A majority of millennials now reject capitalism, poll shows | Hacker News Reader

A majority of millennials now reject capitalism, poll shows

washingtonpost.com

21 pointsrbanffy62 comments

I grew up in a Communist dictatorship in Eastern Europe. Capitalism is far from being perfect but it was much better for my friends and I than communism. It wasn't as good for older people that lived most of their life in the previous regime tho (but we cannot say how capitalism would have treated them if they haven't had lived almost all their lives in communism).

I do not know what the solution to capitalism's problems is but I do know it's not communism. I also realize that rejecting capitalism doesn't imply embracing communism but in practice I don't see anyone suggesting any other alternatives to it.

With the rise of social-nationalism/right-wing activism again in Europe and elsewhere I sometimes wonder if this isn't just collective memory forgetting the horrors of the past that were brought upon by hate and simplification (to me most political ideals like communism and nationalism are the result of minds that refuse to view the world in the highly complex state it is in and are looking for simplifications/shortcuts), we are forever doomed to repeat those mistakes. :(

Does democratic socialism not have a place in your solution set?

The idea that stakeholders >= shareholders should be enshrined in our governing policy.

Capitalism has a flaw in that if it isn't actively maintained (i.e., anti-trust, regulations, tariffs to prevent abuses) it simply becomes oligarchy (USA is an oligarchy in all but name).

Social democracy cannot be replicated in countries like USA or Eastern Europe. It has had been abused in Eastern Europe to maintain communism 2.0.

> Social democracy cannot be replicated in countries like USA or Eastern Europe

Why?

Because of mentality and being very prone to the too much free power makes one too cocky. We can actually see how it works when corporations get lazy and mismanage very hard.

Mentality can be changed for good (the past few years show how it can be changed for evil).

If it can't, then it's a missed opportunity of planetary proportions.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/20446694?mag=socialism-make-peo...

You are highlighting a problem of too much centralization, not a problem of economic left or right. Centralization has this problem independent of whether it manifests in government or corporations.

People get way too hung up on what I'd consider the theoretical government + economic label a place runs under, and overlook the power structures and how the powerful operate with respect to the needs of people. Along those lines, maybe we have something labelled democracy in America, but the power structures responsiveness and effectiveness (esp with the current tax vote), is getting closer to a communist dictatorship rather than moving away.

How so? Didn't the people elect congress?

No, the people do not elect congress, until every congressman/woman runs without a single dollar from donors, and uses only public platforms to promote themselves.

Money buys politicians, which buys elections which buys what they do/don't do in congress. It's all an organized but legal crime syndicate. Extortion, bribery, etc are legal in politics, because politicians make the rules.

I agree we should get the money out of politics, but let's be honest with our terms. The people do elect congress, though corrupt money is allowed to influence the people.

Yes. Couldn't agree more. Politics in so called democracies is nothing more than legal organized crime syndication.

In other words, politicians run legal protection rackets. Mafias.

Major Study Finds The US Is An Oligarchy

http://www.businessinsider.com/major-study-finds-that-the-us...

> Researchers concluded that U.S. government policies rarely align with the preferences of the majority of Americans, but do favour special interests and lobbying organizations: "When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it."

Sure, so we can say that people vote against their interests. We can't say that the U.S. is a dictatorship. Let's be precise with our terms, rather than contributing to political polarization and blustering.

Systematically studying a range of issues supported by voters and comparing them against actual congressional votes is not blustering. It's rather methodical and data driven.

The study isn't blustering. Claiming that America "is getting closer to a communist dictatorship" is.

Communist dictatorships don't have the characteristic power structure of a close circle of oligarchs that overall decide policy?

...who aren't chosen by the people. That's the defining characteristic.

Neither are the oligarchs in America.

The economic left to right axis, and the authoritarian libertarian axis are orthogonal. I hope this helps.

Thanks for that post. It's an interesting perspective, from a background different than my own.

I think the key term here is "dictatorship". There's been capitalist dictatorships as well, and they've been terrible (Franco in Spain comes to mind for example).

I wouldn't be worried by the modern rejection of capitalism, because it's definitely not a rejection of democratic systems. In fact, if anything, it's fueled by the failure of democracy in the face of the inevitable oligarchy product of capitalist economics. If anything, I see this as a wave of people trying to save democracy.

Misleading title. The last sentence of the article:

> "They're not rejecting the concept," Della Volpe said. "The way in which capitalism is practiced today, in the minds of young people — that's what they're rejecting."

It's no surprise people reject concepts they don't adequately understand. I don't know who exactly you could blame here. But if they all understood what it meant, I don't believe nearly as many would be rejecting it.

That’s quite the accusation. I understand capitalism quite well. It often optimized the wrong thing. I have no problem with being in the socialist democracy of canuckistan with regulations and all.

Canada is still more capitalist than socialist. It has a few socialist Bells and whistles like socialized medicine, but really not that close to socialism over all.

Yet it's enough to provide a significantly better quality of life than the US. As a 24 year old, living in America is rough. I'm $30k in student loan debt, struggling to find a job in a non-coastal region, and can become bankrupt and homeless with an unlucky illness.

And my situation is not unique, if anything, I'm above average. I'm lucky enough to have some money in my savings, a middle-class upbringing, and some personal finance classes under my belt. For someone not as lucky, it would be obvious to them that something is incredibly broken in our society.

I think this is half correct. Part of the reason they “don’t understand” it is because leaders in business and politics misuse the term to mean “back the fuck off and we’ll make things better.” It’s sort of a catchall diversionary term for deregulatory policies and Ameican exceptionalism, and I think millenials have a pretty valid reason to be critical of those things after getting the short end of the economic stick and entering one of the worst job markets since the 1930s.

It's not hard to see the flaws in capitalism, but hard to come up with a decent alternative. Capitalism is the private ownership of assets used for production, such as factories and land. One alternative is government ownership, but that has a terrible track record. What other systems are possible? Non-profit organisations controlled by their employees?

Good questions, but you ask as if there were no intellectuals out there discussing postcapitalist futures or social movements trying to build (or "prefigure") a postcapitalist world. Granted, they often aren't very visible, but publications like Jacobin are a good way to keep up with these efforts.

Do you have any specific articles?

I often recommend this one: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures -- it has since been elaborated into a book. Bonus points for lots of sci-fi references.

A mixture of both? It's ludicrous to assume all enterprises are equal, or that companies should be allowed to grow as big as they want. Yet here we are; Healthcare and university education is run like any other business, banks are so big that if they fail the whole economy falls with them, cable-providers are so big they can buy the FCC, etc.

There are enterprises that IMO are not meant to be run by private, for-profit orgs, or should be capped on size.

Phamaceutical lobbies peddling opiates caused the heroin problem, alcohol lobbies pushed the war or marijuana, bank lobbyists pushed for deregulation that caused the housing crash, the subsequent recession, and wage stagnation as well. The problem is they're trying to get money independent of whether they hurt society or not. This is the second demonstration in american history that unfettered capitalism naturally creates an environment that is anti-competitive and fundamentally an un-free market. As lovers of startups, and the innovation and disruption that they provide, we should be pushing for models that prevent corporations from seizing control of our government and pushing out the real innovators. The dreamers who hope to make a living making the world a better place instead of making a quick buck robbing society.

People who oppose a free market economy are the ones who haven’t lived outside of one.

People who make broad assumptions are those who haven't looked into closely into the problem and the literature of different viewpoints.

Or so I assume, idk, my opinion.

Maybe capitalists are more likely to tell pollsters to screw off.

Sent from iPhone X

Are you only allowed to criticize capitalism if you own no possessions and live in a hut in the woods you built yourself?

No, but if you're enjoying products that would have never been developed without profit incentive, then there's hypocrisy in rejecting capitalism.

There's really, really not. I think you need a refresher on the definition of "hypocrisy", because yours is badly wrong.

If you're willing to engage in respectful debate, rather than just vacuously claiming that I'm wrong, I'm happy to discuss any definition you'd like to proffer.

We (I'm assuming you're not posting from North Korea) all live in a capitalist society, so virtually all the products we use are "made with profit incentive". Since it is not possible to live in society without consuming any products, your definition of a "hypocritical" capitalist critiquer implicitly includes all of them - which makes it useless as a definition, as it carries no informational content.

But many products would exist without profit incentive. This isn't a thought experiment. East Germany had bread and houses. They didn't have iphones. If you want the iphone, you have to accept profit incentive.

The same way if you want a welfare state you have to accept taxes.

The Harvard University survey, which polled young adults between ages 18 and 29, found that 51 percent of respondents do not support capitalism. Just 42 percent said they support it.

The results of the survey are difficult to interpret, pollsters noted. Capitalism can mean different things to different people, and the newest generation of voters is frustrated with the status quo, broadly speaking.

If you do a survey and ask if people are pro abortion, most of them will say "no." If you do a survey and ask if they support a woman's rights to have control over her body and have reproductive choice -- aka "pro choice" -- most people will say "yes."

Most folks think a woman should have access to abortion services should she need one. They also think it should be an absolute last resort for when things go wrong and should not be used too casually as a primary form of birth control. The reality is that most women would never use it that way. But birth control methods fail far more often than most people imagine, plus sometimes someone is assaulted.

TLDR: How you ask the question can skew the answers and also people often mean very different things with the same word.

Communication R hard.

By any definition of capitalism, the iphone wouldn't have happened without it, so you can't claim that ambiguity in the question would prevent hypocrisy.

"The word 'capitalism' doesn't mean what it used to," said Zach Lustbader, a senior at Harvard involved in conducting the poll, which was published Monday. For those who grew up during the Cold War, capitalism meant freedom from the Soviet Union and other totalitarian regimes. For those who grew up more recently, capitalism has meant a financial crisis from which the global economy still hasn't completely recovered.

"They're not rejecting the concept," Della Volpe said. "The way in which capitalism is practiced today, in the minds of young people — that's what they're rejecting."

Only if you also hand built all the tools for building said hut and also also did not learn how to do any of that from instructions on websites or YouTube videos.

;)

What happen to capitalists without capital who uses iphones built in communist States?

If you're going to criticize it you need to propose something better.

Marxism demonstrably isn't it.

> If you're going to criticize it you need to propose something better.

No, I don't. This is nonsense. "How should society be run" is an unfathomably complex problem, possibly the problem of our entire existence. Of course I don't have the complete answer. That does not preclude noticing the myriad problems with the current system, to suggest it does is a complete non sequitur.

> Marxism demonstrably isn't it.

Holy fallacy of the excluded middle, Batman! Where did I say I was a Marxist? I'm a confiscatory-tax-supporting democratic socialist who _agrees with you_ that Marxism was a disaster. But keep on trucking with your false dichotomy where you either love crony capitalism or you're a Marxist. It doesn't seem to be working on Millenials.

> No, I don't.

Yes, you do. Otherwise it's just whining.

Illustration:

I can't fly like Superman, even though it would be really, really cool if I could. It's a problem that makes my life less happy than it would otherwise be.

The first option I have is figure out some way to make that possible, and advocate that society (or venture capitalists, or whoever) devote the resources necessary to make it happen.

The second option, if the first ends in failure, is to conclude that it's not actually possible to do that, and just accept that fact and get on with my life.

The third option is to spend all my time complaining about how "unfair" it is.

The third option is called "whining".

A product made possible by endless amounts of money being poured into state funded R&D for missile defense.

Hmm, research and technological innovation are a bit interconnected it seems.

Obviously, the implication is we should toss out capitalism!

This sure disappeared from the front page in a hurry.

Here’s your scheduled reminder that, no matter what benevolence they claim, a news site run by a venture _capitalist_ fund may not have your best interests at heart vis-à-vis discussions about capitalism.

To be fair, it's an old article that was already discussed years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11578841 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13760557.

I don't think it's likely that Y Combinator is so scared of anti-capitalist discussion on their web forum that they would actually tank the thread to censor it.

Come now, we enjoy a good anti-capitalist critique as much as the next citizen. But the community's dislike of dupes knows no bounds.

You don't really think we're ideological control constables do you? I can't imagine a sillier thing to be.

We won't know until the posters organize to take over the means of moderation and consign you to the ash-heap of comment history!

Yes, because the voting system on HN has nothing to do with how long articles stay on the front page.

Extreme capitalism fuels social problems and millennials have to clean up the mess.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com