As multiple posters have already said, what we have in modern American society is a problem with kids going to college, being essentially indoctrinated in left-wing philosophy by their professors, getting a degree, and then getting out into the workforce only to find out that they’re in the hole for tens of thousands in college debt, and they can barely find a job making $36k to start. Half of their wage is going into their housing, and most of the other half is going into food, bills, Netflix, whatever. These kids are getting degrees in Communications, Business Administration, Law, and so on, and they’re finding that there aren’t any jobs available for these easy degrees that don’t involve difficult math or using your brain too hard (watch them screech when you suggest that the liberal arts are of limited practical value in a society where technical management is usurping social management).
All of the decent-paying factory jobs have been outsourced. A lot of the trades involve navigating a complex maze of credentialing and closed union shops and whatnot, and in the end, you’re stuck in a sausage party with a bunch of abrasive macho men that would make most of these college kids wilt with just one look, doing jobs that involve power tools, loud noise, and grease under your fingernails every single day. What they imagined would happen, of course, was that they’d land a cozy office job making $60k, maybe $80k a year straight out of college and be able to pay off their tuition fees in a reasonable timeframe. Instead, they usually end up flipping burgers or serving espresso for the people who do those jobs.
This leads to a whole lot of resentment, and most of that resentment isn’t even exactly of the unreasonable sort. They paid for a product; their education and their degree. They expected to receive a return on their investment, and yet, they did not. Right out of the starting gate, they are swindled out of a substantial sum of money and forced into debt servitude by over-education and under-employment. This is why many millennials still live with their parents and haven’t really started families of their own. That, in turn, leads to all kinds of emotional troubles.
But the attraction of communism runs deeper than mere practical concerns of this nature. A lot of people are increasingly skeptical of the general manner in which capitalist society is structured. Consider, for a moment, the average office job. A typical office worker spends a considerable amount of time, every workday, commuting and getting ready for work. So much of their time is occupied, they turn to fast food and other services to fulfill tasks that they don’t have enough free time to do on their own. When they get to their cubicle, about 3 hours of the time spent behind their computer, on average, is actual work. The other 5 hours is spent merely passing the time. Ritualized self-imprisonment for a wage. Not to mention, most of what they do could easily be done by telecommuting instead, given how ubiquitous internet access is in most first-world nations, so technically, their commute and all the services between them and their workplace are unnecessary frivolities.
David Graeber, who recently passed away, was an anthropologist and one of the leading figures in the Occupy Wall Street movement. He wrote a book called
Bullshit Jobs where he described people relating anecdotes to him about how useless their jobs were.
His argument was that these jobs take an emotional toll on the people who perform them, when those people realize that what they do for a living is essentially useless and their job does not need to exist. He also argued that this form of compulsory employment is actually a hallmark of socialist societies; pointless and Sisyphean tasks akin to digging a ditch and filling it in over and over again, just like in a gulag.
Another factor is the increasing influence of the FIRE industry on society’s affairs; Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate, in other words. Finance and insurance, in particular, are not actually real goods of any physical substance or use-value, but are “virtual” goods represented by the wholly imaginary value of money and debt. The larger the share of the market occupied by finance (i.e. paper-shuffling and making money with money), the less of it is occupied by other things (i.e. real industries that produce real goods that people can use and enjoy), however, this is relative. In most instances, Finance serves to increase growth and liquidity of the overall market, insurance acts as a hedge against risk, and real estate offers investors the opportunity to invest in, and reap the rewards from, rents on properties.
When people have no assets and they rely entirely on wages to make their money, they grow resentful towards people who have assets, of course. This is because, as Thomas Piketty put it, R > G. The return on capital investment is inevitably higher than the growth of wages. What this means is that capitalist societies are inevitably unequal, in the sense that those with no assets are at a strict disadvantage compared to those who have them. A lot of people don’t understand how finance works. A lot of these people have never invested in their lives, and recoil in horror at the idea of owning stock. I’ve owned stock. It’s not a big deal. When these college kids hear that Jeff Bezos is worth $131 billion dollars, they imagine a literal Scrooge McDuck swimming pool of money, filled with that exact sum. Many of them don’t understand that his wealth is locked up in his assets, and if he were to sell his Amazon stock, the value of the company would shit itself and he’d be taxed on the proceeds, so basically, he has every incentive to keep holding stock in his own company. The more clever communists note that Jeffy B. can basically use his stock as collateral in a very low-interest loan of any size, so he could technically buy, oh, I dunno, a private submarine and an underground sub pen, or whatever the hell he wanted.
Another thing is that people with a high net worth do indeed have an outsized level of influence on politics, through their many charitable organizations, think tanks, and lobbying groups. In other words, they can use their financial power as a lever to nudge society in the direction they wish, usually in the direction that nets them more profit and minimizes the wages and labor protections of their employees.
Furthermore, it is arguable that a lot of what capitalism promotes is essentially wasteful consumerism. Past a certain point, there is such a thing as uneconomic growth. Capitalism is stuck in a cycle of endless growth. Under capitalism, economic contraction of any kind, even the kind required to lessen the burden on the environment, is a failure mode. There is such a large web of debts and obligations and contracts under capitalism, all it takes to bring the whole thing to a screeching halt is a large number of people suddenly defaulting on a bunch of loans. Growth is necessary, because it feeds back into the cycle of parasitical usury that underpins much of our financial system. If someone says they want to save the environment with an alternative energy source or material, usually, what they really want is to sell you a fancy new product.
Our society also happens to discard tons and tons of its wealth in the trash. Planned obsolescence means that people buy things that were designed to expire, become unfashionable, or break after a short while, guaranteeing their re-purchase and a constant stream of revenue. Unfortunately, this means everyone has to work like dogs to keep re-creating the wealth that was lost, for if they were to hoard that wealth instead and stop buying and trading things, the resultant illiquidity would destroy the markets. As a rule, capitalism discourages frugality and encourages extravagant spending, hence consumerism. Of course, many of these young millennials are fooled into becoming quite consumerist themselves, mainly to fill the void left by their unfulfilling and pointless jobs; in this schema, luxuries like streaming subscription services are merely there to make the moral and spiritual bankruptcy of their existences more tolerable.
So, in a sense, there are a number of reasonable anti-capitalist arguments out there that lure people into communism’s arms. Unfortunately, none of these solve the essential problem of socialism; it transfers the unearned influence and power of an unaccountable and shady army of businessmen to an equally unaccountable and shady political party, one who has no real competitors and may torment the citizenry at their leisure.
At least businessmen are occasionally divided against one another, and make no mistake, the only guarantor of liberty for the plebeian masses in a functioning society is an upper class divided against itself. That’s why we have anti-trust laws. That’s why we have government as a check against corporate power. Unfortunately, our government doesn’t always hold up its end of the bargain; once the rich get rich enough, they simply pay government to let them get away with murder.
If the minimum wage in the US had kept up with our increase in productivity, it would be $24 an hour right now. If the minimum wage was actually $24 an hour, companies would be employing half as many people to try and balance their books, and any wage surplus would soon be eaten up by the increased price of goods and the increased cost of living, as the ones selling those goods would detect that their customers have the ability to pay more.
Most millennials who are attracted to communism don’t actually want to work like a dog, like people did in old Soviet Russia. They envision a society with more or less the same amount of wealth, but less laboring overall and more time for leisure (a.k.a. ”please gimme Patreonbux for my shitty art”), either due to automation or the elimination of unnecessary, environmentally destructive, and emotionally taxing work. The goal isn’t to “have free things”. The goal is to get rid of work, which is the one thing standing between them and a permanent childhood.
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