The tale of the first successful unionization effort at an Amazon fulfillment center prompted a dissonant pair of reactions in me. As such things often do, it then prompted my setting those reactions to print (of the digital variety).
Last year, a slim majority of the 8300 workers at the location at Amazon’s Staten Island, NY location voted to organize - a first for the tech giant. This being a private employer and private-sector workers, I smiled at market forces doing their thing. It's far better for workers to pursue positive (to them) changes via this channel than by government coercion, and unions have long had an important role in the private sector, and if the reports of working conditions there are accurate, I say good for them. I remain firmly opposed to the existence of public sector unions, and to government coercions of any sort (on the employer side, on the labor side, on the "we aren't involved but we want to run the show" activist side, etc.), but I'm totally cool with private individuals organizing themselves in any sort (absent violence, of course). That includes speech (see: Citizens United), political activism, work places, advocacy groups, and on and on. Voices in unison are louder than individual ones.
My smile at this market-in-action was diminished by learning that the "salts," the people who worked from within to organize the workforce, were socialists working in conjunction with such affirmatively coercive entities like the Democratic Socialists of America and Jacobin Magazine.
Private-sector unions are not socialism, either in the according-to-Hoyle form or the vaguer, squishy, feel-good modern domestic form. However, they are easily co-opted by those movements, because power is seductive, and it's far too easy to succumb to the "let's use our numbers to coerce change via government" temptation.
That the "salts" at the fore of the Amazon organization effort are youngsters is where my lament (and the title of today's offering) coalesces. Bad ideas that are 'shiny and bright' persist in the political sphere because "fresh fools" enter adulthood every year. Given the enormously expanded access to information and history that the information age has proffered, there's absolutely no excuse for people to stand in ignorance of the countless humanitarian disasters born of socialism and other forms of collectivism - but for the reality of motivated reasoning.
Human brains are quite malleable, and are driven by emotion and other illogical factors more than by rationality. Bad seeds planted early set deep roots that are very hard to dislodge, and the Leftists who dominate our educational system have done a yeoman's job in sowing those seeds in the young-adult generations of today. Dislodging socialistic tendencies from these generations may prove impossible, especially as older generations die off. Most of the understanding of the perils of socialism that I see in my political travels are among people my age (late 50s) and older. There are some young small-government folks out there, but they are scattered islands in a sea of statists, they have little to no voice on the public stage, and too many are living under the fear of cancellation and social exile should they speak against the looming train-wreck.
This mess falls into the "burned hand" category.
I fear the only way this drive leftward resolves is through personal experience, and much badness may need to happen before the young and dumb feel enough pain to see past the smokescreens and snake-oil pitches to the real causes. They’ve closed their eyes and ears to the lessons of the past, and believe their ideology has little or nothing in common with that which killed over a hundred million and impoverished billions.
While I don't want to turn into one of those cranky "kids don't know shit" codgers, when I see bright young people lured by socialism's siren song, I'd be derelict if I didn't warn of the doom those sirens were offering.
I already know I'm out of the target demographic of marketers and cultural purveyors. I left 18-to-49 a decade ago, and as I get older, my voice will be less and less heeded by the young. So it goes - and that's not always a bad thing. Racists - real ones, not the fabrications of the woke - have pretty much aged out of society. But, the Berlin Wall came down 34 years ago, meaning that anyone who was old enough to understand what that meant has crossed the half-century rubicon. Just as World War II is now almost entirely history rather than memory (the youngest WWII vets are in their 90s), the Soviet Union, the Iron Curtain, and the horrors of that totalitarian rule are fading into the sterility of history books.
The rehabilitation of Marxism continues apace, with its acolytes buying into the "bad implementation" excuse for the unfathomable damage and misery it inflicted on the world. As the people who know better age out, first of relevance and then of existence, the risk of a redux of its misery only grows and grows.
Today's crop of croppers earnestly believe the next blindfolded swing at the socialist piñata won't be totalitarian and won't dictate social behavior -their version of socialism will just be "nice". I may not be around to see it as, like you, I've got maybe a quarter century left on Earth - actuarily speaking. But the decline will be Hemingwayan - gradual at first, then sudden. When today's youth are in their dotage, they'll be telling their kids about the Good Old Days when middle class families had stand alone houses in neighborhoods, cell phones were ubiquitous, cheap and reliable, food was so cheap that obesity was a problem, people routinely lived into their 80s and hardly anybody complained of being cold all the time.
It's bizarre to me that socialists somehow think organizing a labor union is anything other than a free market activity. I suspect they don't know market theory at all - they view everything through the Marxist lens. The "capitalism" they imagine they are fighting is just as imaginary as the utopia they want to replace it with.
Has anyone told a young socialist that they are perfectly free to form a corporation structured according to Marxist principals, where the workers all own equal stake in the company and receive equal share of the profit? They should try it and see if it works, and leave everyone who doesn't want to do that alone.