by Luther Blissett » Tue Aug 12, 2014 11:59 am
I see it more as a barely-contained simmering pot about to boil over.
Younger generations today may know nothing but militarized police, checkpoints, sonic weapons and microchips but they possess enough information to know what a dystopia is and to rebel against elements of society that are anathema to nature. They've come up in a time where widespread occupations of public space, hacking, leaking, whistleblowing, and their Egyptian Skype buddies staging revolutions are the vastly more impressive and inspiring new normal than the measures which oppress them. My generation didn't have that, and as far as I'm aware the generation before didn't have anything closely resembling it either. My stepdaughter organized one in a series of large-scale protests against the corrupt school district at the age of 14. I didn't organize any protests at 14; the depth of my activism was soft environmentalism via the Surfrider Foundation and reclamation of public space for skateboarders and self-centered, privileged revolt against cops.
I've mentioned this before but it's apt here too: the younger generation of leftists coming up from behind has, on average, a vastly superior, more adept, and deeper understanding of marxist philosophies and the contextual knowledge of how to apply them to revolution (or at least, what seems to me to be the foundations preparing for explicitly that). When I was a young leftist, my fellow young leftists, when I could find them and communicate with them pre-internet, could discuss anarchism and revolution only in the most naive, elementary terms, and it was enough to write passing, maybe even sometimes excellent college essays. It's unimaginable to me what it must be like to be granted access to historical context, global perspectives, tools of revolt, philosophy and voice as a poor and angry child.
The global brain theory can be perfectly applicable to the soft sciences, and some of the things that can be important to them, as well. That can explain the means for how class struggle becomes an emergent issue. It's not some lost gnosis that inequality is worsening. It's not like our parents' generation has hidden it from children.
There's a reason why their media - The Hunger Games, Snowpiercer, David Comes to Life, Wall-E, The Purge, Radiohead, Divergent, The Giver - and resurgent interest in vintage cyberpunk focuses on both violent and non-violent revolt against corporate-controlled dystopian visions of the future or near-present. In much older science fiction, the machinations that led to societal collapse or complete control were often obscured or ambiguous. There is now a marked change, capitalism and elite power tend to be revealed either from the outset or at the conclusion as a driving catalyst for negative change. Art and action created by young people today operates along similar lines - take aim at the rich kids, get them in the crosshairs, and take them down.
Why is this important? I think that denying that all this is happening to the younger generations, and that they are probably fond of their oppression, is repressive.
The Rich and the Corporate remain in their hundred-year fever visions of Bolsheviks taking their stuff - JackRiddler
