(02-19-2017, 01:28 PM)TeacherinExile Wrote: I don't normally read articles on The Daily Beast, but as I was grazing headlines today, this one caught my eye: "The Screwed Generation Turns Socialist"
The thrust of the article was about making distinctions among the generations with some supporting data. It even gave a nod to Strauss & Howe. The nascent embrace of socialism by Millennials has been revealed in previous surveys. What truly riveted my attention toward the end of the article was its reference to the Millennials' less-than-steadfast commitment to liberal democracy, as I have seen that tendency corroborated by another academic study recently:
...Yet even given these factors, Republicans have their work cut out for them as the generational wheel turns. Certainly, to be remotely competitive, they must abandon socially conservative ideas that offend most Millennials. The GOP’s best chance lies with making capitalism work for this group, sustaining upward mobility and expanding property ownership. If we see the creation of a vast generation of property serfs with little opportunity for advancement, America’s future is almost certain to be redder, a lot less market-oriented, and perhaps a lot more authoritarian than previous generations have ever contemplated.
For those who gave The Fourth Turning a close reading, Strauss & Howe vaguely alluded to just such a prospect. And, of course, the writer here means "redder" not as in red state, but as in cue the music and strike up "The Internationale."
Read further at this link: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/20...alist.html
Around the turn of the century (19th to 20th) the leading capitalists like Rockefeller, Ford, and Edison decided that if the capitalism whence they prospered were to survive, they would need to ensure that the proletariat would need a stake in the system. It is not likely that either read any Karl Marx, but they certainly knew of him second-hand. So turn the proletariat into consumers buying the wares of capitalists, and make Marxist socialism irrelevant. So it has been through the entertainment moguls, capitalists but not largely industrial capitalists. So it was with developers of middle-class housing. So it was with the creators of electronic devices like televisions and personal computers. At any point since 1917, capitalists were wise enough to recognize that the sullen and angry proletariat of Marxist literature was to either be co-opted with a car, nice clothes, furniture, appliances, and a comfortable flat with running water and inside plumbing (the liberal solution) or to smash the dreams of an angry and sullen proletariat with a fearsome order of terror and brutality, as with fascism or Apartheid. Fascism and Apartheid allowed existing elites (often agrarian elites who still had traces of a feudal heritage) more profits for the time... before that got destroyed in war and revolution.
The American Right wants its "Red" America as a Christian (Pence) and Corporate (Trump) State... one which dispenses with the consumerism of modern capitalism and reverts to the early capitalism that Marx saw. That's the only capitalism that Marx (or Dickens in his time, or Lenin in his time and place). A hundred years ago, Russia was culturally sophisticated, technologically average, and socially backward by world standards. Does that sound familiar?
A Socialist revolution or takeover is typically a Crisis event, whether early (Hungary in 1919) or late (Hungary in 1947).
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
