Generational Precarity, Education, and the Crisis of Capitalism: Conventional, Neo-Keynesian, and Marxian Perspectives

In the wake of the global financial crisis, societies across the world are attempting to manage potentially destabilizing levels of youth unemployment and underemployment. New terms have entered the popular lexicon such as ‘generation jobless’, ‘the new underclass’, and ‘the precariat’ in order to describe a generation of young people struggling to acquire secure livelihoods in the most dismal labor market since the Great Depression. This article draws on analytical resources from critical sociology of education and heterodox political economy in order to critique orthodox economic diagnoses of generational precarity as a human capital problem. It argues that while neo-Keynesian accounts provide an important corrective to certain aspects of conventional (neoclassical/neoliberal) viewpoints, they ultimately fall short of the explanatory power of Marxian analysis, particularly concerning the primacy of class relations and the contradictory role of employment within an increasingly crisis-ridden global capitalism.