Groucho Marxism

I often go and sell copies of The Socialist newspaper in my local town on a Saturday morning, as do many of my comrades in the Socialist Party. One of the things we have noticed recently is that more and more young people are approaching our stalls with concerns about education and employment. These people invariably seem to support the Party’s aims of nationalization, council house building, a £15 an hour minimum wage, and free education. They want better than what is being offered to them by capitalism – and frankly who can blame them? According to the Office for National Statistics, the numbers of young people not in employment, education, or training rose above one million in March 2026, the highest level in 12 years.

For those in education the situation is also dire. They face a narrowed curriculum since the introduction of the EBacc in 2010 (focused on English, Maths, Science and the Humanities, at the expense of the arts), and a high stakes exams-focused curriculum which prioritises content and rote learning, all underpinned by competitive league tables. We should not be surprised by any of this. As the American sociologist Susan Ferguson points out in her book Children, Childhood and Capitalism, under capitalism schooling is fundamentally about disciplining children rather than educating them. We have seen this play out recently with the rise of ‘strict discipline-focused schools’ where compliance and control are prioritized above pupil wellbeing.

As Ferguson outlines, schools disempower and repress children to force them to obtain the exam scores they need to be deemed ‘successful’. Any students who do not obtain the requisite grades are written off as failures. Children from poor backgrounds are hit particularly hard as they significantly underperform relative to their peers. According to the Education Endowment Foundation, in 2013 only around 30% of students receiving free school meals obtained five or more GCSEs at grade C or above, compared to around 60% for other students. Politicians talk of ‘closing the attainment gap’ but if anything the gap is getting bigger. Since 2019, the number of low-income, white British girls passing GCSE English and Maths has fallen by around six percentage points.

Young people from poorer backgrounds are also more likely to be a ‘NEET’: not in employment, education, or training. The recent rise in NEETs has created some panic for those in the capitalist class – not because they care about the peoples’ wellbeing, but because the cost to the UK economy has been estimated to be around £125 billion per year. But there has been nothing done to alleviate the impact of poverty or the cost of living crisis on young people, especially the neurodivergent and vulnerable. According to the Milburn report, an independent review of the increase in the number of young people who are not in employment, education, or training, we have created “a generation that is functionally less able to engage with education and work.”

Perhaps surprisingly, an estimated one in ten NEETs are also graduates. For many such graduates this has meant having to take out a ‘plan 2’ student loan. A recent inquiry suggests that around 30,000 of those who have taken out these loans did not understand the terms and conditions before they took them out. Many of these students were promised that a university degree would mean a guaranteed career; but this is not the case with an increasingly harsh jobs market. We have all heard horror stories of young people applying for hundreds of jobs without success or even contact from a human. Defenders of capitalism have offered various explanation for this ‘lost generation’, from a culture of disability and benefits to inadequate preparation in schools. But these are a smokescreen.

The problem is not that young people are lazy or unwilling to work, as many right-wing commentators would have us believe. The problem is that they are being screwed over by neoliberalism capitalism. Just look at what the current ‘Labour’ government has done since coming into power: hiking tuition fees whilst making cuts to schools and other public services used primarily by young people. A functioning society requires investing in the future of young people. We could start by making education free and wiping off all student debt. The reason the government won’t do this is not because of a lack of money but because it goes against the neoliberal austerity agenda. This agenda exists to create artificial scarcity and discipline the working class.

Anyone who thinks that young people can continued to be screwed over this way indefinitely is in for a surprise. There is only so far that people can be pushed. Young people are increasingly turning to socialism as they understand that is the only way out from the doom loop they find themselves in – as the heightened engagement with our socialist stalls demonstrates. Perhaps the revolution might not be too far off after all. And when it comes, we can be sure that young people will be the ones leading it.