Gen Z have found ourselves under a government that doesn’t care about whether we’ll be able to replace the population. This is the only thing we can conclude from how the American ruling class is not only eliminating the conditions for starting families, but substituting the existing workforce with one from abroad. And both major camps of the elites share these goals, including the Zionist right-wing that’s been assigned to manage the present stage in our crisis. We know this because even though the different wings of capital are divided on how to handle many aspects of immigration, they are decidedly united on one particular part of this issue: the importing of the most high-end tech workers, who can facilitate the imperial war machine, security state takeovers, and the tech monopoly rule amid capital’s next consolidations.
This project, which entered the discourse a year ago amid the backlash over Trump’s H-1B visa plan, is what exposes the Zionist right’s true character. The pro-“Israel,” neocon wing of the Republican Party presents itself as a defender against technocratic liberalism, but it only seeks to accelerate the war that the Biden administration was waging against America’s people. And many within the MAGA base are coming to realize this, which is a development that the workers movement must take advantage of. Something we must account for, though, is that the great majority of Gen Z did not join in on Trump 2.0; the supposed Gen Z right-wing trend is greatly overblown, as evidenced by how 60% of Gen Z supports Hamas over “Israel.”
The most popular Gen Z ideology is a left-wing one, and many of the Gen Z right-wingers are conservative in an anti-Zionist way. This is because it’s the post-Covid generation that’s experienced a version of American capitalism which shuts out the bulk of the masses. We’re the ones who haven’t gotten opportunities that were available even just before 2020, when our social structures broke down to an unprecedented degree. This is the generation that’s as a rule not on track to have children, and the elites are responding to this reality the only way they know how: by preparing to hollow out America, and fortify its imperial apparatus through labor which comes from abroad.
To combat this engineered collapse, we need to look for guidance that can actually let the working class mount a coherent resistance against Malthusianism. This guidance does not come from Elon Musk, who’s been talking about the birth rate crisis but won’t actually do anything to solve it; the place to look is dialectical theory. An example is the rebuttal by Engels against Malthusian thinking, where he pointed out how inherently productive it is to create families:
That population is always pressing on the means of employment – that the number of people produced depends on the number of people who can be employed – in short, that the production of labour-power has been regulated so far by the law of competition and is therefore also exposed to periodic crises and fluctuations – this is a fact whose establishment constitutes Malthus’ merit. But the means of employment are not the means of subsistence. Only in their end-result are the means of employment increased by the increase in machine-power and capital. The means of subsistence increase as soon as productive power increases even slightly. Here a new contradiction in economics comes to light. The economist’s “demand” is not the real demand; his “consumption” is an artificial consumption.
For the economist, only that person really demands, only that person is a real consumer, who has an equivalent to offer for what he receives. But if it is a fact that every adult produces more than he himself can consume, that children are like trees which give superabundant returns on the outlays invested in them – and these certainly are facts, are they not? – then it must be assumed that each worker ought to be able to produce far more than he needs and that the community, therefore, ought to be very glad to provide him with everything he needs; one must consider a large family to be a very welcome gift for the community. But the economist, with his crude outlook, knows no other equivalent than that which is paid to him in tangible ready cash. He is so firmly set in his antitheses that the most striking facts are of as little concern to him as the most scientific principles.
Within the Zionist right’s ideology, this innate value within family is seen as meaningless. All that matters to this ideology is profit, specifically the kind of profit that comes from financial monopoly. When the most powerful type of capital is one that has no borders, and centrally relies not on material production but on financial speculation, the ruling class can afford to let the United States collapse. The elites would prefer for the U.S. not to collapse, which is why there’s a push-and-pull between the Malthusians and the Elon Musk camp: the super-rich see that the foundations for a productive workforce are falling out, so among parts of their ranks there’s a desire to reverse the decline.
The decline will continue for as long as the present social system stays in place, though, so these protestations from elites like Musk are impotent. The only thing the machine of global capital can do is keep sacrificing our society, one part at a time. And as the breakdown becomes more advanced, the tendency is for our civilization’s leftovers to be grabbed up by the biggest financial institutions; think of how firms like BlackRock and Blackstone have been consolidating their control over the housing market, and expanding the problem of rent or home ownership being unattainable for the average person.
Even though material production keeps being driven down, and this is now translating to a massive slowdown in biological reproduction itself, finance only grows more powerful. Amid the incremental sacrifice of America, finance views its other global tech hubs as assets that it can rely on to maintain its military machine, thereby sustaining the long-term war which imperialism seeks to wage against China.
The only way out of this is through workers revolution. What does the path to this look like, though, in such an advanced stage of capitalist decline? We have reached a point where the power of finance, and the damage finance does to social structures, can set entire countries on a path to biological extinction; south Korea and Japan being the most pronounced examples of this so far. America is on a trajectory towards the same level of birth rate crisis that these countries have reached, we’re just in an earlier stage. And though this crisis is not the most urgent or severe problem we must focus on, it’s emblematic of a larger threat towards the power of the working class. This is the threat in which the post-Covid generation could become successfully demobilized, more than they already have been, to the effect that growth for workers organizations gets seriously blunted. We must not let Gen Z’s widespread estrangement from the path towards starting families translate into an apathy towards the class struggle. We cannot surrender to the engineered collapse.
How to resolve this problem is something for us to collectively figure out through the experience of class struggle. But there is an aspect of this crisis, and Gen Z’s reactions to it, that give us a sense for how to rally this generation’s “left-behinds” around popular revolution.
What we are seeing with Trump’s H-1B policy, which now will require a fine of 100K for applicants to be eligible, is a scheme to further gentrify our society. To cultivate a new, foreign-extracted wing within the labor aristocracy that the government makes sure comes from the most well-funded global centers of imperial tech. Witnessing this project has certainly created disillusionment among the boomers and Gen Xers who overwhelmingly make up the MAGA base. But among Gen Z, the alienation is so severe that the great majority of them were never even willing to become part of MAGA in the first place; if the post-Covid generation does overcome apathy, it will gravitate to a political movement that looks different.
The struggle against the Gaza holocaust has been a critical step towards this Gen Z awakening, and we must keep Gaza at the center of our practice; but we must also synthesize pro-Palestine politics with a politics that confronts the conditions Gen Z is facing. That gives them recourse for being excluded from the traditional life paths, while our government facilitates a new wave of imperial gentrification.
We see the anger among Gen Z’s “left-behinds” towards today’s economic elites; anger that goes beyond past rhetoric about “the 1%,” and extends to the professional-class collaborators of finance capital. We’ve seen how the media has covered for the Gaza genocide, and how the universities have acted complicit in the holocaust despite their “progressive” image. Now the ruling class is making a cultural pivot to the right, hoping that this revanchist Reaganite trend will divert from any potential working-class revolt. But the consciousness of the masses grows less compatible with pro-establishment politics as time goes on, and it will produce such a revolt if we put in the work to organize the masses.
————————————————————————
If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pressures amid late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here.
To keep this platform effective amid the censorship against dissenting voices, join my Telegram channel.
