Millennials Love Capitalism—They Just Don't Know It

It’s a balmy evening in late July, and I’m in the audience for what I thought was a “Breathing Economic Democracy Teach-In” at the Museum of Capitalism. But our host, Ricardo S. Nuñez of the Sustainable Economies Law Center, is just setting the tone by reminding us all of our status as oppressors. Nuñez, an energetic young man with a hipster mustache, quickly pivots to the theme for the evening: “Imagining alternatives to existing capitalist society.” He uses the word “awesome” a lot.

I had already received a thorough education in oppression by wandering the museum, a pop-up installation that occupied 13,000 square feet on the second floor of a warehouse-like space on Jack London Square for three months this summer. There were views of a marina bristling with sailboats on one side and a busy set of train tracks on the other.

The museum describes its mission as “establishing justice for the victims of capitalism and preventing its resurgence.” It wants to “bring to light the vast number of individuals and communities around the globe who resisted capitalism and helped to develop alternatives to it, serving as an inspiration to future generations.” Future generations will hopefully not judge the institution too harshly for partnering with those very same capitalists; the museum is part of a business consortium called the Jack London Improvement District. One of the Museum of Capitalism’s founders, Timothy Furstnau, evidently thinks working with capitalist entities is itself a bold, ironic bit of performance art. In June, he told CityLab, “Oakland presents itself right now as a convenient, ready-made exhibit on a certain kind of accelerated development and moment in capitalism.”

At the teach-in, although there is an admirable amount of racial, ethnic, and gender diversity among the assembled group of nearly 50 people, there is a surprising amount of homogeneity in age and appearance. The men wear tastefully distressed skinny jeans, fitted shirts, and funky glasses. The women are dressed pretty much like the men, except for one who arrives wearing a vintage-looking dress and toting a pair of old-fashioned roller skates. They are almost all in their 20s and early 30s. I’m likely the only person in the room without a tattoo. The main other candidate for this prize is a rumpled-looking man sitting in the corner who makes the mistake of trying to ask a follow-up question during the Q&A and is immediately silenced by our facilitator: “Let’s only hear from people who haven’t spoken.”

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FREE STUFF

Capitalism has long been a bugbear of the young, and flirtations with socialism and communism are nothing new. Before World War I, radicals like John Reed, Max Eastman, and Randolph Bourne gathered in Greenwich Village and promoted alternatives to capitalism in such publications as the Masses. The counterculture of the 1960s took it as a given that capitalism was the enemy. But eventually, most anticapitalists come to terms with the free market. It is part of middle age. Max Eastman ended up with a well-paying gig at Reader’s Digest. More recently, ’60s counterculture enthusiasts John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods, and Steve Jobs, of Apple, became hippie capitalists (and very rich).

Will Millennials (people born between 1980 and 1994) and their successors—the so-called iGen (1995 to 2012)—follow suit? Their skepticism of the free market seems more widespread than in previous generations. In 2016, Harvard University surveyed people between the ages of 18 and 29 and found that more than half (51 percent) did not support capitalism. They aren’t averse to socialism, either. A 2015 Reason-Rupe poll found that 58 percent approved of socialism—up from a 2011 Pew poll that found 49 percent of young Americans had a positive view of it. The support for septuagenarian socialist Bernie Sanders among the young during the 2016 presidential election surprised many people over the age of 40, but as one young Sandernista wrote in Time: “When a disheveled old white dude comes along and says our society is rigged for the rich, perpetual warfare is not the answer, and people of color should not be slaughtered by the police—and then asks for our help and a few dollars to bring about a revolution—you’re damn right we’re going to stand with him.”

It’s not clear, however, that this generation knows what socialism actually is. Another Reason-Rupe survey noted a far lower level of support for state control of the economy than for socialism among the young (only 32 percent said a “government-managed economy” was a good thing), even though such control is one of the pillars of a socialist system.

Alec Dent, a 20-year-old junior at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, agrees. “I don’t think my fellow young people really understand what socialism is. To most of us it’s just an abstract concept, identified more with the ‘lovable crazy uncle’ image of Bernie Sanders than the tyranny of Stalin.” He understands its appeal to his peers, however. “Socialism promises all these amazing things, like free education, free health care, and a living wage that Sanders’s fans mistakenly believe could just be tacked onto American society, with everything else remaining exactly the same,” he says. As comedian Bill Maher observed on HBO’s Real Time, when kids today think of socialism, they don’t think of Soviet-era repression but “of naked Danish people on a month-long paid vacation.”

Millennials appear just as stymied by capitalism. Many of the younger folks I spoke to noted that they had been taught little about our political and economic system in either high school or college. Dent says his high school teachers never mentioned capitalism, but they did mention socialism. “It was presented as just another political system, an acceptable alternative to democracy,” he recalls.

Pop culture is happily tapping into this youthful anxiety: The makers of global cuteness juggernaut Hello Kitty recently introduced a new character, a female red panda with anger management issues named Aggretsuko, who, the New York Times reported, explores “the fallout of global capitalism.” According to the Times, “In her narratives, she is the commodity, and the joy of the consumer has given way to the anxieties of the consumed.” Another new character, Gudetama, a “gender-ambiguous egg yolk,” also suffers capitalist angst; it mirrors “the people in modern society who despair amid economic hard times,” according to the company.

So what do iGenners think capitalism should be? Something meaningful, judging by the labels they embrace to qualify the term. Something “sustainable” and “mindful” and “conscious” and “cooperative.” If, as The Communist Manifesto argued, “the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production,” a reasonable percentage of today’s young people evidently cannot exist without rebranding capitalism.

In some ways it is reassuring to see capitalism remain a convenient foil for a new generation and to listen, as I did at the teach-in, to a Millennial labor activist urge us to imagine “a world where we don’t have to sell our labor because so much is provided for us” and where anticapitalist activists are the one group likely to achieve full employment because everyone, everywhere is constantly being “exploited.” It is reassuring because their actions don’t yet follow their words.

Before the teach-in I overheard two young women discussing the challenges of finding “work in the social justice community” and the low pay before exchanging tips about job listings and interview strategies. A large majority of the audience was checking their smartphones throughout the teach-in, suggesting that while they might ostentatiously reject capitalism, they have no intention of giving up the technology that represents its most accelerated and brutally efficient form. And for all of their rousing anticapitalist sentiments, their generational responses have thus far been more reactionary than revolutionary—Occupy Wall Street, campus sit-ins, hashtag activism. They clearly aren’t pleased with capitalism, and they want something to ease the burden of their anxiety—and of their student loans. But what they really seem worried about is capitalism’s future, not its wholesale elimination.

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AFTER CAPITALISM

One of the conceits of the Museum of Capitalism’s inaugural exhibition is that you are arriving from a point in the near future, after capitalism’s end, to view the artifacts of a terrible era. A tone of smug knowingness pervades the space. Visitors are encouraged to see law enforcement, for example, as a scourge. The “Police Mindfulness Meditation Chamber” has you sit in near-darkness listening to a hypnotic loop of chants and music to soothe feelings of aggression, which the police are assumed to indulge. “Artist Packard Jennings cites being personally beaten by riot police as part of an Occupy Oakland march in 2012 as a key moment in the conception of this exhibit,” the wall text reads. A nearby exhibit features the paper targets with an outline of a human torso that are used for target practice, although in this case, instead of bullet holes, they are stenciled with phrases like “the cops” and “there’s no getting away with it.” Other law-enforcement-themed exhibits equate prison labor with plantation slavery and feature police batons that have been “transformed into flutes.”

There appears to be little thought given to the overall layout of the Museum of Capitalism; installations dot the large open space but there is no clear narrative structure and patrons wander aimlessly. There are some contradictory notes as well, such as the transparent acrylic cube marked as a donation box, complete with a securely fastened Master padlock to prevent theft. I struggle to tell if this is, like Duchamp’s urinal, an ironic nod towards the commodification of art or if it is a real donations bin.

Hypocrisy looms in the gift shop, which sells bat guano fertilizer for a more sustainable gardening experience, Museum of Capitalism tote bags, and Karl Marx finger puppets. Nearby is a library of capitalist-themed books, including Captured: People in Prison Drawing People Who Should Be, which features sketches and paintings of people such as Rex Tillerson, Jamie Dimon, and the CEOs of Nestlé, BP, and McDonald’s drawn by convicted murderers and other felons.

Then there are the restrooms. A museum staffer points me to them, earnestly apologizing for their “gendered nature.” Therein you can help yourself to a 30-page pamphlet on the “Capitalist Bathroom Experience” in which public sanitation, one of the triumphs of modern engineering and public health, is yet another capitalist conspiracy against the little guy. Did you know that public sewer systems “increased the quality of life for the upper classes by removing bad smells and allowing them to make pleasurable boating excursions”? Or that “toilets and sewers made people healthy enough to produce profits”? And that “under capitalism defecation and urination were also sites of class struggle”?

Such clever posturing about economic revolution is much in evidence in the anticapitalist magazines and books flooding the market, many of which spend as much time policing their fellow lefties as they do debating their capitalist enemies. The Jacobin (endorsed by Chris Hayes and Noam Chomsky!) describes itself as “a leading voice of the American left.” Yet a recent issue savaged California senator Kamala Harris and attacked Al Gore for “Learjet liberalism”—Democrats one would think they would consider fellow-travelers or at least likely allies.

There’s a particular antipathy for “neoliberal warmonger” Thomas Friedman in the Jacobin. The review of his Thank You For Being Late noted that in its nearly 800 pages, “there is approximately one glimmer of hope: the point at which Friedman remarks that this is ‘maybe my last book.’ ” A sampling of earlier pieces on Friedman finds the Jacobin equally unsparing: “In his latest column, Thomas Friedman reaches new heights of belligerence—and idiocy” and “Friedman has done a superb job of delegitimizing himself as a journalist by peddling an array of schizophrenic postulates against a solid backdrop of warmongering apologetics on behalf of empire and capital.”

Recently, the magazine tweeted, “In the US and around the world today, political violence is the hallmark of the Right, not the Left,” and a competing lefty magazine, the Jacobist, scoldingly tweeted back, “Do you guys know what a ‘Jacobin’ is?” Old wounds fester on the left. A recent article in the Nation about the resurgence of the Democratic Socialists of America took the time to complain, “The Socialist Party faded as a national force after Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal stole many of its ideas and much of its thunder.” Publications such as n+1 and the New Inquiry have found success in attacking capitalism to bring a younger audience into the socialist fold.

For all of this new and energetic organizing and activism and coming-togetherness, however, there exists a tension between those on the left who want to save capitalism and those who want to destroy it. Clinton Labor secretary Robert Reich is one of the former, arguing in his book Saving Capitalism (2015) that income inequality has grown too great and large corporations too powerful while necessary “centers of countervailing power” (unions, political parties) have deteriorated. His proposed solution is “an activist government that raises taxes on the wealthy, invests the proceeds in excellent schools and other means people need to get ahead, and redistributes to the needy.” Sound familiar? Reich insists this isn’t socialism but rather “capitalism for the many, not the few.”

His message is not likely to resonate with denizens of the new youth anticapitalist movement; I doubt they will be wearing T-shirts with “End Upward Pre-Distributions Now!” emblazoned on them any time soon. As readers, they seem to prefer the gimlet eye of the Jacobin, which revels in mocking capitalism’s extremes. In an article, “Laughing at Rich Kids,” that celebrated the cancellation of the disastrously organized Fyre music festival, Alexander Billet drew a red line between himself and his wealthier peers, decrying “the cultural cachet of the young and obscenely affluent,” with “their Instagram feeds . . . full of garish flaunting, of smug and petulant revelry in having what we don’t.” He suggested that nothing should “stop any of us from pointing and laughing. Heartily.”

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CATASTROPHE IS OPPORTUNITY

This triumphalist sensibility is evident throughout the Museum of Capitalism. Consider the “Bankrupt Banks” exhibit, which features large reproductions of the logos of failed financial institutions, from Merrill Lynch to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, hung from the rafters of the museum. “Originally designed to convey strength, authority, and confidence,” the description notes, “these now defunct symbols become portraits of failed power structures.” Similarly, “Abandoned Signs” features images of vacant storefronts, most of them once small shops on Main Streets, with the note, “There is a gaping disparity between the daily rhetoric of a capitalist society, and an honest assessment of the waste, repetition, redundancy, and inefficiencies of so much activity done in the name of business, productivity, and entrepreneurial freedom.”

It’s strange to see such gloating over business failure when, at the teach-in, I was taught to embrace independent businesses as a model of sustainable capitalism and opportunity. And yet, for many of the anticapitalist left’s noisiest intellectuals, catastrophe is opportunity, because collapse and disorder highlight the need for capitalism’s total destruction. Naomi Klein, something of an anticapitalist prophetess, has urged young radicals to embrace the findings of climate science as a way to speed the destruction of capitalism. Writing in the New Statesman in 2013, she argued that it “makes the ditching of that cruel system [capitalist growth] in favour of something new (and perhaps, with lots of work, better) no longer a matter of mere ideological preference but rather one of species-wide existential necessity.”

On its website, the Sustainable Economic Law Center (cosponsor of the anticapitalism teach-in) illustrates its mission with an animated short film featuring “Lady Justice” pointing out how “Big Business” (portrayed as a block of large ugly buildings) targets “nice people in nice communities” and has “gone and gotten every one of them hooked on energy, food, water, goods, money, and jobs that come from outside of their communities.” The narrator says, almost gleefully, “This is not going to be pretty.” The animated short goes on to predict a near future where everything is “spiraling all out of control.” A welcome development: The chaos will encourage “communities” (depicted as little stick-figure people holding plants) to create food and housing co-ops and community farms.

During the teach-in at the museum, I heard a lot of pro-community buzzwords like “sharing,” “resilience,” and “capacity-building.” When pressed for specifics about what such pleasant-sounding forms of capitalism would look like, however, the best definition one of the panelists could come up with was “openness, love, and compassion.” Another responded by questioning the questioner: “What is it like to be free? What is it like to live in a world without prisons?” Rather than coming to a better understanding of “conscious capitalism,” as the teach-in went on, I started to feel like I was trapped in a socialist version of a Successories motivational-merchandise store.

Among the panelists at the teach-in, only the representative from the Mandela Foods Cooperative in Oakland acknowledged some of the problems of creating a noncapitalist, “post-wage-slave economy,” including cultivating “accountability when there’s no boss.” She also acknowledged that prices for food at the co-op were higher than in a regular grocery store. Because organic!

But the left is making inroads among younger people by speaking directly to their desire for greater justice in the economy. As Jean M. Twenge notes in her book iGen, numerous surveys show that the Millennial generation is interested in jobs that bring meaning to their lives, not just success. Socialism might not be good economic theory, but as history has shown, it is good at convincing the young of the moral necessity of its cause.

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JACK LONDON’S IRON HEEL

Jack London Square has a plaque commemorating “Oakland’s famed native son,” the author of books such as The Call of the Wild and Sea Wolf. It also notes, “For a time he was politically involved in making socialist speeches.”

London did more than make speeches; he was a committed radical, known as the “Boy Socialist of Oakland,” and toured the country denouncing capitalism and urging labor strikes. He twice ran for mayor of Oakland on a socialist platform. His 1908 dystopian novel, The Iron Heel, pitted a courageous socialist movement against an evil capitalist power structure, “the vague and terrible loom of the Oligarchy,” which eventually morphs into a crypto-fascist terror organization called the Iron Heel. Oakland is today booming thanks to the region’s high-tech economy, and I wonder what London, who once described capitalism as a “monstrous beast,” would think about the growing commodification of the city. He might have appreciated the paradox. Not far from the plaque that commemorates the novelist as a proletarian hero, you can tour the USS Potomac, which was Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s yacht (dubbed “the floating White House”) and which now hosts sunset cruises and wine and cheese tastings. Or you can stop by Forge and “enjoy fantastic views of the Oakland Estuary with your artisanal, wood-fired pizzas served in an industrial space with rustic accents.”

A significant portion of today’s young people seems to want capitalism itself to be a more artisanal experience, one that is focused on fairness and with a sense of purpose. But what experiences will drive this sense of purpose? Unlike Jack London, who worked as a war correspondent, sailor, Alaskan gold miner, salmon fisher, and longshoreman, today’s Millennials are less likely than members of previous generations to have even had a summer job. No wonder that when he spoke at Harvard’s commencement this spring, the world’s wealthiest Millennial, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, called for measuring meaning rather than GDP and said, “We should explore ideas like universal basic income to make sure everyone has a cushion to try new things.”

Cushions sound a lot more pleasant than risk-taking, which is why such messages hold appeal for the younger generation. But for an economy to thrive, it needs people who are not only willing to work hard and plan for their futures, but also willing to hazard failure. Millennials struggle with risk, so much so that many colleges and universities are creating programs to teach “failure-deprived” students how to handle setbacks. It’s not surprising why this is the case: A generation raised under Panopticon-like levels of parental surveillance, who always got a trophy or ribbon for showing up, and whose educational experience, thanks to grade inflation, rarely included anything less than a B, can be forgiven for craving safety over swashbuckling business ventures. The new anticapitalist call for pursuing “well-being” rather than economic growth or GDP is both a far cry from the muscular socialism of Jack London and a departure from the more swaggering entrepreneurialism of older generations. It speaks to the Millennial’s fear of failure.

Part of the reason for the surge of fascination with socialism is that younger people haven’t experienced any of its negative side effects. As Alec Dent says of his peers, “They don’t recognize that much of what they enjoy in life is a result of capitalism and would disappear if socialism were to be implemented. They haven’t seen socialism’s failures firsthand.” When the polling director at Harvard asked follow-up questions of the young people who expressed unfavorable views of capitalism, many of them told him that their main problem with capitalism was that it was “unfair.” Defending capitalism against this sensibility is a difficult but necessary challenge; merely repeating the same free market bromides while invoking the name of Ronald Reagan isn’t enough to meet it.

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REBOOTING CAPITALISM

One possible guide through this thicket hails from the home of Adam Smith and free market economics. Ruth Davidson is a Scottish Conservative politician and a proponent of capitalism. In a July article on the website Unherd.com, she diagnosed the ills that the young in particular are suffering in the global economy, including the rising costs of education and the challenge of finding affordable housing and reliable employment. Supporters of the free market, she went on, have to face some difficult moral and political questions. “Speaking as a Scot, and one that grew up just a few miles from Adam Smith’s birthplace in Fife, it’s worth returning to this particular ‘father,’ ” she wrote. “Because Adam Smith wasn’t just an economist, he was also a moral philosopher. And while his An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations might have dissected the nature of self-interest in trade as led by the invisible hand, he was also the author of a Theory of Moral Sentiments. He argued that far from being purely self-interested, we care about the well-being of others, for no reason beyond the simple pleasure we take from their evident happiness.”

What this means, Davidson argues, is recognizing that for an increasing number of young people in Europe and the United States, “It is not inequality that bites deepest, but injustice.” She urges conservatives and free-marketers to acknowledge this. Her suggestions include improving the physical and digital infrastructure outside cities, upgrading education and training services to better reflect the increasingly automated economy, and moving to policies that “help to build” housing rather than “help to buy” it. “Capitalism has lifted billions out of poverty and made the world a better, safer, healthier, more comfortable place,” she wrote. “It’s not working for everyone, however, and some people are enriching themselves through the kind of restrictive practices that Adam Smith warned us about two centuries ago. Nationally and internationally, capitalism needs a reboot. Time to press Ctrl+Alt+Del.”

And it is not just young people in the U.K. who are skeptical about capitalism. A September report from the Legatum Institute found that a majority of Britons holds “an unfavourable view of ‘capitalism’ as a concept, viewing it as ‘greedy,’ ‘selfish’ and ‘corrupt.’ ” A majority hold a more favorable view of socialism than capitalism. Unlike in the United States, though, conservatives here are at least attempting to defend capitalism and the free market. It is a matter of political survival.

Prime Minister Theresa May’s gaffe-filled keynote address at the recent Conservative party conference in Manchester dominated the news, but Tory leaders throughout engaged the issue of young people’s skepticism of the free market. Speaking on October 2, Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, noted the challenge. “A new generation is being tempted down a dangerous path,” he said. “We have to explain why and how the market economy works and the role of competition as the consumer’s friend.” He was quick to acknowledge the “frustration of the young” and promised to open up “derelict land” for new housing and to increase funding for loan programs to help the young who see a real-estate market “rigged in favor of those already way up the ladder and against those trying to get on the bottom rung.” The Tories recognize that they are in competition with politicians on the left who promote a vision of socialism as an endless buffet of free services with no economic repercussions.

The irony, UNC’s Alec Dent tells me, is “The vast majority of Millennials support capitalism, but don’t realize it.” He cites their abiding love affair with smartphones and laptop computers, objects that capitalist enterprises have created and without which, he says, “Millennials would be truly lost.” Dent thinks that his peers’ desire to reconcile Bernie-style “benevolent socialism” with free-market capitalism is a “misguided attempt to get the best of both worlds.”

His sister Julia, 24, agrees. When she was in college, she spent a semester living in Denmark and saw benevolent socialism firsthand. College students were demonstrating against reductions to their stipends, and their teachers were demonstrating over changes in their hours. “The teachers were so angry that they protested for weeks,” she tells me, “which led to schools being shut down.” It “showed me the cracks forming in the socialist system,” she says, as did the observations of her host mother, who was one of the angry teachers but who also recognized “the effects of democratic socialism that people tend to overlook, like their extremely high tax rates or abuse of the health care system.” Julia acknowledges the Danish system’s achievements—“the lack of homelessness is something the United States should strive towards”—but understands that “the negatives are slowly starting to outweigh the positives, and it looks like the infrastructure of socialism may not be as strong as Millennials perceive it to be.”

Survey data show that iGenners, contrasting with Millennials, are less concerned with the pursuit of “meaning” than they are the practical pursuit of money, and they have a more pragmatic approach to the workplace and their career options. But they are even more risk-averse than Millennials, a further challenge for the future of entrepreneurialism.

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THE BATTLE OF IDEAS

Those who support free enterprise must acknowledge that a renewed battle of ideas is taking place between capitalism and socialism and that the socialist camp is winning the early skirmishes. As Matthew Elliott of the Legatum Institute notes, “It is clear that those of us who believe passionately in free enterprise need to up our game.”

The founders of the Museum of Capitalism cited an observation from the political theorist Fredric Jameson as their inspiration: “It has become easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” “Making capitalism a ‘museum piece’ is partly an effort to help us do just that,” one of them said in an interview. But the observation simply is not true anymore. Many people on the left are now imagining the end of capitalism—or at least a pretty thorough evisceration of its core principles. And their message is finding receptive young ears. Capitalism has become a story about inequality for younger Americans, not one of opportunity. This is why the Museum of Capitalism could cite as its inspiration the musings of a tenured Marxist at Duke University rather than those of a businessman.

Christine Rosen is a senior editor of the New Atlantis and a columnist for Commentary magazine.