Surprisingly, PhD Marxian economist Richard Wolff agreed to debate a YouTuber known for playing video games. A very strange event, but I decided to give it a watch.
Wolff tends to focus more on the “democracy in the workplace” ordeal, and less about trying to build up a picture of explaining capitalism’s development and why it lays the foundations of socialism through a historical materialist analysis.
This is not the approach I would take, but I understand why Wolff does it. With very limited time, it is difficult to really explain these things, and focusing on a simple aspect — especially on that focuses on the class struggle between the workers and capitalists — can work decently well in such a confined setting.
Wolff’s approach is simple and effective, and I have seen it work on people.
My main comments are on some of the points Destiny makes.
USSR and Industrialization
Wolff pointed out that the Soviet Union was the fastest developing economy in the 20th century. Destiny claimed that “socialist policies” did not cause this development, but “industrialization”.
This is just, frankly, a strange argument.
It would be like if someone pointed out Cuba’s illiteracy being abolished under the socialist government, and then a detractor making the claim, “that was not because of socialism but because of literacy programs!”
The conceptualization of a policy and writing it into law does not solve the problem. Actually going out and implementing it solves the problem. Destiny has constructed a weird situation where any tool you use to solve a problem, the actual success can just be blamed on the tool and not the policy makers using it.
He has effectively setup a situation where he can dismiss literally any success of a socialist government using this framework.
Investment and Worker Co-ops
There was a back-and-forth that went on for a long time whether or not worker co-ops could ever receive investment. Frankly, I think Wolff handled this argument quite well on his own, but I will still comment on it anyways.
Destiny at first says it is impossible for investments to even legally happen under Wolff’s system because of the lack of private ownership. Wolff points out this is nonsense because you could invest in a company without taking ownership of it, because ultimately what people care about is making money off of buying and selling stocks on a stock market.
Stocks derive their worth in relation to the company’s prospective success as well as the dividends those stocks pay out. A worker co-op could provide both of these things without giving the stockholders control over electing the board of directors.
Destiny responds to this great rebuttal by abandoning that argument and shifting the conversation to be about willingness to invest. He argues that people would not invest into a business they would not have control over because then it could not guarantee them profits.
Wolff points out that the stock market is ultimately about gambling on whether or not a business will be successful or not, not guaranteeing profits, so whether or not it is a co-operative does not fundamentally change that. People invest into the stock market ultimately to try and make money, and if a co-operative shows a lot of promise, there will be investors. It is thus a bit silly to think there would be zero investment, especially in companies that look very promising.
Destiny then abandons his argument yet again and shifts the conversation to a legal discussion, saying that businesses are legally expected to put their investors first, but a co-operative would not, as it would put workers first. A co-operative could just take investment and then shut down the whole company and leave.
Wolff just makes the very simple argument that you could have a law requiring a co-operative to make an honest effort to develop the company, and ban obviously illegal practices like taking investments and running, without compromising anything he proposed.
I was surprised, honestly, that Destiny was so insistent on this point that co-operatives could not have investment. It was by far his weakest argument yet he insisted on pushing it to the end, constantly abandoning points to move to another, and was easily were Wolff performed the best as well, since it was such a silly criticism.
Economic Purity
After Wolff explains his definition of capitalism, Destiny says “that’s not a definition of capitalism because Mondragon.” He repeats this many times throughout the debate.
Personally, I view socialism inherently centered around public property, economic planning, and not simply worker self-management. But, let us ignore that for a second and just work within Wolff’s framework here.
I have written my own post here on my views of socialism. While I do talk of public property, I go into quite a bit of detail attacking the “purity” dilemma, and this same line of reasoning can apply here to show the flaws in Destiny’s arguments.
A lot of developing countries today still have a peasantry, western Europe still had a peasantry when Marx was writing. Did that mean these countries are not capitalist because they have an element of feudalism? He seems to think pointing to a minority form of production within an overall capitalist system is somehow an argument. It is not an argument, it is meaningless.
I think Destiny is stuck in black-and-white thinking, he cannot understand that economics is complicated and no system is “pure” and every system is a mixture of elements from many other systems. What defines the system is not its “purity” but what is the principle aspect of that system.
Think of slavery in the USA. It lasted well into the capitalist period, but that did not mean the US’s economy was not capitalist nor did it mean it was a pre-feudal economy. The macro-economy was clearly capitalist and behaved predictably like a capitalist economy would, even if on a small scale it contained some pre-capitalist elements.
Destiny cannot help but think in black-and-white terms, so admitting that a system can contain elements of another system, he calls this an “amorphous” definition. But it is fundamentally impossible not to create an amorphous definition. There is absolutely no possible way to define any economic system that does not inherently lead to this.
The reason any definition will be “amorphous” is because the transition from one economic system to the next throughout history has always been gradual. It is difficult to pinpoint the beginning of humanity because life evolves very gradually, and any point in time you pick as “the beginning of humanity,” you will find that a year in the past or a year in the future, those humans look almost identical, so someone might question why not a year before that time, or a year after?
Hence, you can only really give relative timespans of the “era” of something in any sort of evolutionary process, and your definition will necessarily be fuzzy because it is impossible to distinctly draw the lines between the two.
Destiny seems unable to comprehend this and thinks because Wolff’s definition can apply to a co-ops in a capitalist society, that proves capitalism fits his definition of a socialist society, which is an absurdity. Those co-ops are clearly not the principle aspect of the society.
Simply put, you cannot just read facts to understand the world, you also need to read some philosophy as well. If you cannot interpret the facts correctly, you will come to silly conclusions. Destiny is stuck in trying to use a black-and-white philosophical analysis which simply does not work when trying to understand something complex as socioeconomic systems.
Destiny as the Arbiter of Morality
Whenever Wolff would criticize some of the outcomes of capitalism and use that as the basis of why the system should be changed, Destiny would constantly reject this, saying it is a “moral” analysis, and he does not care about “morals” but about the “outcome at the end of the day.”
He presents this argument as if this makes him in a better position than Wolff, because Wolff is arguing things based on morality but Destiny is just arguing things based on facts.
The obvious problem with this line of augmentation is that facts have to be interpreted. Whether or not the “outcome at the end of the day” is desirable or not is subjective and inherently comes back to what you personally value.
Some people are more concerned about seeing the stock market go up, some people are more concerned about seeing real wages go up. Everyone has the same facts, but different people value different things, and so they interpret what is a desirable or undesirable outcome differently, and thus, inherently, they interpret if a system “works” or not differently, even if all these people are presented with the same exact facts.
When Wolff explains his problems of capitalism, he is explaining — which he made very clear in the debate — that he is using a different measure for success, and that capitalism fails to meet that standard.
Destiny dismisses this saying that economic systems are just “tools” and “only the outcome matters,” and that Wolff is “moralizing.” Yes, economic systems are like tools, but the tool you use for the job depends on what you desire to see accomplished.
In this sense, Destiny is effectively trying to paint his subjective moral values as objective facts while painting Wolff’s values as subjective “morals.”
There is a quote from Zizek, “ideology is strong exactly because it is no longer experienced as ideology.” Destiny believes his ideology and values are just fact, and sees others who value different things and want different outcomes — and thus would advocate different tools — as being the ones who are ideological.
Destiny tries to present himself as the “rational” one by doing this, but in reality, he only demonstrates how much of an absolute dogmatist he is.
Destiny’s Distaste for Historical Arguments
This one in particular struck me as quite odd. Destiny during this debate was constantly upset about Wolff bringing up feudalism and complained about it several times.
Destiny constantly brought up questions about what capitalism and socialism are and how we would get there. Wolff would naturally explain this by comparing these systems to systems of the past, as well as talking about past systems transitioned to the next.
This is clearly reasonable. There is absolutely nothing wrong with doing that. That is what any rational human being would do. Destiny strangely seemed to be upset by this, as if making historical arguments for how something in the future might come about is somehow inherently unreasonable.
He then prided himself in “never mentioning feudalism.” I mean, obviously he did not, because he is defending the current system, so he has no need to talk about other systems, while Wolff has the pressure of talking about economic transitions from one to the next, which inherently requires him discussing how systems have historically went through this process.
When you are literally talking about how to get from one economic system to the next, it kind of is blatantly obvious that you should look at history and see how the current economic system developed out of the previous one.
There is absolutely no reason not to do that. It is like Destiny just does not like Wolff using reason. There was absolutely no rational reason to be upset with Wolff talking about other economic systems to try and explain what he is advocating for in relation to them.
Other Comments
- Destiny was asked a pretty good question on why he never mentions Vietnam when talked about successful COVID-19 responses. He tried so desperately to weasel his way out of it that he somehow ended his answer condemning “the Uighur situation” in China.
- Destiny said that 20% of each business being owned by the workers is “too far.” Germany has codetermination laws that any large business with over 2000+ employees must have just under 50% of the board elected by the workers. 20% really is not that radical and would not destroy the economy, small business would likely be excluded as well as they are in Germany, simply because it is difficult to enforce such a system on all tiny businesses. Destiny calls himself a “social democrat” yet somehow thinks policies far less radical than Germany is “too far.”
- Destiny made the claim that Bezos’s vast wealth came from the demand for his labor. The payment you get for your labor power is called a wage, and if is a consistent annually wage, it is called a salary. Jeff Bezos has a salary, anyone can look up this number. It is currently $81,840. His salary quite obviously does not explain his vast wealth, and Destiny making such an objectively false claim is just embarrassing.
