Politics and the Rising Generation

Loccum Manifesto on Politics and the Rising Generation

By Loccum Manifesto

[This February 1998 manifesto is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, http://www.grundrechtekomitee.de/sozial08.htm.]

I. Principles

1. Politics is measured in whether it makes possible a present and an open creative future for children and young persons. Whether politics honors its obligation to basic rights and human rights can be judged in its dealing with the needs and interests of children and youth.

2. Adults make politics. However the politics of adults lives from the intruding of children and youth who with their unfettered imaginations question conventions. Youth discovers new ways of dealing with old and new problems. Offering merely formal chances of participation is not enough to win children and youth for a democratic politics, for the process of a necessary democratization of German society. The present and future must be opened up to creative possibilities.

3. Politics is only possible when a society is conscious of the discontinuous continuity from the past, present and future. Politics has to respond to current demands and also to the past and the future. A categorical imperative is in force in this sense: Act so your actions are clear to your children and grandchildren.

4. Neglecting the demands of the day characterizes current politics. Even more alarming, current politics doesn’t do justice to the future demands resulting from the present. The key word of the present is “innovation”. However what is understood and practiced under innovation amounts to overwhelming all future creative chances by the consequential problems of these innovations.

Like lemmings, politics abdicates to the supposed practical necessities of an economy oriented in the principles of growth and competitiveness. […] A politics oriented in such a growth-fetishism is strikingly without a future.

5. If politics should gain present and future creativity, both its goals and its methods must be changed. Above all more democracy must be ventured. This is necessary in all social areas including the economy and the development of new technologies. Daring more democracy means: Politics must open itself to children and young persons. Symbolic acts like lowering the voting age are not enough. Rather the whole process of adolescence must aim at the greatest possible independence and the best chances of acting with self-confidence. The human rights and civil rights of children and young persons should be taken seriously at last.

II. Contradictions characterize the present situation of young persons.

III. Selling off the future is the central problem.

IV. Analytical observations on youth in a future-unfriendly society

V. Several demands for a responsible youth policy

A new public youth debate is necessary. This must break away from the current fixation on the false picture of a supposedly ever more violent and more brutal generation “hostile to foreigners”. Rather its central question must be: What must be done to open up a viable present and a creative future to all children and youth?

Adults are the first addressants of this debate because they forfeit the future of young persons. This youth debate should be encouraged in the circle of youth experts and youth activities: in youth periodicals, youth meeting places and youth radio and television broadcasts. […]

Converting long recognized necessities into political action is crucial in present youth policy. In this sense, the following demands have priority:

1. Schools must be fundamentally changed in view of increasingly complex conditions and radical changes in the work society. Schools should be democratically organized places of life and learning. Only in this way can proper academic socialization processes occur today. Otherwise liberal democracies threaten to remain without citizens who can cooperate or participate. […]

2. Unlike the dominant tendency of narrowing university education and adding new social barriers, as many young persons as possible should have the opportunity to study – independent of economic labor market arguments. This assumes an egalitarian social security of the students.

On principle all institutions of the tertiary educational system should be equalized. Their common educational goal is competent participation in social life. University autonomy should be democratically re-established since it only exists symbolically today. […] A society that doesn’t realize the demand “Education is a human right” at the end of the 20th century misses its chance.

3. The restoration of the familiar work society of the 19th and 20th centuries is neither realistic nor desirable. The uncoupling of socially meaningful work and the capitalist labor market is on the agenda. This should be granted to everyone since individual self-confidence and social esteem are connected to social activity. This may not represent a problem in complex societies – besides the distribution problem – given the abundance of necessary social and political activities. Programs that could reduce mass unemployment and dependence on income support should be developed according to the structural principle that socially meaningful work should be organized socially. Public funds could be bound to self-defined jobs that actually make possible jobs beyond power and the state. The “labor market from below” is the command in the distress and an unconventional way out of the lack of imagination of labor market policy.

4. All problems of this world cannot be solved militarily. Problems are only aggravated or intensified militarily… Rational and responsible tasks for young persons could lie in the area of international peace services. The countries needing such assistance should define their needs themselves.

5. Full citizenship including all political rights should be unreservedly granted to all “foreign” youths who were born or raised here. Their political and legal discrimination should be ended.

6. In the area of non-academic youth work, maintaining existing youth meeting places and youth education sites and supporting youth associations and youth initiatives are important. As in the area of education policy, austerity measures should be retracted. Conditions should be created encouraging projects of self-help and self-organization.

These demands that can and must be organized concretely are inevitably utopian. In other words, they probably cannot be realized in the foreseeable future in this society. The future of our children and grandchildren in a democratic and peace-oriented perspective requires doing everything so these utopias become real.

Merely appealing to established policy is not enough. A qualitatively different youth policy cannot be limited to a government department. A change is only on the horizon when youths and adults unite in organizations and conflict resolution strategies to induce a provocative and constructive discussion. Adults established in the institutions of politics, education, economy, media and culture have little credibility as long as they are not ready to question their privileges from their privileged situations. One crucial question is whether they are prepared to credibly change their own well-trodden, ingrained paths and lifestyles that have effects endangering the future. […]

That some youth are starting to boycott products and services where essential crimes against democracy and ecology occur is a hopeful sign. Exemplary, future-friendly projects should be developed and realized with young persons. These projects could lead to successful changes in political areas. Substantive demands should be combined with conflict resolution strategies. Otherwise these demands are only a paper protest.