed still on the side of the welfare state or on the side of COVID, emergency powers through COVID, always you as an individual, not as an end. It's not the purpose of going to protect you, but as a means to serving some higher goal. And that is always evil. That is always wrong. Socialism, socialism as an ism, certainly as a consistent ism, embraces that completely and is pure evil because it rejects you, me, rejects our values, rejects our mind. It rejects our right to our stuff, to our thinking, to the product of our thinking, to our goal, which is our own individual happiness. It rejects that completely. You are not an Indian or yourself. You cannot just pursue your own values. And your mind is just one mind among many. What's important is what the group thinks. And this is why, this is why, by the way, you get that. You get how little they regard the human mind, the individual human mind with their adoration of democracy because democracy is the expression of the collective. And it's the subjugation of the individual to the mob. It's a subjugation of your mind to the demagogue. The demagogue can rally up the majority. It's the subjugation of your mind to any group that can muster enough resources to decide how you should live your life, which you should do, what your values should be. So every aspect of socialism, in every aspect of socialism, every variation of socialism, it is an evil ideology. Again, because it rejects, it rejects the sanctity of the individual. It's sanctity of your mind. And it sacrifices it towards the group. The group, the collective, is the primary. And again, you could see this in Wolf all over the place and why, at the end of the day, he wouldn't even condemn Mao Zedong because Mao, I mean, he was just doing it for the people. Maybe he made some mistakes, but he was doing it for the right cause. He was doing it for the people. Even Stalin, as bad as he turned out to be and he was a little bit of an egomania. But it was an attempt at the common good and what's most important, it was an attempt to crush the individual. Stalin and Mao were very good at that. Very good. It's suppressing individual, eliminating private property. They just got a little too, the socialist said, they just got a little too carried away with it. So yes, is socialism evil? Yes. If your standard of the good is that which promotes human life, if the standard of the good is that which supports human life, human individual human life, then socialism enemy. It has killed tens, if not hundreds of millions of their own people, not in war, but just in spite, in order to achieve their system. Can you believe? So we'll get to the, we'll get to the, can you believe in a minute? They've killed tens of millions of people, starved them, slaughtered them. There's never been a form of socialism that has been even mildly successful. It has failed. It's anti-life. And what the anti-life is, anti-morality, the anti-life is the evil. Good is pro-life, evil is anti-life. Socialism is anti-life, therefore it's anti. Therefore it's evil. And again, everywhere, everywhere you look, it's anti-life. Everywhere you look, it's failed. Everywhere you look, it has been a disaster. Some places worse than others. And you can look at Venezuela, you can look at North Korea today as examples of this. Nothing good, nothing good comes from socialism. On a small scale or on a big scale. It's not true that families are socialists. It's just not true. Certainly not democratic. And, but they're not socialists either. Not everybody gets the same. They don't get according to what they need. At least not a healthy family. Not, you know, maybe when the kids are very young, but it's not political. You know, Hayek said, family's a socialist and that's why people have this implicit, you know, from each according to ability, to each according to his need, is true within a family. Now really, certainly not among adults within a family, but even children should learn at a pretty young age to fend for themselves, at least to some extent. So they're not all provided by others. And not all their quote needs are met. That's how you, that's how you raise welfare recipients, not independent adults. Thank you for listening or watching The Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening, you get value from watching, show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbrookshow.com slash support by going to Patreon, subscribe star locals, and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those, any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see The Iran Book Show grow, please consider sharing our content. And of course, subscribe, press that little bell button right down there on YouTube, so that you get an announcement when we go live. And for those of you who are already subscribers and those of you who are already supporters of the show, thank you. I very much appreciate it.