Sign up with Google
etienne_marais
Honorary Master
(part 1)
Younger generations are growing increasingly sceptical of capitalism and enamoured with socialism. Are they blaming the right people, though?
The view that Western capitalism isn’t working for the majority, who are getting poorer as the rich get richer, is so commonly believed that for most people, it goes without saying.
This has consequences around the world, but also in South African discussions about the kind of political economy we should like to see in South Africa, once we’ve thrown off the shackles of the ANC.
I’m from Generation X. I grew up during the Cold War. I remember Mutually Assured Destruction. I read reports about the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) that featured bread queues, ten-year waiting lists for awful little Trabant or Lada cars, and the yearning for freedom represented by Western pop music and fashion. I saw photographs of the polluted industrial wastelands of Eastern Europe when the Iron Curtain fell. I remember Lech Wałęsa and the Solidarity trade union of Poland, which throughout my teenage years fought against authoritarian socialism and communist occupation. I remember the gaunt faces and drab clothes of long-suffering East-Germans as they streamed into West Berlin in 1989.
I dabbled briefly with socialist thought as a student (although I didn’t inhale), but I soon realised that if socialism wasn’t damned because of its record of abject failure, famine and death, it was damned because it didn’t make any sense. (Last year, I wrote an article about socialism as explained by socialists themselves to illustrate just how ludicrous an idea it is.)
Generations X, Y and Z
The oldest members of Generation Y (millennials) were eight when the Berlin Wall fell, and ten when the USSR was dissolved in 1991. For Generation Z (zoomers) and Generation Alpha, the fall of communism and the great failures of socialism are ancient history.
To them, socialism is an ideology that promises fairness and equality and humanity. What’s not to like?
Their willingness to believe these promises isn’t tainted by their own experiences of 20th century socialism, or by the images beamed from failed socialist experiments.
The few socialist experiments that still continue – like North Korea, the Republic of Congo, Venezuela, Cuba, Mozambique or Angola – are outliers in faraway places, about which they know little, which they ignore, or which they glibly explain away.
By contrast, they look at the problems they experience, and associate it with the hegemony of Western-style liberal capitalist democracies.
Has capitalism failed younger generations?
Younger generations are growing increasingly sceptical of capitalism and enamoured with socialism. Are they blaming the right people, though?
The view that Western capitalism isn’t working for the majority, who are getting poorer as the rich get richer, is so commonly believed that for most people, it goes without saying.
This has consequences around the world, but also in South African discussions about the kind of political economy we should like to see in South Africa, once we’ve thrown off the shackles of the ANC.
I’m from Generation X. I grew up during the Cold War. I remember Mutually Assured Destruction. I read reports about the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) that featured bread queues, ten-year waiting lists for awful little Trabant or Lada cars, and the yearning for freedom represented by Western pop music and fashion. I saw photographs of the polluted industrial wastelands of Eastern Europe when the Iron Curtain fell. I remember Lech Wałęsa and the Solidarity trade union of Poland, which throughout my teenage years fought against authoritarian socialism and communist occupation. I remember the gaunt faces and drab clothes of long-suffering East-Germans as they streamed into West Berlin in 1989.
I dabbled briefly with socialist thought as a student (although I didn’t inhale), but I soon realised that if socialism wasn’t damned because of its record of abject failure, famine and death, it was damned because it didn’t make any sense. (Last year, I wrote an article about socialism as explained by socialists themselves to illustrate just how ludicrous an idea it is.)
Generations X, Y and Z
The oldest members of Generation Y (millennials) were eight when the Berlin Wall fell, and ten when the USSR was dissolved in 1991. For Generation Z (zoomers) and Generation Alpha, the fall of communism and the great failures of socialism are ancient history.
To them, socialism is an ideology that promises fairness and equality and humanity. What’s not to like?
Their willingness to believe these promises isn’t tainted by their own experiences of 20th century socialism, or by the images beamed from failed socialist experiments.
The few socialist experiments that still continue – like North Korea, the Republic of Congo, Venezuela, Cuba, Mozambique or Angola – are outliers in faraway places, about which they know little, which they ignore, or which they glibly explain away.
By contrast, they look at the problems they experience, and associate it with the hegemony of Western-style liberal capitalist democracies.
