Generation Left after Corbynism: Assets, Age, and the Battle for the Future

Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party has allowed age to emerge as a dramatic new axis of political division. This article treats the political generation gap as, in part, a transformation in class composition. Most notably, starting with the political age divide makes recognition of a shift toward an asset-based economy hard to avoid. The economic crisis of 2008, and the British government responses to it, have provoked a contradiction between the two main avenues through which neoliberal subjectivities are trained. While neoliberal institutional reform and the styles of management that accompany it continue to train the young in line with theories of human capital, the specific nature of their entrainment in bonds of debt increasingly undermine the notions of meritocracy on which the human capital metaphor implicitly depends. This contradiction opens up possibilities for constructing more open conceptions of the future which can, in turn, be embedded within institutions yet to be created.