China’s Youth Are Quitting the Rat Race to ‘Let It Rot’
China’s Youth Are Quitting the Rat Race to ‘Let It Rot’
Demoralized young Chinese are looking for pathways out of the carefully scripted lives their elders want for them
Young people in China are becoming more rebellious, questioning their nation’s traditional expectations of career and family
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It's interesting because people are people and it doesn't matter where you are born.
If you look at it from a birds eye view you will see a younger, smart generation trying to fight it's own governments.
It's not USA vs China vs Russia vs Europe etc. it is the younger generation vs the old generation. Currently each generation is fighting it's own government and slowly realising how poor they have done in the last decades.
Nobody wants war.
t’s not USA vs China vs Russia vs Europe etc. it is the younger generation vs the old generation
No, it's owning class vs working class, anything else is a distraction in service of the owning class.
Workers of the world, unite! ✊
(edited in image. If you need image description - source)
Even marxists don't simplify the classes as much as that diagram suggests. It's missing peasants, artisans and the petty bourgeois. It's also never been as simple as capitalist vs working class. Capitalists regularly fight amongst themselves as do the working class. This whole idea of class struggle being the only struggle is so oversimplified it's kinda silly.
I don't think it's honest to frame it in generational language either btw. Though that is a component of it.
Imagine that - an infograph gives a concise summery of a larger idea.. 🤯
Either way - it is really that simple and splitting the working class in to splinter groups is just another division, which again - only serves the owning class. Them fighting amongst themselves is irrelevant, they've been united enough to maintain this system for centuries because they have the same goal - stay in power, make as much money as possible. If that happens via collaboration one week, then they'll collaborate that week, if it means they need to go to war the next week, then they will, and have been, doing exactly that.
In contrast, as long as the working class stays divided (along race, gender, ability, and even "work level" or whatever you'd call the division you've brought up) we will never be free.
I'm the furthest thing from a class reductionist, and I think intersectionality is vital, but all of the systemic barriers we face (racism, sexism, ableism, querrphobia, and so on) exist to serve capitalism and those who benefit from it. That doesn't mean those systems don't need addressing, but part of doing that is understanding why they exist, and how they serve to divide us.
Seriously, what end could splitting hairs over "peasants" or "artisans" possibly serve (And are those hundreds of years old terms even relevant in our world with our technology?)? Even the petit bourgeois is oppressed by the owning class, the system convincing them that a "middle class" exists is part of the fucking con, and the whole fucking point is to see how irrelevant these semantics are and fucking unite so that we can have a better society for everyone.. 🤦♀️
Seriously, what end could splitting hairs over "peasants" or "artisans" possibly serve (And are those hundreds of years old terms even relevant in our world with our technology?)? Even the petit bourgeois is oppressed by the owning class, the system convincing them that a "middle class" exists is part of the fucking con, and the whole fucking point is to see how irrelevant these semantics are and fucking unite so that we can have a better society for everyone.. 🤦♀️
You haven't read marxist or anarchist theories very well if this is what you think.
Artisans are any one man business. They don't have employers to exploit them that's why they are an important class in marxist analysis.
Petty bourgeois aren't middle class necessarily; it refers to small business owners. They are exploiters of the workers beneath them while being exploited by others. Small time land lords would be petit bourgeois for example. These people are in essence part of the "owner class" because they own a business or building.
Peasants are not considered to be a revolutionary class because they aren't the proletariat. Not a problem in western societies but some countries still have peasants.
all of the systemic barriers we face (racism, sexism, ableism, querrphobia, and so on) exist to serve capitalism and those who benefit from it.
You don't think racism affects business owners or landlords? Or sexism? Or anything else?
This is the kind of assertion given without evidence that made me leave marxists behind. I am sick to death of people claiming all these problems are because of capitalism. If anything capitalism has helped address some of these issues like sexism because women not working is bad for the system. In fact not fully utilizing people because of prejudice in general is bad for capitalism which is all about efficiency and exploitation.
Edit: also policy regarding peasants is one area where marxism and anarchism differ significantly from what little I understand of anarchism.
This whole idea of class struggle being the only struggle is so oversimplified it’s kinda silly.
There's nothing wrong with a simplified model if it gets you the results you're looking for. And for the vast majority of the working class thinking in simplistic terms such as capitalist vs. worker would improve their lives tremendously.
The more complex models might be useful for explaining how things change and evolve. But mainly complexity is introduced by capitalists (or capitalist simps) to sow discord among workers and keep us from organizing effectively.
Why are all the marxists coming out of the wood work? Y'all can't run a society for shit. Why are you still here and existing?
China was one of your experiments that went wrong. Go and build a working model for a socialist or communist society and I might listen. Until then you have nothing to add. Anarchists had better luck than you guys and you killed them for it.
I mean, call me whatever you want. It's irrelevant. Do you need my vote or not? If you don't then ignore me. If you do then pay attention.
So are you a marxist or something else?
Which country do you live in? I live in the UK so unless you are here it's mostly irrelevant what you vote for.
You asked the question bud. Not my fault you don't like the answer.
So I will take it you don't live here and I don't need your vote.
If you only want UKers answering your question then say so in the first place.
You're the one who asked if I needed your vote lmao. I don't. You're just annoyed you don't have any leverage over me.
I'm waiting for Gen Z to realize that they've grown up interconnected and have the ability to coordinate like no one ever could before and when they realize that I expect them to flip the monopoly board.
This is exactly why the billionaires are dismantling the current social media platforms. Organizing is the only threat they truly fear.
As phrased in a recent anti-union campaign by Amazon: Watch out, your co-workers might be "vulnerable to organizing".
Can you expand on how billionaires are dismantling social media?
did you miss what happened to twitter?
No. I don't see how it was "dismantled." Can you explain?
Rate limiting and heavily pushed “premium” options have made Twitter near useless for large scale organizing.
600 posts a day makes it nearly useless for organizing?
Have you attempted to use the platform since the rate limiting? It’s approximately 2-3 searches before you’re rate limited out of the app for 24+ hours.
You’re also unable to view comments unless you’re logged in, so you’re required to give them semi-accurate information for an account too.
It’s literally useless for organizing unless you pay for it, which defeats the entire purpose of wide spread reach like it used to have.
Okay so twitter is useless. What about all of the other social media sites out there?
None ever had the organizational reach Twitter did. FB/Instagram require more personal data and are much worse for discoverability. Mastodon and BlueSky have the issue of nobody using them (in the grand scheme of things). Lemmy and Reddit don’t work well because of reach and censorship respectively.
There still isn’t something out there that replaces the use cases of Twitter.
Its capitalist owners rendered it useless for political organization.
This is just repeating the claim. Can you explain how so?
It is wasteful by way of being botted up to the point of inefficiency for individual political communication and its owners are happy to take payments from abusive operators responsible for the bots, if not doing the botting themselves. That's just Twitter. Other platforms experience similar crapitalist growing pains albeit not all exactly in the same way. For profit motivated entities, there's always a diminishing ROI on politically actionable systems.
It is wasteful by way of being botted up to the point of inefficiency
Twitter was a bot fest long before Musk took it over. And that isn't a problem with billionaires, but an inherent problem with system itself that can be, and is, exploited by plenty of people.
I am of Gen Z. The opposite is true, I would think. Or, rather, the truth is more complicated in both directions. It's not true to say we've "grown up interconnected", by the 2010's, most of the mainstream culture was basically gone. You had maybe the marvel movies, but, you know, social media, the internet, kind of revealed a self-evident truth. That there wasn't a grand a unifying "american culture". At the very least, such a thing had been waning for a long time, but the counter-cultural movements of the 90's could still be considered a unifying culture of gen X, and elder millennials. Lots of people watched MTV. The closest thing zoomers have is stuff like mr beast, or kai cenat, which we might all be tangentially aware of, but we've all become atomized, there's a limited number of zoomers who watch that and that's not "the culture". There is less genuine engagement with a "the culture", and more awareness of a variety of subcultures, of a broadness.
You know, along those lines, there's also a lack of ability to coordinate. We can "coordinate", yes, you can use social media to DM and communicate with other people, but you're doing so at great risk. Basically every social media site now, of the major ones, is a fed honeypot, and you can be banned at any time for any truly revolutionary action or coordination. Your coordination is also easily trackable and visible and thus easily co-opted, corporatized, destroyed. I would've thought that tech literacy would've gone up with Gen-Z, you know, kind of along the same lines as a fish swims in water, but, you know, owing to that same metaphor, what the fuck is water, david foster wallace style. I don't know shit about that guy other than that single joke. The kids have no tech literacy, because everything has been crafted to be easily accessible, and simplified, by the companies that now control the internet.
I think the only shot really is if the tech oligopoly is broken up, and not just in terms of regulation, like what the FTC does, but it has to be bred out. The environment and technology must change in such a way as to no longer allow those sorts of fiefdoms. Tech adoption must happen that eliminates that. Which it kind of can't, because the technology is still subject to all the material conditions and market forces, but then we're kind of encountering a chicken and egg problem. Fediverse is pretty good as a solution but we've seen limited buy-in, partially as a result of the conceit of the thing, and I think, you know, if we don't learn any lessons from the classic internet (we won't), we could just see some fediverse instance, a singular instance, get uber-popular, and then just kind of separate from all the others after they've grown to encompass the whole thing. Migrate away, bam, new monopoly, just as happened in days past.
In any case, the environment must change, tech literacy, media literacy, all the literacies must rise, and then I think we would be primed to flip the chess board. I would say that Gen Alpha might be the ones primed for it, but I think, you know. They're all like, the true Ipad kids, that are condemned to watch youtube kids content, which is the most reprehensible shit imaginable, with the worst of millenial parenting that I've seen. Maybe number blocks and alpha-blocks and bluey will save everyone, but I kind of doubt it somehow, the millenials seem a little bit too fucked up to break the cycle and I kind of don't really want to see what happens when a bunch of Gen Z parents who watch mr beast and can breathe in the polluted water start having kids. You know, I think the reaction is going to be much the same generation to generation, in terms of people who uncritically propagate the same shit, people who are nihilistic and angry at everything and take it out on their kids, and people who do their best to give the best to their kids and end up sheltering their kids in the process. I dunno. I kind of hope I'm wrong.
Also climate change is happening at a really good clip so that's maybe a bigger priority, cause unless that gets stopped, then this is all a moot point.
I think we just keep normalizing it and you wittpe down the population to those to unaware to notice it's shit but simply continue cause it's the animal drive and those who are psychopathic self driving who don't care if it gets worse cause they expect to get their own at any cost. And the world will spin on and get worse and worse without end until it does.
I would expect nothing of the sort. They're already been misdirected into the blanket "boomers bad" mentality, that all the old people living in poverty are somehow to blame for all their ills.
The ruling class will continue to rule, because they know exactly how to manipulate the plebs.
Of course it's the super rich, but who is voting for policies that support the super rich? It's not young people.
Well the young don't vote at all most of the time.
But when was the last time you saw a party with policies that didn't support the super rich? Since Reagan, no matter if the president wears a red or blue tie, the rich have gotten richer.
The only choice is how much poorer the poor get, with a side order of "other" hate. When the Zoomers are 50, don't worry. There'll be a whole new bunch of "others" to hate on, to distract them from the fact that they can just barely pay the rent. The boomers thought they'd be different too. Peace and love and hippies and Woodstock. Gen Z will be no different.
Peace and love and hippies and Woodstock. Gen Z will be no different.
This but with the emphasis on the people who got fucking killed or put in prison or aged out of the ability for revolutionary action, while the rest of them kind of, left those guys to rot in jail, and went on to just exist passively in the system, and purport the same hippie mentalities, and then get sorted, just the same as last time. Power corrupts and is magnetic to the easily corruptible.
You know, I do wonder if, as the contradiction builds, and the farce kind of becomes more obvious, with like, the starbucks pride month rainbow logo while they also crush their unions, I wonder if everyone will make progress along that, as the marxists kind of tend to predict, with the whole "capital contains the seeds of it's own destruction" spiel. I dunno. I think probably people don't give a shit about contradiction though and are free to just keep living with a totally normalized cognitive dissonance.
Oh you're just doing some "both sides" doomerism. Got it.
Aw, reading comprehension too much for you?
Haha okay dude, you're clearly out of touch with the youth these days. Gen Z says "okay boomer" and that's pretty much it en masse. Gen Z is however not putting up with corporate bullshit as much.
It's kinda been that way since the internet has been readily available.
It’s been that way since the 1960s at least.
Since the 18th century at least.
Humans always have and always will struggle with government. It’s a complex topic and every decision has tradeoffs.
No war but the class war
Boomers want a war.
I actually think that the biggest damage the parents of the Boomers committed was glorifying their war stories. Don't get me wrong, I probably would have too so I'm not saying this out of judgement. But I think the Boomers grew up feeling like the only way to prove themselves was to fight as hard as their parents did. And when there weren't any Nazis to be found, they found fights with anybody they could.
... including their own children.
Idk, if I was young and rich I probably wouldn't give a shit about changing anything. I'd maybe even invest in anything that promised to keep things the same
That's EXACTLY what they do - invest I'm anything that promised to keep things the same, this is our salary.
Don't trust anyone over 30.
Im over 35 and I know better than to trust myself!
glares at reflection in mirror
... you do realize lemmy users skew older, and it's not just kids saying "eat the rich", right?
I understand that quote, but these days it's a dumb one. Gone are the days of "settling down" into a bubble once you hit 30.
Right, but I was replying to someone making it a generational thing.
I agree the quote is stupid. Also the guy was joking/exaggerating when he said it, never meant it the way it was used (even in movies, like Planet of the Apes) and also thought it was stupid. Which is partly why I picked it.
