Work is our main life’s activity. From the earliest age, we prepare for it. Our schooling is geared to it. We spend all our active life involved in it. Work is the basis upon which society rests. Without it, there would be no food, no clothing, no shelter, no schools, no culture, no art and no science. In a very real sense, work is life. To deny a person the right to work is not just to deny him or her the right to a minimum standard of living. It is to deprive a person of human dignity, to cut them off from civilised society, to render their lives futile and meaningless. Unemployment is a crime against humanity. The creation of a kind of under-class in the inner cities of the United States and other countries is a condemnation of modern society. The following quotations reveal the fears of the most conscious strategists of capital about the tendency towards social disintegration in the West:

“The concentration of growing populations of disgruntled and impoverished people in cities dependent upon vulnerable infrastructure is fraught with dangers. Not the least of these is a strong likelihood that the social solidarity that underlies the welfare state will be broken apart in the years to come. The steadily escalating costs of supporting dependent populations will try the patience of the more successful in an economic downturn…But that is the problem for the next century.”

“The welfare state has made failure pay in evolutionary terms. Underclass women give birth to 60 per cent more children than middle-class women – black or white. But even this statistic underestimates the impact on the population. Underclass women not only have more children, they also give birth at a younger age, leading to a geometric rise in the underclass population over time.”

Rees-Mogg, who comforts himself with the delusion that “Marxism is dead”, gives voice to the politics of open reaction, which vividly recalls the pronouncements of Victorian Malthusians a hundred years ago:

They [the poor] are abetted in the wasting of their lives by the perverse incentives of entitlement programmes that impose effective tax rates of 100 per cent or more on those who shun welfare to take a job. In many cases, the total value of food stamps, rent subsidies, welfare payments, income supplements, and free medical care and other services exceeds the after-tax income that can be earned in unskilled work. And welfare entitlements, by definition, can be realised with little or no daily effort. You don’t have to rise in the morning and rush through a crowd of commuters to secure your livelihood… Lax law enforcement also makes illiteracy, idleness, and illegitimacy more attractive. Children who can make one hundred dollars per hour as thieves or drug dealers are less likely to be impressed with the rigours of learning to read or keeping a minimum-wage job that may pay off in a better life only in the future.[43]

On the other side of the Atlantic, the same feeling of foreboding is spreading among the strategists of capital. The well-known American author and economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, unlike Rees-Mogg, is a liberal in politics, but has come to similar conclusions. In his latest book The Culture of Contentment, he issues a stark warning of explosive social conflict arising out of class divisions in American society:

Yet the possibility of an underclass revolt, deeply disturbing to contentment, exists and grows stronger. There have been outbreaks in the past, notably the major inner city riots in the latter 1960s, and there are several factors that might lead to a repetition.

In particular, it has been made clear, tranquillity has depended on the comparison with previous discomfort. With time, that comparison fades, and also with time the past promise of escape from relative privation – of upward movement – diminishes. This especially could be the consequence of a slowing or shrinking economy and even more of a prolonged recession or depression. The successive waves of workers who served the Detroit auto factories and body shops – the refugees from the adjacent farmlands of Michigan and Ontario and later the poor whites from Appalachia – went up and on. Many of those who came from the South to replace them are now stalled in endemic unemployment. No one should be surprised if this should, someday, breed a violent reaction. It has always been one of the high tenets of comfort that the uncomfortable accept peacefully, even gladly, their fate. Such a belief today may be suddenly and surprisingly disproved.[44]

  1. Rees-Mogg, W. and Davidson, J. op. cit., pp. 294-5, 183 and 273.

  2. Galbraith, J. The Culture of Contentment, pp. 170-1.