From business administration, the write-up is known as the opposite of the write-off. Write-ups increase the value of fixed assets, while depreciation can save taxes. In everyday life, on the other hand, the attribution is often due to our longing to provide understandable reasons for the behavior of the other. The world has fallen apart. The wish that terms could mend the pile of broken glass and structure the chaos, understandable as well as in vain.
But what is the point of trying to put whole cohorts of people into the drawer of a generation attribution? One hopes to create clarity, orientation. Of course, also and above all: to set yourself apart. The term crutch is helpful. Because it makes sense to realize what time someone comes from, what may have shaped him or her and what could be the reason that she or he is now threatening to fall out of time.
Of course, the concept of generation is also useful if a reproach is to be formulated from it. Although there is usually a degree of injustice to generalization. An accusation that is often made in the plural: you, not you. You fought this war, you looked the other way when it would have been your duty, you plundered the planet. But that ignores the fact that there is something impossibly static in the generation drawer. It denies development where it is conceivable, ignoring change where it can be included as a possibility. Assumes that mistakes are not learned from mistakes. So that nobody can leave their generation drawer.
they deserved it
In fact, a generation is not a stable construct based on a foundation of similar interests. You belong to a generation all your life. To deduce from this that an eternally identical moral and political constitution is connected with it would be nonsense.
Back to the attribution and its counterpart, the write-off: If the reproach seems pointless to a generation because things have already gone, it will be written off. “OK Boomer!” Is such a write-off. “OK Boomer” has become a meme ever since a 25-year-old politician in the New Zealand parliament, in response to heckling from representatives of the generation born between 1956 and 1965, expressed her displeasure with their arrogance, know-it-all and uneducable nature.
A meme, that is: a creatively created content of consciousness that spreads quickly – in the past one would have said: viral. The young green politician has the content of awareness that the baby boomers are reacting with condescension and ignorance to the climate movement initiated mainly by young people in an exclamation. In the right place, at the right moment and rightly. The guys who were shouted at it must have deserved it.
However, some of the reactions are astonishing. the New York Times interpreted the meme as a declaration of war, the Guardian came to the conclusion that there is a lack of solidarity with the older generation, because one can and should learn from the experiences of the baby boomers instead of demonizing them. Perhaps, it might be argued, it would be better to learn from the mistakes of that generation.
It is above all sociology that divides people into generations and arranges them accordingly. And look at what characterizes certain age groups, how much their living conditions and their origins have an influence on their here and now and being. It is said that a new generation emerges every 15 years. It gets its labels. The associated attributions are often used in company management and in conflict management. Strategies are knitted from this, the mixing ratios are checked for their advantages and disadvantages and suggestions for optimization are made.
We currently offer: the traditionalists (1925-1940), the 68 generation (1941-1955), the baby boomers, the X generation (1966-1980), the Y generation (1981-1995), the Z generation ( 1996 – 2010). Do the 2011s already have a name? This is accompanied by a whole series of columnist attributions, such as the TINA generation (“There is no alternative”), the Golf generation, the millennials or the Xennials who do not want to be Y or X. It is conspicuous and alarming at the same time that attempts have been made for several years to postulate intergenerational wars, or, more gently, intergenerational struggles. The main conflicts, the basic contradictions, are not sought between classes, not between people who are in different places in the social gradient, not between externalizing and externalizing societies, and certainly not between wage labor and capital, the exploited and the exploiters. Instead, between the generations. But what, one wonders, does the boomer generation of the global north have in common with those who were born in a country in the global south between 1956 and 1965? Not too much. And what does the 40-year-old entrepreneur with his private ownership of the means of production have in common with the 40-year-old employee who cannot offer anything else for sale but her labor?
And the class antagonisms?
These questions, too, are not a plea for forgetting or belittling the fact that the younger generations are confronted with living conditions that are already imposing on them to do away with everything that has been done. It can be said that they will be no better off than their ancestors. And that their accusation against those who let it get this far is logically directed at people of older generations.
The economic conditions of the past more than 500 years have meant that the conquest of the earth is almost complete, but the consequences of this unprecedented campaign are fatal or deadly. Only capitalism took the Bible completely at its word and carried out God’s supposed commission to subdue the earth. He has created relations of production that cannot function otherwise than through the exploitation of living labor and incessant growth and extraction of natural resources, far beyond the needs and possibilities of the planet.
If so, it seems to be as perfidious as it is clever to talk about intergenerational wars or make generational conflicts the supposedly most important issue in times like these, instead of focusing on the disaster of an economy that is now a destructive driving force – suitable To completely gamble away in the now what is needed for life and survival in the near future. Because if you let yourself be persuaded that you have to fight against other – older – generations, you will have neither the time nor the strength to change the situation. Because this neglects the fact that every generation of the past we speak of was still divided into haves and have-nots. And that there have always been worlds in between and still remain today. They cannot be tied to the ascription of belonging to a generation. “OK Boomer!” Should be translated as follows: We and our descendants will have to pay the uncovered bills of the economic system. Anyone who wants to do something about it together with us is encouraged and welcome.
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