Yes!
Most contemporary arguments on the left about the usefulness of generational analysis are really disagreements about the functioning of class politics. Generational analysis can’t be reduced to class, but in conjunctures such as ours, it can add a useful temporal dimension to our understanding of class divisions. The point of identifying divisions within the working class is, of course, not to exacerbate them but to understand their causes, so that we can better strategize how to overcome them.
Generational analysis provides clues to the operation of class today, because generational political divisions have arisen out of the key structural crises and trends of our times: climate change, secular stagnation, the drawn-out collapse of the neoliberal consensus, and an aging population in the wealthy nations. Although these crises operate along different timelines, it is our misfortune that they’ve all come to a head at this moment. The 2020s will be among the most pivotal decades in the history of humanity. Inaction on the climate has brought us to a point of absolute crisis. Unfortunately, the long-term trend of falling birth rates—which means that there are proportionately more older people now than ever before—has coincided with a dramatic move to the political right among that demographic. Great inertia has been added to our political systems just when fundamental transformation is most required.
Not all conceptions of generations are compatible with a class analysis. Indeed, our current generational categories—boomers followed by Gen Xers followed by millennials followed by zoomers, with each group culturally unique—are arbitrary and incoherent. Typically, when people talk about generations in reference to societies rather than families, they’re referring to all those born within a roughly 20-year period. If we assume that a person’s child-rearing years encompass a similar span (let’s say from 18 to 38) and note that the time from one’s birth to one’s child-rearing years is roughly similar in length, then the logic is easy to see. But there’s a problem: Births take place each and every day, so how do you determine when one generation ends and another begins?
We’d do better to recognize that discrete generations don’t come along cyclically in tidy bundles every 20 years. Instead, they form when conditions are right: Generational distinctions become important when they coalesce around events and periods of sudden, accelerated change that alter what seems politically possible. It is at these times that the ways a society makes sense of itself—the stories it tells itself—get disrupted in an uneven manner.