By Cal McCaslin
Anyone who has grown up in the U.S. is no stranger to the idea that with hard work and determination, one will surely be rewarded with affluence and luxury. “If you work hard, you can one day be like us” has long been a manipulative tactic on behalf of the oligarchs to increase the profit-generating potential of the laboring class. Prior to the century, it’s true that many American families were able to live in relative comfort based on a single income, but what about the workers of today? With young adults entering a world where their degrees are useless, housing is impossible to afford, and the cost of living continues to rise exponentially, many of today’s youth are questioning if the “American dream” was ever real to begin with.
Young people’s frustration with the economy is not a new phenomenon. In the 1937 American Student Union pamphlet titled: “The Campus: A Fortress of Democracy,” Joseph P. Lash writes about students: “His family must invest a certain amount of money in his education. But planning is not possible amid the planlessness and instabilities of an economic system that only six months after the initial hosannahs to a new prosperity were launched goes into a sinister tailspin… It is no exaggeration to say that today lurking at the back of every student’s mind is the fear of a coming, nameless, intangible doom.”
As a young person myself, I can verify that those feelings of doom unfortunately have lived on, exacerbated not only by financial struggles, but by a constant barrage of bad news. Many of us struggled through COVID while emerging into adulthood, numerable recessions, and the looming threats of both climate change and another world war have led to mass feelings of helplessness. It’s no wonder that the young people of today are prioritizing their interests, spending time with friends, and leisure time when many feel there’s no future. Meanwhile, many young people get caught up in hustle culture– the continuation of the American dream– believing if they sacrifice all those things and sweat blood, they will one day be wealthy.
But we must understand that just as the oligarchs and war-mongers use a carrot-and-stick method to pacify workers, so too do they weaponize apathy. Both tactics are meant to prevent working class resistance against the horrid treatment we face by the ultra-wealthy who rely on our compliance. If a worker pursues petty-bourgeois aspirations, they aren’t focused on collective struggle. Likewise, if a worker believes abandons collective struggle, the ruling class can continue to rip up our woodlands, commit genocide in the name of expansion, and grind workers to the bone without resistance.
As the leaders of tomorrow, we must reject both hustle culture and doomerism. Both are opposite sides of the same coin of subservience to greedy capitalists who view us only as their personal piggy bank. Despite the stigma that Gen Z and millennials are just “lazy,” we are anything but. We are burnt out from being highly exploited, but the fact that capitalism cannot even continue the lie of the “American dream” is a sign that this system is already failing. Revolution is already being made in the shops, the unions, and the progressive organizations that are fighting for change, such as the still-existing American Student Union. Unlike the oligarchs who let the myth of the American dream fall away from our heads, the progressive youth of today will never let the flame of collective struggle die, because a worker-centered future isn’t a dream– it is inevitable.
