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Bill Gates has said that capitalism isnt working, and that socialism is our only hope in order to save the planet.

During an interview with The Atlantic, the Microsoft founder said that the private sector is too selfish to produce clean and economical alternatives to fossil fuels, and announced his intentions to spend $2 billion of his own money on green energy.

The Independent reports:

The Microsoft founder called on fellow billionaires to help make the US fossil-free by 2050 with similar philanthropy.

He said:

Theres no fortune to be made. Even if you have a new energy source that costs the same as todays and emits no CO2, it will be uncertain compared with whats tried-and-true and already operating at unbelievable scale and has gotten through all the regulatory problems.

Without a substantial carbon tax, theres no incentive for innovators or plant buyers to switch.

Since World War II, US-government R&D has defined the state of the art in almost every area. The private sector is in general inept.

The climate problem has to be solved in the rich countries. China and the US and Europe have to solve CO2 emissions, and when they do, hopefully theyll make it cheap enough for everyone else.

In recent years, China has surged ahead of the US and Europe in green investment, despite remaining the worlds most polluting country in terms of fossil fuels.

Between 2000 and 2012, Chinas solar energy output rose from 3 to 21,000 megawatts, rising 67 per cent between 2013 and 2014. In 2014 the countrys CO2 emissions decreased 1 per cent.

Meanwhile, Germanys greenhouse emissions are at the lowest point since 1990, and the UK has seen a decrease of 13.35 per cent in emissions over the last five years, according to official quarterly statistics from the Department of Energy & Climate Change.

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Bill Gates: We Need Socialism To Save The Planet - Your ...

Marx saw socialism as a new mode of production that would follow capitalism the same way that capitalism had followed feudalism. It would represent a break, a rupture, and would likely come about through a revolution like the one in France. Socialism, and its ultimate form of communism, would incorporate in modified form certain elements of capitalismnamely popular democracybut abandon others, like capitalist ownership of the means of production. In Engels later formation, the working class, having won power, would own and control the countrys industry through their control of the state.

Before World War I, and to some extent afterward, many Marxist socialists saw capitalism becoming, in effect, a giant system of factories in which a small capitalist class ruled over the countrys rapidly expanding ranks of industrial workers. Through labor organizing and a socialist political party, the working class would seize power and displace the capitalist class. A dissenting group of revisionists, led by Eduard Bernstein, foresaw the growth of a new middle class and the attempt by the capitalist class to meet some of the demands that Marxist socialists believed would precipitate revolution.

But the debate between Marxists and revisionists was diverted by the Russian and Chinese revolutions. None of the pre-World War I socialists in the West believed that a country without a developed working class or the experience of parliamentary democracy could create socialism. But the leaders of the Soviet and Chinese revolutions insisted that they had done just that. As a result, the socialist debate for many years was waged over whether these countries were really socialist. That carried through to the new left of the Sixties when radicals describing themselves as communists adopted Cuba or China or even North Korea as models. (Acommune in Berkeley called the Red Family extolled the achievements of Kim Il Sung.) Their critics on the left, some of whom flocked to NAM, saw Debs socialism as a model. Debs believed in elections and democracy, but he also envisaged socialism as workers ownership and control of (repeat after me) the means of production. So what should have been a debate between Marxist and liberal socialists became a debate between self-styled communists and Marxist socialists.

In Western Europe, however, where many of the socialist, social-democratic, and labor parties entered government, socialists were forced to define their objectives more clearly. And what has emerged is a liberal conception of socialism. It has found itself under attack not from communistswho have disappeared after the fall of the Soviet Unionbut from Christian Democrats, Conservatives, and other center-right parties that continue to put the imperatives of the private market first. To some extent, too, that debate has crept into the socialist and social-democratic parties themselves through the advocacy of neoliberal politicians like Tony Blair in the United Kingdom, Gerhard Schroeder in Germany, Felipe Gonzalez in Spain and Francois Hollande in France.

In all its different varieties, you can still mark some clear lines between this Western European socialism and Marxist socialismand also distinguish pretty clearly between it and the neo-liberalism or market-liberalism that came to dominate the Democratic Party here. In practice, social democracy has probably reached its acme in the Nordic countries, where the left has ruled governments for most of last half-century. In these countries, the publics interest takes precedence over private interests of capital. Governments oversee the relations between employers and employees. Workers rights are enforced. In Sweden, the government conducts negotiations between labor and capital. In Germany, union representatives sit on corporate boards.

In some countries, key public service industries are nationalized; in others, they are strictly regulated in a way that goes well beyond our palsied agencies. Britains health service is state-run. (In Switzerland, the government sets rules for non-profit private firms to provide universal insurance.) In France, there are guarantees against arbitrary dismissal from a job. In Denmark and the Netherlands, it is easier for companies to hire and fire, but the government also provides very generous employment insurance. In Denmark, unemployment can last as long as four years and cover as much as 90 percent of what a worker had been earning. In most of these countries, college education is free and workers can also enjoy free retraining programs.

Thats not Marxs vision of socialism, or even Debs. In Europe, workers have significant say in what companies do. They dont control or own them. Private property endures. But within these parameters, families dont have to fear going hungry, losing their home, losing health insurance, and being unable to send their kids to decent schools just because somebodys job is automated or their company made bad investments.

Theres an implicit trade-off in this kind of social democracy. Private capital is given leave to gain profits through higher productivity, even if that results in layoffs and bankruptcies. But the government is able to extract a large share of the economic surplus that these firms create in order to fund a full-blown welfare state that alleviates the daily anxiety that workers feel. Nordic and Dutch social-democratic parties were among the first to make this trade-off soon after World War II, and the terms of it are still being fought over throughout Western Europe and Canada.

By the standards of Marxist socialism, this kind of social democracy appears to be nothing more than an attenuated form of capitalism. In the 60s, we scoffed at the very notion of Sweden as a socialist country.But the older version is not remotely viable. As the Soviet experiment with blanket nationalization showed, it cant adjust to the rapid changes in industry created by the introduction of automation and information technology. For non-vital services, the market is a better indicator of prices than government planning. And as the American Max Eastman pointed out after World War I, the older Marxist model of socialism may not even be compatible with popular democracy. By concentrating economic power in the state (or even in American states), it would lay the basis for authoritarian rule. In other words, Marxist socialism may not be viable or desirable.

Social democracy or liberal socialism, while lacking in utopian appeal, does provide a vision that goes very far beyond the status quo in the United States. It would bring immeasurable benefit to ordinary Americans. A good watchword is economic security something that is very lacking to all except the wealthiest Americans. It is the next step beyond the industrial capitalism that Marx and Engels believed was doomed. What politics and economics look like beyond that is simply unknowable. Its like speculating on whether there is human life on other planets.

Whats the difference between this kind of socialist politics and garden-variety liberalism? Not much. But I do think it defines a leftwing version of liberalism, and one that differs in some respects from the current variety and could provide an outer horizon for a liberal politics as the socialism of the 1930s did for the New Deal liberalism of the time.

Contemporary liberalism has lost that horizon. It has drawn back from a focus on the economics of the average American and became increasingly identified with social causes. It has incorporated the economic priorities of those segments of Wall Street and Silicon Valley that support the partys stand on social issues. Sanders campaign showed what that had wrought in terms of Democratic ideology: Party leaders and pundits reflexively dismissed as utopian, or simply undesirable, his focus on free college tuition or Medicare for all, or his call for a political revolution in how election outcomes are determined. His positions were attacked because they wouldnt past the current Congress or might even causeGod forbida political upheaval. But they gave a meaning to politicsa relationship between means and endsthat Hillary Clintons laundry lists of incremental proposals, and her appeals to identity groups (Its her turn), lacked.

There is, of course, a larger argument to be made about whether a socialist politics of this kind is politically viable in the United States. I always believed that if Sanders had won the nomination, he would have been pinioned as a proponent of big government and higher taxes. In November 2016, a proposal in Colorado for a single-payer health insurance system that Sanders campaigned lost by 80 to 20 percent. Sanders would have had trouble with Trump, but in retrospect, he might not have lost some of those Midwestern states that cost Clinton the election. Well never know.

What does seem clear to me is that American capitalismand that goes for Western Europehas entered a period of upheaval, where voters are looking for alternatives beyond what the major parties are offering. It wasnt just Sanders results in the U.S.; it was Melenchon in France and Corbyn in the U.K. and Pablo Iglesias and Podemos in Spain. These might not be the greatest candidates, and socialistsor left-liberalsmay not be able to get their candidates elected or even nominated, but through participating in organized politics, they can begin an important discussion of where these countries should be headed.

I cant really comment except in a very general way on DSA or on other current socialist groups. I like DSA because it is committed to working within the Democratic party rather than trying to perform Nader-like surgery on our two-party system. We are stuck with two major parties, and if socialists (or their right-wing counterparts) want to influence the countrys future, they are going to have to work through them. I also like DSA because, unlike many Washington-based organizations, whose members consist of people who clicked on a link, or unlike political organizations that depend on wealthy donors and foundations, DSA is based on a dues-paying membership that works through chapters. Unlike Indivisible, it is not bound by the politics of the moment.

And much of what DSA chapters have done pretty much conforms to what a social-democratic group would do. They were big supporters of Sanders campaign in 2016 and have echoed his kind of concerns this year. Theyre focused on local elections and organizing, along with health-care battles at the state level, and theyve been organizing against white supremacists Summer of Hate rallies. But they face the same problem that plagued social democrats in the 1960s and 1970sthey haventyet developed a viable idea of what American socialism should and (at this historical moment) can be.

The DSA fails to recognize how far-reaching and, in a way revolutionary, are the reforms that liberal socialism can advocate.

In its Resistance Rising strategy document, the DSA defines its aim as as the radical democratization of all areas of life, not least of which is the economy. Under socialism, it says, democracy would be expanded beyond the election of political officials to include the democratic management of all businesses by the workers who comprise them and by the communities in which they operate.

The platform goes into some detail about different sectors of the economy. Very large, strategically important sectors of the economysuch as housing, utilities and heavy industrywould be subject to democratic planning outside the market, while a market sector consisting of worker-owned and -operated firms would be developed for the production and distribution of many consumer goods. It is hard to parse this out, but it suggests that the large firms that make goods that go into producing other goods, or raw materials, would operate outside the market presumably through central planning. These would include, it seems, firms like Intel, while consumer- goods businesses like Apple would operate within the market, but would be under worker control. Which would mean what?(Im experiencing flashbacks just asking these questions.)

If the problem with current liberalism is that it is too timid and too grounded in the current deadlock between the parties, the problem with the socialism of the DSA is that it fails to recognize how far-reaching and, in a way revolutionary, are the reforms that a liberal socialism could advocate. American socialists need to do what the Europeans did after World War II and bid goodbye to the Marxist vision of democratic control and ownership of the means of production. They need to recognize that what is necessary nowand alsoconceivableis not to abolish capitalism, but to create socialism within it.

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The Socialism America Needs Now | New Republic - New Republic

This video is pretty entertaining. Ami Horowitz interviewed New York millennials, asking about their views on the all-important question of income equality. Actually, anyone who thinks about the subject for two minutes should be able to figure out that a society without income inequality would scarcely be worth living in. But these people are without a clue.

Horowitz continues with questions about Venezuela, where starving people are fighting over dead rats. New York millennials (the ones in the video, anyway) claim to believe that poverty is a small price to pay for socialism. My guess, though, is that a few days of eating dead rats for dinnerif theyre luckywould change their views on socialism. Here it is:

My one quibble is the assumption that Venezuela exemplifies income equality along with socialism. In fact, relatives and friends of the Chavez/Maduro regime have made off with billions while the majority went hungry. Socialism always leads to this kind of stark inequality. As I wrote at the link:

[T]hat is what socialism is all about: great wealth and power for a handful, poverty and humiliation for the vast majority.

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Starvation: It's a Small Price to Pay for Socialism! | Power Line - Power Line (blog)

Everything was coming up roses on the University of Illinois at Chicago campus. Red rose symbols were emblazoned on scarlet T-shirts, branded on pinback buttons affixed to messenger bags and backpacks, printed on brochures and pamphlets, and projected onto the walls of a lecture hall in the student center on the east side of the school's grounds. One would've been forgiven for mistaking the gathering for a conference of professional florists.

All of the floral iconography was in fact political in nature. During the first weekend of August, UIC played host to the national convention of the Democratic Socialists of America. The image of the rose, which has served as a symbol employed by leftist movements for more than a century, is a central emblem of the DSA. Two "red scares" and the cold war have chilled much legitimate talk about socialism over the course of the last century, but the ubiquity of rose-bedecked swag was just the most visible sign that the anti-capitalist movement is blossoming.

The size of the DSA's proverbial rose garden that weekend was larger than any in the nonprofit organization's 35-year history. The convention drew 1,000 attendees from 49 states, including 697 delegates and about 300 observers. One DSA official called it a "historic moment," noting that a single room was packed with more people than had attended the previous three conventions combined. The sight of the rose-filled student center prompted Harold Meyerson, editor at large of the progressive political magazine the American Prospect and a DSA member since 1975, to marvel to a fellow longtime member, "Look at all these new faces. I can't believe it!"

The most prominent of those new faces was a man whose last namefittingly enoughis Spanish for the word "rose": Chicago alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, who joined the DSA in March. On the eve of the convention's first day, the 28-year-old councilman, a red rose pinned to the lapel of his dark suit jacket, delivered a rousing welcome speech that made it clear he wasn't there simply to serve as a city ambassador. "I address you tonight not as an emissary of the mayor of the 1 percent or the class of City Hall," he said, "but as your comrade. As a proud Democratic Socialist, I welcome you." Amid cheers and applause, the alderman paused briefly to smile.

The three days that followed were rarely so exhilarating. "The trouble with socialism," Oscar Wilde is often quoted as saying, "is that it takes up too many evenings." He was talking about all the meetings, and indeed the DSA convention's days and nights were overstuffed with lengthy, frequently heated, sometimes hiss-filled debates on administrative rules about dues collection and formal votes governed by tedious parliamentary procedure. But ultimately the DSA collectively agreed to leave the Socialist Internationala loose confederation of worldwide member partiesand expressed support for the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. It also advocated for a socialized national health care system devoid of the profit motive, endorsed Black Youth Project 100's Agenda to Build Black Futures, and elected to create a national Afro-socialist caucus.

By the close of the weekend, the DSA had managed to push its political priorities further to the left than ever before. For recent converts like Ramirez-Rosamany of them young, female, queer, and people of colorit was one hell of a coming out party, and a glimpse of the promise of the new wave of socialism.

Eight years ago, a segment of the right responded to the election of Barack Obama by jump-starting the Tea Party to block the Democratic majority's agenda. Now that the electoral pendulum has swung hard to the rightand possibly completely off its pivot with the coronation of Donald Trumpa growing number of people, whether emboldened by the Bernie Sanders campaign or put off by the ineffectuality of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, are swerving left and becoming card-carrying members of socialist organizations. (Full disclosure: I'm one of those people, having joined the Chicago DSA in May.) The International Socialist Organization has grown nearly 50 percent over the last couple years to about 1,000 members nationwide (including 125 in Chicago); the ISO's Socialism Conference, held in Chicago in early July, hosted more than 2,000 people, a third larger than the previous year's event.

But it's the DSA, officially formed in 1982 during a convention in Detroit, that's experienced the most marked growth. Membership has more than tripled since 2015, from 8,000 to 25,000. Today it's the largest Marxist organization in the U.S. since World War II. Locally there are more than 1,300 members among the chapters on the north side, south side, and Oak Park, with a west-suburban addition in the offing.

Chief among the factors drawing new members to the DSA is the ecosystem of collective DIY activism, from mass marches on the national level to small local committees and chapter-specific working groups focused on mobilizing action on issues such as anti-racism and feminism.

Whereas the Tea Party was a GOP movement masquerading as populism, one intended to gum up the works of the Obama administration, the new breed of lefties joining the DSA wants to fight the worst excesses of the Trump agenda while also raging against the Democratic Party machine. They view the Democrats as stuck in passive #Resistance mode, a weak-kneed party trading Russian conspiracy theories while failing to offer a compelling alternative vision to the hellish Trumpian present.

It was telling that the segment of Ramirez-Rosa's speech at the DSA conference that garnered the most enthusiastic reaction was when he threw jabs at the Democrats. He lambasted the administration of Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel for neglecting public education in favor of overpolicing black and brown neighborhoods. Democrats, he said, are too often "corporate shills who [wear] blue ties instead of red," politicians whose agenda too often resembles something like Trump's.

"As Democratic Socialists, we know that just as rigorously as we resist the right wing and their mouthpiece president, so too must we resist the neoliberal Democrats," Ramirez-Rosa said. "If it's barbarism or socialism, I choose the latter."

A socialist Chicago alderman who calls out Democrats for being Republicans in disguise? Until the most recent presidential election, the emergence of such a figure seemed unlikely if not impossible. Even among progressives, socialism through much of 2015 remained relatively taboo, a dirty word confined to the margins. When conservatives labeled Obama a socialist early in his presidency, they meant it as an epithet.

That's a dramatic shift from a century ago, when socialist movements surged throughout the worldmost strikingly in the Russian Revolution of 100 years ago. Chicago was the center of the radical left in America during its heyday prior to World War I, says Alan Maass, author of The Case for Socialism. "Chicago was a hub for transportation, industry, and for waves of immigrants who were some of the most radical of the early labor movement," Maass says. By the 1910s, a dozen socialist newspapers were published in Chicago, and the city elected several aldermen who belonged to the Socialist Party founded by Eugene V. Debs. The union leader from Terre Haute, Indiana, was sent to prison for his role in the violent 1894 Pullman strike in Chicago and became radicalized by reading Karl Marx's Capital. Debs helped form the Socialist Party and ran as his party's presidential candidate five times, including a 1912 campaign in which he earned 6 percent of the popular vote.

As post-WWI interest in the left grew, the Bolsheviks' rise to power together with domestic labor unrest spooked U.S. officials and prompted a counterattack in the form of a red scare. On New Year's Day 1920, Chicago police raided union halls and bookstores and apprehended about 150 socialists, communists, and anarchists, many of whom were deported. Socialism was positioned as positively un-American. A second McCarthy-era red scare in the 40s and 50s broke the back of the movement. Socialist ideas have since had fleeting moments of relevance, including the New Left movement of the 60s, but over the last four decades there has been a slow erosion of significant radical movementsespecially as the Republican Party began dismantling laborand Democrats, lured by the siren call of Wall Street and "market-based solutions," looked away.

It was in high school, after reading Noam Chomsky's seminal critique of Western capitalism Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order, that Ramirez-Rosa began identifying as a socialist. Even as he came out as gay at age 16 while in the midst of his very first political campaign, for junior class president, Ramirez-Rosa felt compelled to remain closeted about his Marxist politics.

In a culturally tolerant city such as Chicago, where even Republicans have been known to march in the Pride Parade, plenty of rainbow flags fly in publicbut none that are socialist red. It made sense, then, that when Ramirez-Rosa launched his insurgent campaign against incumbent 35th Ward alderman Rey Colon in September 2014, he didn't shy away from his sexual or racial identity ("openly gay 26-year-old Latino" was reflexively affixed to his name in the local media), but still opted to stay mum about the S-word.

"People that helped run campaigns told me, 'Look, we have these same values. We also identify as socialist or leftist, but we don't think you should run as one because you'll lose," Ramirez-Rosa says.

Then came Bernie.

"Bernie Sanders opened up that door for me," Ramirez-Rosa says. "I said, if someone could run for president of the United States and say 'I'm a democratic socialist,' then, hell, I can come out of the closet. I've come out of the closet before."

Improbably, it is a septuagenarian who deserves more credit than any other figure for socialism's current vogue among millennials. The wizened Vermont senatorwho embraced leftist politics and joined the Young People's Socialist League while a student at the University of Chicago in the early 60sgot within spitting distance of the Democratic Party's nomination for president with a grassroots campaign built on a platform infused with socialist ideology: free college and health care, economic redistribution in the form of higher taxes on the rich, and a "political revolution" against corporate power and oligarchy.

Among those the Sanders campaign lit a fire under was 22-year-old Jacquelyn Smith, who'd traveled from Washington, D.C., to attend the DSA conference. She came to socialism after struggling to connect with the culture of one-upsmanship among activists on her university campus. "College activism often turns into this battle of who's the most woke, and I couldn't get engaged in it," Smith says. In the wake of the presidential election, she decided that sitting on the sidelines and simply holding progressive values wasn't enough. "I knew I needed to fight for my values," she says. A Google search for "democratic socialism"a term she'd heard Sanders use repeatedly on the campaign trailpointed her toward the DSA. Days later she joined the Metro D.C. chapter and attended a meeting in a library basement so crowded that it "wasn't just standing room [only]," she recalls, "it was hallway room only."

When Sanders lost the nomination to Hillary Clinton, it didn't do much to dampen enthusiasm for him. According to the findings of a Harvard-Harris survey published in April, the senator still ranked as the most popular politician in America. The devotion was certainly on display at the People's Summit, the Berniecrats' second annual conference, held in June at McCormick Place. The line to see Sanders's keynote speech at the summit snaked out the door as thousandsincluding left-leaning celebrities John Cusack and Danny Gloverpacked the Arie Crown Theater. He delivered a kind of state of the political revolution address. "We may not have won the campaign in 2016," Sanders said, "but there is no question that we have won the battle of ideas."

Across the pond in the U.K., democratic socialist Jeremy Corbyn won the battle of ideasand nearly the campaign. Though British conservatives and centrists alike dismissed him as a left-wing extremist, he earned enough votes in June's special election to deprive prime minister and Conservative Party leader Theresa May of a majority in Parliament. The American left has embraced Corbyn as a hero. The DSA convention crowd twice broke into a chant popular in the U.K.: "Oh, Jeremy Corbyn! Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!" set to the melody of the White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army."

In the U.S., meanwhile, DSA members and enlistees in "Bernie's Army," the affectionate nickname for Sanders's political action committee, are starting to win smaller municipal elections. DSA member Chokwe Antar Lumumba, the 34-year-old who was elected mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, in June, told attendees at the People's Summit that he wants to make the southern capital "the most radical city on the planet." Another DSA member, Black Lives Matter activist Khalid Kamau, 40, won a seat on the city council of South Fulton, Georgia, in April, the same month that 28-year-old DSA member Dylan Parker was elected to the city council in Rock Island, Illinois.

A number of new DSA members who gathered at the national conference spoke of joining the day after the presidential election or soon after. Sixty percent of the Chicago DSA's 1,300 members joined since November 9. Delegate Ashwin Ravikumar, 30, an environmental social scientist at the Field Museum, described something of a postelection come-to-Marx moment while on assignment in the middle of rural Peru.

"I wake up on November 9 assuming Hillary is the president. But I call my mom just to check in, and she told me Trump won," he recalled. "My heart just starts beatingboom! boom! boom!in my chest and I hang up and go into a daze. I spent that entire day with a machete weeding a coffee farmer's field in the Peruvian Amazon. There I was just hacking away at vegetation, and in my head raging against the Democratic Party for allowing Trump to happen and the failures of liberalism."

Lucie Macas became a member of the Chicago DSA a couple days after Trump's win. "The night of the election, I didn't get any sleep. I watched it and I realized I didn't want to just give up and say, 'This is what it will be the next four years.' I wanted to join something that would make a difference locally," the 31-year-old said. "I've been doing lots of work so far. I work in environmental justice in Chicago, and here [at the DSA convention] I connected to other people and created a coalition focused on water issues in the Great Lakes in the midwest."

Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, Chicago alderman and new Democratic Socialists for America member

Since the election the new left has also been strengthened by a vibrant independent media. Radical publisher Haymarket Books, which recently won approval to open a community center in a mansion in Buena Park despite protests from NIMBYs, scored big with its release of the latest book by social activist Naomi Klein, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need. Klein's anti-capitalist polemicwhich she calls a "movement book"charted at number two on the New York Times best-seller list immediately after it was published in June. The progressive magazine In These Timesfounded in Chicago in 1976 by historian James Weinstein and modeled on a socialist newspaper from the turn of the centuryhas seen subscriptions jump to 50,000 from just 10,000 in 2011. The magazine's editors are in the midst of redesigning and expanding the publication to respond to the influx of readers, both in print and online.

"The most popular politician in the country identifies as a socialist," Miles Kampf-Lassin, In These Times's community editor, says of Sanders. "The ideas of socialism are popular, so we're trying to reach this new, young, excited audience."

In These Times shares part of its Logan Square office space with the local outpost of Jacobin, the New York-based quarterly magazine "offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture." The Baffler, the quarterly magazine of political and cultural analysis launched in 1988 by onetime Reader contributor Thomas Frank, moved operations to New York City last year. Today especially the publication's website reads like a socialist rag, with features such as labor journalist Sarah Jaffe's Interviews for Resistance series. These days, rose emojis spring up like weeds on social media. The stars of Weird Twitter and Left Twitter, amorphous but overlapping subcultures, have become known for posting absurd, subversive, and incisive non sequiturs.

The common voice of the new-left media balances self-serious activism with an anarchic sense of ironic humor. "We need socialism because only socialism can guarantee that Ringo gets the best healthcare in the world, and Paul gets the worst," Australian cartoonist and Left Twitter luminary Ben Ward recently tweeted from his account @pixelatedboat, which has 112,000 followers.

Like many of his peers at the DSA conference, Zach Maril, 26, said he discovered the organization's Metro D.C. outpost through Left Twitter and Chapo Trap House, a caustic and hilarious left-wing comedy podcast that ranks among the top 200 on the Internet. "It gives me hope, I can't express how much it means to me," said Maril, now the head of his chapter's events and logistics committee, during a DSA conference panel introducing old and new members.

While in town for the convention, the three original Chapo Trap House cohosts, including Chicago native Felix Biederman, did a pair of postconvention live shows at the Hideout. During the summit, Biederman says, he was approached by several DSA delegates for whom Chapo was their gateway to socialism. "If they listened to us and thought the realm of political possibility was way further than they thought it was and it got them mad and they took actionthat's fucking amazing," Biederman says. Stand-up comedian and Catastrophe star Rob Delaney, who made a guest appearance on Chapo Trap House in April, is a proud DSA member and actively promotes the organization on social media: "My web-page's sole purpose now is to lure teens & millennials into the #ripped arms of feminist socialism," he tweeted in January to his 1.4 million followers alongside a link to the DSA's website.

The outreach appears to be working, though socialism's momentum among millennials could be due as much to changing political attitudes as to cultural cachet. According to a 2015 YouGov poll, while positive views of socialism remain a minority opinion, 43 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds hold a favorable opinion of socialism compared to just 26 percent who have an unfavorable opinion of it. Much of that can be attributed to this generation's coming of age after the specter of the cold war had faded. Its defining anxieties stemmed not from the threat of communist totalitarianism but economic inequality and a bleak job market.

When R.L. Stephens, 30, graduated from George Washington University Law School in 2014, the Minnesota native found a dearth of employment prospects. "I realized I didn't want to be an attorney, but I'm black and I had no job experience, so I found myself working at the Gap," he says. After helping rally his coworkers to change the Gap's scheduling policy, namely the use of "on-call shifts," he began a job in Chicago as an organizer for the Unite Here labor union. But even unions weren't influential enough to address the suffering Stephens sawespecially on the part of young black people in neighborhoods with disproportionate levels of violence and unemployment.

"I was like, yeah, this union is mostly people of color and this is tight," Stephens says, "but how am I building a politics that builds a more socially transformative process? That's when I really started thinking seriously about socialist politics." He now cohosts the Jacobin podcast Stockton to Malone. He joined the Northside Chicago DSA in February and was swiftly elected to the National Political Committee, the organization's board of directors. "How do you take the particularities of people's suffering and subjugation and subordination and oppression and attach them to the fight for universal emancipation?" he asks. "That's what this convention's aboutit's about figuring out what that means."

The DSA is trying, with some success, to diversify its membership in terms of gender and race. During the convention, half the spots on its 16-member National Political Committee were slotted for women, and four went to people of color. Nationally, the organization as a whole is still disproportionately white and male, but among the delegates in attendance in Chicago, 40 percent were women and about 20 percent were people of color, according to the DSA. Of Chicago's three DSA chapters, 39 percent of the members are male, 60 percent are female, and 25 percent are people of color.

The common depiction of socialism as being full of "Bernie bros" is a frustrating one, Macas says. "I'm not a white dude. I'm a Latino woman, and there are a lot of women and people of color here," she said at the DSA conference. "The thing we're doing is normalizing socialism to some degree and saying, 'This isn't just for white dudes. Socialism is for everyone.'"

Lately Ramirez-Rosa says he's been trying to reclaim the term "Bernie bro" from its pejorative use in the same way the LGBTQ community came to embrace the word "queer." "I'm like, 'Yes, this 28-year-old queer Latinx son of working-class immigrants is a Bernie Bro,'" he says. "It's cool when the left uses the term, but when you have neoliberal political operatives using that term to divide people and demonize people who are fighting for social and economic justice, it's disgusting."

As the DSA's big convention weekend in Chicago neared its end, there seemed little doubt that the current iteration of socialism is a far cry from the stereotype of pointy-headed old white men muttering about Marx in the dusty corners of an academic library. Further confirmation came during an afterparty on Saturday, August 5, at the shared office of In These Times and Jacobin on Milwaukee Avenue.

"Oh my god, this party is lit!" Stephens exclaimed, walking off the dance floor drenched in sweat. His voice was hoarse from straining to be heard above the hip-hop being blasted by a laptop DJ. Poster-size covers of old In These Times issues adorned the walls of the second-floor office as reminders of socialism's past. But the hardwood floors were filled with the future of the movementRamirez-Rosa, Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara, the cohosts of Chapo Trap House, and hundreds of youngish DSA delegates, many wearing rose-covered T-shirts representing local chapters. While some swayed to the music or took shots of Malort, others engaged in conversations about the practical value of third parties and whether socialism should be a reform movement that embraces Scandinavian-style social democracy (as Sanders believes) or a full-fledged revolutionary movement with the objectives of redistributing wealth, transferring ownership of the means of production, and abolishing police and prisons. The affair was even crashed by a gaggle of Lollapalooza attendees who'd heard through the grapevine about a rager off the Blue Line.

A handmade sign taped to a column in the middle of the room carried a message for Chicago's mayor: i hope everyone has a great night, except rahm emanuel. fuck rahm emanuel.

That's not to say socialist organizations such as the DSA currently pose a significant threat to corporate Democrats such as Emanuel, much less President Donald Trump's right-wing agenda. (Trump recently applied the term "alt-left" to anti-racist protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, that included some socialists.) Despite the recent spike in popularity, socialist organizations remain a relative blip on the nation's political radar. The Chicago Teachers Union, for instance, has about 30,000 members as compared to the Chicago DSA's 1,300. That's why members like Ramirez-Rosa are careful not to rush into talk of socialists presenting a third-party challenge to the Democrats from the left. The numbers just aren't there.

The movement's modest stature, however, isn't stopping Ramirez-Rosa from marshaling the DSA and other ally organizations such as Reclaim Chicago and the CTU to help build up a progressive caucus in the city. In the next two years, he intends to help slate aldermanic candidates that he hopes will remake the City Council into "a real disciplined force for leftist policies that will uplift working Chicagoans." By 2019, he says, he expects this caucus to put forward "alternative policies to those that favor the 1 percent. And hopefully we have a progressive mayor and we are then delivering to him the votes to push forward progressive policies."

It's an ambitious agenda for an alderman who hasn't even completed his first term in office. But there are indications that socialism is at least helping to nudge the political needle left in Chicago and beyondeven if smashing capitalism remains far from reach.

Ramirez-Rosa has found Chicagoans remarkably receptive to socialist ideasparticularly if he has a chance to explain. "When we break through the false narrative put forward by the corporate media and actually go out and knock on doors and talk to people one on one, they're actually with us. I don't think there's this big divide between rank-and-file regular Democrats and the members of the DSA. They're actually with us on the policies, and so our job is to go out and present them a candidate and win those elections," he says. "That idea frightens the neoliberal establishment."

Something else that might frighten their foes is the chant delegates broke into as the convention was adjourned: "DSA ain't nothin' to fuck with!" v

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Beyond the 'Bernie bro': Socialism's diverse new youth brigade - Chicago Reader

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)