Young workers reject capitalism’s dead-end future

According to a recent Harvard Kennedy School study, only 13% of 18-29 year olds in the U.S. have confidence “in the direction the country is going.” By overwhelming majorities, the young people surveyed reject both bourgeois political parties and believe economic trends will leave them worse off than their parents. Support for capitalism has likewise dipped, from 45% in 2020 to 39%. (Harvard Youth Poll, Fall)

Given the systemic crisis global capital is experiencing, these findings should come as no surprise. Over the past six months, unemployment has surged to 4.5%. Annual layoffs have topped 1 million — the highest level since the beginning of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. (cnbc.com, Dec. 4) Because the Trump administration has used the federal government shutdown as a pretext to suppress monthly jobs reports, the actual figure is likely far higher. 

Inflation, rated the greatest concern in the Harvard survey, continues to undercut wages and drive up already exorbitant prices and rents. Some 43% of young people overall reported financial hardship. Financial insecurity reflects systemic racism; 50% of Black and 51% of Latine respondents report hardship. 

Tech billionaires hoarding astronomical wealth 

Even as signs of crisis multiply by the day, the corporate media continues to celebrate the record-breaking stock market boom, which has added hundreds of billions of dollars to the already astronomical wealth hoarded by tech, real estate, finance and weapons barons. Fueling the boom is the speculative frenzy for generative artificial intelligence (AI). 

Tech billionaires are revelling in the prospect of the mass unemployment and immiseration that AI automation threatens. In an interview, the CEO of Anthropic AI, Dario Amodei, insisted that AI could lead to unemployment rates of 20% by eliminating entry-level jobs. (axios.com, May 28) 

For the time being, Amodei’s prophecy is wishful thinking. Despite the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on semiconductors and server farms, tech companies like Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia and Open AI have largely failed to turn a profit. (futurism.com, Dec. 5, 2025) 

Yet their intent is clear. The AI boom is only the latest offensive in the class war waged by the bourgeoisie, which for over two centuries has used technology to devalue and impoverish the working class.

Given the plans Silicon Valley billionaires have for AI, the mantra, repeated ad nauseum by their chorus of booster sycophants, that it “is here to stay,” sounds less like a promise and more like a threat. More and more workers are taking it that way. Some 45% of those polled in the Harvard survey expected “AI to take away opportunities.” This is already happening. Citing their AI investments, companies such as Microsoft have begun laying off tech workers. (workers.org/2024/04/78192/)

Young workers reject endless wars

As their views on AI use show, young workers are rejecting the future of endless austerity, war and intensifying exploitation offered to the working class. As the Zionist holocaust in Gaza has shown, the technological dreams envisioned by tech billionaires are a nightmare for everyone else. 

In his book “The Palestine Laboratory,” Antony Loewenstein notes that it is no coincidence that tech billionaires like Larry Ellison, Peter Thiel and Thiel’s crony, Palantir CEO Alex Karp, who represent the predominant fraction of the U.S. ruling class, have championed support for the genocidal Zionist state. A major source of Silicon Valley investment, “Israel” tests state-of-the-art drones, surveillance systems and automated killing algorithms in Gaza.

Tech companies are using these same technologies to surveil and terrorize the Black, migrant and Indigenous communities in the U.S., those Trump’s fascist crackdown is targeting. (wired.com, April 18, 2025) 

Although not covered by the Harvard youth survey, other recent polls have shown that support for Palestine is surging, above all among young people. (brookings.edu, Aug. 6) 

This spectre of rising anti-Zionism continues to haunt the Western bourgeoisie. In a recent interview, former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton — a war criminal responsible for terror bombings and massacres in Libya and Syria — blamed TikTok videos for “brainwashing” young people. Billionaire Oracle CEO Larry  Ellison and his son, David, who recently bought Paramount, whose empire includes CBS, have vowed to intensify”hasbara” messaging. (972mag.com, Dec. 4) (Hasbara is the word used to describe pro-Israeli propaganda.)

Yet the ruling class propaganda offensive is failing. As their complaints reveal, bourgeois propagandists know as much, and they are scared. They are right to be. Deepening support for Palestine shows the possibilities and power of revolutionary mass politics. 

The discontents recorded by the Harvard study are the more explosive for being, as yet, shapeless. True revolution can and must become reality through socialist organizing based on solidarity with anti-imperialist resistance in the worldwide class war. The fascist tendencies that the capitalist crisis has thrown up in the form of Trump once again confronts the working class, especially the youth, with the choice Rosa Luxembourg first posed in 1915: “Socialism or Barbarism!”