As one raised in a communist family and born during the War (hence the name), I would suggest that even Marx would despair at the gormlessness of anyone who thinks nowadays that nothing changes, that the conditions for revolution which may have existed in the middle of the nineteenth century, still exist.

Marx complained in the late 1870s to Engels (or was it the other way around ?) that Britain was well on the way to developing a bourgeois proletariat. He would have been aware of the changes in the productive forces, i.e. its technology, and that more advanced and complicated technology everywhere required more skilled workers - hence more education, and more opportunities for the beat and brightest children of the working class to get up and out.

Marx was devastated when the Paris Commune of 1871 failed. Then of course, the European powers expanded their empires, providing managerial opportunities for anybody in the working class to migrate and 'improve themselves'. Meanwhile every new industry required more technically skilled people than ever before. So the education system broadened into secondary education. Governments (e.g. Bismarck's), under pressure from unions, improved working conditions, brought in the eight-hour day, guaranteed wages and improved conditions in many other ways, especially by implicitly promising better lives for working-class kids - no thanks to their generosity. But in all of these ways, revolution was a thing of the past by 1900, only possible when capitalism in a country like Russia, and later China, was on its knees.

The peak of manufacturing employment in Australia was around 1966, fifty years ago. The children of those workers went onto teachers' college, nursing schools and university. The number of all 'worker' jobs is a fraction now of what it used to be. Barely 10 % of workers are in unions, let alone left-wing unions. Even Marx would realise the jig was up: that any notion of 'revolution' was anachronistic fantasy. e.g. Venezuela.

In the 1930s, Gramsci also realised this and advocated - instead of revolution - tearing down any and all bourgeois institutions, by any means conceivable.

Joe

Marxism, the political philosophy that has killed more people that all the others put together.

As young folk look around at the world individualism and greed has crafted for them. And see the wealth trickling ever upward into fewer and fewer hands and know, no matter how hard they work or for how many hours? They will always get further behind, rent more and more humble abodes, try and get by as everything they need get progressively more expensive.

All while the real pigs of George Orwell's animal farm keep pileinging on the pork!

There is an example from capitalism that allows those who create all our wealth and prosperity to share a fair and reasonable portion of it.

And that is through cooperative capitalism comrade.

Co-ops allow the income and profit earned in the community to stay in that community far longer doing the work of up to seven times as much money as that occurs.

Co-ops are generally union free workplaces that need no protection from unions whatsoever. They invariably are equitable places that share the wealth and profit they create amongst those who actually create it!

Imagine how much cheaper our electrical supply could be if were wrestled back out of the hands of tax avoiding, price gouging, profit repatriating foreigners and instead reticulated in genuine feice competition by a medley of employee owned co-ops.

Co-ops were the only private enterprise, free market, business model to largely survive the great depression intact and solvent! Even as communism proved it couldn't function without a measure of slavery and central command and control dictatorships. And ginormous firms went under.

Extreme capitalism no better, as ordinary folk (exploited masses) were treated less generously than owned slaves.

Extreme capitalism cannot exist without the cooperation and compliance of the ruling class! And that ruling class cannot in truth have the genuine interests of their fellow citizens or the country at heart?

Because if they did, some of the entirely self serving or incomprehensible decisions wouldn't be possible?

Simply put, I don't blame our young people for losing all faith in the ruling class and the status quo!
Alan B.

As far as I'm aware socialism hasn't killed anyone! But communism which rode on its coattails to power has, with Lien responsible for as many as a million deaths and Stalin responsible for as many as 25 million disappeared or dead folks.

As far as I'm aware no deaths can be directly attributed to Socialist Scandinavia. But a world leading happiness index, may well be!?

Even so, so incredibly ignorant folk, who ought to try talking from a little higher up, manage to equate unselfish and sharing Buddhism with of all things, communism!

Ditto Marxism. Which is more socialist and revolutionary. Revolutionary in the belief and knowledge this was the only way the great unwashed would be able to access both justice and equality/fair and equitable treatment before the law and in the workplace.

Do we need a revolution to see this longed for equitable treatment and social justice become our everyday reality? Along with affordable housing, affordable energy and an economy that works for us, not every foreigner with deep pockets?
Alan B.

What a nice way of saying our universities are becoming some of the most corrupt institutions in the first world. Mal subtly tells us that tens of thousands, without the ability for serious academic study, have been lured into university courses, of no value to society, or the student's future.

He does not actually say that this has led to tens of thousands feeling robbed by the education juggernaut, which promises everything, but gives almost nothing to the majority. Most courses qualify people for nothing more than a pencil pushers job in the bureaucracy, or burger flippers, rather than the expectations promoted.

So these disillusioned folk, finding they have not been equipped for, & were probably never capable of earning that peaches & cream existence the university promised, look for another way. Socialism, with the lure of spending other people's money, looks like their best prospect. With lefty academics, converting this to communism is easier than teaching anything useful.

One has to wonder if this was not the plan all along in expanding tertiary institutions, with the added advantage of infiltration many indoctrinated socialists/communists into the bureaucracy.

While it is true, socialism [is] not the answer students need, we can go a step further & find universities are not the answer most of them need either.

Alan,

Socialism is the ownership of the means of production by a central government and Communism/Marxism is extreme socialism, so socialism has killed millions.

Socialism lite is where the government owns the supply of services and utilities and taxes business which is largely what we have in Sweden and to a lesser extent in Aus.

Secondly as a correction, the sale of electricity assets in Victoria initially led to a drop in the real price of electricity. The costs of electricity began to rise when the government started to regulate the crap out of it first with standards that forced distribution owners to gold plate their networks at consumers costs, then the requirement for networks to buy super priced renewable power, again at the consumers'cost.

Finally, "extreme" capitalism hasn't existed since slavery was abolished, and even then was still better than "extreme" socialism.