Said the ardent young socialist to the ABC, ‘I was born when the Soviet Union still existed, but I have no memory of it and it doesn’t inform my politics at all.’ It’s frightening to realise how, even with a universe of fact and history just a click away, the stupid are determined to stay that way.
At the internet’s dawn, some felt the universal availability of historical and current information might lead to a golden time of human enlightenment. After all, with so many facts so easily accessed by everyone’s computers—and now their mobile phones—surely we would quickly reach a point of great shared knowledge and understanding.
Interesting theory.
As it turns out, that hopeful notion did not count on a few things. Like the insatiable human capacity for cat videos. And porn. And, for all I know, cat porn (there’s something for everyone on the net). Then there was the problem of disseminating information itself. It soon emerged that misinformation is far more attractive, which goes some of the way to explaining why socialism and communism are again so remarkably popular among the young.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s rise in the UK and Bernie Sanders’s barnstorming 2016 presidential run in the US were both driven by youngsters who are really into this crazy new socialism thing. For them, far-Left concepts of collectivism and centralisation are original and fresh—although they might have taken a clue as to the vintage of these ideas just by looking at Corbyn and Sanders, who respectively pre-date a US flag with fifty stars (by eleven years) and the Partition of India (by six years).
Absent effective father figures of their own, British and American kids have settled on great-grandfather figures instead. In Australia, too, so-called millennials (those born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s, and destined to be paying off student loans from the 2010s until the 2050s) are swinging to socialism. They might be buying iPhone Xs, but they’re partying like it’s 1917.
Appropriately, our own socialist ABC recently provided an online piece revealing just how it is that children of the information age are so incredibly short of information when it comes to political history. These revelations, pegged to the centenary of Russia’s Bolshevik uprising, were clearly not the ABC’s aim.
“The Bolsheviks’ seizure of power from the Russian provisional government 100 years ago, eight months after the overthrow of the tsarist regime, came at a time of food shortages, collapsing infrastructure and disorder,” the piece initially recalled, accurately enough.
“The revolutionaries’ leader, Vladimir Lenin, had built on the communist theories of Karl Marx to offer an alternative to the liberal democracy supported by the Russian middle class.
“For Osmond Chiu, a 31-year-old unionist and member of the Australian Labor Party, this possibility of an alternative to accepted economics is the key legacy of 1917.”
Young Osmond lives in Australia right now, where you can easily bounce from job to job like a pinball, buy a brand new car with coins scratched up from friends’ couches, fly interstate on bonus points and, if you’re Noam Chomsky fan Lisa Wilkinson, demand a $700,000 raise because you’re a girl. Yet he’s somehow drawing primary socio-financial lessons from a turnip-driven economy some 100 years and 15,000 kilometres away.
“Mr Chiu says the sense that the existing system would deliver for most people, including his generation, was shattered by the global financial crisis,” the ABC piece continued.
“Since then, he says, there has been increased interest in socialism among young people, and that thanks to social media and the availability of information on the internet, the term ‘socialist’ is losing some of its Cold War-era stigma.”
