Welcome everyone. Today's speaker is professor Rebecca Carl, a professor of history at New York University. She's the author of many books and I don't want to allow myself to indulge in praising her scholarship or giving much detail about her CV because it would just take precious time away from her presentation. The title of the presentation is The Socialist Law of Value and the Rural Economy, Wang Yanan and Marxism in China. I want to thank Nathan for inviting me. Thank you all for coming. I'll just dive in. This is work that I am presently in the process of revising and putting together for a monograph that may or may not come forth at some point. But the set of issues that today I'm going to talk about is to try to think about what is a socialist economics or rather how we can think the economic under socialism. How can it be constituted as a topos and an object of study? Now, if the question is asked merely as a problem of rapid growth and industrial modernization as a question of strategies for achieving certain predetermined goals that can be counted and accounted, then of course the question of socialist economics or the economic under socialism is doomed to being an abortive historical problem, always falling short in relation to capitalist economics. But as socialist economics is a serious problem in the fields of socialism, anti-capitalism and the economic anti-disciplinary can only be constituted as a problematic if we take seriously the fact that socialism is not capitalism monkei. And yet that it is also potentially trapped in analytic categories and historical contexts that somehow never could or did free themselves from their origins in classical and neoclassical economics. In this sense, socialist economics is an abstract question. How can it be philosophically constituted as something other than the particular economic strategies pursued by socialist countries, such as China's is also a very concrete question. What practices helped constitute the economic in some historically existing version of socialism such as China's in the 1950s? To approach this question, one of the main problems, I think that needs to be posed and considered has to be what is the new socialist person, the Xiaohui Zhuixinren, if she is not the capitalist classical and neoclassically posited economic person, the Jingjiren, who is naturalized in most social and political economic theory from the late 18th century onwards. The question of socialist personhood clarifies that the economic can never merely be a question of economics, but rather, and obviously, it must be a question of sociality, history, and of culture. Wang Yanan, the economic philosopher and translator of Marx, wrestled with this in similar questions, either directly or indirectly from the late 1930s through the late 1950s. For him, the question of the economic in its abstract and concrete social relation to personhood was a philosophical and thus a historical and practical question. In its most concrete and yet also most abstract eyes, Wang wrote many times in the 1930s and 40s on the problematization of economic person, often by critically attacking Werner Sombart's assertion that capitalists are the masterful creators of social life and thus the ideal personification of personhood in general. This reification that conflates individual desire or pursuit with a systemic logic becomes entirely ideological and thus historically philosophical when economic value, Jing Ji Jia Zhi, and historical values, Li Shi Jia Zhi become one through the transformation of the law of the jungle, the natural world, into the survival of the fittest, the human world. As Wang repeatedly said, this is just bad history. Most important for the present purpose, as Wang sees it, the problem of value and values, conflation becomes a key mechanism through which systemic logics are ideologically instantiated and materially substantiated through the narratively imputed individual history, individual hero of history. The narrative is not the mere superstructural or representational form reflecting content. Rather, the narrative of the individual hero capitalist who creates capitalism as a naturalized system of human nature creates the content itself. If that narrative then is constituted through economics, then one major way of transforming the historical material conditions is, as Wang asserts, by correcting the irrational historical, irrational economic relations among humans. What Wang calls for is a reconceptualization of the narrative that naturalizes some relations while denaturalizing others. So in the remaining part of this talk or this presentation, what I wanna think about is how narrative changes can be posed and posited, and thus how the value values conflation that leads only to mystification and alienation can be reoriented towards an exposition that provides a historical basis for a different kind of economic practice and thinking. These issues were seriously pursued in the thinking about and in Chinese socialism, thinking about and in Chinese socialism of the 1950s. They were never resolved and perhaps never could have been. The rural communes became the narrative center around and through which this new exposition was to be written. So just to go back briefly before I go to the 1950s, in the early 1920s, in the context of the socialist calculation debate in Europe, Ludwig von Mises, an anti-socialist and fervently anti-communist theorist of what came to be known as the Austrian School of Economics, declared that under socialism, and he was pointing here, of course, the Soviet socialism then in formation, quote, there would be no means of determining what was rational and hence it is obvious that production could never be directed by economic consideration, unquote. For von Mises and his partner in debate, Frederick Haye, this was a fatal flaw that doomed socialism not only to irrationality, but to impossibility. Working on the conceptual premise that the only mission of economics was the rationalization of production and consumption and circulation, socialism appeared to von Mises and Tehyak as an irrational rendering of social life that attempted to escape the unwavering laws of human nature. It's against this kind of imputed immutability that China's socialist economics was posed, particularly in the articulation of Wang Yan Nan, who had been a lifelong critic of the Austrians. And I've written, in my 2017 book, Magic of Concepts, I've written extensively about Wang Yan Nan's critique of the Austrian School in the 1930s and 40s. In any case, in China in the 1950s, for Mao Zedong and the Maoist faction of the Communist Party, the problem of conceptualizing and realizing socialism was never merely a problem of economic considerations, even though the original five-year plan of the PRC conformed to the Stalinist urban-first heavy industrialization policies that are most associated with the very socialist economism that became characteristic of Soviet competition with the capitalist world through the 30s, 40s and 50s. Yet by 1956 and 57 in China, at the end of the first five-year plan, a period of summing up experiences and learning from past mistakes ensued. In this process, not only were the economic achievements of the first five years of socialism in China tallied out, but even more consequentially, the very purpose of socialism, its social revolutionary goals was raised and redubated in light of the ways China's economic achievements had fallen short of socialist ideals understood in non-economistic fashion. The law value debate was joined at this time and is best understood as a process of trying to think about what a distinctive economics of socialism or socialist economics might look like. Certain participants in the debate took seriously the proposition that in socialism, the economic cannot be analytically or otherwise separated from the totality of life itself. And through the debate, they attempted to think about ways to subordinate economic practice to that totality. The debate proceeded vigorously through 1959, although to the extent that the debate got bombed down into modes of counting or accounting, the problem became enmeshed in an insoluble conundrum of using separable capitalist categories to think socialism. And in those terms, the indivisibility of socialism became impossible to conceptualize. Hence, to the extent that the debate was forced into conceptual modes of profit, price, commodity, labor and value, as separable categories of counting, there was no escape from the narrow logic of the law of value as an accounting mechanism rather than a new form of sociality.  But nevertheless, several aspects of the process, we have to grasp very, very briefly. And it's generally understood that the 1958 publication and translation of Stalin's problems in Soviet socialist political economy helped to animate the debate in China over commodity production, law value and other related questions. This text was published just as the communist when the boom chang feng was beginning to blow, and the rural commune campaign was being launched. Mao Zedong made extensive notes in the margins of this book in which he took great exception to Stalin's mechanical notion of how socialist economics should function. These notes were not publicly available at the time of the debates, although Mao's own interpretation of how socialist economics deviated from capitalist and from Soviet's concerns had recently been summed up in his April, 1956 essay, The Ten Great Relationships. In 1959, a major conference was convened in Shanghai on the problem of economic theory, of socialist economic theory. The first of its kind in scope and reach, it was organized by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing in partnership with the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, held at Shanghai's Peace Hotel, over 240 economists and social scientists attended. It gathered together those who would continue the discussion of socialist economics that had begun in 1955 and 56, and that had restarted after the publication of Stalin's book. Shremu Chao, Sun Yefang, and Wu Jun now are most associated both with the original discussion of Stalin's book and with this conference. Wang Yanan, too, attended the conference, as did practically everyone of any note in the field at the time. Whatever the merits of the various debaters or of the various debates, it seems generally agreed by scholars today that this was the first and last possible time under Mao that such a free-wheeling discussion could and did take place. As is clear from the day new law of the debates, however, the terms in which the questions were posed became enmeshed in ideological intransigence and thus in political traps. It is unclear to me how it could have been otherwise given the specific political and then tragic historical context in which the issues were battled out. Abstract questions raised with reference and in dialectical relation to the particular set of historical problems were quickly concretized in the front political context where the abstractions became simplified into operational categories. In this operationalization, the inseparable social and historical nature of the question of socialism was lost in application. Now, my own interest in these questions is not in endlessly rehearsing the minutiae of the theories or the debates. Rather, my interest stems from my more general preoccupation with Wang Yanan, which in turn emerges from my interest in how the problem of the economic was and could be constituted in different historical errors when what counts as economic practice is thrown into question. Now, this was quite clear in the 1959 debates over what constitutes, what is particular about Chinese socialism? What is particular about socialism in China? The problem then of labor and the problem of profit could not be understood then in the same expropriative manner as under capitalism. That is in the 1950s and particularly in the construction and establishment of the communes, the problem of economics, what is the very terms of economic practice were thrown into question. As Isabella Weber has explored the problem of output versus profit was one of the major issues debated between Chen Bo-dan and Sun Yafeng from 1959 to 1964. And it's in the context of those debates that Wang Yanan also intervened. Wang was most concerned in the late 1950s to denaturalize categories. So it's to reinvent them into newly emerging social formations. Thus, whereas somebody like Sun Yafeng treated the law value as an objective law of economics, Wang treated it as an embedded law in a specific social formation. For Wang, the question of the study of socialist political economy was a problem of epistemologically or conceptually specifying the scope of the object of study. He wrote that the study of political economics cannot be construed as a problem of objective existence or merely of policy or laws. In other words, the study of socialist political economy is a problem of practice in which all practices must be conceptually treated as fully embedded in social and cultural worlds that are not reducible to a singular logic of economics as a discipline of accounting or accounting. As Wang clarified, the moment one tries to reduce political economy to a study of a singular object, a singular duixiao, one reduces its potential for producing new conceptual forms from the emerging concrete socialist practices on the ground. This dynamic conceptualization had to take as its object then the newly emergent form of the communes. In this regard then, Wang in 1959 professed himself to be a partisan of what was called the social relations camp of the debate over the law of value against the forces of production camp of the debate. For him and from the perspective of this social relations camp, the problem of socialist economics could not merely be about which categories, laws and structures could be enumerated as externalities to practice, but how categories of economic life were being created in socially transformed relations of production as internalities to social practice itself. That is, he was concerned with how practices of economic life contributed to the establishment of a new social formation altogether. That is the rural communes and how from within this evolving new social formation, new categories, new usages and new relations would and could be elaborated. In a piece he wrote in January, 1959 for the People's Daily for the Remy Dribal about the advent of rural communes, Wang noted that in the light of this new social formation, the expressive form and functional scope of hitherto existing economic laws had to be rethought. In this rethinking, one of the most important questions revolved around the relation of product, chanping to commodity, shangpin, that is the question was if what was now produced in the communes should be properly understood as product and not commodity or whether the product and commodity should be understood in some internally or externally related connection. Of course, the nature of the commodity economy was the major question raised by the rural commune form. It was on that issue, the whole law value debate hung. Nevertheless, Wang's position here is unique. As he articulates, the question could not be exclusively about circulation and price. That is how value was realized either in circulation in exchange or in relation to price, unless one wished merely to return to the problem of capitalist economics. Hence, it is the conditions under which product, chanping is produced and allocated that has to become a question of an internal to the social relations of production. Primarily, while the question of circulation and exchange is external and only secondary, in other words, it functions only with relation to its positional subordination in the new social formation. In this theoretical and material context, the problem of whether Chinese economy was socialist in a national sense, necessarily intruded as an important consideration. Wang wrote, quote, the reason the commodified product remains necessary is because to a large extent, we still require the law of value to play a positive role in stimulating production and enhancing the social forces of production. To the extent that, add that unquote, to the extent then that China's socialist economy was unevenly national or to put it differently, to the extent that the national economy and the socialist economy were not yet temporarily or spatially aligned, you had a mix of various kinds of economies at the time and the socialist, the most advanced form of the socialist economy then was the rural commune. The law of value was required for the regulation of the productive and allocative relations between the uneven sectors and for the positive stimulation of sectors, not yet producing and yet still stuck in producing, not yet producing products, sorry, and yet still stuck in producing commodities. In other words, the production of commodities is backward form and the producing of product of Chanping is the more advanced or socialist form. With the problem of commodity circulation having been in part transformed into the product, the problem of product allocation, in other words from Shangping Liu Tong to Chanping Fenpei, the mechanism of realizing value also had been transformed. It was no longer the old law value that dominated Jirpei, but the new law value regulated through the new social relations in which the overall productive process was embedded. Thus, if one sees the late 1950s in a transitional frame as comprising layered elements of the new democratic mixed economy, old forms of semi-feudal and semi-colonial productive processes, socialism and communism, then commodity production remained a vestige of a previous mode and its operation, including the old law value based in market exchange remained part of the totality but not in a determinative position. This was largely because the private profit motive was no longer extant under socialism, thus the striving for price and market were no longer of primary concern and comparative sectoral advantage was not the logic upon which product was produced. Instead, the product was part of a totality whose end goal was not profit but provision, gonging. Thus rather than pertain to different sectors of the economy, the law value positively regulated the uneven relations within a whole. This could clearly be seen, Wong says, through the rural communes. The most important point here is about the articulation of uneven social formations in a totality whose social logic has now been transformed. The mechanism or principle of potential transformation of unevenness will have been the rural communes as a new social formation whose integrated economies are not based on comparative advantage or profit but on the provisioning of human life and the enabling of the emergence of the new socialist person. As Wong says, quote, all what needs to do is to participate even once in rural commune planning conferences to listen to how commune members sum up their discussions and convictions about the proportionate investments they make in farming, forestry, husbandry, sidelines and fishery in order to understand that in making certain decisions as a collective and in terms of the overall situation, they do not consider the law of value or comparative advantage in their allocations of resources and labor power. In this situation, Wong concludes, the law of value is, quote, nothing more than the law of commodity prices that must be determined by the socially necessary amount of labor, unquote. Now, the problem of the socially necessary labor time complicates and also clarifies the matter. For some economists, such as Sunya Fang, socially necessary labor time was a form of calculation where the inspection and calculating required to account for efficiency turned the problem of labor into an economic mystic mode where abstract labor becomes a synonym to socially equalized labor as a mechanism of accounting. In Wong's terms, however, socially necessary labor time is a principle of social life where the concrete problems of the reduction of wastage and the provisioning of communes turns the economic as practice into a problem of how to establish the rule of personhood over economics rather than the rule of economics over personhood. Sorry. Rather than just reducing value to labor where labor is merely a countable unit of value, what Wong insisted was that value be derived from labor that is labor is value as a social form of the transformation of life itself. It is undoubtedly here, however, that the continued use of the law of value to regulate backward that is non-socialist parts of the economy can and did get bogged down into the counting mechanisms. And yet as Wong describes it or attempts to save it for the non-determinative and yet important socially regulative function, the law of value must be thought as intrinsic to the foundations of the socialist economic system and the national planning system. In its internality, and because it is at the mercy of human intervention rather than operating anarchically or independently in the marketplace, it can function without threatening to contaminate the non-capitalist totality of rural communes and their particular form of integrated social production and social life. That is if the law of value is not cast in its accustomed capitalist narrative role as player in circulation and exchange but rather is cast in a protagonist role as this primary exposition of the value of labor as a category internal to the new socialist formation of the rural communes. It cannot be threatening to socialist production, rather it contributes positively. By May 1959, the April conference was now concluded. The debate on the law of value moved into a next phase and Wong was very involved in that phase as well. So for him then, in enumerating the ways in which economists and commentators had hitherto misunderstood the law of value, Wong clarified that socialist planned economy requires the law to increase labor power and to accelerate production. And yet still he maintains that the law of value and socialism pertains primarily to the sphere of labor and production and not to the sphere of circulation and exchange. Wong is not concerned with what comes to be called in post-Maldungist discourse scientific management but rather with the reduction of wastage in the overall economy and the stimulation of product that could help China cope with the necessarily self-reliant autocrat strategy of development imposed upon it by the global sphere. He is interested that is in labor as a form of social life and livelihood rather than a source of accumulation of surplus value. In general, what this position allowed Wong to argue was that the rural communes were an advanced social formation that provided the conditions under which the positive stimulus of the law of value could be fostered while the negative attributes of such a law could be relatively negated. Wong argues this through a number of different essays that I will not go into. They are in a longer form of this presentation that forms part of a paper that is to be published very soon. What he argues, and here I want to note, of course, what lies in the background of the failure of all of this to actually grab hold of anything is the fundamental crash and crisis that happens in the Great Leap Forward and that informs the famine and the deaths of millions and millions of Chinese peasants and people. So I don't know, I cannot determine from the reading of or of anything that I have seen whether Wong is aware in 1959 of this looming crisis. What I do know is that from the end of 1959 to the end of 1962, he stops writing altogether and presumably he stops writing because his abstract ideas of the commune turn out to bear no relation to what's actually happening on the ground. But what I want to do is not to nostalgically look back and think about what would have happened if Wong's abstract ideas had actually come to be but to try to think about the realignment of economic production and sociality in the realm of economic thinking and socialist life and how that was being thought as a philosophical, economic and social problem at the time. And of course, one of the major problems was, I mean, aside from the looming famine and all the rest which was of course a tragic historical outcome but one of the major philosophical or mechanistic problems inhered in how the communes were to interact with one another and with the planned economy. Now this, as we know, broke down fundamentally but it was here then that the logic of the law value remains intrinsic to social and socialist production and is also externalized as a conscious tool of regulation. And here he analogizes the law of value and its function as part of a chess game or a go board, Ipanchi, right? With the mode of coordination not being market competition or profit driven growth but rather based in who can help whom in an overall scheme of development. Now there's to be sure, there's nothing in any of this thinking that helps a technocrat understand what and how to count and where to find the proper object, the dweisham of accounting. If value is derived from social labor and is not an extrinsic measure of that labor, the unit of accounting is not evident. But that is due then in turn to Wong's own conviction that fully exploring and explicating conceptual issues is an intimate and intrinsic aspect of identifying any object of analysis. In other words, the object cannot become before the concept, the concept has to be derived from an object. So on the one hand, Wong dismisses singular explanations of development and instead insists that it is only the dialectical interaction among and between relations and forces of production that provides the momentum for transformation and accelerated development. And on the other hand, in the specific context of socialist China of the late 1950s, there are still huge gaps and thus enormous unevenness in the overlapping modes of production still extant in social life. Whereas in capitalism, unevenness is an obstacle to transformation or put differently, whereas capitalism's purpose is to continuously reproduce unevenness and thus lock into place the unequal relations of time and place or space so as to better accumulate. By contrast in socialism, this unevenness is the very condition for the enabling and promotion of social transformation. Thus in the rural areas, the coexistence of different forms whether cooperatives and communes promotes the transformation of all into the more socialist form as their non-antagonistic contradictions lead to the process of quantity change turning into a change in quality. In other words, the way in which unevenness operates in socialism is progressive and it serves to stimulate transformations in social relations, whereas in capitalism, it is regressive and only serves as a principle of capital accumulation. And so for Wang, it's the emerging rural communes that provide the socially transformative principle upon which socialism as a generalized form of human life and personhood will have been articulated. Meanwhile, it is the law of value was embedded in the emerging socialist forms that allows and forces different levels of formations to interact in a totality whose logic is no longer the production of capitalist profit but rather the promotion of socialist provision. Now, as I said, we all know the consequences the Great Leap Forward and the enormous suffering that that entailed. The fact of the famine of course precluded the subsequent revisiting of any serious further consideration of socialist economics as a form of non-economistic social practice rooted in provision rather than profit in socially transformed relations of production rather than in the primacy of the forces of production. By the 1980s, when the debate over the law of value was rejoined in the context of post-mal reforms, the logic of the party and of social practice already had been transformed. The return in the early 80s of such economic thinkers as Shremu Chow and Sun Yat-Bang and Go-Jun, among others, can be considered good indicators that economics as a science of capitalism was poised for a comeback. The whole question of socialist personhood was thoroughly mutated into the demand that everyone perfectly embody economic personhood, thus short-circuiting alternatives to economicistic and productivistic social logics and social processes. So saying is not meant as a nostalgic reach for a lost past that could have been different. It is merely to indicate that the extended decade of the 1950s debates about socialism were perhaps some of the most consequential theoretical and practical discussions there could have been on the potential of a socialist economics or an economics of socialism. Revisiting those debates is meaningful for understanding what at that time was perceived to be in the realm of the possible and how fully the reality fell short. And I think I'll end there. Thank you very much for this extremely interesting and rich talk. So value is socially necessary abstract labor time and then I'm interested in the abstract there where in the first chapters of Capital, Marx talks about the relationship between concrete labor and abstract labor, which I understand as coming into being through competition in the commodity and labor market and the transformation, if you like, of concrete labor into abstract labor. And whenever I hear about, and I don't know this literature very well, but the law value under socialism or under any kind of non-capitalist mode of production, I wonder about the mechanism of mediation between concrete and abstract labor. And I wonder if that's something, I don't know, that was an issue in these debates in the 1950s. Sure, yeah, that's the wing of the debate I don't deal with. That's the wing of debate, the debate that continues to count labor as a unit of value rather than the value of labor as embedded in social forms. And so, I mean, obviously at some point in order to have a functioning economy and to have the technocrats who run that economy, there has to be units of accounting. And that's where the, what Wong is saying, that's where the translation doesn't happen. In other words, the philosophical concern with how to think of socialist economics with capitalist categories that are derived from capitalist histories and capitalist practices, that becomes the insoluble problem. Because if one is gonna continue to operate in a neoclassical or neoclassical economic categorical universe, it is very hard to break free of precisely these kinds of mechanistic questions that require one to account, mediate, and so on. And so what he's trying to do, what Wong is trying to do is think about how under the problem of socialist labor as provisioning rather than as the extraction of surplus value, how the provisioning gongin is going to realign concrete and abstract labor. In other words, there is no longer a gap. There's no longer that difference between concrete and abstract labor. If one thinks labor as the value of creating livelihood and creating personhood rather than personhood creating value. That's the best I can do there because, but people like Sun Yat-Fang, Shemu Chao, Gu Jun, and many, many others, I mean, I have a huge tome of these 240 economists and social scientists who arrived at the Peace Hotel at the Hoping Fandian in Shanghai in 1959 to debate out these questions. And a full 235 of them are trapped in precisely going round and round in these circles. And five of them are trying to think something else. So that in reading through, and they're vigorous debates, it's not like everybody who's thinking the same set of problems is thinking the same thing. I mean, Sun Yat-Fang comes out on the very wrong end of this, I mean, politically wrong end of this at that time, although he comes out on the politically correct end of it in the 1980s, when this gets rethought. But yeah, these are, Waiyan Nan was a translator of Marx, Capital One, Two, and Three, so he's intimately familiar with Marx's discussion of these things. And what he's trying to do is think his way out of the capitalist traps. He doesn't succeed in, I mean, I think that he's provocative for that reason. And the reason I'm interested in him is because he refuses to subordinate his philosophical thinking to party dictates. But by the same token, it's not practiced economy. It's not practical. Last night I was reading the poverty of philosophy and Engels has a nice introduction where he's complaining about Rod Berthes. And Rod Berthes is doing this apparently, using, trying to come up with socialist economics using bourgeois political economy categories by basically saying, we should try and find a way to make the law of value work without exploitation. And what was funny to me was it seemed actually a lot like Austrian style critiques of socialist planning where Engels says, if you try and do that, then everything will have to go, because you lose the market as the mediation between concrete and abstract value, you'll have to do it through sort of central planning by the state and that will interfere with people's freedom and will lead to shortages. And I was amazed, like, oh, this is Engels talking, right? And it sounds to me like that's, maybe not in those concrete terms, but that's sort of you and Engels and Wang Yan'an are maybe all saying that the trouble is once you have a revolution, you need to stop trying to use capitalist economic categories in your analysis of what you're trying to do in socialism. Well, I mean, Wang was, as I tried to indicate in my discussion, I mean, he's very clear that China presents not the national economy of China is not even, it's not evenly socialist. It is very unevenly socialist in fact, and it could very well be that way for a very long time. And therefore one has to use different conceptual categories for different kinds of things. But if one is reaching for socialism and not reaching for capitalism, then one has to reach for philosophical and conceptual formulations that don't merely repeat capitalist desires and capitalist narratives. And so he's not saying that, all of a sudden 10 years after the revolution, China should be fully socialist and everything should be abolished. He's not saying that at all. He's trying to rethink what the, I mean, as we know unevenness in Marx or as a problem of capitalist development is the premise upon which capitalism works, is the creation of unevenness, so as to further accumulate people like David Harvey and so on have discussed this as a spatial fix, whether one believes it's a spatial fix or some other Rose Luxemburg crisis of over accumulation, whatever it is, right? There you, colonialism as whatever, these are all familiar categories and familiar notions. So that for him, he's very clear that unevenness in capitalism is regressive. It holds places back. It holds people and locations enthrall to the domination by capital. But his understanding of unevenness in socialism is entirely different because there is unevenness in socialism, especially in China socialism in 1959, you have these very advanced forms, which are the communes, and then you have regressive forms, which are even though things are being nationalized already by the 1958-59 nationalization of private property and so on, you do still have private profit, private and various forms of production and accumulation that are not yet subordinated to the socialist principle. And so for him, the question of how to transform those sectors of the economy or those sectors of production into socialist forms is premised upon the unevenness where you have the advanced forms that will drag along and finally pull out of their capitalist backwardness will pull along other sectors of the economy. Obviously, none of this had enough time to work before it all crashed. And so yeah, it's not clear that there was an answer at that time or at any time to this question. It's just that he was not a fan as the Mao was not a fan of the anarchic marketplace as being the mediator of economic life. So Mao in 1959 makes very clear that the market has to be under politics in command to use a phrase. This is part of a larger set of writings that I've been doing on Wang Yan'an and these critical moments 1930s, 1940s and 1950s when the problem of the economic had to be rethought. So the 1930s in the context of the global depression, the 1940s in the context of the total war and the 1950s in the context of the transition to socialism at each point what constitutes economics not as a disciplinary practice but as a social practice had to and was rethought very fundamentally. And so at each point there were huge debates that Wang Yan'an was central to in many ways. So I've been trying to think through this periodicity of debate from the and of course the logic of concepts which I published in 2017 deals with the 1930s, 40s, 1980s, 90s comparisons. So I thought I would go back and do a more embedded 30s, 40s and 50s consideration which is what this is part of. Something that I think is really one of the most elegant features of capital as a book across the three volumes is that he starts with his own presentation of this is how I think the capital system works. And then through a very elegant progression you see how the bourgeois understanding emerges out of that. So it's a nice sort of historical materialist understanding of bourgeois ideology and in particularly the trinity factors of production form. But the marginal revolution hadn't happened yet. And then I think most Marxists I run across just see the marginal revolution as kind of basically the second international was getting powerful and scary. So they had to do some really kind of say course apologetics and get rid of value from their economics. And that doesn't, to me that doesn't seem like a very good account. Like there should be a way of sort of keeping with you know Marxist project of saying like why marginal utility is a sort of necessary development of bourgeois ideology. And I'm just wonder in his engagement with the popularity of marginal utility types in China did Wang Yanan having account of why this is happening? Well, I mean his account of why it's happening in China is a non-account. It's really just these are all these are these are these are compredor disciples of you know shitty economics economics you know from elsewhere and they're just you know ideologically bulldozed into this because it seems closest to the common sense. So that you know his dismissal of its adoption in China is very very is very offhand. And I mean he doesn't minimize how what a grip it has but he does minimize what you know he doesn't think about it in terms of a narrative of you know why this at this point. His critique of Austrian school more generally and why it is wrapped up in its relationship to the German new historicism which he equally despises, okay. And so that he thinks both of these are and that he pins these two the idea strangely I guess are not so strangely that these are in Europe backward economies that need to think their way out of backwardness into something and that these are and that these are mechanisms whether it's new historicism in the national economy nationally at that nationalist economies like with Friedrich Leist or so on or it's the Austrians that these are backward economies that need to think their way through and out the other side of their backwardness. I don't recall exactly. I mean it's been several years now since I read him on the Austrians and I wrote, you know and often I've given talks about the magic of concepts in various places and people ask me specifics about the Austrian school. I said everything I know about the Austrian school is in that chapter. I don't independently study the Austrian school of economics so that, you know I'm not an economist and I don't independently study it but the problem of the Austrian school for Wong is that it conforms to a certain kind of in a so-called backward economy where you don't have the mechanisms of imperialism or of imperial control and of colonialism or those are not the major mechanisms through which capitalism has advanced what you have are individual heroes who can go forth and fulfill their desires and so that it comes out of a national backwardness. Yes, of course that failed miserably and yes, and as I said Wong's and everybody Sun Yafang and Srimu Chow and so on all of them go silent from the end of 59 until 62, 63. And so one has to take this silence as either having been politically silenced or just being horrified at what's going on and therefore having very little to say about it in the terms that are discussed. By the time you get back from the disaster by the time people start re-engaging the question of economics you're into what the historian Morris Meisner has talked about as being the Thermadorian reaction to the Great Leap, in other words the return to certain kinds of private profit and so on and those are re-theorized and so the commune, yes the commune is heavily theorized through the 1960s and certainly through the 19, through the cultural revolution until it's disbanding in the 1970s, the late 70s and so on the communes then become re-theorized as failures as abject and absolute failures no matter whether they actually had some efficacy or not they are abandoned of course as a social form. So yeah, sure Chinese economists have taken up the commune form repeatedly specifically most recently in the debates Wente Jun and his debates over rural reconstruction and so on have revisited the communes as social forms so sure, yeah, there's a ton of economic work work from economists on that for sure.


Well, good morning everybody. How are you? Great start to the day, right? Yeah? My name is Ray Boshara. I direct the Center for Household Financial Stability at the St. Louis Fed and it's great to be here. And first of all, I want to thank the conveners of today's today's event and as well as the financial supporters that made it possible. Some of you know that I spent nine years at the New America Foundation before joining the Fed three years ago and I have to say I don't miss being a grant seeker but I do miss working with folks like B.T. Roe and Brandi Mikhail and other folks who we're just fabulous partners to work with. Because I work with the Fed, I now need to say that these are my own views and not necessarily the views. And I'm glad that I remembered to say that. So I'm going to start off with two questions here on the millennial challenge. First, you know, how did we get here? How did the symposium come into being? And here I'll say a little bit more about what we'd alluded to about some of the research we did at the St. Louis Fed that brought us here. And then second, there's what, you know, what is my brief take on the millennial challenge and then we'll turn it over to the real millennials on the panel here. So how did this symposium come together? Well, when I started at the Fed a few years ago, I've been working in this field of building savings and assets. I think the experience of the recession made it very clear that we can no longer talk about just savings and assets. We had to talk about debt and the entire family balance sheet given the role that debt had played in bringing down both families and the economy. So that was our framework. And then under the leadership of our Senior Economic Advisor Bill Emons, who we'll hear from soon, we decided to focus on demographic drivers of balance sheet away from income as a determinant. And we focused in particular on age, race and education. And we found that younger, non-white and less educated families both lost the most amount of wealth from the recession and were the slowest to recover it. And it turned out to our surprise that age actually ended up being the strongest predictor of who lost and who recovered their wealth, even controlling for race and education. This was a pretty remarkable finding. And then, however, we thought we should look back a little bit further, go beyond the Great Recession and see what happened. And so we went back 25 years. And it turns out that if you look at older Americans, those over age 60, in real terms, they had double their wealth in basically one generation over, you know, about 30 years. Middle-aged Americans, those aged 40 to 60, in fact increased their wealth by two thirds over that period. But younger Americans, those under age 40, in fact, had lost 10% of their wealth in real terms. When pressed for reasons, we cited weaker labor markets, the rising cost of higher education, reliance on loans to pay for that education. And perhaps a little surprisingly, the world at luck simply played when they were born, you know, that younger Americans simply happened to follow some of the luckiest generations that America may ever see. So it was just poor timing. It was poor timing. So, you know, we were troubled and kind of fascinated by these findings about age. And so we decided to convene a research symposium on this very topic that was held in May in St. Louis. But we thought after this symposium, I thought, God, this is really rich with insights. And I just didn't want to stop with research. I just wanted to stop with the balance sheet. And, you know, since I spent nine years at New America and 20 in DC in total, I'm kind of a policy guy at heart. So I called Reid and my colleagues, former colleagues at New America, and said, what can we do about this? You know, can we think a little bit beyond research, think beyond balance sheets? And Reid and I together hatched this idea of a cross-cutting policy symposium looking at a, you know, pretty broad range of issues. Now, to give it some credibility, Reid and I thought that even though we are cutting edge, we are aging Gen Xers and thought we needed to bring some real millennials into the discussion to add some credibility to what we're doing here. So I called Gen Michori first because we had done an event together on student loans at the St. Louis Fed. And they had been in turn brought in the ruse of the campus network. And I think they've learned a little bit from us, but I believe we've learned a lot more from them on how to do this right. So let me just offer a couple of brief thoughts on what I think is the millennial challenge, millennial, millennial challenge. And then we'll turn it over to our panelists here. Since the May symposium, the Federal Reserve has released new data on the wealth and income of families. It just came out in September. And we had been expecting a recovery. We thought, you know, we'd seen signs and other data that we kind of turned the corner on the recession. But in fact, things got worse for everybody. Things got worse for every group between 2010 and 2013. And, you know, that the Spallant Sheet Recession was in fact stronger and deeper than we had imagined, you know, that the Great Recession had cast a much longer shadow on the recovery and on struggling Americans than we had anticipated. Now, no one was spared in this recession. And again, the numbers got worse for everybody. But it was particularly harsh on younger Americans. And, you know, just more generally, we found that looking at the recovery overall, we had about a third of Americans who were doing fine. We called these the thrivers. They're better educated, they're older, and they tend to be white or Asian. Overall, they are thriving, they're doing well, they recovered, they lost wealth, but they recovered it pretty quickly. And overall, they're doing pretty well. But the many two-thirds of the population we call struggleers, less educated, younger, and they tend to be belonging to a minority or a historically disadvantaged group. They're two-thirds of the population. In many ways, if you look at family wealth, which is a really important barometer of your well-being and how well you could do in the future, we have a new economic divide in America. And it really is this divide between struggleers and thrivers. And the two-thirds of Americans not yet fully recovering their wealth, you know, this is troubling. It's troubling for these families, and it's also, I think, troubling for the recovery of the economy. So, as I mentioned, younger Americans are among those struggleers, and the recession had a particularly hard, pretty bad effect on them. And as we mentioned, what was really challenging is that they hit the labor market during the Great Recession and its aftermath, leading to reductions in both their income and their wealth. So, I see two key challenges here, two key questions that we have to think about for millennials. The first question is, how permanent are these reductions in income and wealth? You know, can in fact they recover? Or is this something that's just going to persist throughout their lifetimes? And then, second, thinking a little bit more broadly, you know, given that what we learned about the wealth levels of younger Americans being below what they were for previous generations of younger Americans, you know, can they ever either reach or exceed the wealth achieved by previous generations of younger Americans? You know, the part of the American myth or dream is that every generation does better and better. And for the first time, we have a generation, at least in terms of wealth, that may not exceed the wealth of their parents or grandparents at a similar age. So, are we entering kind of a new normal here? I'm not really sure. And again, this challenge is especially acute for younger Americans who are minority, lack of skills, education, and networks. Now, I don't want to end on that note. It's a little daunting. I would like to mention something that the demographer Neil Howe shared with us at our May Research Symposium, which I thought was really interesting. And it's this idea that every generation reimagines the American dream for itself. It thinks anew. It thinks fresh about who we are and what is success and what we're trying to achieve. And, you know, they define it in their terms, not in our terms. And we have to be careful about imposing our view of the American dream with a boomer view of the American dream onto these current millennials. And, you know, there are signs of encouragement, of course. I mean, you know, I was looking at the White House report that came out a couple of days ago, 15 economic facts on millennials. Number three says that they value family time and social networks and want to have meaningful careers. You know, and so maybe their meaning, their success, their definition of success has more to do with meaning than it has to do with material possessions, or, you know, which, if that's the case, I think that's great. And it doesn't preclude the challenges of having what is, what Brandy described as financial security, how we get there I think is very different. But if success isn't the two cars in the garage in a suburb, that's, I think that's actually a pretty good thing. So, with that, I'm going to turn it over to first to Jan, then to Sarah and Lauren Allen. And let me just do a couple of brief introductions before I do so. You all have extended bails. Jen Mishory is Executive Director of Young Invincibles. And as I mentioned, we participated in a student loan form with us last year. Sarah Adela is a Policy Director of Generation Progress. And Lauren Allen McCann is an organizer, tech policy expert, and a Civic Innovation Fellow at the Open Technology Institute at New America. Not the New America Foundation. I'm learning at New America. So, let me pause and turn it over to Jen. Thanks so much, Ray. I'm really excited to be here today, and thank you so much to everyone who worked so hard over the last couple of months to put this together. Young Invincibles actually got started about five years ago around the healthcare debate. And we got started because we felt like the youth voice, the millennial voice, wasn't really present or wasn't present in a way that was genuine, authentic, really representing the challenges and perspectives of young people in that debate. So, young people wanted health coverage. Young people were struggling to get health coverage because they couldn't afford it, because they were struggling with a lot of these economic challenges that we've seen over the last couple of decades. But stakeholders, politicians, and media, they weren't always providing that perspective in a way that was accurate, that was based in data, that was based in the perspective of this generation. So, we found that in healthcare, and as we got started, as we engage in this research, we found this in all these other ranges of economic challenges facing this generation, access to higher education, access to employment. Really identifying the trends and challenges that this generation was facing was crucial to being able to then identify solutions. And over the last five years, we've really found that those challenges are unique. They've been happening over the past couple of decades, but we've also seen challenges that have really been exacerbated since the Great Recession. So, I want to talk very briefly about one example of a trend that we've really focused on. We're going to talk more about it later, but I think really, really shows the kinds of trends that we've been seeing over the last couple of years. And that's higher education. So, someone going to college in 1980 could go to school full-time. They could work a minimum wage job over the summer, and they could not only pay for their school, but they could leave with about a thousand dollars extra to cover their additional expenses. That is absolutely impossible to do today, as most of us in this room understand. You can go to school today. You can work over the summer at a minimum wage job. You can maybe pay for half of your tuition at a four-year public school, and you're left with about five thousand dollars in tuition that you need to try and cover somehow. So, those trends have been going on for several decades. Now, we also know those trends have been exacerbated in the last five years since the Great Recession. Another example. When my mom went to college in the 1970s, she went to a public school. She probably paid about less than a thousand dollars in today's dollars to go to college. When I went to school, I graduated from college in 2007. I paid about six or seven thousand dollars a year to go to a public institution. Much higher, so a pretty good deal in comparison, although significantly higher than my mom. Seven years later, that same school cost thirteen thousand dollars to go. That's UCLA, my own mother. So, we're seeing trends that are based in decades of state disinvestment, but then also really, really high disinvestment since the Great Recession. And those trends are mirrored in other economic trends that we're seeing in employment and access to health coverage, etc. So, we're excited to be here today to talk about those trends and to really work to closely define the nuances of these challenges that are facing young people. Because I think that you hear a lot about these challenges in the media. You hear a lot of discussion about millennials, but really digging into the data and figuring out what's going on will help us better to find the solutions that we want to see. So, Sarah, I want to hand it over to you. Thanks, Jen, and thanks everyone for being here today. Thank you so much for inviting me to be on this panel. My name is Sarah Aldello, and I am the Policy Director of Generation Progress. We are the Millennial Engagement Arm of the Center for American Progress. Quick question, because this is a panel that talks about how many of you are, millennials are, whether you identify as that or not, you're born within the age range. All right. Okay, so thank you. Thank you for that. And it's really exciting to be in a space talking about the millennial generation with so many millennials in the room, because obviously you all are the experts in this conversation, and we have a lot of data that we're going to be talking about. At the end of day, this data reflects a lot of what we think is so important when we're talking about the millennial generation is, who are we talking about? Well, someone mentioned earlier that the millennial generation is over 40% people of color. And this is something that is at the core of our work at Generation Progress, because if we are not minimally reflective in the room of what those demographics look like, then how the heck are we going to come up with solutions to better help the millennial generation? But what does that mean for the millennial generation? We need to look and see not only how the generation overall is doing, but how African-American youth is doing, how our Latino youth is doing, how our API is doing, how our Native American is doing. And while we've been seeing some really positive trends about youth of color going to college, we're still out there. We're not doing good enough. When we look at unemployment rates and we see the trends among young people, we also have to look at African-American unemployment rates, which are double the national average. If we're not looking at these very specific groups, then we're not looking at the generation because the generation is made up of people of color. I think the other thing that we need to really focus on as well is looking at the amount of LGBT young people in the millennial generation, by LGBT for those who don't know, I mean lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender young people, over 6% of the millennial generation identifies as LGBT. This is double what older young people are doing at this time. When we look at things like access to jobs or who's out in jobs, one, we don't have data, which is really troubling about queer youth and their ability to find jobs and be employed. But what we do see is that for those who are working, who are out in the workplace, the older generation is out at much higher rates than the younger generation. Something like 40% of LGBT adults are out in the workplace, whereas it's only about 5% of LGBT young people. When people talk about queer youth, we're like, oh, people are coming out younger, there's a lot of amazing activism and organizing happening, but if we look at trends around unemployment, young queer youth are freaking out about the idea of losing their jobs. At the end of the day, millennials want stability. This is something that we've seen in our polling and with talking with young people, and if you don't have a job, then you're not able to take care of yourself and your families. So what we've been seeing is that we've been seeing a lot of people who are out in the workplace with their resumes and from their social networks. Where maybe you in college, if you were able to go to college, you were a part of your pride group and you worked at your resource center and maybe you volunteered on a campaign, which is amazing and things that I would look for when I'm hiring, but we see from queer youth are taking all of this off their resume, which makes their resume not as strong. We're talking with young people and I wish we had more data on this, but unfortunately, there's not questions that are asked around sexual orientation and gender identity in so many of these surveys. So I say this when we're talking about the diversity of the generation, diversity yes means racial ethnic, it also means sexual orientation and gender identity, but what it also means is like as your country of origin and something that came out in the White House report, which I don't know, maybe some people are undocumented, maybe some people are documented, maybe some people have green cards or are citizens now, but that also means something very different from what we're talking about because we haven't seen those numbers since the early 20th century. So we are a generation that is diverse in so many different ways and if we're not reflecting those voices in our spaces and what we like to do a generation progress is we have summits and conversations and for us one of those things that we get really excited about because yes we are quite optimistic as the millennial generation is that we see these issues in a very intersectional way. We can't talk about unemployment without talking about our own identities, be it as an immigrant, be it as a queer young person, be it as a Latino or African American, they all come together. As someone who started off in reproductive justice spaces who is now working in economic justice because at the end of the day whether or not you can have a child or support a child is also an economic decision in a part of your economic well-being. So I'm really excited to jump in further in this conversation and to really discuss yes, let's talk about the millennial generation, all the hopes and dreams and promises that there is to come but also the challenges that we face as we live with these varied identities in our everyday lives. I want to like stand up and be like actually just kind of piggyback on what you're saying as the tech policy person, I'm supposed to now talk to you about Facebook and what millennials are using online media to talk to each other and we have a new sense of connectivity because of that. But I think again that's too much of a general perspective on how millennials, how people are actually using technologies and even taking a step back what kind of technologies we're building in the era of millennials. Right now it matters less the fact that Twitter exists than has become the organizing platform for not just Ferguson but for Occupy. We're seeing movements happen in real time at a variety of scales internationally yes but also here in the US that are intersectional in their nature. I think this doesn't come up enough when we actually sit down to talk about technology tools, we get scared talking about how younger people are actually using them to address systematic racism and classism because in general we're quite uncomfortable talking about systematic racism and classism but you know what I'd say that's part of what it means to be a millennial. I get torn between thinking about this generation as an entire collection of that kid from the emperor has no clothes or Peter Pan. I mean we are optimistic but we are also in this place where we've kind of at the end of our rope. I don't have much more to add than what's been said on terms of like the economic landscape but the fact that we have seen Occupy and Ferguson in the last five years alone means that we have a generation of people who are tired of just dealing with rhetoric and who are at a point where they want things to be taken literally. We can't just talk about housing numbers if we're not talking about people who don't have access to housing in a very literal and substantive way. And yes that involves technology but if we are actually thinking about technology in the millennial context we look at how these technologies are being decentralized. We look at how community wireless is happening and often actually isn't driven by millennials. It's often done in older generations and this is where I kind of bring up the idea that we are also Peter Pan. When I say we I'm talking about the majority white demographic that controls a lot of the narrative. Often when we have conversations about technology in the millennial era we are talking about smartphone usage among a certain white population and then we stare at black Twitter and we kind of drew a little bit because it's completely fascinating to us.  The whole point of this is to say in everyone's interest in the millennial generation we are missing the ways in which this should be an intersectional point to look at age more generally to look at how when we develop tools and technologies and also target our politics at different demographics. We are in a post Obama generation where we have convinced ourselves that it's going to be young people running campaigns that's going to change politics at the same time ignoring how burnt out we all are with politics. How campaigns and campaign technology have burned us out on what it means to live in a governing system. It's an interest, you can look at this fact two ways. One is that to the fact is that millennials are registering as Republicans and Democrats less than any other generation and yet we have a higher opinion of Congress. The political geek in me wants to read that as a desire for governance. A desire not just for a morphous concept of policy but actually to see the system work and to see the system work for everyone. You could also look at that as complete disengagement as the gaps that exist growing bigger and the people on the one side of that line growing farther and farther away from access to power. However we slice it, this is the generation that is going to get real about power. That is going to be talking about power in everything that we do and that is going to be pervasive throughout all the conversations in the next time. And to the extent that we are able to tap into the history of the generations that came before us because surely power dialogues are not new. And to the extent that millennials my kin, especially my kin in technology are capable of applying history to the present text. I think there's going to be a lot of interesting developments but I basically just want to re-echo this idea that we are intersectional and what we can't do in our conversations is isolate it from this particular demographic. Great. Thank you all. So let me begin with one question and then we'll turn it over to the audience. So fascinating insights on education, identity, power, I love it all. What's it all aiming towards? What's success? Neil Howe in his generational analysis as I mentioned noted that each generation defines the American dream for itself. So in your view, what is the American dream for millennials? What is success? You know what I think, so we actually had some polling on this question a few years ago and we said, do you think that you're going to be better off than your parents' generation? And about half of the respondents this was 18 to 34 year olds said no. They didn't think they were going to be better off than their parents' generation. But we also asked, do you think that you'll achieve the American dream? And about 70% said yes. We do think we're going to achieve the American dream. So I don't think you could relate a lot into those sort of two responses. But what I like to think about those numbers are that people do think they're going to achieve the American dream but that might look different. In fact it probably will look different than other generations. Success will look different. To your point earlier, perhaps that's a good thing. I think there's probably going to be a lot of bad things about that because we've been facing a lot of economic challenges over the past couple of decades that are going to decrease household wealth and other challenges that are going to start to manifest themselves. But I do think that success will look different and we're already seeing that in terms of the numbers of young people who are waiting to buy homes, who are waiting to get married, who are waiting to have kids. Just the definition of what success looks like in your 30s is going to look different. I think the question of the American dream is really interesting and I bring it back to I want to go back to the comment I made earlier about diversity in the generation. Millennials are over 40% people of color and I think we have to remember that for communities of color, the American dream has been something that we've been striving for for a very long time and have not ever reached. And so this idea of what is an American dream is we want it but yes it's going to look really different and there's going to be different milestones in our lives that are like part of us getting there. I feel like there's this new life milestone where it's paying off all your student loans. I don't know if like folks have like I have no one here there but I notice like on Facebook and stuff people are like my friends will say oh my god I just paid off my last student loan and then everyone's like oh my god I'm going to do that someday I'm going to pay off my student loans that's great. And previous generations would have parties to burn their mortgage whenever it was paid off. So the idea, I've heard of this about burning a mortgage off and I'm like wow getting a mortgage that sounds great. Maybe someday that will happen. Then you can burn that too right? Yeah I'd love to burn that. There have been folks who have been talking about burning promissory notes for student loans. But this America dream that we all want to have, we want to be able to support ourselves and our families and that's going to look very different depending on who we're talking to because for some of us supporting ourselves and our families means that it might mean having kids but it might mean not. It might mean getting married. It might mean not. It might mean supporting our parents who are either who are not doing well or who also might not mean that as well. And so I think the American Dream for the Millennial Generation is the flexibility to make these decisions for ourselves and not to have them made for us. So for example when we talk about my friends who are working and have kids the idea to choose whether or not to stay home for kids in childcare, that is a real economic decision for most of my friends and it's certainly not because I want to be a stay-at-home mom or not or I want to be a stay-at-home dad it's because I don't want my paycheck to go all to childcare or I don't want to just or I do want to stay at home because that's what we've decided. The decision is being made for us and so for me and then talking with my friends and with the young people that we've been working with the American Dream is the ability to make decisions for ourselves and not for them to be made for us. And to that point to create the policy levers that open up those decisions, right? Exactly. It means things like childcare not being more expensive than college.  My friend is about ready to have a baby and for newborn care it's $400 a week and that's as cheap as she could find it. That's crazy. Yeah. One of the interesting stats that doesn't get talked about too often related to marriage is that almost a third of millennials say that they'll never get married with a good deal of insurance. Recently Time Magazine did this survey of what if we offered marriage in different kinds of contracts and they did it kind of with a tongue in cheek like, oh, let's see what millennials do with this. Millennials ended up rating two forms of marriage alternative systems of marriage incredibly highly. One was the beta marriage where you go into a contract for two years and then you have the opportunity at the end to either sever without any divorce, any consequences or renegotiate your terms and extend your marriage. The other was the real estate model where you decided at the onset of marriage whether you were engaging in a 5, 7, 15, 20 and 35 year I believe contract and then with those similar checkpoints. And everyone reading this thinks it's absurd because marriage is one thing and marriage is a man and a woman and you know it's not anymore. Marriage is for the rest of your life except that half of Americans get to forces. When you start unpacking these things we realize that we have been living with multiple American dreams but without necessarily identifying that. And to me it makes the I first read this article and perhaps it's because I have my millennial goggles on 24-7 I just was like yeah this seems really sensible to let people mix and match and roll their own but it isn't. This is one of the things perspectives that millennials are bringing into this. And when you think about that in terms of policy it's going to mean the institution of new programs. It's also going to potentially mean or should mean rewriting existing programs as well. Alright so when Xers and Boomers think about you know risk and we understand that you guys are you know not quite as risk. You're not the risk takers we know. We didn't think it would apply to marriage. I mean this is a pretty radical idea mitigating risk I guess even on such a fundamental institution. Fascinating. Yeah. Well I mean marriage and divorce it's one of the largest like financial consequences that you can enact in your life right? I mean when you share assets there's a number of large financial decisions but the fact that there's even the potential for nuance and how we would approach this and thinking about different contracts it's worth considering the ways in which again to me everything comes back to power but if you're looking at a generation that grew up with high rates of divorce a generation that also is one of the I think one of the peak rates of single motherhood I believe in like recent years like we are watching what family structures mean change in real time so why not our formal family structures? Interesting. Yes completely radical but then again that's why you asked three millennials up here right? Yes. Yeah you broaden my notion of what it means to be risk averse. Very interesting. Do we have time for some questions? Great. Brown rules please identify yourself in your institution if you have one and direct a question to any one panelist if you'd like. Do I see any hands? Any hands? Come on this had to be provocative. I could talk about Occupy more. Yes here. Go get one too here. Hi my name is Eric I used to be with the Roosevelt Institute and now I'm with the Alliance for Justice in town and I was really really excited that you named power in this conversation that you uplifted that concern because I hear people kind of intellectualizing the feelings of millennials all the time trying to figure out like who we are what brands market to us best but the conversation about we're not just risk averse because we're united uniformly that's what we're going to do but because we had such constraints placed on us that we grew up in decades of violence and war or we saw any semblance of the New Deal consensus vanish in front of us or all these other things so I guess I want to reframe the conversation a little bit about even within a conversation about student debt where our choices have evaporated and where in many cases we're risk averse because we're embedded almost like slaves to this kind of economic system and so I guess I'd like to hear a little bit about in these kind of visionary ideas of what millennials need from our political system, economic system, social system whether or not you see us working through institutions, outside institutions or in some sort of hybridized situation to not just you know envision something because Silicon Valley told us to but because it's something that we need now and we need to have opportunities, experiences, etc Yeah, thank you for bringing that up so I love these conversations of power because if we've looked at the millennial generation like we are, like was mentioned earlier we're pretty pissed off as a generation if people have not realized and we're expressing it in different ways and so you know some of the young people that we work with and we're partner organizations are not only in Ferguson right now but are like leading the fight in Ferguson is talking to old school leaders which is great we love our old civil rights leaders but there's also millennials who have broken off and are doing their own things and leading their own direct actions in Ferguson, in Ohio really pushing back against police brutality that has at this point, I think we can all agree has gotten out of control in this country especially against black and brown young people but that's one set of issues there's other issues as well I mean if we look at reproductive rights and access to abortion care and access, those were young people who took over the Texas state capitol who were pushing Wendy Davis, Leticia Vandepied on to force the filibuster those people that was young people who were leading that fight young people are the ones who are knocking on doors to get folks registered to vote young people are the ones who are turning out in elections but we're doing both and right we're trying to work within these systems because we get there's a system to be worked in but we're also creating our own systems as well and for one of the things that I love to talk about with Millennial Generation is like everyone like year 2020 2020 is really important for a couple reasons one, all millennials will be able to vote not only will all millennials be able to vote but we're going to be 40% of the voting block and that should really freak out people who are controlling these old systems of power because it's not going to say the same things are going to change now of course I am very concerned because we as the Millennial Generation have to keep working with our brothers and sisters to make sure we are engaged because there are intentional efforts out there to get us to be quiet and to get us to stay home and to get us to stop caring but I think perhaps it's like that optimism that we have where we kind of don't care about that for now and we're going to keep pushing whether it's an access to choice, whether it's an access to jobs and employment and apprenticeships to be able to join a union why can't we join unions at rates that our parents join unions that's crazy so but yes power is absolutely at the core of 2020 like that is one of those big markers that we have because our generation is going to show its power yes now but also then one of the other interesting elements I think to think about this especially now that we have Ferguson as a living example of how you have external power structures organizing right, you have actual individual people pulling together using social media the formal institutions have gotten involved the formal institutions have helped us do that and you do have that kind of collaboration but then it's interesting to take a step back and look within the context of young people mobilizing and using these distributed technologies where we've seen it not work as well people have a lot of different opinions on Occupy but Occupy could have become the offline mobilization effort that translated into the student loan debt revival right, there was a huge movement where people pulled it was like November 16th I participated and I left my bank and I went into a local credit union there was massive mobilization on these very small scales but it never leveled up into a movement to affect policy in that way by contrast we have the dreamers which was an undocumented youth movement that was incredibly decentralized and actually had a lot of conflicts with major institutions when they came in to help them organize and actually if you come tomorrow to the political participation panel we'll have somebody there who actually helped organize from the dreamer side to talk about this more and I think that is we're looking forward into these patterns and we're thinking about 2020 and we're thinking about beyond 2020 watching this relationship between formal institutions and real individual people is going to be the fascinating element in terms of like how power gets used, whether power gets corrupted and also how these institutions evolve, institutions that can play well with others, institutions that can take a step back and that can let when people are mobilizing on the ground in Ferguson that can let that happen instead of getting involved and being like by the way this is CNBC are going to be the ones I hope that will kind of evolve or die in this process but that's to me the big challenge that millennials are putting outward in terms of formal institutions of power. But on Occupy though some of those organizers are like many are still organizing and a lot of them just bought out student debt of those who are attending for profit colleges like that was amazing so you still see some of that like those remnants still happening and I think that's the other thing in terms of like what is power rate, power isn't just like something that's there and gone, power isn't something that's built, it's a muscle, it's something accumulated Occupy is still happening, there's Occupy radio reaches I believe over like 60 countries around the world one of the headquarters is here in DC these movements don't die just because the hashtag loses attention I certainly know that if you have ambitions to redirect social spending it's heavily tilted towards previous generations of filaments and a lot of work on this if there's any hope of sort of having more resources geared towards younger generations they're going to need a lot of power can I have hands, anybody who'd like to make a question or comment, I think we're going to take three together and then we'll turn it over to the panelists so there was one over here earlier any other any other folks okay Steve and then Hi I'm Christy Green I've been in academia I'm actually trying to get out of it but one thing I've often heard as an academic is that I need to teach diversity by race, gender everything and I've started to wonder why, and I'm a Gen Xer, when I teach millennials should I be teaching them something or should they be teaching me so is there something that needs to be taught about diversity? Okay hold on I'm going to take a couple more. Steve and then do I have a third? Okay great As a Gen Xer it's great to see all the Steve Oriel, I'm actually an advisor locally, been working in financial security for the last 20 years and I guess two pieces of good news one just on the diversity front for the first time I know in my career both the CEOs of my professional association and primary company are both women so I want you guys to know on the private sector side there's just being made but we can work together on all these issues so thanks and yes here please I think I'm a little stuck I'm Emily Baxter I work at the Center for American Progress and I was wondering if you guys, you talked about this a bit but do you take a cynical or an optimistic view on hashtag activism un-clectivism or slacktivism and has anyone done any research on that? Great, do you guys want to respond to one of those questions or? Sure, I mean I could take certainly also the last question I take a pretty optimistic view about online engagement you know I think that we've seen example after example of young people using technology to make their voices heard institutions responding to that I think there's certainly examples where you know you can take the cynical view and perhaps might be right to do so but as a whole we, I don't know that there's been and maybe you can jump in here if you know differently than I do significant research looking into that except that we know of specific examples where we've seen it work Yeah I think well one to answer your question also to go back to teaching diversity like it's both Anne right we can all I think some of the best classrooms that I've ever been in are ones where yes the teacher is teaching but the class is also teaching as well as someone who worked with students with special needs for two years that was the experience of my classroom and that was how we actually I was able to do the most teaching was when I was talking to my students like listen yes I'm like Mexican-American my Spanish is awful and yours is much better than mine but so if you can work with me on my Spanish then I'm going to work with you on reading by bringing both of us to a similar playing field that is how like the best education has happened in my experience oh there's my there but also diversity is not just like you have to also live diversity right so it's like who is in our classroom who are we reading where are we going what are these and are we creating space for those especially in academia and depending on where you teach I went to Georgetown not the most diverse campus that there is but how do we also create space for those with diverse experiences to be able to participate in the classroom because not frequently and like very frequently we're just kind of shut down in those spaces because for many of us we've not been in majority white spaces and to be able or spaces that are different from our own identities and when we are in a minority so maybe it's making sure we have create create space for those with disabilities maybe it's recreating space for those who are low income or first generation in terms of like the hashtag activism I go back and forth super effective when we're targeting companies right I mean goodness like you have a bad experience at potbellies and you tweet at them and they're like oh my god we're so sorry right here's a sandwich here's a sandwich we're going to connect them right away I had that experience but I think there are lots of questions about like about policy now one of the most successful well a very successful thing I saw that was great but things have shifted greatly talking about the Dreamers is in the 2010 fight for the Dream Act to pass I remember Dreamers were the first ones who started shutting down Facebook pages for senators and they were like the first movement who was like you know what we're all going to go on this we're going to like the senator we don't like and we are going to all post the same time the same message and so eventually like they literally like these are not offices that were necessarily opening doors to us but when we shut down their Facebook page they knew that we were there and so I think success can be defined in many different ways and we have to like tease out what that means online because sometimes it means getting people to pay attention to you who won't open doors to have a meeting maybe it hopefully it means like getting more legislation passed can I just jump in really quickly and say so my my feeling with hashtag activism is like it's great our generation is like totally full of memeability which is the ability to like pattern idea and then spread it and we can all tap into the idea and we need to go back to it but that to me feeds into a very problematic perspective of what politics is that keeps power on the outside where the many are always going to the few and bang on the door and saying please let us and we have this amazing cat meme or please let us and we had this hashtag that is very powerful and when you Google search yourselves later you will be very ashamed I want us to offline better to me it's like click click activism aside right it's actually about the ways in which politics with the ways which government is infiltrating our entire lives every part of our lives we have the opportunity to influence that in so many different ways so how we use online tools now is not necessarily problematic but like a learning curve that shouldn't stop us from thinking about governance about the policy process beyond legislation and our opportunities about how town hall meetings are structured and what opportunities for engagement is there and I do think that's a challenge for millennials I'm optimistic because I think that this idea is and this research is part of my work and if I'm here the hive mind is obviously getting there too but that is going to take willful action to translate how we interact with online tools I don't think you can I mean using online tools is just that it's a tool right it's a tool in the toolbox and it's a very can be a very effective tool for one of many okay we're getting the signal and but before we think our panelists here I want to note that Lauren Allen is going to come up and talk a little bit about what comes next so but first of all let's thank our panelists here for giving us up for a great time so in the spirit of interactivity and conversation know I'm not about to drop the name of the hashtag I'm going to talk to you about how this afternoon works each day of the millennials rising symposium there is a policy workshop breakout session those are going to be our opportunities to do basically we're doing here but with more conversation on the different topics that each of the panels covers we're going to convene in this room for these dialogues and we'll be split up by topic we're going to be run in an unconfirmed manner which means that each of you will have the opportunity to contribute fully we're going to be convening at 3.30pm for the first one today and there will be one tomorrow at 11am after the two panels then don't have to worry about it we'll run through all the directions ahead of time but essentially what we're trying to get from these conversations is what you're thinking not just what you're thinking about as we're up here Mike and talking to you but also what are the challenges that you see and what are the kind of provoking, stuck in your teeth questions that you know are going to take time to workshop and revolve that are really going to take actually the hive mind to work through so as you're going, as you're taking notes they know that you're not just taking notes for yourself potentially you're taking notes for all of us, thanks in advance and I promise this will not be a painful experience because it is the last guard between us in this room and us in that room with reception afterwards so I'll be back at 3.30pm to talk some more but look forward to having your interaction then perfect, thank you, ok, thanks everybody