Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Saturday, July 09, 2011

We Are All Unemployed Now

Unemployment is, and has long remained, and looks long to remain, devastatingly high. The pain and suffering of the long-term unemployed is a real and abiding and ever-more-catastrophic tragedy to which some in public life occasionally genuflect, although not nearly enough, and not nearly as often as they do to complete nonsense like deficit handwringing about which most of them don't even really care (else why all the ruinously expensive war adventuring and tax cuts for the rich) and about which most who do care do so only because they are dangerously illiterate about macroeconomics (no, Virginia, national economies aren't actually like family economies, yes, at the zero lower bound only government spending is reliably stimulative).

But it really must be pointed out that not only should the suffering of the unemployed be endlessly in the spotlight as it is not, but also that many of the gratefully employed are only employed precariously, often in low-paying jobs that are unequal to the demands of families in the longer term (healthcare and education expenses, conspicuous among these). So, too, even those who are lucky enough to have reasonably well paying jobs are so thankful and anxious about keeping them that millions upon millions of Americans are by now virtual hostages in their workplaces, putting up with crap they would not otherwise tolerate, subject to petty tyrannies with little sense of recourse, eager to accept exploitation lest they come to seem dispensable.

Across the American labor force the pressures created by the unemployment crisis suffuse everyday life with anxiety, stress, fraught fragility, and all very much to the advantage of the bosses, the owners, the incumbent elites who throng the Boardrooms and the Beltway.

A generation of the middle class decimated by Reaganomic and Clintonomic flattening of the buying power of wages, union-busting, deregulation of enterprise, looting of infrastructure, privatization of public service, displacement of manufacturing onto overexploited regions of the globe, enclosure of cultural and genomic commons, corporate externalization of costs and skimming of profits, fraud-enabling financialization and digitization of the economy has left average Americans with few resources to cope with the true crisis at hand.

The demoralizing reality of mass unemployment is reverberating across the social fabric of this nation into every household and onto every screen and deep within every psyche now, habituating too many of us to lifelong exploitation and unaccountable rule by plutocrats.

1 comment:

Zach Wheaton said...

"'The function of social inactivity', as Derrida puts it, 'of non-work or of underemployment is entering into a new era. It calls for another politics. And another concept.' This 'new' unemployment - 'that more or less well-calculated deregulation of a new market, new technologies, new worldwide competitiveness' - doesn't feature in the news, because it doesn't count as an event according to the opposition of the actual and the virtual. It doesn't occupy a certain place and time, even though it's undeniably with us here and now."