The “Precarious Generation” and the “Natives of the Ruins”: The Multiple Dimensions of Generational Identity in Italian Labor Struggles in Times of Crisis

“Are We a Generation?”: Identity by Distinction and the Rejection of the Rhetoric of Youth

Activists tend to be very skeptical toward the rhetoric of youth and generational change that often characterizes political debate. To them, it seems like a cheap trick, an instrumental use of youth that tends to hide the real issues behind a facade of newness and coolness. Both a student union and a workers’ union representative told me very similar things, stating that what is needed is substantial change in organizational and political practices, rather that cosmetic change in putting young people in charge:

Playing the generational card works today, this is demonstrated by the parties, the way in which they put things on the talk shows, just put a person a little younger, 10 points more. Because in a phase in which politics has been particularly immobile, with the usual old people always present, clearly people appreciate the novelty, something that, however, is now being exploited. Generational change does not always have a political sense, if you end up putting a young man who says the same shitty thing that an old man said, basically it is useless, it is a marketing operation, which is a bit what is happening today, that everyone has realized that being young is functional to show people “how cute, young engaged people.” (IL2)

I have met the generational debate in the union in several ways. Sometimes pretentiously, “Let’s leave space to the young,” with fake dynamics. It is always difficult to judge what others do, but I think that when you make it only a generational thing, it means you want to put different people there and not to actually change something. The issue is how you change practices, not just change people. [. . .] We too have discussed, and are discussing, how to foster renewal processes, but renewal is not just generational, it is how your practices change. (IL6)

What emerges very clearly is that activists are very aware of the instrumental role that the rhetoric of youth and generational change has played in the past few decades in the neoliberal transformation of society (Sukarieh & Tannock, 2015). They are sick and tired of being instrumentally used for cosmetic or rhetorical reasons. As we will see in the next section, their whole generational identity is built on a feeling of disappointment and betrayal, the idea of belonging to the “precarious generation.”

A Shared Socioeconomic Context: The “Precarious Generation”

The activists I interviewed observed a widespread generational identity among those people who are usually identified as “millennials.” For them, this is the precarious generation. This generational identity, coherent with the sociological literature, depends on the experiences that people belonging to it shared: These experiences fundamentally coincide with precarity, the crisis, and a horizon of impoverishment in comparison with the previous generation. This was well summarized by an activist of a labor-centered radical political collective in Padua:

We are the people between 30 and 40, the generation that has engaged in mobilizations and that was devastated by the laws on precarity, by the lack of opportunities. A generation that was deluded and then disappointed. Overskilled people that suddenly realize they are poor, marginal, and without a future. (IL8)

The generational identity, thus, is based on social elements, on shared socioeconomic conditions. The generational issue is understood by activists as a social issue, a matter of class, labor conditions, employment relations, access to welfare, wealth. Activists recognize that class or status distinctions still intersect with generational cleavages, but the widespread reading is that precarity and the crisis cut through class boundaries, threatening the lifestyle and the professional and personal perspectives of individuals coming from different social backgrounds and creating the conditions for a shared generation experience that, as we will see later, fosters shared generational traits, although not deleting preexisting class boundaries. This intersection between generational and class belongings is explained by an activist of a mainstream trade union:

Generational belonging has an effect, but comes after social belonging. If I speak to people of my generation that attended university, we will probably have a lowest common denominator, in terms of thought, of life experience. If I speak to a person of my generation in a plastic factory in Sesto Fiorentino, I won’t even see the generational aspect, because he has a life experience that is completely different from mine. Then, there are common traits: my generation was the first generation that saw its perspective of life and success being inferior to those of the previous generation, so this can be a life experience that is common to everyone. It works for someone with a university degree as well as for the boy who left school and entered the factory at 16. (IL4)

This shared generational identity, based on social conditions such as precarity and the crisis, has broader consequences, according to activists. It is not simply an economic factor but shapes several aspects of people’s lives. This is how this issue is summarized by the spokesperson of a student union:

For me today there is a generational identity, because it is determined by particular social conditions joined together. In a moment in which clearly the condition of poverty is extremely correlated with age, with a generational condition, then what we have in common is a social condition, not only age. Now [. . .] there is a generational poverty, there are some common problems, some psychological and social issues, from the fact of being digital natives to feelings of despair, depression, that are linked to systematic contradictions that people feel at the personal and individual level and to the fact that, society being very atomized, there aren’t the tools to face these issues. So, I think that in this moment there is an identity, clearly with some differences, that is determined by specific social conditions, that join together, more than once, people who belong to the same age group. (IL2)

According to activists of labor struggles, social conditions tend to be shared by those that are close in terms of age more than it used to be. These activists describe their generation as the recent graphic novel by Zerocalcare (another millennial, with a strong activist background, that in the past few years has become a bestselling author and a generational icon) “Macerie prime” does: as the survivors of a natural disaster (the crisis), that destroyed the social environment in which they grew up, creating a postdisaster setting in which they somehow try, relying on their sense of solidarity, to get on with their lives (Zerocalcare, 2018). The socioeconomic process of the crisis deeply affected the personal characteristics of individuals, producing outcomes in their psychological and social tendencies.

Different Political Participation Experiences: The “Natives of the Ruins,” Between individualization and Collective Action

In general, the crisis and precarity seem to have affected the preexisting processes of individualization, fostering widespread feelings of isolation, loneliness, and abandonment. Once again, according to activists, these feelings are rooted in socioeconomic processes and hinder the capacity of workers to organize. This does not mean that young workers are all isolated and passive while their older colleagues have the opposite attitude. As a representative of the steelworkers’ union FIOM explained, there are different kinds of loneliness:

Among the workers, it is a different loneliness. It is not true that those who have arrived now are all unprepared. There are those who participated in great collective battles for the acquisition of certain rights, there are those who found those rights when entering the workplace, and then there is a whole generation of people who have arrived at work in a context of precarity. Not only the young, because there are also the precarious 50-year-old, desperate, because maybe it’s the third job they lose and they’ve gone through mobility three times . . . It’s the degree of isolation and loneliness you have in knowing that you have a destiny of individual blackmail, so you don’t look for information, you don’t get politicized . . . The real difference is the fact of being blackmailed. It is not by chance that they introduced rules that have clearly affected the isolation of workers. (IL6)

The dynamics of individualization seem to intensify over time and to have particularly significant effects in the youngest portion of this generation, those that are in their teenage years or in their 20s. These are the people that Zerocalcare’s graphic novel calls “natives of the ruins,” those that grew up in the context of the crisis since their childhood. Individualization seems to make significantly more difficult than previously the construction of collective action. Activists tend to cite the widespread use of social media as part of this process but more as a consequence of individualization than as its cause. This is how a student union representative explains this process:

This has an effect on participation in particular with respect to social networks, the way in which physical mobilizations are perceived, the way in which we perceive media activism, the way in which collective organization is perceived. Clearly there are difficulties in physical organization. The digital tools that at the beginning of the development of Facebook were considered useful, instruments that are somehow complementary to the physical meeting, today are increasingly contradictory, starting from the famous fake news. So, in some ways there is certainly a bit of rejection of the collective organization, [. . .] if we want to say so, this is a bit the risk. On this there are contradictions that are important for us, so understanding how to find the tools of which the online space is not a substitute, but instead maintains its complementarity and broadens participation in physical moments, obviously it is a challenge, it is not very easy. It is about understanding how from the individualism that has been promoted, we can find a starting point for the reconstruction of a society, collectivity, and this also requires an effort, from our point of view, that must be very specific. (IL2)

Thus, for activists what is really worrying and challenging is the increasing atomization of society, more than the widespread use of social media, although the latter is commonly interpreted as an indicator of the former. It is more difficult to aggregate people, to create links of solidarity, to develop the prepolitical conditions for a shared social belonging and for collective political action. This consideration is not limited to students. Individualization, and a certain culture of individual responsibility that has become hegemonic in the years of neoliberalism, is identified as the main shared generational trait, and the main threat to collective action, also by an activist of a self-organized workers’ collective:

There is a generational identity, but it is negative. [. . .] Those who grew up in a different phase, who have seen something better, resist. While the younger the workers are, the more they accept everything. You realize that the political situation of the country, the inability of the unions, the fact that the social actors are unable to rebuild society, to make society, make so that the dominant feelings among young people, the younger part of our generation, those who grew up with Berlusconi and Renzi, in the myth of the self-made-man, of sacrifice, the dominant feelings are just strong individualism and lack of faith in collective organization. Social struggle exists only as personal, revenge but very often there is not even this sense of revenge. (IL3)

In the activists’ analysis, this widespread sense of isolation is the outcome not only of socioeconomic processes rooted in the neoliberal transformation of society but also of the crisis of representation that has affected several collective actors in the last few decades: Without parties, unions, or social organizations, individuals tend to lose their capacity to feel part of something that goes beyond themselves and to take part in collective action. This process of education to individualism is described also by an activist of CLAP, and in her view it affects also activists themselves:

There is a very strong difference in terms of political formation. I believe that the school and university reforms have achieved their goal fully: people are more ignorant, have less critical capacity and less mental elasticity. They are much more individualistic. Even the militants, the activists: there is a very different perspective. [. . .] As far as I am concerned politics has always started from studying: self-training, seminars. If there is an issue, we must start from there, plumb all that has been said by anyone who has gone through critical thinking, then a great job of research, reasoning, etc. This happens much less. I do not want to be too categorical, but I noticed that it is no longer part of the common approach. (IL8)

Nevertheless, there are socioeconomic roots in this process, and they do matter for its development. The “natives of the ruins” grew up in a context in which finding a job is not a given, in which the bar of expectations is rather low, and, thus, the attachment to any job becomes stronger and the consequent blackmailing of active workers becomes more dangerous. This is how this mechanism is explained by a gig economy activist:

There is a latent conflict, but the way to aggregate people today, in our generations, is no longer the call to arms, the great imaginaries, this is not the generation of 2001, it is not the precrisis generation. That is, precrisis there was the risk of losing, today you are subjectivized in a social and political environment where your level of expectations is structurally lower than that of your older brothers, and then emerges a composition of the younger generation that is conservative, which is very similar to one’s parents paradoxically. One believes in work as a means of being able to live, work as a necessity whatever, the work that is needed anyway, here in the first assemblies “We are afraid to expose ourselves because we do not want to lose our job.” There is no willingness to say “Fuck, let’s try to do a lot of things, let’s see, so nothing will happen to us if we are many,” people do not believe in this thing. (IL3)

The same dynamic of training in exploitation and resignation that has characterized the years of the crisis and that particularly affects younger workers is described by an activist of a grassroots trade union:

It is more difficult with young people, partly because we have suffered a lot this form of education that says “be thankful you have a job, try to shut up and keep it tight, because there is a crisis.” There is also a difficulty in exposing yourself in struggles. [. . .] In my opinion there is the lack of a narrative of the struggles. Even in schools there is no narrative of the conquest of rights through the struggle, so there is a bit of resignation. (IL10)

The relationship between individualization and social media, and the impact it has on constructing collective action, is described also by an activist of a student union, who points out how individual-based forms of expression make it more difficult to adhere to any kind of collective identity. This activist points out the challenge we will analyze in another section: how to respond to this process, changing the forms of organization to adapt them to a more individualized historical phase, without ceding to the neoliberal hegemony and completely renouncing collective action:

Some elements, like social networks, have changed us, even our militants. For example, when I was younger, before expressing a Facebook status I waited for the organization to discuss the thing, but not today. There is Brexit, I express myself on my profile, then perhaps I call the assembly. There are the elections: I write on my profile then maybe I call the assembly. That is, the paradigm is different, and there is much more desire to get likes, also in style. [. . .] There is less time that you are willing to devote to politics, certainly in general. It is a consequence of society, it is not that the comrades are more assholes, and I think that the goal is, being in these contradictions and having them fully in mind, to understand how the organization changes, clearly not fully adapting, but maintaining a role that is not to defend an organizational form that perhaps no longer exists in today’s society. (IL2)

Genoa and the Wave: An Idealized Past

The previous section pointed out that the precarious generation, identified by the shared experience of economic hardship, is internally divided, according to activists, based on the political context in which their political socialization took place. In this context, the recent past takes on the traits of a mythical golden age. Some activists, during the interviews, spontaneously mentioned the demonstrations against the G8 in Genoa of 2001, and, more broadly speaking, the Global Justice Movements of the early 2000s, not only as a fundamental stage in their political coming of age, or a context that particularly favored mobilization and politicization, but also as a counterpart to the depoliticized contest in which we live:

For what regards practices, going through some experiences makes a difference. For my generation, Genoa is the milestone on which you measure yourself. And this changes how you are in the union. But I think the issue is going through some experiences, not how old you were when you went through them. [. . .] Compared to the era of Genoa what is lacking now is a shared worldview, in the sense that before it seemed that it was all more socially widespread, now it is not so. People got isolated, meanwhile, precarity has increased, poverty has increased, so many dividends have increased, so in contexts where you felt you had great collective processes, you went through a very strong phase of disintegration. (IL6)

Today even the social context is complex, while there are many foci of struggles we are not faced with large movements of a national or European nature as there were in other phases, as in the 90s and early 2000s, the “no global” movement. Today you have to find different ways. (IL10)

When asked to compare the present context with those of the Global Justice Movement, even a very young activist, who in 2001 was in primary school, describes the past in a rather idealized way, in comparison with the grim present in which she is active:

At the time there were the movements. It was a different thing, the social forum, the international dimension was very different, today we have almost war with North Korea, there is Trump who carries on a totally protectionist position, when before the time of globalization, marches full of people, a different perception of the struggle, too . . . The political and social phase is certainly different. (IL2)

Memory, especially in the context of movement culture, often tends to idealize the past, and it seems like the memory of the Global Justice Movement is undergoing a similar process to the one that involved the narratives of 1968 (Zamponi, 2018c). People tend to forget that Italy in 2001 gave an overwhelming electoral majority to a right-wing government and that neoliberal globalization was much more hegemonic, in public discourse, then than it is now. Nevertheless, the construction of this mythical golden age seems also related to the fact that decades-long processes of individualization are often reduced to sudden changes that took place in the past few years. This has also probably something to do with how age differences and generational change are amplified by the young age. The 22-year-old representative of a student union, for example, self-identifies as a part of the “generation of the Wave,” referring to the 2008-2011 cycle of student mobilization, and thus expresses a significant distance from the younger students she represents:

Personally I feel I belong to the Wave generation, even though I was very young. [. . .] A person who has not experienced student mobilizations has much more difficulty conceiving the contestation. This on the one hand is worrying, because we risk then not even more able to imagine how to carry forward a protest, as well as rediscovering the elements of radicalism from this point of view. But simply maybe with a different interpretation we could begin to understand that today the mechanisms of participation have simply changed, and therefore we must intercept them rather than lock ourselves in our conception. I say “our” because I feel almost belonging to another generation compared to the one I represent. We must ask ourselves about new forms of participation, because then the big question is how a boy born in 2000 participates in politics: it is a different way from the one I conceive of. Because for me political participation is physical, dialectical, public, etc. How can I not try to interpret at least the thrust that exists behind the comment, participation on the platforms and so on? (IL7)

What is interesting in this quote is the fact that a big cleavage inside the “precarious generation” of millennials is proposed, depending on whether or not people are old enough to remember or to have participated in the latest large wave of student mobilization, 10 years ago. As we have seen earlier in the comparison with the Global Justice Movement, the lack of large social mobilizations that has characterized Italy in the past few years is interpreted by activists as a relevant factor in the depoliticization of the youth and in its lack of training in social activism. Notwithstanding this perceived distance, as the quote shows, the activist feels compelled to challenge her preexisting habitus in terms of forms of participation, putting into question the established handbook of student mobilization and pushing herself and her organization to invent something new, able to respond to the needs or demands of younger students.

Addressing Individualization: New Forms of Participation for the Postcrisis Youth

As we have seen earlier, activists do not passively accept individualization, the increase in which they see in the youngest components of the “precarious generation,” as an obstacle to collective action, but they problematize it as an issue that needs to be addressed by them and their organizations, challenging established and routinized ways of doing things. The pessimistic view that emerges from the analysis does not bring them to resignation but instead pushes them to creatively address this issue. For example, as a student union representative told me, the familiarity with technology and the sense of immediacy that characterizes the “natives of the ruins” need to be taken in their multiple dimensions, including the inherent and unexpressed critique they entail:

This generation is immediate. Immediate answers are sought, everything must be close at hand. The use of technology pushes us to want everything and immediately from the world around us. But I think there is still a tension towards criticism. The protest against the school reform, 2 years ago, unfortunately did not find answers, but helped to put pillars, in the students who experienced this mobilization. And the need to respond to material needs today is there for all to see. Technologies also pose contradictions, because it is not true that everyone has a smartphone. The student experiences inequality. [. . .] I also see a positive tension, of participation by the students, because if this were not the case, then we would not have succeeded in mobilizing anyone on the issue of alternation. I do not want to take it as a paradigm. But if this narrative had been so convincing, so real, the students would have believed it. But since this thing does not exist in the reality of the world, then this leads to activation. I see that what has been told to me is a lie. Maybe I do not have the tools to answer. But I see that my father does not find a job, even if he has skills. So we have to ask ourselves how we are to intercept people, rather than being locked in our leftist schemes that then no longer intercept anyone, but not because we have to lose values, but because it is our duty, otherwise we are out of the world and out of history. (IL7)

Activists observe in young people a need for politicization, that traditional organizations do not address and that, for example, youth organizations are sometimes more equipped for. A student union representative, in her interview, pointed out how increasingly people join her organization, or collectives that are somewhat related to it, because traditional social and political organizations do not address their needs of politicization. It seems like more horizontal and inclusive forms of participation, typical of less formalized organizations, are more and more able to involve young people, whose needs for socialization and politicization, in this context of individualization, would otherwise find no answer:

There is a need for politicization, for more general politics, and this clearly means that our historical activities, like student representation, are a bit in crisis. This need comes from the fact that many social organizations do not do what they should do, many parties do not do what they should do, so the reaction of the comrades is “we have to do it.” For me it is wrong because everyone should have their social role, in terms of which subject subjectivizes, what is the limit between the general work that you do and then your real ability to affect the topic. Banally, Legambiente, which is an environmental association, certainly should have a greater ability to affect our environment, as the CGIL should take care of work and we should take care of students. In the general crisis, however, this border is clearly very fragile, so we find ourselves constructing a very broad analysis of everything and even then clearly having new organizational repercussions. (IL2)

These considerations echo the ongoing research on forms of collective action that go beyond the traditional claim-based repertoire of action (Bosi & Zamponi, 2015). These forms seem to increasingly resonate with the demands of socialization and politicization that individualization leaves unanswered. In a context in which individuals find it more and more difficult to subordinate their individual identity to a collective, new forms of action, based on a more pragmatic and modular approach, may allow people to enjoy some forms of collective participation without the heavy boundaries of political belonging. This, at least, is the experience recounted by a Bologna-based activist, who represents a gig economy workers’ collective but is also part of an ARCI club:

The thing that can detract from this conservatism, from these individualistic attitudes, is precisely to act on human weaknesses, in the sense that we are a generation of lonely people, that when I finish education, we gradually restrict the fields of friendships to chase the work goals, to navigate in precarity, and as a result there is the need for contact between people, developing organizational arrangements much more based on shared aperitifs, on music nights, events in which to make people talk without the claim to have an immediate political translation. It is a much longer work, but it is a necessary work, since the traditional spaces of collective organization, which were the factory, the school, the university, are more and more places of passage, more and more. There is a need to invent new places, to aggregate by addressing one by one the different pieces of the identity of each person, because the social identities are now more and more varied: one feels to be a musician but is also a food delivery rider, maybe half of the day you involve him as a musician and the other half as a rider. Being realist today is doing this kind of work. Otherwise you resign yourself to be a fisherman with a small net. Today the social organizations unfortunately are in an irreversible crisis, so we must reinvent the form, the real challenge is to discuss the method, form, and style of the things you do more than of contents, because otherwise the fish quietly pierces your weak network. And this, however, causes your uselessness. If we do not do this, resentment and resentment will make fascism win, this is the point. (IL3)

In an era of individualization and atomization, in which even personal identities are fragmented, collective action needs to take this fragmentation into account, creating multiple nexuses between the individual and the collective, situated at different levels of the people’s day-to-day experiences. Interestingly enough, as we have seen, times of depoliticization create a new demand for politicization. And times of individualization create the demand for strongly tied communities, as a Padua-based activist said:

I observe that there is a great need for a return to the community, even identity-based. The quest to build families, precisely, to build very strong, very clan-like relationships. I do not want to say that this is necessarily negative, but without a certain critical-feminist gaze, this threatens to reproduce hierarchical, hypermorbose, very dangerous dynamics. (IL8)

The relationship with technology, from this point of view, is a crucial issue: On one hand, activists feel the need to use it as much as possible in order to reach the people they aim to organize; on the other hand, they feel like they need to maintain a critical approach toward spaces that are inherently considered as inhospitable for collective action. A student union representative well described the dilemma:

It’s a complicated issue, because on the one hand we need to always seek direct contact with the students, then pulling them back to the real movement, because using social networks is often alienating, but on the other hand these tools exist, we cannot live in the Middle Ages, so, for example, today the surveys we do, we do them using Instagram. This does not mean that we make that place anyhow political, and a poll is not the same as a discussion, but if there is a very alienated, depoliticized composition of the students, on the other hand there is an expression that we try to interpret, to understand how we can intercept it. (IL7)

This challenge to construct new forms of political participation, able to address the evolving characteristics of the youth, is the main issue of generational conflict inside social movement milieus. While youth organizations constitutively address this challenge, other actors are much more attached to established forms of collective action, and this creates the potential for generational conflict. Interestingly enough, both student union representatives recounted in these terms their experience of participation in the “No” front in the constitutional referendum of December 2016:

There is a generational tension. Politicians, especially in a social organization, tend to think that organizations are monolithic. So the issue is that they do not realize that it is a phase, which we have largely defined, taking Gramsci, interregnum, in which either you change or die. [. . .] Consequently, not having clear in the analysis what is their role, they do not choose the right practices, which are then the same that would allow you to survive, changing, questioning the things that unfortunately or fortunately are needed, without making a value judgment if it was better to have a twentieth century organization or that of today. (IL2)

There exists a refractory block just to any other mode of participation. It is the exact same thing of the reading that many are giving of the Five Stars vote: We tend to take distance from this new form of participation, expression of a vague willingness to participate. (IL7)

While these activists, as we have seen in the previous section, are rather critical and pessimistic toward their own generation, which they see as increasingly individualized and hard to involve in collective action, at the same time they are much more critical toward their older counterparts, who are seen as the remains of a world that does not exist anymore. These activists feel alone in addressing an issue that they consider difficult but unavoidable, and that, in their opinion, most organizations are ignoring.