Generational Politics Is a Real Expression of Capitalist Crisis, Not Mere Corporate Pseudo-Science
Source: Elias Koenig. "Who’s Afraid of Gen Z Socialism?." October 26, 2026. jacobin.com
The Gist
The author says the left shouldn't brush off the 'Gen Z' protests just because the generational labels come from marketers and pundits. Young people really do suffer particular harms under today's capitalism, like joblessness, high living costs, and austerity, and they organize around their age group. Generation and class are therefore linked, and socialists should engage with generational politics instead of denying it.
Conclusion
Socialists should not dismiss generation-based movements like the Gen Z uprisings as a shallow liberal or corporate frame. They should treat generation as a meaningful way young people experience and make sense of capitalism's crisis and the life chances it denies them, while keeping class analysis central.
Premises
- The 'Gen Z' label and generational categories come from US marketing firms, pollsters, and pseudo-scientific theorists like Strauss and Howe, and they often obscure the capitalist class relations at the heart of the crisis.
- Despite this, generation has become a key vector along which movements organize and identify themselves (e.g., Gen Z Mada, Gen Z 212, 'You messed with the wrong generation!', 'Génération 6-7 refait Mai 68').
- Gen Z is the largest generation ever born, and capitalism is struggling to absorb it into a faltering global economy, as shown by mass informal employment, rising youth unemployment, inflation, and austerity.
- The main grievances of youth protests (corruption, austerity, cost of living, rents, conscription, climate breakdown, AI anxiety) are symptoms of capitalist crisis that disproportionately hit young people, giving the crisis a distinctly generational dimension.
- Intergenerational injustice is a fundamental feature of capitalism, which Mitchell describes as 'a form of life built on taking livelihoods from the future,' and protesters themselves link class and generation, as in their hatred of 'nepo babies.'
- Shared experience of historical events can form 'political generations' (Milburn), but different class positions produce different generational units within an age cohort, so generation and class can be analyzed together.
Assumptions
- The way protesters describe and organize themselves is good evidence of real structural generational divisions, not just a media or marketing construct.
- Generational experience can be analyzed through a class lens without reducing one to the other.
- Youth-led protests across very different countries share enough causes to be treated as one phenomenon.
- Left critics (Bevins, Reed) are mainly objecting to the liberal, consultant-driven version of generational thinking, not to every use of the concept.
- Young people's grievances are caused by capitalism rather than by country-specific or non-capitalist factors.