The label “Gen Z” is hardly sufficient to describe such a diverse range of social movements. In many cases, it’s a cliché imposed from the outside by pundits with little understanding of local dynamics. At the same time, generation has undoubtedly become one of the key vectors along which movements organize and identify themselves, from Madagascar’s “Gen Z Mada” and Morocco’s “Gen Z 212” to Germany’s “Gen Z regelt.” “You messed with the wrong generation!” the rallying cry of Myanmar’s 2021 civil disobedience movement, has become a popular motto across the region. In France, the slogan “Génération 6–7 refait Mai 68" (Generation 6–7 is doing May ’68 all over again) has gone viral.

How should socialists relate to such generation-based movements? Unlike class, race, or gender, generation is not a category that has traditionally been at the heart of socialist politics. Generational designations like “boomers,” “Gen X,” “millennials,” or “Gen Z” are not the product of Marxist theory but of predominantly US business consultants, pollsters, and think tanks like the Pew Research Center. Since the 1960s, US marketing corporations have built a profitable industry around studying the attitudes and preferences of supposed generational cohorts.

It’s worth highlighting the sheer absurdity of the generational thinking that is at the heart of this corporate “science.” Its most influential articulation remains that of William Strauss and Neil Howe, two former congressional staffers, who mapped out their “theory” over a series of books, including Generations (1991) and The Fourth Turning (1997). Strauss and Howe argue that human history progresses in continuous eighty-to-one-hundred-year cycles. Each cycle corresponds to roughly one long human lifespan and can be broken down into four seasons (“turnings”), which always occur in the exact same sequence:

First comes a high, a period of constant expansion. Next comes an awakening, a time of spiritual exploration and rebellion. Then comes an unraveling, in which individualism triumphs over crumbling institutions. Last comes a crisis — the fourth turning — when society passes through a great and perilous gate in history.

Every period corresponds to one of four generational archetypes, which, in turn, give rise to one another by way of a specific parenting style: the prophet, the nomad, the hero, and the artist.

According to Strauss and Howe, the recurrence of these different child-rearing styles can explain nearly everything: developments in popular culture, workplace dynamics, economic crises, wars, and all other major events in US history since 1584. Their esoteric musings are loved by political elites of all stripes. Steve Bannon has described The Fourth Turning as “central to his worldview” and based his 2010 documentary “Generation Zero” on its arguments. During his time as Donald Trump’s top aide, Bannon reportedly kept an annotated copy of the book on his shelf. Al Gore, Strauss’s Harvard classmate, called Generations “the most stimulating and politically relevant book on American history that I have ever read” and sent a copy of the book to every single member of Congress. Bill Clinton, in turn, is said to have been influenced by the book in his decision to choose fellow baby boomer Gore as a running mate for the 1992 presidential race.

Unsurprisingly, many thinkers on the Left have been suspicious of generational discourse. Commenting on last year’s Gen Z uprisings, Vincent Bevins argues: “For over a century, it has been young people who are most likely to take to the streets and take risks. Claiming that an uprising will be ‘led by Generation Z’ amounts to little more than saying that it will happen in 2025. . . .  I think the generational framework is a symptom of intellectual poverty.” In the same vein, Adolph Reed Jr warns:

The generational frame of reference is a product of pollsters and consultants who have a political service to sell that is an alternative to organizing durable constituencies around issues, programs, and political vision — the approach through which political movements actually take shape. . . .  This strategy will never help us advance a broadly egalitarian agenda.

Bevins, Reed, and many others are right to criticize the shallowness of liberal generation-based frameworks. Talk of generations often obscures what is at the heart of the present crisis: capitalism and its system of class and market rule. Yet if the current wave of uprisings illustrates anything, it is that many young people do experience the crises of our time in explicitly generational terms.

Globally, more than two billion people belong to Gen Z, i.e., those born between 1997 and 2012, making it the largest generation ever born. Combined with the similarly large Gen Alpha, they make up almost half of the global population. Capitalism has been struggling to integrate this massive new cohort of workers into a faltering world economy. Nine out of ten young workers in low- and lower-middle-income countries (which host the majority of the Gen Z population) are employed informally and without protections. Youth unemployment has also been on the rise. The US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran has only exacerbated this situation, driving up inflation and causing global shortages in oil, gas, fertilizers, and petrochemicals.

While Gen Z protests in the Global South have largely focused on anti-corruption demands, protests in Europe have centered on austerity and the cost-of-living crisis. Both issues concern key strategies employed by the ruling class in response to the deepening structural crisis of the global economy: on the one hand, the fusion of political and economic power and the emergence of a new state capitalism, which has led to new forms of profiteering and corruption; on the other hand, the dismantling of the welfare state and the expansion of rentier capitalism in the imperial core.

Other common themes in Gen Z protests include rising rents, military conscription, climate breakdown, and anxiety over the impact of artificial intelligence — all of which are symptoms of the crisis of capitalism that disproportionately affect young people. In this sense, the current crisis has a distinctly generational dimension. As political theorist and historian Timothy Mitchell argues in his new book The Alibi of Capital, this is no accident. According to Mitchell, intergenerational injustice is a fundamental feature of capitalism, “a form of life built on taking livelihoods from the future.”

As political economist Keir Milburn argues in his book Generation Left, the shared experience of historical events such as pandemics or financial crises can forge what he calls “political generations” — generational units that rally around a shared interpretation of the events witnessed, as well as a shared collective response to them. Milburn notes that not everyone automatically becomes part of the same “political generation.” Within a certain age group, there may very well be different responses to the same conjuncture, which would then form different “generational units.” Importantly, this leaves room to account for different class positions and interests that exist even within the same age group, and that ought to remain central to any understanding of how capitalism operates.

Many Gen Z protesters recognize this interplay of class and generation. A defining element of the recent uprisings has been class hatred against “nepo babies,” the children of the politicians and other elites who are flaunting their wealth online. In Nepal, viral photos of a provincial minister’s son showing an enormous pile of gift boxes from luxury brands like Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Cartier fanned the flames of popular anger. In the Philippines, netizens began conducting so-called lifestyle checks on Reddit, scrutinizing the consumption practices of popular politicians and their family members in light of their declared income. In Germany, high school students striking against military conscription have chosen the motto “The rich want war — the youth, a future.”

It’s not just The Economist and its acolytes who are at a loss over such outbursts of generational rage. The reaction of the ruling class at large reveals an utter lack of both economic literacy and political imagination. While politicians like Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar, Poland’s Donald Tusk, and Donald Trump have echoed far-right talking points blaming mass migration for the unrest, EU legislators are now investigating the alleged role of Russian, Algerian, and Iranian foreign interference. Similar rhetoric can be observed in India, where Narendra Modi’s government has sought to cast Gen Z protests as foreign-funded. Meanwhile, liberal reporting often focuses on the role of social media and various pop culture references in the protests, from the straw-hat pirate flags of the popular Japanese anime One Piece to the three-finger salute inspired by The Hunger Games.

Yet if there is anything new about this protest wave, it is not the occurrence of leaderless mass demonstrations, political violence, or the use of social media as a mobilizing tool (the 2010s provide ample material to study any of them), but the extent to which generation has been globalized as a political identity. Somehow groups as diverse as young Burmese guerrillas, Indonesian delivery riders, and French high school students have all come to think of themselves as part of a political subject called “Gen Z,” as if this were the most natural thing in the world.

While social media platforms like Discord and TikTok have helped circulate generational discourse originating in the United States, the ease with which it has caught on can only be explained with reference to the fundamental political and economic challenges facing young people across the world: economic precarity, ecological breakdown, and the escalation of imperial violence. The ruling class is scared of Gen Z socialism because it has no answer to these challenges.

Socialists are taking note. In France, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party La France Insoumise (LFI) has thrown its weight behind the youth uprising. Videos of Bally Bagayoko, the LFI mayor of Saint-Denis, shielding student protesters from riot police have since gone viral around the world. In India, communist student unions have been an integral part of the Cockroach mobilizations since the early days of the movement. That early involvement is now paying off, with Neha Bora, the eloquent and defiant president of the Marxist-Leninist All India Students’ Association (AISA), becoming the face of the latest round of mobilizations. Who knows which country will be next?