Silence, Boomer: The Real Reason Millennials Are Becoming Socialists
Contrary to the plethora of opinion pieces from boomer-centric financial magazines, capitalism’s refusal to play nice with millennials, and not the inverse, has caused tension between the two. Late-stage capitalism has failed to live up to the liberal ideals that millennials were promised: the free market has failed to create a paradise of leisure and high living standards. In fact, in America, the greatest country in the world™, has its citizens working more than ever for stagnant wages. This comes at a time when the technology industry is making great strides, but the benefits are reaped almost exclusively by a powerful group of ultra-wealthy entrepreneurs, like Jeff Bezos, who exploit labor and sit on their vast sums of wealth like a dragon with hoarded gold.
A twitter account with the unambiguous username “Has Jeff Bezos Decided to End World Hunger?” was created in July 2019 and quickly garnered more than forty thousand followers over the next two months. The account regularly asks whoever is listening the eponymous question which is based on an International Food Policy Research Institute and the International Institute for Sustainable Development study which claims that it would cost $11 billion per year to end world hunger; this is not an impossible sum for Bezos, who is now worth around $165 billion.
These concerns are not new: Russian scientist and influential leftist thinker Peter Kropotkin wrote about control of labor value in 1906, saying “Socialists have said it and repeated it unwearyingly…these few [rich men/monopolists] prevent the remainder of men from producing the things they need, and force them to produce…whatever offers the greatest profits to the monopolists.” Nowadays, leftist critiques of individual capitalists and capitalism as a whole are often disseminated through twitter and other social media platforms and can reach far more people than Kropotkin was able to in his lifetime, an opportunity for publicity that the left has never had.
This has been invaluable to the modern left, especially since mainstream media is loath to acknowledge the problems of unequal distributions of power, widespread worker dissatisfaction, and the overall dismal future of western capitalism because of their intricate relationships with other capitalist individuals and institutions which oppose any hint of change to the status quo. Linguist and political theorist Noam Chomsky, echoing the words of George Orwell, describes the process of self-censorship on these issues. Chomsky notes that “[W]hen you go through the elite education system…you learn that there are certain things it’s not proper to say and there are certain thoughts that are not proper to have…if you don’t adapt to that, you’re usually out.” He goes on to state that mass media mainly serves to divert popular attention towards frivolous entertainment and away from the halls of power as the real drivers of society (the capitalist class) make the decisions behind the scenes.
These are not just the heady theories of a single professor; a 2014 study from two Professors from Princeton University and Northwestern University concluded that “[E]conomic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”
The homogeneity of rightist thought in mainstream media is especially visible on foreign policy. During a catastrophic war fueled entirely by oil, Islamophobia, and imperialism, which was (at least initially) pushed for by many major American news outlets, young leftists found themselves looking to the past to find figures sympathetic to their views. For instance, leftist thinker and activist Emma Goldman’s 1910 critique of American motivations for entering the Spanish-American war could be repackaged nearly word for word into a progressive blog post on the Iraq War (substituting sugar for oil of course), “when we sobered up from our patriotic spree it suddenly dawned on us that the cause of the Spanish-American war was the consideration of the price of sugar; or, to be more explicit, that the lives, blood, and money of the American people were used to protect the interests of American capitalists.”
The persistence of capitalist hegemony, unequal power, and the endless brutal treatment of workers throughout capitalism’s history, contrasted with the dogged tenacity of socialists in arguing against these conditions, seems to be a large part of socialism’s appeal to young people. America’s Bernie Sanders and the U.K.’s Jeremy Corbyn are both longtime socialists, vocal outsiders, and opponents of austerity who have managed to acquire widespread support from young people and ride the recent leftist winds to political success a full century after the time of Goldman.
The juxtaposition of capitalism’s overproduction and unequal distribution of wealth with the “rising tide lifts all boats” philosophy of ideological capitalists on daytime talk shows is particularly odious to millennials. The outcome of decades of aggressive austerity-driven neoliberal policy, like gutting welfare and multiple giant tax cuts, has been a dreadful job market marred by sky-high levels of mental illness and underemployment.
While these are broad and complex problems, some contemporary leftists have begun to offer diagnoses that don’t involve blaming the poor for purchasing iPhones.
Since capitalism requires one to have money to survive, which for those of us without a large inheritance means being employed, make-work must be created to replace the jobs that are being automated away - remember those “strides in technology” I mentioned earlier - as we enter the next stage of capitalism. The effect of this development can be described as what London School of Economics anthropologist David Graeber, in his book Bullshit Jobs, calls the “bullshitization” of the economy. Working a job where you do nothing but punch in and punch out, perhaps serving as a status symbol to a boss or reading over endless unimportant paperwork, is, according to Graeber, both profoundly common and mentally devastating.
A 2015 YouGov poll found that in the United Kingdom, only 50 percent of respondents with full-time jobs were entirely sure their job made any sort of meaningful contribution to the world, and 37 percent were sure it did not; a similar poll put the latter number at 25 percent in the United States. Graeber explains the untold negative mental effects on workers of having a so-called bullshit job by citing the large amount of “emotional labor,”; the term was introduced by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild when she found that flight attendants spent so much time acting happy to create a pleasant atmosphere for the passengers that they were often afflicted by psychological trauma such as depression and a loss of identity.
Graeber received a number of stories from those who work bullshit jobs after he wrote a popular essay on the topic which was picked up by many mainstream publications. Summarizing his findings from the testimonials he writes this in Bullshit Jobs, “Even in relatively benign office environments, the lack of a sense of purpose eats away at people. It may not cause actual physical or mental degradation, but at the very least, it leaves workers struggling with feelings of emptiness or worthlessness.”
As the Western world moves away from manufacturing and towards the “gig economy” - dominated by the sad duality of back-breaking service jobs at Amazon packaging plants and mind-numbing bullshit jobs – the cold reality of late-stage capitalism has dissuaded many young people from the anti-left fervor of previous generations: Americans ages 18-29 have a more positive view of socialism than capitalism, and the trend shows no signs of stopping.
In summary, capitalism is in a death spiral and angry Wall Street Journal articles about millennials’ coffee consumption aren’t going to save it.