In and Beyond Class: Radical Subjectivity of the Youth

• In Event: 121 - Section on Marxist Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 01. Social Justice Movements

Abstract

Despite the presence and leadership of the youth in uprisings since 2011, sociologists have been shy to qualify the youth as a revolutionary subject. Instead, existing research tries to frame the heterogeneous masses in class analyses emphasizing middle-class, precarious, and working-class components, and assesses their radical subjectivity accordingly. This paper argues for the radical subjectivity of the youth suggesting that the youth is a social category of capitalism like wage-labor, and as important as classes are for capitalism and revolutions. The youth is constantly being-made as both victims of a future capitalism, and agents to realize that future. In the midst of this unique position they can develop their own productive forces to resist against their transformation. Together with the youth's closeness to our mental faculties, due to their not-yet-complete alienation, the youth is more likely to trigger radical imagination and have the material basis to practice it compared to other groups during times of capitalist crises or innovative transformations.

Author

• Onur Kapdan, UCSB