By Situation Theatre 13/11/2019

The viral meme says much about the failure to build solidarity amongst the 99%..

For the many progressive lovers of the meme, let’s start by validating your feelings before proceeding to gently invalidate them.

And who better to outsource this validation to than Mad Fucking Witches. On Sunday, they wrote this as part of an explainer on their editorial decision to continue sharing the popular phrase.

“OK Boomer” was invented, in the main, as a way for disgruntled Millennials and other younger age-groups to respond - gently and ironically - to claims from many Boomers that their generation are lucky, and that most modern children grow up now with more advantages than those born in post-war years. Importantly, though, it’s also become a catch-cry for younger people who feel devastated the earth their parents are leaving them hasn’t been well managed: in fact, far from it. Not only that, they know their parents and grandparents had free tertiary education, cheaper housing, more job opportunities, and, generally, more stable employment. They’re annoyed those benefits have been denied to them, as they struggle with HECS debts and expensive rents. And when looked on in this light, who can fucking blame them?”

Reasonable stuff.

For the meme’s defenders, “OK Boomer” is not a blanket dismissal of an entire generation, but a specific, targeted, powerful, justified response to feeling patronised and stereotyped by an entitled older interlocutor.

Used in such a fashion, and thought of in isolation, that point is arguable (although it seems odd that it’s obviously regressive for older people to stereotype, patronise or dismiss younger people but yet somehow cool and edgy for younger people to do exactly the same in return).

An anti-boomer comedy rant from the frequently hilarious Tom Ballard, presumably written before he became radicalised on his excellent podcast Like I’m A Six Year Old… or perhaps written just for the giggles.

Unfortunately for its devotees, the meme cannot be separated from its broader neoliberal context, the very context which makes its use flawed, counterproductive, and even corrosive to building a solidaristic movement which could build power and pose a genuine threat to the neoliberal order.

Image from Decolonisation Through Revolution

Before expanding on the reasons why, there’s a scene from the film The Pervert’s Guide To Ideology which seems relevant here.

Discussing the 80s cult classic They Live, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek explains how protagonist John Nada tries to force his best friend to put on what Žižek calls “critique of ideology glasses”, which would allow him to escape his ideological prison and see the truth of the contemporary political moment.

Prior to an 8-minute fight scene in which the friend resists putting on the critique sunglasses, Nada says “I’m giving you a choice: either put on these glasses, or start eating that trashcan”.

Žižek says “I already am eating from the trashcan all the time. The name of this trashcan is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating. Its not only our reality which enslaves us. The tragedy of our predicament when we are within ideology is that when we think we escape it into our dreams, at that point we are within ideology.”

The attachment of many progressives to the “OK Boomer” meme is totally understandable and born of a justifiable outrage at the gross injustices of modern society. It’s partially about wanting to escape the nightmare of the present into dreams of a better future. Unfortunately, by adhering to a generational antagonism fostered by the legacy mentalities of competition and identity politics within the festering confines of neoliberalism, the goal of sweeping social change only recedes further beyond the horizon.

A society, divided against itself not just by age, but also by gender, sexuality, ethnicity and so on, cannot hope to make radical progress. The ruling class will play on these divisions until the cows come home or civilisation collapses, whichever comes first.

In this context, putting on the “critique of ideology sunglasses” means giving up our anti-boomer rhetoric and mobilising the powerful 99%/1% enmity instead.

It means building solidarity in our communities between young and old, women and men, black, brown and white, poor, working and middle-class.

It means seeing the enemy not as our uncles and aunties, our annoying older neighbours, or random older people on fiery Facebook comment threads.

It means seeing the enemy for who they truly are: our venal corporate media, our avaricious billionaires, our ecocidal fossil fuel industry, and, worst of all, our craven and corrupt establishment politicians.