[lbo-talk] A different "last" generation

andie nachgeborenen andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com
Fri Feb 17 11:58:12 PST 2006


Have had interesting and rather depressing chats about socialist politics with my teenage kids, one a 16 year old HS junior, another an almost 13-year old middle schooler (now reading Orwell's 1984) on his own, both very smart and fairly politically aware, quite progressive in their values -- antiwar, anti-imperialist, antiracist, anti-corporate, pro-union, feminist. But utterly skeptical about the possibility or point of socialism -- not that they have a sophisticated understanding, though they both have the general idea that it involves the workers running things. Or that their objections are particularly sophisticated or novel. (Generally comes to, A good idea in theory but it won't work in practice.) But what's somewhat dispiriting is the lack of hope for a future that is better than this. One can't say the view's irrational, and maybe some of it is just self-assertion of a sort normal and natural to teenagers. But I wonder how common it is, and I bet it's pretty common. Now, I don't really think we're the "last generation" of socialists; no doubt things will change when, as must happen, resistance reignites for whatever reason. But I can't say these conversations fill me with joy. jks

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