The Bernie Sanders Moment: Brought to you by the generation that has no future

“Si l’on ne croit à rien, si rien n’a de sens et si nous ne pouvons affirmer aucune valeur, tout est possible et rien n’a d’importance. ” ~Camus

economically speaking

Kudos. Recc’d for the title. These are interesting times. To me it looks like Bernie, or Donald. Check this out Standford grad for Trump – http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/03/28/donald-trump-immigration-trade-jobs-column/82071844/

have in the office an essay on how Japanese youth are facing the future by Anne Allison “Precarity and Hope” in a volume she edited with Frank Baldwin. She uses Lee Edelman’s concept of “reproductive futurity” to indicate how for many youth the present is not made sense of in terms of the rearing of children in the future. Not having met what Bourdieu would call a certain threshold of income, many youth cannot make a plan for life, which would include how many children to have. Also seems like in Bourdieu’s language we could say that the future is not something that is simply to be endured where the present beyond monthly debt payments is endlessly repeated. Nor is the future something to be controlled and conquered. There are no realistic hopes, only hope full of dreams. Drawing here on Richard Swedberg’s essay on Bourdieu’s economic sociology.
At any rate, I think Anne Allison’s work on precarity and hope in Japan would add to this discussion. Haven’t yet quite finished the essay.

that should be:

the “millenial thing” really is a thing

Nice piece, and interesting references RNB.

Bernie’ is just a phony candidate supplied by the establishment for Clinton to run against and win

No that was Jeremy Corbyn. Who won.

I was going to say, wouldn’t happen in Japan. There is a sense of predatory here that previous generations lacked but there is definitely a strong culture of getting a career out of uni. It’s weaker than it was before and the companies are doing what they can to make it less rewarding but it’s still very real, there are more jobs than applicants and the corporate job is still designed to be relatively secure. Everyone blames the increase in temporary and casual work on the 1990/ks shock but I see simple bloodymindedness by companies as the cause. In an aging society there is no reason for unemployment and if you follow the basic rules it’s not hard to make a career here.

I do get a feeling thouh that millennialist here are sick of the lack of change. They haven’t given up on a career future but have given up on any political future . Many want change but it isn’t coming and they don’t know how to get it. It’s become a society of workarounds and cover ups for young people (literally – they cover their tattoos). This is a bit scary because Japan changes by revolution and if there is an appetite for unmet changes maybe something will come.

But at least in terms of career, it’s still a reliable society.

Faustusnotes #14: “In an aging society there is no reason for unemployment and if you follow the basic rules it’s not hard to make a career here.”

Currently this is pretty much an unspoken tenet of US economists, too. You can almost hear them breathe a sigh of relief that the “baby boomer” generation was old enough to accelerate their retirement schedules during the last 8 years. Just a stroke of luck in the generational timeline (plus personal acceptance of poorer dotage), relieving some pressures in The System. If the boomer-bulge had NOT been near retirements yet, the US “unemployment rate” would be sky-higher, and god knows what the politics would be like right now…

Brett Bellmore #16: “As long as he plays his part in the farce, making it look like a competitive election…”

Oh nonsense. Bernie wants to be President. This year his lead in the Sanders/Trump matchup polls has GROWN STEADILY from 2% to 17%. Over the same time, Sanders has averaged 10 points ahead of Cruz. If Bernie knew a way to knock Hillary out of the race tomorrow, he would do it.

Are you guys all Republican campaign strategists? It is hard to imagine that your divorce from psychological reality is not feigned.

Let’s stay on the topic of the post, for once.

I’m interested in the economics of the Japanese job-hunting scene. Apparently there are 128 positions for every 100 applicants, but people go through this incredibly arduous 1 year long process to get a job as an entry level staffer at a company where they will work for years as just a drone. I have a 29 year old gaming friend who went through this route and appears to be currently earning about 200k yen a month – a salary anyone in the west would baulk at at that age (but he gets free accomodation, so I guess he’s a millionaire in London). How is it that demand can outstrip supply but it’s the people selling labour who have to go through the arduous process?

It’s as if the economics we are routinely fed by our political masters is wrong, or something …

Corey-

What are the many industries the students were referring to? It makes sense to me to see it as difficult to make a career in journalism/media, but what are the other industries? Education, health-care, food-service, business management? Plumbing, carpentry, construction?

Not to thread-crap, but I think the usefulness of the kind of assertion you’re making here is going to depend on the industry.

There is no cloud. There are only servers. Destroy the servers, destroy the back-ups, and you’ve done the same thing as burning the paper.

You can have such a thing as learned helplessness, which is also to say that helplessness can be taught. And it has been taught.
Worth reading on this topic is Franco Beradi with his concept of “The End of the Future”. He doesn’t mean literally there will be no future, but rather that the idea of the future as different and better from the past has been officially abandoned. The future is not something to be looked forward to but something to be feared. Also worth reading, and from a younger generation, is Mark Fisher’s collection of essays “Ghosts of My Life.” My generation (born in the 50s) would sometimes say “why bring children into the world if we are all going to die in a nuclear apocalypse.?” Now, it’s why bother making plans for a future which will be worse than the past? So long as people think that there is no hope of improvement, all they will do is fight each other for the scraps. It’s notorious that revolutions take place at times when change seems possible.

Soullite@25
so are you proposing a Mr. Robot style of f-society action? Unfortunately I have no computer skills or I’d join up. What Corey describes isn’t just true for millennials. Late Gen-Xers I know (including me) who thought it okay to go off track for a short time, even (especially) those with recently completed PhDs, and even from top-tier universities, are screwed. An ABD such as myself, finds little motivation to complete, and there’s a large dearth of desirable plan Bs or Cs to turn to. I adjunct when possible and take on even more demeaning teaching roles, but mostly try to imagine how my part-time, boring, mostly clerical, $18/hour job will ever get me close to paying off student loans or the mere semblance of financial security (I was funded in grad school, but what the university thought was enough to live on and what it really costs to live bear no relation to one another). The academic job market being what it is, even if I had more time and motivation to write, I don’t think finishing the degree would change my situation much. It’s not just millennials who have no future.

Ze K, that’s a wise place to be positioned philosophically and every good Buddhist will agree with you, but we’d better not let our governments in on the secret.

Val,
as an ex-pat Aussie (interestingly from what you write living in Germany) and I can tell you that what Australia has that is precious is compulsory (well sort of) voting and STV (single transferable vote or preferential voting). Hang on to them! Both of them keep the Pols in line.

It also has inherited from the British a properly independent Public Service (including electoral commission) and an independent Judiciary. The lack of the latter two is among America’s greatest problems.

Glancing back at Wedel’s Shadow Elite, she focuses on a Bosnian who traveled to Malaysia, got a degree in political science from the Int’l Islamic University there, moved to Beirut, got a Masters in ME studies, moved back to Sarajevo in 2001.

Who are Corey’s interns at a major American magazine, likely with 5-6 figures in student debt from a ranked university, seeking a career in existing? I see them as credentialists, seeking to leverage the existing system and their comparative advantage in it. Nearly conservative.

This is unfair, but history does lead me to look for the interesting Left in expatriates and exiles. Not that hard to travel, and much cheaper than a six-figure Ivy League degree.

The fact that 10 media interns might be unsure about what to do with themselves is hardly either surprising or generalisable . Some things might be true (1) there is more labour market volatility, particularly for certain jobs or demographics (2) house prices and rents are inflated in urban areas (3) there might be less opportunity for meaningful employment in certain careers or for certain demographics (4) certain sections of the youth might perceive (rightly or wrongly )that they have few prospects or that the future is bleak.
None of that implies that a generation have given up on careers or that their experiences are literally incompressible to someone born 10-20 years prior to them.

Lee @15 “I want to read chroniclers from within the younger generation.”

Holly Wood (real name, apparently) is a good place to start:

https://medium.com/@girlziplocked/d-i-n-o-s-why-bernie-winning-caucus-states-is-why-bernie-is-more-electable-than-hillary-86a136e083f4#.s0o3kqi5w

https://medium.com/@girlziplocked/open-letter-to-the-hopelessly-indebted-voting-for-hillary-clinton-e651203250ee#.sy3z6rj80

https://medium.com/@girlziplocked/the-baffling-reason-why-so-many-millennials-hate-baby-boomers-92e827a11296#.kyjuln224

https://medium.com/@girlziplocked/the-moral-fallout-when-academics-sell-out-1bc28f2e0a13#.oh8nv095z

https://medium.com/@girlziplocked/america-is-a-big-country-with-a-lot-of-shit-to-do-4a06f31f0d22#.8n3vsdflu

Is it possible that ‘Bernie’ is just a phony candidate supplied by the establishment

Is it possible that Ze K is a phony commenter supplied by the CT establishment to ‘liven up’ comment threads?

Is it possible that the moon is made of green cheese?

Is it possible that Putin is an alien in a human body?

Etc.

I want to read chroniclers from within the younger generation.
There are few if any who can give a good sense of the generation as a whole. Most millennial writers seem to have a hard time transcending their personal experience, possibly because there’s not really a larger context in which they can do so. Reading a lot of different writers and then trying to generalize is probably a more fruitful approach than trying to find some sort of voice of our generation.

Holly Wood: There have never been as few Democrats as there are right now.

A big vote for Sanders amidst a small vote. Both political parties are in deep trouble; one Party knows it.

kevin drum finds the lop-sided margin given to Sanders curious and he’s right to scratch his head in wonderment. but, there are always divides. somewhere in the anti-war generation of the late 1960s Cheney and Alito were nurtured.

yes, large numbers are burdened with fantastic student debt. and, large numbers are not. that’s a divide. that divide will matter — the exemption from debt for some will matter as much as the burden of debt for others.

@22 I hate to break it to you, but Trump cleaned up in liberal Mass and New Hampshire with voters of all stripes, not just the elderly. He’s a vulgarian, but given the lack of choices it’s no surprise (to me) that many would choose a reality tv billionaire over a bought and paid-for political hack. We only narrowly escaped a choice between two dud dynasties. One of those two is still in the ring.

I hope Sanders knocks her out.

Bernie has dragged the Democratic party conversation to the left, eg HRC & TPP without being (personally) divisive, perhaps with an eye to the landscape after the election. You don’t need to win all the time in order to do politics but these days we’re all Vince Lombardi playing football.

Which to me seems to be the core of the current problem, nobody willing to cut slack for anybody. No wonder the kids can’t make a move.

As an Actual Millenial (albeit one on the older end of the spectrum), I count myself quite fortunate to have attended a UC in the early part of the 2000s, rather than a private college, and doubly lucky to have been refused admission to law school in 2010. As a result of decisions whose impact I had no way of foreseeing, I don’t have any student debt and am in a comfortable, well-remunerated tech job. A lot of people I know, including some very good friends, are not nearly that fortunate.

Well, I’m old enough to have just started reading the paper regularly around 1990, which is also about the time my younger brother graduated from college. And while it was considered very sad that kids graduating around then had few job prospects, and that because it was just a fact that you could never recover, in terms of career, if your first couple of years out of college were bad, in terms of employment–things were absolutely certain to pick up after a couple of years, and moreover (even though this hadn’t been the case for those unfortunate kids) the best thing you could do to make sure it didn’t happen to you was get lots and lots of education, no matter how much it cost.

Of course, it didn’t cost quite as much then, and loans weren’t generally as big, and internships were more likely to be paid, and this kind of thing is a generational event now instead of occurring in small pockets of the economy.

On Trump “cleaning up” in Mass: He got about 310,000 votes, compared to 610,000 for Clinton and 590,000 for Sanders (and 114,00 and 113,000 for Kasich and Rubio, and 60,000 for Cru).

I agree that there are some millenials with the resigned attitude described in the OP and in my experience anyway, can’t really ascribe a demographic as to why this is the case (i.e. rich, poor, rural, city etc.).

What I can equally say is that there are also a huge cadre of what I call parent created super-kids that are energized by launching their second start-up as soon as they get back from irrigating fields in Africa and running a triathalon.

There’s never been a group so connected, so technologically empowered and exposed to so much potential wealth/opportunity. Perhaps that’s daunting when carrying around a pile of debt, perhaps that’s energizing – I’ve not walked that mile. I do know that the kids that are prepared to pay some dues and get down to making a carreer quite often find one….just like the generations before them. Real life starts when you stop letting others tell you how to do it and start making it happen for yourself.

@ 61
in other words: Horatio Alger 2.0

The remarkable thing about the last decade is the amount of stability in western political systems.

That’s the remarkable thing about 9 out of 10 decades you can name. And then sometimes the unremarkable happens.

The policy of financing higher education falls into the same pattern, by the way. Talk up the value of higher education, but use a policy mechanism that draws away most of the benefit to some loan shark and makes the “beneficiary” miserable.

Trader Joe @ 61

It is the yawning divide. There are those with a lot of student debt and others with none or very little: it is something of a barbell distribution. Half of this latest generation of adults knew poverty growing up; half didn’t.

The ones who make it will have a big need to believe that this is a just result reflecting personal virtue. So, the Right will have its recruits. The Left — will they be waiting for personal transformation?

“I’m interested in the economics of the Japanese job-hunting scene. ”

From anime watching with my kids I’ve seen a little bit of how this appears in that popular medium. bob mcmanus may be interested in this comment.

The Devil is a Part-Timer is literally about the Devil, who travels to our world from a magical dimension and finds fulfillment in working at a McDonald’s as a pseudo-young-adult, complete with shared apartment. Never has fast food labor been so represented as fulfilling in any other work I’ve seen, although some of this is for comic effect.

Noragami is about a “stray god” who appears to be a teenager, who takes any odd job he can get for the traditional offering of a 5 yen piece (about 4 cents U.S.) and is homeless. A girl who wonders if she should hang out with him thinks back to her mother’s warning about hanging out with lazy people, which is kind of puzzling since he’s always working or trying to work. Part of that scene is her thinking about or watching a TV show about “parasites” who live off of their parents — which, again, the god character doesn’t have.

One Punch Man has a favorite of mine, a rare appearance of anti-work activists as thugs who just want people to give them money and who beat up anyone who doesn’t. As the cultural changes we’ve talked about happen, anti-work activists are going to appear more and more as villains in this way, so this was like seeing the first crocus of spring.

Not really: being university grad who wants ‘a career…not just in journalism but in a great many industries’ doesn’t put you in the 1% or make you white..

@b9n10nt

Heart of a heartless world, soul of soulless conditions.

There’s a good Jacobin essay to be written (drawing on a mcmanus-esque reading list?) on empathy and community-building as revolutionary acts. Resisting the self-construction which late capitalism tries to build.

What spiritual practices do you find productive, if Christianity isn’t? (I meditate myself and have half-a-toe in Soto Zen practice. ‘Sgood.)

@64 engles
“I do know that the kids that are prepared to pay some dues and get down to making a carreer quite often find one….just like the generations before them

How do you “know” this? What does it even mean (eg. is it falsifiable)?”

I know it cause I see it in my workplace, see it in businesses my friends are involved in etc….a kid willing to step-up, take some responsibility and show some initiative will usually get a shot to show what they can do. I’m not saying they go from the mail room to CEO in a day and I’m not saying they probably aren’t getting screwed wage-wise on the front end of that journey – they probably are. That said, if they show they are responsibile, dependable, make good decisions, they will get a chance to progress and build a carreer – if not there, elsewhere (I also think few kids have any clue what they really want till they’ve worked some things they didn’t want – but that’s a different topic).

As Bruce notes @69….there is a divide and I do appreciate its harder for the kid carrying debt – but in my observation, the go-getters are not confined to either the debtors or non-debtors. The go-getters are the ones that understand that the degree they earned isn’t the end of the line, its a ticket to join the line and it only has a value if you are willing to make it have value.

Its true, it doesn’t work for everyone. But its far to easy to focus on the college grad working at Starbucks or driving Uber and not look at the one who opened their own coffee shop or wrote their own app.

I’d rather, a la Bernie, that the kids didn’t have to graduate with lots of debt in the first place. That said, if a kid is going to take up a place at college, graduate and then be depressed that the world doesn’t automatically recognize their brilliance and award them a place in society with a nice pay-check and manageable responsibilities – they’ve learned the books but not the lessons.

Ben @ 79

Vipassana.

Here’s a could-be: standardized collectives created by people in retail (aka sucky jobs that aren’t a career and won’t pay a mortgage + tix to Hamilton) and the energy goes into personal development, communal living, and transformative urban politics rather than capitalist careerism. Call ’em “check out collectives”. Or something

I grew up in the 1980s.among my friends. We all thought the world may end any day in mushroom clouds and nuclear war. So most just went surfing and took drugs. Not so different. After a while we worked out life goes on In she end, was the only one that went to university and did a bunch of book learnin’, including getting a PhD. So it will be for the current generation, I suspect. 40 will sneak up on them too. And life will go on slightly better or slightly worse for almost all.

I thought part of Brett’s post was correct. I mean he’s wrong to think Sanders doesn’t want to win, but obviously Bernie doesn’t want to alienate Clinton supporters too much if he does get the nomination. So this part of Brett’s comment is just common sense–

“It’s a delicate balancing act. On the one hand, he can’t go after her directly in an all out effort to win the nomination, or he gets destroyed. On the other, he has to be a strong enough candidate that just tossing him aside and appointing Biden isn’t feasible.’

This is also why you can never have a very honest discussion in American election years. Bernie has already gone about as far as you can go criticizing the party whose nomination he is seeking. I just read some Daniel Larison articles about the Saudi war (crimes) in Yemen–Sanders would undoubtedly oppose US policy there, but is he going to say that Obama is supporting war crimes? Not likely. Someone running for the Democratic nomination can’t afford to piss off the bulk of Democratic voters. On the Republican side they openly favor war crimes and the only person who might have said something about this was Rand Paul.

And okay, this is all a bit off-topic, though I think it connects in a roundabout sort of way, in the sense you rarely have an election season where the candidates come anywhere close to telling the truth about anything. But with Sanders and in a psychotic sort of way, Trump, that’s not as true as it usually is. Why is that? Probably because people think the system is falling apart.

“and in a psychotic sort of way, Trump, ”

Um, in case people misunderstand, I think Trump is a racist bigoted maniac. But he did tell the truth about Bush and Iraq. And it seemed to go over well with many Republican voters.

I think some of the commenters here… really aren’t grasping the issue.

It’s not that there isn’t work.

It’s that unless you work in a small number of fields that still adhere to old economic models- govt employees, people with or economically near good unions, certain professional fields- there just isn’t any PERMANENCE.

I literally cannot imagine ever being in a place, career wise, where it would make sense for me to put down serious roots in a community. I’ve never lived in the same place for more than three years, and all of my moves were due to work issues. Every job I’ve held has had an implicit time limit- there’s been something, usually an economic or business plan issue, that’s made me aware up front that sooner or later things would change.

I’ve had work. Consistently. I’m not broke and I’m not hurting. My wife has also worked consistently, even when my job dragged her around the Midwest and forced her to change jobs.

It’s just… I don’t see an end to this. My skill set is in reasonable demand, but I will probably never feel comfortable and confident in my future, because complacency kills. I feel like a predator. If I stop worrying where my next meal is coming from, I might not have one. And when the gazelles emigrate to other pastures, I damn well better follow.

For young or middle aged people working or hoping to work in the general world of business, I think those feelings are very typical. And they’re not conducive to the American dream of owning a house, raising kids, and settling down.

I’m not kidding here. I’ve lived in four cities in ten years and I can’t see that pattern ever changing.

@87Patrick
Your observation is a good one. For what its worth, I’d say job Permanence died sometime in the 90s and has probably gotten progressively weaker over time. As you say, there are fields that remain exceptions, but the expectation that a person needs to keep agile and flexible is a stark change from the boomer generation (and saves a lot of money on awarding the 10 year lapel pins and 25 year engraved watches).

I feel like your number of inter-city moves is perhaps unusual on a widely generalized basis, but may be normal for your particular vocation – a good friend who is now a tenured Uni professor bounced around much the same before finally sticking a landing (as he likes to say it). My younger brother in tech has worked a number of jobs, but always in the same city. He’s been permanent as to home address but not business address (and on a number of occassions his home address was his business address as a remote employee w/all the related travel that entails).

I’m not sure how these experiences should bear on college interns though – they aren’t likely to have known such challenges so shouldn’t know to be even faintly depressed by them.

sorry for the mess-up in italics — only the word ‘favela’ was meant to be italicized

@ Patrick 87:

You’ve just demonstrated why so many Americans aren’t moving from low-wage, high unemployment regions into high-wage, low unemployment ones: people value and are willing to pay for stability (and are loss-averse).

On the macro- level, public policy is fixated on economic growth (GNP) to the neglect of other aspects of peoples’ welfare. By not questioning the value of private income in relation to other public goods, we are socially engineered to serve a system that does not reciprocally serve us.

Ze K: re: “monarch”

I think the Trump appeal (and US Presidential politics in the TV age generally) is largely following a deep-seated pattern wherein the pesantry turns to the Monarchy (a highly symbolic authority with whom an emotional attachment is formed) as a righteous force against an oppressive aristocracy.

mcmanus
Younger generations are all [sic] becoming self-financing entrepeneurs, with a lot more “freedom” and a lot less security.

This is an epic overgeneralization. What about all the people who continue to go to law school, med school, business school, grad school of one sort or another? A certain portion may become “self-financing entrepreneurs,” others won’t. Many will prob. have “less security” than (some of) their predecessors, but that’s a separate point.

those who accumulate contacts, languages, and skills in the NGO/non-profit communities

Did it ever occur to you that some who do this might be motivated by, among other things, idealism? Or you so inclined to see everything, incl. the NGO/nonprofit sector, as dictated by ‘capital’ that motives are irrelevant?

Or you so inclined to see everything, incl. the NGO/nonprofit sector, as dictated by ‘capital’ that motives are irrelevant?

Mostly an economic determinist, but I do agree that the accumulation of social capital can have its own kind of profit.

Said enough here today.

Younger generations are all [sic] becoming self-financing entrepeneurs, with a lot more “freedom” and a lot less security.

This is an epic overgeneralization. What about all the people who continue to go to law school, med school, business school, grad school of one sort or another?

You mean the people seeking debt-financing for an investment they believe will earn substantial long-term returns? Ummm

I don’t think it is profitable to talk about the “go getters”. They are going to get the best of what is available. I think we should think about the average and below average. How can we maintain society that can’t provide a decent living for the great majority of its citizens. A pyramid may make a stable building, but it will not make a stable economy.

I don’t think it is profitable to talk about the “go getters”.

The poor, homeless, and jobless often hustle more than the petty bourgeois within much worse conditions of competition and impediments to accumulation. I am aware of Mumbai and Rio, believe those streets have their share of go-getters, and am in no way celebrating the enforced totalitarian libertarianism of post-capitalism.

But…

Globalization and the march of the machines is reversible

No, it’s not.

I see more concentration of capital.

The difference is a concentration in Dearborn Michigan, owned and controlled by Henry Ford, and a concentration in Goldman-Sachs or Apple’s retained earnings or Walton family shares or SWFs, where the accumulation and concentration necessarily becomes available for others to use or leverage. Industrial Capital versus finance capital. Finance capital, fictional capital, has to move.

Carrier could move their fixed capital to Mexico because circulating capital has become dominant. Liquidity is becoming grotesque.

the go-getters

Speaking of generational divides

Thanks Matt @80 . Very true .

@phenomenal cat
Scale matters, yes. But what I was objecting to, perhaps not as clearly as I might have, was mcmanus’ implication (as I read it at any rate) that all choices of or decisions about jobs/careers/etc are simply a matter of a utilitarian-style calculation as to what will get the most ‘return’. Obvs. that’s not uniformly the case. There are what the OP calls ‘existential’ as well as economic considerations:

Although all of these young men and women had some combination of writerly dreams, none of them—not one—had any plan for, even an ambition of, a career. Not just in the economic sense but in the existential sense of a lifelong vocation or pursuit that might find some practical expression or social validation in the form of paid work.

The “vocation or pursuit” in this sense is not something everyone in the world has the luxury of even thinking about or trying to follow, but that’s not to say it doesn’t exist at all.

As to development, yes, good intentions often go awry. But there are NGOs that do valuable, often insufficiently acknowledged work; they manage to improve lives even if they are not overthrowing capitalism.

p.s. To anticipate a possible riposte re my quote from the OP, I do not think payment (“paid work”) is the only or an always indispensable form of “practical expression” of a vocation. There are prob. a few well-known cases, say, of writers who had v. different “day jobs”; Wallace Stevens comes to mind and I’m sure there are other examples. But this is a side pt.

http://www.epi.org/publication/the-class-of-2015/

There is data and analysis on this topic. And the big problem is not new college graduates, especially white ones, although it is a problem. It’s new high school graduates. As always, entering the labor market in a downturn sucks. Those entering the market in 2009 and 2010 were hit harder than those entering today.

Bob mcmanus
I have described it as the cartelization of capital.
There is little doubt that, despite what some would like to think, the poor work a lot harder than most of rest of us. Unfortunately, most of that is to keep them from falling farther behind.

Looks like Holly struck a nerve. The kids really are alright. “Hate speech.” Jeezus.

JanieM @ 117–thanks for preempting my diatribe with more tempered speech than I might have used.

“I often hear the sentiment” [Regret the typo]

Would anyone, if they could go back in time, have the guts to tell depression-era Americans that hey, they live in the richest country in the world after all? Many countries in southern Europe face mass unemployment right now. I’ve applied for 243 jobs since the beginning of the year – yes, I’ve kept track. It is perfwctly common to have 50 to 200 applicants for each position. I’m fine living in the firstworld – except the part where I feel fucking useless and that I’m getting older with nothing to show for it, or any expectations that things will improve. The part where I walk past people sleeping in the streets and know that the only reason I’m not there is that my family gives me food and shelter could also use some working on.

I don’t think millennials are lazy. I am a millennial who has perhaps had similar difficulties as those expressed by some above. My problem is with the premise of the post, that there’s some sort of collective generational apathy developing. Also that what we’re facing is unique.
Did the “baby boomers” really have it as easy as claimed ? I understand my perspective is probably skewed from growing up in Ireland rather than the US , England or most of Western Europe , which didn’t have that post war period of growth and economic security , but even in the industrialised west, was life really as simple as people like to claim? It seems at that time there were a lot of people excluded from society and the economy and a lot of opposition to both. I mean my parents had to leave the country, as did a lot of their siblings, then moved back to a regional Irish town in the 80s to start a business. I doubt it was particularly easy, although they were among the lucky (having some qualifications)
And they wanted things I didn’t , ie married by 22 with all their kids by 30. Was that time really more conducive to such stability or did people just have different preferences ? It seems to me that there’s a mix. In what ways are our problems unique? in what ways is mobility becoming stifled ? For who? Do people have different expectations than previous generations etc? There might be something there I guess, but I don’t see that the case has been made .
And there are still careers. I mean people still become plumbers, accountants , carpenters , insurance salesmen, teachers, policemen, nurses , tax men. We aren’t literally living in a post work dystopia (yet, anyway )
I do agree kidneystones rhetoric that at least we all have clean water is ridiculous. (But not surprising considering the source )

The idea that “baby boomers” are all alike suggests that the writer has only met two or three of them

How is this possible? It’s impossible for someone in the millenial generation to meet only two or three boomers. They probably know as many boomers as they do millenials. The boomers are a populous generation and they’re in charge of all the functions of society that millenials interact with.

Functions of society that are often very unpleasant. Coincidence? Surely …

Would anyone, if they could go back in time, have the guts to tell depression-era Americans that hey, they live in the richest country in the world after all?

Judging from this thread, quite a few people absolutely would say that.

TM @123
Yes.

But perhaps you missed the next sentence I wrote @91, viz. “one’s wants and expectations are usually gauged in relative terms”. I was not meaning to advocate quiescence or starting from “the lowest of expectations,” to use your phrase. (I suppose I cd have made that clearer.)

No one with any sense would walk up to, let’s say, a middle-aged former factory worker now either unemployed (or working in a low-wage job) and say “look on the bright side: you live in the richest country in the world.”

That’s ridiculous. As I said @91, people’s reference points are inescapably and understandably relative. The former factory worker’s reference pts are his former employment (now gone) and the living standards of others in his society.

It’s possible to understand this and at the same time realize that there is a global as well as national picture. However no one is suggesting, at least I didn’t mean to, that e.g. the magazine interns shd find it consoling or “a coping mechanism” (TM’s words) to think of the poorest people in the world. One doesn’t compare oneself to the poorest people in the world. One’s compares oneself to one’s peers and others in one’s own society.

No one with any sense would walk up to, let’s say, a middle-aged former factory worker now either unemployed (or working in a low-wage job) and say “look on the bright side: you live in the richest country in the world.”

Yes, but only because no one wants to risk being punched in the face. The media is in fact entirely full of people saying just this, from the safety of a studio and cultural context where everyone believes the same thing.

@138

And the best way the “center” can think of to accommodate resentment toward that, apparently, without doing the impossible and talking about economics (which are important even if they’re not the only determining factor), is to go Haidt and say, “yes, the problem is that liberals irrationally hate your culture, which in fact is really as much better than theirs as you think.” Which, strangely, isn’t actually an effective way to counter the ideology of white supremacy. It effectively restricts the extent of the economic discussion, however,

@ 136 In my experience, middle-aged folks rarely welcome unsolicited commentary on their lives from strangers. Suggestions on how to look at life are even less welcome. The challenges facing the two groups – former members of the middle-class now out of work (see Disney) and recent college grads are not entirely dis-similar, nor are they alike. The latter often have large debt, fewer life skills, and little work experience. The former have 20-30 years work experience, enjoyed considerable/some success at work, and have an abundance of real-life skills – raising families, etc. Both groups are capable of keeping two thoughts in their minds at the same time. And as we move into similarities, both groups are being screwed by globalization, etc. The older may have recently lost a home, a job, and the ability to provide for her family. The younger can’t see where to get a foot on the rung of mobility. Both need to see that the world is not what they knew, or were led to believe it would be. This isn’t abstract for a substantial number of people I know, most of whom fall into the older category. As noted, I very strongly disagree with those who discount our ability to effect change. If we believe we are ‘doomed’ no matter what we do, we have zero incentive to do much. We need to be able to get a hold on one tiny part of our lives and start implementing positive change. That’s why we need to be aware of the challenges we face and the challenges others face.

My first strong impression of entering Mexico city by train in the morning for the first time decades ago was watching individuals line up at the communal tap, carrying brightly colored buckets, so that they could begin their day. That’s life everyday. I asked a fairly well-off Chinese woman why she decided to move from upscale Shanghai to Tokyo. Her reply: easier to live, by which I subsequently learned – in Japan she didn’t feel the same compelling need to soak all vegetable produce in cold water for two hours every day to leech out toxins.

We do face challenges and we’ve got it sooooo easy compared with many/most of our ancestors and many/most living in other parts of the globe. In Paris, I walked past one of the work actions alluded to elsewhere last week. In this particular case, disgruntled employees had stacked garbage at the entrance of a college and set the ancient doors alight. As I stood with several students watching the police gather ‘evidence,’ they alluded to the political problems France faced. I agreed, but pointed out the problems weren’t 1944, or 1914. We agreed.

Each generation has its challenges. Ours pale in most respects to those of those who came before us. I remember when inter-racial marriage was illegal in some states, when Australia had a color-bar, etc. etc. etc. Others have already done the heavy-lifting. We simply need to remember that others faced/face far more daunting challenges than we do today. That’s not the same as walking up to a stranger and announcing that she, or he, should ‘look on the bright side.’ We need to remember we’ve been born with skills and freedoms that few others enjoy. Our job is to understand the limits of what is and what is not possible. Expecting to swim against the tide by choosing a career path in a dead-end industry is not the same as being forced to train your much lower paid replacement on the threat of losing a pension, payout. We cannot and should not do much to help those too dense to read the writing on the wall. Skilled workers being forced to train their replacements have every reason to expect their government to provide some form of protection. They’re not getting it. So, they’re turning to Trump, or Sanders. They’re right to do so, because none of the other candidates is going to lift a finger to fight the status quo.

We need to fight the status quo because resisting globalization is the challenge of our time. But if we refuse to fight, then we can’t possibly win. Protectionism and fair trade look pretty good to me right about now. Taxing the shit out of corporations screwing their workers is likely to enjoy broad public appeal and for once we have two, not one, candidates ready to make this a reality.

Good times!

What Mr. Sanders offers is not revolution but reversion to and completion of the Welfare state, that is, a kind of stabilized, restrained capitalism. As many in the present discussion have mentioned, many young people (and not so young) find their economic world and prospects to be precarious. I believe this is because capitalism (as we know it, anyway) is reaching its physical limits and has begun to devour itself, and is thus running ever faster since the food remaining to it is, so to speak, pre-digested. (For example, buying a company, breaking it up, selling off the pieces quickly at less than they were worth, and getting rid of the employees; this can be done much faster than old-time expansion and accumulation.)

While it is always possible for some to find opportunities in graveyards, junkyards, earthquakes, and riots, most people probably desire nicer opportunities more suited to their natural pace and ambition, hence desire a reversion to earlier, seemingly better times. But I wonder if this is possible. Physical limits are unforgiving, even for the very smart. And our great leaders are not so smart.

Anarcissie illustrates the hazards of treating “capitalism” as an unified organic actor.

We, and the institutions we create, are “capitalism”. The continual reproduction of political society and its economy is organic and necessarily cyclical, with periodic crises, but within the bounds left by its historic path, and the limits of logical and material necessity, plastic and undetermined going forward. Our creature does not have intentions or purposes of its own, even if we are a fractious and absent-minded bunch of architects of our future.

“But when Trump says America is a “poor nation” and talks about pulling back various military and political commitments until others step up and pay their way, that’s a major change in the way the US has talked about itself up to now.”

@121: U.S. presidential candidates often employ rhetoric about making other nations “pay their way,” “fight their own wars,” “America isn’t the world’s policeman,” etc., during campaign season. The U.S. actually provides relatively little in the way of foreign aid, but you wouldn’t know that to hear them talk.

Trump also wants to give rich people a nice big tax cut, but for some reason he doesn’t yap about that much.

111, 117 & 119: I wouldn’t worry. In the fullness of time Holly’s young relatives and their friends will be excoriating her for her generation’s shortcomings in between mouthfuls of Holly’s pot roast, while Holly mutters about how easy they have it. I hope their jeremiads are better written, though.

bruce wilder 03.30.16 at 4:18 pm @ 146 —
I wasn’t thinking of capitalism as a unified organic actor but rather as a collection of activities and relations, some of which predominate at any given time, and all of which change. (Hence the quasiweasel ‘as we know it’.) When the predominant activities and relations begin to approach a limit, the predominant actors (Capital) will seek out new activities and relations, withdrawing support from others, thus creating instability, perceived by others as precarity and lack of power and influence in the political realm. I was questioning whether a recollection of the Welfare state is going to solve the problem. Supporting Mr. Sanders is good business for me — I live on Social Security — but it’s business as usual. Or as used to be.

reason @ 145: the growing dishonesty of the conversations in the public sphere

I am with you there.

Of course, political persuasion has always involved elements of deception, but, yes, something is peculiarly dysfunctional. I do not know that I can explain it adequately. Some of us use the label, neoliberal, pointing at several related lines of rhetoric and thinking, but then are told that the label is meaningless, simply a synonym for “you don’t like it”.

Upthread, I said that I thought broad elements of the electorate experiences the dishonesty and the disconnect between stated intentions and commitments of candidates and their policy choices in office as “insincerity”. Of course, politicians have always been somewhat cynical in their use of their own sincerity, but I meant to indicate that in the present case, there’s a profound disconnect between the rhetoric of policy intent and the actual mechanisms and foreseeable consequences of chosen policies. Many people, maybe, cannot fully articulate that disconnect, and their own ideas about what is a good policy commitment and what policies follow from that may be bizarre (so you get people to whom a wall on the Mexican border sounds reasonable). But, nevertheless, they understand that the results of recent policy in domestic economics or international relations have not been satisfactory and don’t trust what the usual suspects tell them.

139 The “age inequality” argument is clever because it is true that *on average*, the over 60 are much richer than the under 30, and relatively speaking, the discrepancy has greatly increased. But of course, the vast majority of the over 60 are still not rich, not even affluent (as I recall, only 25% have more than 250k in net worth, which means that 75% own at best their house after a long life of working and most would be poor without Social Security). It’s just that most rich people belong to older generations (which is to be expected of course). What’s the name of that statistical fallacy again? In addition, what is new is that the fortunes of the younger generation have tanked particularly since the great recession.

reason @145 and Bruce @152:

It would be interesting to know, if one could quantify such things, what proportion of all the communications one receives (or better, perhaps, the stimuli one experiences) in an average day are some form of advertising or marketing. I’d guess a large majority. In which case, a hypothesis presents itself: the nature and function of human communication has altered. Through most of history, the default reaction to any communication was “this is what the speaker believes.” One needed only to judge the credibility of the speaker in order to know how to act. In the 21st century, after generations of saturation advertising, much or most of it deceptive or at least manipulative, the default reaction is “this is what the speaker, for some purpose of his/her own, wants me to believe.” Virtually all public communication may safely be presumed to be aiming at some effect, rather than simply at conveying information or conviction. Finding out what the speaker actually believes, much less what’s actually true or false, is the hearer’s responsibility: caveat auditor. Universal mistrust is the moral foundation of this stage, at least, of capitalist society. Hence, honesty is no longer the best policy.

I like geo’s proposed research project – and my attempts at thinking through some of the practicalities (e.g. the basic question of whether we should attempt to quantify this in terms of percentage of individual messages received or percentage of time in day they would take up if one actually paid attention to them all) support his hypothesis, that many if not most of us are now conditioned to ignore most of what is thrown at us on the reasonable assumption that it will be manipulative rubbish, and to suspect most of the rest of having similar purposes but being better at disguising them. In which case, the only messages with any hope of being accepted as sincere are those which, prima facie, no one in their right mind would think of putting forward in anything other than naive/deluded sincerity: old-fashioned socialism or virtual fascism.

“That’s hate speech” and not-Godwinning / “my kids and their friends are fine” / #notallboomers. I don’t see what those Millennials are complaining about at all!

Boomers did accomplish something: they pretty much get the credit for ending official racial discrimination in the U.S. They also pushed some progress in feminism, anti-homophobia etc. and increased mass environmental consciousness, all of which were worthy achievements although quickly subsumed into neoliberalism. In every other respect, the generation failed the important social challenges of our time and left the world worse than they had found it.

They failed even on their own terms. The boomer counterculture — the hippies — were, as the current joke goes, always right. The failures of the boomer generation involve the rejection of their own counterculture and a return to standard cultural values.

But the oldest Millennials are 25 or so now, and they’re failing as a generation too, so people can console themselves with that.

Rich P. @160
The boomer counterculture — the hippies — were, as the current joke goes, always right.

The baby boom, as usually defined, runs from 1946 to 1964, I believe. The statistical peak of the baby boom, iirc, was the year 1957. Someone born in ’57 was, almost certainly, too young to participate in the height of the hippie era — say, Haight-Ashbery 1967 or Woodstock ’69, just to cite two famous examples.

‘The hippies’ were thus the counterculture only of the first wave of the baby boom and by no means of the whole ‘generation’. This may seem like a minor pt but I think it’s worth recalling as it likely has some application to other statements about ‘boomers’ that one often sees.

What if entrenched discrimination of all kinds, and class, were not confined to generational cohorts? Isn’t the promotion of boomer hatred (And yes, it is hate speech – Much of the basis of genocide against Jews / Kulaks / “wealthy peasants” in the last century was whipping up resentment based on perceived “greediness” or monopolisation of resources) perfectly tailored for right wing and neoliberal overlords to get us and our children fighting amongst each other and ignoring structural racism, sexism and class, not to mention all the disastrous policies (housing, health, finance) which emanate from them?

The thought that one lives in the richest, strongest or whatever nation in the world is, for many curiously consoling. The thought that, whatever one’s present circumstances, other people somewhere else – as it might be the Chinese – are better off is somewhat less consoling, but is still regularly put forward here and elsewhere.

Holly woods boomer piece struck me as something I’d have written to my mother if she grounded me at 15 for smoking behind the bikeshed

To be more serious, I do (to some degree ) admire hollys gall and vitriol. I understand her schtick is exaggerated for effect , and is intended to serve a particular rhetorical purpose. That’s all fine and understandable, but it’s not an analysis in any meaningful way. It’s a persona, not an intellectual position

Professor Q says it better than I can:

http://johnquiggin.com/2015/08/06/the-generation-game-and-the-1-per-cent/

“A Zombie idea which can never be killed.”

The Pete Peterson’s and the business right are eager to promote the generational warfare story – it suits their interests quite nicely. The problem is that that story has resonance. America* squandered its historic opportunity after the fall of the USSR with a series of unforced errors. The mis-managing of the East Asian financial crisis and the WoT/Iraq War are the big ones here, but feel free to add your own example from the litany of failures we have experienced in recent decades. Financial capital and the war economy have been privileged over any sort of long-term investment in infrastructure, education, or our urban environments. We identify as a specific race religion gender class politic and style, but we have little sense of being engaged in a common project, working together to some future. The majority of our leaders go along with this, play up or even encourage division, and all the while we are expected to tune out the dull roar of American decline.

It’s not just our infrastructure that is crumbling, or that legislation and the machinery of government are woefully out of date; the feeling of dread really kicks in as you watch the general failure of American institutions of all stripes. The traditional media come quickly to mind, but our churches, our sports leagues, our schools and universities, our police forces – all mired in scandals including some mixtures of fraud, sex, and violence. How many of you would say with 100% confidence that you think our elections are administered fairly?

But instead of a call for national renewal, or even an honest accounting of where we are headed, you see those who have established themselves digging in. When someone like Holly Wood rails against aging Americans retreating to their suburban McMansions, it is against this backdrop of the broad-scale retreat towards the private in American life. The sense of ‘well I got mine’ by those in positions of power & influence. Has it always been such? Not in America – not as millennials were raised, high on the legacy of the post WWII boom, with the brashness of the 80’s and the optimism of the 90’s added for good measure. Yet as our lives are increasingly tailored to the sort of flexibility desired by the market, the hope of stability – through a career, or through the American dream of buying a home – appears increasingly out of reach. So there is a lot of anger and resentment against America*, and for millennials a sense of betrayal. Just before we arrived on scene, the common wealth of this country was parceled out and walled off (or shipped overseas). People are noting that it is not just millennials who are hurting, that plenty of the older generation have been hit hard by recent events. As if the millennials do not know this – remember, these are not our parents, our aunts and uncles, whose jobs and retirement savings we have watched disappear. This is part of the story of betrayal – will this be our fate a few decades hence as well?

Who stands in for America* here? It is easy to blame the older generation, who have dominated all positions of authority in society for all the obvious reasons in addition to the abnormal size of the cohort (also treated too expansively imo). The right wing wants the youth believe it is a generational question. The prospect of a shrinking pie, an age of diminished expectations about the future, gives an audience to these worries about debt and a long-term competition for societal resources. I know a lot of smart people my age who are sympathetic to this line, we (the left) should be troubled by that fact. But more than wringing our hands about it, something is going to need to happen in a material sense to give the younger generation a sense of ‘buy-in’ in the American system. As Sanders shows, millennials will reject this view if they are offered a viable future to substitute for it (one that openly acknowledges that “the system is rigged”, and even names the culprit). It is just hard to believe that it is worth staying the course if you think the trajectory is all wrong.

Not “insulted”, genuinely fearful. Thinking of the next few years with vulnerable old people needing a higher level of care, “cared” for (thanks to the wonderful world of privatised “care”) by resentful people who have been ginned up to hate them.
That’s going to end well.

I think two things can be simultaneously true:

Yes, we suffer from upward redistribution of wealth, grave ecological threats, a dysfunctional political system, a tragedy of mass incarceration & social upheaval, the vestiges of racism and sexism, and a civic culture steeped in escapism & triviality on the one hand and acrimony and bitterness on the other. These harms and threats are each related to a system in which our elites rise to, maintain, and defend their privileges.

Yet we are still a thriving prosperous society: In the U.S. measures of happiness are stable and among the highest among nations, life expectancy has continued to increase, per-capita income advances decade by decade, scientific advance and technological ingenuity continues to give us confidence in our potential to flourish…personal freedoms persist and -among some of the most vulnerable populations- expand.

Among politically-involved groups (of all ideologies) there’s a resistance to acknowledging the good news for fear that only persistent messages of fear and alarm will motivate “the choir” and spread the gospel among the unconverted. But I think that resistance is psychologically naive both for groups and individuals.

There’s very good reason for the Left to lay claim to and take credit for the prosperity that we do enjoy. It is as rational to hope that this 40 year period of neoliberal advance reflects old and dying ways of thinking as it is rational to fear that we are headed into darker times.

Optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect? I think the intellect is rather lazy in accepting pessimism as an objective view. I think there is a way to acknowledge the corruption and threats that we face in this society without succumbing to acrimony, bitterness, or blame.

Perhaps these words are…condescending? Irrelevant? Distractions? But whatever fortitude it requires to hope for and work for social change, it can’t be well nurtured by constant messages of “We deserve the American Dream and you took it away” or “everything sucks and is getting worse”, can it? Seems like that’s a very contradictory way to go about working for meta-personal progress.

Holly Wood’s piece has great vitriol, and it’s generally true that “let’s you and them fight” is a great strategy to get the exploiters to fracture the exploited. Worked when the planters and the elites in the South put poor whites and African-Americans at each others’ throats. Why should it stop working now?

I am simply pretty orthodox and I looked for the quote in vain but Marx said something about capitalism (or other mode of production) only being superseded when all it’s existing tendencies are maximized in breadth and depth.

1859 Preface:

No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation.

ie. highly ‘orthodox’ but not exactly uncontroversial

As a social historian, maybe I can tell you some things about baby boomers. For most of us, our parents had been affected by the Second World War, and for many, our parents had been directly involved. But we were born after the war, when they came back, determined that things could be different, that evil in the shape of Hitler had been defeated, even though they knew, puzzlingly, that their side had done some terrible things too.

We were the children of that belief, the ones who would make the dream of peace and plenty and fairness come true. And to some extent we did, until things went wrong in the 70s – when we were still marching (I have photos of myself marching) and then even more in the 80s, when we perhaps were old enough to start taking some responsibility. I am not sure who is responsible for what happened in the 80s, and the start of neoliberalism, but I feel fairly sure it wasn’t women. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think there were any women amongst the leading lights of the Chicago School of Economics.

I think the neoliberal turn was more a reaction against feminism, and against anti-racism and anti-colonialism – I think it was white ruling class men reasserting their dominance. I don’t know what generation they were , exactly, but I don’t know that that matters. I do know that I fought against them, and I suffered because of it, and I don’t blame those of my sisters (or brothers of the non-ruling class) who went along with it, because there were real penalties for those of us who didn’t. I didn’t end up in poverty, but I didn’t end up in parliament either, which was certainly a possibility for me at one time.

And I should add that “the wonderful world of privatised care” was preserved and enabled in the U.S. by Obamacare, which patched over just enough of the crisis in the system to foreclose any other solution. Those people are getting paid very little for changing bedpans in part because liberals insisted that this was the best we could do and that we were ridiculous idealists if we held out for anything better — the same liberals who insist that HRC is the best we can do and that we’re ridiculous idealists if we vote for Sanders. Is thee a generational divide there? Oops, I think that there is.

Maybe you should read what I said, Rich, and respond to that. I am not responsible for what the white ruling class men of my generation did, and nor is Helen.

As I say, I don’t blame my sisters who went along with the neoliberal turn. Take Hillary Clinton – she tried to introduce a better healthcare funding system when her husband was elected (her husband, note, because even though she might have been more capable, she couldn’t have been elected then) and she got howled down. So she remade herself, with the blonde hair and the make up (and what her husbands infidelities may have had to do with that, maybe one can guess) and the neoliberal compromises, and became acceptable. And now all the young lefties are bagging her.

As I said, I didn’t go down that path myself. But I never got near the influence that Hillary Clinton (or Julia Gillard here) had either. So maybe think about why people compromise, hey?

To a large degree I determine “the tasks mankind sets for itself” by what actually happens and what gets done.

From the sixties, flying cars didn’t make much progress, but Star Trek tricorders are in our pockets. Some progress has been made in the US on the environment and gender equality but considerably less on racial equality.

I don’t say “we tried but failed” or “we didn’t really try” because I don’t view the political will/desire for tasks not yet accomplished as an independent variable. Social desire/hope/optimism/determination is a material condition, a historical social fact.

Individuals have a greater degree of freedom, but very small influence on global conditions. However, history stops now, and teaches us that conditions can change rapidly and radically. Humility should restrain prediction and favor preparation.

“And the boomers are the adult elders in our society: they really have more actual responsibility and blame than anyone else.”

As a rule, it’s always true that power and responsibility correlates with age. What I find a bit puzzling is the focus on the 1946-1964 cohorts as the generational bogeyman. Surely my own post-boomer generation has its share of responsibility, and surely the under 40 and under 30 generations also have their share of responsibility. Sorry to break it to Holly Wood but if her generation even bothered to show up at elections, they could have easily voted many of the hated boomers out of office (*), not to mention what they could have achieved with determined political activism.

To be perfectly clear, the generational blame game, whether understandable or not, is politically poisonous. Progressives have nothing to gain from engaging in it.

(*) Not to open that can of worms again: I’m not talking about those who make a conscious political decision not to participate in elections but the majority who simply don’t care.

‘And now all the young lefties are bagging her.’ (Val, 191)
Why do you care? She doesn’t.

Val @186
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think there were any women amongst the leading lights of the Chicago School of Economics.”

Anna Schwartz? Rose Friedman (who arguably led her husband astray)?

RP 197: I don’t even know how to make sense of a statement like “No other generation has less excuse for saying they were fooled”. Generations aren’t fooled and don’t make excuses, people do.

Nevertheless you are raising difficult questions. For example, when “justified” anti-capitalist resentment in Germany and elsewhere turned against “rich Jews”, was there anything wrong with the anti-capitalist resentment itself, or with the way leftists at the time stoked that resentment, or was this just an expression of deep-seated racism/anti-semitism and the pseudo-anti-capitalism just a propaganda veneer? What can, what should we learn from historical experience?

Ze K 196: Are feminism and ant-racism blame games? Or are you referring to the right-wing backlash, which blames women and minorities for any and all real and imagined social ills? I can only observe that the right-wingers are far better at the blame game. The famous male white trump supporter is entirely motivated by resentment. Should progressives really try to beat them at their own game?

“what, and the gender- and race-based aren’t?”

Good point. You could have replaced boomer for “white man” and not an eyelid would bat, so common would be the screed .

steven johnson: “Holly Wood and her ilk unquestioningly accept that revenue must come from wages, instead of other taxes,”

Only if you can’t read.

Here’s a paragraph from the same post being criticized above:
“When Baby Boomers were my age, most of them voted for Reagan, Bush and Clinton. In a nutshell, the policies Boomers voted for included: sweeping financial deregulation, the Vietnamization of the Middle East, the steady erosion of trade protections, and the deconstruction of the New Deal. I see nothing worth preserving in this backwards heritage.”

What could Holly Wood *mean* by “the deconstruction of the New Deal”? It’s so hard to figure out! It’s too tough for us, but the part about bedpans was sure toxic.

Before people start accusing me of saying that everyone else is stupid, again, I’m not. The word I prefer is “horrible”. Stupid people could not use their education and reasoning power to misread so creatively and self-interestedly.

I’m sorry this is getting beyond ridiculous. Generationalism, like sexism and racism before it, is a process of putting a large and very diverse group into an ill-fitting bucket. It is just as unacceptable as sexism and racism are.

reason: “Generationalism, like sexism and racism before it”

So I assume that “reason” also objects whenever anyone says Black Lives Matter, because that’s supposedly racist, and instead says that all lives matter. I mean, it’s racist whether it’s a less powerful group criticizing social practices supported by a more powerful group or vice versa, right? Or whenever anyone here uses the word mansplaining, reason must pop in to write “that’s sexist”. #notallmen, after all.

If people were really consistent non-essentialists, I could sort of understand this. But all that it seems to amount to is that people have their favorite “large and very diverse groups” to blame, and they really object to anyone blaming the group other than the group that they’ve decided is to blame. Conveniently, they are always not in whatever group they think its blamable, so they are never responsible.

RP
Huh? Are you saying something about the nature of black people as a group or is there an implied ALSO in there? Sorry, I don’t see the relevance.

““When Baby Boomers were my age, most of them voted for Reagan, Bush and Clinton.”

Her profile says she is in her late 20’s. I’m a boomer, born in 1946. 1946+29=1975, before any of the above were nominated (and most of us including myself didn’t live in California to vote for Reagan as Governor there). I voted for McGovern and Carter. (Didn’t see much difference between Humphrey and Nixon and didn’t vote in my first chance – my mistake. Have voted in every election since, typically at 6 AM before getting to work. Never voted for Reagan or either Bush.)

I read the Boomer article by Ms. Wood, back when it was linked, a day or so ago, and was mildly offended but let it go. Now that it has become a topic here, I won’t list all the inventions and scientific and medical discoveries of Boomers, the foundings of Greenpeace and similar organizations, but just repeat Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap. That includes Boomers. Maybe your generation is different, but I doubt it.

Rich @205: Let’s just declare that sociology doesn’t exist

I second that.

When we’re tired of discussing Holly Wood on who’s responsible for “the deconstruction of the New Deal,” perhaps we could move on to two brand-new masterpieces on the subject: Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal and Steve Fraser’s The Limousine Liberal.

You can move on wherever you want…

TM: “I don’t know what reason thinks but if you are saying that you can’t oppose racism without accepting its essentialist premise”

I’m saying that racism and “reverse racism” are not simply both racism. When people criticize black people being shot by police through using a slogan like Black Lives Matter, that is not racist. Nor is it essentialist, necessarily: even through races are social constructions, social facts are very important in people’s lives. Similarly, when relatively powerless youth criticize the decisions of their elders through a social construction like the generation concept, that isn’t “generationalist.” I think that people would sort of intuitively get this if they weren’t strongly predisposed not to get it.

As for steven johnson, he can take a paragraph that starts with “the policies Boomers voted for included” and wonder why it doesn’t include Carter, and take a generalization about Reagan, Clinton, and Bush and say that one of the policies is misapplied to Clinton. Plus he apparently doesn’t think that the Iraq War and other wars in the Middle East were / are based on “a policy of withdrawal of US forces in favor of local allies doing the fighting”. I’m not defending Holly Wood’s piece as correct, but it’s a whole lot better than the tawdry nitpicking in support of virtue deployed against it.

@198: Clinton says that she wants to earn the votes of younger people and she would have both practical and personal reasons for being sincere about that. I’m sure she’d like to be a more inspirational candidate than she is considered to be in some quarters, and she has adjusted her rhetoric and approach to acknowledge that deficiency, which could be observed, for example, in her speech after her victory in Nevada.

Sorry forgot link http://www.nytimes.com/1984/11/05/us/making-mark-on-politics-baby-boomers-appear-to-rally-around-reagan.html?pagewanted=all

So, let’s see if I’ve got this right about generationalism. If you don’t vote, you are being irresponsible. You share some responsibility for the predictable results of how and whether you vote. In a group sense, a democratic, majority vote has legitimacy — it is the best way of making a communal political decision.

At the same time, you can’t generalize about a group of people’s beliefs because a majority of them voted for something. The majority is not responsible for their democratic decisions. A democratic, majority vote really doesn’t say anything about the people who made it.

I think that I can reconcile these two beliefs. Together they say that individual virtue is paramount and must be defended. If someone doesn’t do an individual act that people agree is virtuous, then they are not virtuous. If they join in a communal act that people agree is not virtuous, then that can not be held to impinge on their individual virtue. In short, you can not generalize.

Rich@187

A class structure can’t be sustained merely because the 1% want it sustained. It requires widespread buy-in

Why would Latin Americans vote for a neoliberal system that regards them as citizens of second class countries meant to be subservient to the West? Because most bought into the fantasy that we were to become first worlders, part of the privileged core, if only the technocratic, modern, neoliberal precepts were followed. In both the core and the periphery, people sold-out. In Latin American, most bought into the fantasy of becoming part of the exploiters instead of the exploited. In the West, it was for cheap imports.

It’s the global neoliberal consensus.

#191 Val: Is it possible that perhaps Hillary, who has surrounded herself with neoliberals, is in fact a neoliberal. That is someone who believes in the markets, meritocracy and order. Because if she is you don’t need to tie yourself up in knots explaining her policies as compromises, or 6th dimensional chess. It’s simple – she pushed the policies that she believed in. Maybe she’s an ideological politician who disagrees with the ideology of social democrats. Because it’s a lot easier to explain her and her career if you assume that.

As for the compromises she made in her career. Sure, she lived in a sexist time. But she’s also a mediocre politician (as in someone who can build coalitions and persuade others to follow her. She’s an extremely capable bureacrat) who hitched herself to the most brilliant politician of her generation. If Bill Clinton had had the political abilities of his wife – noone would have heard of him.

Scrolling back to 171, I did mention it was obviously hyperbole for effect. This is also Bill o Reillys schtick. Perhaps she pulls it off better. It seems the jury’s still out.

TM @220: You can move on whenever you want

Would much rather you came along!

Rich Pukalsky
“At the same time, you can’t generalize about a group of people’s beliefs because a majority of them voted for something. The majority is not responsible for their democratic decisions. A democratic, majority vote really doesn’t say anything about the people who made it.”

Oh come on – that is ridiculous. Are you saying the people who voted democratic are just as responsible for the GOP congress as the one’s that voted for the GOP? Democracy is a process – you don’t just vote once. It is the process that matters in terms of legitimacy not the individual decisions (you aren’t deciding for eternity – that is the whole point). And I don’t even know it is true that the majority of GOP votes came from boomers (and it certainly not true that significant numbers of younger voters don’t also vote GOP). Why are you spouting this nonsense – it is like saying young people are responsible for crime because more young people commit crime.

@ 235
I’ve already acknowledged Thatcher and reason informed me above that there were at least a couple of women involved in the the Chicago School. They were exceptions to the general rule though, not the rule. Other than that, you can read what I said to Lupita in my comment @ 237

@ 233 – the millenials I know in Australia don’t think that way about their parents – so again I’d suggest to you that the causes of this are mainly economic and political, not generational (except insofar as a majority of US boomers did support Reagan, as I noted earlier. But you know if she hates older people for voting for Reagan, maybe she should just hate those who did, rather than older people per se).

Val,
I come from a family of 7 of whom 6 were university educated and all left of center and one (my mother) who was not and is stridently right wing. You could take that as an anecdote to suggest that women are more right wing (probably false) or that university educated people are more left wing (it really depends on what they studied). But I’m more inclined to think it is more complicated than that.

@Suzanne, 224
She’s a politician. If she wanted to appeal to leftist youth (not all youth are leftist), she would.
But appealing to leftist youth has a political price that appealing to, e.g., the AIPAC does not have.

Btw it is truly amazing how many guys on CT are like ‘of course I’m not sexist but gosh this feminist I’m talking to is nutty/bizarre/generally wrong about everything’

geo @ 156

The analysis of political cycles in terms of generational turnover turns into astrology because people don’t read Ecclesiastes as seriously as Holly Wood.

Are you familiar with Gresham’s Law? It is the economic principle, “bad money drives out good” and ostensibly explains why a debased coinage will displace one whose precious metal content more closely approximates its face value. But, people have long used that basic idea as a metaphor. The Wikipedia article on Gresham’s Law provides this quotation from Aristophanes’ The Frogs (405 BCE):

The course our city runs is the same towards men and money.

She has true and worthy sons.

She has fine new gold and ancient silver,

Coins untouched with alloys, gold or silver,

Each well minted, tested each and ringing clear.

Yet we never use them!

Others pass from hand to hand,

Sorry brass just struck last week and branded with a wretched brand.

So with men we know for upright, blameless lives and noble names.

These we spurn for men of brass…

One irony of Gresham’s Law as an economic principle is that it is actually not desirable to invest precious metals into currency; money to function well as an economic institution should have no inherent value of its own. But, put that insight aside.

The point I want to draw attention to, in my roundabout way, is that investment is cyclical, not linear. You build something up, and that creates an opportunity: to tear it down. Some great monarch establishes a coinage of proven integrity, and in its context, that policy yields some gain, but it doesn’t continue to yield a return just because it is virtuous. A coinage with a high precious metal content yields a small and possibly diminishing seignorage, as its integrity becomes an accepted fact, but confidence in its integrity and habits of commerce predicated on its integrity opens the possibility of great gains from debasement.

The integrity that once supported credibility was an investment, an accumulated resource, deliberately husbanded and nurtured, but as it accumulated, and lost its scarcity value, it ceased to yield sufficient return to support reproduction. And, the opportunity to disinvest, to make depreciation yield cash, so to speak, arose in its place. Credibility has no more profitable use than as a means of deception.

I suppose I am arguing that a world that has depleted its stock of integrity and is low on credibility is a world in which an entrepreneurial effort to rebuild integrity and credibility, has a prospect of earning a good return on such an investment, given the scarcity. Thus, to everything there is a season.

‘Boomers’ itself refers to two distinct cohorts. The immediate post WWII cohort that comes of age in the late 60’s counterculture and the politicized era of Vietnam (draft and all) is very different than the cohort that comes of age in the go-go 1980’s. The latter cohort voted for Reagan and Bush overwhelming against their democratic opponents, to the tune of 20+ point differentials (the data I have shows that the former favor Reagan as well, but by a less pronounced margin). But don’t take my word for it; look the figures up yourself, you might be surprised.

Rich P is on point when he calls people out for selective anti-essentialism. If we want to talk about political and economic life in a country of 300+ million people, we have to use aggregates. Getting upset with that when it applies to your group is totally natural, but irrelevant to the question of whether we can productively use that particular grouping to understand social life.

@Val

I would say the empirical evidence bears out my theory that neoliberalism serves the interests of white ruling class men, particularly from the USA.

There is no difference between the interests of white ruling men as opposed to those of non-white ruling men and women. As always, it depends on the empirical evidence you seek. Google some images of the Latin American political elite, for example, a picture of all the heads of state at this year’s CELAC summit in Ecuador. Google images of the wedding of Carlos Slim’s daughter. In both cases, you will see people who look like Latin Americans. You could do the same with African and Asian political and economic elites.

Whites have not supplanted the local elites, they work together. Each elite looks like its surrounding population with better teeth. Maybe whiteness explains Western elites, but you cannot generalize this to the rest of the world.

I just want to say what a pleasure it has been to see Lupita return to these threads. She has been missed.

Lupita @ 253
My theory is that there are patriarchal hierarchical structures that developed historically, and are no longer supported by laws (the relevant laws have in most societies now been repealed) but are still commonly found in most (though not all) societies and corporations. However if you take the idea of the pyramid shape (which isn’t the only way you can represent this kind of thing, but is ok I think) then those at the very top (a la the richest people in the world) tend to be white men, often from well to do families.

It doesn’t imply that you don’t get the same thing in other countries, including ‘non-white’ countries.

Thank you, Yama.

“My theory is that there are patriarchal hierarchical structures that developed historically, and are no longer supported by laws (the relevant laws have in most societies now been repealed) but are still commonly found in most (though not all) societies and corporations.”

Yes, social change takes time.

To sort of get back to the original point. How will creating more female billionaires, or making a neoliberal female president, improve the lot of women generally?

Speaking of Bad Generalisations, I want to rephrase my comment @ 246
Btw it is truly amazing how many guys on CT are like ‘of course I’m not sexist but gosh this feminist I’m talking to is nutty/bizarre/generally wrong about everything’

I should say, not, “it is truly amazing how many guys on CT … “, but instead, ‘it is truly amazing how often some guys on CT … “

Sorry for repeat postings – I meant that to mean there aren’t many guys who do that, just some who do it rather frequently. And I actually intended to suggest that I wouldn’t necessarily include eg JeffreyG in that group, just in case it seemed as if I was – but I realise it may have come out sounding the opposite. Oh, I give up! Time to stop.

@ 265
Getting upset with that when it applies to your group is totally natural, but irrelevant to the question of whether we can productively use that particular grouping to understand social life.

Perhaps you could explain what you mean by that?

Val, as a feminist, you probably use gender a lot when it comes to understanding social life. But you understand that events and policies, while oftentimes impacting women as a whole in a certain way, will also have different and sometimes even idiosyncratic effects with regard to particular women. The fact that some few women will benefit greatly from policy x does not mean that the claim ‘this policy will hurt women’ is off limits.

The analytical utility of thinking in terms of social group is an empirical question, and it is not to be resolved based upon anecdotes and/or personal feelings about one’s relation to the stated group. Maybe there are relevant sub-groups then? Again, an empirical question, still treating in aggregates.

Yet we have seen many, many anecdotes in this thread along the lines of ‘oh I know a few Millennials through work and through my kid(s)’ [one could argue that the OP set the stage in this regard]. People somehow seem satisfied to remain at this level of analysis. But it is possible to both a) think in terms of aggregates, and b) understand that there are internal differences among those aggregations.

Now, frankly speaking, this is only a point of contention because this issue seems to have bearing on this notion of ‘responsibility’ or ‘guilt’. Personally, I think that thinking about politics in this sort of desert/moral frame is unproductive (in the most basic sense of distracting us from achieving outcomes that we otherwise could generally agree to pursue). As technocratic as liberalism purports to be, oftentimes the ideas are technocratic in form, moral in substance. This is a longstanding theme of liberal thought, which consistently has to answer for the times when the needs of upholding the market system impose massive costs on society. Anyways, the key here is that the question of ‘who is responsible’ is a political question. As I argued above, the right wing wants to spin this narrative of generational conflict, and in so far as that narrative has resonance, the left should be concerned . Holly Wood here as anec-data.

To the point of the OP, Sanders has shown that millennials do notnecessarily support a politics that gives up on our commitments to the old and aging. But what Sanders’ ideas do, at the same time as they re-affirm commitments to Social Security and Medicare, is radically reject the dominant ideas of the previous generation. Socialism worn as a badge of honor; a direct criticism of selfishness and ‘greed is good’ culture; a recognition that the US has been the international equivalent of a schoolyard bully. A rejection of the idea that America is the greatest country in the world .

New advances in refusal to generalize are all around us! Let’s say that I went to a discussion among people from El Salvador about the Atlacatl Battalion and, in general, what the U.S. did during the Salvadoran Civil War. And they started to talk about how Americans supported those actions. Then let’s say that I got up and said “Wait, you are unjustly blaming all Americans for the actions of our democratic majority! I personally opposed those actions and by talking about ‘Americans’ you’re talking about us as if we’re all responsible.” I can imagine the response, but let’s say that I then went on to deny that the very concept of “an American” had any meaning. It was just an accident of geographical location, grouping an arbitrary set of people together. The fact that we’d voted in the same elections and paid taxes and so on doesn’t mean that we shared responsibility for anything. All that mattered was our individuality.

Maybe Lupita will get a laugh from this, maybe not.

Yet we have seen many, many anecdotes in this thread along the lines of ‘oh I know a few Millennials through work and through my kid(s)’ [one could argue that the OP set the stage in this regard]. People somehow seem satisfied to remain at this level of analysis. But it is possible to both a) think in terms of aggregates, and b) understand that there are internal differences among those aggregations.

So you didn’t bother to read the linked article by John Quiggin, I take it.
“Personal feelings” is code for “silly, emotional woman can’t do analysis.” We see what you did there. Stop it.

Helen: “Thinking of the next few years with vulnerable old people needing a higher level of care, “cared” for (thanks to the wonderful world of privatised “care”) by resentful people who have been ginned up to hate them.”

So is Holly Wood encouraging that resentment, or voicing it?

There is little difference, cf. violence against women compared with the hate speech against them on almost every social media platform from the Chans down to your local news service. Once that particular ball gets rolling downhill it aquires momentum and the verbal hatred stokes the violence and so it goes.
Elder abuse is a thing. Google it.

So by writing “Have fun cleaning your own fucking bedpan” she was actually encouraging elder abuse. Wow, what a Nazi!

I don’t know why bob mcmanus and geo are so tired. Things like this refresh my essential faith in the human spirit.

AcademicLurker: “Heh. A few months ago, driven by extreme boredom (home sick), I was browsing the archives of The Valve’s Theory’s Empire book event*. Hundreds of comments arguing over whether whether it was legitimate to talk about Theory, or whether you could only ever talk about individual theorists. plus ça change!”

Ah, those days of eleven years ago. I thought of doing a short play in three acts called “Reductionists Gone Wild!” in reference to those stupid Girls Gone Wild videos, but it’s not actually reductionism, because no one actually believes it. It’s just something that is deployed selectively and in bad faith.

Here’s my favorite example: there is no such thing as a global temperature. I linked to a random first Google hit, but this one was all the rage among global warming denialists for a while.

@Val

I am not responsible for what the white ruling class men of my generation did

I don’t blame my sisters who went along with the neoliberal turn

My sisterly sentiments do not run as deep as yours. I blame my Western sisters and brothers equally. I also blame my brown and black sisters and brothers. If not, who is there left to blame for the current world order? It is us collectively, extraterrestrials, or nobody. At the very least, it is happening under our watch.

geo @ 276.

I think it might be a bit early in the millennium to start short-selling deceit and manipulation.

In other news, Wikipedia is marking April 1 by featuring Gregor MacGregor, famous as the first Cazique of the Principality of Poyais.

Rich, you keep attacking the strawman of imaginary people who don’t believe in aggregations, while in fact your interlocutors are simply saying that this particular aggregation is bullshit. It’s not the same thing at all.

@ 271
Yeah, I referred to my youngest daughter and her friends, said their experience seemed different to those in the OP, and speculated about how that might be related to the different economic and political conditions in Australia (which, as I think you probably know or may be vaguely aware of, are significantly different than the US in some ways). So shoot me, as you apparently say in America.

I give up. Good luck Helen, you’ll need it.

This is a really bizarre discussion.

Holly Wood’s piece was clearly hyperbolic and taking the piss. She, like many millennials, is pissed off at her generation being patronized by the US media. This is a thing that happens to millennials. She was EXAGGERATING for comic effect. This is a thing that some humans do.

I cannot believe I have to say this, but apparently I do. Writing that you won’t change somebody’s bed pan when they’re old does not mean that you want to exterminate the old. It is not ‘code’. It is not intergenerational warfare. At most it’s a gentle gibe that “hey granddad, you’re gonna need us one day, so watch your mouth, right”. AT MOST.

All this for Holly. Okay, I nominate Amber Lee Frost as the spokesperson for her generation. This should be fun…

A strong history of hateful speech towards any group leads to an escalation of violence towards that group. People here may choose not to believe that, but that’s their prerogative.
Since even mentioning gender is anathema to this group, here’s a different example, where violence against a specific group is escalating at the same time as hundreds of clickbait articles are written claiming they do awful things, and if you say “Pfft, bloody cyclists, who cares” you’ve just proved my point.
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jul/01/sabotage-and-hatred-what-have-people-got-against-cyclists

Hate speech according to Helen:
“Have fun cleaning your own fucking bedpan.”

Beyond parody.

“Since even mentioning gender is anathema to this group”

Huh, what? Where is this even coming from. The person whose post you’re reacting so strongly against is a woman. Whose work was praised by another woman on this thread. And whose feminist writing is liked by many of the men on this thread that you’re accusing of misogyny.

An Amber Lee Frost post My Kind of Misogyny.

Should be fun.

Helen: “A strong history of hateful speech towards any group leads to an escalation of violence towards that group. People here may choose not to believe that”

As a Jew, I never knew that! And I agree that this piece of Holly Wood’s really reminds me of the people who wiped out a good part of my family tree. That was a apt comparison on your part and not overdone at all.

Now, as to “mentioning gender is anathema to this group”, let’s bravely break this taboo as well. I think that the Millennials complaining about this have actually mentioned gender. They’ve said that the baby boomers always seem to retreat to symbolic uses of feminism whenever they are challenged politically. As in: people must be against HRC because she’s a woman, and Bernie Bros like him because he’s a man, and look at what a feminist HRC is she can’t be a neoliberal. I wonder what seems strangely familiar about that? Surely no one could be doing that here after just having had it brought up. Why, it would almost be like these were actually powerful, older women accusing a rather powerless younger woman of something really nasty and justifying that somehow as “feminism”, and that that was such a typical interaction that younger people had started to comment on it. But that can’t be true. It’s inconceivable.

Cian 296 and others: The backlash against Holly Wood is overblown. I’ve said that before. However, you seem to overlook the money quote:

“The next twenty years of you aging into corpses in your boxstore suburban wasteland is going to cost the nation trillions. Your selfish deaths will cost our children schools and libraries.”

This is factually bullshit and dangerous right-wing let’s-dismantle-social-security-so-retirees-will-have-to-fend-for-themselves propaganda.

Finally, in case this really needs spelling out: “A bedpan or bed pan is an object used for the toileting of a bedridden patient in a health care facility”. If they were able to clean it themselves, they wouldn’t need one.

Also 195 is not great. When I look at the question of why young-poor people are less active in the political process, I’m going to guess the actions of the rich and powerful, not unstable internal causes of the powerless.

Asteele
So you are working for the GOP? Assisting their let you and him fight strategy?

Sabotage and hatred: what have people got against cyclists?

When they came for the vaguely progressive yuppies with a massive persecution complex I said nothing…

Cian @ 293
I only referred to one of JeffreyG’s comments, so it may not have been clear. In one comment (#271) he suggested that some people were arguing only at the level of anecdote and in a subsequent comment (#279) he specifically identified me as one of them. In fact, not only did I discuss in some detail the economic and political circumstances in Australia and America, I also subsequently linked to evidence about voting patterns in both countries.

Now JeffreyG doesn’t have to read every comment I make, but he should also refrain from writing crap about me.

I’m not getting involved in this discussion further, but I wanted to put that on the record. I have previously been accused of elitism for suggesting that it’s good to support your arguments with evidence. I’m not suggesting that everyone who comments here has to be an academic, nor that people shouldn’t be able to express unsupported opinions when they want. I do think though, that people should understand the difference between opinion and evidence. I also think that if people are representing what others have said, they should try to do so fairly. There are several people in these threads who won’t do that, and it spoils the discussions.

It’s basically about whether you’re trying to have a discussion on important and controversial points (recognising that sometimes people get heated and sometimes they make mistakes), or whether you are just playing some game that you want to win. Because the latter is not a discussion. I suppose one could just ignore people who do that, but it is difficult, particularly when they’re actually talking about you and the things that you are supposed to have said. And it’s not just JeffreyG who does that, by a long chalk. I wish there was someone moderating these threads who could make people abide by some kind of rules of honest argument, but given that there’s not, I think some discussions are being so damaged that they’re probably not worth participating in.

A lot of people here are really having trouble accepting just how much Millennials hate them.

Nobody who actually is a millennial would ever doubt this. We hate you. We hate most of your icons — most notably, JFK, who cuntishly stated ‘Ask not what your country can do for you!’ as if Democracy was about enslaving yourself to the state, and you all tried to turn him into the new incarnation of Jesus for saying it! We hate your politicians. We hate the political issues you fight over — focusing on abortion when none of us can get a job that doesn’t involve a deep fryer, screaming ‘WAR ON WOMEN!’ as your only political slogan for six years while the bottom fell out from under the economy, caring about every social issue under the sun but completely ignoring the economic ones your children needed you to focus on. We hate the way you blame us and call us lazy after you destroyed our futures, removed our ability to form families and sent every job worth having overseas.

You all have no concept of how much hatred and fury is coming your way over the next few decades. You have no idea the horrors that await you in retirement homes, because we sure as hell aren’t going to give a shit about your dignity after you murdered our futures and insulted us for it. You have no idea how horrible your ‘legacy’ in history is going to be, because we are the ones who will write the history books when you’re gone.

There will never be a generation as large as our again, in no small part because of the policies you advocated and voted for.

+1 to Soulites comment

I haven’t engaged in the Helen argument, and I guess this is in part my own hobbyhorse, but the period roughly June 2008 to June 2009 was probably the most important political moment in our lifetimes, and baby boomers etc have not come to grips with it.

Obama, Krugman, DeLong, etc and the Democrats did not save the world with Tarp inadequate stimulus etc, they betrayed the working class and especially future generations. It had been thirty years in the making, and Republicans did set them up. But Republicans/conservative do understand Schmittian politics of creating a catastrophe and forcing your opponents to surrender or go to total war. A FDR “we welcome their hate” was not optional, it was necessary.

Obama and Dems sold us out, and most liberals have given them a pass on it. Now it’s too late, you rarely get opportunities to redo historical conjunctures. I don’t blame millenials for hating us.

[Ok Obama was born 1961. Does anybody really view him as a typical baby boomer?]

Look can we stop playing stupid games here. The people who voted for the GOP (whatever age they are) are responsible for the GOP, the people who didn’t are not. That is the way voting works. What counts is what people do, not what group label you stick on them, people are neither guilty as a consequence of a label, or innocent as a consequence of another label.

reason: “in our teenage years we grew up with the very real threat of being conscripted and sent to Vietnam. It politicised the whole generation”

And because of this politicization, your generation resolved to never send young Australians off to war and poorly justified foreign interventions ever again. Oh, wait. Actually, to quote Holly Wood, “You voted for every Iraq war.” It’s almost as if what you thought was politicization wasn’t politicization at all, but rather a natural disinclination to get shot, and that once you’d gotten yours you didn’t really care about any kind of generalized political lessons at all.

@320

No, I think of Obama as Gen X, like me (born in 1966).

We’ve had two Baby Boomer Presidents in he US, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Before 2000, IIRC, we had few major candidates, even, who were young enough to be considered Boomers.

I’ll bite, what is the “crap that the mainstream media spew out about milennials”? On this thread there has been the claim that commmenters “insinuate that millenials are basically spoiled and lazy”. Except nobody said anything of the like (prove me wrong with actual quotes). What is really going on here?

Val, I don’t think I have been ‘writing crap about you’ – I addressed you both because you were asking me to clarify my comments, but also because I thought you would be sympathetic to my problem with the reliance on anecdotes in this thread. You yourself voiced an issue with this line of analysis somewhere mid thread. There are many comments that I take issue with in this thread, but few of those posters have lingered here. I singled you out largely because you seemed interested in having an actual discussion.

I think the claim that this thread started off with an excess of anecdotes is wholly defensible, and I stand by it. Throughout the thread, I have tried to communicate why the Sanders campaign is attractive to millennials. Funnily enough, despite the OP and some of the comments at the very beginning, there doesn’t seem to be much interest in that discussion.

See, I am a millennial in America, so this is something I think about and care about. So I am going to object when someone draws inferences about the situation of my peers that I think are faulty.

reason, the idea that the American perspective distorts things in a thread about the support for Bernie Sanders among millennials is ridiculous.

Yeah, Australia is different. We wish we could be more like you all – that would be great. But Australia is a different political set-up, doesn’t have the same problems with foreign policy, and is closer to the Chinese business cycle than the American. I don’t get what Australia has to do with anything here – as far as I can tell, no one is claiming that this phenomenon exists in Australia(?)

TM 04.01.16 at 1:47 pm @ 329 __
It’s ‘Kids Today’ decorated with generationalist astrology.

Cian 04.01.16 at 3:17 am @ 299 —
So you see it is anger and maybe nascent hate. Now, when you apply that kind of thinking and feeling to huge demographic categories — and everyone can do it — you get a certain kind of politics. I’ve noticed that working out in Real Life, not just in Net verbiage. In the case of Holly Wood, she even has mistargeted the hate object — it was not the Boomers, not even their parents, who bulldozed the orchards. If it matters.

The road to Nuremberg is shorter than you think.

At the innumerable protests I’ve been to I’ve tended to hear a chant, “No justice, no peace”. What could that mean? It’s so hard to figure out. I guess that what it means is that angry and relatively powerless people should consider carefully who is to blame, realize that responsibility is diffused over too many people to make holding anyone responsible meaningful, and then go home and play a video game.

But if some people are still angry you can tell them that the road to Nuremberg is shorter than they think. Because that makes perfect sense.

reason
or maybe you don’t recognize these things in your country because they are different in your country. Most if not all of the data on a generation gap in attitudes and experience is from the American context.

Again, who in this thread has argued that this carries over to Australia?

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I certainly do not merely mean GOP supporters. And “reason” has been giving a very good illustration that the phenomenon extends outside the U.S. He talks proudly about how his generation of Australians was politicized by conscription and in the same breath says that sending younger people to Iraq was completely different because it was a volunteer army. There’s nothing more essentially boomer than that.

RP
your arguments are just silly.

I don’t think we should play lightly with the lives of volunteers, but that doesn’t mean the situation isn’t quite different than the situation with conscripts (who didn’t even get a vote). Volunteers are getting paid to do a dangerous job and know that. Of course society owes it to them to ensure they have decent alternatives and that they are well paid and looked after – (and that is the real scandal by the way – see VA underfunding).

I’m not saying these people shouldn’t be angry, but the anger should be targeted. It is like someone who is angry with a particular woman blaming all women. It is not acceptable as far as I am concerned.

JeffreyG
Why are WHICH baby boomers desperate to make us millenials (who exactly) hate ourselves. No I do not belong to a baby boomer conspiracy and I have no interest in making ANYBODY hate themselves. I have only an interest in convincing people to vote consistently for people who advocate better policies.

I repeat again,
if sexism is unacceptable, and racism is unacceptable, and homophobia is unacceptable why exactly is generationalism acceptable?

Usurious credit cards

Damn spell check.

You know, a rudimentary understanding of the nature of space-time and causality would lead one to believe that those who chronologically came before (let’s say, oh I don’t know, the “boomers”) necessarily, in aggregate, create the conditions under which those who chronologically came after (work with me here and let’s call them “millenials”) are forced to operate. Indeed, indeed, #notallboomers; I’m sure lots of you are cool and good and not at all bad. It doesn’t change the fact that young people today are facing tougher economic conditions as a consequence of decisions made before they were even born, and to add insult to injury they also have to listen to a boomer culture industry that derides them as lazy and entitled. I wonder where that hostility could possible come from…

bruce wilder @ 249

A Gresham’s Law for integrity? Oy! I can’t find it in my heart — or God knows, my mind — to disagree, but isn’t it sad (Or ironic. Or something.) that one of the most astute analysts of human frailty in the CT comments section finds an economic principle lurking behind yet another area (lying) of human endeavor? (As in If we could just agree to run this human psychology stuff like a business, we might finally get somewhere.) Has the Cato Institute been alerted?

Short version: truly, this was an insight worthy of Jonathan Swift. Next time I’m roped into dinner with a Trump supporter — and in Arizona that’s a genuine hazard — I may just whip it on him (or her.)

reason: “Volunteers are getting paid to do a dangerous job and know that.”

It’s neoliberalism then. OK, Boomers were politicized into neoliberalism, and they are very proud of that.

BW: “This has become one of the least enlightening threads in my recollection.”

Sometimes the BS is so breathtaking that enlightenment isn’t really what you’re going for. In that case all you can do is keep mocking people by telling them the truth. “might as well not be lying when standing in shit”, to quote myself.

I’ve been trying to convince people to take responsibility for this stuff ever since the Reagan years. And no, they say it’s not their fault, because a) it’s the GOP, b) they voted, c) they voted for the “right” candidate. Was there ever another adult generation that wasn’t willing to take some kind of communal responsibility for how their society turned out?

Bruce W @350
Everybody.

JV: “derides them as lazy and entitled” , again, no evidence whatseoever that this is true. Certainly no one on this f***ing useless thread has derided you as lazy and entitled.

“Most of the world lived most of the time in autocracies”

So everyone has to vote, and it’s their DUTY, to set rules that will shape a good society. But if those rules did not in fact shape a good society then hey, most of the world lived most of the time in autocracies. And most things were inherited, and when someone talks about e.g. the deconstruction of the New Deal then people just inherited that destruction, it was beyond their control even though they voted for it.

I’m getting more and more convinced by this argument. It’s your DUTY to symbolically dodge responsibility for anything that’s going on by doing an individual act that satisfies your sense that you have done all that you could.

Even if we grant that generations (silent-boomer-X-millenials) are discreet entities and further grant that such entities have a coherent agency on politics -and by grant from this we are way out on a limb, analytically- a fundamental error persists: boomers are old and millenials haven’t gotten old yet.

Until the millenilas have taken the reigns and solved inequality, war, and nuclear fission can we at least give them both a pass for their (insert insult here) and ignore their better-than-thou criticism of boomers’ (insert insult here)?

Can we have this conversation in 40 years when we can give our longitudinal study time to mature?

Rich Puchalsky @ 355

I’ve been trying to convince people to take responsibility for this stuff ever since the Reagan years. And no, they say it’s not their fault, because a) it’s the GOP, b) they voted, c) they voted for the “right” candidate.

Bloody, but unbowed. Perhaps that’s the best we could have done, but it’s certainly not what we hoped or worked for. The millennials have my sympathy, and if they really think they need it, they’re also welcome to my confession that not all of my generation (b. 1943) kept the faith. Many of us, in fact, never read the catechism of that faith, let alone helped write it. Perhaps the millennials will do better, perhaps not, but most assuredly they’ll get their time in the tank. Doing better is a collective process, and if we’re lucky, a cumulative, rather than cyclical one. I’d like to bet against Bruce Wilder, you might say, but I’m far from sure that it would be prudent to do so.

Oops
That post was @342

JV: “derides them as lazy and entitled” , again, no evidence whatseoever that this is true. Certainly no one on this f***ing useless thread has derided you as lazy and entitled.

I wasn’t talking about this thread, I was talking about the larger culture. Thanks to engels for getting there before me with the links.

RP
I’m only kidding with that last sentence of course, but you sure aren’t making yourself popular.

engels 359, I addressed that way back at 154. The median US retiree household has a net worth of $170,494. Why do you think that figure is remarkable, because it’s so low?

Why do you think that figure is remarkable?

It’s quintupled in the last three decades.

But of course, the vast majority of the over 60 are still not rich, not even affluent

That’s like saying the wage gap between men and women doesn’t matter because “the vast majority of men are not well-paid” – ie. BS

I think CT has reached peak troll.

Time to go outside.

373, of course the difference in wealth between old and young matters, but that doesn’t make it remarkable. It’s exactly what one would expect.

As to the 170k, if your point is that the old geezers have it too good if after 40-50 years of working they have managed to pay off their mortgage and aren’t living in poverty any more, as was customary until a few decades ago, then I must say you are one really weird species of Marxist.

JanieM 375, you are so right. I’m out of here.

William Timberman @ 353

Sorry to confound or disappoint my main fan. I don’t know what I was going for in the comment of which you complain: in frustration at my own inability to express any useful distinction, I drove off the main road to visit a kind of fractured satire of CT comments. But, as RP has observed we are out beyond the normal bounds of parody already, and the normal rules of narrative physics don’t apply in this barren region, where Holly Wood is Goebbels.

One of my main themes, as you know, is that we simply don’t know: uncertainty overwhelms us individually and collectively, but we have to pretend otherwise to get on with it. Otherwise, we might be too terrified to cross the street. Fiction is our main weapon against uncertainty and its existential anxieties and ethical dilemmas. We say we want the Truth, but the certainty of Truth is not available to us; what we generally mean is that we want a better, more inspiring, more motivating story. Better can entail enough truth that we can escape Reality Biting us in the behind, as it tends to do when our self-serving lies go too far in the direction of denial and failure to properly acknowledge the limits of our capabilities, aka our responsibility for consequences.

I rail against mainstream economics and its ideological child, neoliberalism, because I understand it. It is a fiction, but I don’t rail against it as a fiction per se; I rail against it as bad fiction, fiction that hides genuine social mechanisms behind its mythic preaching about virtue moving a just world: if we only get the incentives right . . . In 1983, neoliberalism was lubrication for a change in policy — not one I agreed in detail with even then, but still some change in policy was absolutely necessary. Today, it is a form of insanity.

It is the “absolutely necessary” that is hard to grasp, even in cases as clear as Thatcher confronting the coal miners over the fate of their subsidized, obsolete industry. That’s Reality Biting policy and the fictions of a previous era in the ass. Right now, Reality is biting us in the ass over the latest extension of “free trade” to take one example. And, we struggle to construct a new fiction that might guide policy in a less self-defeating direction.

I think we are having remarkable difficulty collectively abandoning the fictions of the past, which have turned rancid as they have reached the limits of their logical extension. That’s an integrity problem, if you like. A problem with truth-telling. But, we have to understand that in a world where we do not know the Truth, and can only offer each other better adapted fictions. Fictions that carry meaning, but somehow allow us to access social mechanisms for changing policy. And, part of that is admitting failure.

We are having a problem of truth-telling, in that we are having trouble, collectively, admitting failure. To me, Clinton is the unwitting symbol of a stubborn refusal to admit mistakes and failure. ymmv

Anyway, I’ve run out of steam and have to go do actual work.

#337: TM – Are you deliberately misreading Engel’s point, or are you really that obtuse. The point he is making is that the wealth gap between the young and old has greatly increased. If you really want to flounce off because he won’t engage with the argument you’d prefer – ok – but it lacks dignity.

Dr Pangloss @352

‘I think Australia making it compulsory makes it clearer – it is a responsibility. You aren’t voting to get something for yourself – that is what markets are for – you are voting for your fellow citizens, to set rules that will shape a good society. It should be an informed and careful vote and you should take the trouble to inform yourself and understand the consequences. It is a DUTY.’

So why does Australia get the same shitty selfish right-wing governments as everyone else? Could it possibly be that the Australians who would not vote if it were not compulsory are as lacking in enlightenment and empathy for others as those who vote in other countries?

Engels @ 376

‘In Britain you can also look at the changes to the welfare system, which has been massively rebalanced in favour of pensioners in last five years alone, not to mention higher education debt. Anyhoo time to do something less boring than argue with idiots…’

Quite right, and it has been going on for some time. I worked at a social security office more than a dozen years ago, and they had increased Pension Credit at the same time as they hammered the unemployed, single parents and those on Income Support. In many ways this is totally irrational. Many pensioners have no mortgage to pay, no dependents, have fewer ‘luxuries’ to pay for than when they were younger. Then again, it encourages pensioners to spend money on the younger generations of their family, so maybe it provides an ideological example of the ‘trickle-down effect’!

I would say that many pensioners have not asked to be preferentially treated and they are so disparate in wealth that there is little common purpose among them, but their ‘relative’ advantage is bound to create some tensions, as well as political consequences. It’s pretty safe to say that the votes of older people gave the Conservatives their election victory in 2015.

Cian 381: Are you deliberately misreading my point, or are you really that obtuse. First, the young don’t have savings because they haven’t had time to accumulate savings. That is what you’d expect and no evidence of a gerontocratic conspiracy or even injustice.

Second. the majority of retirees are not even comfortable. Most have no meaningful savings other than the house they live in, and SS together with Medicare are just enough to not live in poverty.

Third, the fortunes of the young have deteriorated mostly because of student debt. That is a scandalous issue but hardly one which people on CT are ignorant about. In any case it is neither causally nor otherwise related to the meager savings of typical retirees. You could make a case that many of them have through their political choices contributed to this state of affairs, and that would be fair, but the suggestion that the old have gotten rich by squeezing the young is idiotic.

Fourth, anybody who is outraged that retirees aren’t poor is a reactionary asshole, and if they also think that blaming the elderly is a courageous political stand, they are dangerously deluded.

Soullite

We hate you.

We hate the way you blame us and call us lazy after you destroyed our futures, removed our ability to form families

You sound like a Bolivian peasant ranting against Bechtel and the empire. It seems like the US has created its own internal third world. Which is good. It makes thinks easier for the globe.

Regarding Holly Wood, I wonder if she is aware that, just as millenials are awaiting boomers’ infirmity to strike, so is the non-West awaiting the first crack in the empire’s façade. I doubt it since she doesn’t rant about what free-loaders young Americans are thanks to the US’s position in the world nor did I see any indication of her being influenced by anything other than what is written by her fellow Americans, which is quite a feat given that she has an internet connection. She seems very unsophisticated and parochial, innocently poking here and there, just for fun, oblivious of the world and of being so typically American, not particularly angry or hateful.

So bringing this back to Sanders, the idea is that millennials are not just resigning themselves or playing the victim; instead, we are actually quite hopeful about the future. It is just that we are hopeful about a radically different future than the America we have now. So all the notions in the mainstream media that people like Sanders are not serious/worth serious consideration, making unreasonable demands, too ‘pure’ – so much of this is based in the received wisdom of (what many millennials understand to be) faulty ideas. Growing up on the internet, at a time of widespread institutional failure, yields an interesting sort of ennui. Millennials are the first generation where a majority acknowledges that the true markers of American exceptionalism are nothing to be proud of.

TM; Yeah – I wouldn’t say that people here are bad at all wrt the ‘lazy millennials’ sort of thing. Some intimations of it sure, but people like myself have their say and we have had some proper back and forth about it. But in so far as we are going to have this conversation that brings in the broader discourse, you can’t deny the existence of this sort of stuff, so I think you would agree it is germane to this discussion.

Again, this sort of meme (‘lazy millennials’) only works because it feeds into a broader narrative that resonates with people. In so far as people here are concerned about a generational divide deepening into a generational sort-of ‘class warfare’, I think you should be listening to some of the concerns someone like Sanders is giving voice to. If Sanders is to lose the nomination, it will remain an open question as to what extent these concerns are taken seriously by the Democratic Party.

In so far as people here are concerned about a generational divide deepening into a generational sort-of ‘class warfare’, I think you should be listening to some of the concerns someone like Sanders is giving voice to

Yep. And likewise for intra class antagonisms based on race or gender. “We’re all it together” (so stop complaining) is not a socialist sentiment.

But seriously, is her name really Holly Wood? Because that would be amazing!

@js.
But seriously, is her name really Holly Wood?

I wd be very, very surprised if that were her real name. (n.b. I mostly stopped reading this thread about 90 comments ago. Just not that interested in the ‘generational’ topic, I guess.)

bianca steele upthread somewhere
… I think of Obama as Gen X, like me (born in 1966).

The generally accepted cutoff for the baby boom is, i believe, 1964. (I’ll have to check it but i think it is 1946-1964.) Therefore you, bianca, born 1966 are Gen X or whatever, but Obama is a baby boomer. Not that i think any of this esp. matters.

And if you want to put yourself and Obama in the same generational box, why not, i suppose…

LFC: The accepted cutoff was 1960 or 1961 until about, maybe, twenty years, ago, when someone looked at a graph and decided the boom continued until 1964, and the NY Times decided that anyone born before JFK was shot was a Baby Boomer. Since this was well after everyone involved had reached adulthood and knew whether or not they counted as a Baby Boomer, I see no reason to change the way I use the term.

Usually a straight lurker, but allow me to offer a perspective you might not see too often around these parts. I’m an educated millenial whose great distance from the neurotypical has resulted in my earning a wage in low status blue collar environments (food service, retail and warehousing). Right now I work at a “distribution center” that employs people whose capacities are more representative of the population of millenials writ large than the daughters of academics and professionals. Based on my observations of language, judgement and ability to plan, I’d say the IQs of my co-workers range from 70 to 115 with 90-95 being the most common. The warehouse employs about 40% whites, 40% blacks and 20% Spanish speakers (no Asians or Jews that I’ve met). There is a fair amount of self-segregation between the races and especially between those with different native languages. But you do see everybody sitting together in the break rooms a good amount. Being a highly physical workplace, the average age of non-management employees is mid to late twenties. About 700 employees.

My work is boring as sin, so I pass some of the time conducting amateur anthropological fact finding missions. People open up with their co-workers in ways they might not with outsiders. They talk about hopes, dreams, fears – where they’re from and where they hope to go. I have found that there is a sense of class identity that transcends race and language, although I would say there is very little “class consciousness” in the sense of people talking about or, from my elliptical inquiries, having the vocabulary to express the notion. But it’s there. By and large, working people know things are getting worse for them in America as a group and they’re well aware that the rich are getting richer. But the overriding response is apathy; there’s an overwhelming air of resignation that the great machines of society will churn on regardless of any input they might offer: it’s simply their job to see to it that they and their families don’t get crushed.

There are competing explanations for what exactly the machines are and who they serve. I know a couple guys who are into the whole Rothschilds-Bilderberg Group-End the Fed type stuff. Many retreat into religion, either as an alternative social support apart from the state – many black folks in this camp – or as a means to justify to themselves their humble position (various flavors of Calvinism and prosperity gospel). Others just get smashed every night (or morning, depending on shift) after work. There are some who believe that it’s only right for management and the ownership to work folks to the bone – that’s it’s some people’s lot to work hard and serve and others to rule. I’ve heard a few people talk positively about unionization in the abstract, but never with enough seriousness to invite the inevitable retribution that is implied in the anti-union videos we all watched when we were hired.

Very very few have an appreciable political life. Most will know the names Clinton and Trump and Cruz and Sanders; the breakroom TVs are on rotation between Fox, CNN and MSNBC, after all. By and large, they could give platform bullet points and reproduce the slogans but not what they mean in material terms. In my questioning, they understand that ISIS is an Islamic terrorist group but not who Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is or what territory the group controls. Nobody understands what a marginal tax rate means. Nobody could tell you what a CDO or a CDS is. Many still believe Saddam had WMDs and an operational relationship with al Qaeda. A few voted in the primary, but this is not a group that evangelizes: no phonebanking or canvassing or attending rallies or such. There’s not a bumper sticker to be found in the parking lot (I’ve looked). For the record, Sanders does not inspire any particular enthusiasm here; he’s just too far removed for what’s thought to be possible.

To stick up for my people, many are active in community charity. The company does projects for local homeowners down on their luck who need some repairs done, and there’s always a good turnout. Really, they’re great people by and large, they just have zero confidence that things will get better for them or those they hold dear beyond what they can personally provide. The company offers some scholarships to those who want to further their education, but few people sign up. Most are more focused on maintaining. A lot of young parents; a lot of children born out of wedlock to folks who haven’t been together very long. Always someone in the extended family who needs help with this that and the other.

I do feel there’s an underlying sense of unease, that the world is moving ever faster and that they’re not going to be able to keep up. These folks are just not going to be the computer scientists, the proverbial robot programmers of the future; they’re just trying to keep moving faster than the machines can so they don’t get axed. Many have part time or seasonal jobs as floor covering people or handymen or painters or in various other blue collar enterprises. It’s takes all they’ve got to raise a family in today’s savage environment. I’m thankful every day my wife and I decided not to have kids, as there’s no way in hell we’d be able to afford it.

There’s a lot of short term thinking. The “gig economy” is not news here. There’s not a lot of confidence that social security will be there in the long term. Most haven’t really thought about investments or retirement beyond the company’s 401k match. The feeling of having ‘no future’ resonates: nobody expects to have a career akin to previous generations. The future is too uncertain. Technology is moving too fast. Nobody knows what the labor market will look like a few years down the line let alone a few decades. They’re already starting to hire all the new folks as temps. That trend will only accelerate and metastasize. Of course I’m generalizing with these characterizations. There are many exceptions. But this is my sense of the zeitgeist. Right now, the average millenial guy, the guy with the 95 IQ is just happy to be working, to be able to provide and buy some nice rims and a good system or lift his truck, to feel like he’s still valuable. But, like the slave whispering in Caesar’s ear, there’s always the nagging question: “for how long?”

Anyway, thought you might appreciate a dispatch from the other half.

Someone said about a certain sort of revolutionary, “children playing with fire who don’t even know that fire is hot”

“At 2°C,” Eakin says bluntly, “we are likely to lose numerous species of coral and well over half of the world’s coral reefs.”…

I just remembered that at one point, the NYT had the cut offs at 1945 and 1966. I remember that because it put my husband and his mother both within the same generation.

js @ 398

Sometimes, reading long CT threads one is not involved in is remarkably like finding oneself sober in the middle of a bunch of drunk people. It’s that “holy shit, that’s how I must sound” feeling that’s rather similar.

(and I think you’re underselling yourself, your contributions usually sound pretty lucid to me :))

Barack Obama, Generation X. Possibly. I just can’t get into the generational wars because I’m not part of any generation at all, it turns out. Thanks fuckers.

And Val, thanks!

Ze K, I know you hate nothing more than capitalism that works, but, but the current path seems to be either that, stagnation or fascism. Oh, right.

Thank you too js

So, in a message that all is forgiven and I can be as drunk and incoherent as anyone else (Saturday night here), I would really like to talk about something that happened today.

I was at a rally, protesting the cuts to climate science at the CSIRO*, and it got a bit boring*, so I got chatting to a young guy who was handing out Socialist Party material. We talked for a while about various things*, including the fact that there are three different socialist organisations* in my local area.

Late in the conversation, just before I went to listen to the last two speakers*, I mentioned that some older male socialists I talk to seem a bit sceptical about feminism. A look of shock crossed his face. He said that he couldn’t imagine any real socialists behaving this way, and that true socialism was about equality for all.

So this is a young guy who is a millenial, or possibly even a post-millenial, if such a thing exists – he was so young. Think I’ll leave it there, but engels et al, I hope you take note.

* http://cpsu-csiro.org.au/2016/04/01/melbourne-rally-to-protest-csiro-and-climate-research-cuts/

* because some of the early speakers were a bit ‘scientists are a wonderful elite and you should all bow down and worship them’ which is what actually puts people off science

* particularly our shared view that climate scientists would be better off saying they were workers who were doing a difficult and important job to the best of their ability rather than presenting themselves as an elite.

* long story, which I’m happy to expand on for anyone interested (the long version is quite funny) but partly due to the fact that I live near to large university

*Greens and Youth alliance, all women (youth alliance had two speakers) – greens speaker an elected politician who actually fired up the crowd, unlike most of the previous speakers, so why were they last on the program? I think I know why but won’t talk about it here

@419 the only way that most CT threads can be understood is to assume that pretty much all the commentators are drunk.

Just think guys! When we were younger we used to go out on a Saturday night and drink beer and talk shit to our friends in pubs and bars. Now we stay in and drink wine and talk shit to complete strangers on the internet.

And they say there’s no such thing as progress.

I don’t think everyone was ‘talking shit’ and I learned a fair bit from Lupita’s and Jeffrey’s comments, among others. I also thought the post was great. My impression is that with a couple of exceptions people here really don’t want to know about younger Americans’ perspectives, or Sanders, generally. Not a surprise really.

…Young people proved to be about equally or more open-minded than their elders on all the categories Gallup tested, but the biggest gap between young and old was on “socialist” candidates…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/rampage/wp/2016/02/05/millennials-have-a-higher-opinion-of-socialism-than-of-capitalism/

Miles from London, find out which postcodes could grow into the next mini property price bubbles
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/property/11518363/Britains-new-property-hotspots-will-see-house-price-hikes.html

Brett @432,

I know this is hopeless, but . . . .

Your analogy with philistogen theory is telling, as is your belief in the “every time it’s been tried” thing. First of all, I’ve never seen you, ever, actually say what you think “Marxist theory” is. I’d love to see you paraphrase it and relate it to Marx’s writings. What, exactly, do you think has been tried and disproven?

But the real core of your problem is this: You seem to think there is this one set theory, which everyone supposedly agrees to, based on Marx’s writings, as if it were a maths or physics theorem. Something that never involved thousands of subjective interpretations, or a huge range of disagreement even within the community of Marxists and Marxians. You seem to believe that Lenin and Mao and others took this one thing, this one, actual, concrete entity, and reproduced its exact essence, parameters and dimensions, as if it were a model home, kept its exact logic intact, and that because they supposedly never deviated from this one essence, that proves that one thing, that model home, that math theorem is/was a disaster.

Ever stop to think that maybe they got it all wrong? That their extremely subjective interpretations, which were ferociously attacked by other self-identified Marxists, were wrong? And that because Marx wrote almost nothing whatsoever about what would replace capitalism, and spent most of his life just critiquing the existing economic system, there is no maths or physics theorem to get wrong? As in, he never went into the slightest detail about how to set up a new government and what it would look like, and he also warned against trying to have a socialist revolution in a country without a strong, surplus-yielding, already modernized economy.

In short, what is this “Marxist theory” you think has been disproven?

As for thousands dead, so what.

I believe this thread has now reached Peak Crooked Timber…

Ze K @437,

“‘It’ being public ownership of the means of production, public investment, and an attempt at distribution according to fairness and the public needs. What else is there? ”

If that is “it,” then “it” never has been tried before in the modern world. The public didn’t (doesn’t) own the means of production in Russia, NK, Cuba, China, etc. etc. A one party state/dictator did/does.

And you’re forgetting the other central tenet: full democracy, including the economy. That has also never been attempted on any national scale, anywhere in the modern world.

And:

“And what do the purges (and tortures, etc.) have to do with any of this? ”

It proves again that there is no one “it” involved. Who did Stalin and company purge, assassinate, etc. etc.? The vast majority were leftists who disagreed vehemently with the one party state and its interpretation of the revolution, of leftism in general and Marxism in particular. My point being that it’s absurd to dismiss “Marxism” based upon its perversion, bastardization and radical distortion by a few. The left itself has never been able to agree about what “Marxism” actually means . . . . and all too many right-wingers think they have and that everyone was/is on board with Stalin and Mao’s radically subjective version, etc. etc.

The left never was.

Richard @439,

Marx had arguments with Marx about this. He evolved over time and disagreed with himself often. Again, there is no one “it” to disprove. That’s my point. There’s not even an “it” if we just look at Marx and only Marx. Throw in the 10,001 interpreters and things spiral out even more from there. There is no “it.”

I side with Bakunin, btw, on more things than not — among other anarchist-socialists. To me, Marx was most valuable as a critic of capitalism. He did next to no work on what would replace it, just that it needed to be replaced, and he showed why this was/is the case.

So when the issue is what was implemented to replace the existing capitalist system — state capitalism — is under scrutiny, does it make any sense to hang this on “Marxism” when Marx himself barely said a peep about that? And when there is so much diversity and divergence among Marxists and Marxians themselves?

Not to me.

Ze K @443,

Sorry, but you’re absolutely wrong. About “full democracy” and everything else you write above. By definition, “the public” didn’t own the means of production. A single party/dictator did. That’s not “the public” in any other sense than Orwellian. And “full democracy” is direct, participatory, includes the economy, and has never been tried on a national scale in any nation. And, no, Greece didn’t have full democracy. They had a representative, highly limited form of democracy which did not count women, minorities, slaves or the landless in general.

Full democracy mean universal suffrage and is direct, participatory and not representational.

Rich @444,

The diversity among “Marxists” is staggering. Again, there is no “it.” And because that diversity is assumed right off the bat, there is no need to run from the term. Why should Marxists stop using the term when it has never meant anything remotely close to the black and white, comic-book version peddled by its critics?

Just take a look at the variations linked to here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism

It’s not a matter of “ideal versions” or “No True Scotsman.” It’s that “Marxism” has no single definition and encompasses massive differences in goals, philosophy, emphases, methods, etc. etc. . . . which render the idea that “it” has been disproven completely absurd.

As for those experiments. How many have there been? Six, maybe? There have been hundreds of experiments under capitalism, all of them massive failures, too. They obviously dwarf those who borrowed the name “Marxist” for theirs. And the death toll for the capitalist world is many, many times greater than that of the faux-Marxist examples.

I despise both. I have supreme contempt for both. And I am not advocating for any “Marxist” alternative, because such a thing doesn’t exist beyond the desire to see socialism replace capitalism. Marx wanted socialism to replace capitalism. He didn’t want “Marxism” to replace it. Even for Marx, there was no “it” like that. He also wrote a bit, often in vague terms, that socialism, once it became second nature, once it was naturally integrated, would be replaced by communism, the absence of the state. Basically, left-anarchism.

The argument in Marx’s day was the belief that a government was necessary as a transitional stage to the absence of government, versus the belief that this could be skipped. That, no, we need the absence of the state as the revolution itself, not as a goal via natural process. But the end goal was the same.

It wasn’t “Marxism.” It was socialism, followed by communism, both of which preexisted Marx and he always acknowledged that.

Ze K @449,

What would you call those experiments, though? Cuz they aren’t what Marx wrote was necessary. Again, he said capitalism needs to be replaced by socialism, and in those hijacked revolutions, state capitalism (not socialism) typically followed a kind of obdurate feudalism, or close to it. He also said, don’t have revolutions in nations like that. He wanted socialist revolution in Britain and Germany first, hopefully with parallel revolutions throughout Europe, which would then spread. He was smart enough to know that if they happened in “backward” nations, they would fail — both due to the West crushing them, and the absence of an economic surplus, so they would suffer from “sharing the scarcity.”

In reality, places like the Soviet Union were the ultimate betrayal of socialism — and, by extension, “Marxism.”

@451,

“Actually, they worry me. But these body-count contests are incomplete without including the monumental tolls of death and destruction that accompanied the rise and establishment of liberalism-capitalism, including its imperial and colonial aspects.”

Very true. And the latter is never acknowledged by the triumphalists in the liberalism-capitalism corner, and we’re brainwashed into not even thinking about those things. It’s heresy to even suggest we might be as bad — and in total, we’ve been far worse.

Again, I condemn both. That’s why I push for alternatives that have never been tried. Everything that has been tried in the modern world has been despicable in effect.

453: I am a teetotaler who would like to bring back prohibition but make marijuana mandatory legal and may still be flashing from the 70s. I would hope my psychedelic experience shows in my prose but I am no Robbins, Farina, Pynchon, or Wallace, and can only do my best to write kaleidoscopically.

Ze K @455,

“That comment was about the 1790s purges in France.”

It was? Because it was in direct response to this question:

“Who did Stalin and company purge, assassinate, etc. etc.?”

@454 So I take it that you did and do inhale. Can’t believe that HRC has not hit Sanders hard over this; it would have hurt him all over Washington.

In an interview with Katie Couric of Yahoo News, Sanders touched on a variety of subjects — including his past drug use.

“I coughed a lot. I’m sitting around, I smoked marijuana,” said Sanders, who then coughed for affect [sic]. “I smoked marijuana twice, didn’t quite work for me.”

bob @458,

How do you see “Marxism” in light of the subset of the subset discussion?

Do you think there is a there there? An “it” that has been disproven?

Btw, good PoMod references, though was surprised you left out Barth and Barthelme. The latter is one of my favorite all-time postmodernist writers. Especially great with his short stories. And if you really want kaleidoscopic, you should read Henri Michaux, the Belgian surrealist poet, painter and experimenter with myriad drugs. The inventor of “Plume” as well. He was PoMod long before they “officially” existed.

imho Marxism these days mostly amounts to a sort of intellectual kitsch.

The idea that ‘socialism’ as a political impulse today has much to do with Marx is a right wing myth – at least in the developed West. Contemporary socialism comes much closer to Polanyi’s ‘tendency in industrial civilization to self-consciously transcend the market by subordinating it to democratic society’. Even here, with ‘industrial’, we see clear signs of age. What might a post-industrial socialism look like?

‘Socialism as political impulse’ never had much to do with Marx. Marx didn’t invent socialism, he just greatly improved the theoretical tools available to serious socialists for understanding capitalism, fighting the power of capital and building a better future.

In purely economic terms imperialism makes no real sense. Capitalism per se doesn’t provide any reason for proactive military action. With the very limited exception of things like Perry’s expedition to Japan. The benefits to everyone of Japan opening trade with the world exceeded the opportunity cost of the expedition. Japan however was quite exceptional in its response and was certainly a great power by 1904 (Russo-Japanese War) and has a strong case that is was actually a great power by 1895 (First Sino-Japanese War). Usually the cost of any military action exceeds any possible profits from the military action. Capitalist states could afford to waste money on empires, it was still a hugely loss making endeavour.

War is fundamentally a value-subtracting activity. Huge amounts of stuff is used to break existing stuff leaving less stuff than you started with and stopping you from using the stuff you have used to break stuff in a more constructive way. Some individuals get more stuff but overall amount of stuff decreases so aggregate losses exceed aggregate gains.

A coldly economic approach to Iraq would have been to end the embargo Iraq wanted to sell oil, western businesses wanted to buy oil as cheaply as possible and increasing supply would lower the marginal cost of oil. The embargo was politically and morally motivated by a desire to punish the Iraqi government for Iraq’s awful human rights record and history of military aggression.

“he just greatly improved the theoretical tools available to serious socialists for understanding capitalism, fighting the power of capital and building a better future.”

And wow have those theoretical tools been so successful at those three tasks. Only a century later and so much progress has been made.

I also like the “serious socialists” part. Anyone can read what Marx thought of other socialists, and his followers continue the same attitude. “Serious” means pretty much what the capitalist media mean by “serious”: it means “always wrong”.

I actually think Marx had a solid grasp, and a significant impact on, the socialist politics of his day. Yet by the time WWI rolls around it was pretty clear that Marxism was insufficient – theoretically speaking – for analyzing politics. A bunch of people add things on in the meantime, but it was not for nothing that Gramsci, arguably the most politically attuned of the Western Marxists, considered the Russian revolution a ‘revolution against Das Kapital’. Gramsci himself of course abandons Marx’s approach to political rule and interjects his own, a pattern of ‘slight stretching’ that continues as “Marx” is championed in the colonies.

Ze K 04.02.16 at 7:22 pm @ 455:
“Actually, they worry me.”

‘That comment was about the 1790s purges in France. You sure it worries you? It’s history.’

Yeah, it’s history, and you know what they say about history.

So who are the ‘reasonable theorists’ of the left you’d contrast with crazy talking point spouters like David Harvey, Perry Anderson or Ellen Meiksins Wood?

Brett @470,

Again, I know this is hopeless, but . . .

“A single owner, no matter what you call it, no matter what motives you theorize it should have, always is a dictator. That’s the problem with your theory, Plume: you’ve built a dictator into it without realizing it.”

Yes. That single owner as dictator is why we need to get rid of capitalism. That’s what capitalism is based on. It’s based on the dictator/autocrat model, and the master/slave model.

But that part in bold? I shouldn’t have to explain this to you, but I didn’t invent socialism. I didn’t build anything into it.

Beyond all of that, there is nothing vague about the concept of “the public.” It’s just all of us. Every citizen, together. All citizens make up the public. So when the public owns the means of production, we all own it. We each have our individual shares; we’re all co-owners; there are no bosses, no dictators, no autocrats precisely BECAUSE we all are co-owners. Co-owners with equal say, equal voice, equal share, equal value.

In “socialism” as I understand it, power is dispersed, decentralized, completely spread out into 315 million bodies, all with equal standing under the law. Which means a “dictator” is an impossibility. No one person has authority to take control over everything, because we all have equal power. And to further devolve power away from any centers, we have autonomous, community-sized, egalitarian, democratic, cooperative economies, federated to one another. There are no political parties to take control. There are no concentrations of power beyond the individual. You can’t take control of a business by yourself. It’s always already owned by everyone. As in, literally everyone. We all hold the means of production in common.

As for the nonsense about “inevitability. Ironically, that sounds like vulgar Marxism. That sounds like a person who believes in historical inevitability, like victory for the proletariat. Nothing is inevitable. Other than you showing you don’t have a clue about leftist thought.

Now, as I asked earlier, please explain, in your own words, what you think “Marxism” means. Please explain what “it” is, in your view — the “it” that has supposedly been proven wrong so many times and inevitably leads to dictatorship. What is “it”? Brett . . . .

Rich @473,

Your constant denigration of socialists is puzzling. You say you’re a left-anarchist. Well, pretty much all the most famous left-anarchists in the 19th and 20th centuries considered themselves “socialists.” I can’t think of a single one of them who didn’t, as a matter of fact. They used terms like “socialist” interchangeably with “anarchist-socialist,” communist, “anarchist-communist,” etc. etc. Kropotkin, Proudhon, Reclus, Morris, Bakunin, Goldman, Luxemburg, etc. etc. etc. They identified as “socialists.”

Chomsky identifies as a libertarian socialist, which is pretty close to my own point of view, though I think I’m more of an anticapitalist than he is, and more eco-conscious.

Also: Sanders isn’t a socialist. Judging from his proposals, he’s not a democratic socialist or even a European-style social democrat, either. He is fine with capitalism being the economic engine. He isn’t talking about any nationalization of any good or service, much less industry. Though he cites the Scandinavian countries a lot, he doesn’t appear to want to go as far as they have already gone — or went forty years ago — when it comes to the Commons. I think he would have been considered a mainstream liberal if it were the 1960s right now. Relative to the rest of the field, he’s great. But he still falls well short of what America needs, which is far more than an updated New Deal. That’s what Sanders is, essentially. A New Dealer, with updates.

We need someone willing to call for the dismantling of the empire and the replacement of our economic system with a sustainable, eco-friendly, fully democratic one — non-violently, through the democratic process. But that needs to be the goal.

Brett Bellmore 04.02.16 at 9:25 pm @ 470:
If one entity controls all the water, you’re a slave, because you must have water.

One entity controls the water supply of New York City.

Plume: “Also: Sanders isn’t a socialist. ”

engels said this too. So 40% of young people or whatever have started to look favorably on socialism, and have a favored candidate who has said that he’s a socialist through a long career in Congress, and the first impulse of self-declared socialists is to say that he isn’t a real socialist. OK. But what I wrote was all wrong?

Rich @487,

Sanders has always been at pains to distinguish himself from plain old “socialist” by adding the modifier, “democratic.” Not since his youth has he called himself just a “socialist” without that modifier — as far as I know. To me, this is redundant, as “socialism” isn’t socialism without full-on democracy, including the economy. It’s something else entirely. But democratic socialism is basically used as a kind of marker, a sort of “to the right of” socialism “proper,” if I can binge on scare quotes here for a moment.

And I’m not talking about “purity” or anything like that. It’s a different point of view, an actual faction on the left that believes it is best to work with the Democratic party — to be the “left wing of the possible within the Democratic Party.” And this means keeping capitalism in place, compromising on things with the Republicans and the Democrats, and giving up on the idea of public ownership of the means of production or a classless society down the road. In Europe, it’s a stronger brew, and means certain industries are nationalized — which is about as close to “public ownership” as we’ve seen, but still not there. European “democratic socialism” is closer to what Tony Judt talked about in his Ill Fares the Land, for example. “The heights” are commonly held, but everything else is in the private sector.

I think the rise of young people saying they are okay with socialism is largely based on a misunderstanding of the term, though it’s a hopeful sign — this misunderstanding. It’s a lot more positive in its error than the right’s ignorant distortion, which basically just boils down to “Big Gubmint tyranny” and is pushed to make sure the richest retain their power and privilege. As in, the right’s demonization of socialism is in the service of keeping the ruling class in place, fat and happy. That’s not the rationale for the millennials’ embrace, etc.

Good article on the changing attitudes from Harold Meyerson, who identifies as a democratic socialist, too.

RNB @486,

Sounds like the right-libertarian delusion of “creative destruction.” That if the government just left the private sector alone, it would lift itself up after it demolishes part of itself in these crashes. In reality, it would, by definition, be too weak to do that, which is why the government has always stepped in to bail out the capitalist system, which simply can’t function without massive government support. At home and abroad. From 1970 to the present, we’ve had more than 100 large scale international bailouts, as David Harvey notes in his The Enigma of Capital. These have totaled many trillions of dollars and there is no end in sight.

Capitalism simply can’t go it alone, contrary to right-libertarian and conservative belief. Not only with day to day operations, and between nations, but each and every time it collapses, the only entity capable of lifting it up is government. It requires a bigger government apparatus, in fact, than any previous economic system.

Again, I like Sanders best among all the candidates. Actually, he’s the best we’ve seen in a generation. But, IMO, he still doesn’t go nearly far enough. His New Deal liberalism, while being a great deal better than Hillary, and with Hillary being better than Trump . . . . . it’s still weak tea overall for what ails us.

On the ‘necessary’ role of the state there is this
http://evonomics.com/stop-crying-about-the-size-of-government/
Which I think brings us back to Marx’s critique of Hegel: does the present state corrupt the essence of the state or is the essence of the state, corruption?

The price of microelectronics has plummeted since 1979 while the price of big-ticket items like housing, medical care, and higher education has long been growing faster than inflation. In my wife’s neighborhood growing up circa 1979 all the lower-middle class families there could afford to own a car and their own detached houses. But nobody in her circle could have splurged on a home computer. Since 1979 the real price of a home computer from e.g. Apple is down 75%, and it’s much more capable. But the real price of houses in her old neighborhood is up about 700%, and the house was the much more expensive item to begin with. The implication that American young adults could buy the same things their parents did at a similar age, if only they weren’t squandering money on quinoa and iPhones, is completely wrong.

Look, I didn’t love the Holly Wood piece (that name, tho) — just not getting the humor I guess, and also missing the context (I manage not to encounter jeremiads against millennials somehow). But some of the stuff on this thread is ridiculous. My kids, so ambitious!, Go-getters! iPhones! Have you even heard about the iPhones!? (I’m vaguely surprised no one’s mentioned cable yet, maybe that’s too 20th century.)

But, I don’t know, maybe look at what debt—and student debt in particular—looks like now vs. what it looked like a generation ago, let alone when the GI Bill allowed people to enjoy the baby boom. Or maybe look at what retirement plans, sorry “retirement plans”, look like now vs. what they looked like a generation or two ago. Or—closer to the concerns of the OP—maybe investigate the elusive ubiquitous “independent contractor”. This isn’t your Uber driver; this is people in full time jobs with—often—few or no benefits, this is also one of the fastest growing categories of employment in the US. Maybe then it will begin to make sense why even the go-getters! among the millennials (and I would guess that the people Corey mentioned in the post are mostly go-getters! by any reasonable measure) are feeling a measure of despair.

We can and should acknowledge the hardships that current 20-somethings face, but we should also be wary that a fixation upon them can lead to or reinforce regressive reactionary politics: me above we, us against them, relative status wealth vs. objective material plenty.

Not saying the the Holly Wood posts necessarily represent an ethos of greed and delusion, but they -quite typically, as an example of liberal economic critique that accepts capitalist premises- insufficiently point towards a proper solution to the stress and despair.

I look on the internet for “cheap low-calorie breakfast” and find recipes calling for something called “quinoa” (which sounds expensive to me), lingonberries, fresh organic kale, almond milk. Those do not seem to me to be the concerns of people who are financially constrained.

Keep ’em coming

Yes, without this timely warning, people without your deep understanding of history might expect capitalism to end because a socialist was elected.

In any case, I don’t have a hostility to socialism. Once again you are confusing yourself with the movement, comrade. I have a hostility to people who have no understanding of what went wrong in the past and who want the next generation to repeat the same old mistakes.

A good piece on Sanders by a young(ish) American Marxist (which incidentally does seem to sort of allow him the use of the label ‘socialist’)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-theory/wp/2016/03/25/the-sanders-democrat-is-paving-the-way-for-the-radical-left/

I don’t think that you’re anyone’s comrade because I don’t think that you actually engage in any political activity.

Well then you’re an idiot.

Attempts to abolish capitalism have tended to work less well and often end up with piles of skulls. Corporatism less so than socialism. In any event the historical record provides a strong reason for being sceptical about replacing capitalism.

Capitalism tends to be most successful in democracies. The generally low level of corruption means that the most effective way of being successful is to be more competent than your competition rather than getting your cronies in the government to ban your competitors. Which is what happens in places like Russia. Corporatism like mercantilism has a lot of political favouritism and market manipulation.

China is currently having some success in implementing a properly functioning market while remaining a dictatorship. Whether this can work long term is more of a question, Indonesia under Suharto tried the same, it worked for years, then it suddenly didn’t, Indonesia is now democratic.

Democratic institutions in the west work, you can tell from things like the way politicians pander to those parts of the population who actually vote, like pensioners and largely ignore those who don’t like the young and unemployed.

Quite a lot of left wing criticism of capitalism is actually directed at the corporatist and mercantilist elements rather than areas where the market operates effectively.

Rich,

“So any other tendency is supposed to wait with bated breath to be judged “real socialism”, but at the same time they aren’t supposed to say anything bad about socialism because we’re all socialists. ”

It’s not about remaining silent. It’s not about holding back on criticism. Nothing is above critique or questioning. Everything is fair game. But the object of the critique, the object of the questioning, should match up with the thing being critiqued or questioned. It’s important to be accurate about what, exactly, is being critiqued. What “it” is.

Zooming in to a fundamental level for analogy:

If Joey Smith steals Sally Jane’s lunch at school, and she accuses Bobby Johnson instead, who was home sick at the time, then this is “bad critique” and doesn’t match the object with the thing being critiqued.

North Korea, for example, is officially called The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea by its leader. If someone is highly critical of that government — which they should be; it’s horrifically bad — it doesn’t make sense to do so by being critical of “Democratic Republics.” It makes sense to be critical of dynastic dictatorships and so on, but not “democracy” or “republics” or “people’s republics” etc. etc. etc. . . . which do not match up in the slightest with what actually exists in North Korea.

It’s not asking too much that criticism of “socialism” match the thing itself, and that if it doesn’t at least have the core, essential tenets of two centuries’ worth of theory and small scale practice, it shouldn’t be called “socialism.”

I’m not a socialist , (or Marxist ), so haven’t read enough Marxist writers (I’ve read the usuals, Harvey , Anderson etc). What else would people recommend ? Less in the lines of critiques more in line of visions of what a socialist society would look like and a rough blueprint of how you’d get there ? I have had my eyes on this book by Paul Auerbach “socialist optimism”, does anyone know whether the author and/or book is any good ?
Also , I have to agree with jeffreyg, I’ve no idea why people are so taken by Acemoglu and Robinson’s work.( There’s a pretty stinging critique of them by Peter temin, which I’ll try dig up and link to later)

Cranky Observer @516,

Not to mention even more slaughter in WWII by the capitalist world. And you can add colonialism to this as well. To the hell on earth this produced for “third world” peoples. Its chief impulse, at least from the 19th century on, was capitalist expansion, as capitalism itself is essential imperalistic, and the first innately imperialistic economic system in history.

The slave trade was also a capitalist venture by the 19th century, and the rise of capitalism itself extended the life of slavery in the Americas by several decades, as it made it highly profitable again. The pre-capitalist dynamics of slavery would likely have forced its end for strictly economic reasons, but capitalist “innovations” boosted its capacity to sustain itself and thrive — making banksters and myriad financiers obscenely wealthy as well.

If Mao and Stalin can be blamed for deaths due to famine, and those deaths pinned on “socialism,” then famine in Ireland and Africa and in every capitalist nation, colony, satellite, etc. etc. gets pinned on capitalism as well. Hell, deaths due to cigarettes, the quintessential capitalist export, number several million per year, year after year after year. That’s a result of capitalists knowingly producing deadly products. If that doesn’t count as a “pile of skulls” attributable to capitalism, then one can’t justify a count for “socialism,” either.

Not to mention the fact that “socialism” still hasn’t even been tried on any national scale, whereas capitalism has and dominates the globe.

World War II was started by Nazi Germany which was quite explicitly a corporatist state. Its allies Italy and Japan were also corporatist.

Slavery was far more associated with pre-capitalist mercantilism and the development of capitalism in the 19th century was associated with the destruction of bonded labour. Accusing capitalism of causing slavery is utterly at variance with history. Britain at the same time capitalism was developing began devoting considerable resources to not only eliminating slavery in the areas it controlled but also eliminating the slave trade world wide and coercing other states into abolishing slavery.

Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot all killed huge numbers of people in pursuit of their vision of socialism. Attempting to radically change the basis of an economy in pursuit of some theoretical vision of how things ought to work has a really bad record. Firstly you need to use a great deal of violence to overcome opposition and then you tend to cause famine as what you are trying to do doesn’t work. In a democracy the opposition of the sceptics is usually enough to stop that sort of thing from being attempted and certainly enough to cause its abandonment if it actually starts to fail.

Mercantilism was imperialistic and expansionist, the gaining of trade monopolies and other privileges over colonies was viewed as a good thing. Adam Smith pointed out that even the most generous estimate of the value of these trade privileges was a tiny fraction of the cost of getting them. From a purely capitalist point of view there are almost no circumstances in which it is worth beginning a war, capitalism itself is pacifist and internationalist. Warfare is started by other things, like nationalism.

Brett,

This is true:

“Attempting to radically change the basis of an economy in pursuit of some theoretical vision of how things ought to work has a really bad record. Firstly you need to use a great deal of violence to overcome opposition and then you tend to cause famine as what you are trying to do doesn’t work. ”

And you’ve just described what capitalism has done all over the world for roughly two centuries.

I don’t think we are yet at a position where we can predict what a post-capitalist economy would look like. We have seen the failure of a couple of suggested replacements, corporatism and socialism. The former is, like mercantilism, a less efficient market system, the latter ends up turning into a full blown command economy and is even less efficient. What actually works is a capitalist economy with a strong democratic state which uses various redistributive taxation policies to help those who lose out due to being unlucky, incompetent or the victim of prejudice.

One of the problems Ireland had in the 1840s was that it wasn’t really integrated into the early-capitalist economic order. Ireland’s economy was based on self sufficient subsidence agriculture and imported and exported little food so the infrastructure to move food wasn’t in place, Ireland’s economy was too localised and essentially pre-capitalist. A country better integrated into world trade is able to import food in the event of a serious crop failure. We recognise that not nearly enough was done at the time due to excessive fear that the Irish wouldn’t do anything about the underlying structural problems with their economy.

@ Ronan

What else would people recommend?

I would recommend reading about Emiliano Zapata, his Plan de Ayala, and how he expropriated and distributed land in his state of Morelos in the form of ejidos (an indigenous socio-economic system based on communal property).

Continue with President Cárdenas’ implementation of Zapata’s Plan de Ayala (as expressed in Art. 27 of the Mexican constitution) in several other places around Mexico and how that turned out (short story: lots of corruption, a few good results).

Finally, because all stories have an end, read about NAFTA, which includes the derogation of Art. 27 leading to the privatization of ejidos, millions of ejidatarios engrossing the reserve army of labor in order to collapse wages in Mexico to benefit maquiladoras, the rise of Zapatistas demanding constitutional reforms recognizing the social rights and autonomy of indigenous communities, mass emigration to the US, collapse of wages in the US, construction boom and bust, anti-immigration fervor, and the rise of Trump.

I think this story of socialism in the form of Zapata’s socialist revolution and the Mexican socialist constitution, the NAFTA counter-revolution, and the Zapatista counter-counter-revolution, encapsulates what socialism is, how it comes to be, how it ceases to exist, and how it never dies.

Against Acemoglu and Robinson:

How were English institutions inclusive–unlike in France, taxes could be raised without consent and property could be more easily seized. Parliamentary supremacy in England is mischaracterized as an inclusive institution according to Robert C. Allen who also argues that factor prices had more to do with British industrialization than the greater inclusivity of institutions.

Were the institutions brought about the Meiji Restoration inclusive as well? Is Botswana’s relative success really due to the greater relative inclusivity of institutions? They have met a lot of criticism. One could also argue that it was not strong property rights but weak ones as in the case of German patent law that enabled high growth rates.

Do settler mortality rates really serve as an exogenous variable determining quality of institutions that enable Acemoglu and Robinson to escape the problem of reverse causality? In other words, they have to show that settlers did not set up putatively favorable institutions in places that had proximity to trade routes that already positively affected long-term development. Have they done so?

And how much of the variance in growth do inclusive institutions account for anyway? Do geographic factors such as malarial burden and isolation really matter as little as they say? Can we understand the material conditions of women without reference to culture as a determinant of institutions (they don’t really discuss women at all)? Do they underestimate the importance of policy mistakes resulting not from vested interests but prejudice and ignorance in holding back growth?

Without the econometric analysis can A&R avoid selection bias in the natural experiments they idiosyncratically choose to support their institutional hypothesis?

Also have they underestimated the benefits putatively inclusive institutions derived from their colonial relations?

And as Temin asks: do they suffer a kind of Olympian detachment from the failed states that they are observing that they do not notice how close the US is to becoming one?

Japan, Singapore and Scandinavia aren’t corporatist they are capitalist. Corporatism was the economic system of states like fascist Italy Franco’s Spain and Argentina under Peron amongst others. It was pretty much abandoned as a failure in the 1970s. The idea that the optimal trade policy is to have low tariffs and markets open to the outside has more or less won everywhere. China is more an example of trying to combine capitalism and despotism.

Donald Trump is an example of a modern corporatist or mercantilist (they are fairly hard to tell apart). Populist “common sense” economics without a sound intellectual backing, calling for high tariffs and repudiation of trade deals.

Thanks engels and lupita.

Lupita, I know the story very superficially, anything in particular you’d recommend reading on it?

The US has seriously flawed political institutions along with a culture of interest groups not exploiting those weaknesses. The US has been able to get a presidential system to work while France has got a semi-presidential system to work. Parliamentary systems seem to be a bit less vulnerable as you don’t get a deadlock due to a split mandate. Presidential and semi-presidential systems have the problem that you can end up with a confrontation between the head of state and the legislature where both have a democratic mandate not to back down.

The US founding fathers tried to copy and improve the British constitution they managed to re-break some of the things we had fixed. Giving the head of state actual power and separating the cabinet from the legislature were the two biggest. They went for separation of powers we chose accountability instead.

Corporatism is an economic ideology. It favours existing established interest groups at the expense of others. This tends to lead to protectionist policies designed to favour declining businesses with high barriers to entry. In Latin America it led to import substitution where high tariffs were used to make a high cost local producer artificially competitive with more efficient foreign businesses. Protectionism cost the losers in aggregate more than it benefits the winners. If you artificially make steel expensive with tariffs the cost is to the manufacturers who buy the steel who find that their costs are higher and they have to increase their prices causing them to lose sales and market share. The costs of protectionism exceed the benefits.

…And avoid anyone in any way influenced by Althusser and you’ll be fine.

avoid anyone in any way influenced by Althusser

*polishes icepick*

@ Ronan

The functioning of an ejido (or its precursor, the calpulli) are both socio-economic systems based on communal ownership, so perhaps you would be interested in those as examples of how socialist units have actually operated. Then there are the caracoles formed by the Zapatistas whose functioning has been described by el subcomandante Marcos. I cut&pasted some quotes so that you can get an idea of how they operate. It’s very pedestrian, I’m afraid.

Government
we made all of the major decisions, or the “strategic” ones, of our struggle, by means of a method that they call the “referendum” and the “plebiscite”.
Good Government Juntas change continually.
“rotations” which last from eight to 15 days
There’s no continuity, because agreements are made with one junta one week, and the next week there’s already another, different junta.” Some don’t go into details and posit: “the Good Government Juntas are chaos.”

Social
we lowered to zero the rate of alcoholism
And we got rid of prostitution and unemployment disappeared as well as begging.
the cultivation, consumption and trafficking in drugs were prohibited

Ecology
The destruction of trees also was prohibited, and laws were made to protect the forests, and the hunting of wild animals was prohibited

Women
While the percentage of female participation in the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committees is between 33 and 40%, in the autonomous councils and the Good Government Juntas it is less than 1% on average. Women are still being ignored in the naming of ejidal commissioners and municipal agents. Government work is still the prerogative of the men.
Domestic violence has decreased, it is true, but more through the limitations on alcohol consumption than through a new family and gender culture.

Health
In the five regions where the Good Government Juntas are operating, health campaigns are being carried out which promote the use of latrines and the cleanliness of dwellings.
Generally speaking, the Good Government Juntas are seeing to it, little by little, that each of the Autonomous Municipalities has a basic community health structure: health promoters, health campaigns, preventative medicine, micro-clinics, pharmacies, regional clinics, doctors and specialists.

Conclusion
And we made many errors and had many failures.

Rich, remember when you said you weren’t going to respond to my comments because I was beneath your intelligence? Is there anything I can do to persuade you to re-institute that policy?

RNB @ 488
I just checked back in to see if there were any comments I should respond to (as opposed to those I shouldn’t) and found yours, so thank you. Very good advice which in future I shall try to follow (as I don’t necessarily intend to disengage from CT forever). I also think that most people on CT, most of the time, do try to follow those principles.

However it’s also important to put on record that I think I was particularly subjected to misrepresentation and ridicule by a few commenters here, and that that is related to the fact that I take a stronger feminist line than most commenters on CT. I also think that’s something that CT, collectively, should think about.

@539 Wasn’t there some previous discussion of Ellen Wood’s Origin of Capitalism here at Crooked Timber?

Anon @ 550
I think your critics here would argue you hold a *more moderate* feminism, one impoverished by your generosity toward those who have compromised with neoliberalism. To be clear: we might be wrong about that, but it’s a sincere disagreement about what counts as strong feminism that’s the real dispute.

Anyway, as I said, I really want to disengage for a while, so maybe we can discuss this further another time.

It isn’t used as the basic economic policy of any major nation. There is a general consensus that tariffs should be low, trade is basically a good thing, &c. all elements where the corporatist and capitalist elements differ. Corporatism was popular in the 1930s as a reaction to the great depression demonstrating the apparent failure of capitalism. Corporatism was the economic theory espoused by fascists. It essentially vanished with the last fascist states in the 1970s.

The attitude to competition is diametrically opposed. Capitalist states have legal procedures to prevent anticompetitive practices while Corporatist states actively encouraged anticompetitive practices.

The existence of some corporatist elements like the UKs water industry and a few smaller regulated monopolies in the economy like the existence of socialist institutions like the NHS or state schools doesn’t make the UK corporatist or socialist. The economy is still fundamentally capitalist. The corporatist elements that exist tend to be far less significant then the socialist elements in the economies of rich nations.

Val @554

“Anyway, as I said, I really want to disengage for a while, so maybe we can discuss this further another time.”

Fair enough. It’s good to take a break from these things every now and then, and I could use one, too.

“But I would like to suggest that the reason you think that is because you don’t understand what I’m saying, so I’ll try to say it one more time.”

Maybe so, but not being or feeling we’ve been entirely understood is a burden we all bear in these conversations, and often it’s easy to confuse honest disagreement with misunderstanding or willful misreading. I think many, even most, in this thread have met their responsibility of trying in good faith to understand one another. Sometimes we still fail to, and it’s no one’s fault in particular. Justice can be done to all sides in a dispute, and everyone still be left dissatisfied.

“In any system where there is a dominant and a subordinate group, those members of the subordinate group who first achieve some power are likely to be compromisers. Nevertheless, their achievement of positions of power is important because they are the first steps towards building a critical mass that can actually achieve change.”

I agree completely, and suspect most in this thread do, too. So, given agreement that on balance achievement of positions of power for members of a subordinate groups is a good thing, there can still be disagreement about how this is to be achieved, and in which cases the benefits outweigh the harms. I assume your opponents disagree with you on the latter only, believing that in certain cases–e.g., electing Clinton (or to take non-controversial extreme cases, electing Palin or Fiorini) will do some good in that respect, but not enough to justify other harms they believe (rightly or wrongly) would also result.

Again, it seems like an honest disagreement in which both sides are compatible with strong feminism. We can save the discussion of that disagreement for another day, but I still insist most everyone here is concerned about how best and effectively to practice feminism, not exhibiting skepticism toward it. (The same might be said about the bickering over “socialism”–isn’t only one poster here really suspicious of socialism, and the others just disagreeing about how to best promote it?)

anon: “(The same might be said about the bickering over “socialism”–isn’t only one poster here really suspicious of socialism, and the others just disagreeing about how to best promote it?)”

Sort of. It depends on what you mean by “socialism”, which is a contested word that some people prefer to assert isn’t contested, something generally done for bad reasons.

If socialism means “public ownership of the means of production”, that’s only putting off the actual disagreement, which consists mostly in what “ownership” means (and to a lesser extent what “public” means and what “the means of production” are.) In short, this definition blends state socialism and libertarian socialism, something which happened at an early point for historical reasons. In practice, it’s always been used to try to get libertarian socialists to think of themselves as a kind of adjunct to state socialism.

It’s long since past the point where libertarian socialists stopped pretending that they are in agreement with state socialists in any important way. State socialism is always going to lead to the same socialist states that we’ve seen in history. That’s not an improvement over what we have now, unless you as Ze K does think that China is better than Western liberal societies. State socialism always involves the management of public assets by a class of managers. There are schemes to get away from this, but in practice that’s what they’re always collapsed into.

Rich, I agree with you about the separation between “state socialism” and libertarian socialism, which we both endorse and embrace.

I absolutely reject the the former.

Rich @562: “Sort of. It depends on what you mean by “socialism”, which is a contested word that some people prefer to assert isn’t contested, something generally done for bad reasons.”

Yes, but I think we can frame that either as a disagreement what socialism “is” in some narrow sense which allows that the disagreement is fundamental (“your socialism is my anti-socialism, so we’re fundamentally opposed”), or we can frame that as a disagreement about what socialism “ought” to be, in which case the semantic disagreement is based in support for at least overlapping, partially shared concepts about what ought to be (“I want socialism to go here, you want it to go there, but we both want some overlapping thing that has been wanted under that name in the past”).

In this case, the foundational agreement is that all are suspicious of “capitalism” on most definitions, only suspicious of “socialism” on contentious ones, and all endorse “socialism” on *some* definition, which at least partially overlaps many of the others’ definitions.

Maybe the shorter way of putting it: everyone agrees that something in the Wittgensteinian family of resemblances of “socialism” is worth promoting. Likewise, in Val’s discussion, we all probably agree that some concept with a substantial family resemblance to “feminism” is worth promoting, and equally or comparable important as class justice.

For that reason I suspect it’s unconstructive to accuse each other of on some level being opposed to feminism or to socialism–even given the fact that the semantic disagreement about the extension of those terms is deep.

. . . it’s unconstructive to accuse each other of on some level being opposed to feminism or to socialism–even given the fact that the semantic disagreement about the extension of those terms is deep.

Did I hear someone say something about “incredulity toward metanarratives”?

These disagreements are not “deep”. That’s the wrong metaphor.

These discussions produce a lot of rising smoke, destined to be lost in the clouds, and arguments about what impressions their puffy shapes make upon our undisciplined imaginations.

BW: “These discussions produce a lot of rising smoke […]”

Well, what do you suggest, BW? These discussions are an amusing way to spend time in between work. If you want something productive, I could try to get you to join a project to reduce GHG emissions by tracking corporate policy of major GHG emitters and increasing the importance of GHG reduction plans within corporate bureaucracies. Anyone who can argue on CT could also do that.

I do confess I am waiting like a potential witness to an impending car crash to see if this is going to get a reaction from the Mean Girlz: “. . .we’ll be teaching the kids about how they, too, can equally rise to a position of power where they can maintain an unjust system. That’s what feminism is all about.”

Ze K @ 575

There would seem to be sensible arguments to the effect that Britain should not be producing much new steel, let alone exporting it. That doesn’t mean that making steel no one needs as a make-work program for British steelworkers is sensible.

Ze K @ 577

Yes, and those governments are willing to do that, because of the evidence of potential for increasing returns to scale in aircraft production that yields big economic rents and advantageous terms of trade.

Ricardo’s argument on comparative advantage depends on a small number of plausible assumptions. It holds provided that the relative costs of production in different places are different and the transaction costs are small enough to be negligible. Specifically it holds even if one place has an absolute advantage at everything.

The euro has essentially the same problem that the gold standard had, and indeed other fixed exchange rate systems, it doesn’t allow the use of exchange rates to correct for different economic circumstances. In the 1930s Britain had a very quick recovery as we left the gold standard quickly and massively devalued. Full employment was reached by 1932, faster than any major economy except Japan. The 1930s in the UK were economically speaking better than the 1920s had been. The early 1920s depression was deeper than the Great Depression. The Bretton Woods system was replaced by a generally superior floating exchange rate system.

I didn’t favour joining the Euro as I was worried that they might actually take the stability and growth pact seriously. And not abandon it when good policy called for abandoning it. I was right to worry. The benefit to the UK of being part of a larger currency was limited and the risk of being stuck with a bad monetary policy was significant. I would only support joining the Euro if the stability and growth pact were abandoned.

From Wikipedia:

Following Britain’s withdrawal from the gold standard and the devaluation of the pound, interest rates were reduced from 6% to 2%. As a result, British exports became more competitive on world markets than those of countries that remained on the gold standard. This led to a modest economic recovery, and a fall in unemployment from 1933 onwards. Although exports were still a fraction of their pre-depression levels, they recovered slightly.

Unemployment began a modest fall in 1934 and fell further in 1935 and 1936, but the rise in employment levels occurred mostly in the south, where lower interest rates had spurred the house building boom, which in turn spurred a recovery in domestic industry. The North and Wales remained severely depressed for most of the decade. In severely depressed parts of the country, the government enacted a number of policies to stimulate growth and reduce unemployment, including road building, loans to shipyards, and tariffs on steel imports. These policies helped but were not, however, on a sufficiently large scale to make a huge impact on the unemployment levels.

BW: “I do confess I am waiting like a potential witness to an impending car crash to see if this is going to get a reaction from the Mean Girlz”

You forget that Lupita wrote it first. “Lupita” is a female sounding nym, so that magically changes it to “a feminist criticizing a feminist” from “a man getting in an argument with a feminist”.

But might as well toss in this piece on Trump also.

I do confess I am waiting like a potential witness to an impending car crash to see if this is going to get a reaction from the Mean Girlz: “. . .we’ll be teaching the kids about how they, too, can equally rise to a position of power where they can maintain an unjust system. That’s what feminism is all about.”

So to push back against antifeminism is “mean”?
This is a whole other discussion, though.
But of course men love this approach, because it lets them off the hook and ensures they can remain as the dominant group for a while longer.

Helen: “So to push back against antifeminism is “mean”?”

It’s not antifeminism: it’s a different feminism than yours. One which doesn’t equate the physical state of being female with being a feminist.

Don’t presume to know what mine is either. You just labelled it antifeminism, so let’s not have this holier-than-thou thing where you’re not being insulting and labelling people.

“Women in high positions of the neoliberal order key to breaking down hierarchies” sounds like a really bad jv policy debate argument, like for why the perm uniquely solves the kritik

Your latest one is your usual stupid one-liner, being an extended quote that says that because some people say they are socialists who you think aren’t, that it’s a bad idea.

Er what does this sentence mean?

But really you’re just doing what you always do: defending the boundaries.

So if I don’t think Tony Blair is a socialist then I’m responsible for the Gulag. Damn.

Have you ever had an original thought?

Maybe not, but I know bullshit when I see it.

engels: “So if I don’t think Tony Blair is a socialist then I’m responsible for the Gulag.”

Been over this before: I don’t think you’re responsible for anything. But the article that you quoted mentions that all five Labor candidates in 2010 said that they were socialists. Do we have to take them at their word? No, you could make an argument (as opposed to a one-liner argument from incredulity) that they weren’t real socialists by historical definitions, if you wanted to do that tiresome boundary-defending activity. But they are people who stood a chance of being elected to important political positions, backed up by a electorate that (perhaps mysteriously) seems to think that they are socialists in some sense. Sure, you can have your opinion of what socialism should be, just as I have mine, but they get to define what socialism actually is through practice. Similarly, you can say that Chinese Marxism isn’t real Marxism, but there are 1.3 billion Chinese people living in a one-party Marxist state, and what you say doesn’t make them disappear.

I admire engels’ dedication to supporting my comments. Here I said that all he does is mindlessly defend an ancient orthodoxy with one-liner arguments from incredulity, and he obligingly trots another one right out.

Rich, I admit to being lost for words. Your ‘anarchism’ is about as radical as Alan Sugar. Cheerio.