Les Enfants des Marx et du Coca-Cola. The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola. That’s what Jean-Luc Godard playfully, disdainfully, lovingly, jokingly, sneeringly described French youth as in his layered 1966 film Masculin Feminin. This generation, that Godard was age-wise not a part of but culturally intertwined with, was in his eyes just as concerned with the Vietnam War as the latest fashion trends. Concerned with union strikes and the suppression of arts just as much James Bond and Bob Dylan. Concerned with reading Marx whilst sipping on a Coca-Cola. The twin forces of communism and consumerism animated this particular generation. Summarising generations and decades in 7 words is easy to do with the benefit of hindsight, that Godard was able to do it in the midst of a moment - two years before the events of 1968 - is impressive.
So let’s take up this task for the contemporary moment, and ask the question that naturally follows from viewing the film. After all, to paraphrase W.H Auden, ‘we alone are left with our day’ so we may as well attempt to make sense of it. Who are we the children of today? Coca-Cola certainly still reigns, poisoning the planet and our bodies, but Marx is long dead, reduced to nothing more than a spectre. Rather than being an animating force of history, he is crowded round by the few left disciples trying to reanimate him. The last embers of some vague Marxism were put out in the 2010s - Corbyn, Bernie, Syriza & Podemos, all left as quickly as they came, leaving little trace behind.
If it is not Marx, then it is surely Capital, in all its hideous forms - it appears as a Bezos, a Trump, a Thatcher, a Kanye. Capital, which in the words of Mike Davis has created a world in which “a thousand gilded-oligarchs, billionaire sheikhs, and Silicon deities rule the world.” They rule it with impunity, and without consequence - Bezos plots to take over the stars, Musk tortures animals in pursuit of brain-chip ‘neuralink’ technology, the Sheikhs in the desert continue to plunder natural resources. But where the children of Marx and Coca-Cola were pondering and fighting battles over a future, the children of today are left in this vision-less wilderness that Capital has created. There is no grand vision of the future between the billionaires and the sheikhs, their only desire is all that they see - ever greater profits. Zizek calls them ‘the lumpen-bourgeois’, inverting Marx’s ‘lumpen-proletariat’ diagnosis - from an underclass that has no class consciousness, to an upper-class that is “unthinkingly motivated solely by the trappings of material wealth.” Similarly, “Greed breeds reptilian minds” writes Mike Davis, and when you see the ambitions of those that are successfully greediest stretch to ‘brain-chips’, ‘the meta-verse’, and Saudi Arabia’s “line city” then greed doesn’t only breed reptilian minds, it kills minds, it destroys visions of the future, it creates a cohort of people who only consume in the here and now. Tomorrow is not worth thinking about when you are the Master of Today.
People have grown fond of quoting Gramsci, the idea that “the old world is dying and the new world is struggling to born,” but maybe that isn’t the case. Perhaps this is all there is, a continued decline and degradation of economic-systems and eco-systems. The future will not come to pass. Nothing will slouch towards Bethlehem. Nothing new will be born, nothing new can be born, ‘hell is empty and all the devils are here.’ Maybe then we can call ourselves the ‘children of the apocalypse’, but an apocalypse is dramatic - its sudden, a rupture, an immediate end. The relief of an end won’t arrive. Capitalism’s death rattles will produce a feedback loop of decline and destruction, chaos and conflict - what won’t destroy us will only make us weaker. Economic crises feed into neo-fascism, ecological collapses feed into resource scarcity feeds into conflicts feeds into economic crises and so forth. There are already signs of this loop turning and turning, loosing chaos and conflict onto the world - much scholarship agrees that climate change induced drought a decade ago in Syria caused mass migration, pushing an already delicate socio-economic situation into an ongoing civil war. Putin’s criminal war in Ukraine threatened European energy but also African food security. Countries that were already teetering on the precipice of famine, or were looking to shore up their food security before the invasion now face great challenges.
And whilst Putin wages war in Ukraine, it begins to feel as if the planet we live on is starting to wage war on us. Sick of the microplastic poisoning, of the oil and gas extraction, of the destruction of rainforests, of wiping out coral reefs and whole ecosystems. We now live on a planet that will without doubt get hotter. Where wildfires will burn with greater fury, storms and floods will rush with greater intensity, where locusts will swarm and Europe will both swelter underneath heat-domes and freeze within cold snaps.
A cursory glance to pop-culture is to be confronted with the century of the self at its peak, as the void of narcissism that is Kanye West continues pushing the boundaries of his grotesque spectacle in pursuit of nothing more than the self.
Perhaps you do not see these phenomena that I have outlined, who am I to speak for our generation. Perhaps you have enough faith in the systems that brought us here that they will produce answers, again who indeed am I to speak for a generation. There is an inherent sense of narcissism in believing that it is you who is living through the most exceptional of times, the worst of days, that it is you alone who is writhing in fear infected by apocalyptic nightmares. Walter Benjamin mere months before killing himself as he evaded Nazi capture wrote that his era was the emergency, as Fascism was ascendant across Europe. Those who lived under the shadow of a US-Soviet nuclear exchange also believed theirs was the days of the most vital and important emergency. From our vantage point they too lived through existential emergencies, they too fought and struggled, but here we still are.
Claude Mauriac wrote of Paul, Masculin Feminin’s male protagonist, that he “stood out as the image of the young man for all times - nervous, worried, unhappy, despondent.” In this text I have probably cast myself as Paul (his inability to flick a cigarette into his mouth feels appropriate); nervous about climate collapse, worried about escalating conflicts, unhappy about economic crises, despondent at the death of Marx. He was the child of Marx and Coca-Cola, what am I the child of? TikTok & Trump? Microplastics & Putin? Xanax & Thatcher? Oil & Kanye? If that is the case, as it so overwhelmingly feels, then I have every right to be despondent.
And yet, as I wrote this overwhelmingly pessimistic text, as I sped through global issues, as I stood at the precipice with humanity in 2022, the despondency couldn’t win, I wouldn’t let it. If I did let it this text wouldn’t have this paragraph, and I would be even less fun at parties. Nobody who has ever become despondent has ever created anything, they have only willingly or passively destroyed. It is useful, then, to think of Andreas Malm’s closing arguments in his book ‘How To Blow Up a Pipeline’ - which is less instruction manual, more theoretical climate-activism manifesto. Malm rejects climate fatalism as an act of “reifying despair” and as a tool of discouraging support and action in the face of climate catastrophe where ultimately “every gigaton matters.” For Malm humanity has to channel the spirit of those who fought in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising where those who fought “knew that death was certain, and yet they still fought on, it can never be too late for that gesture” because that gesture was “for history, for memory… the affirmation of life by sacrifice and combat with no victory is a tragic paradox that can only be understood as an act of faith in History.” The choice for Malm, in the face of climate collapse, is not whether we die but how we are to die, and he concludes that action, however hopeless, is always better than “burn[ing] impassively.” After all, to return to W. H Auden “The stars are dead. The animals will not look. We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and History to the defeated May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.”
Maybe then we’ll be the children that rectified History.