The global ruling classes are terrified of you.

That is the only reasonable conclusion one can draw from reading the reports from global consultancies like PwC and the Tony Blair Institute about the political revolts led by young people across the world.

These kinds of reports purport to be about “empowering” the youth but are actually frantic manuals for how to manage dissent while the neoliberal order decays. They are the ruling class’s attempt to figure out why the 1.8 billion young people in the Global South, and the millions of precarious youth in the West, are starting to burn down the furniture.

But rather than offer you a future, they are offering you a podcast, the commodification of hope that tries the old neoliberal trick that individualised “small acts of kindness” will result in an end to the permacrisis.

The global elite consulting firms argue that the solution to political insurrection in places like Nepal and Nigeria is better “communication”. They look at the 2025 Gen Z uprising in Nepal, where youth stormed parliament after a TikTok ban, and diagnoses the cause as a “failure of communication”, rather than resistance against economic strangulation by a generation facing 20% unemployment.

They take the visceral anger of a generation facing climate collapse and economic precarity and reify it into harmless, corporate-friendly “Sustainable Development Goals”. The “small acts of kindness” propaganda just hides systemic failure and attempts to transform the political subject (the revolutionary youth) into a consumer subject (the ethical shopper/volunteer), thereby absolving the corporate class of its role in creating the crisis.

Their advice to global leaders? Become “influencers.” They explicitly praise politicians for appearing on sex-positive podcasts and urge governments to set up “rapid-response units” for social media. They want your political rage to be vented on platforms owned by billionaires, where it can be monetised as “content”.

This is a classic neoliberal move: replace vertical conflict (class conflict) with horizontal identity (generational conflict), ensuring capital remains safe while the kids post TikToks about “awareness”.

As long as you are posting about the revolution, you aren’t actually doing it.

This is the ultimate neoliberal insult. The world is burning due to corporate extraction and imperialist war, and PwC suggests that if you were just a bit nicer, we might hit those Sustainable Development Goals. This is called reification: turning a political struggle (who owns the water?) into a personal moral failing (did you recycle today?).

Both reports they treat “youth” as a monolithic cohort. But there is no such thing as “the youth.” There is the child of the landlord, and the child of the tenant. By framing everything as a generational issue, they hide the reality of class.

The “youth” in the Global South aren’t just “digital natives”; they are the reserve army of labour for global capital.

When global consultancies advise governments on how to “engage” this group, they are advising them on how to pacify a surplus population that capitalism cannot employ and will not feed. Categorising the youth-led protests and revolts as a “generational” issue obscures the real material conflict between capital and labour.

The financial elite, the billionaires and the corporate executives want to manage your dissent. It’s time to make yourself unmanageable.