DeepSummary
The episode begins with Daniel Turade explaining the metaphor "capitalism is the virus" and how it relates to the profit motive leading companies to suppress information about harmful products and practices. He discusses how pharmaceutical companies prioritize profits over developing life-saving drugs and how capitalism fuels catastrophic climate change and decreasing life expectancy.
Emily Steers talks about her experience successfully unionizing teaching assistants at Wilfrid Laurier University, highlighting the benefits of unionization like better wages, benefits, and working conditions. She emphasizes that while unionization is a step towards a more equitable society, it is only a stopgap measure on the path to restructuring society to prioritize human needs over profits.
The speakers argue that the capitalist system is fundamentally flawed, with the ruling class exploiting workers for profit. They advocate for an international socialist movement led by the working class to reclaim industries and establish a system where resources are distributed based on human need rather than the drive for profits.
Key Episodes Takeaways
- Capitalism prioritizes profits over human wellbeing, leading to preventable diseases, environmental destruction, and declining life expectancy.
- Unionization provides workers a means to negotiate better wages and conditions, but is just a step towards the larger goal of restructuring society around human needs rather than profits.
- An international socialist movement mobilizing workers and the oppressed is necessary to overcome the exploitative capitalist system run by the ruling class.
- Under socialism, decision-making power would lie with the masses to structure production and distribution around fulfilling human needs and abilities.
- Past socialist experiments suffered from problems of hierarchy and lack of democratic mass participation.
- Overcoming capitalism requires moving beyond reforms and taking control of industries to establish true workers' democracy.
- Solidarity among workers across borders is crucial to realizing the internationalist vision of democratic socialism.
- Art, expression and meeting human needs rather than profits would be the driving forces in a socialist society.
Top Episodes Quotes
- “The pandemics of lung cancer, mesothelioma, other environmentally linked cancers, and diabetes, so called diseases of old age, would have been largely mitigated if profit did not factor into the equation.“ by Daniel Turade
- “Not by developing new drugs that help people, but by increasing market share and getting doctors to prescribe their costlier medication instead of alternatives.“ by Daniel Turade
- “The end goal is the restructuring of society so that we are not dependent on wage labor for survival.“ by Emily Steers
- “Thats why it is vital to mobilize the masses with the vision of workers control and workers democracy in mind. For workers of the world to unite when the moment comes.“ by Daniel Turade
- “When we are able to actively consult with a broad base of people, when we are able to get input from the people and actually meet their needs and figure out how to build a society that meets the vast majority of people's needs, that is the path to liberation.“ by Emily Steers
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Episode Information
The Red Review
Socialist Action
7/4/22
All the people who work on The Red Review live and work on stolen Indigenous lands across Turtle Island. There can be no reconciliation without restitution, which includes Land Back, RCMP off Indigenous land, and seizing the assets of the major resource corporations and returning them to the commons.
In this special episode of The Red Review, brought to you by Socialist Action, we rebroadcast a conversation between Emily, Daniel, and comrade Chris Wanamaker, host of The Open Mic, a Literary Journey into Words on local 107.3 FM in St. John's New Brunswick. In this conversation, Daniel reads out an article he published, "The Virology of Capitalism," which Chris connects to Emily's experience organizing a union of teaching assistants at Wilfrid Laurier University. Stay tuned until the end for Emily's brilliant rendition of "Union Maid."
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