Problems with the youth? Slackers and hooligans, preppies and punks, ravers and squatters, stoners and the completely normal

Translated from MSZ 2-1981

Discontent with the young is older than bourgeois society. Plato was already complaining that the young are “no longer like we were,” which is why he is often quoted in order to explain the harmlessness of the “youth problem.” The certainty that the young have yet to become decent members of society – and that this has to be done the same as with the older generation – is then usually outweighed by understanding for the young: “My God, they are still so young.”

The fact that young people still have to become what they are not yet, this negative determination of a time of becoming, is the fundamental bourgeois error in the appraisal of the young; at the same time, it causes all sorts of silly worries, as if growing up might not work out. A “crisis of meaning” among the young is as easy to postulate as the negligence of the adult world, and one publicly worries whether “these young people will also grow into our society.” Yes, where else would they?

The problem has really never existed that a society would suddenly lose its offspring. The baseless worry about the success of becoming grown ups completely overlooks what young people are and that they already are all they ever will be. Between the ages of 12 and 20, one doesn’t need to first mature into a society in which one has already spent a dozen years of one’s life; nor does this time to complete the knowledge and skills in preparation for professional life serve to differentiate the intellectual abilities of a fifteen year old from those of an adult twice this age: nothing else is to be learned, of course.

The ideology of the maturing process claims a benefit to this stage of life for the adolescent: he learns what he needs to, he becomes what he should be, in order to find his success in the world of careers. One deems young people to be the subjects of their lifestyle – even and precisely then, when listing all the requirements to be fulfilled in the conditions of success by which the young people are measured. In fact, the ages of life derive their particular characters exclusively from the various uses that capitalist society makes of age groups. Accordingly, the young are by no means a “not yet,” but rather exactly what they are used as by the state and capital. Hence a society does not have – as pedagogical sourpusses like to report – the youth it “deserves,” but rather the youth it needs. What else should young people do, other than prepare for what is in store for them? To expect fundamental criticism, novelty and subversion from, of all people, those who do not yet have a say is unfounded. A few stones might fly and the kids might be badly dressed, but even in 1981 “preparing for it” is what the youth do – only, today no longer the same way as 10 years ago.

“We weren’t like that!”

– everyone thinks at the age of 25 and forgets that different things were required of them. Although the 1953 VWL exams could not secure the Chancellor’s chair for everyone, the dyslexics of the Weimar Republic are the vice-presidents of the Bundestag today. Until not so long ago, studying was not just a means to a career, but already its success: the student did not become a member of the elite first, he was a member of the elite. With the expansion of schools and universities, the democratization of elite education was initiated and a growing interest of the state and capital in the qualification of the young was signaled to the youth of the time with keywords like “depleted educational reserves” and “promotion according to the Honnef Model.” As scientifically trained employees, one could use them and always more of them.

Today, the successful reform of the education system faces a state policy that does not want to produce more academics, but fewer; as well as an economy that, through increasing rationalization (yes, former students have already achieved something!), makes itself more and more independent of employees from all levels of the educational hierarchy. Overcrowded classes and teacher unemployment, “exploding” student numbers and job cuts at the universities, frozen student grant money and widespread agitation against the “educated elite” signal to the next generation a quite conditional interest on the part of the state and the economy. Since everyone is allowed to study whatever he wants, it means little, and education policy consists only in the fight of the Ministers of Education against the students’ desire for education: they think they are in demand as educated people, when it is still not clear whether they are in demand at all! Too many of them are at the universities, the community colleges, and even high school has become a qualification (!) which one can not get today.

If, for those who have already climbed the upper levels of the educational system, the increased screening – the shrinking demand for the services of the young – only means that they do not reach their goal, but drive away the graduates of the next lower educational level from the still privileged positions, then this “cut throat competition” has a very unpleasant effect on the normal labor market where capital freely selects from the growing supply for its declining demand who it wants to use – and who it does not want to use at all.

In this society, however, being used to increase someone else’s wealth is the “chance” of people to make a living. Only this chance allows them the necessary error that the world is – somehow – also for them and the effort, even if it is high, worth it. “Being used” as an object of exploitation is the basis for people’s interest in “the economy” and the rule that sustains it.

The less the material basis of this interest is ensured, the more it becomes the pure virtue of competition. The attitude that the kids have to muster is to “nevertheless” not want to give up on success – regardless of their chance of achieving it – and its presence decides whether the youngsters turn out any good at all. In addition, they are encouraged by a thousand family and youth magazines with the message that they nevertheless still have a chance, although if not a straight line to the “dream job” of car mechanic:

 “What is it about the spectre of rising youth unemployment? ‘Nothing at all,’ says the Federal  Institute. ‘At present, 3.4% of young workers under the age of 20 are unemployed in the  Federal Republic...’ The vocational counsellors recommend girls and boys definitely do an  apprenticeship. Anyone who doesn’t have a cereer will be unemployed sooner. Nobody should  rely on getting by in life on odd jobs.” (Bunte, Sept. 11, 1980)

Exactly, you could do that in the past – and even that was enough. In bourgeois society, people do not relate their expectations of life to the wealth that exists, but measure what they get in terms of the claims they have acquired and learned in the course of their education. Public school graduates do not make demands for professor’s salaries; they refer to their modest satisfaction and their narrow-minded pride “in what they do,” that they get what a graduate from public school deserves.

Today, however, even these tiered claims are no longer satisfied. Acquired qualifications do not count; the training which everyone is supposed to receive becomes inaccessible to those who no longer obtain a high school degree, etc. This termination of the familiar connection between effort and income which the latest national policy has brought about, the denunciation of the old “if you can do something, you can be something” leads to a separation in the youth between those who now dedicate themselves all the more to the virtue of competition, who go for it when qualifications no longer guarantee anything in times of lower demand for qualified labor certificates, but become all the more important precisely because of this. And a few of the rest quickly learn from the intensified selection in the schools that there is no reason to shine their shoes for anything. It does not take 9 or 13 years for an individual to find out whether there is any interest in him, so today there are already children in the second grade who have decided for themselves that they are running for nothing.

But even among those who, as always, pass through the schools, the interest in success separates from the interest in the profession or in the school. Today a high school student must want success in school without being allowed to see it as preparation for a certain profession chosen from any inclinations. Likewise, his necessary commitment to his success in school is precisely abstracted from knowledge of the subjects.

In the past, those in school who were most interested “in the matter,” thus learned better and more successfully, who had the luxury of not needing to worry about the competition at school, about grades, had the purely negative relationship of bad students to learning that today seizes all students. In the past, the security of the baccalaureate after the hurdle of the 10th grade was the prerequisite (of course not any more) for a free interest in all knowledge (and all the philosophical and artistic nonsense of the bourgeois world), so the reform of higher education has put this free interest in the service of the school competition and thus doomed it. The luxury of student life is over; anyone who wants to become something must make an intense effort to pursue school as his acquisition of a place in the hierarchy of occupations, which is not to be confused with a free enthusiasm for school or occupation.

 “Many teachers complain that young people are not really interested in anything, are  apathetic, listless, resigned.” (Süddeutsche Zeitung, August 10, 1980)

Now they should even be enthusiastic about this whole fuss! Clearly, the end of the certainty that one will find an “appropriate” occupation has effects on the mood and state of mind of young people. When the representatives of the people argue with those of the elite teachers' associations about whether there is less learning in schools today or more inhumane competition than in the past, then both are certainly right: more studying is done for exams and nothing is learned at the same time. Kids adapt to the new demands by being more diligent than the previous generation and more stupid.

Youth – that’s something too!

To the extent that the ideology of the “meritocracy” loses its plausibility, the power of educational appeals is also exhausted: “You are permitted, but for that you must also...” The ideology that it pays of to fulfill one’s duties is no longer in, and so the right to be permitted is simply claimed. Never before have young people been permitted so much as they are today – and they certainly notice this freedom as society's lack of interest in them. There is not even much disappointment about that.

But there is one thing that young people insist on, and that has earned them the insulting name “slackers”: the right not to still have to be enthusiastic.

With this mistake, discussing the younger generation’s clearly worsened prospects, the reasons for which they are not interested in and which they do not want to fight, as an obstacle to their partisanship for the whole or as the cause of a justified non-enthusiasm, the young behave like welfare cases – and are treated as such. They like to present themselves as victims of circumstances that they can’t possibly be expected to prevail over, and this is how they are also treated by the media when it mulls over the “problem” of their “disenchantment with the state” with eloquent representatives of the school youth.

Young people are no longer “our future,” “our next generation of engineers and skilled workers,” but a recognized social problem. This is democracy: it damages an entire generation and does it the honor of being declared the number one national social problem. The victims are so free and feel themselves to be exactly what they are defined as. Those who take it further write reflective essays about the “problems of young people” and they – even prouder of not having any prejudices because they renounce judgments – demand only one thing from the adult world: “More understanding for the young.”

This methodological position towards oneself distinguishes young people today: while other generations always saw the status of adolescents, who are only half recognized as adults, as a shackle that has to be gotten rid of by earning one’s own income or by other accomplishments (going to university), 18-20 year olds today speak of themselves as teens and demand their “rights as young people.” As these self-confident problem cases of the nation, they are then actually granted a few playgrounds, as well as their own culture, which the adults no longer understand as an attack on their own.

While other generations wanted to grow up as quickly as possible, today's generation concludes from the hopelessness of their job prospects that growing up is not worthwhile and reclaim the “right to be young!”

 “While the adults still assume that the phase of adolescence is a time of preparation, of workng  for what comes later, ‘life’, today’s adolescents do not understand it in this way, but consider  their adolescence to be an existing, current life.” (Süddeutsche Zeitung, Aug. 10, 1980)

Well, look here, now the kids think their lives are for living! Youth researchers (something like this now also exists!) see a change in values going on here and consider the hopelessness of the kids as ever more materialism: they don’t want to wait for life until they are old. However young – and that just means not being economically independent, not able or allowed to do what one wants, and the silliness of opposing the puritan sense of competition to only the freedom to the senselessness of those who are not taken seriously – ; to grasp youth as the goal of one’s own desires is the opposite of a person who knows what he wants. It is not possible to dismiss their demand for recognition, understanding, and respect as youth as a “youthful folly,” since they are proud not to be taken seriously.

What has been said here about the young refers by no means only to the “problem cases” in the narrow sense. A “class consciousness” of youth exists far beyond the circle of those who no longer find jobs. What is a way of life for some, the unemployed, hippies, etc., is cultivated by the rest as the ideology of their daily efforts to be successful. The Bavarian authorities have showed that this worldview of young people as young people can even be mobilized. After the recent mass arrests in Nuremberg, the nation saw a wave of solidarity among students and apprentices. One stands up for young people as young people! And a girl from the country, who certainly never wears purple dungarees, never squats houses, and certainly never throws stones, answered a question about whether all young people are so disenchanted with the state and so alternative: “There is only one youth!” (Bavarian television, April 1,1981)

Squatters – aggressive welfare cases 

Young people do not criticize what they experience in educational institutions and on the labor market, nor that they are increasingly excluded from higher education, from the better and more pleasant occupations, many even from the average standard of living, but that they are not needed and do not receive enough attention and understanding. This criticism is not based on material interest, but on its capitalist prerequisite. Just as the German working class is not lacking in wages but in jobs, so the young do not lack in good prospects, but in a social task. (If this criticism were to go beyond the youth cultural realm and become political, it would not lead to labor disputes, but straight to labor services!) Secondly, this false criticism presents itself as an unfortunately persistent obstacle to one’s own enthusiasm for the state and society. This is the insolence of the subservient person who expects to be able to get something by referring to a restraint on his will to be ruled.

Squatters notice this second side. They become active as neglected social cases. They don’t beg, they don’t want to be “passive deadbeats,” but take what they need to practice their youthful way of life. Like the blacks in the slums of the USA with their riots, they only refer to the public neglect of their needs, so they believe themselves to be entitled to some things as social cases. This weak criticism, which against all experience sees the state, property and home ownership as actually great social providers, is very seriously believed by them when they, without even thinking of a fight against property and its rule, “justify” taking an empty house. Even a right to violence is derived from the standpoint of the rebellious social case – and this too is handled like a German version of the Harlem edition. Without the slightest calculation as to the effect of an action on the other side, a window pane is broken “in order to express our great rage,” or a Christmas tree is lit on fire because there must be a “ruckus” (or “riot”) “if the Senate won’t listen to us!” The psychological relationship to the riot, which is not calculated to agitate or harm the enemy, but to help the emotional life of the stone thrower, manifests itself then in short-sightedness, as led to the Nuremberg arrests: without even thinking about the fact that a confrontation with the police had to be conjured up by throwing stones, after the crime had been committed they calmly went to the Center for Young People and discussed the question of violence in order to be taken by complete surprise when the police came to make arrests.

In this way, they get the consideration from the society that they want from it – and get only as long as the authorities quite freely refrain from evicting them from houses – until this is done  anyway. Second, the squatters get what they apparently want most from the society: the feeling of being needed, of having a community-building task to devote themselves to:

 “Where everything is so broken, we have finally found a meaningful job   here.”(Nuremberg squatters)

Meaning for the little people

Ten years ago, there was a generation of young academics who were so sure of success that they could choose from the different professions that were open to their members and thus set standards. The students were so enthusiastic about the academician’s possible “meaningful” work that they temporarily turned down the reality of their bourgeois career from their professional ideals. They were so sure that they would be needed that they set conditions for belonging to the better status.

Today, because they are not needed as much, young people develop the ideal of a genuine community in which value is placed on their participation. And because they are no longer supposed to, they search for meaning. While successful generations found their meaning in the idealization of their professions – a teacher is much more than a teacher, but a creator of humans with an incredible amount of responsibility –, the higher purpose that one gladly accepts and that makes all the shit seem worthwhile must be sought in people for whom the profession, whether they get it or not, can no longer be a perspective, separate from its bourgeois activity.

If today’s youth are enthusiastic about anything, it’s religion, whose heaven, separated from bourgeois life, is more suited to the need for meaning in bad times, when serious professional idealism appears as unauthorized materialism. Mocking the Trinity has gone completely out of fashion among the younger generation and the churches are getting full again; church days ultimately offer the meaning and communal experience that the young are hungry for.

And because they don’t just believe in God, but want to have their own Jesus, youth sects flourish alongside Christian rock services. There, where one has deposited one’s last penny, one will then practice the strenuous art of “accepting” without criticism the “others” in complete indifference to their appearances, odors, knowledge, interests, and other individual peculiarities. A member of a youth sect makes dedicating one’s own life to higher purposes, as well as the creation of a genuine, unconditional community, his sole task in life. Thus the need for meaning, otherwise the ideal compensation for failure in competition, in which people formulate their will to continue bearing up, becomes an extra reason for the youth to freak out. They no longer fail, because they don’t want to let themselves be measured by the standards of success.

Fans

Normal youths satisfy their need for a purpose worth devoting themselves to and for a community in which they will also be important, in addition to professional and school life, with hobbies in cliques. But because the hobbies are chosen purely in contrast to everything one has to do, they usually have little more content than “free,” “completely informal” “do what you want.” (This is all that interested visitors could report about the self-governing (!) youth centers.) So they quickly become bored by their negative purpose. The sense of a community in a clique is then for many set in the army.

One can also, for example, simply declare oneself for the town where one lives and practice local patriotism in the fan club of the local football team. Then one spends one’s weekends with fans from the other team and looks forward much more knowingly than soldiers to when one is ready to attack for one’s cause – “We are we!” In this way, one can prove that it is worthwhile to do something, that there is a community in which one’s own dedication is needed and important, or the same vice versa, that one is nevertheless a special, unique, and unmistakably valuable individual.

Disco

Today a lot of female hairdressing apprentices no longer go out, when they go dancing, to the nearest bar with a DJ, but afford themselves the “luxury” of “experiencing” the notorious “Saturday Night Fever” in a glittering disco-palace that is expensive for their circumstances. While the rock'n’roll generation sowed their wild oats with handsprings and occasionally turned a stage into firewood – there were no “slackers” in those days but “rowdies” – Beatlemania might be remembered from the pictures of enraptured screaming teenagers who thought Paul was their very personal “little prince” – the disco audience, which takes in all classes, lets itself be persuaded from all possible sides, paying homage, when shaking limbs to the monotonous sound of the loudspeakers, to a worldview – and believes in it at the same time! The “feeling” that one gets by “totally switching off” every thought and every specific feeling (by the way, this also requires a good deal of musical brutality!) is supposed to be precisely – even though a hundred or so people are doing the same thing in a very small space – the demonstration of an individuality that has acquired its innermost expression here – with flared costumes, light-shows and war-paint. Yet the most extravagant disco look reveals its fixation on the crowd one wants to stand out from.

In conscious distance to the big disco wave, parts of the youth look back to things that are down-to-earth, close-to-the-roots, go on pilgrimages to folklore sing-alongs and reject the common yardsticks of professional and private success. Girls, for example, wear alluring floppy worker’s jeans, some don't mind carrying cozier things with them again, even braids come into fashion along with other self-knitted items. The young gal’s old ideal of marriage, having many children, and family security is once again openly acknowledged here.

Preppies

While some present the old German housewife as an ideal protest against the liberated career woman, others are able to neatly set themselves apart by dedicating themselves in terms of costume to the casualness and sporty chic of previous, more successful generations. Just as the others are indifferent to success, the properly dressed preppies mimic the will to succeed. It would be completely wrong to accuse these cleanly dressed children of having conservative, or worse, political intentions; for the sake of display, because one is playing the ruling class, a few pieces of elite theories are taken up, of course. According to them, one is sure that the rest of the world, against which one also cultivates a minority consciousness – “we are not understood!” – is plebian. And yet it is far from certain that these little fellows will even go to college.

Punks

The opposite side is not long in coming – and the war between preppies and punks, between people of different style persuasions, can begin (or come to a stop when a new ‘I-am-somebody’-fashion comes along). While some toy with integration, others – purely negatively – do the opposite: nonconformity. Pedagogical intellects eager for insight become exasperated with this fashion-adverse young scene when they ask what the clothing and disguises are supposed to express other than the protest: we are different and don’t fit in! In their club names – “No Future,” “Trash” or simply “Punk” – they imagine themselves to be the last dregs of this society. As this scum, they assert something and demand attention from the rest of square society, which on the one hand they want nothing to do with, but on the other hand reproach for not letting them participate: “I want to shock!” – but that’s not so easy. Twenty years ago, one was a beatnik and a troublemaker if you didn’t cut your hair for four weeks. Today, however, the right of individuality, to be allowed to be quite different, does not yet have to be enforced: short and long hair, skirts and trousers, dingy or dapper, with beard and without – one “is allowed” anything and it doesn’t even blow the minds of old fascists anymore (they wear sideburns too!). You have to shave your head, whiten your face, and stick a safety pin into your cheek to make people turn around.

The politicization of the young

The media people who keep a sharp eye on the youth and worry about whether they will turn out the way they are supposed to are always discontent; even the “Bild” complains about slackers:

 “Man, people, where is your oomph? You are a boring generation!” (The “Bild” author  misses, of all people, Grumpy Gus.)

The smart kids aren’t critical enough, the nurses for the disabled aren't assertive, and most simply aren’t enthusiastic about anything. As little as the journalists have understood what animates the youth, their huge amount of luxurious nagging shows that they know the “problem of the youth,” which they exaggerate, will not become a problem for the state. Ten years ago, Grumpy Gus was an insult, today an honorary title that can’t be awarded!

What the early warners of system loyalty keep quiet about is that the youth is politicized, that they are just as much in favor of it as a youth with bad prospects can be in favor of it. They no longer want success, they no longer want to criticize, they only want to be more recognized as youth. Especially in its craziest forms, the youth want to demonstrate nothing more than that they are somebody too, i.e. to see and to present themselves as at least free people, although better – because they lack the material basis for an interest in bourgeois rule, i.e. in the freedom of the citizen. If one can understand why a homeowner regards freedom as “worth defending,” why the employed proletarian says he “has” a job, this youth lacks a reason to want freedom in this way. From this, they draw the conclusion that they will then become idealists of freedom, not want it for something, but simply want themselves to be free people. In this way, young people, with their individualism and longing for a genuine community, become a direct reflection of competition. What becomes of them is no secret either: they get older! And with that, many will take up tedious occupations and hold on to their youthful search for meaning as harmless compensation – as an alternative hobby. The minority, however, will be wastrels, as everyone now senses, because being German and being employed will have less and less to do with each other.