Millennial Bashing, Generational Conflict and Worker Division

There is a long-lasting narrative about a war that is fought in western cultural spheres again and again and again. It's when a society, built with the sweat and tears of a now aging generation faces their successors, who are somehow inadequate to take over what their predecessors have built. Especially Millennials. Nobody likes millennials. Gen X thinks of them as spoiled and weak-willed, with bad work ethic and a whiny disposition. Zoomers think of them as weak willed, all too willing to give up control to the mechanisms that have been actively ruining the economy and associate them with a failure to take charge of what the boomers had previously broken beyond repair. And don't get either generation on either side of them started on the boomers/zoomers respectively. Either way, ones own generation is the only one that ever did anything decent - at least of the ones that are still alive. We can even see zoomers going off about generation alpha not having an attention span on account of spending so much time on TikTok already, and they're still very much aware about this generational treatment, considering they're currently being blamed for ruining the low-income job economy through their unwillingness to lick capitalist boot for table-scraps. The generation that fought in WWII might have been the only exception to this phenomenon in modern history, though most of them proceeded to do some pretty awful stuff. If it's not clear by now, I feel that this idea in general is pretty silly. Still, I use "boomer" as an insult when somebody is complaining about the noise or young people existing in a space - "loitering" as the aforementioned boomers refer to it to. I tend to think of that as a mindset though, rather than an age. VSauce once described this phenomenon as Juvenoia, a sort of paranoia about what the youth might be doing wrong, or even just differently, and while it's a nice enough conversation starter, looking at this phenomenon's function is illustrative for a lot of things.

The impulse to write about generations, or any generally formless (I'll describe what I mean by this later) category of people might honestly just be a writer's reflex, especially when analysis is being elusive, and somebody observes ultimately normal, but not inoffensive behavior of other peer groups. Aristotle didn't start the trend, but he certainly contributed. Some have linked this behavior to authoritarian tendencies and presumably the younger generation clapping back as reactionary behavior (?), and while this is probably an apt observation (I don't have any background for these papers) I'm obviously more interested in the effect of the practice, as the effect has been sneaking into reporting from overtly capitalist, supposedly youth-positive, and outlets that borrow occasionally from scientific journals.

Any time a narrative like this emerges, it might be worth asking whether it is as universal as it purports to be. Obviously, the narrative of generational conflict of this type is familiar in the western cultural sphere, but outside of it, it takes on somewhat different characteristics. In Asia, for example, generations only as recently as Gen Z have been taken to exhibit notable enough collective traits to give label them as one, discrete generation, instead of the much more fluid (and much more sensible, in my opinion) "young", "working age" and "old" people. It's rolled back into retrospective analyses of the Millennial in contrast to it, but those structurally have a somewhat orientalist character, by construction. This makes obvious sense, considering that with the exception of Japan maybe, the development of most Asian nations were not segmented in parallel with that of the Imperial Core that more or less developed its lifestyle parallel only achievable through leveraging the unequal labour conditions in previously imperialised nations. Trying to fit a label like "Millennial" to a group of people only marginally aware of even the American cultural hegemon at the time will obviously have to derive its definitions from the western understanding of the corresponding demographic. Doing so will have some (possibly) unintended consequences, however, as at this point, the definition of a generation and "generational character" is rarely ever invoked outside of the context of generational conflict. It projects conflict into spaces where the "Millennial" exists, regardless of cultural context or historical analysis. Clearly then, these categories are highly constructed, which doesn't need to necessarily be a bad thing. It just has to turn out useful.

Analysis of generational character is somewhat of an informal observation. There are occasional statistics involved, but in essence, these observations are a look at the effect of overarching challenges that have faced a population. The culture it produced, the advances made and the collective anxieties developed. It stands in relation to not insignificant elements of historical analysis, but is itself not useful beyond shorthand. It's also, for a lack of a better term, very WASPish.

Contemporary culture in the western sphere has largely been filtered into the public consciousness through the eye of affluent North Americans, and until very recently, produced in the Americas. The American petit bourgeois has in a way functioned as a "gate keeper" for popular culture. During the time of the US invasion of Iraq, this was very visible, as American jingoism filtered down through culture into modern European islamophobia through the medium of their culture, despite most of their European military allies declining Bush' call to arms. Hippie culture during the Vietnam war spread into the European allies despite many of those countries not being directly involved, and also despite the strict segmentation of Europe into US and Soviet bloc states. The culture that finds its way into the broader consciousness then, mostly portrays petit bourgeois understanding of the world and its political mechanisms. This is somewhat ironic, as beyond the explicit story-telling, much of popular culture is not in fact produced by the white and gentile "upper middle class" that builds the bulk of culture consumption, but from marginalized and politicized communities. This means that this is the main perspective provided as data, which more or less stands in contrast to the collective reaction to the social and economic strains experienced by the generally much more numerous (and thus economically more vital) working proletariat, whose material conditions have not significantly changed in their relation to their labour across several of these generations. I might make a sweeping generalization and group the working class relations ever since the end of the Cold War together as effectively identical.

While the filtering process has effectively reduced the function of generational categories to a reflection of the "upper middle class zeitgeist", the way it is used reveals a somewhat unsettling mechanism. Obviously it has found purchase in mainstream political and social discourse, and it's been adopted as an elementary component of ones social identity. This is probably the reason for the attempts to fit these categories into contexts that they don't really find any use in. As we've seen by now where it was derived from, it might be good to think about when they are applied next. In fact, that is not a trivial exercise.

An aggregate of the articles mainly concerned with the generational war narrative shows a tendency towards either moral or economic arguments. The former category I'd argue has very little place in public discourse, as it's very thinly veiled populism at best. Luckily, these things face backlash eventually, when harping on it isn't fun anymore, although by then the effects of the discourse have played themselves out also. Much of the analysis is based in the interaction with money, specifically the interaction with financial reserves either saved up by oneself, but often implicitly inherited, i.e. not technically their own. At the same time, this is often put into contrast with their relationship to procuring money, i.e. with the job market. Now, this might seem like a decent way to deal with two different demographics, but there is an implicit constraint made beforehand. Readers that know my tendencies will probably have spotted it by now: These behaviors are only really relevant to the working proletariat. The bourgeois doesn't interact "normally" with the job market and as a consequence, in both cases their spending habits are less structured, for lack of constraints. This in itself is a little odd, but let's remind ourselves of the framing this classification invites: No generational character without generational conflict.

Is it then implicit that generational war is only a relevant behavior within the proletariat? The bourgeois' relationship to capital and the job market definitely hasn't changed too much in the last century, so how come they aren't also invited to the party? That sure seems convenient, especially since this conflict is framed through the lens of (semi-)intrinsic "character". I treat it as "intrinsic" in argument, since in liberal philosophy, character is something transient within a group, meaning that while it might be the product of tradition and collective development, by the time it has manifested, it's basically static for the foreseeable future. Conflict between two such collective characters implies a contradiction that blocks the groups from collaboration until it's resolved in one way or another. In this context, it fragments the proletariat into age groups spanning roughly 20 years each, using essentially authoritarian arguments each of the groups is encouraged to level towards the other. 20 years is (or has been until recent years) also a very convenient measure for one generation, as it splits the working class demographics into three groups, one of which is on their way out and on the level of vulgar politics mainly interested in retirement benefits over the interest of the labour conditions, or even material improvements of the labour force, one of which has reached the point in their careers with the highest mobility and best prospects, interested mainly in the calcification of the structures that has just recently turned friendly towards them, and one has just entered the job market, often with bourgeois aspirations and a willingness to sell their labour for less than it's worth, whether they technically know better or not.

It's a minor tragedy that the narrative of the generational war has entered the public consciousness at all. It further fractures proletarian interests beyond the already base political interest of the individual. A united worker's movement would be able to achieve a lot more, if these superficial divides were overcome, and materially, this really isn't a case of many singular struggles, but rather a united one to begin with. To add to that, this obviously isn't the only false dichotomy that splits proletarian interests in this way. Many of such highly constructed, problematic and ultimately harmful classifications can be found in the rhetoric of the (crypto-)fascist in need of a scapegoat. Young men searching for perspective get pulled into the "men's rights activist" movement that uses a constructed, deliberately traditionalist "male-female" classification for similar ends, though in this case it's overtly visible enough for even most moderates to point and laugh at the Tates and the Petersons of the world. But even in this case, the analysis often ends when the chief clown of the ring has been identified, leaving the core issue unidentified and as such unaddressed. The key term here is intersectionality, basically the idea that while different individuals are faced by different sets of problems, some of which might intersect, structurally addressing them will find them fighting for the same causes and against the same structures. Rejecting them because of some perceived divide is as such directly counterproductive.