Last December, YouGov analysis of the 2019 uk general election results found, to nobody’s surprise, that ‘age is still the biggest dividing line in British politics’. Labour had a 43-point advantage with the under-25s, while the Tories led by 47 points among the over-65s. Likelihood of voting Conservative increased by 9 per cent for every decade of life. This disparity was just as pronounced during the 2017 election—when the gap in voting intentions between the youngest and oldest grew to a cavernous 97 per cent—and the eu referendum, which saw retirees back Leave in overwhelming numbers. Yet the generational fault-line now taken for granted by the commentariat has opened up rapidly. Just ten years ago, support for the main parties was roughly equal among 18–24 year-olds.

This sudden polarization—which has informed several progressive insurgencies since the financial crash: not just Corbyn’s Labour, but Podemos, Syriza, Mélenchon, Sanders—is the subject of Keir Milburn’s Generation Left: a concise intervention on the relationship between age and class, pooling the theoretical resources of Mannheim, Tronti and Badiou to identify what generates a generation. Milburn is a lecturer in political economy at the University of Leicester and an active member of Plan C: a diffuse anti-capitalist collective that uses experimental organizing methods to raise consciousness and combat the far-right. He co-hosts the ‘Acid Corbynism’ podcast on Novara Media, which applies Fisherian Kulturkritik to hippyish topics like love, freedom and friendship, and his new book is inflected by this outlook: eclectic in its references, optimistic in its analysis, acutely sensitive to cultural affects.

Milburn begins by dispelling the idea that generations are established solely through demographic trends. The Baby Boomers, he writes, came about through a dramatic rise in birth-rates between 1945 and 1965, yet this bulge was bookended by two events that demography cannot explain: the end of wwii and the introduction of the contraceptive pill, both of which influenced the ideological character of this cohort. Any account of generational formation that neglects these social and technological developments—focusing instead on endogenous population patterns—is therefore incomplete. It is vital to excavate the factors that underpin shifting birth-rates, rather than treating them as given.

Indeed, Baby Boomers are one of the only clear examples of a demographic overhaul coinciding with a distinct cultural identity. Millennials were not created by any correlative population spike, yet their alienation from older age-groups remains akin to what Boomers experienced in the 60s. For Milburn, this confirms Mannheim’s thesis—outlined in his 1923 essay, ‘The Problem of Generations’—that generations are produced by ‘dynamic de-stabilization’, or rapid historical change. A new, cohesive age category emerges when, ‘as a result of an acceleration in the tempo of social and cultural transformation, basic attitudes must change so quickly that the latent, continuous adaptation and modification of traditional patterns of experience, thought and expression is no longer possible’. This explains why generations rarely conform to the cyclical 20 or 30-year timescales set out by sociologists. In periods of calm, young people inherit the existing worldview. When that stasis is disrupted, they coalesce around a different schema.

This coalescence takes place because the youth respond to transformative historical processes with an ‘elasticity of mind’. Their relative lack of experience makes them susceptible to the ‘moulding power of new situations’, capable of aligning their perspective with altered realities, whereas their parents have built up a ‘framework of useable past experience, so that every new experience has its form and its place largely marked out for it in advance’. Mannheim insists that this distinction does not make the young inherently progressive and the old incurably conservative. ‘Youth and age . . . do not of themselves involve a definite intellectual or practical orientation; they merely initiate certain formal tendencies, the actual manifestations of which will ultimately depend on the prevailing social and cultural context’. Yet when we consider the 2008 financial crisis—and the austerity measures that flowed from it—there are obvious reasons why these tendencies produced a decisive leftward swing among teenagers and twentysomethings.

The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, writes Milburn, was an earth-shattering Badiouian Event: ‘a moment of sudden and unpredictable change that ruptures society’s sense making’. By fracturing the neoliberal symbolic order, it called for the instatement of new Subjects and new Truths—for a political orientation beyond the tired fatalism of the 90s. This was a call that the young, ‘lacking a solid interpretive prism formed of past experience’, were uniquely capable of answering. It was their responsibility to dismantle the ‘entrepreneurial self’ which Milburn sees as the linchpin of post-Fordist ideology. The primary objective of the Thatcher–Reagan programme, he argues, was not to push through economic reforms that favoured capital, but to deflate the communalist energies unlocked by the Keynesian settlement and replace them with a model of property-owning individualism. The cultural efflorescence of the 70s reflected an emerging horizon of possibility that was incompatible with capitalism itself. This utopian climate was destroyed by the doctrine of There Is No Alternative, which promoted ‘investment in the self’ over collective empowerment, as if societal futures had to close so that individual prospects could open. But it is precisely this belief in individual futurity that the Event of ’08 belied, exposing major flaws in the system supposed to guarantee a profitable return on self-investment. Over the following years, young people watched their life chances crumble amidst the housing crisis, student loan debt and labour-market precaritization. The result was a transcendence of entrepreneurial ontology.

Milburn describes the 2008 meltdown as a ‘passive event’: ‘something that happened to us’ rather than something we participated in. Within six months it had ‘disappeared behind the spectre of deficits in government budgets’, and the onset of austerity compounded the impression that ‘possibilities were closing down’. But while this feeling of disempowerment triggered far-right mobilizations amongst the youth of Eastern Europe, in other countries it yielded to the ‘active events’ of 2010–11: Occupy Wall Street in the us, the student movement in Britain, anti-austerity demonstrations in Western Europe, revolutionary upheavals in the Arab world. Each of these constituted a ‘moment of excess’ in which street-level activism allowed subjectivities to form outside of neoliberal logic. Despite the geographical and political differences between such moments, they shared a striking number of organizational forms, including democratic assemblies and consensus-based decision-making: a commonality that, for Milburn, speaks to a unified process of generational construction, developing common techniques in response to common problems.