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Towards a new political economy of youth

The roots of the political-economy-of-youth perspective can be traced to the neo-Marxist attempts to account for the youth movements and countercultures of the 1960s and to argue that youth constitute a potentially revolutionary ‘class’. Although this perspective influenced subcultural views of youth, since the 1980s sociological and cultural studies approaches to youth studies have tended to focus on the disadvantaged and working class rather than the entire youth segment of the population, while becoming increasingly preoccupied with subjectivities rather than the material conditions. Although these approaches to class divisions within the youth segment are useful, there is recent evidence of a systemic proletarianisation of the entire youth population in many countries, raising again materialist concerns and the issue of youth-as-class. Evidence for class-relations between youth and adults with respect to reduced earning power and education-to-work prospects is presented, followed by a critique of current youth-studies approaches that do not provide explanations of the root causes of youth proletarianisation. The paper ends with a call for a revival of the political-economy-of-youth perspective that is capable of generating ideas about solutions to this proletarianisation.