Now is the Time to be Active!

For more than six years from 1939 to 1945, there was no meaningful unemployment in Great Britain and in other countries fighting the war. In wartime, the production and output of countries are centralized—it is commanded by governments according to need. Free for all capitalism is suspended, even if capitalism continues under government supervision. Centralizing command makes for the efficiency needed to win serious wars. The almighty “market” is no longer good enough for success.

Indeed it was so inefficient under pre-war capitalism that around 20 percent of people seeking employment could not get it, so at any one time, one person in five were not contributing to the national wealth—we were so efficient, it seems, they were not needed. Then the war came, and suddenly they could be employed!

For a decade before WWII, the figures recorded in Great Britain for those out of work never fell below ten percent. Usually, they were much higher. For three years on end, from 1931 to 1933, they were 21.3, 22.1 and 19.9 percent. In those days, long, dreary queues had to form every day to get hand outs called dole. Year after year, myriads did not know what it was to have a job. Even in 1939, when we were supposedly busy preparing for war, every one in ten workers could not find an employer.

The situation is getting similar today, but today the politicians bleat on behalf of the capitalists that those out of work are “work shy”—lazy! Why then are people not lazy when it comes to a command economy in war time? The were not lazy. They were kept unemployed and on the pittance of the dole or, today, Income Support so that the competition for work is intense and the pressure for better wages and conditions evaporate in the pressure to be employed.

Of course, it helps when a lot of manpower is forced into the military to work and die for not much more than they would have got in the dole queues—one of the reasons why the west is gradually following the US in keeping up a permanent war economy which is not centralized. There is no necessity to win modern wars. In fact, the US hardly ever does win them, but they consume manpower and men, and waste vast amounts of productive capacity making stuff to be destroyed—a perpetual money making machine which is paid for by the tax payer and the rewards of which go to mega rich warmongers like the Cheneys, Bushes, and the rest of the tiny elite that run the USA.

The similarities between the crises in capitalism in the 1930s and now have been repeatedly highlighted, not just by the left. Have employed people conditioned themselves to be helpless? In the last post, speaking of the crisis of the 1840s, even the London Times warned the wealthy to beware! These days, there is evidently no need. The people have indeed learned to be helpless. Yet it is the people who have all the real power, the economic power, and the power of numbers. Instead of being helpless, now is the time to be active, moving motions in unions and party branches, joining demonstrations, lobbying MPs and in the US, Congressmen or governors, and co-ordinated striking. Don't be helpless, be active!

People: Let this be the Final Crisis

Capitalist society in England stood at a parting of the ways. The crisis was far more than commercial and industrial—it was a profound social crisis, a turning point in social development. The times were apocalyptic. All social values were being re-valued. Society was racked by the civil strife of the “two nations”. The air was full of doubts and questionings and suffused with the…

…deep wrath of the whole working class, from Glasgow to London, against the rich, by whom they are systematically plundered and mercilessly left to their fate, a wrath which before too long as time goes by—a time almost within the power of man to predict—must break out into a Revolution, in comparison with which the French Revolution, and the year 1794, will prove to have been child’s play.

Condition of the Working Class in England, 17

This startling sense of imminent social upheaval, this feeling that we stood face to face with a crisis, solvable to all appearances by force only, was not the exceptional apprehension of the great revolutionary. It is to be found running through the literature of the period. It was the theme of all serious thought and utterance on social affairs. It runs through the pages of Disraeli, Carlyle, Kingsley, Gaskell (who was prophesying revolution as early as 1833), John Stuart Mill:

I cannot think that the working class will be permanently contented with the condition of labouring for wages as their ultimate state… It is not to be expected that the division of the human race into hereditary classes, employers and employed, can be permanently maintained).

And it was symptomatic that The Times of London found it necessary to thunder editorially:

War to the palaces, peace to the cottages—that is a battle-cry of terror which may come to resound throughout our country. Let the wealthy beware!

----oOo----

It seems that as long as the people who do the work in our society will not learn from history they are doomed to repeat it. This is not a description of the present crisis but one of England in the 1840s, edited lightly from Allen Hutt, The Final Crisis, (1935). At least two similar major periods of economic crisis, paid for by the people who are employed in unemployment or wage cuts, have interverned between the 1840s and today—four crises in 170 years, yet those who suffer to pay their price simply accept the lies of the rich, and continue being exploited. Isn’t it time that people who have to work for a living—us!—pulled the rug from beneath the idle fat cats who purport to rule us? To do so we first need to recognize that we are being made fools of, and then to do what The Times saw as a likelihood:

Let the wealthy beware!

Middle Class Support for Welfare Goes Up When They Feel at Risk Themselves!

Three researchers from Yale and Ohio State University, Philipp Rehm (Ohio State), Jacob S Hacker and Mark Schlesinger (Yale) examined attitudes to welfare policies within the US and across 13 other countries. The researchers surveyed people’s support for unemployment insurance across 13 nations (Portugal, Switzerland, Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Spain, Finland, Ireland, Germany, Australia, United Kingdom, United States). They then surveyed US residents alone on their support for specific social policies within the United States and asked people to assess major economic risks—both their level of worry about them and their level of expectation that they themselves would experience them. Rehm said:

We also probed their attitudes about spending on existing programs, the role of government relative to the private sector in providing economic security, and hypothetical social programs that could be created to deal with major economic risks. Our research all produced highly consistent results across nations and within the US.

They found that support for welfare policies goes up when economic difficulties strike higher up the social scale. Popular support gets broader and opinion less polarized. Where the risk of unemployment or other misfortune threatens mainly people already on low incomes and at the bottom of the social scale, opposition to the welfare state among the generally better off is strongest. When, in times of widespread recession, that threat begins to climb the social ladder, support for welfare policies tends also to migrate up the ladder and to widen out among a larger proportion of the population.

Economic events that make better off people feel insecure are likely to reduce their traditional opposition to welfare. This has the effect of raising a nation’s average support for welfare intervention as those who normally perceive themselves as self sufficient feel at greater risk of losing jobs, homes and other major fundamentals of life.

Conversely, when economic hardships strike only those who are generally on low incomes most of the time, opposition to the welfare state remains strong higher up the social scale. It takes a more widespread misfortune, such as national or global recession, to shift attitudes. The paper says:

To create cross class coalitions—that is, a wider proportion of the population supporting the welfare state—risks have to broaden in reach, not just deepen in impact on the already disadvantaged.

The conclusion is that a broad coalition of support across the social divide is necessary for welfare states to survive:

There seems little question that welfare states cannot long swim in a sea of public hostility, that widespread support is a necessary condition for their sustenance.

It seems a patently obvious conclusion, but says nothing about why people should be so opposed to welfare when the research shows they turn to supporting it when they themselves feel insecure. Welfare is a security net! Remove the net and it is missing when you need it. In other words, it is common sense to want to have a security net, and there is no time better than the present to prove it.

The middle classes, for the first time in several generations, are beginning to realize that they too can feel the need for security when the ruling class starts to pull the snug rug of middle class complacency from beneath them, for the smug rug includes the safety net. For that reason the agents of the ruling class, supposedly democratically elected governments of get rich quick opportunists, will squeeze the blood from the underclasses before they will squeeze anything from the middle class.

The point of Rawls's “Veil of Ignorance” is to put everyone in the situation of not knowing where in society you will end up. If you know you are wealthy and are complacent about your position in society, then you will not care a hoot what happens to your neighbours. If you consider that you might end up poor or disabled, whether by misfortune or bad judgment, then you will insist upon society providing the welfare safety net that you will need to keep you alive and perhaps sane. Quit apart from that, though, which is still an argument from self interest, people in putatively Christian societies ought to have sufficient compassion for the poor and disadvantaged to want to have them protected.

There is a final reason for welfare, another selfish reason for the middle classes, and that is the need for everyone to have some money to spend. In a hierarchical society like western societies, money has to be injected at the base. It is then inevitably spent by the poor on their necessities, and someone has to supply those needs—small shopkeepers and services, or people employed at the lowest level of supermarkets and service industries. That money therefore moves up. The “trickle down” idea is manifestly nonsense, because the rich spend their money wherever in the world they like, and mostly not in western supermarkets!

It is therefore in the best interests of everyone to support the welfare state. Any of us not at the top of the heap might need it, and all of us do need it for society to work properly. It also ensures that we are doing the most honorable thing, and that is caring for the welfare of the least in our society. That alone ought to be sufficient when people like to claim to be Christian.

Cut the Working Week to Share Out the Work

Our economic system urging both parents to work causes immense damage to children. 20 per cent of young people aged 18-24 are unemployed in the UK, a far higher rate than for the rest of the age range (16-64), which was 8.4 per cent. In the US, the unemployment rate of 16-24 year olds was a staggering 53.4 per cent! Yet the government continually increases the retirement age forcing the elderly to work in the expectation that they will die without ever collecting a state pension, while the youth have zero prospects. Does this make any social sense? It will leave a generation of young people wasting their youths struggling to find work, while the elderly have to work to avoid pension poverty.

It is all part of the One Percent's strategy of bringing on a Third World wage economy by driving people to accept low pay or face losing their jobs in factory closures and switches to the Third World. This was proved by a report from the UK Labour Force Survey which found 5.3 million workers put in an average of 7.2 hours of unpaid overtime a week last year, worth around £5,300 a year per person.

What is needed for social and economic fairness is, first, for the rich One Percent to cough up more of their accummulated wealth—in short, for them to pay their whack to alleviate a crisis brought on by their own greed. Then, second, for everyone else the available work should be shared fairly. A shorter flexible working week would provide more free time, allowing parents to spend more of it with their children, and teenagers more chance to get work skills. 20 hours a week seems a sensible sort of level, but the whole idea flies in the face of orthodoxy. If wage rates remained the same, many people could not afford it, so other changes would have to be made. Readjustments have to be made—increasing pensions and reducing the retirement age, allowing jobs to be released for the young to get essential work experience.

One idea touted for long is that everyone should get a state allowance—rather like the UK Child Allowance—replacing multiple benefits, then those who would rather not work, the elderly, the infirm, yes and those content not to work but live on a low income but be able to develop their personal skills, be educated better, become artists, musicians, develop their own businesses They need not be employed, leaving them free to do as they wished, while those motivated by remuneration could fulfil their own ambitions. In this increasingly technological world, we all, governments too, have to get used to the fact that when robots are doing the work, employment will be at a premium, but businesses and the economy still requires people, employed or not, to be able to spend. Robots do not. Without spending power no one can buy, and no one can make money serving robots!

GBS—“The Cognate Question of the Redistribution of Leisure”

Millions of our people, some living on the dole—and some on property!—do not work at all, whilst other people are working fourteen hours a day… Can anything be more ridiculous? one man unemployed and the other working fourteen hours a day! Surely the sensible thing is to take the unemployed man and let him do seven hours of the work of the fourteen hours man, and then see whether you cannot split it up a little bit further. About four hours work a day all round, accompanied by a sensible redistribution of income would make us all healthier and happier than we are at present.

G B Shaw, In Praise of Guy Fawkes, (1932)