<\/b><\/p>\n
Dr David Bates, Principal Lecturer in Politics and International Relations <\/b><\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n
What are we to make of George Osborne\u2019s pronouncement at the Conservative Party Conference <\/a>that the long term unemployed are to be compelled to carry out up to thirty hours unpaid labour, report daily to a job centre, or to undergo intensive \u2018treatment\u2019 as a condition of the receipt of benefits?<\/p>\n Clearly the populist right wing press love this sort of thing. We need only look at the headlines in the Daily Mail<\/i>.<\/p>\n George Osborne\u2019s intervention raises some important issues.<\/p>\n First, unemployment is not in general the result of feckless individuals failing to \u2018get on their bike\u2019 and find a job; unemployment is a structural fact of late capitalist economies. The deindustrialisation of European economies (concomitant with the industrial expansion of China and India) produces long term unemployment and cross-generational exclusion.<\/p>\n There are in short, not enough jobs for everyone. Late capitalism will never achieve \u2018full employment\u2019.<\/p>\n Second, though \u2018unproductive\u2019 at the economic level, the unemployed maintain a key economic utility \u2013 specifically the disciplinary role they play in keeping \u2018labour costs\u2019 down. This is why neo-liberals such as Mr Osborne do not want to see \u2018full employment\u2019. In economies with full employment, the bargaining power of labour is increased. And this bargaining power translates pretty quickly into political power.<\/p>\n Third, neo-liberalism \u2013 or at least Mr Osborne\u2019s vision of it \u2013 has an ideological need for the unemployed underclass. Karl Marx called this group the \u2018lumpenproletariat\u2019, the \u2018scum\u2019 and \u2018offal\u2019 of nineteenth century industrial society. The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin embraced them as the \u2018flower of the proletariat\u2019. <\/a>The Victorian ruling elites called them the \u2018undeserving poor\u2019. Osborne first characterises them as those wanting \u2018something for nothing\u2019. What they need is a good dose of \u2018tough love\u2019. He speaks of a \u2018war on welfare\u2019, by which it would seem he means a war on welfare claimants.<\/p>\n The \u2018underclass\u2019 are the constitutive \u2018Other\u2019 of indebted neo-liberal subjects<\/a>. They are what an increasingly exhausted, alienated, and exploited section of the population look to with disdain when they start their second job of the day. They are what the lower middle classes chose to despise, while gazing on their \u2018shameless\u2019 exploits with titillation in the pages of the Daily Mail<\/i>. They are what Osborne needs to move the public gaze away from bankers, white collar criminals, gangster capitalists, mortgage brokers, and indeed politicians \u2013 those really to blame for the \u2018state we are in\u2019.<\/p>\n