I used to think that people focusing so much ire on boomers was anti-Marxist because the main contradiction in American society is class (settler / indigenous, bourgeois / proletarian) but I’ve started to wonder if this profound and really ubiquitous age-consciousness (ageism) is actually just a step toward class consciousness? Like I’m guessing most people who hate boomers don’t really have a problem with homeless boomers?
I’m thinking also of how women in South Korea are refusing to get married or have kids and how this will basically destroy South Korea (albeit slowly) if trends continue. Women in South Korea are objectively correct in identifying men as their oppressors, but is this awareness of the patriarchy a step toward class consciousness and revolutionary thought or is it a dead end? I guess it depends on the person as well as circumstances.
It still seems like, regardless of how hard the bourgeoisie pushes the idea that only individuals exist and anyone can rise to the top if they just work hard and smart enough, large numbers of people are possibly developing nascent class consciousness, which can lead toward an understanding of historical materialism and scientific socialism. This is basically an extended “is it gonna be barbarism or socialism?” meme but I just thought I’d post it here to see what people thought.
It could also develop into reactionary anti-retirement sentiment.
hate boomers -> abolish social security
Definitely.
No. “Boomer,” “Millennial,” “Zoomer,” etc. are terms that were invented for marketing. Generational warfare is largely a distraction- the major reason older generations tend to lean more conservative is because poor people die younger.
Edit: Just to add, Millennials and Zoomers would probably be a lot more right wing if not for the 2008 recession and housing crisis. The biggest reason they tilt more left is because the current version of capitalism has run out of ways to give them the stability that older generations enjoyed. That’s it- there’s nothing intrinsically better about young people.
its one of those things that can lead to correct conclusions on accident but it needs to be corrected before it leads to dumbass shit
Yeah, because it’s not rooted in actual political economic theory, it can be easily co-opted by liberal bourgeois propagandists and fascists.
If you hate the concept of boomer because they’re out of touch and have it better than you, that can easily be shifted to sell you garbage marketed for “youth” or get you to start coming to conclusions that the reason they had it better was because of war and segregation.
It’s important to reveal the economic basis for the massive shift in stability between generations driven mainly by the erosion of all public services and the wholesale selloff of all control over industry to private interests who are now shifting into a primitive financialization model which kneecaps production and will lead to total ruination.
I mean, maybe, I guess? At the very least I think that “anti-boomerism” can be an exercise in understanding survivorship bias. We know very well that marginalized groups tend to have shorter life expectancies or lifespans, and this was especially pronounced in the boomers’ birth-years. We know that, for instance, a lot of the key figures in Stonewall and the 20th century LGBT rights movement thereafter were of the baby boomer generation or on its fringes, but very many of them succumbed to AIDS or any number of other tueurs long before the modern-day anti-boomer sentiment could emerge.
So I think this is the important thing for people to keep in mind. That when boomers seem to “be a certain way”, that it isn’t anything inherent about boomers, but more because a large share of the boomers that one will have to interact with on a regular basis are going to be those who were “privileged enough to survive”. This thinking extends to understanding that there are also those boomers who were fortunate enough to survive, and that there are also those boomers who are now a bit less privileged than they used to be (e.g. old age or disease brings its own forms of marginalization).
But maybe I only reached these conclusions about baby boomers because I have '60s parents, of which one died when I was young for reasons I’d consider to be directly tied to being in a marginalized group, and I myself have this medieval serf ass life expectancy. For someone else with different life experiences, I can see how “anti-boomerism” can be something much more reactionary, if they aren’t willing to look at both sides of the coin as it were, and instead go “boomers make me angy therefore old people baaaad, got dang moochers got to live life on easy mode now expect me to pay for their golden years” or whatever.
Edit: Like another comment says, zoomers would be a lot more reactionary if the capitalism “we” were born into worked better for us, and generational labels as a whole are largely a marketing thing or a distraction. I’m just saying that you could push someone down the right path when thon brings up “boomers”.
