172 James:
No she didn’t but she was quite active and she knew about things. So there was this protest outside a hospital and there were these placards
‘Nurses Not Bombs’. So I went down to it and I got grabbed by some of the Socialist Workers and I got recruited so to speak. [..] But yeah I
went to few of their meetings and demonstrations when I was quite young.
52
Islington participant Rudy:
This might not be a fair question, but can you like think of any particular experience that sort of turned you on to it [socialism]?
Sam: Um, I’d say that I probably got radicalized in that respect around the
time of the student protest last year. That’s when I got more drawn towards the kind of more radical end of the leftist spectrum, I was a
fairly radical Keynesian for a while, but then I got kind of got involved in more ultra-leftist politics and I found that they quite
suited my beliefs.
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Islington participant Additionally, while Ben, Anthony, and Jazmin cited their parents as their initial
political influences, the rest of these young people who cited a plethora of different initial influences, also stated that their political views were markedly
different from that of their parents. This is in keeping with Flanagan’s 2008 claim that young people rarely reflect the same exact political positions as their
parents despite parents usual status as primary agents of socialization. One of my original objectives for this research had been to find out if there
were any common experiences or modes that led young people to develop a more heighted political awareness. For a number of reasons, which include too small a
sample size and other methodological limitations that I describe in section 9.2, I did not find any. However, while there is little that can be generalized from these
young people’s politicizing experiences, they nonetheless reinforce the point that even a kernel of exposure to critical perspectives, irrespective of the setting,
medium, or timing, can have both a catalyzing and lasting effect on the development of young people’s political views and practices.
5.6 Potential Future Political Trajectories and Concluding Remarks
Overall, the young people in this group expressed a host of political and critical views, which involve significantly contestation of dominant neoliberal
52
Furthermore, James attributes his introduction to anarchist ideas from a hard drive which he received form his uncle which contained over 20gb of videos, some of which were about
anarchism.
53
Given that Sam was 16 years old during my interview with him, his account suggests that he was at least a Keynesian sometime around that age of 14 or 15.
173 discourses. While their political ideologies vary, with Aimee, James, Jazmin, Joey,
Arlene, and Luz expressing anarchist identities or sympathies, and others like Anthony being the elected senior school President, Ben, and Senai expressing
broadly social-democratic views, all of them fall within a Leftist spectrum. This observation, coupled with their detailed political-economic knowledge, support for
welfare institutions, humanist outlooks on the role of education, and their overall highly developed sociological imagination Mills, 1959, allows me to, without
too much hesitation, argue that these types of young people are the ones most likely to be the potential catalysts for social change. This is perhaps an obvious
conclusion to draw, and it cannot be assumed that their counter-neoliberal dispositions will not change as they get older, nor that highly critical yet non-
activist young people like Ben will join a political organization. However, what these young people have provided is the insight that despite their different
ethnicities, genders and class backgrounds and national settings, they process, frame, and interpret social information in surprisingly similar and consistent ways.
In oth er words, and in accordance with Althusser’s 1971 theory of interpellation,
these young people, through whatever different points of ideological contestation they have been exposed to, have generated transposable dispositions and
corresponding views and attitudes that allow them to more readily resist neoliberal discursive interpellation.
However, while this group is definitely the most leftist in their views, most of them cannot be labelled as specifically anti-neoliberal. That is to say, most of their
views and attitudes were such that they reflect what Willis 1977 refers to as ‘partial penetration’. For instance, Senai, during our short interview, expressed
affinities for capitalism in her affirmative opinion of Bill Gates and his wealth. Jazmin, Luz, Lisa, and Lupe, however sympathetic they were to socialist andor
anarchist ideals, were sceptical of democratic socialist alternatives, believing in particular that human beings are too self-interested to make such an ideal system
work; while Ben and Anthony held a more reformist social democratic political outlook, which, whether they are aware of it or not, are still capitalist in form, and
therefore also inherently premised on the ontological position that emphasizes human selfishness. These can all be contrasted to what I believe are the more anti-
neoliberal views of my anarchist participants, Arlene, James, and Aimee, who not
174 only believe in an arguably more authentic form of democracy,
54
and in egalitarian economic systems antithetical to neoliberalism, but also hold a fundamentally
different ontological view of human nature. This view holds that humans are just as capable of being empathetic, just, co-operative and altruistic rather as they are
of being competitive and self-interested. Furthermore, this is a view that is supported by various anthropological, historical, and increasingly cognitive,
developmental, and social-psychological empirical accounts Graeber, 2009:2004; Olson, 2008; Sloane et al., 2012, Zinn, 2003,
55
and therefore at the very least, as I will emphasize in Chapter 8, worthy of consideration and discussion in education
settings. However, this is not to suggest a normative evaluation of their political views on my part, but rather that a more authentic anti-neoliberal disposition
necessitates a more affirmative view on the possibilities of non-hierarchical forms of democracy and the belief that human beings can make it work; without these
beliefs firmly in place, capitalist and hierarchical organizational forms of thinking, and as a consequence practices and forms of organization, may start to insidiously
manifest themselves, regardless of the critical and humanist views that people may have and consciously express Albert, 2003. As Pynn 1988 argues, for example,
in talking about organizations as opposed to organization, we afford our dominant institutions a supreme level of agency that obscures our own volition in enacting
them, and crucially, blinds us cognitively to alternative possibilities. However, here again is it also possible, given their already established critical dispositions
and precocious nature that, at some point, and perhaps in the near future as they attend university all of the
CriticalPolitical
young people expressed plans to attend a university, they will be introduced to more radical politics and
movements, and will possibly be informed and influenced by them. As stated, their current dispositions are such that they are oriented towards a leftist counter
54
I did not include Sam in this subgroup because of his professed Trotskyist politics, which, while socialist, are expressly authoritarian in their organizational commitments. Thus, in this context,
Sam cannot be placed alongside Aimee, Arlene, and James with their more direct democratic political leanings.
55
For example, a study by Sloane et al., 2012 found that 19-21 month-old infants have a general expectation of fairness, and that even babies are disturbed by displays of injustice even when it
does not apply to them. This study lends support to the argument that fairness may be a natural human predisposition.
175 neoliberalism, and not towards a more conservative neoliberalism. However,
without the benefit of a longitudinal study, this is only a provisional speculation, and it is of course entirely possible that at least some of them will move politically
to the right or to any other variant; as zoo participant Ben stated, “I’m 17 years old,
I’m still really young. The way I think is going to change, my opinions on these things [political topics] are going to change. S
o it’s a gradual process from things you take here and there”. Having more authentic and cognitively ingrained anti-
neoliberal views does not of course automatically translate into developing anti- neoliberal practices. However, the former are a necessary precondition for the
latter. As Buroway argues 2008a, p.29, “habitus plays a secondary role in the
reproduction of domination, but can play a primary role in the creation of new social orders
”. Lastly, it is not my intention to only define as political those young people
who only take critical stances towards the existing socio-cultural and political- economic systems. It is entirely possible, and in fact very likely that, somewhere
in LA and London there exist groups of teenaged conservatives who are at least as
politically knowledgeable and dedicated as the
CriticalPolitical
young people I have described in this chapter. And indeed, it would be interesting to explore if
these conservative young people shared a similar concern for social justice as the
CriticalPolitical
ones, or if their concerns were more inflected through, and reflective of, neoliberal discourses. In any case, future research would benefit
from a broader sampling methodology that also seeks out more conservative young people. In the next two chapters, I will describe the main characteristics of
the other two classifications of LA and London young people that I have identified as:
ArtsyIndie
and
Mainstream.
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Chapter Six ArtsyIndie Youth
The Wild Cards
Rudy: What type of media do they [young people] engage with?
Warren: They watch a lot of TV [shows] and movies on the I
nternet. There’s a lot of bootleg websites where they stream pirate movies. They have
IPods, and th ey’re really technically savvy. Some of the kids do role
playing games on the Internet. But yeah, they all have IPods. Race, religion, creed, class, it doesn’t matter, they all have IPods. But they
don’t go to the movies as much, and I don’t think they watch much TV because a lot of the stuff is on the Internet. -Youth Worker:
Bresee Foundation Rudy:
Last question, is there anyone that you look up to? Veronica: I really look up to my friend, he was my ex-boyfriend. He lost his
eyesight when he was three, and I really look to him because after losing his eye
sight he didn’t give up. [..] My documentary was based on him, the one that I got an award for second place. And it shows
how he could do so many things without his eyesight, when other people who have their eyesight ar
e always saying I can’t do it, it’s too hard. [..] It’s really amazing. He was the one who helped me finish
my video because by then I did n’t have my parents’ support. Bresee
participant As the title for this chapter, and above extracts suggest, the young people that
I have classified as
ArtsyIndie,
expressed a distinctive and pronounced affinity with artistic endeavours e.g., dancing, writing short stories, playing music, film-
making, painting, in addition to a tentative rejection of mainstream popular media-culture which consisted of accounts similar to that described above by
Warren, and an active engagement with alternative andor independent Western and non-Western media-culture. In this chapter, I will draw out these prevalent
characteristics, pointing to the socio-cultural experiences, media preferences and interpretations, and corresponding affective and apolitical dispositions of these
young people, and speculate on some of the complex ways that these help them to contest dominant neoliberal discourses. As in the previous chapter, I will also map
out and analyze some of the substantive content, i.e., central tendencies, and conceptual, semantic, and lexical associations characterizing this group of young
177 people
’s political-economic schemata, and their divergence from, and congruence with, neoliberal discourses.
6.1 Leisure Time, Cultural Preferences, and Affective Dispositions:
