The world economy has changed its nature. Since the early 1970s it has become highly unstable and has favoured the rich over the poor. Unfortunately, even if politicians accepted this, there would be very little they could do.
For a quarter of a century after World War II, most young men in Britain, almost regardless of their level of ability and education, could confidently assume that they could find themselves some sort of job within a few hours whenever they needed one. Admittedly, the job might be utterly boring and without prospects, but nevertheless it would provide them enough income on which to live remarkably well. It was a marvellous time to start out in life.
But a sea-change took place at the beginning of the 1970s and twenty years later roughly a third of the men aged between 18 and 24 were either unemployed or 'economically inactive'- a term applied to those people without work who have given up what governments see as their economic function of keeping wage rates down by continual job-hunting, and who have thus made themselves ineligible for the dole. At any one time an estimated 100,000 young men were homeless as a result of inadequate incomes, some sleeping on city streets, while theft, the crime for which this age-group is most frequently responsible, almost tripled between 1971 and 19923 . "For many youngsters, crime has become a matter of survival in this new society which appears to cater only for the winners" Stewart Lansley of the Henley Centre for Forecasting wrote . "Today, denial of the new trappings of consumerism means a denial of full citizenship.... The result has been a growing lack of community cohesion and a declining sense of social commitment."
Despair engendered by poverty and involuntary idleness drove increasing numbers of young men to suicide: in 1992, 500 males aged between 18 and 24 killed themselves in Britain, 80% more than ten years earlier. Indeed, suicide became the second most common cause of death for all young people. Other age-groups were affected by the rise in unemployment, of course, but it struck most harshly at the young who, right across the EC, were twice as likely to be jobless as anyone else of an age to work. In France, for example, in 1995, 45% of those leaving school with their baccalaureate and 80% of those without any exam successes were unemployed nine months later. Robert Castel, a sociologist, was not alone when he warned of the danger of society breaking down.
What had gone wrong? How did an economic system which had enabled Britain to keep overall unemployment between 1.2% and 2.1% of the working population from 1945 to 1970 alter to such an extent that later governments were entirely unable to hold the problem in check? <snip>
In the meantime, the outlook for many people is grim. In a state of increasing desperation, our present political leaders and their immediate successors will try ever harder to make their collapsing creation work, hoping rather than believing that the world economy will suddenly start to work perfectly and a more general prosperity will return once the few remaining trade barriers have been brought down, the burden of tax and social spending cut and the intensity of competition heightened further. This is a forlorn hope. All that will happen is that more and more people will be excluded from full participation in the mainstream economic system. Unemployment will mount rapidly and generate even more crime and misery as social welfare payments are whittled away. Too lazy or complacent to seek alternatives, politicians, academics and commentators will cheer this immiseration on, arguing that the more rapidly a country adjusts to world market conditions by getting its wages and other costs down, the brighter its future will be.
"The most worrying aspect of the present crisis is that, for the first time in history, the rich no longer need the poor" Pierre Calame, the president of the Foundation for the Progress of Man told a conference I attended in Paris in June 1993. He went on to explain that, in the past, the rich had always needed the poor - as servants, to grow food, to build their houses and to make the goods that they required. Now, however, many of the jobs that the poor had done were performed by machines and, as far as the rich were concerned, it was unnecessary for as many people as previously to be retained within the economic system. The surplus was therefore being expelled and maintained in limbo at the lowest level of public support possible without them becoming a serious threat to the well-being and equanimity of the better-off.
But if the rich can manage without the poor as a result of technology, can the poor manage without the rich? I believe they can, and the ways in which they can do so are what the rest of this book is about.
