Lost Generation – Finding Future? Challenges for Youth Policy

After just having finished drafting a document under the title

Crisis and a/n/o [and/no] end?

I am now preparing the conference in Moscow later, in a way the application of the topic. It is titled

Lost Generation – Finding Future? Challenges for Youth Policy.

The thesis which I will present is very much reflecting the fact that the current structural crisis means especially for young people total exclusion, establishing a lost generation. However, it may well have another meaning, namely offering a door to overcome the deep structural weakness of capitalism: investment programmes etc may help to reinstall to some extent the status quo ex ante, however such programmes will not be able to make use of the huge productive potential that today’s societies waste: inequality needs to be addressed by fundamental redistribution, redistribution has to be oriented on changing the process of production and opening doors to its real creative potentials overcoming the limited understanding of production, reducing it on a narrow economic understanding of commodity (and profit) production – we have to look the at the processes of producing and reproducing social relationships.

Indeed, another world is possible ….

See in this context the still interesting publication:

Burgess, Paul/Herrmann, Peter (eds.): Highways, Crossroads and Cul de sacs. Journeys into Irish Youth & Community Work. A Reader; Bremen: Europäische Hochschulschriften, 2009