Generational Change Meets Climate Change:

The logic of capitalist modernity privileged “efficient” capitalist production regardless of the human consequences. Marx, influenced by Humbolt’s travels- devastated the soil, the factories of Manchester polluted the water and the air-this was the “metabolic rift”, or, the dialectic of Enlightenment. This had two major consequences the rationale of abstract wage labor which meant the exploitation, alienation, and impoverishment of workers to gain profits, and willful blindness to the externalities of capitalist accumulation-namely environmental despoliation, endangering health, especially of workers and today, the very viability of humanity now facing a “sixth extinction. This, rationality, first evident in the factories of Manchester and had become fully rationalized with Fordism/Taylorism, and now, an age of mass consumption-profitable for fossil capitalism enabling as much surplus value as possible. Nevertheless, a Hegelian Marxist understanding of the dialectical nature of social movements has told us that the progressive reaction to the adversities of the Anthropocene are c evident especially in the various progressive mobilizations. The current generation of youth, generation Z, clearly impacted by the economic adversities of neoliberalism, whose progressive social values regarding race, gender/LGBT, ethnicity, having mobilized various reactionary movements, is clearly become the spearhead of progressive social change regarding the inequality and precarity of neoliberal capital, the environmental devastation as seen in more frequent and devastating hurricanes, flooding, droughts, forest fires etc. in the reactionary attempts to preserve essentialist, hierarchical, privilege granting identities. Across the globe the environmental movements of today, are attempting to change the very nature of production and distribution- any major aspect of which is moving away from consumerism that is for long time privilege the accumulation of material goods- considerably above any possible necessity- toward being fully human in terms of creative self-realization, equality, democracy, freedom, harmony between people living in meaningful communities and in harmony with Nature.