Apropos of nothing, really, but I was reading about Well next to the Sea, a sleepy ex-fishing village in North Norfolk. 37% of property is actually a second home, while the price of buying a modest starter home runs to 14 x the average income. As well as the insane housing discrepancy, the town itself has become utterly dependent on tourism and seasonal wages - a low skill, low paid, no fucking hope, enclave of privilege and rural poverty, standing side by side. The only solution I can see is a kind of reverse enclosures movement where we simply take it back. Labour's relationship to the means of production is less of a clear cut division than the simple fact of property ownership. I know people who make more money from the annual equity on their house, than their salary...and as a numbers game, the proportion of home owners to renters has equalised in just one generation. The chance of owning any sort of home has become vanishingly small...with a generation of renters who will never be able to afford to buy... while a fucking demented property market (the bribe paid to lessen the deepening austerity of wage stagnation and crap jobs) will, I think, become the locus of real discontent.
Apols for irrelevant rambling...automation is yet another blow, removing any sense of pride, skill, community. Wages are not the only thing lost when labour is seen as expendable. Wells used to be a poor but cohesive working village...not some seasonal service repository for London wankers working in financial services
