Millennials’ Socialism Seeks a Balance With Capitalism, Not a Mutiny
We want our socialism to balance your capitalism, not topple it.
I am so tired of hearing older people explain to us why my generation likes socialism. The NY Times has published two articles recently expressing surprise at the leftist turn our generation is promoting in the Democratic party. The first is a report of the leftist forces behind Abdul El-Sayed and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the second an Op-Ed piece about the growing popularity of socialism among young people. However neither of these articles were actually written by millennials.
Although the oldest of us are now 37, we still cannot seem to get our hands on the public megaphone. Instead we are cursed to scream into the social media void only to see our opinions and trials garbled by older generations in the established media. Why? Where are our voices?
The answer is: we are drowning.
The statistic that 1 in 5 millennials live in poverty doesn’t surprise me. But when older generations ask each other why so many of us are still living at home, (23% of us still live at home and 80% of us aren’t homeowners), why so many of us are still working in retail and food service, (43.5% of all retail/service workers are millennials or younger), I am continually surprised at how easily we get the blame with epithets like ‘lazy and entitled’. Older generations snapped up all the lower, (but still subsistence), wage jobs that were left after the Recession layoffs and we were stuck with the same jobs we had in high school. The jobs that make you run to stand still. We are constantly hustling to survive.
I am writing this in between ordering chemicals at the pharmaceutical lab I work for. I could write this at home, but when I am home I have to use my free time to make ends meet by sewing pillows from old clothes which I sell at weekend flea markets. At 32 years old with a BA and most of an MS, this is the first full time job I’ve ever managed to get. It’s certainly the first one that allows me to have my own apartment, (even if paying rent means that I can’t afford to see the doctor). The last order I placed for my ‘beneficent’ employer, I spent more on hydrochloric acid alone than I make in a month’s salary. I’ve seen some of that acid go to waste when the expiration is up. I’ve seen full bottles poured out, dripping dollars that could’ve meant my energy bill was going to get paid this month. Is it really any wonder that New Deal socialism looks pretty damn good to millennials right now?
As the most educated living generation, we know our history. We know that corruption and capitalism are not synonymous. We know that socialist governments can breed corruption just as easily. Any system made by humans is subject to our faults. In fact neither pure capitalism nor pure socialism really exists in practice, does it?
Take China, for example. It isn’t fashionable for us to talk about China as a communist country anymore since we depend so much on their inexpensive imports, but in practice China is a communist government that both still has a domestic ‘free market’ and participates in the international one. As this article from The Conversation points out: “Currently around 70% of Chinese industrial output is now produced by non-state controlled business firms, and over 80% of the industrial workforce in China is now employed in the private sector.” Governing parties will often hold shares in larger and industry influencing industries, but isn’t it interesting that one of the largest and most powerful communist governments in the world can’t exist without some kind of balance between the two economic systems?
Millennials believe that a happy medium must be reached between capitalism and socialism to ensure freedom. After all our forefathers reasoned similarly when they designed a system of checks and balances within our government: balance is necessary. But with our current capitalistic economy our scales are now tipped dangerously in favor of the richest 1% and severely against the rest of us.
America has had a sour taste in its mouth about socialism since McCarthy terrorized the 1950s. In fact, we’ve had more than one ‘red scare’ craze sweep this country since the founding fathers were picking out parchment for our constitution. But we can’t let the politically driven propaganda of the past cloud our vision of the future. We have to be able to innovate solutions to the problems that are steadily worsening for 99% of our citizens freely, without squabbling over whether we’d end up being Norway or Venezuela. What we really should be asking ourselves is: what makes those two examples different? And why does Chavez’s rise to power eerily echo some of the things that our ‘free market president’ is getting up to, (not least of all by attempting to pack the supreme court and eliding government interests with private ones)?
I was told that in America, all ‘men’ are created equal. And if we are really to believe that the use of the word ‘men’ is supposed to imply all citizens regardless of race, creed or gender; then the path that our forefathers put us on when they built this country should lead to complete equality: financial, political, and educational. Right now to many of us, that the path to that future sounds like democratic socialism. It seems like the natural and patriotic solution.
We are ever the country of immigrants, the country of rebels. We are the cowboys that struck it rich when they discovered oil in their backyards and founded the beginnings of our greatest industries. Yet as much as we are told by those who inherited their power from those immigrants, rebels and cowboys that they are ‘bootstrappers’, that they built everything they have today with their own hands: we know that the ‘men’ who founded these industries had government support. The government enabled them to exploit free labor, (they still do in many instances, it’s just not called slavery anymore). They had government subsidies where they could pick up the foundations of their businesses for pennies. They had easily attainable bank loans. They weren’t making room in an overcrowded system, they were expanding into the beyond. But over the years when both markets and states began to populate, and overpopulate, that adventurous spirit waned. A new merchant class ‘aristocracy’ grew. Money stopped flowing as easily.
Now to avoid the richest 1% of Americans becoming so topheavy it tips our country like a toddler’s game of Jenga, we should be focusing on strategically loosening up resources and evening the playing field. To right the injustices of the past we should be enabling the traditionally oppressed to join the true first class citizenship of this country. Because if all ‘men’ are supposed to be created equal, then those 1% who inflate themselves to trillionaire status on rest of our backs are doing nothing less than flouting the Declaration of Independence and everything it stands for. That kind of inequity was the provenance of kings, remember? We cannot allow the merchant class, who once rose up and ousted those monarchs to forget why they did so. It. Is. Unpatriotic.
So instead of arguing with your children about whether socialism is something we’ll grow out of, perhaps it’s time we stop fighting each other on the philosophical field altogether. Our president’s principles, (as well as those of most influential 1%-ers), have wildly and flagrantly vacillated due to personal interests anyway. When we have a leading party that insists on working only for themselves, then this argument can be nothing more than a distraction. Remember that grand debates of economic structures mean nothing to those who suffer their effects the most. We cannot afford to get caught up in our philosophical differences because every moment we are distracted, another dollar is picked from our citizens’ collective pockets.
