People have started asking me and my friends when we’re going to sell out, move on and get real jobs, like they did after the Sixties. We are told that pretty soon, we’ll need to face reality.

Whenever anyone tells you that, it’s important to remember that the so-called ‘reality’ that we’re being ordered to face, in the way that one might be told to face the wall, was and is built on debt and sand: it is a specific agenda whose survival depends on everyone else continuing to believe that there is no alternative. As an anonymous aide told writer Ron Suskind in the early Bush years: ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.’

Young people today don’t get to sell out. We don’t get to slink away into comfortable jobs, because for a great many of us, there are no jobs: 25 per cent of 18 to 25-year-olds in Britain and North America are unemployed or under-employed, rising to 50 per cent in Greece and Spain. We don’t get to retreat into the country and live off the land, because the land is being torn apart for the last dregs of dirty oil.

Jacopo Rosati

The concept of generation war usually obscures as much as it reveals. This is not least because the notion allows a class conflict that is unique to its historical moment to be phrased as an everyday tantrum against mum and dad, experienced collectively, the kids kicking off against the old folks, inevitable and, ultimately, dismissible.

Nothing could be further from the truth. There is nothing the least bit Oedipal about the uprisings swelling and fading and swelling again in waves across the world right now. Oedipus, in the old myth, killed the king his father, on the road to Thebes and went on to take over the kingdom. In our story, if young people don’t stand and defend it, there’s not going to be a kingdom left to inherit.

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Aspects of this conflict are inevitably generational for one reason and one reason only. The people currently in charge of the money, resources and the political capital – call them the ‘one per cent’, call them oligarchs or call them, if you’ve a certain sort of surname, mum and dad – aren’t going to be around by the time the real shit hits the fan.

When the levee breaks

By the time the oil runs out, by the time the flood waters start to break the levees of wealthy Western cities, by the time the social safety net has been eroded to the point at which none of us without private doctors can imagine old age without fear, all of those people will be safely in the ground, in hardwood coffins in the cold earth far away from human suffering. That’s all it is. An accident of timing. The schedule we’re working with allows those currently in power to gamble on debt futures and profit from resource wars that their grandchildren will have to finish without fearing for their own personal comfort; and that affects every decision being made or delayed in our names.