For Anyone Who Wants One

After all, what made the Great Depression “great” was not only the staggering level of unemployment (no less true in various earlier periods of economic collapse), but its duration. Years went by, numbingly, totally demoralizingly, without work or hope. When it all refused to end, people began to question the fundamentals, to wonder if, as a system, capitalism hadn’t outlived its usefulness.

Nowadays, the 99ers notwithstanding, we don’t readily jump to such a conclusion. Along with the “business cycle,” including stock market bubbles and busts and other economic perturbations, unemployment has been normalized. No one thinks it’s a good thing, of course, but it’s certainly not something that should cause us to question the way the economy is organized.

Long gone are the times when unemployment was so shocking and traumatic that it took people back to the basics. We don’t, for instance, even use that phrase “the reserve army of labor” anymore. It strikes many, along with “class struggle” and “working class,” as embarrassing. It’s too “Marxist” or anachronistic in an age of post-industrial flexible capitalism, when we’ve grown accustomed to the casualness and transience of work, or even anointed it as a form of “free agency.”
~ from Uncle Sam Does(n’t) Want You by Steve Fraser and Josh Freeman ~

You know that something is wrong with any system when there are people who want to work, but there are no jobs to be had. As the authors of this article point out, we have grown not only to accept unemployment but to expect it. To our mind's eye, it is as natural as breathing air.

Why should a job only be available if it generates a profit for the few? Why do we accept this concept as making any sense at all?

The answer, of course, is that we've been conditioned to believe this. It is what makes our system "work" for the owners of the means of production. As long as there is a pool of unemployed persons, it holds wages down. When the pool is really big, it doesn't just hold wages down, it drives them down! It also makes those lucky to be employed more fearful and more fearful workers are less apt to complain and/or join a union!

The employment picture in this country and elsewhere isn't going to get brighter anytime soon. The corporate class is raking in the dough, so why mess with a good thing?