Millennials are our only hope
If we’re to believe the corporate media, millennials are the most spoiled and entitled generation to have ever graced this planet. They can’t take their eyes off their phones, they don’t know the definition of hard work, and they’re always whining about how society’s given them the shaft. Oh, and we shouldn’t forget how their low voting rates are equated with an ignorance of politics.
Is this characterization accurate, or the biased assessment of boomers and Gen Xers who don’t want to recognize how they’ve failed the generation that came after them? I think you can tell my answer. This negative stereotype of millennials is the fiction of the generations that ignored climate change, benefitted from countless social programmes that have been significantly rolled back (if not outright eliminated), and whose greed brought on the recession of 2008–2009. Their actions could lead millennials to become the ever first generation to be worse off than their parents. That’s quite an indictment, though one that’s happily forgotten for an ignorant millennial stereotype.
Millennials are told that to get anywhere in life they need a degree, which today requires taking on massive debts. This means that at the very beginning of their lives they’re already saddled with a great financial burden. Between 1985 and 2012, the cost of college tuition in the United States increased by nearly 500%, while the consumer price index increased by only 115%; and in the United Kingdom, tuition fees weren’t introduced until 1998, and can now cost as much as £9000 a year. But even after getting that degree, and all the debt that came along with it, millennials are having a harder time finding the jobs they were promised.
The U.S. unemployment rate stood at 5% in April 2016, but it was 10.8% for young people aged 16–24. The situation is similar in the U.K., where in February 2016 the unemployment rate was 5.1%, while for youth it was 13.7%. It’s harder for millennials to find work, and much of the work that’s available to them doesn’t take advantage of the skills they acquired in university, or, even worse, it does, but doesn’t provide them any further compensation. Scott Santens, a basic income advocate, observed that automation is already having an effect on the labour market, leaving only two kinds of employment: “jobs that require so little thought, we pay people little to do them, and jobs that require so much thought, we pay people well to do them.” The middle is increasingly hollowed out, and all that’s left is low wage service work and the big salaries of engineers, doctors, and the like.
This isn’t just a throwaway line, but is clearly evident in the post-recession job numbers. Since the recession,
Higher-wage industries — like accounting and legal work — shed 3.6 million positions during the recession and have added only 2.6 million positions during the recovery. But lower-wage industries lost two million jobs, then added 3.8 million.
The opportunities that were available in the past simply aren’t there any longer. It’s much harder for someone to work their way up in a company without an education, and it’s also harder for people with an education to find an entry into their field. A growing number of young people only have the option of going into service work, no matter their level of education, and those jobs command low wages, few benefits, little opportunity for advancement, and precarious schedules.
Between 1979 and 2014, the purchasing power of the average U.S. worker stagnated, and since the recession all of the income gains have gone to the top 1% of earners. However, that hasn’t stopped the cost of housing and other essential goods and services from increasing. In New York City, neighbourhoods are rapidly gentrifying with rents increasing by an average of 67.2% between 2000 and 2012, and in London, one of the world’s most expensive housing markets, rent can take 88% of a young person’s income. The situation is so dire that in the United States that
more than half of all renters pay more than 30% of their income for housing, a figure that has doubled since 1960, and a quarter of all renters pay more than 50% of their income toward housing.
Young people can’t be blamed for ignoring mainstream politics when politicians couldn’t give a damn about their suffering (and often make it worse). They can’t be blamed for spending so much time on their phones when it’s not only their connection to their friends (who they may have trouble seeing regularly because of precarious work schedules), but also to the greatest source of information humanity’s ever known.
Millennials have been fucked by an economy that they had no part in destroying, and it’s given them a perspective their parents never had.
Boomers and Gen Xers grew up during a period that has increasingly proven to be the exception to the capitalist rule. Due to the massive rebuilding effort that occurred after World War II, and the economic and military race between the West and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, capitalism was forced to spread the wealth beyond the system’s elite so that everyone could benefit. This led to a long period of rising wages, and the building of a massive welfare state to provide the masses with a number of social benefits, including education, health care, and a social safety net.
Capitalism had to absorb some socialist characteristics to prove to the masses that they could have the best of both worlds, but now that the threat of communist expansion has passed, social democracy has been abandoned for a more market-dominated neoliberalism. Wage growth began to slow in the late 1970s at the same time as right-wing governments began their war on unions, and there have been a series of attacks on the welfare state, culminating in post-recession austerity programmes which have paired cuts to social services with tax breaks for the wealthy.
The best evidence of this reversal in the priorities of the system is the return of wealth inequality to levels not seen since the 1920s, before the Great Depression. The top 0.01% have already surpassed the percentage of national wealth they held in 1928, and the top 1% is seeing their wealth rise so swiftly it shouldn’t take them long to achieve the same. The chart below shows that inequality was low throughout the post-war period, but has begun rising to levels we haven’t seen since the early twentieth century.
Considering the world that’s been thrust upon millennials and the false promises that were made to them by their parents, it would be understandable for them to be angry or apathetic. However, despite their experiences of poverty and the lack of opportunity available to them, they’ve become one of the most socially- and economically-progressive generations we’ve ever seen. The following statistics will focus on the United States, but the same trends can be seen across the Western world.
Millennials reject mainstream politics, with 50% identifying as independents. Only 31% believe there’s a big difference between the Democratic and Republican parties, but they are much more likely to vote Democratic, as it’s the most progressive option on offer. A full 43% of millennials are non-white, and only 26% are married, even though preceding generations had much higher rates of marriage at the same age. This is, in part, due to the lack of “a solid economic foundation,” resulting from precarious work, low wages, and the rising cost of rent.
This economic pain has also had an impact on how trusting the generation is compared to others. Only 19% of millennials believe most people can be trusted, and its believed this is because “people who feel vulnerable or disadvantaged for whatever reason find it riskier to trust because they’re less well-fortified to deal with the consequences of misplaced trust.” Despite that, a full 49% are hopeful about the future, and it may be because of their socially progressive nature.
Millennials are far more likely to support gay rights, marijuana legalization, and other socially liberal political reforms. Their openness to diversity and recognition of various sexualities and gender identities is also freeing them to experiment and embrace aspects of themselves they may have been pressured to suppress in the past. Recent surveys have shown that 49% of British under-25s and 31% of under-30s in the U.S. identified themselves as not 100% heterosexual, placing themselves somewhere else on the Kinsey scale.
As millennials come to dominate the political process, our societies will become more accepting of those who are different, and will adopt a more liberal legal system that rejects the influence of religious morality. However, due to the economic pain so many millennials have experienced, they’re also rejecting the capitalist narratives that were taken as gospel by many of their parents.
In the United States, a full 51% of people aged 18–29 do not support capitalism. The system has failed them, and they’re looking for something else. They know they deserve better than the endless debt and low wages that are on offer, but they’re not going to get it with an economy that puts profits before people. This is exactly why young people are getting behind Bernie Sanders and his call for a democratic socialism that would raise taxes on the rich, place restrictions on large corporations, institute single-payer healthcare, and make public colleges free to attend.
Harry Potter could easily be classified as the book series of the millennial generation, so it seems fitting that I end with a reference to it. Dumbledore believed that Harry was the wizarding world’s only hope against the Dark Lord Voldemort. It’s my belief that millennials are humanity’s best hope to combat the exploitative capitalist system that’s begun showing its true nature once again, and the wealthy elite that benefit from it.
Millennials are rejecting not just capitalism, but the social conservatism that has been allowed to dominate up until recently. They may be reluctant to vote, but I would argue that’s simply because mainstream politics has failed them and they haven’t seen anything inspirational or hopeful to vote for. It’s possible Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, and similar political leaders could change that. Even still, millennials have shown themselves not to be politically apathetic. They make their voices heard in the streets instead of through the ballot box, and I have no doubt that if no movement emerges offering the kind of world they want, they’ll make one for themselves, and the votes will follow, just as they did for Spain’s Podemos.
There’s a lot going on in the world to make people cynical about the future. The far-right is rising on a wave of racist nationalism. Another economic collapse is inevitable, and it may be even worse than the last. Conservative minority groups fight every piece of socially-progressive legislation that passes. But the trend is in the right direction, and every year brings more evidence of millennial political engagement and new ideas about how to build a more equal, inclusive, and socially-just world.
The forces of fear and division will lose in the face of a united movement for a fair economy and an open society, led by the millennial generation.
Paris Marx is the author of A Music Industry for the 99% and Dystopia or Utopia?. He writes about the growing divide within the capitalist system, movements for alternative forms of economic organization, and ways of living that challenge traditional narratives.
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