Strickland - Growing up postmodern: neoliberism and the war on the young

Ronald Strickland

Growing Up Postmodern takes its inspiration from Paul Goodmans Growing Up Absurd , an indictment of postwar American societys failure to provide the necessary conditions for boys to grow up into an emotionally healthy and dignified adulthood. Writing at the end of the 1950s, hard upon the emergence of both the youth culture and the socioeconomic and cultural conditions that we now identify as postmodernity, Goodman saw modern American society as suffering from a long list of compromised revolutions. In Growing Up Absurd he called for a revival of progressive efforts in areas such as urban planning, social welfare, workplace democracy, freedom of speech, racial harmony, sexual freedom, popular culture, and public education to produce a society that could inspire young people, an adult society worth joining.

In many ways the problems Goodman identifies are still with us today. He describes a postwar American society that was unwilling to fund adequate public education, and unable to provide meaningful and dignified employment for most of its citizens. At the turn of the century, despite the pro-education rhetoric of recent political campaigns, public education is still suffering after more than two decades of systemic underfunding from the 1970s into the 1990s. And during the high employment boom years of the 1990s the largest growth was in low-paying, dead-end service-sector jobs. Goodman describes a postwar society that was alarmed by youth violence and responded with increasingly punitive treatment of young offenders while the root causes of youth disaffection and hopelessness were ignored. In the last two decades, even as public education funding has stagnated, budgets for new prison construction are exploding and children barely in their teens are being held responsible as adults for criminal behavior. Goodman describes a postwar society in which young people have a little extra spending money, so they get around more and are exposed to the expensive glamour, but this is precisely not attainable by them unless they take short cuts. At the end of the twentieth century the youth marketing industry that Goodman observed in its infancy has long since come of age. Contemporary youth are prematurely affluentthey have money for consumer electronics, fashion apparel, movies, and music cds, but they linger in dependence upon their parents assistance for basic living expenses, educational costs, etc. According to economic forecasts, many of them will not attain the level of economic security achieved by their parents.

These chronic problems of modernity have become the accepted status quo of postmodernity; to many people they now appear no longer as problems but as the natural and unchangeable order of things. Indeed, for some contemporary cultural critics postmodernity is a revolutionary new social order in which the political projects and goals of the enlightenmentdemocratic political empowerment, progressive social policy, high-quality public education, etc.have been rendered obsolete. In the consumerist theory of Jean Baudrillard, for example, the freedom to consume has replaced political freedom. In postmodern society, according to Baudrillard, subjectivity is formed and expressed through consumption. Postmodern consumption exceeds the fulfillment of need, expressing the subjects desire at the level of the political economy of the sign, which is taken to supercede the societys economic relations of production. The corporate-political strategies of neoliberalism have been gaining prominence since the economic downturn of the early 1970s. Under expanded free-trade agreements industrial production has been displaced from rust belt U.S. cities to the maquiladora region of northern Mexico and other underdeveloped locations where cheap labor, weak or nonexistent environmental protection regulations and undemocratic governments enable greater corporate profits and leverage for corporations to squeeze further concessions from U.S. workers.