• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, September 3, 2024

If you, like me, spend any time hanging out with millennials or Gen Z-ers, you’ll know that capitalism is not their favorite thing.

That’s fair enough. I have my own qualms about capitalism.

But with capitalism, like most things, it’s not really what you say about it that counts. It’s what you do about it. And for all of us, millennials and Gen Z included, we can talk all we want, but until we stop buying, nothing is going to change.

Based on an Epsilon study,  Gen Z and millennials are outspending baby boomers in just about every consumer category.

Say all the nasty stuff you want about capitalism and our consumption obsessed society, but the truth is,  buying shit is a hard habit to break.

It’s not that hard to trace how attitudes towards capitalism have shifted over the generations that have been born since World War II, at least in North America. For four decades after the war, capitalism was generally thought to be a good thing, if only because it was juxtaposed against the bogeyman of socialism.

The capitalist era peaked in the 1980s during the reign of Ronald Reagan in the U.S. and the UK’s Margaret Thatcher.

But then the cracks of capitalism began to show. We began to realize the earth wasn’t immune to being relentlessly plundered. We started to see the fabric of society showing wear and tear from being constantly pulled by conspicuous consumerism. With the end of the Cold War, the rhetoric against socialism began to be dialed down. Generations who grew up during this period had, understandably, a more nuanced view towards capitalism.

Our values and ethics are essentially formed during the first two decades of our lives. They come in part from our parents, from others in our generational cohort, and from our environment. And for those growing up since World War II, media has been a big part of that environment. Prior to 1980, you could generally count on bad guys in media being Communists or Nazis.

But somewhere mid-decade, CEOs of large corporations and other ultra-capitalists started popping up as the villains.

I remember what the journalist James Fallows once said when I met him at a conference in communist China. I was asking how China managed to maintain the precarious balance between a regime based on Communist ideals and a society that embraced rampant entrepreneurialism. He said that as long as each generation believed that their position tomorrow would be better than it was yesterday, they would keep embracing the systems of today.

I think the same is true for generational attitudes towards capitalism. If we believed it was a road to a better future, we embraced it. But as soon as it looked like it might lead to diminishing returns, attitudes shifted. A recent article in The Washington Post detailed the many, many reasons why Americans under 40 are so disillusioned about capitalism. Most of it relates back to the same reason Fallows gave: They don’t trust that capitalism is the best road to a more promising tomorrow.

And this is where it gets messy with millennials and Gen Z. If they grew up in the developed world, they grew up in a largely capitalistic society. Pretty much everything they understand about their environment and world has been formed, rightly or wrongly, by capitalism. And that makes it difficult to try to cherry-pick your way through an increasingly problematic relationship with something that is all you’ve ever known.

Let’s take their relationship with consumer brands, for example. Somehow, millennials and Gen Z have managed the nifty trick of separating branding and capitalism. This is, of course, a convenient illusion. Brands are inextricably tied to capitalism. And millennials and Gen Z are just as strongly tied to their favorite brands.

But, you may counter, it all depends on what the brand stands for. If it is a “green” brand that aligns with the values of Gen X and millennials, then a brand may actually be anti-capitalistic. 

I won’t even delve into the thorny subject of “greenwashing” and the massive gap between what a brand says they do in their marketing and what they actually do in the real world. No one has defined what we mean by a “ethical corporation” -- and until someone does and puts some quantifiable targets around it, companies are free to say whatever they want when it comes to sustainability and ethical behavior

This same general disconnect between capitalism and marketing extends to advertising. An Ipsos study shows that -- across all types of media -- millennials pay more attention to advertising than baby boomers and Gen X do. And millennials are also more likely to share their consumer opinions online than boomers and Gen X. They may not like capitalism and consumerism, but they are still buying lots of stuff and talking about it.

My intention is not to call out these generations for being caught on the capitalist treadmill we all find ourselves. But I do get a little frustrated when they knock the system with one hand and hit the “Add to Cart” button on Amazon with the other.