Millennials in the US see themselves as less middle class and more working class than any other generation since records began three decades ago, the Guardian and Ipsos Mori have found.

Analysing social survey data spanning 34 years reveals that only about a third of adults aged 18-35 think they are part of the US middle class. Meanwhile 56.5% of this age group describe themselves as working class.

The number of millennials – who are also known as Generation Y and number about 80 million in the US – describing themselves as middle class has fallen in almost every survey conducted every other year, dropping from 45.6% in 2002 to a record low of 34.8% in 2014. In that year, 8% of millennials considered themselves to be lower class and less than 1% considered themselves to be upper class.


By 2013, wages for under-35s had declined in real terms compared with those of people the same age three decades earlier, even when stripping out the effect of long-term unemployment during the worst recession in recent memory. This means millennials are much poorer than their baby-boomer parents were at roughly the same stage of their lives.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/15/us-millennials-feel-more-working-class-than-any-other-generation


Millennials entered the workforce during or in the wake of the Great Recession. Among Millennial college graduates, unemployment and underemployment, at 8.8 percent and 18.3 percent respectively, are historically high compared with the same age cohort in prior generations, and wages for employed Millennials have dropped 7.6 percent since the onset of the Great Recession. High unemployment levels and low wages are making it difficult for many Millennials to make even minimal payments on their record-high amounts of student loan debt. At present, loan default rates are approaching historic highs, damaging Millennial credit scores along the way.


Americans have always believed that with hard work, they will find opportunities for success, prosperity, and upward mobility. But 2013 polling data show that only 15 percent of the country believes that today’s children will be better off than their parents were.1

http://www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/deloitte-shifts/making-it-millennial/259/

Doesn't take either a radical or a rocket scientist to figure this one out. My generation - and working people in general - are growing weary of and impatient with economic realities and the utter impotence of the bourgeois political system to deal with said realities. The only things missing are radically Left prescriptions, and the means and collective efficacy to implement them...

Doesn't take either a radical or a rocket scientist to figure this one out. My generation - and working people in general - are growing weary of and impatient with economic realities and the utter impotence of the bourgeois political system to deal with said realities. The only things missing are radically Left prescriptions, and the means and collective efficacy to implement them...

Well, material conditions....though I wonder how they even heard about the working class, the term has been so expunged from the American lexicon. And like you said, we gotta work on the 'delivery system'.

My generation - and working people in general - are growing weary of and impatient with economic realities and the utter impotence of the bourgeois political system to deal with said realities.

Here is the stumbling block for most folks today. Most working people today believe that the bourgeois political system's aim is to make workers economic lives better, and that it is just the ineptitude of particular bourgeois politicians that is at fault. The bourgeois system is working very, very well for the bourgeoisie. Conditions, conditions, conditions. The economic times are much like those of the late nineteenth century - early twentieth; the main difference is the emersion of so much of the working class into the ideology of their masters, with no working class organizations to make any counter moves. No communist party organizations to speak of unions to speak of, no labor organizations, at all. The working class has been successfully joined to the bourgeoisie as basically a permanent underclass. This cannot last, but the end ain't yet.

Most working people today believe that the bourgeois political system's aim is to make workers economic lives better, and that it is just the ineptitude of particular bourgeois politicians that is at fault.

Hence the inane idealism of the Bernie Sanders campaign and its supporters (or, if you want to go the route of cynical chauvinism and reactionary opportunism, the Donald Trump phenomenon). It's all predicated on the notion that "if we just throw the bums out" and replace them with "better" people, then there will be no need for truly radical (read: revolutionary) prescriptions for the current plight of working people.