The Fear Among the Ruling Class as Youth Embrace Socialism

The Economist magazine, based in the United Kingdom and one of the deep-rooted and influential publications of finance capital, published its issue dated June 6, 2026, with the title “How to Fight Back Against Gen-Z Socialism?” On the cover, alongside photographs of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the leader of the UK Green Party, Zack Polanski, there was a visual composition consisting of a mobile phone bearing the labels “Capitalism is over” and “Freeze rents”, as well as a wristband reading “Eat the rich.” All these elements were placed on a prominent yellow background. The design drew on the connotations of caution and imminent danger associated with the yellow of traffic signs and warning notices. Its clear intent was to frame young people’s turn towards socialism as an urgent problem.

It is understood that for some time now, the struggle against the socialist tendency, which the spokespersons of the capitalist class have begun to mention with concern, has thoroughly settled onto the agenda of these individuals and that they are rolling up their sleeves to produce a counter-politics. If The Economist magazine is carrying this issue on its cover and bringing it to the fore in such a striking manner, one must consider that there are significant developments among working-class youth that they are attempting to manipulate. Indeed, research and surveys already clearly show that the socialist tendency, especially among young people, is strengthening.[1]

The main points emphasized in the lead editorial prepared by the magazine’s editors strikingly reveal how these spokespersons of capital wish to frame and manipulate the issue. In the article, the rising anti-capitalist anger of young people is absurdly labelled as the “me-first doctrine” and “selfishness”, while capitalism is characterized as an altruistic system that places the good, welfare, and happiness of society above everything else. It is asserted that Gen Z socialists focus on sharing and consuming existing wealth rather than creating it, and that they demand handouts financed by billionaires; it is emphasized that a serious struggle must now be waged against this “selfishness” of young people and that the younger generations must be made to strongly grasp that capitalism produces social welfare.

While advancing socialist demands is characterized as selfishness, reading alongside this that capitalism is a system that functions to ensure the welfare of society undoubtedly strikes one as strange. Hearing it seriously claimed that black is white and white is black appears to even someone with the most basic level of knowledge about politics as a discourse that has lost its connection to reality. The “me-first” understanding with which The Economist accuses young people is the ideological motto of capitalism. It is capitalism itself that, with the individualist conception sanctified for decades by Margaret Thatcher’s famous dictum “there is no such thing as society; there are only individuals and families”, has placed competition, personal success, career, and entrepreneurship in the place of social solidarity. Now, however, the representatives of the capitalist system are ironically criticizing young people for being individualist. However, it would be naive to think that The Economist’s editors are putting forward such arguments out of ignorance or because they are using concepts incorrectly. What is at issue here is a conscious ideological intervention aimed at concealing the social reality that lies before everyone’s eyes behind a veil of fog, and at clouding minds by turning the meaning of concepts upside down.

While the magazine stigmatizes young people’s demands for social justice, equality, and the public good as “selfishness” or the “me-first doctrine”, it presents the pursuit of individual interest and profit, which is the fundamental law of motion of capitalism, as “social benefit.” Thus, the meaning of concepts is deliberately inverted; selfishness is made to appear as altruism, and altruism as selfishness. This is a manipulation technique frequently resorted to in the field of propaganda. Through the displacement of concepts, moral and political criteria are blurred; the fundamental reference points that enable the evaluation of reality are eroded, and ultimately, the very opposite of facts can be defended.

This is precisely what The Economist is doing. In the face of capitalism condemning billions of people to precarious work, deepening the housing crisis, widening income inequality, and failing to offer future security to younger generations, young people who object to this order and demand rights and justice are stigmatized as “selfish.” In return, the capitalist system, which organizes all social life according to the profitability needs of capital, is presented as if it were a natural and rational order functioning for the common welfare of everyone. Thus, the justified anger that young people direct at the structural problems produced by the capitalist system is stripped of its character as a legitimate reaction with political and social causes, and is reduced to an individual character flaw, a psychological weakness. Yet, what is actually problematic is not the attitude of young people, but capitalism itself. While competition, individual interest, and profit maximization, which lie at the heart of the system, are rendered invisible, those who demand solidarity, equality, and the public good against this system are declared “selfish.” In this way, the selfish nature of capitalism is concealed, while its critics are sought to be morally condemned.

Yet it is a very clear fact that the fundamental motivation of capitalist production is to provide maximum profit for the owners of capital. The capitalist is compelled to be selfish. Otherwise, he falls behind in competition and is pushed out of the market. Young people’s demands regarding housing, nutrition, and similar issues are not “selfishness”, but rather an effort to resist the mass poverty created by capitalism. The truly selfish ones are those who want the continuation of this system, which leads to the concentration of billions of dollars in wealth in the hands of a few owners of capital while billions of working people struggle with poverty. In a world where a very tiny minority (approximately 60,000 people), now including dollar trillionaires among them, possesses an unprecedented financial power, while one billion people live in extreme poverty and nearly four billion live in poverty, it should not be that difficult to identify the real selfish ones.[2]

Another distortion made by magazine editors is the fallacy that working-class youth try to consume without producing wealth. In fact, this serves as yet another repetition of the age-old capitalist lie. According to the bourgeoisie, the products of labour resulting from production belong to the owners of capital because they were produced using the means of production those capitalists own. Yes, that is true, but during this production process, capitalists appropriate the surplus value generated by workers’ labour —in other words, they exploit the workers. Therefore, if anyone is selfishly claiming the wealth produced for themselves, it is not the working class, but the capitalists themselves. Workers demanding ownership of the value they personally produce is not plunder like the capitalists practice; it is a call to struggle for delivering what is rightfully due to its true owners —the workers.

The magazine’s lead editorial does not stop with these absurdities, but also claims that fixing the prices of basic necessity goods and rents would make the economy sluggish, and states that this is a bad idea. As evidence for this, it argues that rent controls would further worsen housing shortages, that Europe has been struggling for decades to escape the low-growth slump caused by excessive regulations, that the statist “Peronists” in Argentina have caused what great problems, and so on. Here, too, there are major distortions. For the “low-growth slump” was not caused by excessive regulations, nor is the source of the mentioned great problems anything other than capitalism itself.

What is the Real Concern of The Economist?

The bourgeoisie is of course aware that the political consciousness and level of organization of the young people who are turning towards socialism in reaction to the enormous problems created by capitalism are not yet at a level that would threaten its rule. But it is also aware that this is a growing tendency. It appears that its immediate problem at this point is that this advance has begun to affect even the bourgeois left organizations. It is clearly seen that concrete results of this are beginning to emerge, especially in the USA and the UK. For example, the most concrete indicators of the movement calling itself Democratic Socialist in the USA gaining strength in recent years have been the successes it has achieved in the Democratic Party primaries and in various positions such as city council memberships. These successes are no longer limited to a few individual candidates winning. They point to a broader tendency that has begun to affect the balance of power within the party. Trump’s constant talk of the “communist danger” as well as the paving of the way for fascist movements both stem precisely from this rising tendency.

Indeed, The Economist articulates this phenomenon in the article as follows: “what is so worrying about the Gen-Z socialists is how deeply their ideas are bleeding into the centre-left. Desperate to compete, even mainstream Democrats in America now propose mad schemes like exempting over half of tax filers from federal income tax. In Britain the Labour Party, having won power on a centrist platform, has been spooked by the Greens and is rekindling its zeal for higher taxes and state control. Increasingly, the ideas of the Gen-Z socialists can win even when their candidates lose.”[3]

At a time when capitalism is in a historical crisis, the control of the political sphere naturally cannot continue for the bourgeoisie in its old form. Their concerns about what levels the effects that shake the political order of the bourgeoisie will reach are also intensifying. The need to intervene in these matters is becoming apparent. On the one hand, bourgeois reformist organizations need to produce policies that will prevent the working masses from turning towards politics outside the established order, while on the other hand, the need to prevent “the rope from slipping through their fingers” emerges. Clearly, The Economist is trying to chart a course for bourgeois left politicians that will allow them to maintain this balance.

The lines in which The Economist issues its urgent call for struggle read as follows: “Resisting Gen-Z socialism is therefore an urgent task. The first step is for free-market liberals to stop apologising. A series of popular criticisms of capitalism, each containing a grain of truth, has in aggregate obscured the fundamental wisdom that private enterprise is at the root of human prosperity. Yes, people aren’t always rational, as behavioural economics shows. True, inequality matters and growth is better when broad-based. Free trade and globalisation create losers as well as winners. But this is the best time in human history to be born, given record real incomes, high life expectancy and low rates of extreme poverty.”[4]

The call for “a stronger defence of liberalism” proposed by The Economist does not possess content capable of producing results for a system that is beginning to collapse. This “panicked” state of the ruling circles and their calls for urgent measures actually reveal just how fragile capitalism’s ideological hegemony has become in the eyes of young people. The Economist’s call that “free-market liberals should stop apologizing” is an effort to establish an ideological defensive line; however, this effort cannot be convincing because it crashes against the reality in which millions of people, even in developed capitalist countries, live on the brink of hunger.

For a period, capitalism achieved significant advances in the fields of industrialization, urbanization, science, and production. However, today the same system constitutes an obstacle to the development of the productive forces. Capitalism’s historical capacity for progress has weakened. For this reason, the day for its withdrawal from the stage of history has come, and even passed. The level reached by production thanks to the working class is certainly more advanced than all previous periods, but capitalism now stands like a mountain blocking progress, and in conditions where it does not cede its place to socialism, it is dragging societies and the planet towards destruction.

Today’s youth has grown up amidst continuous economic crises, high inflation, unemployment, precarious work, the housing crisis, student debt, climate catastrophe, and wars. The capitalism they know is one in which homeownership has become impossible, the future has become uncertain, and workers are losing their rights one by one. That is, the youth’s turn towards socialism stems from the fact that this system no longer has anything left to offer young people and can no longer produce hope. Moreover, young people react strongly to governments’ support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, just as the Vietnam War affected the youth of the ‘68 generation, and they view these stances with disgust. The revelation of the decadence of plutocrats in matters such as the “Epstein” affair further increases young people’s reactions and anger. Therefore, the growing interest of working-class youth in socialism should not be assessed merely as an ideological fashion, but rather as a reflection of the fact that the historical limits of capitalism are beginning to be felt by wider sections of society.

Despite the delusions that “there is no alternative to capitalism”, the fact that The Economist feels the need to call for “a stronger defence of liberalism” shows that this idea is no longer as convincing as it once was. If capitalism were still a natural and unquestionable system in the eyes of young people, such an intensive ideological mobilization would not be needed to defend it. Reversing the weakening of capitalism’s ideological influence over working-class youth is not possible through more effective propaganda alone. For the credibility of ideology is not entirely independent of material living conditions. People can be convinced for a time by discourses that contradict the social reality in which they live; however, when economic insecurity, inequality, and hopelessness become permanent, the ruling ideas also begin to be questioned.

The youth’s turn towards socialism is not a “mental eclipse” or a “culture of instant gratification” as the magazine claims, but rather a sensible orientation towards a liveable world. The fear of capital is justified; for the youth of the working class will eventually grow their struggle not to repair this broken system, but to fundamentally transform it.