A majority of millennials now reject capitalism, poll shows - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14847167
The Washington Post wrote:In an apparent rejection of the basic principles of the U.S. economy, a new poll shows that most young people do not support capitalism.

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.

It isn't clear that the young people in the poll would prefer some alternative system, though. Just 33 percent said they supported socialism. The survey had a margin of error of 2.4 percentage points.

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.

All the same, that a majority of respondents in Harvard University's survey of young adults said they do not support capitalism suggests that today's youngest voters are more focused on the flaws of free markets.

"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.

A subsequent survey that included people of all ages found that somewhat older Americans also are skeptical of capitalism. Only among respondents at least 50 years old was the majority in support of capitalism.

Although the results are startling, Harvard's questions accord with other recent research on how Americans think about capitalism and socialism. In 2011, for example, the Pew Research Center found that people ages 18 to 29 were frustrated with the free-market system.

In that survey, 46 percent had positive views of capitalism, and 47 percent had negative views — a broader question than what Harvard's pollsters asked, which was whether the respondent supported the system. With regard to socialism, by contrast, 49 percent of the young people in Pew's poll had positive views, and just 43 percent had negative views.

Lustbader, 22, said the darkening mood on capitalism is evident in the way politicians talk about the economy. When Republicans — long the champions of free enterprise — use the word "capitalism" these days, it's often to complain about "crony capitalism," he said.

"You don't hear people on the right defending their economic policies using that word anymore," Lustbader added.

It is an open question whether young people's attitudes on socialism and capitalism show that they are rejecting free markets as a matter of principle or whether those views are simply an expression of broader frustrations with an economy in which household incomes have been declining for 15 years.

On specific questions about how best to organize the economy, for example, young people's views seem conflicted. Just 27 percent believe government should play a large role in regulating the economy, the Harvard poll found, and just 30 percent think the government should play a large role in reducing income inequality. Only 26 percent said government spending is an effective way to increase economic growth

Yet 48 percent agreed that "basic health insurance is a right for all people." And 47 percent agreed with the statement that "Basic necessities, such as food and shelter, are a right that the government should provide to those unable to afford them."

"Young people could be saying that there are problems with capitalism, contradictions," Frank Newport, the editor in chief of Gallup, said when asked about the new data. "I certainly don't know what’s going through their heads."

John Della Volpe, the polling director at Harvard, went on to personally interview a small group of young people about their attitudes toward capitalism to try to learn more. They told him that capitalism was unfair and left people out despite their hard work.

"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."


Lenin wrote:We are the party of the future, and the future belongs to the youth. We are a party of innovators, and it is always the youth that most eagerly follows the innovators. We are a party that is waging a self-sacrificing struggle against the old rottenness, and youth is always the first to undertake a self-sacrificing struggle.


Toward a brighter future...

Image
#14847168
I'm skeptical about this for the simple reason that I'm not sure most of those who indicate they are "socialist" know what socialism means. There are many people who think capitalist parties like the Democrats are socialist (I've also commonly heard "democratic socialist" thrown around in the same context when it's clear they mean "social democrat"), or who think welfare and other safety nets that are hallmarks of Western capitalism think those things are socialist. There's also a similarly large number of very confused people who think embracing liberal bourgeois feminism, liberal identity politics, and so on is the same thing as socialism.
#14847172
I think it would be better to ask more specific questions to get at if people actually support the fundamentals of capitalism or socialism.

Whether or not there should be profit seeking companies, should companies be owned by it's employees equally, etc.
#14847173
What people are rejecting is Communism not Capitalism. The fact most people can't see they are living in a Communist world is a whole another story.

Communists reinventing themselves as "Cultural Marxism" (see School of Frankfurt) made them win the war over Capitalism.

Most like to think Mainstream media controls your thoughts, that's nonsense, no one can control your thoughts, what mainstream media controls is WHAT you talk about. Since they manipulate every single "news" they deliver they not only control what you talk about but your view on the subject, the delivery of the message.

Since when 1% owning more than half of the fortune of a a country is a Capitalis concept? Is a Communist concept, is the base of Communism in which the Government detains all the power over the people, from food production to energy, housing, what is and what isn't shown on TV, radio and etc.

In USA 1% controls the fortune of the country. There's a switch from Government controlling it all to a few corporations controlling it all, the end result is the same though. A good example is one of the most effective Communist ways of controlling the population is controlling food production. From crops to seeds, to grains, pesticides.

Monsanto until 2016 controlled 75% of USA's "table". In 2016 in a 166 billion deal, Bayer bought Monsanto. Obama could have cancelled the merger, he didn't do that. While Rachel Maddow repeated endlessly the word Russia, USA was losing even more the control of their food, what they eat.

Now Bayer-Monsanto will control 90% of what Americans eat. Pesticides, seeds and grains. Since cattle is mostly corn fed in USA, that means they also control the meat market. Vegetables and fruits are seeds and cultivation uses pesticides, that means a single company will also control USA's vegetables and fruits market.

Tell me, a single company controlling 90% of a country's food is Communism or Capitalism?

Not even gonna mention the controlling of land, rivers and sea. Did you know that in Oregon you can get arrested for storing rain water in your OWN backyard? Yes, in parts of USA a person can't use natural resources that fall from the sky (literally) in their own backyard.

Capitalism lost the battle in the 60'
#14847175
Politiks wrote:Do you know that in Oregon you can get arrested for storing rain water in your OWN backyard?


I live in Oregon, and this isn't true. There was a man who was fined (and given probation) for altering the flow of water passing through his property, which is against Oregon law, because it interferes with the flow of water towards natural and man-made reservoirs for drinking water and other purposes (although you can obtain a permit to do that). It is in fact legal to collect rainwater on your roof or tarps and other surfaces, but blocking the flow of water on ground requires a permit: http://www.oregon.gov/bcd/Documents/brochures/3660.pdf

The guy in question wouldn't have been fined or given probation had he complied with requests to follow the law.
#14847191
Bulaba Jones wrote:I live in Oregon, and this isn't true. There was a man who was fined (and given probation) for altering the flow of water passing through his property, which is against Oregon law, because it interferes with the flow of water towards natural and man-made reservoirs for drinking water and other purposes (although you can obtain a permit to do that). It is in fact legal to collect rainwater on your roof or tarps and other surfaces, but blocking the flow of water on ground requires a permit: http://www.oregon.gov/bcd/Documents/brochures/3660.pdf

The guy in question wouldn't have been fined or given probation had he complied with requests to follow the law.


Well....



http://www.foxnews.com/weather/2016/11/ ... our-state/


Is collecting rainwater legal in your state?
AccuWeather
Published November 15, 2016
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Some U.S. states have laws restricting collection of rainwater, making it difficult for the average homeowner to set up a rainwater harvesting system.

Strict regulations and restrictions have been put in place over the last century. Currently, nine states have laws restricting the collection of rainwater, but the severity of those laws differ.

The issue of illegally harvesting rainwater went viral in 2012 when a 64-year-old man, Gary Harrington, was sentenced to 30 days in jail in Oregon.

In the western U.S., any use of rainwater is subject to legal restriction of some sort. In the 1860s, miners in Colorado experienced water shortages and developed a system to divide water based on a priority system.

This system developed into the prior appropriation system, which is basically calling dibs on water.

"Stream flow is supplied by precipitation in the form of rain and snow, so if the supply is taken away, stream flow will decrease," Jeff Deatherage, water supply chief in Colorado, said.

However, this issue has nothing to do with the environment. In fact, a number of independent studies proved that letting people collect rainwater on their property actually reduces demand from water facilities and improves conservation efforts.

ater has become big business. Water is one of the fastest growing industries in the world today. Americans spend billions of dollars each year on bottled water - not counting the billions that go to government agencies - and this resource is quickly becoming one of the most politicized in the world.

"The rain water collection bills allow for small amounts of water to be diverted/collected outside of the prior appropriation system," Deatherage said.

The amount a household can collect is a fraction of what's typically needed. The average family of four uses about 12,000 gallons of water per month.

"National Conference State Legislatures has not conducted an in-depth analysis on the effectiveness of rules or state agency actions related to rainwater harvesting," Policy Specialist with the National Conference of State Legislatures Mindy Bridges said.

An American politician who served as attorney general of Virginia, Ken Cuccinelli, won a lawsuit against the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 2013 claiming the water regulation plan is illegal and a land takeover.

"If the EPA were following the law, we would not have had a legitimate complaint. The reason we won our case was that the EPA did not follow the law," Cuccinelli said.

Cuccinelli said the opposing political party joined the lawsuit despite it being an election yea

A significant motive for the EPA to advance their rainwater agenda is to be able to vastly expand their control over local government decision making and economic development," Cuccinelli said.

Water corporations see the United States public systems as potentially profitable.

"This is wildly contrary to the founding fathers' vision for how this country was supposed to work," Cuccinelli said.

The increased interest in privatizing public water is due to political forces and public policies making public services private for profit.

State legal authority for public entities to privatize water systems has aided the privatization trend. States have enacted statutes authorizing other public entities to enter into contracts with private entities to supply water to the public.

The bottled water industry is making $22-billion-a-year bottling water from municipal water. Companies are bottling up the same water that comes out of your faucet and raising the price.

There is far less testing completed on bottled water than tap water. Bottled water isn't tested for e. coli, and it can be distributed if it doesn't meet the quality standards of tap water.

Unlike tap water, bottled water isn't required to produce quality reports or provide its source. Some public drinking water systems are not required to test for lead under the Lead and Copper Rule, which is the primary federal standard for monitoring the toxic metal.

As seen with Flint, Michigan, the city violated the Safe Drinking Water Act four times due to increases in E. coli, coliform bacteria and trihalomethanes, a class of carcinogenic disinfection byproducts.

In Pennsylvania, a water system does not need to notify customers of their test results until after the end of a six-month period, as opposed to after a sample has shown to be toxic.

If a water system tests samples in March and finds a potentially dangerous reading that exceeds the federal standard, the water company is not required to tell the homeowner until 30 days after the end of June. By that time, people have already ingested hazardous toxins.

So people in states with rainwater harvesting laws should take extra precautions by purchasing filters certified by NSF International.
#14847196
I'm not sure what the purpose of your post (and all of the bolding and highlighting) is. You were wrong when you said it is illegal to collect rainwater in Oregon in one's backyard. The guy in question was arrested, jailed, and fined for blocking water channels without a permit. It is legal to collect rainwater here in Oregon as long as you aren't doing that, and it's off an artificial surface like rooftops, tarps, etc.

Everything you bolded and highlighted was explicitly mentioned in my previous post. Thanks for restating things I already said? :?:
#14847245
The problem is where they turn to and go from there. All their options consist of capitalism-lite "alternatives" which aren't really alternatives under the surface. There's no coherent, meaningful Left in the West anymore. It will have to be built from the ground up, again.
#14847302
I've actually been wondering how "you guys" plan to do that. How do you rebuild a political force from scratch?

I struggled to get people to register to vote and it's the easiest thing in the world to do. How do you convince them to join an actual revolutionary movement?
#14847311
I support democracy not capitalism. Capitalism, essential meaning a dictatorship of the Capitalists, is a fantasy system invented by Marxists. Even Marx never used the term. Its never existed but the Roman Republic was a lot closer than our own time. In Rome you had privatised fire services.

Communists seek to replace something that is not a dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie with something that is not a dictatorship of the Proletariat. Between February and October 1917 Russian workers could vote in meaningful elections, criticise the government and organise in free trade unions and other social bodies. The Bolsheviks smashed every vestige of working class power reducing the working class to serfdom.
#14847354
mikema63 wrote:I've actually been wondering how "you guys" plan to do that. How do you rebuild a political force from scratch?

I struggled to get people to register to vote and it's the easiest thing in the world to do. How do you convince them to join an actual revolutionary movement?


At the moment it’s still the flip. Just because the youth is disgruntled with capitalism doesn’t make a revolutionary movement. So it remains, in my eyes, the unsexy work of beating the drum.

James Connolly wrote:AGITATE in the workshop, in the field, in the factory, until you arouse your brothers to hatred of the slavery of which we are all the victims. EDUCATE, that the people may no longer be deluded by illusory hopes of prosperity under any system of society of which monarchs or noblemen, capitalists or landlords form an integral part. ORGANISE, that a solid, compact and intelligent force, conscious of your historic mission as a class, you may seize the reins of political power whenever possible and, by intelligent application of the working-class ballot, clear the field of action for the revolutionary forces of the future. Let the ‘canting, fed classes’ bow the knee as they may, be you true to your own manhood, and to the cause of freedom, whose hope is in you, and, pressing unweariedly onward in pursuit of the high destiny to which the Socialist Republic invites you


This is dull, boring, tedious work. I unionized one of my jobs and the contract negotiations are brutal and dull. We’re doing them right now. But the real value isn’t as much the material as showing everyone how exploited they are. Part of the reason I get on the internet is to keep beating the drum, a steady unceasing beat. You organize, you argue, right now we’re building a movement. The organization of said movement hasn’t risen to the occasion yet. There are a thousand basement dwelling parties with three members that fancy themselves the vanguard of the revolution. Any of them will do, what is missing is the working class seeing that it is exploited.

Once it can view itself, then it needs to understand its strength.

James Connolly wrote:The rifle is, of course, a useful weapon under certain circumstances, but these circumstances are little likely to occur. This is an age of complicated machinery in war as in industry, and confronted with machine guns, and artillery which kill at seven miles distance, rifles are not likely to be of much material value in assisting in the solution of the labour question in a proletarian manner...Is the outlook, then, hopeless? No! We still have the opportunity to forge a weapon capable of winning the fight for us against political usurpation and all the military powers of earth, sea or air. That weapon is to be forged in the furnace of the struggle in the workshop, mine, factory or railroad, and its name is industrial unionism.

A working class organised on the lines on which the capitalist class has built its industrial plants today, regarding every such plant as the true unit of organisation and society as a whole as the sum total of those units, and ever patiently indoctrinated with the idea that the mission of unionism is to take hold of the industrial equipment of society, and erect itself into the real holding and administrative force of the world; such a revolutionary working class would have a power at its command greater than all the achievements of science can put in the hands of the master class. An injunction forbidding the workers of an industrial union to do a certain thing in the interest of labour would be followed by every member of the union doing that thing until jails became eagerly sought as places of honour, and the fact of having been in one would be as proudly vaunted as is now service on the field of Gettysburg; a Supreme Court decision declaring invalid a socialist victory in a certain district could be met by a general strike of all the workers in that district, supported by the organisation all over the country, and by a relentless boycott extending into the private life of all who supported the fraudulently elected officials.


Since we know what happens to Connolly, this is telling. It is not the time for the gun that he later picks up, it is for the working class to learn the power that it yields. To learn that it must support itself, even if it doesn’t do so.

The party that accurately predicts the future can then, and virtually only then, make a move to be a vanguard of the masses.

James Connolly doing so in 1911 wrote:All thoughtful men and women who observe the political situations of their countries must realise that Ireland is on the verge of one of the most momentous constitutional changes in her history. Some form of self-government seems practically certain of realisation, not because of the increased fervour of the national demand, nor yet because, as Tory bigots blatantly assert, of the position of Mr. Redmond, but from the fact that there is no economic class in Ireland today whose interests as a class are bound up with the Union.


For Connolly and Lenin, the war then drove the final point home. They both wrote that they would not live to see their revolutions, and both ended up leading them. We can hope to advert such a catastrophe this time, but we must recognize and faithfully adapt what tactics we use, why, and when.

But the point is that we are reliant upon the working class and it must be awakened first.

Rich wrote:Even Marx never used the term.


Marx wrote a three volume book called Capital. You’re probably thinking of Adam Smith, who first described capitalism; and being first predated the word. The fact that I have to explain this to you should sufficiently demonstrate to everyone your expertise in the topic. You can now be safely ignored.
#14847356
But the point is that we are reliant upon the working class and it must be awakened first.


I have to wonder how well teaching the working class how much power they have will go. So many people are willing to give up the tiny little bit of power they already have from the political system and just not vote.

I know it's not really the same thing but when you aren't even willing to pick up a pencil and claim the easy little sliver of power that is voting, much less the power you can have in local politics just by showing up to meetings and local candidates, how convincing can you really be to get people to claim the organizing power to rise up against the entire system?

I'm a bit of a cynic though so maybe they will, in the end. Probably things will have to get a lot worse to motivate them though.
#14847359
The Immortal Goon wrote:Toward a brighter future...

How many times must your "brighter future" end in tyranny, poverty, misery, stagnation, enslavement, torture and death before you will become willing to consider the possibility that it is not actually a brighter future at all? That you would offer the Soviet Union as a model to rally around speaks volumes.
#14847361
Bulaba Jones wrote:The problem is where they turn to and go from there.

Liberty, justice, and truth. All that's needed is to find a willingness to know the self-evident and indisputable facts of objective physical reality.
All their options consist of capitalism-lite "alternatives" which aren't really alternatives under the surface.

Except geoism.
There's no coherent, meaningful Left in the West anymore.

Sure there is. It just isn't socialism. You can't build a coherent and meaningful left on refusal to know self-evident and indisputable facts of objective physical reality.
It will have to be built from the ground up, again.

But if all the left can build is socialism, it will fall again.
#14847363
mikema63 wrote:I have to wonder how well teaching the working class how much power they have will go. So many people are willing to give up the tiny little bit of power they already have from the political system and just not vote.

I know it's not really the same thing but when you aren't even willing to pick up a pencil and claim the easy little sliver of power that is voting, much less the power you can have in local politics just by showing up to meetings and local candidates, how convincing can you really be to get people to claim the organizing power to rise up against the entire system?

I'm a bit of a cynic though so maybe they will, in the end. Probably things will have to get a lot worse to motivate them though.


First, I have no idea why my posts aren’t formatting correctly. If someone sees a coding error, will they be kind enough to let me know?

Second, and more importantly, we are alienated from our voting process. I am an advocate of the ballot box as I think that any form of resistance on any plane is worth using. But industrial democracy is more pure, more raw. To go into work and see and use it as being innately political, which it is, resonates. Building a union means politicking, voting, building platforms and strategy. It is, in short, to be part of the process politics alienate us from. The union, then, becomes the platform for the working class.

Truth To Power wrote:How many times must your "brighter future" end in tyranny, poverty, misery, stagnation, enslavement, torture and death before you will become willing to consider the possibility that it is not actually a brighter future at all? That you would offer the Soviet Union as a model to rally around speaks volumes.


James Connolly was from the Soviet Union?

And the same argument as always applies; that the first experiment in bourgeois government ended in a Cromwellian dictatorship; American slavery; and Jacobin terror. To expect perfection is to predict failure. We are more realistic in our view of history.
#14847373
mikema63 wrote:I think it would be better to ask more specific questions to get at if people actually support the fundamentals of capitalism or socialism.

You mean if they prefer to pretend land is capital to justify stealing land, or that capital is land to justify stealing capital?
Whether or not there should be profit seeking companies, should companies be owned by it's employees equally, etc.

So, ask anything but the actual question: what is the basis of property rights, producing or taking?
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