 People who are against socialism, or even just skeptical about it, often ask the question, who will pay for it? College students have become far more vocal in their support for socialism, but it turns out that making everything free is expensive, and raises the question of who's going to pay for it all. Democratic socialism. Is it any different from regular socialism, and who's going to pay for all this free stuff? It's an important question, so let's hear how some random people on the streets of New York answer it. And by random people, I mean people who were cherry-picked by a conservative YouTuber named Cabot Phillips, who's desperately trying to make socialism look bad, and who likely edited these interviews towards that end. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, just elected, 28 years old, self-proclaimed democratic socialist, which has a lot of people talking. What do you think the government should be subsidizing? So her platform includes free healthcare, college tuition, minimum living wage, housing as a human right. Are those things that you think the government should be providing for people? Absolutely. Who in your mind should pay for all of the free things? All of the free things? Well, some of it should come from taxes, but the government should pay for it. But the government is funded by taxes? Yeah. I don't know where the money would come from, but they can figure it out. Okay. More taxes on the rich people? Yeah, for sure, man. Like, they can afford it. It's tax corporations that tax the one percent, and find a way to support a living wage. So if you have an accurate understanding of socialism and what that means, you'll know that none of this has answered the question, who pays for socialism? In fact, the guy doing the interviews never asks that question. He just asks who would pay for government-funded programs to strengthen the welfare state. Ironically, the title of his video is Do Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez supporters understand socialism? But it probably should be called Does the guy who made this video understand socialism? The answer is no. But even if he had asked who pays for socialism, he probably would get similar answers about taxing the rich and taxing corporations. That's because most people have been severely misinformed about what socialism means, and unfortunately, that includes many people who call themselves socialists. Well, damn. So, who pays for socialism? Perhaps it's paid in bourgeois tiers or some other form of liquid-based payment? It's an important question, and I promise you that we will answer it in this video. But first, I have another question that is even more urgent. Who pays for capitalism? The rise of capitalism coincides with the rise of the Industrial Revolution, and it's really amazing to behold what our species has built in just a few hundred years. We have built thousands of roads, highways, and railways stretching through every continent. Thousands of cities, each with thousands of houses and thousands of buildings. Underground networks of plumbing take our waste, purify our water, and bring that water to us with the ease of turning a tap. Thousands of power plants, along with vast networks of cables, wires, and towers to bring us electricity. Countless factories producing every imaginable good. Countless science labs and chemistry labs, hospitals and fire stations, schools for every level of learning, sports stadiums, concert halls, theaters, and other centers for art, learning, and entertainment. We've even reached beyond the boundaries of this world into outer space. It really is astonishing how much we have built, how profoundly we have transformed the world. But who paid for it? A lot of the money came from capitalists, the business investors who make up the capitalist class, and in many cases the money also came from governments. But who paid for it in sweat and exhaustion? Who paid for it in time, in hours and days spent working, in years and decades of their life? Who paid for it in blood, in death, in tears of grief for those lost? In this sense, the payment did not come from private investors, writing checks from the comfort of their office, strained though their wrists may have been from signing all those checks. No, the payment came from workers, from slaves, and from their families. Or, to use the words of the anarchist theorist, Peter Kropotkin, whole generations that lived and died in misery, oppressed and ill-treated by their masters, and worn out by toil, have handed on this immense inheritance to our century. For thousands of years, millions of men have labored to clear the forests, to drain the marshes, and to open up highways by land and water. Every root of soil we cultivate in Europe has been watered by the sweat of several races of men. Every acre has its story of enforced labor, of intolerable toil, of the people's suffering. Every mile of railway, every yard of tunnel, has received its share of human blood. The shafts of the mines still bear on their rocky walls the marks made by the pick of the workmen who toiled to excavate them. The space between each prop in the underground galleries might be marked as a miner's grave. And who can tell what each of these graves has cost in tears, in privations, in unspeakable wretchedness, to the family who depended on the scanty wage of the worker cut off in his prime by fire-damp, rockfall, or flood? During capitalism's time as the world's dominant economic system, the world has industrialized and undergone rapid economic growth. The achievement is incredible, and the price also incredible. We've spoken of the price paid by those who did the work, a price paid in time, in sweat, in bodies handed over to be used and broken. And for tens of millions of people, a price paid in a life lost to slavery. But who else has paid the price? Who has been displaced, conquered, massacred? A lot of the wealth that funded the industrial revolution came from conquest and colonialism. Who paid the price in land lost, in loved ones slaughtered, in cultures and peoples devastated and destroyed by genocide? And who continues to pay because violent atrocity is not just a relic of capitalism's past. To this day, corporations continue to profit from imperialism and war and state violence. Enormous profits are also made by destroying ecosystems, with devastating and deadly impacts for wildlife and human beings. The blood price of capitalism is beyond measure. Capitalism is praised for the immense wealth it produces. Who pays for this wealth? Billions of workers pay with their time and their labor. Millions also pay with their lives, dying from work-related injury and illness. The business owners, also known as capitalists, pay for it with their money. Which, I know, I know, doesn't sound as impressive, but doesn't it count for something? That money pays for the factories, the machinery, the tools, and all the things that workers need to be productive. These are the means of production, and without them, workers could not make the things they make, could not produce the things they produce, could not build the things they build. It's the capitalist who pays for and provides the means of production. So, who pays for capitalism? The capitalists do, with their big, fat, juicy wads of money. But where do they get that money? From whence do they get a hold of such big, fat wads of cash? Capitalists make money by investing money. As the saying goes, it takes money to make money. They invest money into one or more businesses, which then creates a return of more money than they invested in the first place. This extra money, above their original investment, is called profit. By definition, profit is when you get back more money than you originally invested. So, how does that happen? The only way you can get more than you put in is if someone else gets less than they put in, and that someone is the worker. Let's take, for example, a phone factory. In this factory are all the parts that are needed to make phones. Pieces of plastic, pieces of glass, a wizard's curse to ensure that the glass will soon break, metal circuitry, and tiny little screws. All of these parts have value. They cost money. But once they're assembled into phones, their value increases. You can make more money selling the phone than selling the pieces. The phone is worth more than the sum of its parts. When a factory worker takes those parts and assembles them into a phone, what they're doing is taking those parts and increasing their value. In other words, it's their labor that adds value. Workers add value, not just with their physical labor, but also their mental labor. We hear a lot about the innovator entrepreneur, but most capitalists are not innovators, and most innovators are not capitalists. Most innovators are workers, engineers, scientists, software developers, and so on, who are hired by a company, and that company pays them to innovate. Whatever inventions these workers come up with become the intellectual property of the company. The genius of the worker becomes the profit of the owner. So thank you very much, workers. We are very grateful for the value that you have produced for the company, and in return, we will pay you a wage. However, and this is a bit awkward, the wage that you'll be paid is less than the amount that you, through your hard work, have produced for this fine company. I'm sorry. I hope you don't mind. But, you know, if you do mind, you could always go work somewhere else. But full disclosure, it will be the same situation anywhere you work, because that's how capitalism works. You will always be paid less than the value that your labor produces. Sorry, not sorry. Karl Marx talks about this in his book, Capital Volume One. The value of labor power and the value which that labor power creates in the labor process are two entirely different magnitudes. The labor process may continue beyond the time necessary to reproduce and incorporate in the product a mere equivalent for the value of the labor power. Instead of the six hours that are sufficient for the latter purpose, the process may continue for 12 hours. The action of labor power, therefore, not only reproduces its own value, but produces value over and above it. Haha! Check and mate. Marx is saying that workers are paid less than the value that they produce while they're working. That's how capitalists make profit, because the price they pay for their employees' labor is less than the value produced by their employees' labor. So, let's return to the question that let us down this little tangent. Where do capitalists get their money? And now we have the answer. They get their money from other people's work. Now, am I saying that capitalists don't work? Well, that depends on the capitalist. For example, there are small-time capitalists or small business owners, and they often do the same work as their employees. Whatever profit their business makes is partly produced by their own labor and partly produced by the labor of their employees. But as the capitalist becomes more successful, as their business expands and they hire more employees, the amount of money that they make grows and grows and grows, while the fraction of the money that is made by their own labor shrinks and shrinks and shrinks. So, next time you hear a rich person say that their money is the result of hard work, you'll know that indeed, it does come from hard work. It just happens to be the hard work of other people. The global economy is constantly churning out things of value. Products and services that have both use value and exchange value. All of this value, every last bit of it, is produced by human labor, mental and physical. Machines and computers help us do the work, but those too are created by human labor. And all of the infrastructure, the material foundation that makes the global economy possible, the thousands of roads and railroads, the miles of plumbing and electrical grids, the cities and space stations, all of this too was produced by human labor. Anyone who works makes a contribution to this, and that includes those who do the unpaid work of raising children and doing housework, because without this work, the rest would not be possible. The source of all wealth creation in society is always human labor, and this returns us to the original questions of this video, who pays for capitalism and who pays for socialism. So the question of who pays for socialism has the same answer as who pays for capitalism or who pays for feudalism, or who pays for any economic system imaginable. The answer is always human labor, because the answer can never be anything other than human labor, because human labor is the only source for producing wealth. The difference is that in socialism, the wealth produced by human labor is used to benefit everyone. It's used to benefit all humanity. This is in contrast to other systems such as capitalism or feudalism, where a great big chunk of the wealth that's produced by human labor is stolen by the ruling class for their own enrichment. Another difference is that in socialism, we can make it a priority to greatly improve the conditions of human labor. Too often in capitalism, work is boring, exhausting, degrading, insulting the human dignity, it causes chronic aches and pains, or even permanent injury or death. This is part of the price of capitalism, and it's a price that we should refuse to pay. It's a price that socialism will seek to abolish. What price have you paid for capitalism? What have you paid in time given over to alienating wage labor, in dreams lost and goals abandoned, in time lost to worry or fear as you wonder how you'll pay rent or how you'll piece together a livable future? What price has your body paid, your mental health? What has been the cost to your family, your love life and friendships? What price might we all pay as capitalism continues to exacerbate climate change? Will capitalism cost us human civilization? Will capitalism destroy all it has supposedly built? Will our species pay the ultimate price? Extinction? These are the questions we should all be asking. At least, that's how I see it. What about you? Well, that sure got heavy. By now you might be thinking, damn, we need to abolish capitalism. Well, if that's what you want, we need to get organized. And a key part of that is organizing as workers. I'll discuss this in future videos, but for now you can check the video description for a link to a list of learning resources. Feel free to share your thoughts on the video in the comments. Good or bad or just totally random, I want to know. Thank you for watching this video, and maybe you'd like to watch some more. If so, then subscribe and click the bell to turn on all notifications. And if you'd like to watch some more, right now there are video links on the screen. And if you want to help the YouTube algorithm make my videos reach more people, then please share, comment and click thumbs up. Thank you, and please remember to love yourself and each other.