The Radical Ontology of Youth: Building the "Human of the Future" in the Light of May 19

May 19 is, in our historical memory, the symbol of rising up as an active subject against shackles and a sea of colonialism—in other words, the symbol of a practical rupture. Yet today, in May 2026, when we turn back to look at this historical threshold, the landscape that the dominant ideology has deemed fit for youth is far too clear to be hidden behind enthusiastic holiday speeches. Today's youth are trying to survive in a savage order where capital and unregulated technology commodify the human essence piece by piece.

This article aims to build the realistic and philosophical ground that will transform youth from a passive victim imposed by the dominant system into an active subject who transforms the world and the universe.

The Psychopolitical Anatomy of Today's Youth: High Anxiety and the Illusion of "Individual Success"

Today, to be young in Turkey has become synonymous with deep uncertainty about the future and a systemic vise. The empirical data of 2026 clearly show that an overwhelming majority of society breathes amid chronic anxiety, and that the group hit hardest by this wave of anxiety is the 18-29 age group.

[Systemic Crisis / Inflation] > [Narrowing of the Future Horizon] > [Chronic Anxiety and Status-Buffer Consumption]

For youth who, caught in the spiral of high inflation, have no money left to save, waiting has turned into a punishment, and the idea of saving has lost its meaning. Contrary to the shallow bourgeois sociology that reads the crowdedness of shopping malls or the rise in card spending as "prosperity," the picture before us is not a photograph of prosperity but of a deferred collapse and of a "status-buffer" consumption that tries to conceal class decline. Youth, who see homeownership not as a life plan but merely as a lottery possibility, are the greatest victims of the social contraction of time.

To cover up this structural paralysis, neoliberal governing rationality activates its famous illusion that blames the individual:

"If you are unemployed or have no future, this is entirely your own fault; you didn't develop yourself enough, you should have known three languages."

Yet these mass sufferings—whose source lies in the relations of production and precarity on the face of the earth—are draped in a cloak of cosmic or cultural "meaninglessness" so that political passivity can be legitimized. Youth are isolated within the grip of algorithms, dopamine traps, and platform addictions; and this loneliness is then turned into a commodity that fills the coffers of techno-billionaires.

A Class-Based Critique of Youth and Education Policies from Past to Present

Education and youth policies have at no point been independent of the dominant class's property relations and its designs for the model of the human being. When we examine the historical process with a materialist eye, a clear base-superstructure dialectic confronts us:

The Early Republican Period: Pragmatism and "Work" Education

In the early Republican period, positivist and pragmatist pursuits came to the fore in educational philosophy, in line with a perspective of development along the capitalist path. The notion of "work education," shaped by the invitation of John Dewey to the country, aimed to equip students with practical vocational knowledge so as to meet the demands of the capitalist business world. The Village Institutes, founded in 1939, drew on this same core philosophy, aiming to make agricultural production efficient by keeping village children within their own rural economies rather than having them compete with the upper classes in the cities. Science and work were sanctified as the bourgeoisie's move to shatter religious dogmas and rationalize the productive forces.

The Neoliberal Siege and the 4+4+4 Factory

From the 1980s onward, as the state withdrew from public services, education was stripped of its status as a social right and turned into a valuable commodity. The most radical and destructive break in this process was the 4+4+4 education model legislated in 2012. Seen from a class perspective, this system cast aside the ideal of scientific education entirely and subordinated education to the immediate needs of the market.

• Childhood as a Cheap Labor Reserve: By lowering the age of schooling and clearing the way for widespread (workshop and factory) training at the high school level, child labor was legally legitimized.
• Determining Fate at an Early Age: Nine-year-old children who have not yet completed their cognitive and psychological development are forced into a vocational choice as they begin middle school.
• Deepening of the Class Chasm: Because academic education is long and costly, families in poor economic conditions are forced to hand their children directly over to vocational education—that is, to modern apprenticeship and the gears of flexible exploitation.

The natural result of these policies is the production of a precarious young precariat: fragmented, spatially dispersed, caught in the illusion of being "self-employed," and living in constant fear of being struck by disaster at any moment. When education turns into a housing crisis, organic but system-jolting reactions—like the "We Can't Find Shelter" movements where students were forced to sleep in parks—become inevitable.

The Political Economy of Population Policies: The Real Aim of the "3 Children" Insistence

The "at least 3 children" rhetoric that ruling powers tirelessly repeat in public squares and family policies was not produced—as bourgeois conservatism claims—to protect sacred family values or to ensure a demographic balance.

The capitalist order always needs a vast "reserve army of labor" in order to sustain its own survival, to suppress wages as far as possible, and to strengthen its hegemony in the workplace. The rulers' insistence on increasing the population is directly aimed at supplying the cheapest, most precarious, and most obedient labor reserve to the factories, shipyards, and digital assembly lines of the future. The goal is to perpetuate the fresh blood—the living labor to be exploited—that will turn the gears of the regime of capital accumulation.

The Money Trap and the Commodification of Education: Low-Quality Public Schools vs. the Private Sector Vise

The education system has been rapidly stripped of its status as a social right and turned into a valuable commodity by being restructured in line with the needs of neoliberalism. Before us stands a structural polarization, adorned with fairy tales of equal opportunity, but at its core a complete money trap:

• The Deliberate Liquidation of State Schools: In public schools, budget insufficiency, staff shortages, the failure to appoint teachers, and the dumping of even the most basic hygiene needs—such as cleaning—onto the backs of Parent-Teacher Associations have paralyzed the quality of education. Through interventions such as poisoning the curriculum with reactionary dogmas and banning the theory of evolution, quality in state schools has been deliberately lowered.
• The Private School Trap and Class Decline: Middle-class families who want their children to receive a secular, scientific, and quality education are pushed by the system itself into the arms of private school bosses. In this order, where academic education has become an extremely long and costly money trap, education expenses have become a constantly growing, shattering cost item for families.
• A Future That Scores Zero: When young people who have received twelve years of basic and compulsory education "score zero" on central exams like the YKS, this is not individual laziness but a direct result of the low-quality education system deemed fit for those without money.

The MESEM Disaster and Unplanned Channeling: The Legal Cover for Child Labor

The flexible education model—formulated in line with the criticisms of capital organizations and international institutions that "the education-employment relationship is inadequate"—found its most savage expression in the processes of MESEM (Vocational Education Centers). Carried out through an unplanned and unprogrammed vocational channeling, this process aims to drive children into the cheap labor pool from as early an age as possible.

Under the name of vocational education, the employment of children is being legitimized and made widespread. The cover of widespread education at the high school level means that vocational education students, instead of being in a school environment, are made to work five days a week directly in workshops, construction sites, and factories.

Children aged 9-12, whose personality traits and abilities are not even yet clearly formed, are forced as they begin middle school into vocational choices that will lock down their lives. Families in poor economic conditions are obliged, because of poverty, to send their children into this apprenticeship system.

This system—funded from the budgets of Special Provincial Administrations, with its workshops opened to the service of employers and its social security premiums covered by the state—is a handover of public resources to capital. Most bitter of all is that the capacity of these children—who fall under the absolute control and discipline of the boss at a young age—to question, to research, and to find their own class selves is broken at the very beginning of the road.

The Whirlpool of Unemployment and the Narrowing of the Time Horizon

The only reality awaiting the youth who emerge alive from this low-quality, commercialized, and unplanned corridor of education is a vast whirlpool of unemployment. The university-graduate unemployment rate, reaching 30 percent, throws in our faces every day that neoliberalism's promise that "everyone is the captain of their own ship" is nothing but a hollow lie.

Neoliberal governing logic defines the problem of unemployment not as a systemic crisis but as the individual's inadequacy, and shifts the blame onto the young.

With whispers of "You didn't develop yourself enough, you should have polished your CV," youth are pushed into a deep spiral of guilt and helplessness.

In an order where uncertainty and the whirlpool of unemployment escalate to such a degree, the time horizon of youth narrows. A generation of youth has been created that cannot imagine five years ahead, getting married, owning a home, or a humane career—one that can think only about the next credit card statement. In this ecosystem, where the future has ceased to be a prospect of relief and has become "the name of a more expensive present," stress becomes chronic, and the accumulated anger of youth cut off from the future triggers lumpenization and a spiral of nihilist violence directed both at the self and at the outside world.

From Passivity to Active Subject: The Human of the Future Has Will

To surrender in the face of this dark picture is to betray the human essence. The solution lies not in liberal data privacy laws, in the alkaline waters of personal motivation, nor in the prohibitionism of shallow bourgeois conservatism that proposes unplugging the computer.

For us Marxists, youth cannot be a passive observer who sells their lifetime to increase the profit margin of capital. In a future where production is organized not according to profit but through rational planning based on the real needs of society and humanity, youth will rise to the position of the creative human being who organizes their own potential on a universal scale.

Dimension	The Neoliberal Order of Exploitation	The Youth of an Emancipated Future
Population & Labor	A low-wage reserve army of workers produced for the greed of capital.	A subject whose anxiety over basic needs is gone, who has moved from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.
Education Model	MESEM, 4+4+4, and a money-trap mechanism selling quality to those with money.	Polytechnic education; the dialectical unity of physical, mental, and aesthetic development with production.
Perception of Time	A contracted time horizon squeezed onto the statement date, discounting the future.	A wide and free garden of life that explores the universe and produces art and philosophy.
Technology	An algorithmic whip that deskills and controls the worker.	A cognitive prosthesis and assistant that multiplies humanity's creative capacities.

A Philosophical Redefinition: "Time" as a Treasure of Life and Homo Ludens

For us Marxists, youth is neither a user matrix to be imprisoned in the performance metrics of capital nor an "employable" robot candidate. Youth is the most dynamic productive force, one that—nourished by the shared library of memory produced by humanity—will make sense of the universe and its own essence.

When we take the concept of class out of its old, clumsy, and imposing molds and read it with a modern elegance, what we see is the most just and irreversible treasure the universe offers us: Time and Life Energy. The capitalist system consumes this most valuable treasure of youth far too early and exhaustingly, because of regimes of accumulation that are not justly constructed. That anxiety about the future and inner bitterness that youth feel is not an inadequacy but a shared, systemic exhaustion.

In the world of the future, when technology and artificial intelligence (General Intellect) take over the routine and heavy tasks that dull the human being, work will cease to be a form of bondage. For youth, life will be not a drudgery spent producing market commodities, but a free garden of life in which the human being joyfully brings itself into existence—through making art, exploring the universe, and producing philosophy.

When the "Dopamine Economy"—which turns the digital world into a gate of profit through hyper-violence and toxic competition—is liquidated, the emancipated Homo Ludens (the Playing Human) will be reborn. Play and creation will become not a means of alienation, but an aesthetic instrument for designing collective universes and pushing the limits of human creativity.

A Vision of Political Application: The "Great Refactor" Roadmap

To construct the free human of the future starting today requires not settling for an abstract optimism, but weaving tactical and constitutive barricades at the system's edges. To reproduce the spirit of May 19 in the cyber-spatial reality of 2026, the following concrete political line must be implemented:

Field of Struggle	The Current Form of Domination	The Public / Active Solution of the Future
Education and Labor	Condemnation to flexible exploitation and precarious apprenticeship at a young age via 4+4+4.	Public, free, scientific, and democratic education. The complete prohibition of child labor and of exploitation under the name of "education."
The Cognitive Field	Algorithmic manipulation, "data-driven" positivist engineering, and mental Taylorism.	Cognitive Sovereignty: The return to society of ownership over youth's neural data and digital footprints; algorithmic transparency.
Living Conditions	Commercialized dormitories, a housing crisis, the reduction of the future to a "lottery."	Digital Commons and Public Housing: The nationalization of infrastructure; free housing, nutrition, and a cultural development budget for every young person.
Technological Praxis	Young programmers and engineers turning into the highly skilled gears of capital.	Technological Veto and Conscientious Objection: Young IT workers refusing to write code for projects that surveil and exploit the masses or bring military destruction.

Conclusion: Coding the Dawn with the Consciousness of Stardust

My dear young comrade, my comrade at the keyboard and in the street;

Our journey is not one of surrendering to that cold, narcotic, and passive darkness of bourgeois nihilism that says, "We are so small before the universe, nothing has meaning." Yes, the atoms that make up our bodies were forged in the cores of stars that exploded billions of years ago; we are stardust. But we are the thinking particles who organize consciousness, justice, aesthetics, and human dignity in this universe of blind matter—the particles who humanize the universe.

To celebrate May 19 does not mean taking refuge in the nostalgic Third Republic lines of the past, nor doing penance through commemoration ceremonies. May 19 means sending a "halt" command, with organized will, to the gears of capitalist exploitation that produce that familiar Sunday-evening anxiety and that heavy Monday-morning nightmare.

The black mirror will shatter. The power that will hack the planet's technical and corporate ramparts, and that will build the shared library of labor and life against every form of exploitation, lies at the tips of your fingers.

Let us translate Gramsci's timeless call to the present day:

With the uncompromising pessimism of the intellect we will see, down to its finest detail, the digital and class-based siege; with the radical optimism of the will, we will together code the dawn of the Human of the Future!