Giroux

GirouxAmerYuthLeftBehindNotes

Many of these nations share a disdain for young people and a not too hidden willingness to take advantage of any youth who are deemed valuable, leaving the rest to be increasingly viewed as troublemakers and subject to a growing apparatus of discipline and control.

Under the global regime of a harsh, endlessly commodifying market-driven society that nonetheless parades under the banner of global democratization, many youth are confined to what anthropologist Joao Biehl provocatively calls “zones of social abandonment.”(10)

These expanding groups of young people, especially those marginalized by class, race and immigrant status, are defined as a liability, no longer worthy of either social investment or the promise of a decent future.

They are deprived of autonomous social spaces in which the conditions exist for them to narrate themselves as individual and social agents.

Every generation for the last 30 years has endorsed neoliberal policies, leaving today’s young people not only without a voice, but also saddled with a set of economic, political and social conditions that have rendered them devalued, marginalized and ultimately disposable.

Ongoing disinvestment in youth across the globe is all too visible and has come to the forefront of student protests in a number of countries

In countries like the United States, driven largely by financial speculation, market values and the lure of short-term profits, young people are relegated to the status of commodities, a source of cheap labor or simply human waste.

As more and more young people are subject to the dictates of the punishing state, they are positioned within a culture of surveillance and cruelty marked by dead time.  Futureless, they have been stuck in holding patterns that make clear that America’s market-driven economy is deeply disconnected from humanity’s collective relationship and responsibility to youth and the future.(14) Young people, for the last three decades in a variety of Western societies, have been led to believe that their choices no longer carry any serious consequences and that a better future is no longer open to them.

It is about creating counterpublic spheres that “assert the public character of spaces, relations and institutions regarded as private” or currently limited to members of the ruling classes and authoritarian elites.(20)

Enforced privatization, the closing down of critical public spheres and the endless commodification of all aspects of social life have created a generation of students, who are increasingly being reared in a society in which politics is viewed as irrelevant, just as the struggle for democracy is erased from social memory. (9)

In a social order dominated by the relentless privatizing and commodification of everyday life and the elimination of critical public spheres, young people find themselves in a society in which the formative cultures necessary for a democracy to exist have been more or less eliminated, reduced to spectacles of consumerism made palatable through a daily diet of game shows, reality TV and celebrity culture. What is particularly troubling in American society is the absence of vital, formative cultures necessary to construct questioning agents, who are capable of seeing through the consumer come-ons, who can dissent and act collectively in an increasingly imperiled democracy.

Sheldon Wolin is instructive in his insistence that the creation of a democratic, formative culture is fundamental to enabling both political agency and a critical understanding of what it means to sustain a viable democracy. According to Wolin,

democracy is about the conditions that make it possible for ordinary people to better their lives by becoming political beings and by making power responsive to their hopes and needs. What is at stake in democratic politics is whether ordinary men and women can recognize that their concerns are best protected and cultivated under a regime whose actions are governed by principles of commonality, equality and fairness, a regime in which taking part in politics becomes a way of staking out and sharing in a common life and its forms of self-fulfillment. Democracy is not about bowling together but about managing together those powers that immediately and significantly [affect their lives]

 

 

 

 

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