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Theres been a lot of talk recently about how Millennials the generation born between roughly 1980 and 2000 think about economics. Much of it was sparked by the fanatical support for self-described democratic socialist Bernie Sanders from young people in the Democratic primary for president last year. Gallup found in April 2016 that whereas Hillary Clinton had a net favorability rating of -23 among 1824-year-olds, Sanderss score was +39.

A Harvard University poll administered at about the same time revealed how this has been translated into policy views. The survey reported that only 42% of Millennials supported capitalism. According to a contemporaneous Gallup poll, that was about 10 percentage points lower than the general population. The Harvard survey showed 33% of Millennials wanted socialism.

So Millennials have economic attitudes that are different from older Americans. But is their economic behavior different? Do they walk the socialist walk?

Here, the evidence is decidedly mixed.

Socialists tend to embrace public goods because all citizens can consume them. Millennials certainly like them. A Pew Research Center poll from June revealed 45% of 1829 year olds favored a single-payer health care system. This was 14 percentage points higher than any other single age group.

Census data show millennials adopted health insurance more rapidly than any other age cohort when Obamacare began in 201415. Im not entirely sure what kind of political philosophy this behavior illustrates, but it does seem to suggest Millennials embraced the Affordable Care Act, legislation most people believe moved health care in this country solidly to the left.

Socialism, unlike capitalism, makes a virtue of constrained personal consumption. A major reason for this, of course, is that it is less suited to production. But the connection has helped fuse ecology to socialism in the platforms of left-wing parties across the globe.

You may have heard the argument that Millennials are more environmentally conscious than the rest of usthey dont use plastic shopping bags or flush the toilet, etc. A survey commissioned by Rubbermaid reported earlier this year that two-thirds of Millennials would give up social media for a week if everyone at their company recycled.

Interestingly, however, the data on behavior do not bear this out. A 2014 Harris poll conducted for the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI) revealed that whereas roughly a half of respondents over thirty said they always recycled, only a third of the younger group did.

Millennials talk about saving the planet for humanity, behavior a socialist mindset deems heroic, but they do not seem to be doing more than anyone else to secure our worlds survival.

Millennials also use public transportation much more than other groups. Over one-fifth ride a bus or train on a daily or almost-daily basis according to a Pew survey from late 2015. This was nearly double the proportion of any other age group.

Indeed, younger people seem to have much less love than their elders for that ultimate of American private goods, ones own car. The number of licensed drivers in both the 24-29 year-old and 30-34 year-old cohorts decreased by about 10% between 1983 and 2014 according to the University of Michigans Transportation Research Institute. The drop for 18 year olds was a fifth. At the same time, everyone over 45 continues their love affair with the automobile.

This seems consistent with the socialist rejection of material goods, but whether this is correlation or causation is unclear.

Moreover, Millennials have almost single-handedly nurtured the sharing economy a marketplace in which peer-to-peer transactions are facilitated by a software platform that permits participants to divide consumption, as exemplified by Uber and Airbnb. According to Vugo, 57% of all ridesharing customers are aged 25 to 34.

The sharing economy may sound quite socialist because it seems to eschew private ownership. But as Duke professor Mike Munger has pointed out, people in general wish to consume the services that tangible goods provide, not the goods themselves. The sharing economy in fact provides access to the services of more material goods than the user would otherwise have whether thats a five-minute ride in a car or a two-day stay in a house. Its fundamental principles, therefore, are capitalist.

A 2014 Bentley University survey of Millennials reported that two-thirds of respondents expressed a desire to start their own business. But Millennial behavior is different. An analysis by the Wall Street Journal last year found that the proportion of Americans under 30 who own a business has dropped by 65% since the 1980s. Millennials might say they want to be Mark Zuckerberg, but theyre not particularly entrepreneurial.

There does exist therefore a disconnect between Millennial economic attitudes and behavior. What explains it? The generation is intrigued by the idea of socialism. It embraces many of its values and the public policies that would bring it about. But Millennials behavior is ambiguous. Entrepreneurship in private enterprise is not a particularly appealing career path to them in practice.

Additionally, Millennials reduced consumption is probably as much a function of economic necessity as it is a sacrifice of their personal wants to some grand social plan. The Great Recession has left them playing financial catch-up. A Pew analysis of census data reveals 15% of 25-to-35 year olds still live with their parents. Traditionally that fraction has been around one tenth. A 2016 study by the left-leaning Center for American Progress found that Millennials make less than Gen Xers did in their early 30s. They only earn about the same as Boomers, who are 30 years older and 50% less likely to have graduated from college.

So perhaps theres another explanation: When they appear to be rejecting capitalism, its often because Millennials are simply adjusting Americas core economic principles to new technologies and economic realities.

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Millennials are in a love triangle with capitalism and socialism - Learn Liberty (blog)

Bill Shorten is banking on young Australians forgetting the historical failure of socialism, Mathias Cormann says. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian

The finance minister, Mathias Cormann, says Bill Shorten is banking on enough young Australians forgetting the historical failure of socialism to prosecute a Jeremy Corbyn-style politics-of-envy campaign which would deliver only economic decline and social division.

Cormann used a strongly worded speech to the Sydney Institute on Wednesday night to posit that Shorten was intent on inflicting socialism on an unwitting new generation, declaring that the Labor leader has made the deliberate and cynical political judgment that enough Australians have forgotten the historical failure of socialism.

He compared Labors policy platform to the policies of East German communism, characterising the oppositions outlook as socialist revisionism.

The Berlin Wall came down 28 years ago, which means roughly 18% of Australians enrolled to vote were born after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the failure of a system of government that destroyed the economies of eastern Europe, the finance minister told his audience.

Cormanns thesis was that Shorten was growing increasingly cocky and complacent in his pre-election pitch to voters but the overture would not ultimately succeed because the Labor leader had overreached in his shift to the left.

The finance minister said Labor was misreading not only what is in the best interest of Australians today and into the future, but also the great aspirational spirit of the Australian people.

Cormanns speech was predominantly a rebuttal of Shortens political offensive about rising inequality, and his arguments that success in life is increasingly predetermined by parental income.

The minister said intergenerational income mobility was an important measure of equal opportunity to succeed, in that it measures the linkages between the socioeconomic status of parents and the economic performance and success of their adult children.

Australia performs very well internationally when it comes to intergenerational income mobility, he said. Some dismiss these sorts of measures and indicators as too complicated and hard to communicate and clearly for Bill Shorten it is just an inconvenient truth which he chose to ignore.

Indeed, according to the 2016 Stanford Poverty and Inequality Report, Australia was ranked sixth out of 24 middle- and high-income countries when it comes to providing opportunity to succeed in life through effort and hard work, rather than relying on the socioeconomic status of their parents.

On this important measure, Australia ranks ahead of other significant countries including the UK, the US, Switzerland, France, Germany, Japan, New Zealand and Sweden.

In an effort to blunt Labors political messaging on inequality, which is resonant in the community at a time of prolonged wages stagnation, the treasurer, Scott Morrison, has previously used the Gini coefficient to argue that income inequality has improved in Australia rather than deteriorated.

With all major opinion polls, apart from YouGov, showing that the Coalition is consistently trailing Labor on the two-party-preferred measure in the national political contest, the government is increasingly intensifying its political attack on Shorten, who lags behind Malcolm Turnbull on preferred prime minister ratings.

Labor has characterised the increasing stridency from senior government players from the prime minister down as obsessional and over the top.

Cormann on Wednesday argued that Shorten was intent on stoking grievance and resentment with sneering attacks on millionaires, and was also attempting to channel the anxiety of the community to his own political advantage.

He wants to slide into office with the politics of envy and the economics of snake oil.

The finance minister declared socialism had failed for a reason.

If, as a government, you want to pursue equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity, the people in our community that are best able to contribute to our success as a nation will either lose the incentive to work hard to be successful or they will leave and go to work hard and be successful somewhere else.

Pursuing the socialist ideal of equality of outcome leads to mediocrity and stagnation. If you make it harder for aspirational Australians to get ahead, there will be less prosperity which would be bad for everyone.

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'Cocky' Bill Shorten wants to inflict socialism on a new generation, Mathias Cormann says - The Guardian

Home | The Socialist 23 August 2017 | Join the Socialist Party

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Rally for Socialism 2016, photo Paul Mattsson (Click to enlarge)

Socialism 2017 takes place on 11 and 12 November. It is a weekend of discussion and debate with a choice of over 40 workshops and rallies.

Keynote speakers include Socialist Party general secretary Peter Taaffe, author of From Militant to the Socialist Party; Corbynista MP Ian Mearns; Seattle socialist Kshama Sawant who led the US's first successful battle for a $15 an hour minimum wage; Irish socialist MP Paul Murphy fresh from an attempt to criminalise him for effective protesting; and Hannah Sell, Socialist Party deputy general secretary and regular contributor to the Socialist Party's monthly magazine Socialism Today.

There will be time during every workshop for everyone to have a say, to raise questions, propose points of difference, or expand on aspects of the discussion.

We welcome this as discussion and debate brings clarification for all our understanding of the complex world we live in, the lessons from past struggles and the programme we need to fight for socialism today.

At Socialism 2017 we will discuss the Russian Revolution 100 years ago. 1917 provides a powerful example of how it is possible for the working class and poor to take their destiny into their own hands and transform the world.

We will be discussing the impact of the revolution and why the Soviet Union degenerated into dictatorship. But Socialism 2017 will not be a history lesson! It is focused on the burning questions our movements face.

Socialism 2017 will bring together working class fighters, trade unionists and youth and student activists, anti-cuts campaigners, those who want to find out about socialism and Marxism, and people who want to change the world, for a weekend of discussion and debate on the alternative to capitalist crisis.

How can we get rid of the Tories? When will police and institutional racism end? Will a Jeremy Corbyn government be undermined by the Blairites? Can workers fight low pay? What about the trade union leaders who don't want to fight?

What happened to the socialist movement in Venezuela? How can we prevent Trump from delivering World War III? What really happened in the 1917 Russian Revolution?

What do we do about media bias? After Grenfell, how can we end the scandal of private profiteering? Can we win the right to free education?

If these are the questions you are asking then, a) you are not alone, and b) Socialism 2017 is the event for you.

It will be the political event of the year, celebrating the anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution, hearing from workers and socialists in struggle around the world

Continued here:
Come to Socialism 2017 - Socialist Party

This morning someone posted a video showing a man with a sledgehammer vandalizing a monument to Christopher Columbus in Baltimore as he rants about genocidal terrorists like Christopher Columbus and George Washington. The Baltimore Brew reports the 225-year-oldmonument to Columbus is the oldest one still standing in the United States.

The two-minute video also features a monologue that lists capitalism among Columbus worst sins. Christopher Columbus symbolizes the initial invasion of European capitalism into the Western Hemisphere, the narrator says. He continues, Columbus initiated a centuries-old wave of terrorism, murder, genocide, rape, slavery, ecological degradation and capitalist exploitation of labor in the Americas.

The culture of white supremacy preceded the United States. Its at the foundation of U.S. culture, business, bureaucracies, and psychology. Observe how vehemently Republican and Democratic misleaders defend genocidal terrorists like Christopher Columbus and George Washington.

Christopher Columbus has become an increasingly polarizing figure over the lasttwo decades. Those who think his history deserves more criticism and less celebration have the right to make that case. In the past few years, a growing number of cities have renamed Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples Day so its not as if there has been no movement on this issue.

Just yesterday a handful of people in Columbus, Ohio gathered to demand the removal of a Columbus statue at city hall. Thats how this ought to work. You get like-minded people together and make your case to your elected representatives.Smashing things with a sledgehammer in the middle of the night is not what democracy looks like.

Read more here:
Baltimore's Christopher Columbus monument vandalized (for socialism) - Hot Air

A far-right demonstrator in Charlottesville. For the new wave of national socialists, socialism means kicking out immigrants, sequestering black people, and establishing an authoritarian state. Photograph: Steve Helber/AP

The groups that marched through Charlottesville last weekend with clubs, shields and cans of mace were clearly drawn from the most extreme and violent end of Americas far right. But key elements of the ideology of at least some of them echo themes that have animated populist groups across the political spectrum, including on the left.

In their chants and placards, the marchers were explicitly fascist, racist and antisemitic. One of their number is accused of murdering a leftwing activist with his car and injuring many more. They came prepared to do violence to leftists, whom they consider to be existential enemies. They werent shy about any of this, and the event was the crest of an extremist wave that has been swelling since well before Donald Trumps inauguration.

But at the same time, some of the groups that marched evince a hostility to neoliberal capitalism, which is equal to that of the most ardent supporters of Bernie Sanders, the leftwing populist who mounted a vigorous challenge to Hillary Clinton during last years Democratic primaries although for the far right it comes inextricably linked to a virulent racism. Many also support the enhancement of the welfare state.

For example, those marching under the red and blue banners of the National Socialist Movement (NSM) have signed up to a manifesto that supports a living wage, sweeping improvements in healthcare, an end to sales taxes on things of lifes necessity and land reform for affordable housing.

An establishing principle in the document written by their leader, Jeff Schoep, is that the state shall make it its primary duty to provide a livelihood for its citizens. It calls for the nationalisation of all businesses which have been formed into corporations.

The manifesto of Matthew Heimbachs Traditionalist Worker Party calls for opportunities for workers to have jobs with justice. And in a manifesto issued on the day of the Charlottesville march, the noted far-right figurehead Richard Spencer wrote that the interests of businessmen and global merchants should never take precedence over the wellbeing of workers, families, and the natural world.

Spencer has previously spoken out including at the American Renaissance conference, a gathering of far-right activists in Nashville in July in favour of single payer universal healthcare.

At the conference, Spencer gave Trump just three out of 10 when invited to rate him because he was too focused on the Republican agenda of tax cuts and dismantling Obamacare.

These critiques of capitalism and mainstream conservatism are key to the socialist element of national socialism. Observers of the far right argue that understanding this is essential to demystifying the far rights appeal, especially to the alienated millennial men currently swelling its ranks.

Matthew Lyons is a researcher into far-right movements, and the author of one book on rightwing populism in the US, and another, recently published, on the alt-right. He argues that a lot of the socialist content in the ideology of movements such as the NSM is vague, and is at one level a prime example of how the far right takes elements of leftist politics and appropriates them for their own purposes.

But he adds that there is a broad hostility to an idea of the capitalist ruling class, within a notion of capitalism centred on stereotypes of Jews.

He talks of a long tradition in Nazism and other parts of the far right of drawing a distinction between finance capital and industrial capital, with the former, identified with Jews, being seen as parasitic.

This identification is apparent on the web pages of NSM, and until the site was purged from the internet on the website of Vanguard America, the group with which the alleged murderer James Fields marched in Charlottesville.

Jewish finance is consistently nominated as the principal enemy of these groups. Lyons explains that this distinction is an antisemitic variant on the ideology of producerism, which is common across the populist right and privileges the makers of tangible things over those engaged in more abstract pursuits. They define industrial capitalists as good capitalists, or even as workers, he says, adding that this was how the noted antisemite Henry Ford described his role at the head of a giant auto manufacturer.

So there is a notion of class conflict, and even a revolutionary perspective, says Lyons. But the society they plan to build on the wreckage of the one they overturn will be constructed for the benefit of whites.

Their socialism, explains Lyons is not universalist. It rejects any notion of an international working class. In their utopia, the state would only be used to tend to the needs of white people. And many groups also reject the idea of equality even among whites.

Alexander Reid Ross is the author of Against the Fascist Creep, a sweeping history of fascism from the early 20th century to the present. He argues that while contemporary fascists try to make nationalism palatable for the working class, ultimately what they envision has nothing to do with socialism; its absolutely inegalitarian.

He also points to the historical example of fascist states during the inter-war period, where workers lived on less food, received lower wages for working longer hours, and enjoyed no collective bargaining rights, and then were fed into the meat grinder of the second world war.

Similarly, for the new wave of national socialists, Ross says, socialism means kicking out immigrants, sequestering black people, and establishing an authoritarian state within which they can live out their fantasies.

Implicitly and explicitly, they offer a critique of the free market capitalism that has been recent conservative orthodoxy throughout the developed west.

Shane Burley, researcher and author of a forthcoming book, Fascism Today: What it Is and How to End It, says: What they want is a situation where the economy is not left up to the free market where it is instead under the control of an elite.

He points out that the trend of mobilising socialist ideas and rhetoric really dates back to the Strasserite section of the Nazis, and helped pull support from areas that would normally go to the far left. It would be a socialism that retains hierarchy, where classes are determined by God or science.

A preoccupation with the source of inequality was on display at Julys American Renaissance conference, where speakers flourished IQ data, and even images of different-sized brains, in their accounts of the reason for social divides. There, and at other alt-right events this year, it has been evident that these views are very attractive to a particular slice of young, millennial men.

In Charlottesville, hundreds marched sporting white polo shirts and distinctive, undercut fashy haircuts. At the Nashville conference, they made up half the crowd. In the breaks between speakers, many sought out Spencer to take candid selfies.

Ross said that in the unresolved aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, those seeking out fascist groups resemble those of the interwar period: veterans who are pissed off about the way that society treats them; and an educated strata who dont feel they can find a place in the current economy.

Observers argue that Trumps campaign rhetoric runs parallel to the racialised economic populism of the far right, and opened up a space in which they can proselytise.

Lyons says that as president, Trump has mostly pursued a familiar conservative agenda, but as a candidate, his platform of protectionism and xenophobic economic nationalism marked out the place where civic and racial nationalism coincide.

In the wake of the Charlottesville protests, and as Trumps presidency continues to melt down, it remains to be seen whether socialism, fascist-style, will retain its allure for so many resentful, violent young men.

See the rest here:
Socialism, fascist-style: hostility to capitalism plus extreme racism - The Guardian