13.02.2025

Five generations: Armenian family (1901)

Politics of the generation game

How leftwing are the Zoomers? We are told that 47% want “the entire way our society is organised” to be “radically changed through revolution.” Paul Demarty examines generational dynamics

A rare piece of cheery news greets readers of The Socialist, the weekly paper of the Socialist Party in England and Wales:

47% of people aged 13-27 think: “The entire way our society is organised must be radically changed through revolution”, according to a Channel 4 report, ‘Gen Z: trends, truth and trust’. Other reported findings reveal a deep mistrust in establishment institutions and a sense that ‘the system is rigged against us’.¹

In various mainstream publications, this is more a cause for alarm than celebration. The Guardian is typical:

The Channel 4 report … found 33% of those aged 13-27 agreed that the UK would be better off “if the army was in charge”, and 47% agreed that “the entire way our society is organised must be radically changed through revolution” … Is the younger generation really so keen on authoritarian leadership?²

For the UK’s leading liberal daily, it is no surprise that desire for revolution is ipso facto authoritarian and of a piece with a desire for military rule. The piece also notes some eye-catching survey answers procured by the Daily Mail - that found a supermajority of this group in favour of the chemical castration of sex offenders, and 45% in favour of restoring the death penalty.

Crunching numbers

What, then, are we to make of ‘Gen Z’, the ‘zoomers’, or whatever else you want to call people who are between 13 and 27 years old?

One’s first instinct is to say - nothing terribly much. What is one to do with such crude generational stratification? I am what they call a ‘geriatric millennial’, which feels half-right. Does an arbitrary 28-year-old have more in common with me than she does with an arbitrary 27-year-old? Does a 13-year-old have more in common with a 27-year-old than a 12-year-old? Is this more or less meaningful than Myers Briggs-style personality types, or indeed star signs? What is all this stuff for?

The straightforward answer is - it is for marketing. When you are trying to sell consumer products and services to people, you need to understand the consumers sufficiently to sell enough of your stuff to make your business viable. Crude statistical methods may be just fine for the purpose, even if they defy common sense, so long as revenue comes out the other end of the model. It is marketing, after all, that gave us the old ‘ABC1C2DE’ set of social class categories, which admittedly are more memorable to us geriatric millennials (and, I suppose, baby gen-X-ers) than the young folks. People seem more obsessed with age today.

It is not an uninteresting axis of sociological analysis, but one beset by the troubling reality that people insist, against their better judgment, on getting older. Who should we compare ‘Zoomers’ to: their ‘millennial’ contemporaries, or those same millennials 14 years ago, when they were the age of the Zoomers?

Such subtleties do not seem to have unduly worried the authors of ‘Gen Z: trends, truth and trust’, which Channel 4 rather ambitiously called a research study on political attitudes - and specifically attitudes to the media - and which is the basis for The Socialist’s glee - and The Guardian’s panic.³ On closer examination, we discover that this is all in fact the work of Craft, a market research agency (what else?), based at 1 Canada Square - the pyramid-capped carbuncle in the middle of Canary Wharf. This is the third such report it has produced for Channel 4 on this subject.

From squinting at the footnotes in the flashy pdf C4 published, it seems to be based on a survey of 2,000 ‘Zoomers’, with a survey of 1,000 people aged 28-65 for comparison. This is claimed to be nationally representative, but there are no details as to how this was assured, or in which terms ‘representativeness’ was conceived for two spectacularly tiny samples. I have been unable to find any description of the survey methodology, which is not encouraging. By way of contrast, the annual British Social Attitudes survey is always accompanied by a long pdf offering all these gory details - the 2024 edition comes to 20 pages.⁴ The marketing mavens of Craft plainly consider scientific transparency infra dig.

That said, the fact that this crew were able to find a thousand or so youngsters with a clear (if no doubt somewhat politically indeterminate) sense of the necessity of revolution is heartening on its own - even if, per impossibile, they have conducted the least representative survey in history, and somehow managed to interview everyone in the country in that age bracket prepared to openly call for revolution. I would propose, however, that we should take heart not from the idea that a great youth revolt is about to sweep socialism into being, but from more modest encouragements.

Size

The fundamental problem for the socialist left is a simple one: size matters. This is obvious as a matter of common sense - larger parties and organisations, all other things being equal, have more potential impact than smaller ones. (All things are, of course, not equal - but I leave that to one side.)

There is something deeper here, however, than mere common sense. All the non-size-related advantages in the class struggle - control of production and distribution, preponderance of armed strength, control of the political and judicial apparatuses, etc - accrue to the ruling class and its various proxies.

In order even to obtain small, partial victories, the workers’ movement must unite large numbers. Victory in a single strike requires minimising the number of scabs, for example, which in turn demands that the workers at the firm refrain from scabbing, but also that the unemployed in the surrounding community abstain from scabbing under severe economic pressure. It is mass organisation, at a larger scale, that allows us to redress some of the other imbalances - gatecrashing the political system, gaining some economic leverage through union strength and cooperatives, arming ourselves, and so forth.

To belong to the socialist left in times when it is small and marginal, therefore, is intensely demoralising. It is to watch the world around you grow meaner, crueller, ever more debased with violence. Unchallenged, capitalism at some point devolves to warlordism. It is a hard thing to watch, helplessly, from the sidelines.

After the great snowstorm in February 2018 - the ‘beast from the east’ - I found myself in a tailback on a country lane, which turned out to be obstructed by a vast snowdrift. At the front of the queue, a man was digging away at this mountain with a tiny child’s beach spade, presumably the only relevant item in his car boot at just that moment. In times of reaction, we are all that man. There is so much to do - more and more every minute - and no tools to hand to do it all with. Before long, you cannot imagine seeing another victory in your life.

The means by which we get through these periods are, ultimately, generational. This is true in both directions. Older comrades, who have lived through both success and failure, have an important role to play, which is not always properly appreciated in a leftwing political culture somewhat too enamoured with youth. But so also do the young, with minds still voracious for fresh understanding, and readier to take risks.

The struggle is a long one, and decisive in its success or failure is generational replacement, especially in fallow periods. When done well, the generations shape each other. It is a kind of conflict, but agonistic rather than antagonistic. The youth fearlessly challenge the elder comrades on those points that have, perhaps even unnoticed, become unquestioned dogmas among them; to get out of their routines, among other mere technical matters. The elders in turn teach the youth how to operate in the wider movement, to think strategically, perhaps over more time than the young recruit has yet been alive. There must be friction - it is never a priori obvious whether a policy is patient or merely complacent, daring or merely adventurist. They learn from each other. In the process, a political tradition is handed on, but necessarily changed in the effort.

I may be accused here of dealing in stereotypes, but stereotypes are often true. It is merely a fact of human neurobiology that, to put it crudely, young minds are on average cleverer and more foolish, and old minds wiser and more stupid. These things matter. We are, after all, seeking the liberation of all human beings as they are, not some collection of immaterial souls floating frictionlessly around a spirit-world.

Wrong

Let us think of how it can all go wrong. There are many ways: the anarchist, well into middle age, still insisting on starting brawls with the police on demonstrations; or the precocious youth who has become fixated on some outré philosopher or another and can no longer be even minimally corrected by the elders’ transmissions from planet Earth.

But the most spectacular examples are the most instructive. Think of the Socialist Workers Party, which recruits healthy numbers of youngsters at university - only to burn them out by exhausting their energy in fruitless attempts to recapture past glories. When the SWP rape scandal broke in 2013, the leadership - disproportionately drawn from older comrades - could only lean harder on their command-and-control methods in response. The vast majority of the youth decamped, largely to become absorbed in facile identitarian fads.

Suppose Channel 4 and Craft have done a somewhat representative survey. Large numbers of young people have taken stock of the world around them - as I did, in the wake of the Iraq invasion, and a former generation did in the midst of the horrors of Vietnam, and as people a little younger than me did when the financial system came to the brink of collapse and only banking oligarchs were protected from the dismal consequences - and decided that revolutionary change was needed.

Any adherent of the revolutionary left should find this a matter of relief and great promise. More than the possibilities presented by this particular cohort of potential recruits, which are great enough, we are reminded of the basic point of Marxism: that capitalism, like all class societies, trains its own gravediggers, and no end of strength in force of arms or ideological enforcement can convince everyone, all of the time, that we live in the best of all possible worlds. It is worth digging away, even when we only have a child’s spade to hand!

What we must not do - and here I speak, frankly, to and for the contingent who have been around the block a few times - is idealise the youth, or put too much on their shoulders. We must not project onto them an image of SWPers or CPGBers, ready to sprout fully-formed. We must not suppose that new layers will be insensate to our political weaknesses and cultural deficiencies.

Nor should we pretend that some new turn of world events will deliver a huge generation to our disposal. Allegiance must be earned, in a culture of equality - above all in a culture of honesty denuded of official optimism - and it must be earned from the new layers that are actually there, not the ones we complacently imagine just over the horizon.

The youth of today will be the elders of tomorrow only if their commitment can survive the setbacks intrinsic to the struggle. That is our duty, regardless of the survey data.