Majority of young Americans distrust capitalism, embrace socialism

boing
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As a decade-plus socialist, we’ll see how long this lasts. I sincerely hope that the intentional FUD-wave that washed over the previous few generations has finally begun drying up, but we’ve got a lot of people who are casually tossing the term around without actually knowing much about it which hurts all of us.

It doesn’t help that there’s a giant political/economic machine that is constantly churning out misinterpretations and pumping up broken, audience-specific stereotypes. To folks much older than me, we’re trying to destroy America and people younger or the same age as me seem to want to make sure that everybody knows they aren’t one of those damned millennial types that we’re all supposed to hate for basically the same recycled reasons that are used every time someone wants to stir up inter-generational conflict as a tool to politically divide and conquer.

The entire time I was growing up I observed and was told that becoming more conservative was a sign of maturity, and that “you’ll understand when you’re older.” I’m into middle-aged territory now, and my observation of my self is that I moved to a certain point on the political spectrum that I felt ethically comfortable with and I’ve stayed there. All the added wisdom and context of age and maturity has done is show me that a lot of people think conservatism and maturity are linked, but what really happens is that people tend to get more selfish and less brave as they age. Authoritarianism and selfishness are things that attract the fearful because they create the illusion of control and safety.

I’m not turning anybody away, I just worry that it won’t last.

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I see you’ve fallen for the same either / or paradigm of capitalism vs. socialism that makes it impossible to have informed and nuanced positions. You do realize it’s possible to take elements from both and have a market-based economic system that serves the interest of the majority?

Take Denmark for example.

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Here is the OED definition:

“1. A political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole

  1. 1.1 Policy or practice based on the political and economic theory of socialism.

  2. 1.2 (in Marxist theory) a transitional social state between the overthrow of capitalism and the realization of Communism.”

A quick look at dictionaries available to me indicates that some form of “workers control the means of production” is a critical component of socialism.
If you advocate workers control resources and means of production, you have to infer some system where transfer of resources and equipment from the current owners to the collective will take place. Take me, for example. I have a piece of land, two tractors, and lots of other associated farming equipment. What do you believe should happen?

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How does that work, specifically? Obviously, you cannot get everyone in each collective together every time a decision needs to be made.

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In this radical new dispensation, authority is vested primarily in the communal level — the village. At one assembly I attended, villagers gathered in a spartan town hall to debate their affairs. An old man began by retailing all the decisions of the previous meeting. The audience grew restive with boredom until a very young co-chair gently stopped him. Then, others took turns to voice their concerns. These were the stuff of day-to-day village life: anxiety about deliveries of medical supplies; celebration following the announcement of the opening of a small new factory for laundry powder. But the rocketing prices of bread and other basics were lamented at length. The prosaic found its voice, too: someone complained about children riding their bikes too fast around the village.

Not all decisions can be made at the most local level. Those that need broader discussion go to district or cantonal assemblies (Rojava is comprised of three cantons). Here, as in the villages, care is taken to give non-Arab minorities and women prominence. Every assembly I encountered was co-chaired by a woman. In one town, a very young Kurdish woman enthused to me that never before had people like her — “the youth” — been included in actual government. At meetings across the region I was struck by the sense of a population trying to get used to methods of self-government that were entirely unfamiliar after generations of dictatorship.

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While it’s absolutely correct that the media misrepresents the conflict between the two ideologies, the “let’s just compromise” argument has some critical flaws. One in particular is the fact that what you’ve described–a system where some things are “socialized” and other things “free markets”–is the current status-quo. You’ve just described modern neo-liberal economics, which we already know doesn’t work, just like we know unregulated markets don’t work because we already tried that too.

The immediate political conflict presented in the media is basically just coverage of a very tiny portion of the conflict, which is that there are people who think that everything is already too “socialized” and needs to be privatized and turned into a market. That much is blatantly obvious in the United States where people have rushed at all levels of government to disassemble everything from infrastructure to public education–the reason the roads don’t get fixed and education is so poor is because there are people actively destroying the infrastructure that we already figured out that we needed and put into place.

We didn’t start out with those things, we figured out that we needed them from experience.

This is just a microscopic part of that conflict though. Capitalism and socialism are built on fundamentally different principles that are, in fact, pretty incompatible. For example, the two systems approach the idea of work and the value of people entirely differently. Capitalism creates a system by which moral and ethical decisions are modulated by money, where socialism actively tries to prevent that exact thing. Socialists look at situations like Flint and global warming and say “this is an essential problem that we need to work together to fix for everyone’s collective benefit” while capitalism looks at those same problems and immediately starts figuring out why they’re too expensive to fix, which is a huge part of why they’re still problems, and unless we all grow the hell up and do something about it now, problems that aren’t going to get fixed because those decisions will never be “economically sound.”

The simple fact is, pure capitalist systems have existed, and currently do exist. The world is and has been under the control of capitalism and/or systems very much like it for centuries at this point, almost entirely unopposed. There have been very few examples of actual socialist governments being allowed to operate without (mainly foreign) capitalist interference. People bring up the USSR and China and the like, but those are actually very poor examples, ideologically speaking. The movements in those countries were compromised very early by fascists, power-seekers, and nationalists–that’s not to say that there weren’t just some plain old bad ideas offered by otherwise genuine people, but basically the moment things stop being democratic and start being unilateral, you can be certain that a movement has jumped off the socialist tracks. That’s not even taking into account things like the effects of WWII, or foreign interference. Most of those leftist governments South and Central American that were overthrown by “freedom fighters” backed by the west? The “freedom fighters” were actually often just fringe political groups intent on obtaining unilateral power above all else, and the main reasons the socialist-leaning governments were deposed was because the US and the USSR were engaged in economic warfare, and western corporate interests wanted governments that would trade bribes for political support and disastrous trade policies that destroyed local economies.

So while I get what you’re saying, I worry that you’re drifting into argumentum ad temperantiam territory, which is just as fallacious as the false dichotomy created by the media.

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That’s a typical reductio ad absurdum fallacy response. Nobody is advocating a move back to Soviet-style collectivism. “Means of production” as defined by Marx is really an antiquated notion as we are talking about primarily a post-industrial economy now. Nobody is going to tell you what you can do with your tractors.

But more worker inclusion at the controls of business is an element of socialism that many can get behind. We already had something like that for many years called Unions, and they helped to create the most prosperous period and build the largest middle class in American history. You can thank unions for your 40 hour work week and annual vacation.

There are many examples of representative democratic governments protecting private ownership and free-market capitalism while at the same time implementing social programs that provide better opportunities for the people.

It’s called regulation and policy. It’s just that in the US, over the past 40 years our government has been completely captured by industry so much so that regulations are being systematically dismantled in the quest for higher corporate profits at the expense of the welfare of the people. Removing big money from politics is the necessary first step to rectifying the problem.

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That is the status quo in every functioning society I am aware of.

The problem isn’t that we have some socialized systems and some free market systems, the problem is that we haven’t achieved a proper balance between the two.

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I agree with @anon81034786 above, but I think there’s more to it than using the welfare state to ameliorate the externalities of market actors. The value of unions is they they fight for the recognition of workers contributions to the success of companies, and work to treat them less as second-class stakeholders to the shareholders.

I don’t think revolutions that overnight try to transfer from one system to another without buy-in is a mess. Warren very deliberately and wisely is targeting companies with $1b in annual revenue and talking about incremental change in how management and labor are treated and rewarded. That’s a far cry from your little farm with a tractor. For you, the lines between personal property and business assets is very blurry. I would never suggest that you chop your personal tractor into X number of pieces tomorrow and hand them out to your X number of employees. With large corporations it’s not so blurry. Assets are purchased by the corporation for the benefit of the corporation’s growth. Sharing ownership of these assets, equipment, physical plant, etc… with the workers who helped build the equity to make those purchases is less fraught.

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If you review my past statements, I have not endorsed any form of pure capitalism. As a matter of fact, I have lived and worked in Denmark. It is not an example of socialism. The company I work for there is not owned by the government or a collective. It is owned and controlled by shareholders. Rasmussen has made it clear that he rejects any suggestion that Denmark is a socialist country.
Socialism is rooted in the idea of “ popular control of resources and production” , to quote the constitution of the DSA. ( also, “profit is theft”)
I like to discuss nuance. But before we get to the specifics of how to run such a system, we really need to address the issue of collectivization.
I admittedly have not read the platform of every socialist splinter group in the USA. I have looked at those of the DSA, SPUSA, PSL, and a few others, and they all have collectivization as a key tenet

Sorry for the multiple replies, I am having trouble with a borrowed device.

Means of Production is currently defined as “raw materials, facilities, machinery and tools used in the production of goods and services.”

The socialist orgs all seem to have slight variations of the same marxist goals. If they advocate a system that does not include workers control of the means of production and resources, they should remove that part of their doctrine or constitution. I get that forced collectivization is not what socialism means to you, and lots of other people. That is the part of making the sausage that nobody wants to talk about. But if we support any of the current leading US socialist organizations, we necessarily support their key tenets as published.

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You get that the 60+ year old anarcho-syndicalist Mondragon collective employs over 70k people with wage compression from highest remunerated to lowest ranging from 3:1 to 9:1 (depending on sector of economic activity) while incorporating democratic decision making, yes?

Seems like an attractive libertarian socialist success model (albeit within a wider capitalist economy).

How do you suppose folks in Flint, MI, St. Louis, MO, and rural AL believe they will be living under hegemonic state capitalism?

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Ah, makes sense. Apple revenues increase year on year and Exxon Mobil has not been doing so hot in terms of revenue the last few years. Apple definitely looks like a better investment at this point!

If you do all the work yourself, then it sounds like the workers own and control the means of production. Private ownership is really the purest form of syndicalism.

If other people work for you and you listen to their input about how they can do their jobs better and react accordingly then it sounds like the workers are still controlling the means of production – control is not necessarily the same as ownership.

The important points are that workers have a say in how the work gets done and share in whatever success the enterprise encounters.

“Capitalism” is more a description of a state of affairs where (typically wealthy) investors own capital and hire a managerial class to make decisions of what to do with that capital, while workers have neither ownership nor much input into how the businesses are run.

One arrangement that seems to work well (especially in agriculture) is to incorporate your business and then reward your employees with partial ownership of the business. This doesn’t mean necessarily parting with ownership of your land and farm equipment – the business could lease them from you as one possible arrangement. Have you heard of the businesses I mentioned earlier – Land O Lakes, Cabot, and Organic Valley? Did you know they’re all worker-owned cooperatives?

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As opposed to the corruption free corporations that throw millions upon millions of dollars into the pockets of politicians?

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If you’re looking for the Pedant Pendant award for your determination to properly define what socialism is and isn’t, you’ve got my vote. However, I think you’ve lost the plot of the thread.

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There’s no universal system to do that - unless you are talking about armed conflict, which is wasteful and destructive. Mining and farming and manufacturing are all different, and different places have differing cultural practices, so there have to be different paths for different situations.

In analogy, you don’t use the same soil amendments for blueberries and asparagus - you use pine needles for blueberries and ash for asparagus because they are different. The end result is the same, healthy fresh garden produce, but you can’t demand a single magic fertilizer, the world doesn’t work that way.

One path to employee ownership is for the workers to pool their funds, secure loans from banks, buy out the prior owners, and use the increased profitability resultant from removing the non-worker owners to pay off the loans. That’s working for these guys, apparently..

But that path will generally only be viable when feckless, greedy owners have driven a company into the ground; the ruling economic classes won’t allow it to happen to an enterprise that is generating profit for them.

Another path is when more enlightened owners realize that employee ownership delivers better workers - consider New Belgium Brewing, for example. There are thousands of employee owned companies in the USA.

Why not? It is rather commonly done. Typically the collective votes on who is the person best qualified to make decisions that aren’t important enough to warrant a full assembly, and reviews that person’s performance at later thyngmoots, but another approach is to simply do all business decisions in conjunction with some other shared activity such as a daily meal.

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That doesn’t really address the fact that capitalism, by definition, consumes more than it creates and given time it will corrode the “socialist” elements out of existence–like it has been, and continues to do the world over. Even places with well-functioning social support systems have seen capitalist influence foment public hatred for those systems by intentionally breaking them and then metaphorically pointing and shouting, “look at how broken this is everybody!” That simple technique, getting into a social support system and intentionally turning it into a dysfunctional mess in order to drum up support for its destruction, has been extremely successful in many parts of the world.

Capitalism is built on some fundamentally broken notions, not the least of which is the idea that scarcity (of materials, goods, skills etc.) is what makes things valuable while simultaneously requiring an infinite amount of it. You can’t have infinite scarcity, we will eventually run out of things to sell and elements of our lives and culture to monetize. One could even argue that we’re already seeing this happening with the “serviceification” of everything from software to underpants–you can seriously subscribe to underpants now. That’s not innovation, that’s lack of ideas resulting in the remonetization of something already monetized. Similarly, it’s not enough to simply display advertisements anymore, now advertisers need to creepily peer into everyone’s personal life and pass those observations on to yet more people for money.

There’s also the fact that capitalism depends on competition, competition is universally less efficient than collaboration–a point clearly demonstrated by the prevalence of both implicit and explicit corporate collusion–while we live on a world with finite resources. Sure, there’s asteroid mining, but how long until we get there, and who gets to control it? Do you think that the 40-some years that the two most powerful countries in the world held the world on the brink of nuclear destruction helped or hurt that?

What happens under capitalism if, say, we towed a few gigatons worth of precious metals back to earth, rendering them effectively infinite at our present scale of existence? This is something that capitalism sees as a bad thing because it instantly devalues the stuff already here. What would happen is that whomever managed to bring those materials back would first flatline the price, destroying their competition, then raise it to whatever the hell they wanted once they effectively controlled the now single economically viable source of those materials. The sad part is that’s better than what will likely happen, which is that we’ll never get that far because this is already considered a nightmare scenario by capitalist standards–something that is itself proved by the fact that we have more than enough food to feed everyone on the damned planet every damned day, but instead we just throw a bunch of food away and let those people starve because otherwise we’re undermining the value of the food.

In fact, there’s a pretty succinct example of what exactly is wrong with capitalism: it’s a system that throws away “unused” food while people starve to death in order to preserve the value of said food. Capitalism not only makes people think that’s a rational way of thinking, it makes them think it’s a moral way of thinking. All it has to do in order to get people thinking that way is implant the simple notion that it’s “unfair” for people to be given food, or clothes, or housing when they need it, but can’t afford it. It never willingly bothers to ask whether or not it’s fair that we just let some people starve and when the question is forced, capitalism provides a “moderate” solution of “we just have charities for that sort of thing” which isn’t meaningfully different than saying, “not our problem.”

The balance you speak of probably doesn’t exist, because capitalism is a dangerous, selfish ideology that necessarily values inanimate objects and abstract concepts over human life. That’s not a way of thinking that is conducive to humanity surviving the next 500, or even the next 200 years.

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I feel like maybe this is not-picking but fer chrissakes THE POLICE EXIST TO ENFORCE PROPERTY RELATIONS THUS ARE FUNDAMENTALLY NOT AN EXAMPLE OF SOCIALISM

Sorry for the yelling. It’s a pet peeve. I’ll go hide in the corner now.

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A government system that encourages ‘pocket payments’ is broken in my opinion.

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Can you provide an example of a functioning society (that is, bigger than a small tribal community) that does not allow any form of capitalism at all?

I’m not happy with the balance we have now, but c’mon.

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