Generational Discourse is Anti-Materialist and Must Be Rejected for Revolution to Succeed

HOUDINI speaks on the always-hot-button issue of generational discourse. We are here to convince you that we should toss our product-induced, age-related differences if we want to forge a new social era.

I'm sure someone else (glances at my folder of Adorno PDFs) has already written about this topic extensively but I just wanna do some low stakes ranting about it. And bare in mind, this is all coming from someone who deeply identifies with being an "elder zoomer," who believes that "Gen Z" deserves to be a part of the culture too. Feels like we weren't until Kane Parsons dropped The Backrooms, and this magazine was founded with the intention of giving our generation a voice. But lately, the generational discourse has become stale, boring, I've seen enough generational discourse Tiktoks that have absolutely zero material backing to know that this framework is significantly rooted in idealist thinking.

Here's an example:

Imagine a 41 year old, firmly a "Millennial." They might identify as such. There might be certain things that you associate with this Millennial identity; these things are almost always consumption based. Imagine this: during a friendly discussion at the local gastropub, this 41 year old Millennial laments to their friends that they'd never be able to be friends with someone who's 25. What do they even have in common? 25 years old? I bet they didn't grow up with the Nintendo 64!

See the product as identity? It's a pretty boorish example but I think it works.

Now, imagine this Millennial is working at an Amazon warehouse with a sizable amount of 25 year olds. They end up sticking with others in their own age bracket. After all, they have things in common. They can discuss the days of yore, e.g. "remember Blockbuster?" Again, another product. The Zoomer, on the other hand, might bring up commodities that the Millennial is unfamiliar with. How can the Zoomer relate to the Millennial who's never watched Wendigoon or didn't grow up watching Regular Show? Again, consumption as identity, which circles back to identity as consumption. "I do X because I'm Y."

On the warehouse floor, you see the material reality of labor: the shared exploitation, bodily strain, surveillance management, the need for collective action. But this is obscured by that prefabricated identity. The 41-year-old and the 25-year-old Amazon workers are objectively in the same class, their interests materially aligned against Bezos. But the generational discourse gives them a superficial, consumption-based “common ground” within their age bracket and a manufactured alienation from those a few years younger.

Even without the intergenerational discourse, the division, the stereotypes, the memes, we can see clearly how these marketing labels as identity immediately break apart the working class. Do you need to be a part of the same generation to enjoy the the sight of the wind rustling through the leaves of a green tree on a beautiful summer afternoon? How much music is labeled as Gen X that's enjoyed by Zoomers? Who can't enjoy a Madonna song? What about some of the classic folk tracks? Do we need to be in the same generation to get something out of Pete Seegar? How much of the human experience is shared universally compared to how much is segregated by birth year? Do you need to be in the same generation to know you don't get paid enough, get worked to the bone, and your boss is a prick? How much of this "generation as identity" discourse strips us of our ability to build relations with each other as workers?

If we can't build relations with each other, and our ideas about ourselves are based on consumption, then we become hyper-alienated beings who repost "Look at what they took from you" memes about Pizza Hut interiors:

"But the Boomers!" you might say. Those awful, evil Boomers are to blame for everything! I mean, is Elon Musk a Boomer? Peter Thiel? Bezos? (maybe) Is JD Vance a boomer? The ruling class is multi-generational. We have to be as well. My DSA chapter is like 60% Boomer-retiree-aged women. Could you imagine how much less effective our chapter would be if everyone who wasn't a Boomer made it a problem that half the chapter is?

For every Boomer retiree at the boat launch here there's another 2 who are working minimum wage door greeter jobs, or lined up for our mutual aid food share because living on social security is HARD. People of all ages come through that line. People of all ages work the food share. All of this is coming from a person who's been describing themselves as an "Elder Zoomer" for a decade. I'm not saying that breaking this mindset will be easy. Even typing this I'm like, "come on, they're fucking Boomers it's okay to hate them!" But it's not pragmatic and it's anti-materialist. The year you were born might determine some things, but it seldom determines your relation to the means of production. The benefits that the Boomers saw where only really accessible to the white Boomers as well, remember, black families didn't even get the GI Bill from WW2.

I worked with a Boomer who was a cable dog for Bell before they became AT&T, worked there for 23 years. Lost his pension right before he was ready to retire. He was promised that pension and it was taken by the capitalist. How could I blame him for our current reality when he too has been destroyed by the capitalist? He will work until he dies, almost certainly on the job. Real blue collar, salt of the earth type of guy, whatever you'd imagine a 67 year old cable dog who works like it's 20 years younger than he is would be like, that's him. That's a worker, just like me.

We're all workers man. You know what I thought when I worked with him though? I was kinda honestly vindictive about him telling me how he lost his pension. I knew it was fucked up, but I was like 21 and I still thought "well you're a boomer, you had it all handed to you, now you can suffer like everyone else" That's me without class consciousness using the generational discourse as false consciousness. That's what they want us to be doing.

Perhaps Gen X and the Boomers did have a better social safety net, but look at things like education disparity and chemical poisoning. Are the boomers unique because of they were exposed to insane amounts of lead? And other life altering chemicals? Happens everyday in the hundreds of sacrifice zones around the country, sacrifice zones lived in by, you guessed it, poor working class people. Reading level? Education quality varies so significantly in this country based on class. A well off suburban family in New York today is going to have kids who can read better than a trailer park family in Mississippi right now, and that outcome has basically nothing to do with their generation. Class continues to be the defining thing.

I'm not saying you can't factor age into policy i.e. "gambling apps are targeting young men specifically," but "how do we organize millennials against gambling companies" would be a brain dead thing to ask, no? You would ask, "how do we organize workers against gambling companies?" This generational shit is getting old. Full stop. I'm tried of listening to TikToks and video essays about nostalgia and shit people bought at age11. I'm tired of entire traits being put on to people based on this completely nonsense neoliberal concept. Shit has become secular astrology for some people.

I think it also acts as a form of solipsism. "Anyone who's younger than me has never experienced X and can't relate to Y" is intellectually lazy and acts to uplift your own world view as the pseudo default; everyone else is an abbreviation of it. "What do I have in common with someone who didn't grow up playing the N64/PS1?" has nothing to do with age really, if you think about it. Because you could have grown up in that era and just had a class position that was too poor to afford a console. You might just not have played video games. You might not have had consumption oriented parents. Generations are a very middle class consumer sort of ideology.

All in all, I think generations as a framework are counter revolutionary and only further the division of the working class, which is what they want.