Name: Z from Black Socialists in America Explains What's Wrong with Capitalism
Uploaded: 2020-06-14T22:12:45.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Z from Black Socialists in America Explains What's Wrong with Capitalism' from Tim Heidecker on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-06-14. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Z from Black Socialists in America Explains What's Wrong with Capitalism' from Tim Heidecker on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-06-14. Transcript available.

first of all somebody sent uh you sent a picture to our producer of your
library uh a collection
of books you have and i was impressed to see not only do you have zone theory
but you have the on
cinema reader that is a that is an impressive uh collection of books i got more
i got more stuff
from the the tim and eric universe uh in the stash it's not just that i'm a
huge fan i've been a huge
fan for probably over a decade now wow you're my hero great it's really great
to to be able to speak
uh through this platform of yours i appreciate it are you in uh are you in los
angeles i don't know
you have to understand i don't do any research when i do my show i don't know
anything about
anything but are you where are you right i'm in i'm in new york city and i was
actually i invited
zach fox who's a black comedian based in la on to this show too but i actually
think he's asleep
right now but he's on your time he's actually a friend of stevens of thundercats
okay well maybe
i'll have him call in during the thundercat hour of the show the thunder that
would make sense that
would make sense too so where do you want to begin i i should have it's tough i
should have it's too big
of a conversation right to just i just want to have you on and say um you know
first like maybe just a
little history or a little background from you like how did you become i don't
want to say the word
radicalized but they i saw that on twitter about people saying like there
somebody asked like when
did you kind of become again i don't say the word radicalized but you become
maybe dis disillusioned
with the democratic party or become how did you become politically uh awakened
or aware i got hairy legs
are you gonna have to mute doug it's it's you know what that was not me i only
got like what 10 15
minutes i know i'm like how how do i get how do i see if you would like if you
would like me to
if you would like my hands are up i'm not touching it i will i'll be happy to
love it i love it okay
last one i'll take a break um i actually if you don't if you don't mind like
given i only have
so much time i kind of want to start with like the moment go ahead we're in
like with police
brutality please white supremacy and racism and all these different things and
i just kind of want
to make the point that i feel like we're compart trying to compartmentalize
maybe not trying but
we're compartmentalizing issues here we're kind of like talking about racism we're
talking about police
brutality in a vacuum almost when you know when we're talking about the
institution of policing
we're talking about something that that you can tie directly back to slave
patrols and when
we're talking about policing as an institution something that's upheld by a
government that's
controlled by the capitalist class and controlled by the property class and all
of this is happening
on a broader backdrop of you know a socioeconomic system of domination that we
call capitalism
mm-hmm um and you know so it's like it's tough it's tough to kind of piece
piece everything uh together but
it's it's necessary because when you when you can kind of look at things from
that angle um you kind of
realize that um you can't really we can't really legislate some kind of systems
change uh uh given that
especially in the u.s where capitalism it developed out of chattel slavery
right right all of this stuff
the social systems of domination the economic systems of domination they're all
interconnected and um believe
it or not in different contexts around the world in the past 100 100 100 200
years
um you know there's been discussions about oh let's just get socialist
representation let's
let's get legislation from europe to japan the tip of the 20th century you know
uh people were talking
about this yeah um so there's a lot of history to unpack there i don't want
anyone to just take my
word for it but there's a lot of you know context to it and so that basically
you know puts us
us in a in a position where we really have to start talking about how do we get
at capitalist relations
and how do we get at these like hierarchical authoritarian power relations
starting from where
we're at you know and i actually i listen to office hours so um i've listened
to the episode where you had
steve from from pavement on and i really liked what you said about how you
really appreciate it when people
can actually offer speak to the imagination speak to what actually can be what
the alternative can be
and i actually think that the left whatever that means now um up until this
point hasn't really done
a great job uh of doing that we do a really great job of explaining how fucked
up things are right in
really great detail but i think in this moment we have to kind of sit with the
fact that the radical
change that we really want and that different people are envisioning it's not
going to fall
from the top and it's it's crazy you know in this moment where with the rebellions
and the crazy
that's been going on our organization has been getting more attention for that
reason people are
seeing okay um what we've been doing isn't cutting it maybe i have to explore
some radical strategic
alternatives because as a whole is about to get very radical whether you want
it right or not yeah
we're all in a burning house yeah we're all in a burning house it's going to
get it's going to come
to everybody yeah and whether it's whether it's i want well well whether it's
climate or just the very
concept of uh capitalism where you there needs to be an exponential growth so
if anybody that's an
economist can explain to me how you can have a company and have that company
have exponential growth
without unlimited resources that doesn't it doesn't compute at some point it
falls apart at some part
at some point it's a it's a pyramid scheme it's a ponzi scheme right that is
starting to collapse
it's happening in all kinds of different ways right and what i want to say to
that is
for those who do have this understanding however they got to it it is
overwhelming and it can be
intimidating to look at the totality of this whole thing and be like holy
fucking shit what are we what
in the world are we supposed to do up until this point it's been a lot of
reactive activism it's been
a lot of electoral stuff millions upon millions of dollars into the electoral
stuff
and i think right now is the time where we really need to start talking about
being proactive and
actually building socialism like building a new world within the shell of the
old and and building
it up to the point that it can render you know the status quo obsolete meaning
poor and working class
people they see what we're building and they go geez like why it's meeting my
needs i have more autonomy
i have control of my life and in my community yeah why in the am i going to go
join this like
mini dictatorship because that's what the workplace is for most people it's a
dictatorship every single
one right you have a hierarchy you have that pyramid and you have a group of
shareholders at the top and
they're scraping off the surplus and they're throwing you scraps and scale that
all the way up
right and it's that pyramid scheme that you were you were talking about and so
our organization and our partner organizations um more specifically cooperation
jackson based in
jackson mississippi we're we're basically using a lot of institutions that come
out of what we call
the solidarity economy movement so worker cooperatives community land trusts
credit unions there's not
enough time for me to yeah each of these different things but i actually want
to zero in on the
cooperative bit because i think it's right it's it's because when we're talking
about worker cooperatives
and different structures of that we're talking about breaking the employer
employee dynamic right
in relationship right because that's what we that's what we want we want to
live in a world without
bosses and so a lot of freedom really understand freedom right freedom and
liberty right right and
responsibility and you know and uh you know humanism so that humanism so it is
it is it is uh strategically
selfish in a good way i don't know if selfish can be used in a good way but it
is strategically advantageous
for me it can well it's strategically advantageous for me to be good to you not
only not because i'm
worried about going to hell or i'm worried about going to jail but it's because
then you lie odds are
you're going to be good to me right and we're going to take care of each other
you know right but let's
we gotta we gotta like elevate to the level of like in talking about
institutions talking about
really like money and power yeah how how we're actually relating to each other
in an economic
sense and that's that's kind of like that's the most intimidating bit but it's
the most important
bit it's why we're so focused on labor and in our context as black people we're
trying to build in
self-determination we're trying to build a cooperative economic base we're
trying to you know what we
say free the land so that we can really carve out a space where we don't have
to deal with the the the
police you know coming in and and doing what they've been doing right since the
slave patrols um and we
want to be able to build in this way in a broader coalition with people of
other you know other ethnic
racial backgrounds people all around the world and so right now we're really in
this moment my organization
in particular of trying to really communicate the the vision for an eco-socialist
society the society
that we want to see in a really creative and exciting way and i you know we're
also having
conversations with creatives artists comedians well i wanted to have zach on
and he can speak to this
himself whenever i guess he's on the show zach braff zach braff is going to be
joining us folks
zach zach fox because in comedy as a as a black comedian he's already you know
he's already kind
of he's well read on all these this different that i'm talking about and his
practice is organizing
amongst other black comedians in a cooperative way and then using after they've
paid their bills and
they're comfortable and the business costs are taken care of using that surplus
and putting it in a fund
for other people to build in the exact same way so that we can all start cooperating
with one another
and that's kind of like the idea the nugget that we're trying to get out to
people and we're trying
to make it easier for communities to develop in that way because there's so
much there's so many
barriers just to do that you know so how do people so noobs i hate saying noobs
like i'm some kind of
gamer but how do people like are that are there's a lot of people that are very
educated on this a lot
of my listeners are a lot of my listeners are very aware i also didn't want to
say woke i'm trying to
stop using all these buzzwords but like how where do they go to like i mean i
think some people might
be this is breaking my brain i don't understand how do we right how do we stop
this so where do people
start where do people go and let's like give them something positive and some
place for them to go to
explore and learn more right right i would actually say black socialists plural
dot us and a part of
why our platform has gotten so big in the last few years is because of the
educational work we've been
trying to do with limited very limited resources but we've been distilling a
lot of these concepts
down to some some key things in a lot of different ways and we have a lot more
work to do
actually on that front um cool yeah can i ask a question doug's got a question
and then we'll wrap
things up because we have a busy busy you know i could do the show all day i
wish i could do this
show i mean i should do that adr show every week i'm like dylan what do you got
there well i'm just
wondering um the word socialist scares a lot of people away so of course what
do you say to someone who
hears that word and immediately says well that's you know they're just turned
off immediately by that
um i don't know i i like to talk about um socialism as economic democracy and
then i like to really
bring it to the very very micro level talk about like democracy in the
workplace why are we always
talking about democracy in terms of like i don't know electoral politics or
government or whatever
but then when we start having a conversation about why is it my workplace
democratic it's it's like i
don't you know there's there's a there's a huge contradiction in that and even
in in liberalism you
know we're talking about liberty we're talking about democracy and egalitarian
principles and values but
you know it's all kind of on paper it's not really in in practice and you know
it's a lot to to unpack
you know even just democracy in the workplace one person one vote how that's
how that's structured
but i think people need to understand like capitalism is that is that is like i
said before that is the
dictatorship in the workplace it is the centralization of power it is the
hierarchy we're just we're just
trying to relate to one another in a cooperative way and we want poor and
working class people to to have
control and you know decentralization is another kind of big part of what we're
pushing on i don't
know if that answers your question um but it is a lot to unpack it's a lot and
there's going to be people
that are not ready for it or not open to it but you know and you can't there's
only so much arguing with
your aunt you're going to want to have the energy to do so of course it's i i
mean let's just close by
saying i think it's important that you're out there uh presenting an
alternative vision of what the
future could be right and that's and too many politicians have stopped doing
that it's my favorite
guy ever is adam curtis and he talks of in in uh hyper normalization which is i
think one of the greatest
movies i've seen in a long time talks a lot about that the people that the
leaders have stopped
providing a vision because they feel things are fairly hopeless and that they're
going to maintain
sort of a an illusion of normalcy an illusion of how things should be because
they've created systems
that are impossible to manage anymore and that right so right so they've
stopped they've created false
they've created uh you know controversy and crisis and you know not so much
created that but they've
they've made they've they've prioritized things uh incorrectly um but anyways
people have stopped
our leaders have stopped giving us what a vision of what the future could be
people like you are out
there uh actually well that's promoting a vision for the future that's why we
need to be our own leaders
yes right we got it this has to be bottom up if we keep if we keep looking up
like this this crazy
beautiful world is just going to drop our time here our time here is short our
time here is short use
it wisely as wisely as you can um see i have a quick question it has to be
quick very quick i don't
know if there's a controversial or if you want to answer this but what do you
say to people that don't
want to vote for joe biden trump trump tough stuff z vik brought it sleepy eyed
sleepy eyed sleepy eyed vik has
come with i'm just curious look i'll say i'll i'll say you have you have the
harm reduction kind of take
that right you know like for example noam chomsky has put out noam chomsky is a
big supporter of our
org i i personally you know i i understand i think that's that's a logical
position i'm kind of like
yo can we elevate the conversation even past the presidential election talk
about what we can do
right now just start start building because but voting is is should be the bare
minimum and i think
it's become in some ways it's it's it's distracting when you create this false
liberal conservative
false dichotomy the stuff that we're talking about right now really isn't in
the mainstream it's not
being discussed it's on the it's on the edges so it's on the fringes how do we
how do we elevate the
conversation to be like okay in our day-to-day what are we going to do this is
what we have to do i
kind of like kind of i kind of didn't answer your question no that's that makes
sense yeah i like uh
i think i think rob delaney this was a while ago uh i don't know where he is
now but he just said you
know what i think i'm not going to really comment too much about the
presidential election i'm going to
my energy is going to be focused on on smaller races senate races congressional
districts like that
kind of stuff that's just like he's not really saying like here's who i'm going
to vote for
he's not going to vote for but it's just sort of like right there's there's
other there's there's
uh there's a lot of places you can put your energy right can you imagine if we
could if we
i'm not going to rant for another minute but can you imagine if we could have
the more local kind of
focus on the municipal focus and then pair that with economic democratic
institution building
you know cooperatives uh uh communes whatever it might be so that it can
actually be sustained
right like financially and and show results show results right yeah people are
held accountable
come to our come to our come to our neighborhood and see what's happening here
right right all right
z uh i love you i know already i love you i love you deep love so when i see
you next time i'm allowed to
leave the state i'll try to seek you out please and give you a give you a hug
all right man yeah thank you
for calling one one request go ahead and we get ralph lucas back james dean you
know i think is he
still out here he we he was not in the greatest shape the last time we we
connected with him he was uh
you know we all we all get uh we all get older and sometimes it's like well
this isn't uh possible
i have i haven't checked in a while but he's one of the greatest people we've
ever worked with he's
gonna be a dead man soon i love you guys too all right man take care take care
peace wow
great conversation that's what this show is it's a great show love it it's just
a great show

Z from Black Socialists in America Explains What's Wrong with Capitalism

first of all somebody sent uh you sent a picture to our producer of your
library uh a collection
of books you have and i was impressed to see not only do you have zone theory
but you have the on
cinema reader that is a that is an impressive uh collection of books i got more
i got more stuff
from the the tim and eric universe uh in the stash it's not just that i'm a
huge fan i've been a huge
fan for probably over a decade now wow you're my hero great it's really great
to to be able to speak
uh through this platform of yours i appreciate it are you in uh are you in los
angeles i don't know
you have to understand i don't do any research when i do my show i don't know
anything about
anything but are you where are you right i'm in i'm in new york city and i was
actually i invited
zach fox who's a black comedian based in la on to this show too but i actually
think he's asleep
right now but he's on your time he's actually a friend of stevens of thundercats
okay well maybe
i'll have him call in during the thundercat hour of the show the thunder that
would make sense that
would make sense too so where do you want to begin i i should have it's tough i
should have it's too big
of a conversation right to just i just want to have you on and say um you know
first like maybe just a
little history or a little background from you like how did you become i don't
want to say the word
radicalized but they i saw that on twitter about people saying like there
somebody asked like when
did you kind of become again i don't say the word radicalized but you become
maybe dis disillusioned
with the democratic party or become how did you become politically uh awakened
or aware i got hairy legs
are you gonna have to mute doug it's it's you know what that was not me i only
got like what 10 15
minutes i know i'm like how how do i get how do i see if you would like if you
would like me to
if you would like my hands are up i'm not touching it i will i'll be happy to
love it i love it okay
last one i'll take a break um i actually if you don't if you don't mind like
given i only have
so much time i kind of want to start with like the moment go ahead we're in
like with police
brutality please white supremacy and racism and all these different things and
i just kind of want
to make the point that i feel like we're compart trying to compartmentalize
maybe not trying but
we're compartmentalizing issues here we're kind of like talking about racism we're
talking about police
brutality in a vacuum almost when you know when we're talking about the
institution of policing
we're talking about something that that you can tie directly back to slave
patrols and when
we're talking about policing as an institution something that's upheld by a
government that's
controlled by the capitalist class and controlled by the property class and all
of this is happening
on a broader backdrop of you know a socioeconomic system of domination that we
call capitalism
mm-hmm um and you know so it's like it's tough it's tough to kind of piece
piece everything uh together but
it's it's necessary because when you when you can kind of look at things from
that angle um you kind of
realize that um you can't really we can't really legislate some kind of systems
change uh uh given that
especially in the u.s where capitalism it developed out of chattel slavery
right right all of this stuff
the social systems of domination the economic systems of domination they're all
interconnected and um believe
it or not in different contexts around the world in the past 100 100 100 200
years
um you know there's been discussions about oh let's just get socialist
representation let's
let's get legislation from europe to japan the tip of the 20th century you know
uh people were talking
about this yeah um so there's a lot of history to unpack there i don't want
anyone to just take my
word for it but there's a lot of you know context to it and so that basically
you know puts us
us in a in a position where we really have to start talking about how do we get
at capitalist relations
and how do we get at these like hierarchical authoritarian power relations
starting from where
we're at you know and i actually i listen to office hours so um i've listened
to the episode where you had
steve from from pavement on and i really liked what you said about how you
really appreciate it when people
can actually offer speak to the imagination speak to what actually can be what
the alternative can be
and i actually think that the left whatever that means now um up until this
point hasn't really done
a great job uh of doing that we do a really great job of explaining how fucked
up things are right in
really great detail but i think in this moment we have to kind of sit with the
fact that the radical
change that we really want and that different people are envisioning it's not
going to fall
from the top and it's it's crazy you know in this moment where with the rebellions
and the crazy
that's been going on our organization has been getting more attention for that
reason people are
seeing okay um what we've been doing isn't cutting it maybe i have to explore
some radical strategic
alternatives because as a whole is about to get very radical whether you want
it right or not yeah
we're all in a burning house yeah we're all in a burning house it's going to
get it's going to come
to everybody yeah and whether it's whether it's i want well well whether it's
climate or just the very
concept of uh capitalism where you there needs to be an exponential growth so
if anybody that's an
economist can explain to me how you can have a company and have that company
have exponential growth
without unlimited resources that doesn't it doesn't compute at some point it
falls apart at some part
at some point it's a it's a pyramid scheme it's a ponzi scheme right that is
starting to collapse
it's happening in all kinds of different ways right and what i want to say to
that is
for those who do have this understanding however they got to it it is
overwhelming and it can be
intimidating to look at the totality of this whole thing and be like holy
fucking shit what are we what
in the world are we supposed to do up until this point it's been a lot of
reactive activism it's been
a lot of electoral stuff millions upon millions of dollars into the electoral
stuff
and i think right now is the time where we really need to start talking about
being proactive and
actually building socialism like building a new world within the shell of the
old and and building
it up to the point that it can render you know the status quo obsolete meaning
poor and working class
people they see what we're building and they go geez like why it's meeting my
needs i have more autonomy
i have control of my life and in my community yeah why in the am i going to go
join this like
mini dictatorship because that's what the workplace is for most people it's a
dictatorship every single
one right you have a hierarchy you have that pyramid and you have a group of
shareholders at the top and
they're scraping off the surplus and they're throwing you scraps and scale that
all the way up
right and it's that pyramid scheme that you were you were talking about and so
our organization and our partner organizations um more specifically cooperation
jackson based in
jackson mississippi we're we're basically using a lot of institutions that come
out of what we call
the solidarity economy movement so worker cooperatives community land trusts
credit unions there's not
enough time for me to yeah each of these different things but i actually want
to zero in on the
cooperative bit because i think it's right it's it's because when we're talking
about worker cooperatives
and different structures of that we're talking about breaking the employer
employee dynamic right
in relationship right because that's what we that's what we want we want to
live in a world without
bosses and so a lot of freedom really understand freedom right freedom and
liberty right right and
responsibility and you know and uh you know humanism so that humanism so it is
it is it is uh strategically
selfish in a good way i don't know if selfish can be used in a good way but it
is strategically advantageous
for me it can well it's strategically advantageous for me to be good to you not
only not because i'm
worried about going to hell or i'm worried about going to jail but it's because
then you lie odds are
you're going to be good to me right and we're going to take care of each other
you know right but let's
we gotta we gotta like elevate to the level of like in talking about
institutions talking about
really like money and power yeah how how we're actually relating to each other
in an economic
sense and that's that's kind of like that's the most intimidating bit but it's
the most important
bit it's why we're so focused on labor and in our context as black people we're
trying to build in
self-determination we're trying to build a cooperative economic base we're
trying to you know what we
say free the land so that we can really carve out a space where we don't have
to deal with the the the
police you know coming in and and doing what they've been doing right since the
slave patrols um and we
want to be able to build in this way in a broader coalition with people of
other you know other ethnic
racial backgrounds people all around the world and so right now we're really in
this moment my organization
in particular of trying to really communicate the the vision for an eco-socialist
society the society
that we want to see in a really creative and exciting way and i you know we're
also having
conversations with creatives artists comedians well i wanted to have zach on
and he can speak to this
himself whenever i guess he's on the show zach braff zach braff is going to be
joining us folks
zach zach fox because in comedy as a as a black comedian he's already you know
he's already kind
of he's well read on all these this different that i'm talking about and his
practice is organizing
amongst other black comedians in a cooperative way and then using after they've
paid their bills and
they're comfortable and the business costs are taken care of using that surplus
and putting it in a fund
for other people to build in the exact same way so that we can all start cooperating
with one another
and that's kind of like the idea the nugget that we're trying to get out to
people and we're trying
to make it easier for communities to develop in that way because there's so
much there's so many
barriers just to do that you know so how do people so noobs i hate saying noobs
like i'm some kind of
gamer but how do people like are that are there's a lot of people that are very
educated on this a lot
of my listeners are a lot of my listeners are very aware i also didn't want to
say woke i'm trying to
stop using all these buzzwords but like how where do they go to like i mean i
think some people might
be this is breaking my brain i don't understand how do we right how do we stop
this so where do people
start where do people go and let's like give them something positive and some
place for them to go to
explore and learn more right right i would actually say black socialists plural
dot us and a part of
why our platform has gotten so big in the last few years is because of the
educational work we've been
trying to do with limited very limited resources but we've been distilling a
lot of these concepts
down to some some key things in a lot of different ways and we have a lot more
work to do
actually on that front um cool yeah can i ask a question doug's got a question
and then we'll wrap
things up because we have a busy busy you know i could do the show all day i
wish i could do this
show i mean i should do that adr show every week i'm like dylan what do you got
there well i'm just
wondering um the word socialist scares a lot of people away so of course what
do you say to someone who
hears that word and immediately says well that's