A defining photograph of the Great Depression in the 1930s shows men clustered outside the gates of a shuttered factory, waiting for work, despite the evidence before their eyes. The image still disturbs because the spectre of uselessness has not ended – but its context has changed. Large numbers of people in North America, Europe and Japan want the kinds of work they can’t get.
The education system turns out large numbers of graduates who will not find work in the jobs for which they trained; more people will lose work to those in other countries who work for less; still others will find that as they age, their experience matters ever less. These are the spectres of uselessness today – images not of people confronting a broken economic machine, but of their own irrelevance in a system that works efficiently, and profitably.
I am a beneficiary (today) of the meritocracy. My success is entirely founded on my ability to learn and apply new skills at a ferocious rate – a rate so fast, in fact, that I really can say that I have forgotten more about any number of subjects than most people know. I have spent my career in positions that have rewarded me for having the ability to remake my skill base in very short order. I know that right now, I am at the top of my game as the game is defined today.
At the same time, I suspect the day is coming when, due to age, I start to slow down. When I can’t learn as fast, and when it’s cheaper to hire someone younger and faster and sharper than continue to pay me. I’ve seen the under- and unemployed Baby Boomers – and I know how easy it would be to join their ranks.
So, unlike so many of my contemporaries who fancy themselves Republicans or even more right-wing “libertarians” (conveniently ignoring the anarcho-syndicalist history of that word) I find myself leaning more and more toward the left, toward socialism, anarcho-syndicalism, and forms of left-libertarianism. Where others are content to gloss over the dark implications of the elitism inherent in Randian Objectivism, the increasingly destabilizing forces of technological and late-stage capitalism driven workforce uselessness are all to apparent from where I sit.
The author of this article is right: more and more of us will find ourselves made useless by automation and the expanding world economy. More and more of us in the West will find ourselves without productive work, but still stuck in an economy where success and comfort can only be achieved by being engaged in such work. More and more, only a small elite will actually work, and they will do so for shorter and shorter periods of time. If we continue on our present course, therein lies ruin.
We in the West are creating our own barbarians – a growing class of the useless whole will never be employed or employable. Our education system, still geared for the demands of an industrial economy, does nothing but turn out more and more graduates who will never be employed in the areas for which they were educated, or to the extent they were educated. We are creating a vast class who will have nothing to do but be dissatisfied with their lot – and we are doing nothing to address this. “The market” has shown precious little ability to cope with this growing phenomenon, being rather the cause of the problem rather than part of the solution.
Not all is bleak, but we’re going to have to radically alter our perceptions of what success means, what useful work is, and what the role of the State in the West (particularly in the U.S) is in providing opportunity. More from the article:
Remedies as old as Thomas Jefferson’s belief in “natural aristocracy” or as recent as Tony Blair’s celebration of “meritocracy” are not remedies for ordinary people; they celebrate the talented individual’s escape from the mass. However, I don’t believe the problems posed by “doing more with less” are insoluble, nor that we should look back to an earlier age for models of how to solve them.
One place to start is in the public sector. In my view, the task ahead of the welfare state is to finance and to organise usefulness. Many tasks that provide care and mentoring are either poorly paid or unpaid; unrecognised as work. As the private economy sheds workers, we ought to invent ways to use the skills and experience of these workers as carers – which is to say that we need to expand the welfare state, rather than shrink it or convert it into a private, profitable enterprise.
I agree that one place to start is the public sector, and that the public sector is a large part, but not the entirety of the solution. Anarcho-syndicalist solutions like the Mondragon Collectives, dedicated to local production of goods and services as well as development of new forms of work (perhaps akin to Cory Doctorow’s concept of an adhocracy around something a group of enthusiasts value) must become an important part of this solution if we are to avoid the pendulum swinging too far toward state control.
The failure to recognize this trend is to create an ever-more sharply divided society of a mass of “have-nots” who don’t work ruled by a shrinking elite minority of “haves” who do work. In a bizarre departure from history, productive work will become a privilege of a few. If those who don’t work continue to be marginalized and disenfranchised, if they continue to have almost no hope of climbing out of the economic hole created by being unemployed in a late-stage capitalist society, we can only expect to see increases in crime, mental illness, domestic terrorism, religious fanaticism, and eventually revolution. We are seeing exactly these elements at work in the Muslim world right now, where the violent reaction to poorly conceived Western foreign policy is catalyzed by a lack of economic opportunity and a growing population that is easily swayed by a handful of manipulative religious leaders.
The reality is that if you are reading my words, you are almost certainly part of the meritocracy. The writing and reading of weblogs has to be one of the identifying characteristics of those who are engaged in and reasonably successful at the information and technology driven economy. As such, you have more opportunity than anyone to influence how our society reacts to the series of economic changes brought on by the very technological and social trends that enable our lifestyles. I earnestly hope we can all begin to see beyond our own personal well-being to the well-being of our society, and start to embrace systems that do more than seek to perpetuate our own personal, fleeting, success.
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