0:16 - Wage Slavery
7:04 - The Band and the Audience
20:12 - Exploitation or Opportunity?
34:07 - Understanding Class Differences
36:49 - Education and Economic Disparities
48:38 - The Role of Curiosity
In this extensive lecture, we explore the concept of wage slavery through the lens of Kropotkin's analysis of capitalism and socialism. The discussion commences with an examination of how wage labor is often viewed as a coercive necessity for workers, who must earn wages to sustain themselves and their families. Kropotkin, like many socialists, posits that the workforce actively seeks to understand the inherent disparities within the capitalist system, where a small elite class—the capitalists—reap the benefits of labor performed by the majority—referred to as the proletariat.
Transitioning to a vivid analogy, the speaker draws parallels between the dynamics of a large concert audience and the capital-wage labor relationship. For example, the case of Queen performing before a massive audience invites contemplation about why only a few individuals occupy the stage while countless others comprise the audience. This scenario sets the stage for probing into deeper aspects of societal structures, particularly in questioning why so many desire to be performers yet so few achieve that status. The lecture highlights the underlying talent, hard work, and unique opportunities that separate those who thrive in such exalted positions from the masses.
The discussion delves further into the realities of the music industry and the sacrifices made by bands like Queen. Altogether, the talk reflects on how these artists work tirelessly, overcoming numerous challenges along their path to success. It raises questions about talent and the psychological components driving individuals towards risk-taking in pursuit of their dreams, ultimately contrasting the lives of successful performers with those of their audience members who may possess similar aspirations but lack the requisite skills or willingness to undertake the journey.
The speaker emphasizes that merely being in the audience at a Queen concert does not equate to exploitation. Rather, these individuals make a conscious choice to exchange their money for the enjoyment of the show, recognizing that success in music requires a exceptional blend of innate talent, diligence, and the ability to withstand the demanding nature of performance life. Furthermore, the conversation touches upon the often-underappreciated risks undertaken by artists who choose to forsake their traditional paths for careers in entertainment.
As the lecture unfolds, it scrutinizes deeper systemic issues, such as educational shortcomings and parental influences, addressing why certain individuals remain economically disadvantaged. This segment critiques how the flawed educational system fails to empower individuals with the necessary business acumen or competitive skills to rise within capitalist structures. Instead of blaming capitalism for these issues, the lecturer invites listeners to investigate the complexities of social mobility in relation to personal choice, opportunity, and societal support networks.
Ultimately, the lecture concludes with a call for curiosity and scientific inquiry into the disparities between various social classes. The claim is made that reducing complex socio-economic phenomena to mere exploitation overlooks broader explanations, including personal choices and societal structures, that could lead to an enhanced understanding of why certain individuals are successful and others are not. This comprehensive analysis thus seeks to challenge the assumptions underpinning discussions on capitalism and its perceived failures, advocating for a more nuanced understanding of socio-economic realities.
[0:00] All right, this is part two of an analysis of Kropotkin, and this is wage slavery, trying to figure out the essence of what the socialists dislike about the market system.
[0:17] Wage slavery, so he says, like all socialists, Kropotkin recognized the self-evident truth that workers work for the employing class because they are forced to. Without their weekly wages, they and their families must starve. Right. Right. Self-evident truth that workers work for the employing class because they're forced to without their weekly wages, they and their family must starve. So, when you go from the basic fact that most people work for other people, you have a minority of, we just use the nomenclature, a capitalist, proletariat, working class, right? So you have a minority of capitalists, and you have a majority of proletariat. Most people.
[1:19] Want to work for others, or let's say most people, even if we say they want to, most people work for others. Most people work for others. So you take this fact that there's a small minority of capitalists and a large majority of proletariat, we say that is the situation. Now they say well they're forced to and they're starved so let's look at the situation and try and figure out any and all possible explanations for this phenomenon a small number of capitalists, and a large number of proletariat a small number of business owners and a large number of workers. What could this mean? Well, I'm going to give you an analogy here that.
[2:22] Hopefully will make some sense. So, I don't know, one of the largest concerts, in history was when Queen played Brazil. I think there were 300,000 people in the audience, and I think Brazilians had adopted I Want to Break Free as kind of a political freedom song and when Freddie Mercury came out with giant fake boobs, they booed him because he was a tiny bit of a privileged guy, I guess. So let's look at that situation, right? You have four men on the stage, right? You have Freddie Mercury, John Deacon, Brian May and Roger Taylor. So you've got four men on stage and you have 300,000 people who are in the audience.
[3:14] So, how can we explain this? Now, if we were to say to pretty much any one of the 300,000 people in the audience, would we say, if we were to ask them, would you rather be on stage making millions of dollars and basking in all of those cheers and all of that attention? If you had the choice to be on stage, would you choose to be on stage? And, of course, the answer to that for just about everybody would be, yes, it would be a lot of fun to be prancing around on stage singing your heart out to 300,000 people and making millions and millions and millions of dollars. That would be better. So, if everybody or almost everybody would prefer to be on stage, then the question is, why are there four people on stage, and treat 300,000 people in the audience. Now, when we look at it that way, if we look at the members of the band Queen as capitalists.
[4:34] And we look at the audience as workers and that the workers would like to have the benefits of the capitalists, but the workers are in the audience and not on the stage. And in fact, if the workers were on the stage, there would be no concert. I mean, there would be no concert where you'd have 300,000 people on stage and four members of Queen in the audience, right? That's not a thing. Now, I understand it's not a perfect analogy, but we're looking at a tiny minority of a preferred state, which is being the band on stage, and a massive majority of a less preferred state, right? Because the people in the audience are paying and, you know, it's difficult and uncomfortable. Like there's a Queen album from the live magic tour where there's a photo of the band arriving at the concert with like Queen, a kind of magic branded helicopter, like on a helicopter. Now, I went to a concert once. It was part of research for my novel almost. Which had a large crowd scene in it. I went to a concert.
[5:58] With the Rolling Stones and ACDC and the Guess Who and a bunch of other artists. And it was fine. It was fine. It was a Soros concert, I think it was. And it was fine, but not very comfortable, right? I mean, it took like 45 minutes to get to a washroom and you had to step over everyone and and it was not comfortable to sit for that long, and so on, right? So, Most people would rather be on stage and the people, so they've paid to be in the audience and it's uncomfortable, it's difficult to get to, there are no dressing rooms, you don't get flown in by helicopter, so you have a tiny minority on the stage and a massive bunch of proletariat who'd rather be on stage. The people on stage are being paid and the people who are in the audience are paying.
[7:05] So people on stage being paid millions of dollars people in the audience are paying I don't know how much it would have been 20 bucks or whatever it was back in the day but you know a lot of money relative to the wages of, the average Brazilian and certainly this would have been back in the 80s I think he died in 92 So I think this was in the 80s, and so look at that situation. Now, how do we explain that situation? Do we say, well, the band members are exploiting the audience, and the audience is compelled to pay for the concert because of economic injustice, and, like, that would be an odd approach to take.
[7:48] That would be an odd approach to take, because according to the Marxist model, the capitalists are a tiny minority profiting from the excess labor of the workers, whereas Queen are profiting from the excess labor of the audience. Although, and I remember being quite surprised about this, reading about this some years ago, when Queen toured, they didn't actually make any money from their tours. They just poured all their money back into their stage show and their stage craft and so on. And Freddie Mercury's rather deranged hypersexuality had them. He wanted a giant penis to simulate oral sex on the stage overhead and not just, you know, kind of crazy stuff. But So, the answer, of course, as to why there's four people on stage and 300,000 people in the audience is what? What is the answer?
[9:01] Well, the answer is talent, hard work, inspiration, and desire. So, the band members of Queen were all very talented, very good musicians, which is relatively common. But each one of the band members contributed hits. Right? I mean, you know, my best friend was from The Bassist, as was Another One Bites the Dust. Freddie, of course, did Crazy Little Thing Called Love and Bohemian Rhapsody. Brian May did We Will Rock You. And the drummer, what did he do? Radio Gaga and a couple others. Anyway, so they were all very good songwriters. They were all very talented musicians. They all worked hard for many years in relative obscurity. It really wasn't until Killer Queen that they began to gain any real traction, and they were going to give up several times before that. And they were ripped off of course by the usual pillagers in the music industry so.
[10:18] They have natural talent right i mean it's hard to be a musician if you don't have perfect pitch that's to some degree inborn born inborn right just born with it and you have to have the physical dexterity and you have to have you know the guitarists generally have these long spider fingers that really helps them hit the notes and so on. And you have to, of course, love the guitar or the drums or whatever it is. And you have to be willing to give up on a regular life in pursuit of musical stardom, which is very rare, right? I mean, it's not rare to give up.
[11:03] Uh, to, to, it's not rare to aim for musical stardom, but it's rare to actually achieve it. I mean, a lot of things have to go right. And I mean, what was it Freddie Mercury said that if he couldn't sing or couldn't do this, he'd probably be like a stripper or something like he, he just was not going to be a regular life kind of guy. Now the others, I mean, obviously, Roger Taylor was going to be a dentist or something. And Brian May was an astrophysicist and John Deacon was an electrical engineer or something like that. So they all had parts of regular life, but they all wanted to pursue musical stardom. And they worked very hard and very hard working bad. I mean, for the sort of legendary performance of Live Aid, they practiced for like two weeks before. And Freddie Mercury sang despite the fact that his doctor told him not to because he had a pretty bad, bad throat. And he had a flu or something like that. He had a really bad throat.
[12:02] So why are four people on stage and 300,000 people in the audience? Well, it's not swappable. You can't just swap out Freddie Mercury in particular, right? Because the singer has usually the most distinctive sound for the audience, right? I mean, the drummer is the drummer, and the guitarist, you know, Brian May has this red special that his father helped or built for him when he was in his teens, so he has a fairly unique sound. The bassist is the bassist, but the singer is particularly unique, at least if you have a very unique voice, right? I remember in 90210, the Yes album, one of the non-John Anderson singers was singing. Was it? No, no, so it wasn't that one. It was Anderson Wakeman Bruford. Now, that's a good album, but the singer was kind of generic, and the record exec said you need someone with a more distinctive sound. You've got to get John Anderson back, and he has a very distinctive sound. So the singer is unique.
[13:11] But you can't just swap someone out, right? You have to have that amazing ability to sing, and also you have the confidence to do it in front of the audience, and Freddie Mercury knew how to sort of play with the audience in a very unique way. So you can't just swap people out. If you swap people out, you know, if Brad Pitt's in a movie, you can't just swap him out. If he's sick that day, you can't just say to some extra, you come and do the role, right? I mean, people come to see him. He's got particular and peculiar talents and a very interesting alpha-style relaxation in front of the camera.
[13:48] So, if we look at the musicians, they have particular abilities, musical genius, physical dexterity, a very strong work ethic because they keep working very hard even when they've already made their fortunes. And they have a tolerance for risk that is outside of the purview of the general population. And, and this is not unimportant, right? This is sort of an under appreciated aspect of this kind of stuff. And they are willing to ditch most of their former relationships in order to pursue that level of excellence. This is really important.
[14:45] Because, I mean, they all had, you know, friends in college and so on. And when you become sort of this global jet-setting rock and roll superstar, you're not just going over to your high school friends for, you know, beer, chips, and telly. You live on a different level and you can't really have the same relationships after you make it and particularly when you make it really big you just can't have the same kind of relationships that you had before i mean there's a lot of envy there's of course massive disparities in income you can't just walk down the street with an old friend you grew up with because you'll be recognized and hounded for autographs and you have to be willing sort of like a, a caterpillar, you have to be willing to shed your former life and.
[15:40] Take on this new life and have, you have to be willing to have virtually nothing in common with the people in your past. I mean, obviously, you've got your family and your parents, if they're good parents, and it seems like, certainly, I think, I don't really know much about the others, but Brian May, Brian May's dad was quite dedicated to his happiness. So, and of course, I mean, Brian May is like a polyglot genius of the first order, right? I mean, incredible guitar player, great songwriter, decent singer. He does, you know, he organizes the finances. He ran a lot of the, some of the aspects of the tours, an astrophysicist. I mean, the man is just a stone genius on just about every conceivable level. So...
[16:34] You have to have an ability to shed formal relationships, a high tolerance to risk, incredible physical dexterity, a very hard work ethic. You have to be touched by that finger painted God poke of musical genius. And you have to be a comfortable in front of a crowd. Like there's a huge amount of things that have to come together and you have to be willing to do it. And you have to love the thing for the thing itself so that you don't just make your money and retire, right? Like if you have some job you don't like and you win the lottery, you'll quit your job, right? Whereas these guys win the lottery insofar as they make a massive amount of money, and they still continue to do what they do. And Brian May is still touring into his 70s and 80s, right? So that is just a very unique combination of skills. And the fact that all of them except John Deacon had fairly unique voices that all blended very well together. And you have to be able to have the emotional skills to work in a highly volatile and often drug-fueled environment without breaking up. And yeah, so there's just a lot of things that come together. To have four people on the stage and 300,000 in the audience.
[17:38] Now, of course, the interesting question is, and I don't know the answer to this, but the interesting question is, what percentage of people in the audience could be on the stage? Was it Journey? Was it Journey? Just a small town boy, right? Steve Perry, this is a singer. There was some guy from the Philippines who just sounded just like him, and they just went on tour with that guy.
[18:04] So, how many of the people in the audience could be on the stage? Well, for singers, you'd have to have that, you know, one in a hundred thousand people voice and perfect pitch and stage presence and confidence to sing and a willingness to leave your former life behind. You know, if you're just from some barrio and then you become the lead singer for a journey tour, well, you're probably not going to be hanging out too much with your old buds anymore, are you? right? So you have to be willing to leave all of that stuff behind and be reforged in the image of new freshly minted rock god. So, I mean, the people in Queen could be in the audience, right? They'd go see other bands, so they can be in the audience, they can pay their 20 bucks and so on. But how many people in the audience can be on stage? I mean, you can't, you couldn't really swap out many. He may be the bassist if he was sick. And Spike Edney was a keyboardist who would sit in for, Freddie went through a period, maybe just heavy drug use or alcohol or whatever, but where he would sometimes flub the piano. So they hired a keyboardist to do some of the piano parts for a while.
[19:18] So you could maybe swap that out. But you know, certainly the singer, guitarist. Drummer, maybe you could swap out. There was sort of a famous, and Keith Moon was too incapacitated to drum once at a concert for the Who, and somebody from the audience just stepped in and took over the drum duties and did a pretty good job, right? So if you look at the band and the audience there's a minority of people making a huge amount of money, from other people giving up a portion of their labor, to go and see them, right? So you've got 300,000 people giving up $20, right?
[20:13] I almost said 6 million. I don't know. That's a lot of money, right? So you've got 200, I'm not just making up these numbers. I don't know what they are, right? Although I remember in the era of Led Zeppelin, everybody, of course, used cash back then, which is these garbage bags full of cash backstage at the concert, which I'm sure pillaged on a regular basis. But if you look at that, you have a small number of multimillionaires making a massive amount of money from the excess labor, right? I assume that people didn't go to the concert, but they actually had to eat or starve to death at the concert. So from the excess labor of the proletariat, the band makes a huge amount of money. Is that exploitation? Are they exploiting? Right? I mean, is it impossible for the audience members to form their own band. Well, I mean, a lot of people have tried it, right? I mean, I certainly tried doing garage band stuff in my teens. So, a lot of people will try and start bands. It's kind of a common, it's a common thing. And there was a friend of mine who was in a metal band, and they played the Elma Combo, and they did the song Fairies in Boots. And I jumped around the stage for them because they wanted someone to liven up the song. I jumped around on stage for them and pretended to attack the guitarist and I had these giant boots on and it was a fun night at the El Macombo back in the day. So, and they were actually pretty good. They were pretty good.
[21:41] So.
[21:45] Is there anything stopping the people in the audience from becoming a band? Well, not fundamentally. I mean, you could say, well, they have to be able to afford the instruments, but if they can afford the concert, they can probably afford at least a down payment on the instrument, and then they can go busking, or they can go play at coffee shops, or they can try and get cheap gigs to get started, and so on, right?
[22:04] But of course most people will try an instrument at some time in their life I played 10 years of violin I got piano lessons I learned a couple of songs on the guitar and most people will try and you know for me it wasn't for me it just wasn't it wasn't for me I'm very sensitive to sort of the cost-benefit analysis as most people are and if you're someone like Paul McCartney you got, great musical instincts and perfect pitch and a great singing voice and physical dexterity of the gods and you know he can be fantastic bass player guitarist plays piano and as did you know brian may would play piano for save me and and all of that so yeah so then you get the cost benefit is is is very very strong right for me it wasn't it wasn't that way i could sort of sense that there was going to be great limits and i tend to pursue things where i don't sense great limits at least not up front. And so that's how you sort of get into the better thing. So is there anything stopping people in the audience from becoming musicians? Well, nothing major. Is it a long, hard slog? Yes, it is, for sure. And some people will, you know, I don't know if you've ever sat down and I tried to write songs, I tried writing a couple of songs when I was in my teens, and.
[23:32] I think if you have a, you know, sort of very strong musical genius, then, sorry, strong and genius is kind of redundant, then you recognize all the capacities that you have and you end up, you know, writing really interesting stuff like, you know, March of the Black Queen from Queen 2 is like quite the smorgasbord of pre-Bohemian Rhapsody buffet music. So, and there's like real flashes of brilliance in that song, although the album as a whole is okay, but that song is never more as lovely. And so funny how love is, it's good.
[24:10] So you get that you can go the distance, right? So are the band members exploiting the audience? Well, the audience members can try to become a band if they want, but they probably lack a particular kind of talent and dexterity. They may have a lower risk for tolerance, and they may be comfortably ensconced in their social environment and not in particular want to start doing the touring and the traveling and giving up their relationships and, you know, living in a bus and all of that. So do that life of the musician, like you load up $5,000 worth of equipment into a $500 van to go and play a gig for 50 bucks, right?
[25:10] So, if we look at the disparities of income, the disparity of attention, the disparity of focus at the band versus the audience, we have a number of options. Now, we can say, of course, that the band is just exploiting the audience. But then the question is, how? How is the band exploiting the audience? And of course, I'm open to arguments as to how the band is exploiting the audience, but the band is producing music that the audience wants to pay to see. Nobody's forcing anyone to produce music. Nobody's forcing anyone to be at the concert. How is the band exploiting the audience? And the band also, you know, that's the interesting thing about people who succeed have one thing in common, that they don't give themselves excuses. They don't give themselves excuses. So the band keeps refining and, you know, they put out a bunch of songs. Every band hopes that their song is going to become a number one hit, but they've got to keep grinding, and keep producing, and they just don't give themselves excuses. Now, I would imagine that a lot of people who don't succeed, don't succeed because they give themselves excuses. Oh, you can't get ahead. Oh, their system is rigged against you. Oh, like they give themselves excuses, and then those excuses can harden into an ideology, a sort of rage and resentment. But the people who succeed don't give themselves excuses, because the only way that you can improve is to not give yourself excuses. Excuses are identical to.
[26:35] Stagnation. So, of course, if we have a small number of capitalists and a large number of workers, that is simply a situation. And the question is, what are the explanations for this? Well, what you would do, of course, is you would do some physical measurements, right? So you would, for instance, you would measure IQ.
[26:56] IQ is a very big predictor of success. It's not ironclad, and I'd rather have wisdom than intelligence, and wisdom can be transferred. Intelligence, it's not so much. So just to be clear, right? But if you would look at the average CEO, would the average CEO have a higher IQ than the average worker, the average janitor, let's say? Would the CEO have a higher IQ? And of course, the answer to that is yes, and not even on occasion or on average, that would be an absolute thing. I mean, unless you had, sorry, unless there was some total genius but emotionally troubled, goodwill hunting-style janitor, which would be so rare as to be an outlier that would be safely discarded. But if you looked at the average, let's just take the average, the average IQ of CEOs compared to the average IQ of workers, there would be a vast disparity.
[27:56] And that's not the only thing, of course. It's not like everyone with a high IQ is a CEO, but that would be one thing that you would look at, right? And this would be the equivalent of saying, well, why is that guy a singer? And I'm not. Well, he's a singer because, I mean, first and foremost, he has a much better singing voice, right? And you can't just change that, right? I mean, there's no amount of training that's going to make me sound like Pavarotti or Sting or Freddie Mercury or Michael Buble or whoever, right?
[28:30] It just, I mean, I took singing lessons when I was in theater school for a year, almost two years, and, you know, a little bit of improvement and it helps to some degree. It really helped when it came to, I mean, a yap for a living. So, there's a sort of physical attribute. That physical attribute could be and would be at least to some degree IQ. What about testosterone levels? So, the higher your testosterone, often the higher your risk tolerance, right? Did they go through particular events in their life that may have primed them for ambition, right?
[29:11] Do they have so so i mean do they have access to particular family skills that might help them and so on right so when it comes to why is someone why are some people ceos and a lot of people are a few people ceos a lot of people workers the first thing you would look for is uh physical attributes right with for musicians perfect pitch physical dexterity musical brilliance particularly for songwriting. And then you would look at work ethic, willingness to abandon former social structures, and ambition, and the emotional skills to negotiate a very volatile and complex environment. You know, the Beatles didn't have it in the long run, Queen did, and the Eagles did, although they broke up continually. They said they'd get back together when hell freezes over, and one of their later tours was called Hell Freezes Over, right? The police, the band, the police did not have it. So, you would look for particular explanations, because exploitation, just this word exploitation, it doesn't really answer anything.
[30:22] And you would need physical evidence for this. It's, you know, because they call it scientific socialism, but then they create this imaginary monster called exploitation rather than exploring other things, right? You would interview a whole bunch of CEOs, you would try to measure their mental attributes, and you would measure their testosterone levels, and you maybe look at their birth order, and you'd look at influences and so on and try, maybe it's a religious faith, maybe they had somebody who really believed in them at some point. I mean, just a whole bunch of things that you would look at. But instead, rather than being scientific and trying to understand the differences here, then you would. Just make up this ghost called exploitation and explain everything away. I mean, so that's like, this to me is as scientific as saying, well, weather's quite complex.
[31:20] But we're just going to ascribe weather to the gods. You know, rather than study meteorology and high and low pressures and mountains and other inclement factors and so on, rather than try and figure out what's going on with the weather, which is, you know, complicated and a lot of measurement, a lot of science, trying to figure out what's going on. You just create this ghost called weather gods, you know. Why is there a storm at sea? Well, you can try and figure this kind of stuff out. Underwater seismics, why is there a wave? Or you can just say, well, Poseidon is angry.
[31:53] And it is not scientific. It's the opposite of science. Say, oh, there are capitalists and there are workers. I wonder what the difference is. You know, there are people on stage and lots more people in the audience. I wonder what the difference is, right?
[32:11] And of course, we understand that, I mean, assuming the song wasn't stolen, that when a band plays songs to a willing audience, that they didn't steal those songs from the audience, right? Because the other thing that's interesting about being a CEO, and I'm not being a CEO, but I've been a chief technical officer and a director of marketing. So the interesting thing about that is you have to have a very interesting combination of skills. You have to have extremely high empathy for the needs of the audience and extremely tough.
[32:46] In a sense, lack of excessive, you have to have excessive empathy for the audience and a deficiency, sorry, for the customer. And you have to have a deficiency of empathy with regards to your competitors and unproductive workers. So you have to have very strict standards and you have to be kind of cold towards your competitors and you have to be kind of cold towards unproductive workers and fire them. But you have to have incredibly high empathy for the needs of the customer so you can figure out what they want and how best to satisfy their needs. Again, these are very, very unusual combinations of skills. I mean, in the same way that a lot of musicians become musicians because they're kind of introverted, because, you know, when you're learning the guitar, you're kind of on your own, right? And yet then to go out on the stage and be extroverted, it's just a very interesting combination of skills that's not common at all, right? So, sorry for this sort of long introduction, but I'm interested in why there are capitalists and why there are workers. And I've, of course, been around the chronically unemployed. I've been around working class for a lot of my youth. I've been around the capitalist class in business. And I won't get into all the details about that. I'm sure that'll come out after I'm dead.
[34:08] But I've seen a wide variety. I've sort of cut through the layer cake of the classes and seen in great detail what goes on. In each class and it's complicated and there is of course the free will element as well right so everybody i remember uh talking to one guy in business many years ago who basically said yeah you know he started up his first business and and uh it completely imploded he lost his house his savings was living in his car and he's just like you know i i was really tempted to get a job but then i was like no no no i'm gonna i'm gonna try again and then he ended up succeeding and.
[34:48] And it's like, why do people watch Monty Python? Because they're funnier than most people, and they had that willingness to walk away from their former lives and to take a high-risk venture into comedy and so on, right? So if you wanted to close the gaps or if you wanted to provide more of the proletariat access to becoming capitalists, then you would of course have an educational system that taught them about capitalism and entrepreneurism and taxes and corporatism and regulations and so on and you would teach them about marketing and you would teach them about product development and you would teach them about management and you would teach them about profit loss none of which of course occurs in government schools right government schools sadly are to some degree captured by the capitalist classes to make sure that the poor does not produce competitors who are willing to work for less, I mean, that's the general churn of capitalism. That's why the class is cycled, because wealthy people, have a higher standard of living, and poorer people are willing to work for less. So when I was competing at the beginning with very, very large companies, those large companies had very high overheads, and I was living in a room, and so I could charge less. So.
[36:12] All of that is input. You would teach people more confidence and so on, and money management skills, and how to invest, and how to get investors. Like, you would do all of that in the educational system, and the fact that that's absent in the educational system, is not the fault of the free market, because if the educational system were based on the free market, and I don't put religious education in free market terms, because their currency is not capital, but souls and salvation, so it's a different matter. So...
[36:50] When it comes to education, you would try to close the gaps between the capitalists, and the proletariat by educating the proletariat on how to compete with the capitalists. But you don't really talk about that. At least I've never really seen socialists talk about that because, of course, the educational system is in general, certainly for the last 150 years in most places, socialized, right? And socialism emerged, what, 150, 170 years ago, maybe a little longer, depending on, you know, it's an early movement when it became more popular.
[37:27] So, socialism kind of emerged with socialized education. So, one of the things that socialists have to do is point at exploitation in the market rather than deficiencies in the educational system because deficiencies in the educational system, which is already socialized, would point to deficiencies in socialism, and thus would torpedo their own argument from the ground up, right? So if they were to say, well, the problem with capitalism is that children aren't educated on how to compete with capitalists, and you say, oh, well, who's in charge of the educational system? Oh, the government, the people, right? It's collectively owned and paid for by taxes. It's the socialist system. Okay, so if the socialist system is failing the proletariat, how the fuck can the socialist system save the proletariat? Jesus, right? So they have to create this ghost of exploitation so that they don't have to address the deficiencies in the educational system, which is fundamentally socialist. All right.
[38:23] So he says, whence come the fortunes of the rich? A little thought would suffice to show that these fortunes have their beginnings in the poverty of the poor, where there are no longer any destitute, there will no longer be any rich to exploit them. Right. So then poor people are very poor. Yeah, sure. Okay. So he's saying, and I understand the argument, that poor people are compelled to work because they have to pay their bills. They're broke. And because they're broke, they have to go to work. And because they're broke, They don't have the excess capital needed to start a business and so on, right? And yeah, I get that. So then the question is, well, why are they poor? Why are they poor? Who's in charge of their education?
[39:13] And, of course, their parents are generally in charge of their education, but rather than talk about the deficiencies in parenting, like if your parents are drunk or crazy or drug addicts or lazy or on welfare or whatever, right, then you're not going to learn work habits and effective negotiation strategies and capital accumulation and all of that. So rather than say, well, maybe the parents are deficient in how they raise their children, they're abusive or neglectful, don't take care to educate them to compete with the capitalists, we should improve parenting so that better skills are transferred to the young. Nope, we're just going to talk about wage slavery, right? It's all a cover-up for socialism and abusive or neglectful parenting, right? If people had the means to support themselves, if they were capable of meeting their daily needs without hiring out their labor, no one would consent to work for wages. That must inevitably be, if the capitalists derive any profit, a mere fraction of the value of the goods they produce.
[40:11] Right. So, if a man had the means to support themselves. So, the only way that you'd have the means to support yourself is if you gain more calories from your labor than you expend in the production of food and shelter, right? So, if you've got a couple of acres, right, 40 acres in a mule, and you then have to profit. It's like somebody has to profit, because if you expend 3,000 calories to produce 2,000 calories worth of food, you starve to death, right? Because your body is eating itself, because there's not enough food. So, everybody has to profit. Everybody has to profit.
[40:55] Everybody. money. So saying that there's no need to profit if you're working for yourself is crazy. I mean, that's just such a ridiculous ignorance of biology that it's hard to even know what to say. So yes, if you work, you have to profit. And if you work for someone else, they have to profit. But what you do is you are not being underpaid by the capitalist. You are sacrificing a portion of your wages in order to gain access to the capital equipment of the capitalist. So if you're a worker on Henry Ford's Model T line, then you are sacrificing, you're paying Henry Ford for access to his taxes. His capital equipment and his marketing genius and his advertising budget and his organizational genius and the fact that he's got to hire an army of accountants to pay the taxes to the corporation and the property taxes to the factory. You are paying him to get access to his corporation in order to increase your wages.
[42:07] I mean, you could dig a hole by hand or you could go and pay 20 bucks for a shovel, in which case you are paying 20 bucks in order to be able to dig far faster and with much less injury. So, you're not being exploited by the guy who sells you the shovel. You are paying 20 bucks so that you can get holes dug way quicker and with less injury. So what can I tell you so the worker is paying the capitalist a portion of his wages in order to get greater wages by having access to the capitalist goods and services goods being the capital equipment the services being the advertising and the marketing and the tax paying and the heating, all of that sort of stuff, right?
[43:03] Is heating a good or a service? It's intangible in a way, so it's not exactly a good, but everything that is required to produce a heat is a capital equipment in a factory. So anyway, I'll leave that to the accountants to figure out. So the worker is not being exploited. The worker is making more money by paying the capitalist for access to the goods and services of the capitalist in order to increase the workers' own wages. Because the fundamental question is, if people could make more money out in the country, why are they working in the city, right, if they could make, have a better income? Now, of course, they would say, well, the aristocracy owns all the land, and you can't get a hold of the land, and so on. Okay, well, that's an interesting argument, and I get all of that.
[44:06] But in most places in the world, there's land that you can get a hold of. I mean, like 90% of the Canadian population has been in a couple of degrees at the US-Canadian border. So there's tons of land up there. You can go and homestead it. You can, you know, obviously you're going to have to pay some taxes, and you can find a way to produce further north or in the countryside and even in England and other places, the sort of countryside. You can get a little cottage, you can rent some land, and then, or maybe you can buy the land over time. So, the question is, if it's vastly more economically profitable for people to go out and grow and produce their own food, why are they working in a city? You have to answer that question. And just saying, exploitation is not the answer. You have to follow people's choices and assume, to some degree at least, that people are rational actors and say, well, why?
[45:19] Now, most people who consume music rather than produce it consume music rather than produce it because consuming music is a whole lot easier than producing music. But if you like a particular song, when I was a kid it was what, like a buck fifty for a forty-five like for a single. And if you enjoyed a song, then you could either learn, let's say you liked the song Yesterday, right, by the Beatles. Well, you could go out and learn guitar and you could hope that you sang like Paul McCartney or find someone and pay them to sing like Paul McCartney. And then you would be able to listen to the song whenever you did that. Of course, if you learned it all yourself, learning how to play that song, hoping you can sing like Paul McCartney, it's going to take, I don't know, how long does it take to learn that song on guitar? Well, you've got to go buy the guitar, you've got to buy the notation, you've got to figure out how to play it, and so on. So, 50 hours, 100 hours, who knows, right?
[46:27] So, or you can just go drop a buck 50. So, back in the day, I was making $2.45 working in a convenience store. And so for about 40 to 45 minutes of my time, I could get that song whenever I wanted for infinity. My first album, my first single was 10cc's Things We Do For Love. I remember feeling slightly tense when the things we do for love, the things we do for love, the thing, they just repeated, repeat and fade. It's like, can you finish the song already? Good lord stop with all this filler so if you want to hear the song yesterday you can either spend 50 to 100 hours getting a guitar learning the song hoping you can sing like paul mccartney or you can just spend 45 minutes of labor to go by the single and then you can play it whenever you want.
[47:19] And it's going to be perfect each time right, so which makes more sense is it easier to produce music or is it easier to buy music well if you enjoy music obviously it's virtually infinitely easier to buy music than it is to produce music, is it easier to start your own company or is it easier to use a portion of your wages to rent somebody else's capital equipment and services in order to enhance your own productivity? Well, we know the answer to that, right? Are they rational? Well, if they're rational, they're not exploited. Some people prefer hanging out with the friends of their youth than trying to become phenomenally successful. I'm not going to argue with that. That's not a good or a bad thing. That's not a right or a wrong thing. That's just a thing. Like, that's just a thing.
[48:20] Now for the ambitious that would feel too confining for people who are more homebodies maybe more introverted the life of the ambitious looks pretty horrible but that's just a thing, I'm not going to say to people what's right or wrong, but it's a rational choice.
[48:39] So, sorry, I didn't really get to that much of the text, but I really wanted to sort of explain this. Just be curious. Just be curious. Be open-minded and curious. If people are being exploited, look for how they're being abused and neglected. And the educational system in general is abusive and neglectful. It abuses people by teaching them things that are false and often self-hating, and it neglects them by not teaching them things that would actually help improve their options.
[49:11] So, what can I say? Just be curious. And socialists make up this devil called exploitation. And are not curious about why people are choosing what they choose are not looking for physical education or familiar differences between the capitalists and the workers. And I think that's anti-scientific and bigoted and prejudiced at its core. Freedemand.com slash donate. Have yourself a lovely day. I look forward to your support and I'll talk to you soon. Bye.
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