Black Socialists vs. Black Capitalists (w/ Dr. Jared Ball, Paul Prescod, & Q. Anthony Ali)

We have an all-star panel of black socialists assembled for you here today to take on one of the most viral clips of the last week or so. You might have caught it. Mark Lamont Hill, who seems to be the lone socialist over, uh, on the Joe Budden podcast, a very popular, uh, what do you call, black culture podcast, I guess you would call it, erupted into a conversation about socialism versus capitalism. And basically got Black Twitter in a total firestorm about the definition of these terms and whether or not Black folks should be defending the likes of Jay-Z, who is the quintessential Black billionaire who provoked this entire conversation.

Assembled to talk about this subject with us today on Bad Faith podcast is Paul Prescott. You know him as a contributing editor to Jacobin magazine and a staffer at Labor Notes. Welcome, Paul.

>> Great to be here.

>> You have Dr. Professor Jared Ball, who is a professor of Africana and Media Studies at Morgan State and also the host of podcast I Mix What I Like. Welcome back, Dr. Ball.

>> It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

>> And last but not least, returning to Bad Faith podcast after quite some time, we have Q Anthony Ali, who is a freelance writer from our neighbor to the north but no longer based in Canada, right?

>> No, no longer based in Canada. I'm in Beijing, China now.

>> Well, it's even more of an honor for us to have you then, knowing that you have to wake up so early in the morning to be able to join us. We really appreciate it.

>> That's no problem.

>> All right, let's get right into it. Let's start by just playing the first few minutes of this clip to orient the audience who might not be privy to this controversy. Okay, let's pause it there. Now, that was only, I wrote down, let's get to two minutes and 50 seconds, and I already have a, a throbbing vein in my temple. I saw you had all your expressions as we were watching that. Who wants to go first? Paul, I see you nodding. Which part of this? Maybe we should start with just the Jay-Z clip in and of itself. Uh, Jay-Z makes a couple of points. Uh, he says he didn't get here by taking advantage of anyone, of any loopholes in the capitalist structure, that he earned his money, to sum it up, fair and square, and that capitalism is something different from exploitation. What, what would you say to that?

Yeah, I think there's really just no way once you reach a certain point, like if you're going to be owning a company, whether you're a millionaire or a billionaire, there's no way you get there without exploitation. And it depends how you define it. I think the people on this podcast are thinking of it, if I'm not like shooting my workers or whatever, being the mo, the worst boss in the world, therefore, I'm not exploiting them. But it's a simple fact. I, I like to use the, um, analogy of a company like UPS. I used to work with Teamsters. Uh, the CEO is not a billionaire but a multi-millionaire. And it's like, okay, so every single day, there are drivers busting their ass delivering packages to your door. There's people that you don't see sorting the packages in, you know, difficult conditions every single day. So, you're really telling me the CEO works that much harder than these workers who, at most, if you're a driver, a veteran driver, you can, you can make almost $100,000 a year, but a CEO is making like $14 million a year. So, you're saying the CEO works that much harder than the workers every single day who are actually doing the work? That's exploitation. Even if she's a nice person, even if she, you know, says good morning every day and is nice and whatever and respects her workers, um, it's just built in. So there's no way you're going to be getting that much money off the backs of someone's labor who's actually doing the work. Um, I mean, that, that would be the short answer.

>> Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm hearing you. Obviously, I think we all agree about the, the substance of this, but just to play devil's advocate here, I think there's something about the word exploitation that is lost in translation. It seems, I mean, to your point, Paul, that they're imagining some overlord on the, the workhouse floor with a whip saying, you know, "Pick the packages up faster." And some, anything short of that is just fair. I mean, later on, as we'll hear, um, there's an insistence that Jay-Z works extremely hard and that he is very much a genius. I think when we're talking about creatives, the conversation can get even more complicated because there is this sense that there's a sort of individual greatness that merits that, that is not duplicable and that merits more money than could possibly be justified by a paper pusher CEO at a place like FedEx or, or UPS or, or what have you. So, that's one aspect of it. But then I think I found myself listening to this and thinking, well, they've never heard the analogy, uh, about, you know, where does capital come from? If I'm a capitalist, I have the money to buy the materials to, to build the table. I hire a worker to build the table. But that surplus value comes from the fact that his labor turned a pile of wood into to table. I think he wouldn't have been able to do without me having bought the wood in the first place. But why do I have access to the money that bought the wood? And short of Mark having the time and space to sort of like run through that, I don't know. And I want to open it up to the, to the other two of you. How do you, how would you communicate what we mean by exploitation when there's obviously this communication gap happening there?

>> I mean, the first place I would have gone. Yeah.

>> I was. Yeah. The first place I would have gone is when Jay says that he doesn't take it, he didn't take advantage of people. It's like, well, bro, you used to brag about selling crack in your community. Well, how many, how many, what, what kind of a wake of like, uh, the, the, the carcasses of artists' careers that you leave behind you to get to where you are? The amount, the amount of artists that you used to work with who were left pretty much dead broke by working with you and the kind of constructs they had. Uh, the fact that Roc Nation employees are basically paid like Amazon wages. There's no way that you can say that you didn't take advantage of people to get the Barclays Center built. You basically pitched the, uh, the people in, in Brooklyn neighborhoods on the idea that they're going to be sharing in the prosperity of that team, and what are they getting out of that team now besides, uh, zoning laws, evictions, and property values going up and rents going up? With they have nothing to show for it. So, there's absolutely no way that somebody like Jay-Z can say that he didn't take advantage of anybody. But more over to the point, a lot of these guys get really mixed up when they start confusing commerce with capitalism. The idea that people buying and selling goods in exchange for money, they think that is capitalism. Unfortunately, given that Black people themselves used to be capital. I mean, I'm not Black American, I'm, I'm of Jamaican background, but my ancestors were slaves. My ancestors were, were sold, were kidnapped from Ghana and sold at port in Jamaica. Some of my ancestors took part in slave rebellions in Jamaica. We were human capital. Capitalism was built, literally built on the backs of Black slave labor, the sugarcane plantations, the indigo plantations, the cotton plantations. That is what built what we know today as capitalism. That is what took Europe from, uh, feudalism and mercantilism into modern day capitalism. The, the blood, sweat, tears, and, and treasure of Black people was what fueled the industrial revolution. So to say that capitalism is Black people's birthright is wild to me because the birthrights that were passed down in capitalism were Black people. That's kind of nuts to, to then say that, um, that there's a, there's a problem with socialism. Uh, it's almost like they want to, they want to believe that socialism means that we're all equally broke. It's the politics of Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. And that's simply not what it is. The difference between capitalism and, uh, socialism as a progression to communism is simply this. When the workers, as you said, Briana, turn a pile of wood into furniture, there's two types of value here. There's use value, that is the use that somebody gets out of using that table once they purchased it. There's, there's exchange value, what they're willing to pay for that table that was built. Now, the surplus value, that is the, uh, the amount that exchange value is worth more than the use value, that is the, the wholesale price of the good versus what they pay retail or however you want to describe it. That difference is what is surplus value. So the question is, where does that surplus value belong? Does the surplus value belong to the worker, or does it get funneled up to the owner? That, that is simply the question that socialism is looking to answer. Who ends up receiving the surplus value out of, out of the goods that we create? And the answer is, well, it must belong to the workers because without their value in producing goods and providing services, then there simply is no value. To say that the owner works very hard is one thing. I mean, sure, yeah, I guess you could say that owners do work hard. Their, their labor is different, but in many ways, it parasitizes the labor of the workers. They are simply feeding off of the profits that the workers generate. If workers aren't making things, then you simply have nothing to sell. Therefore, nothing gets exchanged. No money is made.

>> Yeah. It's just a pile of wood. I mean, I found myself, I find myself in these arguments with, you know, conservatives and libertarians over the course of my life. And I, as someone who sort of jokes about not reading theory, find myself constantly just doing the surplus theory of value narrativizing with people because I don't know how else, I don't know a clearer way to demonstrate the lack of value that comes from owning capital, just being the, and also just the reality of just having, just having the capital is your value, right? Like when you tell, when you narrativize it like that, just having the resources to, having gotten that pile of wood, and people are imagining in their head like, "Oh, you go into the tree, like you go into the forest, and I've somehow put some labor in to chop down the wood." No, no, no. You bought, like your value was just that you already had money, and now we have to start asking the question, where did your money come from? And the Jay-Z example, it's just selling drugs. And some other more traditional example, the Kennedys, it's that we were bootleggers, you know, or you were some mafia family, or you were involved in the slave trade. Al, you know, you look at all of these old historical American corporations, and it's difficult to find one that wasn't involved in some nefarious source. So then when you start to demystify the source of the capital, it becomes even more pernicious, the idea that we're investing value in the quality of simply having had money. And that's before you even get to the enormous proportion of billionaires that quote unquote earn their money, receive their money via inheritance. Okay. Sorry, Dr. Ball, I'm monopolizing. Get in here.

>> No, no, it's all good. Uh, um, f the two quick points I wanted to make were that, that one, the analysis that we just heard from Paul and Q is not possible in a space like the Joe Budden podcast, and this is done by design, and this is part of the problem in the first place, where conversations that move into more serious and maybe more complicated areas are never given the, the, the room to breathe and to take place in, in, in ways that they should in the first place. So, so in an old style sort of, uh, media analysis of the situation, Mark is, is, is already in a setup position from jump, and, and I don't know, you know, as I was watching it, I, I was going through all kinds of crises internally trying to answer in my own mind, how would I respond to that moment, and I would have failed miserably, and that's in part by design. So if we even look at the political economy of the Joe Budden podcast as a, as a product, and look at it, the from investment and platforming and algorithm, it is by design a space where these conversations are meant to go exactly as they did. Uh, the other thing, just to the other point I just wanted to raise quickly is that, you know, you know, uh, because I was admittedly, uh, uh, um, embarrassingly, uh, familiar with Jay-Z's career up and through the Black Album. Um, you know, I, I would have to say I was even a fan. Uh, and, and, and he was, I used to call him my greatest contradiction.

>> So, safe space.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Uh, uh, you know, but, you know, like, but because I would acknowledge like politically, we are wildly in different spaces, but I was, I just was always often enthralled with his, his, his work. But the, the point, so I'm, I'm saying that to say that I know very well that one of the very, uh, carefully crafted narratives that he both carried and then promoted was one, these these mythologies around Black capitalism and entrepreneurialism as salvation to the problems facing Black people. But that he crafted it in such a way that in and taking, you know, something that was somewhat of a cliche, uh, uh, in, in rap music, but doing it in, I think, very well, this, this idea that I can, I'm coming from the bottom and doing things that, that, uh, and, and, and overcoming a situation, doing what I have to do to get there. So even if I am harming my own community to do this, it is presented as a, a, an essential, necessary overcoming, even a success story that is, as he said, uh, uh, is necessary so that he can help people. "How can I help the poor if I'm one of them?" Was that argument? Now, of course, the best way to help the poor is to get rid of the rich, and this is part of the, the analysis that, that, that falls flat. So I couldn't help but laughing and because I do know a little bit of the lore of the Joe Budden podcast that, you know, even as that transition occurred in the clip you played, when I ish kind of points it out, points out that, you know, Mark's the one that wants to get rid of the billionaires. It's like, and then the whole room, you could just feel like a whole room of people turning their phones be like, "What?" You know, because, you know, cuz the idea is, and they're even saying in the conversation, we know we're not going to be billionaires, but the, the idea that we might is so enticing and has been so well promoted and imposed on us over such a long period of time that, that, that as one of Rockefeller's disciples said, that that's the point that, that that scattered success breeds universal hope. And that's what we see in, in those kinds of discussions. So, it's important that we have other spaces where we can go to have a more, uh, productive conversation about these things and maybe, um, uh, not that I have hopes that it would circle back into those other spaces and impact them, but that, that might inform someone who might have suffered that discussion, uh, uh, unnecessarily, as, as we have, you know.

>> Yeah. Well, to, to that point, look, there, every time one of these moments pops up, usually because of Mark, because Mark is the only one. God bless him. Well, I won't say he's the only one with sense, but he's the only one that I agree with politically. Let's, let's put it that way. Um, so there was another one of these skirmishes around feminism where Mark said, "Of course, I'm a feminist." And everyone else was like, "Uh, I, I support equal rights for women, but I'm not a woman, so I can't be, like that." That's the level of discourse. And every time some stuff like that happens, Mark ends up being like, or, or people end up saying, "Mark shouldn't be on that show." Like, I don't know why he's there. Like he's too good for the show. I, I don't know that I agree. I think that it's like, it's tough and it's a tough road to ho, road to ho for him. But ultimately, I'm glad that the audience of that show is exposed to Mark, and I was very pleasantly surprised, at least on Twitter, how many people did align with Mark. It, it was interesting the way that this idea that there are no good billionaires was in the room before Mark opened his mouth. The, the white podcast guy to the left, sorry if you're listening and not watching, but he was the one that kind of introduced the idea that, yeah, some of my friends think that billionaires shouldn't exist. And then, you know, to your point, Dr. Ball's, or whomever else was like, "Oh, Mark, Mark thinks that too. Mark thinks that, too." But it's obviously something that's in the zeitgeist. I don't know if it's because of the Bernie runs. I don't know if it's because of I Do Not Dream of Labor TikTok, but it's not a novel concept, and there's an appetite, there's definitely an appetite in the room for the conversation. The other thing I wanted to pick up on that you said, Dr., is this, uh, idea that, how did you put it? Was very eloquent. Scattered success >> breeds universal hope. And I'm quoting Rockefeller, and I'm getting it from, uh, Baron's book. I just can't remember. I, I always forget. I think it's Buckley who said it. William, William F. Buckley, I think, who said it. And by the way, please call me Jared. I, you know, please call me Jared. If I, if you don't mind, if it's, if it's at all possible.

>> Okay. But yeah, yeah, yeah. It, and, and, yeah, but it was that I just want to give Baron credit for where I got the quote from, and, uh, initially. And, uh, but yeah, it's.

>> But this is also, I think, kind of perhaps unique. It feels, at least, >> very, very common, very prevalent within the Black community in particular. There's this idea that everyone else has always been allowed to get ahead, and now that we have equality, you know, within, you know, 50 years of the Civil Rights Movement, suddenly we're all supposed to say capitalism is bad before we have an opportunity to, to get our little piece of the exploitation, too. And that there's something that, see, feels very unfair to be having a conversation about why there should be no billionaires to, like, the fourth Black billionaire that's ever existed. I mean, I'm making up numbers, but you know what I mean? Like, that's, that's the argument. And to your point, maybe this is a good time to play the Jay-Z clip. I saw there's a young Black creator called, uh, Shan to Black, who had a lovely analysis of all of this, and he had pulled a conversation, um, from Jay-Z on what looks like an X thread. What do you call it? The X.

>> I still call it Twitter. So you call it.

>> No, no, but you know when it's like a Twitter conversation, it's like Twitter. It's like call in for Twitter.

>> Anyway, the podcast embedded spaces. Yes. Twitter Spaces. Um, this Jay-Z clip where he's doing the exact sort of, um, sophistry that you described, uh, Jared, using his identity and experience to sell this idea that he's entitled to being a billionaire.

>> That kind of became like a Trump ramble at the end. It was like, where is this going? I, I find it really funny this idea, I don't know where this is coming from, that somehow it's the white capitalists who are telling Black people capitalism is bad to keep them down. I'm like, I assure you, white capitalists really love that there is a podcast full of Black guys talking about capitalism. I assure you they love it. Um.

>> So I don't know where that is coming from, but it's kind of funny to me.

>> And Jay-Z made a lot of money for a lot of rich people like on his way too. So, so this idea that he did something that the industry and that the, the economy doesn't want is absurd. Uh, and meanwhile, Marcy Projects are still there. And for someone of a similar age, I think he's again misusing the term tricknology. And I think he's, he's doing to tricknology what, what the right has done to woke. Tricknology was not meant to, to convince young Black kids to.

>> What's tricknology? The, the way I remember it, it was, it was, it was born out of the, the, the Clarence 13X, uh, uh, uh, you know, God, Nation of Gods and Earth, offshoot of the Nation of Islam, you know, the, the, that kind of, of, of, uh, uh, ideology. And the idea was that tricknology is, is the white man and white supremacy's mechanism of, of tricking Black people to work against themselves. So tricknology, and then, you know, so J-Roo the Damager has some classic tracks talking about his fight against tricknology, and all of this, you know, like, like there's all, you know, and, you know, so, so, so for Jay-Z to turn around and throw this back at us, uh, uh, you know, as a way to defend him doing what, what tricknology was meant to keep us from doing is diabolical. Uh.

>> He's a technologist.

>> Exactly. So he's carrying it.

>> Exactly. He is carrying the tricknology. A, a, a mentality or argument or ideology for the tricknologists to the people themselves. It's, it's, which is of course the, the role he ultimately has ever only played and, uh, uh, and championed in his music.

>> You know what's wild though, like the, the idea of tricknology. I mean, that, yeah, that was that was a concept that was brought in through the Nation of Islam and propagated by the, the Five Percent Nation or the Nation of Gods and Earth. But the idea was that the white man who, uh, who was created on the island of Patmos by, uh, by a scientist named Yakub, created the white man, with inspiration from the devil, to spread barbarity, chaos, and corruption throughout the world. And really, what is capitalism besides that? So literally off the ball, sorry Jared, you're basically like, what, what Jay-Z is describing and the way that he is selling capitalism to this audience literally is tricknology. I mean, the man literally said, "They used to call us [ __ ] a monkey, and now they call us capitalist." But the thing is, Black people are not by and large capitalists because Black people own no capital. People think that capital is money. Capital is not money.

>> Capital is property. So, for example, if you, if you own a factory and the factory produces furniture, the factory is capital. The devices that produce the furniture are capital. The workers that operate the machines that produce the furniture are also a form of capital. Black people ourselves were human capital during the transatlantic slave trade. Capital is owning things that produce value. Capital is not simply having money. So when these guys talk about, well, you know, "I want to get money, I want to get bread," it's like, yeah, but that's, that's simple, that's a simple, it's a means of exchange. It's, it's a, it's a way of exchanging value. Uh, being able to get one thing for another without having to put your own labor into it. That, it's just, it's just a, it's a transmission of value. Having money does not mean that you have capital. So these people talking about like, you know, "I've got a, I got a t-shirt company," or "I'm selling sneakers," or whatever it is that they're doing. But if you don't own a thing that produces money, and I'm not talking about like having a, a podcast, present company except Briana. I'm not talking about having a podcast. I'm not even talking about selling records. I'm talking about like, do you own the record company? Do you have the artists signed? And not just like, do you have the, the, the, uh, the record label? Do you own the means of distribution? That is capital. Capital is being able to produce value by, and being able to walk away from it, and the capital is still being produced. Jay has capital in many ways. For example, Roc Nation, which I mentioned before, and pays their workers poverty wages. Jay has capital, but there are very few Black, like true Black capitalists in America, and indeed the world. What we are all doing is striving to become capitalists. This is where the term petty bourgeoisie comes from. So when we say petty bourg, we're talking about people that are striving to become capitalists. And most people who are in that, that striving will never get there because they themselves are being exploited by the true capitalists.

>> Yeah, that's what's so ironic. He opens by saying, you know, they s, they, there's a lot of vague, "They sold us this lie of pull ourselves up by our bootstraps when they know it was rigged against us and we can't make it. But then we made it, and now they're saying X, Y, and Z." It's like, wait a minute. There's like this acknowledgment that the system is unfair, that it is impossible, nearly impossible to climb up out of it. That, that you are exceptional. You are an an exception to the rule. But he flips it halfway through the narrative to say, to be on, to be on both sides of the equation. "I'm with you. It was us. We were all together. We were all subjugated. Now I'm up here." And rhetorically, you're here with me, elighting the fact that you're obviously not. And the sophistry in that, in that little passage that we just listened to, is really, I mean, I can see why he's a bestselling rapper if this kind of rhetorical ingenuity is going into his his rhymes.

>> But this is a.

>> Go ahead.

>> No, go ahead.

>> No, I mean, this, this is a common refrain is like, who is this "we"? And what really is unbelievable here, you know, cuz I think in the background of this conversation besides like Jay-Z and billionaires, I think is this overall question of, is Black capitalism, is Black business development a route forward for Black people overall? And it's for those that say yes, it's really built on this magical thinking that trickle-down economics, which probably many of those same people will say was bad, didn't work, somehow it's going to work for Black people. So when Jay-Z makes it, Oprah makes it, whoever makes it, we all won somehow, you know? And, and someone I forget who had said it, but it's like, >> think about it like this. If a Black auto worker loses their job, is there some magical Black wealth pot they can just go into and be like, "Whoa, hey, Oprah distributed to this Black wealth pot. Now I can pay pay my mortgage." No, there's not. But it's like somehow it's just supposed to be conflated that all we all are beneficial by all these, you know, Black billionaires or Black people that make it. Um, so it really is absurd, but they just stick in this "we" whenever they want, and we're just supposed to go along with it.

>> It's Black regonomics.

>> Right?

>> All right. Now, we just, we paused the video right when Mark, Mark, God bless him. Just really shout out to Mark. This. They keep coming back to this point, and Mark, every time, is flabbergasted with by this idea that everyone is so defensive of billionaires. So, let's, let's hop back in. He's like, "Wait, what? Why do, why do you think billionaires should exist?" Let's go. Okay, let's, let's pause it for a second before Mark, Mark starts getting back into his explanation. The two big points were one, billionaires deserve it because they work hard. We've kind of tackled that one already. The second point, we've also sort of addressed that he didn't take advantage of loopholes. Mark, with excellent comedic timing, says, uh, "Didn't sell drugs to to get his, uh, initial capital." Does anybody else want to add anything there?

>> Just the line that it was the 80s as a response to that, that this was like, like that was.

>> Supply and demand.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Supply and demand. Like.

>> Yeah. And you were supplying drugs. Black Dynamite. I sell drugs to the community. That's crazy to me.

>> And, and with loopholes, I mean, we, we know how easy it is for the rich to take advantage of tax loopholes and how much that can just add exponentially to your wealth. Um, and the wealthier you are, the more resources you have to exploit those loopholes.

>> Yeah. I mean, it, it, it misunderstands, and we'll get into this later, but it misunderstands what capitalism is. At some point, one of the panelists says, "Oh, I know what capitalism is because we just Googled it." But I think it should be evident there's a pretty thin understanding of what capitalism is. And that the presumption throughout this conversation is that if everything is operating as it should, if there's no cheats and if there aren't any especially avaricious people in the mix, then capitalism will be great. Like, it, it, it will perform well and inert to everybody's benefit. And that's a piece of the conversation that I think is very difficult for Mark to, like, find the space to unpack, but maybe we can continue to do it as we listen and it comes up. Let's push through, um, this next little bit. Okay. What do you make of Mark's formulation? The issue is in the definition of capitalism is the consequences of it. So I, well, I, you know, for me, again, I just want to stress the impossibility of the situation there, and I saw what I think are a number of, of important, uh, uh, I no disrespect to Mark, but I, I describe them as as devices, deflective devices, you know, the, "I'm old" thing. You know, he's got to, he's got to, you know, he's, he's, he's, he's got to bob and weave in that situ, like it's a very difficult.

>> He's being very generous, he's being very patient, and very generous.

>> And then you're talking to people who, with all due respect, have, have, as you point out, they're literally Googling this in the middle of the conversation. So there, it's, and without even a moment to hesitate to think to themselves that, as I'm doing that, I'm admitting I don't spend a lot of time having these discussions, studying these histories, topics, etcetera, and so forth. They just run, you know, push right through that, that barrier. Uh, but where I struggled with, with again, with the privilege of hindsight and some space and even, you know, the flaws in my own response, that, that I've always deferred or, or preferred the Kwane Terrell simp summary. There's only two ways to do this. Your, your, the, the wealth that society produces is either going to be publicly owned by the people and distributed appropriately, or privately owned by a handful of people to where we're, where we're seeing Forbes reporting, uh, one 1% of the population with $54 trillion in wealth, and 800 people worth $6 trillion dollars alone. Uh, the, so instead of focusing, I prefer at least as a tactic to try to focus on the inequality that's produced, and then to point out that, uh, as politely as possible, that, that what we are never taught and never allowed to discuss, uh, uh, in terms of how capitalism works for, we're never, you know, most Americans, at least, are, are imposed and have an education system imposed on us that, that, and identities and other that, that, that prohibit a discussion and an education around what capitalism is, even though we're supposed to be in a capitalist economy, yet nobody understands, nobody seems to have a working, uh, knowledge, and we're certainly not encouraged to have a working knowledge about how it works. So, I've always just tried to focus on, you know, the, that the wealth that all of these people are, are walking away with is generated not only by the exploited labor that was somewhat referenced there, but in the exchange of the purchase and the sale of, for instance, those t-shirts. So, but again, Jay-Z, his whole career has been boosting this analysis that, uh, that that if you're not a boss, you're just a customer, and a customer is a negative. Yet in a 70% consumer-based economy, we should be praising the consumer and then rewarding the consumer as an initial start. This is not most revolutionary, you know, analysis, but just as a start from where we are, should be rewarding the consumer by redistributing all the wealth from that exchange back to people through any number of things like free healthcare, education, housing, etcetera, and so forth. But, but instead, he kind of, Mark kind of gets trapped in that, that moment of trying to explain that, no, no, in socialism, you can have some private property, and you, you, you can have, you know, a little bit, you know.

>> What about that struggle?

>> That does seem a good and important point that that comes up again later. Yeah. Go ahead.

>> Sorry.

>> Yeah. No, just quickly that, that, that what is often misunderstood is, as I understand it, at least, is that the, the critique of that socialism and communism deny people private property is taken to mean at the, at the level of of headphones and t-shirts. But that's not what they're talking about. They're saying that, that, that the, the main drivers of the economy and society would be nationalized in terms of healthcare, housing, education, etcetera, and so forth. So that, so that, that, that can't be privatized and then weaponized and, and exp, and turned into an exploitative process that we see today. So that healthcare would actually be a healthcare system and not a private property business endeavor. So that's, that's anyway, but that's, I think a difficult point to tease out. Certainly I'm struggling in this moment, never mind in that one, to do it, uh, in a, in a, in a, in a kind of meaningful way. But that's why I just always try to lean back and say, look, whatever shortcomings I have, or Mark had in that moment, or anyone has in these moments, we have to realize that these conversations are not encouraged. They're not, that is not a space conducive to those conversations, and that for that, most of us have to do a lot to, to study and learn about these ideas.

>> So now, now that we're here, we are the fish in water who can't see the mana in which we swim. Let me come to you, Q, since you're, um, at in social communist HQ reporting from China, you know, is it, is it true? Are there markets where you live? Are you allowed to purchase things and sell things? I mean, what do you make of this distinction between.

>> No, I, capitalism.

>> I leave my, my, my drab gray apartment block and then I clock in, I clock in at the, uh, the mine and I work for, uh, 12 hours straight. No, it's like, if people knew what life is like outside of the United States, it's China is like, it's, it's the counter example because, you know, the government will order, for example, um, uh, prochemical exporters to simply like, close down production, like you said, they cannot export now because of the, uh, the crisis in fuel prices due to the, uh, the war waged on Iran. Uh, it's very clear here that government controls the markets, that is, that government supersedes private industry. And in the US, they see it complete opposite way around, private industry supersedes the government, owns the government, uh, you look at students who go to school with their, their uniforms on, and you know, for the most part, they're like jogging suits when they get to school. They have a lunch provided for them. This isn't just like an optional thing, it's like they go to a cafeteria and they get lunch. That's simply what happens. Um, if they get sick, they go to a hospital, and, uh, granted, like they will, they will co-pay for it, but it's, it's very cheap. The price of food is like, I can't even believe it sometimes when I go to a restaurant, um, and I pay like $20, and it's a, you know, it's a table of people that are sitting there at the table with me. So like when friends and I go out, we might pay the equivalent of like $30 or $40 US. Uh, I get on the high-speed rail to go between cities, um, I might pay the equivalent of like $14 or $15 to travel 115 miles. So like the, the amount of investment that goes back into China's people, it's mind-boggling to see what happens when a government actually cares about the well-being of its people. So for everything that people say about China being authoritarian and that the workers are slaves and this, that, and the third, like labor exploitation exists pretty much everywhere. And there's, you know, there's examples in China that, that one can point to, and even the government admits this. It, it has come down very hard on, um, employers that exploit, uh, workers as human capital. But at the same time, the, the amount of care and investment that goes into the average Chinese person, I mean, it far supersedes what America seems to be capable of right now. I look at what young people are, are coming out of school with the education that they have, the knowledge they have, not just, you know, third graders who can recite the periodic table of the elements, but I mean, they have a comprehensive education in world history. They understand, uh, you know, the revolutions that happened in Europe, exploitation that took place in Africa, uh, the, the Bolivarian revolution in South America. They understand these things. The amount of education that they have compared to what we get. It's like, I don't, I don't like to get into these kinds of comparisons because the grass ain't always greener. There's, there's things to criticize about pretty much every country, but I mean, it's head and shoulders above what America seems to be capable of right now with a fraction of the money that America makes. So I don't know. You are right in that in many ways, it's like a, it's like a fish swimming in water and asking, what is water? But when I, when I see conversations like that, and they're they're saying to each other, well, you know, there's, there's ways to make profits without exploiting. It's like, well, somebody's going to be exploited along the way regardless. That's just simply the way that the world, world operates. We're not in a global communist revolution. So there, you know, depending on which country you live in, the consumption that you enjoy is going to be at the expense of somebody else who's making less, who's making those primary, who's digging the primary products out of the ground or making the, the secondary and tertiary products for shipping and export to your market. At the same time, there, there are much better ways of conducting commerce and trade that doesn't involve bombing countries or politically subverting their government so that they're more favorable, uh, to your government and are willing to exploit their own people. I look, for example, like what's happening in West Africa. The amount of human capital, uh, that is like the, uh, not just the labor, but the intelligence, the ingenuity of people in Nigeria, Ghana, Mali, Burkina Faso, and so forth, where you have some governments that have recognized the value of their people, that is the Sahelian Confederation, and then some governments that continuously exploit and spread corruption throughout their, their, their countries. These are the countries that are favorable to the US. That, that is, the US wants not only countries that are willing to exploit their people to provide cheap labor, but they do the same thing internally. The United States loves, and this is not just the US, this is the US, it's Canada, the UK, it's Western economies, love when minority communities, particularly Black communities, because of the amount of global cultural soft power that we're able to exercise. They love it when we not only exploit our own people, but then spread the message among our own people that capitalist exploitation is somehow going to produce a net positive. That if you can create an Oprah or a Jay-Z, if you can create, uh, multi-millionaire and even billionaire athletes, that this is how doing something to uplift the community. That that seems to be this message that we've been stuck with for the past 115 some odd years. And I'm not, I'm not really sure what it's done for us. I saw a clip this morning, for example, of LeBron James, uh, making jokes to a bunch of white guys about how the NBA needs to move me, the Memphis Grizzlies, to from Memphis to Nashville because he doesn't like playing in, in Memphis. And it's like, this is a historically Black city that, you know, that just like, just like Jay-Z got it out the mud, Memphis as a community got it out the mud. And then you have this Black billionaire athlete joking about how the NBA needs to take the team away from this self-made Black city and then transfer it to Nashville. That is the ultimate result of Black capitalism is that you have, uh, you have, you have rich Black bourgeoisie who are in alignment with white capital and will casually make jokes about robbing Black people of our own birthrights.

>> Yeah.

>> Can I just add very quickly?

>> Yeah. Sorry about that. Sorry about that. Sorry about that. Go ahead. My bad. My bad. My bad. Go ahead. Go ahead. I stepped on it. Sorry. My bad. My bad.

>> Well, no. I, I, I was just making a joke, but I also was going to bring in the, the Megan Day article I mentioned earlier, uh, titled "The Working Class Can't Be Bought Off Quite So Easily," where she talks about this reference to Jay-Z in the Epstein files pertaining to sports leagues, where the, as the story goes, uh, he was used, he was instrumental to getting cultural buy-in in the community in Brooklyn to building the Barclay Center there with the idea that the benefits of the building being there were going to trickle down to the predominantly Black neighborhood it was in. And moreover, in this particular email in the Epstein files, it's a conversation between Jess Staley, the former CEO of the global finance, uh, company Barclays, uh, saying, quote, "You want to know why we are not in Sao Paulo? Watch the TV ads on the Super Bowl. It's all about hip-hop and hip cars with white women. The group that should be in the streets has been bought off by Jay-Z." Now, it's not the worst reason to be in the Epstein files, but it's not good. And I would add to that the controversy he and Beyoncé were in about a year ago when he and J, uh, and Beyoncé and Jared Kushner and, uh, Ivanka Trump were all seated next to each other at this, I think it was a criminal justice, uh, fundraiser. And there are these questions about, what is the core of your message? How, what is the validity of your authenticity? Who are you friends with and who are you fighting for? If you are willing to rub shoulders with the offspring of the fascists that you're ostensibly working against with your criminal justice efforts. This is Jay-Z. And yet, to your point, I think it was you just saying, this has enormous cultural buy-in and cache among the Black community and the broader international community because of Black American cultural value. Jared, I'm sorry. I'm going to come back to you.

>> No, my bad. I, I was just wanting to point out that in the article or the interview that that started all of this, the GQ Jay-Z piece, you know, he points out in that, in that interview, uh, he makes the point, something to the effect that the, the shortcomings of Black entrepreneurialism and Black capitalism, even as he's, as we've been all discussing, uh, uh, quite expertly doing that switch, Briana, that you talked about, uh, uh, where he can, in midstream, switch back to the other side. So he, he then says that it's important to have to see himself as this Black entrepreneurial success story, but that he acknowledges, but you have to make deals with whites. You have to make deals with the white corporate world because there's only so much you can do, and this, that, and the third. So I'm saying that, that the role that you're now describing is this intermediary role, this neo-colonial bourgeoisie role that he has been tasked with and successful in navigating, uh, for a long time, which is again.

I think an oddity, it it works perfectly that the button podcast would be largely in support of that because they're doing the exact same thing. They are positioned as a podcast exactly the same way, being a black-facing, black cultural product that has a lot of white investment, corporate overlord, uh, investment and, uh, influence over, uh, and CEO management of included. So, and the protection of their copyright. So, I, I'm, I'm curious how you all are going to get away with with these clips and good luck with that. But like they, like they have a, the, the that quarter lab, uh, group that they work with is, is, you know, pretty intense with with chasing down this.

So, my point is, is that going back even to to the initial claim, all of this is in service to a broader political economy, a broader structure, uh, that rewards those who promote and and and, uh, uh, generate both financial and cultural wealth for them. And, uh, and this is, we're trying to clean up the mess here. This is, this is what we're here to do.

>> Well, funny addition because you brought up, uh, Barkclays, Brianna, the the Barkley Center.

>> Yeah. How did Barclays earn its capital? Its predecessor, Colonial Bank. Uh, its members of its boards owned slave plantations.

>> Exactly.

>> David Barkley also owned a slave plantation in Jamaica. So, it's, it's, it's kind, it's kind of like it's, it's how it's, this argu, this argument becomes circular. Where do the capitalists get their capital? And in many cases, just like the broccoli center, know, they, they got it from slavery.

I was literally trying to do the thought experiment at one point listening to this, like, okay, devil's advocate, is there a non-exploitative way to get a bunch of capital? Like, and the best I could come up with was taking your own civ and going out west and panning for gold and striking it rich.

>> Not having, but hold up. You go out west where? Out west in California? And who, who, who was living on the California and soil before the prospectors got there?

>> You got, you got me. You got me. That was the best I could do. That was the best I could come up with.

>> You like trip and fall on a giant natural resource, you know.

>> Um, black style, you know.

>> The best way for us to do it is to have a movement that strips the wealth from those billionaires. That's how we get capital in a non-exploitative way.

>> And can I say this? I mean, I hope I'm not like jumping ahead too much, but a lot of the the podcast hosts, they're, their whole thing is couched in, we're being realistic. Like, all right, you can talk about your leftist dreams. We're pragmatic. We're taking advantage of the system. But it's like, okay, let's, let's talk about what's real. And again, I think this conversation intersects with a more common refrain of like black small business ownership, you know, not becoming a billionaire, but that being a route towards, you know, advancing black interests. Most small businesses fail. First of all, most small businesses structurally cannot pay their workers a good wage, meaning even if they wanted to, the profit margins are too small, can't provide good health insurance, good benefits, things like that. Most black-owned small businesses employ like less than nine people. So, it's not like there's all these people benefiting from it.

Capitalism as a system, I think, even if you Google it, you will find this. It is set up that most people will not be capitalists. So, if you're talking about a way out for most black people, there's no way everyone's going to be a capitalist or a business owner. Most people are going to be workers. And historically, and the empirical data shows this, the best way we've had so far in this country for, uh, you know, what do you want to say, shrinking the, uh, racial wealth gap or advancing workers' economic interests has been through trade unions and social welfare policy.

A lot of people will be surprised by this, but the racial wealth gap actually shrunk a lot in the 1940s. And the big reason why was because you had a combination of a full employment economy, essentially, the large growth of trade unions that were finally letting in black workers, New Deal social policies. All of these things were imperfect. You know, it wasn't perfect for black workers, but that's where you have found the most, um, again, I don't think it's healthy to talk about wealth. It's not like people getting rich, but some stability, some economic progress.

You look at today, um, with the Doge cuts, what has been the biggest impact on black female unemployment? Has been the Doge cuts because black workers are in the public sector, and these are heavily union jobs that provide job stability, good benefits. So, if you want to talk about being real for most people on this planet, what has been the route to achieve, you know, some kind of modest stability? It has been things like unions, social policy, you know, that, that's been the realistic route. And it's just a fantasy to think that all black people are just going to own their own business and it's going to be great because the record is pretty bad on that point.

>> I think that's a really important point. It comes up frequently, this idea that Mark and people who are critical of billionaires the way Mark is doing are somehow in denial of the way that the world is. Um, what's the, there's a name of that logical fallacy. It's like, uh, appeal to tradition. Appeal to tradition. Well, that's just the way it is. And and you, and you just want ponies and rainbows.

I want to also flag that this is not obviously just a black thing. There were a couple of clips that went viral in the last couple of weeks of billionaires trying to rationalize their existence because as frustrating as this Joe Budden podcast conversation is, there is a broader increasing openness to the idea that billionaires should not, in fact, exist. And now they're playing a certain degree of defense. I don't know if you saw these. One was, uh, Jamie Diamond, uh, the head of, was it JP Morgan, uh, pushing back against Bernie's 5% billionaire wealth tax. Let's take a listen to what he had to say.

>> And so what do people say? What do you say to people, uh, like Bernie Sanders, who says it every day, 20 times a day, uh, billionaires and and millionaires don't pay their fair share?

>> I, I don't know what he means by fair share. I, I've listened to that my whole life and, uh, I don't know what he means. I mean, I think that we could acknowledge their flaws and attack the flaws. I don't think just taxing someone is going to attack the floor. Matter of fact, I don't think most American citizens believe that if we tax a trillion dollars more and send it down to Washington DC, that the country will be worse off. I think what they believe is that money will be given out to special interest groups and the friends of this politician, that politician. We need policy that drives growth and that's regulatory policy. I think immigration policy, we should have allow more merit-based and, you know, a path to citizenship there. A lot, I think we should double the ear income tax credit. Like, literally, if you are making $14 or $15,000 a year, that the government give you 12, not just six. And I think that would put money in the hands of people working. It would be better social outcomes, more home ownership, less crime, less, less recidivism, that first rung on the ladder, at least the second rung. And the money would be spent in their local communities.

>> Do you like the idea of Trump accounts?

>> Yes. I, I think it's a great idea. Yeah. And.

>> Jamie Diamond has an estimated net worth of approximately $2.8 billion. Warren Gunnels, uh, Bernie's chief of staff, I guess, uh, replied to this clip saying, under Bernie's 5% billionaire wealth tax, Jamie Diamond would owe $135 million in taxes. He'd still have $2.57 billion in wealth. And every senior would get dental, vision, and hearing benefits. Seems pretty fair for the CEO of a bank fined $27 billion for fraud and $290 million for the Epstein scandal. JP Morgan, of course, was the bank that, uh, financed Jeffrey Epstein's transactions.

All right. In America, you know those memes in China, you know, in North Korea, D with a, you know, cumbly woman. In America, a billionaire will get on national television and whine about having a 5% tax on his billions of dollars. I see you smiling. Q. Have you ever seen anything like it? How, how many billionaires are in China?

>> Uh, I mean, there are billionaires in China, but it's, it's, it's okay. There are billionaires in China.

>> Tax them all away. I saw some stat that it was like China only has like, it has the second highest number of millionaires in the world, but like no billionaires or something like that.

>> No, no, there, there are, there are. But here's the thing, like their, their wealth in a lot of ways doesn't actually belong to them. So the wealth is, is mostly tied up in the into the, in the companies they manage. Um, they can't just like flee the country. So if a billionaire, for example, like, or or even somebody with hundreds of millions of dollars to their name wants to abscond the country, they, they simply can't do that because where, where are they going to move their money? Uh, there are, there are some, uh, rich people, uh, in China that have, uh, slowly been, uh, trying to move the money out of the country into, into Singapore, South Korea, etc. Um, but they've, they've ended up leaving because they find the system oppressive to them. They don't get to keep as much of their money as they would normally want to keep. Um, people ask me all the time, well, whatever happened to Jack Ma? Jack Ma, that is the former, um, CEO of Alibaba. And, you know, I, I find this like so instructive and I, I think it's just something that Western countries need to be able to do. Was when a, uh, a multi-billionaire or a very powerful, uh, tech oligarch decides that they want to essentially create a parallel economy, um, or they want to, uh, rival the power of the government, with with the, uh, the help of their, their friends in the industry, the government says, absolutely not. This is not going to happen. We're going to strip you of your titles and your wealth. We're going to make sure that you, you pose no threat, um, to, to the greater social order. So, yeah, does, does China have billionaires? And does China have sention? Yes. Are they able to exercise the kind of power that a Jamie Diamond can exercise in the United States? Absolutely not. Can't be done.

>> That's an important point. And I should say, because I know my MMT listeners are going to be upset. They don't like it when, uh, Warren Gunnels tweets like this, that of course you don't have to tax to spend on these social programs. And some believe that the better argument against, uh, billionaires or for taxing billionaires is exactly to your point, Q, that when anyone has that much money, you can quite literally buy elections and influence the political system. The image of, uh, Donald Trump being inaugurated with all of the billionaires sitting behind him at the inauguration is pretty instructive. Not that it doesn't also happen on the other side of the aisle, of course. Um, and people like Bloomberg literally buying their way onto the bait, debate stage by being able to jin up the numbers by paying for ads in like cheap southern states, cheap, cheap, cheap to buy ads, I mean, and literally purchasing a place in our democracy. Is why you need to tax them out of having that kind of leverage.

>> But, but can we ask the real question though? Uh, because I think you asked the wrong question. The, the question isn't how many billionaires are in China. The real question should have been, how many of those billionaires took knees in front of their vaults after George Floyd was killed, like Jaime Diamond did? Let's, let's, let's be fair. That's the real question that you should ask.

>> You're right. That's, that's basically reparation.

>> Well, here's, here's the other thing, too. Here's the other thing that we need to know. Um, China, if their, if their billionaires engage in corruption and practices that are against the best interest of the country, they execute their billionaires. They say, "Sorry, bro. You got to go. You're out of here."

>> They're on their news for another reason.

>> The other thing is, you know.

>> I'm not a, I'm not for the death penalty.

>> The, the podcast.

>> This is, this is where this is where we differ. Listen, if I, I think America would be a much better place if they enacted the death penalty strictly for billionaires.

>> Well, we can have a discussion about that one.

>> You know.

>> This is, this is what they're talking about. Bernie's going to be head us in Central Park if he wins. You're saying Chris Matthews was right. Justice for Chris Matthews. He should have been fired.

>> No. See, if, listen, if Bernie had embraced that as a policy, I think he would have taken the primaries.

>> Well.

>> The, um, but, you know, the, the podcast bros, they also always are, they're couching in it. They're like, well, they, they work so hard, these billionaires, so they deserve it. But the other thing is, increasingly the billionaires today are people who are not even building anything. They're doing it through financialization. They're doing it through taking over a company, laying off workers, buying back their stock, giving themselves bonuses. Um, you know, so I think it, it, it's not justified under any circumstances of being a billionaire. But increasingly now it's like explicitly parasitic what they're doing. No contribution to society, no real contribution to the economy. It's just playing with numbers and and making yourself richer.

Well, to that point, maybe we should play this clip of Kevin Oly, one of said billionaires. Uh.

>> How did he make his money? He's the fellow from Shark Tank.

>> Yeah. In. He's actually a Canadian. He made his money by selling a tech company. So, basically, he took over a tech company and, uh, flipped it. And he, he, he doesn't, he doesn't, uh, make money. He basically just flipped assets. He basically did the Elon Musk route without the public funding.

>> M. Well, he has some advice for all of us about how we could all be millionaires if we just managed our money a little better. Let's take a look at this clip.

>> You want to be a millionaire at 65 and a million half dollars? Take 20% of your salary of $69,000 and put it into the market each week. And don't touch it and just watch it on your phone grow. It goes up and down as the market moves. But generally speaking, the market for the last 150 years has given you anywhere from 8 to 12% annualized every single year. You don't have to guess or pick stocks. You don't know. You just buy an index. That's what the app does.

>> Does anyone see any issue with.

>> So that's actually, that's actually a talking point. No, that's a talking point from another one of his, uh, his. So before Kevin Olirri was on Shark Tank, he was on a Canadian show called Dragon's Den and one of Dragon's Den was a very similar show to Shark Tank. I'm pretty sure it actually, it preceded Shark Tank, if I'm not mistaken. Um, but, uh, uh, Kevin Johnson wrote a book called The Wealthy Barber. And this was basically the Canadian version of like Rich Dad Poor Dad in which he, he, he basically advocated the use of of dollar cost averaging. How like average families can make themselves wealthy through dollar cost averaging. That is like take a certain percentage of your income, invest it into the market, leave it alone, and then watch it grow over time. And I mean, granted, like every financial advisor will give that advice. Uh, Olyri goes a little bit higher. Rather than saying 10%, he says 20%. But the issue is somebody like that has no like for, I, I hesitate to say this on your podcast because I don't want to get you sued, but I mean, for a, for a guy who allegedly, you know, his wife was driving a boat drunk and crashed it into somebody else and killed him and he was able to like get her off by saying it was me driving the boat and then nothing happened. Uh, for, for a guy who is able to insulate himself from the consequence and as well from the consequences of their behavior just through the dent of the fact that he has so much money. These are people that have no idea what the average person lives like. For a person that's earning $69,000 a year, I mean, you really generally are going to earn that much in the US if you're living in a large city. And as we all know, people in large cities pay very high rents. So on paper, you might be earning $69,000. But then after you've paid your rent, what is your take home? After you've paid your rent, paid for your gas, paid for your utilities and so on and your food insurance,

>> What do you even have left? Do you?

>> Yeah. In your, in your health insurance. I'm sorry. I forgot that you guys got to pay for that, too. We, we have subsidized publicly subsidized health insurance. I keep forgetting that. Um, but after you've paid all these expenses, what do you have left over? Practically nothing.

>> Yeah. And that's the point that so many people made in the comments as they were dragging him. This idea that they weren't paying 40% of their rent to these education costs, healthcare costs, rent costs, um, and had all this disposable income. But this is also leads to this important point that comes up again and again, this conflation between millionaires and billionaires. And I think people's real inability to conceptualize what a billion dollars really is. I've read this off a bunch of times. I'm going to do it one more time because it just really the defensiveness around, oh, billionaires should be allowed to exist, I think goes out the window when you realize just how much more than a million a billion is. So a million seconds is 11.5 days. A billion seconds is 31.7 years. 11 days, 31 years. Because they're orders of magnitude of difference. And when you look at visual aids that show like this is a grain of rice that's worth this much and now it's a bag of r. I mean, it really is orders of magnitude difference. And it really begs the question, like, how much extra money do people need?

Uh, let's push through with a little bit more of this clip because this next bit coming up is pretty spicy and good and gets into this question of forms of government and what capitalism really is and what alternate alternatives really exist. Okay, let's pause it there.

>> There's so much confusion going on. I love how he jumps in to be like, "Well, no, actually caveman, that's survival. That's not profit." It's like, "Oh my god, there's just so much going on."

>> There's a. Okay, I think it was you actually, Paul, who brought up this, uh, the the role that framing Mark's argument as idealistic is playing. And I want to pair that with something else that comes up in this clip, which is the idea that we all have different standards of what it means to live a good life. And it's not fair to hold me in the West and the Imperial Corps to living my life in a way or or to to judging almost paternalistically is the implication, somebody in Indonesia who wants to make my Nikes for me, right? Who who is profiting, you know, who is able to sustain their families on the slave labor, uh, that Nike will pay them for their wages.

>> What's what's clear is like they're they're committed to defending capitalism and any point they hear about something bad is, oh, well, that's not capitalism. Like, oh no, well, that's greed, or that's just like these people being bad. C, that's not capitalism. Like, oh no, that's giving corporations privileges over people. That's not capitalism. Like, that's, that's kind of the whole game here. Um, and also the inability to kind of think beyond what is. So if you, if there's a country where children work in a factory and they're paid [ __ ] wages and all this sort of thing, um, you know, it can't be because they're forced to do that and they have to do it. It must be like, oh, well, that's just their culture. You know, they, they like it. We in the West, how could we ever understand? They must be built different. You know, we're not built that way. They can be in a factory 12 hours a day.

>> The noble savage of factory working.

>> Right.

>> Of of child labor.

>> It's just this built-in acceptance of whatever it is, it, it must be that way because it's good and right. You know, who am I to change what what God has has laid down on this earth. Um, but yeah, they just kind of worm their way out of everything by being like, well, that's not actual capitalism. Well, it's the reality of how capitalism has functioned since it's been. So I don't know what you want to refer to here. And granted, and I do think it was helpful for Mark to say there are different models, you know, like China, you know, they, there's still markets in place. You can look at Sweden, you know, there is still capitalism happening on some level. There's different ways to organize it, but at its root, you know, the US is kind of performing capitalism the way it was, you know, designed to be. So to just say that's not capitalism is kind of a cop-out.

It also, I mean, to me, it's also a fascinating exploration into the success of post-World War II US propaganda where the manufacturing community in this country, by design, in their own language, used the phrase, uh, reconquer America in terms of repromoting the free market fundamental mythology, that that was meant to to drag the working, the the labor force in this country away from recognizing and being reminded of how well they did to Paul's previous point, uh, in, in large part because the US government got involved during the war in in running the economy and it did well for wages and production. And to get people off of that, the manufacturing community went into a massive propaganda campaign that included even, I was fascinated just to learn about a year ago that they, that that Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom was a well-funded book meant to compete in by design with the popularity of the Communist Manifesto. So it was, it was like, we need a way to explain capitalism the way this Marx dude has found to to explain commun, socialism and communism. And and, you know, so the point being that to to hear in 2026,

>> young, relatively, uh, black men in this in this discussion, you know, talking about the the the value and the beauty from the beginning of this country of a free market. I mean, you know, uh, never mind the the infinite amount of of incorrect, uh, uh, framing of that and and definition of that. Uh, but, but that it's, it's just being repromoted again in this way is is is fascinating and and and also disturbing. Um, but, yeah.

>> Mark said, "You were slaves, dog. You were you were the human capital." He tried so hard. It is not quite getting through. I also think, I this section made me think of the value of making commitments to universal rights and basic fundamental human rights principles.

And the way that America, pretty uniquely in the world, oftentimes with Israel, refuses to subscribe to UN promulgated declarations of human rights precisely because they aren't willing to commit to the idea that profits shouldn't come before whether someone has, uh, access to the basic masal hierarchies of needs. On the other side of the world, won't sign on to the rights of the child because we won't fundamentally provide housing, health care, uh, etc. as a human right in our own country. Famously, just last week, I think it was, uh, Israel, United States wouldn't sign on to the, whatever declaration about the transatlantic slave trade being bad, because of what the implications would be, I think, for reparative justice, etc., etc. I want to push on a little bit longer, so let's just push and listen to a little bit more of this. Okay. Canada wasn't.

>> Yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead.

>> Just before I forget.

>> This is the one thing I didn't catch it the first time, the first couple times I saw this. This is the one thing I actually disagree with Mark on.

>> The, the these social welfare or safety net programs were evolved not to keep capitalism at bay. They were they were evolved and imposed by the state to keep labor and socialism at bay. It was to keep revolution from occurring that we got these little bits of handouts, uh, that people still fight so much about today. But sorry about, I just wanted to, before I forgot again.

>> No, I think that's right. And probably what Mark did, but yeah.

>> No, I, I, I really hate when people do that. They, uh, they say things like, you know, the, the schools are socialism, the roads are socialism, the post office is socialism. It's like, no, this is, this is how a capitalist economy runs. There has to be some concessions made to the workers to keep their lives at least tolerable so that they don't rise up and overthrow. Um, the even the New Deal, like a lot of, you know, sorry, I don't want to, I don't want to step on any toes here, Paul, because I know that you're a big fan of the New Deal, but even the New Deal itself was a massive concession to labor and it, in itself, was, uh, an anti-communist move.

>> Yeah. Yeah, for the most part, to white labor, because it did, uh, that is the, uh, uh, National Labor Relations Act did exclude black workers, primarily the agricultural and domestic workers, from the benefits. But these, these are concessions to the workers to stop the, uh, the push and the capitalists from being slaughtered wholesale. Um, socialism is not simply, uh, creating social programs. Creating a social program is just a byproduct of functioning within any kind of socioeconomic system at all. The, the, the question of socialism isn't, do we create social programs? This is a necessity. If you have no social programs, you don't have an educated populace. If you don't have any kind of educated populace, you really don't have workers. What socialism is, is where do the excess profits from, uh, from the, the benefit of labor? Where does it go? Where, where does all of this money in the market go? Does it get siphoned upwards towards the richest people functioning within that economy, or do they get redistributed to the workers? And people think of redistribution as simply taking money away from rich people and just putting it in the hands of poor people. That's not how that works. It's not certainly not how it works here in China. What they do have are very good schools. They have amazing infrastructure. Um, like, you know, every time I sit on a high-speed rail train, I think to myself, like, if this were only possible, uh, in Canada or if it were only possible in the United States. Um, they have the infrastructure, they have their national defense, they have their, I mean, they have some of the best colleges in in the world. Um, people here talk about sending their children to go to school in the US, Canada, the UK. And I'm thinking to myself, if people in the US, Canada, and the UK knew how how good the schools are here, you'd have the opposite effect. People would be rushing out of, um, out of higher education in Western countries to go here in China. Uh, their, their healthcare, their, their health development, um, agriculture, like being able to create the abundance of food in this country that came from having soil that was in many ways unforgiving to workers. Like the amount of human development that's possible in a socialist country is just leaps and bounds ahead of what has been made possible in these capitalist countries. All that is is where, where does the money, where does it go after the profits have been made? Do the richest people get to keep it, or does it get reinvested in the people and the economy to bring up the, the collective quality of life?

>> And I'll jump in here. One thing I, I really hate, and this happens all the time, especially with healthcare, and you saw it in the podcast, is, um, you know, someone will reference another, basically any other country in the world, you could probably say that healthcare system is better, and then someone will say, well, there's this one problem with it, and because this one problem, therefore our clearly inferior healthcare system, we should just stick with that. It's like, and it's always, whatever, you know, in 1987, someone waited in a line really long in France, and therefore, you know, it's always the most ridiculous sort of evasion of dealing with the fact that like, okay, whatever you want to call it, and I think it's fair to point out, yeah, like single-payer healthcare looks very different in different countries. You have national health system in in the UK, you have different models of doing it, and you can still criticize different models, but it's clearly superior in the outcomes, um, than ours, you know, so what, why quibble over those things? Um, but again, it was this thing of like, well, it's not socialism because, oh, there's some money involved. It's like, okay, again, this is where I think Mark was right. I think especially to a US audience where we're starting at a very low baseline to kind of look at it like a spectrum. All right, it's not full socialism, but it's way more socialist than what we have. And what we're looking at is a socialist kind of policy that is making things better for people. Isn't this something that we would want to do, you know?

>> Yeah.

>> Also need to keep in mind that, uh, with, I just wanted to add one, one quick thing, uh, Paul, which is that with Canada and, uh, and the UK, uh, you know, with Canada, we have our public healthcare system, the UK has the NHS, but, you know, when you talk about like the lines being long, or I'm not really sure where he got the idea that they're really long in the US, different hospital.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah. The thing is, but the lines, the lines are long, but these, these have been under attack for decades. They, they're, you know, premiers of provinces who are pretty much, uh, uh, you know, they're in the pocket of, uh, of of big oil. They're in the pocket of banks and they want to privatize our healthcare industry. So, they have been dismantling the health care, uh, sector in Canada and the UK for decades. So what you're seeing is, if you're seeing people waiting a long time in hospital in the ERs or for to get MRIs and so on, that's because they've been so heavily defunded and underresourced that they're trying to destroy these systems so that people are begging for privatization. This is the end result of, of, of, uh, of starving these systems. This is not simply the nature of these systems.

>> And you heard it in the Jamie Diamond clip. What does he say? He says, "Do we want to tax the billionaires and then send a trillion dollars to Washington so that they can squander it away?" We see how poorly managed X Y and Z program is. There's no point in taxing me because the government is bad. At the same time that they support Doge and all of these deregulatory actions that of course make the outcomes bad. They defund the post office and then complain about how long it takes for the mail to arrive. So yes, that, that's part of what was so pernicious about that clip. And then also this idea that people aren't waiting in the United States of America. If any of the differences, an American won't even go in the first place because they don't want the bill and they'll just die in their house. They don't, they don't want the ambulance bill. So they don't die in the waiting room. They'll die in their house.

>> That's an anecdote. I.

>> Also, also Jamie Diamond, who is the friend that, who is the friend that, uh, that the, that the government officials that, that the Congress people are giving the money away to. Who are the people that?

>> Who are the people that are across the Bro? It's you. Defend the friend of the people in government. That's you and your buddies. What do you mean?

>> Yeah. The last part of that clip was just, um, this weird argument that like, it's not just the US that's bad. It's like, it's like I'm not making fun of your sister. Like, you don't have to be so defensive. Yeah, lots of places are bad in capitalist. Lots of places are bad in capitalist because America did wars of intervention to prevent them from adopting any other system. And yeah, capitalism. The argument is that not that America, your, your mommy that you're like weirdly protective of, is uniquely bad, but that there's a systemic problem here that Mark keeps coming back to time and time again to try to get you to have some appetite for remedying.

Okay. The last point that I just wanted to to raise here is again, this is no, not a criticism of Mark at all, but I would have liked to have heard some discussion about worker ownership. I think that there's this binary of either the government owns everything or private companies, uh, you know, capitalists own everything. And there's no, none of this conception of the idea that the workers own it. And when you're talking about the red, the redistribution, I forget which of you was just saying, you know, the question is where all the profits go. Well, that question is answered very differently if it's a worker-owned business that has an incentive to redistribute back to themselves in the form of salary instead of dividends and sending jobs overseas to squeeze every last penny out, um, for shareholder value. Any, any, any socialists want to say worker ownership before I move on?

>> Well, yeah. I mean, and I, I don't blame Mark for not. I mean, that's like getting into a whole another level we probably couldn't have gotten to. Um, but yeah, you know, and I think it's, it's interesting, and again, different places of the world have different ways of dealing with this, but in the Nordic countries, you see a high degree of worker cooperatives that, you know, have functioned pretty well in the economy and have done very well. And it also would be interesting because a lot of these people will be like, oh, I can never work for anyone. You know, I got to be my own boss, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, they're obviously only thinking about that in terms of being the owner of something. But it would be interesting presenting a different model of like, well, yeah, you're you're kind of not working for a boss, but you're all kind of in it together owning something.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah. But they were, they had already accepted the Jay-Z premise that we're not allowed to think of a world that doesn't exist. So the, that, that realm of the discussion was precluded from the beginning. So even if Mark had thought of it, it was going to be, yeah, there was nothing.

>> It's remarkable. I mean, this is why this is why Star Trek, this is why I talk about Star Trek constantly on this podcast because I feel like it's one of the easiest avenues to getting to pe, getting people to broaden their political imaginations. And and to that end, the last, the last point I have, floor is open for you guys as long as you want to keep talking about this, but is there was some interesting psychology. I was really wrestling with the psychology, like why, why these guys kept getting so sort of angry and personalizing. There was like a kind of a wound that that kept rising. They were triggered by something. Mark is basically telling them, "Hey, the problems in the world and the problems that have been specific or disproportionate to the black community are not actually your fault. You're not stupid. You're not a monkey. You're not avaricious. Like, there's nothing wrong with you. There's a systemic issue that's been preventing you from achieving the American dream. And you don't have to beat yourself up about the fact that you're not Jay-Z. Jay-Z is hardly Jay-Z. Jay-Z is unbelievably anomalous. It's like hoping that you wake up with the voice of a Mariah Carey. That can't be the way we all think we're going to survive. Release yourself from judgment and come this other way." And when Bernie did this in 2016, I remember the, it felt like a national catharsis where people remember when he, he did that, like, um, you know, the town hall, the health care town hall, and all these people who were kind of insecure about talking about how they couldn't provide healthcare for their families suddenly were like, "Gh, what do you mean? Like, it doesn't have to be this way? I'm not a bad father because I can't provide health care for my family." I always analogize it to that scene in Goodwill Hunting when, you know, Robin Williams hugs Matt Davis and says, "It's not your fault. It's not your fault." Like, it's a beautiful, it's a beautiful thing to realize, oh my god, it, it wasn't just my own moral failings, but I just didn't work hard enough. But these guys seem to be having the opposite reaction. What? They, they want to be Jay-Z. Like, they feel like they're being robbed of something by being told that it's very unlikely that they're going to be Jay-Z, but there's something else that they could be. What do you think that's about?

>> That's, that's the, uh, that's being raised with tough love. I mean, like, let's, let's be real with ourselves. If you're, if you're a black person, and this isn't just go for the, like the US, Canada, it's pretty much anywhere else in the world. Uh, you're generally told that there's some, like, there's always something wrong with what you're doing. You, like, you, you have to strive to be good enough. We were told that we have to be twice as good to get half as far. And I, I think, I mean, on the one hand, it, it is positive motivation to know that, yeah, the odds are stacked against you, but you can still succeed. But on the other hand, the, the, the problem becomes, okay, but what if you don't succeed at this thing that you want to do? So, for, for many people, like, they want to become billionaires. I don't even think it's really the allure of being a billionaire. I think if you're a centimillionaire versus being a, if you have hundreds of millions of dollars versus a billion dollars, does your life really improve that much? The answer is no. I think they want to be well recognized, uh, by the people around them. They want to be recognized by the community. They want to be held up as a positive example. And so being called a quote unquote billionaire, that's what will help them arrive at that status. The problem is, what does, what does that bring you? And what does that bring the community? Well, I mean, it, it brings you massive personal wealth, but does it improve the lot of your people? No. It just gets you, uh, adoring fans for a minute until the moment they turn on you. I remember Jay-Z's popularity has been waxing and waning for decades now. I remember when Occupy Wall Street was happening. Uh, he came out with, uh, with some t-shirts that said Occupy All Streets and everybody loved him for a second, like, "Oh my gosh, Jay-Z, he, he's in on this movement. Somebody as rich as him, as famous as him. He, all lives mattered. Occupy."

>> Oh, hang on. Wait, wait, wait, wait till I wait till I get through this one. So, everybody was really happy that he was supporting Occupy Wall Street, you know, by, by the, the message was, well, don't just Occupy Wall Street, Occupy All Streets. Like, you know, we, we should all be demanding more from, from the billionaire class or the 1% or elected representatives and so on. And then he was asked, I forget which publication asked him this, but, uh, he was asked like, "Okay, so the money that you make from these Occupy Wall Street shirts, is it going to be directed towards Occupy Wall Street? Are you going to be financially supporting them?" And he was like, "Uh, no." And then all of a sudden, everyone was against him again. So like, what, what does, what does actually being a billionaire get you in the eyes of the community? And the answer is, well, people are going to want to be you because they want to be as rich as you. But right now, is Jay-Z engendering respect from the broader community? Well, after the wreckage that he's left behind him, not just, you know, with regards to the Barkley Center, uh, dradicalizing black people, forging that deal with the NFL to defuse the anger that was being felt after, after they, they got Colin Kaepernick out of the paint. What, what has he left behind him? What is his ultimate legacy? And the answer is bold, uh, exploitation and selling his own people out. So I think what's getting them that angry is that they want to be able to do it the right way, but the, the problem is, there really isn't ever going to be a right way to do it. I think all that you can do is is strive to, you know, serve your family and serve your community as best you can. And whatever financial capital that you amass along the way, that's great. But if your end goal is to amass as much financial capital as possible, there is no end result other than for you to end up becoming a sellout like Jay-Z.

>> Man, Q was just mad because sat up there and exploded the myth of Canadian healthcare. The reality is the reality is, and then, and that's why Q left out of that important narrative that Jay-Z did leave Marcy Projects with a Bitcoin academy. So, let's, let's, let's be fair to to our billionaire benefactors as we recount this, this, you know.

>> Oh, boy. Yeah. I think you're really on to something. And specifically, I do think I can't speak for other communities, but I do think that my experience with bourgeois black folks, uh, my peers, is that there, even like when we were all at Harvard together and everyone was going to go into banking or be a lawyer or whatever, and that was, that was just the path everybody was on. Black people did all have a certain, certain, it was almost guilt, but let's call it consciousness to be nice about it, that they needed to like, they called it doing good by doing well. And that there was this sense that you had to give back. Now, I don't know why people were sitting around in their dorm saying, "I can't wait to go make a partner at this law firm so I can give back to something." I don't think that that was a narrative that they felt necessary to adopt. But the black people, to a tea, no matter how exploitative of a business you were going into, there was this sense that like culturally as black people, because of our history in this country, you needed to be attached to those movements. But there was this anxiety about it because again, you feel like you have this unique opportunity. You got into this school. You have an opportunity to make more money than anyone in your family ever has. You don't want to give up that opportunity. And almost feels disrespectful, the narrative goes, to your ancestors to not take advantage of this opportunity. But there's, I think, this fundamental truth that what that opportunity comes with exploitation. You can't get around it. And black people, because of our sort of historical legacy in this country, have are wrestling with that dissonance whenever we succeed financially in a way that I don't know that other groups are wrestling with it. And that's, I think, maybe the source of some of this panic that you see in this group. Other, other groups are like happily going off exploiting people, I think maybe. But, but the, the black people were close enough to it. Someone made a Jay-Z was talking about his cousin Butch. I have a cousin Butch. We all got a cousin Butch. And there's this sense of having an obligation to where we came from. And I don't know what to do about that because I understand like intellectually, there is something that feels like quote unquote unfair about everyone else having like a clear conscience as they go and they make their hard scrabble way and latestage capitalism. Why should I have to make the sacrifice? Why do I have to die relatively poor like Kwami or dead like so many activists? You know.

What, what do I, I live? I get one life on Earth. Why should I have to sacrifice it all? Especially when my people have sacrificed so much already. Is, is the, is the, I think the cognitive block that you have to get people past. Black people specifically passed.

So, but I think it's important to point out that that while, as I mentioned earlier, there was a, a national and, and obviously other forms of this outside of this country, but in the terms of this country, a national uh conscious effort by the business community to repropagandize the entire country, there has been, particularly over the last 50, 60 years, a, a heightened, weaponized form of this form of propaganda that's targeted black communities specifically, uh, as a method of counterinsurgency, psychological warfare, counter intelligence program operations, specifically designed to rebrand black power and black liberation as black capitalism. There have been, there has been a targeted effort, uh, uh, we're seeing it even renewed, I would argue, uh, in, in terms of what feels like, at least, uh, I haven't done a targeted analysis of this, but feels like an uptick in pro-black capitalist literature being promoted and arguments being made. And there's certainly, uh, an endless amount of that in the imposed media space that, that we're operating in ourselves. So, it doesn't, it, it, um, it's, it's, uh, upsetting and, and disturbing, but I'm not at all confused by why we see some of the conversations we, we were here critiquing.

And as a result, >> what I'm asking is, you know, why, why is it happening? I'm not confused. I mean, I think I just offered a, a theory as to why it's happening. That's my, I guess my question is, what does the counterprogramming look like if this is an obstacle that we've identified that might be unique to black Americans? I mean, they're propagandizing. To your point, Jared, I think because I think black people are vulnerable to this line of argument for reasons that are sort of historically un- I'm a little bit more sympathetic to, just because of the nature of our history. >> But we got to get past that. So, how do you get it to be the case where Kamala Harris doesn't show up with her like black excellence plan for small businesses, you know, and call that a black agenda, even as she's poo-pooing, you know, reparations or even universal healthcare? You know, how do you, how do you detangle, disentangle black people from the idea that they should get the benefits of capitalism now that we've just been allowed access to it for the first time in the hundreds of years of American history? You know, that, that, that get past the idea that it's unfair that the door is shutting in your face. And does part of that require a vision of the future that isn't this stereotype of living in a gray building wearing a burlap sack that Q alluded to earlier in the conversation?

>> I, I think I don't know if this will totally answer this, but, um, I, as much as, you know, I think Mark going on that show is great. Like you said, doing the Lord's work. I think what we can do in the media world has some impact, but I think ultimately it's going to have to happen through a real-life movement that sweeps enough people up and actually makes change. And I think we're in this kind of chicken or egg cycle where we need some successes as, as movements and reforms one to get more people involved, but we can't get more people involved, you know, if we, um, we can't win these things if we don't have more people involved. And I think this kind of gets to what they're saying about being realists is like, you know, how are we going to get people to this alternative vision when all they see is like, well, the only way I have a chance is through maybe owning a business. Sure, this stuff sounds great. Labor movement, universal healthcare, but we're not winning it. I don't see a prospect for winning it anytime in the near future. And I don't know how exactly we solve that problem, but I think the moment where people can actually start winning on some of these reforms and seeing that like there is an alternative path to improving our lives and, you know, solving the increasingly financial disaster that we're all going through in the real, real world. I think you will win more people away from these ideologies. But it's very hard because again, I think we all have the bias of like, what is right now? I'm going to adjust to that because it's very hard to imagine realistically winning these other things and with all the roadblocks and, you know, I think the burning, burning movement >> burning movements were a great attempt at that. There's, there's many attempts at that. There's many avenues. It could be labor movement, it could be other things, but I think cracking that will get at cracking down this, this ideology. I was just saying this, this, this panel doesn't even want this. This is a panel of people who, who Medicare for All comes up, universal healthcare comes up, and they're going to, people are dying in waiting rooms in Canada. >> Like, and I'm not saying that these guys are representative. >> Yeah, I was going to say, we don't know. Now, don't get me wrong. I mean, plenty people are like this. I know in my life, but they may not be that, we shouldn't overstate how broadly representative they necessarily are of all black people. >> Yeah. Yeah, look, this is, this is, there's an argument for the Zoron Mandanis of the world in what you just said, Paul. Um, you know, fixing potholes and getting tenants' rights and rent freezes and faster transportation as sort of proof of concept, whatever the limits of that may be. My last bullet point here is just I think there is some value in discussing the zero-sum game of it all. Uh, there's this belief, and you heard this pushed a little by Jamie Diamond, that like my being very, very rich has nothing to do with you being very, very poor. The more we talk, the more I feel like all, all anybody should do is do the Mark's theory of labor table talk because everything just seems to come back around to that, like the zero-sum aspect of that, like there is profit, and it's coming from somewhere, and it's coming from labor, and it's not coming from the guy who bought the wood, like that, the value. Rather, that feels so pedantic and almost absurd to say that's what we should be buying ads to go on TV. That's what we should be talking about in debates, presidential debates. But it's hard for me to get around it. I do think it, in some ways, is the most succinct explanation of why you can't negotiate with capitalism. And I'm going to be extremely on-brand, but this is where I, I have to come back to the labor movement because it can make that argument not purely on an intellectual level. And people are really experiencing. Like, I, I think about, you know, a couple years ago, there was the autoworker strike at the big three, General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis. And part of what the union did in bargaining, and they printed out these huge billboards, and they would have workers of meetings like, this is how much money you're asking for in wages and benefits. This is how much the company just spent on stock buybacks, and usually it was like the same number or more. But, you know, it workers who again, are not unfortunately probably not listening to shows like this or reading things that I'm writing, kind of confronting >> Yeah, maybe listening to the podcast Mark Lamont Hill was on, you know, but they're now confronting this in not just intellectually, which is important, but in their real lives and seeing, yeah, like I'm working hard, look at these profits, and I have an organizational way of expressing that and fighting for more of that, you know, and you're just forcing to deal with that reality that you can't deny. So, you know, I just think we need more organizational avenues. Unions are one thing, but they're not the only thing, but more ways people can confront this in their real lives and try to struggle against it.

>> Well, let me leave it there. You guys have all been extremely insightful, comedic, knowledgeable as we pick apart this viral 20-minute clip. We listen to it almost in its entirety. If anyone has any last things they want to say, go ahead and say them as we wrap up here. But I want to give you each an opportunity to tell people where they can find more of you and your work on the internet and beyond. As we close out, let's start with you, Q.

>> Uh, the only thing that I would say is that, uh, there, there really is hardly any such thing as a black capitalist. As much as we want to believe, um, that any of us can make it if we try hard enough, and I'm not saying that we can't, what I'm saying is your, your, your definition of making it still doesn't make you a capitalist. The, the idea that socialism is, uh, some like gray and lifeless housing flats that they show you from like pictures of the old USSR, which often times aren't even from the USSR. But, you know, that, that, that's not what socialism is. Socialism is simply making sure that the profits that get produced from your blood, sweat, and tears are reinvested in yourself as a worker and in the broader community. It's, it's uplifting the collective quality of life. When you look at countries like, uh, you look at the USSR or you look at Cuba and so on and see that they have a low quality of life, that's not because socialism fails. It's because your capitalist system deliberately tries to destroy those systems, tries to impoverish them, uh, to make their quality of living worse to show you as an American never to try that, or the same exact thing will happen to you. And what happens when socialism actually succeeds? Well, you have a country like China, and you will never really understand what China's like until you actually set foot in this country and see people's quality of life. And it makes me so upset to know that this is possible not only in the US, Canada, the UK. This is also possible on the African continent. It could be possible pretty much anywhere if the people had the power to make their governments care about their collective well-being. So, what I would say is, if you're, if you're going to make an argument for socialism, I, I appreciate what Mark Lamont Hill, I do believe he is doing God's work by going on those shows, but you got to point to the successes and say, like, this is entirely possible. It's not just because the, all of the Chinese people in China are Chinese. It's not just because people in Vietnam are Vietnamese. It's because the government actually cares for the well-being of the people, and they know that if they stop caring for the well-being of the people, they will be immediately replaced. That, that's, that's what I think the argument needs to be going forward. I think, uh, the labor movement, I think infrastructure and, and healthcare is all part of it. But I think what it really comes down to is if your, if you know for a fact that your government couldn't give a damn whether you live or die, then it's time, it's time to change your system of government.

>> All right. So Q says beheadings in the streets. Thank, thank you for that. >> And where can people find you on the internet? Uh, I mean, I, I'm a civilian now. I'm hardly really writing. Sorry about that. I'm a civilian now. I'm doing like writing sporadically these days. Uh, but you can find me on X and eventually we'll be coming back to, uh, to doing, uh, writing on a more regular basis once, once everything here with my visa and immigration settles down. You'll, you'll see my writings on a more regular basis.

>> Okie dokie. All right, Jared, where can people find you on the internet and beyond? Uh, so folks can find me at I Mix What I Like and Black Liberation Media and, uh, doing what I would encourage others to do, just constantly supporting these kinds of conversations, grassroots organizations that tried to make material these kinds of conversations. And the only thing I just wanted to add quickly is that one of the, the, the overriding messages I think that we're meant to get from these kinds of podcasts we've been critiquing tonight is just what they said, that that we should not think of a world that doesn't exist. That we, we should be content in, in struggling with the within the parameters that have been set by those in power. And I would want to just constantly encourage that we reject and resist that. Uh, being even an H.B.C.U. professor is relatively easy work. But I've done real labor, and I can't imagine ever for one moment thinking in that, in, in, in those most difficult moments of work that I should not think about a different world or that I should not think about a different way to enjoy, uh, the labor and the wealth produced from my labor, uh, than what what I was have. So, so to for anyone to encourage that we not think of improving or a different world or a world that doesn't even exist, to your point, even about Star Trek worlds that we can't even imagine, is diabolical. So, uh, let's get back to that and, uh, thank you very much for, for this conversation.

>> It's a pleasure to host you all. Paul, where can people find more of you and your work on the internet beyond?

>> Uh, right. Mostly for Jackaben and Labor Notes. I, uh, recently co-edited a book, a collection of bad Russian essays that's published by Damage magazine. So people can go there if they're interested in that.

>> Okay. Amazing. I would like to note, I believe the context of this, uh, of the, of the main clip of the Joe Biden podcast clip is that that's at the end of the episode and Mark had to go somewhere. He was trying to get off the set. He, I think he had to pick up a kid or something. You can, you can hear it and you can see it when you're watching it. Like they were going overtime and he was trying desperately to get his points across before the final buzzer. So I think he did, you know, he did exceptionally well, especially under those conditions and with a five-on-one, you know, gang gang bang gang bang.

>> No, it was a, it was a reverse, it was a reverse jumping if anything. Like I feel like he, he ended up jumping them >> more so than it was a five-on-one. It was a one-v-five. Yeah.

>> But it was his wife that got him out of there if I, if I caught that correctly. So, so salute, salute to our, our spouses who know like, wrap it up. Get my man out of here.

>> We, we love, we love a tag-in. We love a tag team. So shout out to Mark. Maybe he'll come on the show soon and we can continue this conversation. As always, take care of yourselves. Remember to keep the faith. And if you want an additional bad episode of Bad Faith Podcast every week, you can find it at patreon.com/badfaithpodcast. Take care. Hey YouTube, thanks for watching. Just a reminder that this is a podcast. You can catch an extra premium episode every Monday for $5 a month at patreon.com/badfaithpodcast. That's patreon.com/badfaithpodcast for $5 a month. An extra episode every week. Additionally, please do consider liking this video, subscribing to this channel. It helps us out. It helps independent media beat the algorithm. We appreciate you and as always, keep the faith.