Drew Gooden or: How I Learned to Hate the Radlib

A specter is haunting the Youtube algorithm. The specter of radical liberalism.

Recently, a new Drew Gooden video has hit people's recommended page. "Greed is Destroying the World".

In it, Drew speaks on a number of topics related back to AI. Environmental catastrophe, the way the rich exploit the poor (literally saying the working class), the issues of the stock market and two-tiered economy. 

Drew speaks on the fact that people calling for "marginal increases in taxes" are decried as insane and "anti-American". He defends his position as not radical but instead rooted in history. The working class used to have it good, he says! 

Minimum wage, 8 hour workday, union rights, etc.

"Their employers were PROUD of how much money they were paying their employees!!"

And let's not forget: "During the golden age of Capitalism the government... did a bunch of Socialism." I'll stop quoting this video now and get on with it, you've gotten the idea and if not, watch it yourself.

I Began to Hate the Radlib

Overall, the takes in the video are consistent with someone who subscribes to a socially 'progressive' but politically liberal worldview. There are calls to "return" to a time in America where the rich were proportionally taxed much higher, where the outwards appearance of capital was friendlier and its rhetoric more pro-worker. There is this idea by the end that things have to get worse before they get better. But, what is better?

In many ways, liberals have a tendency to look back in the same way fascists do. That's not to equate their social values to one another, but rather they both long for a mode of society that "feels" better. To fascists, the collapse of old social orders leaves them believing a return to the "way of things" would fix this antagonism they have with modern society. To liberals, a return to what they feel is a more "free market" with social progress attached onto would fix the antagonism they feel.

But antagonism is not a byproduct of exterior changes in society. You feel antagonism towards society, but in your hunt for why you've found mirages. The social order has changed because the mode of production and exchange has changed. Where work once belonged to local communities and businesses, it now belongs to international trade and more centralized production away from the numerous pockets of living, and these places cannot compete with corporate production. So, the old social order has died. In the ruins you feel anger, but you ascribe this anger not to the root cause (capital) but to the symptoms. You curse your pain but not the caner.

To radical liberals, they curse the loosening of government reigns. To them, the free market has gone awry and is not itself "free" anymore. All have been priced out by a billionaire class and they have become dangerously aware of the plight of the working class. However, they do not see the systemic issue - capitalism. They instead see this as a scale that has been tipped unfairly, and if we could only take the thumb of the rich off of it, we'd be free once again. The "good ol' days" where unions existed more numerously, and we could all buy a home in the suburbs, and we all had a "living wage". A living wage. Yes, to the liberal, the issue is not that this mode of production has reached its inevitable end conclusion, the likes of which Engels and Marx warned of. No, the issue is that our wage-slavery is not soft enough for their liking. They've become aware of the collar around their neck but it's not that the collar exists that angers them. No, it's that it has become a bit too tight.

Engels posited a number of things which have proven prophetic in the year 2025. That decade after decade, starting even back in his time, the capitalist system would come to screeching halts because the contradictions would pile up and cause economic crashes. In that time, the worker would face the worse of it, since they did not have the means of production under their control. The employer would shed off the worker, often resulting in sicknesses, death, and great insecurity in the working class. The great surplus of unemployed workers that keeps popping up would work only to the benefit of the bourgeoisie - the owning class - who in turn have a great pool of workers all competing to work for the lowest wage to make themselves stand out. 

On and on we go. 

So to Drew Gooden, the fact that capitalism has reached it's end course and the worker is more and more exploited each day is a warning sign to go backwards. To become reactionary and hope that the representatives of the bourgeoisie in parliamentary politics will suddenly become representatives of the working class interest instead, somehow overturning decades of wealth accumulation, all of which has been stolen from the workers. This is the radlib perspective. Not to question capitalism itself, but how to make wage-slavery a little more tolerable. God forbid we perform any level of material analysis.

I Don't Really Hate the Radlib

To conclude, I don't really had the radlib. It's good to point out the issues people are facing. But it isn't enough!

You need to take a serious stance for once. You need to face the music as it were and look at capitalism with a genuine question of: Is what we're experiencing a bug in the system, or a feature?

And I'm afraid, that as all materialists have found out in their examination, it is the latter. It is a feature of capitalism that wealth rises, that the surplus wealth and value generated by the working class ends up going towards the top. That one class of people owns and the other doesn't will always permeate further and further inequality. That capitalism is, at its core, a system of inequality.

That early socialists, anarchists, and workers unions fought to the bloody death to secure 8 hour work days, labor organizing rights, etc. is unsung - only the fact that the rights existed is noted. That those same dead men and women would look on us today in despair is lost on the liberal, that they would hear the cry for a "better capitalism" and weep. We deserved better than capitalism. We deserved, and still do deserve, socialism.