> > > 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.
I am afraid that your kids are at least partially right - at least in the US context. All they know is the US society, and for them trying to explain the virtues of socialism is like trying to explain the virtues of an igloo to the dwellers of the tropical rainforest - they do not even comprehend the concept of ice, let alone that of a house built of it.
The problem with many left intellectuals is that they take a "designer" view of social relations which holds that social relations can be engineered almost at will - poof, capitalism disappears and socialism is put in its place, like a new sky scraper on the rabble of the old tenement houses. In reality, socialism is an outgrowth of a long social tradition that took thousands of years to develop - the tradition of social solidarity and cooperation, flat social hierarchies, relative absence of aristocracy and plantation-style economy, work ethic, civic engagement, the tradition of rights and responsibilities etc. That is why the Swedes, the Norwegians, the Czechs, the Jews, even the Russians, the French and the Germans can at least understand what socialism is all about, and that it can work - if not fully implement it at this time.
But the United States (and other Anglo-Saxon countries, I suppose) has never developed such a tradition of social solidarity and cooperation. In fact, the US has never been a society in a traditional sense of the world, not even a "melting pot" as the national mythology claims - but a hodge podge of local, semi-tribal interests groups, exclusive clubs, and gangs competing against each other and often fighting each other for the control of strategic resources. If there is a concept of the US as one society, it is only because of the federal government and its projects (the legal framework, the interstate system, the armed forces) and the national media network that steadily supply common cultural themes for mass consumption. Take those two ingredients away, and the United States will collapse like a house of cards into a myriad of competing localities and factions, like in Somalia.
To understand the virtues of socialism, you first need to understand the concept of society and social solidarity - and those concepts are conspicuously absent from the US culture, just like the notion of ice field, necessary to appreciate the virtues of igloo, is absent from tropical cultures. That is why your kids are absolutely right - socialism will never work - as long as all they know is the US and its social organization. It will never work HERE. The US-sers will be drowning in their own trash and waters from melting polar caps, and they still will be praising the virtues of individualism, competition, profit making and small-business capitalism - because that is all they know. Just like the Easter Islanders - cutting down the last tree to keep erecting the statues they worshipped, and perishing thereafter.
If you want to explain to your kids the virtues of socialism, you first need to make them first-hand experience the notion of society and social solidarity, as opposed to private exclusionary clubs and gangs that are the dominant form of social organization in the US, if we take the federal government out of the equation. Have them live abroad for a year or two - Europe, Latin America, Israel - where they can truly experience the "social" in "socialism." My ex and I made that effort and send the kid to experience other countries (Europe, Cuba), even when money was really tight. But inoculating the kid from the virus of US-style individualism and localism was worth every penny of it.
Wojtek