Cornish men are fishermen…

A Cornish song, famously turned into a graffiti challenge on a mine's wall, ran 'Cornish men are fishermen/Cornish men are miners too/When all the fish and tin are gone/What are Cornish men to do?'.

I thought of this last night while listening to Paul Uppal MP, Emma Reynolds MP, Ken Harris and Jane Nelson debate employability. They - and we - all support further education for all, apprenticeships, transferable skills and all the other current jargon. Emma, Ken and Jane also spoke up for the humanist values, very hearteningly.

But we still have a problem. Not everybody can be a web developer or a graphic designer. Economies can't run on serving each other coffee, cutting each other's hair and doing people's nails. I've found my personal solution: 4 degrees and I'm in the 12th (yes, 12th) year of temporary contracts. The current one expires in June. No contract, no mortgage, no planning for the future.

But I'll be OK. It's what used to be called the working class that's bothering me. What's the point of apprenticeships if there are no jobs out there? The UK abandoned investment in industry after WW2: no innovation, no specialisation, no energy efficiency - then affected to be shocked when the metal-bashing jobs went abroad, quickly followed by the highly-skilled manual jobs which could have replaced them. In recent years, the Labour government provided mass higher education, but didn't develop an economy to take advantage of these skills, leading to degree-holders colonising the jobs traditionally taken by the less-educated. It made HE look like a way of massaging the unemployment figures rather than a serious plan.

Some sections of society will be fine: bankers, hedge-fund traders, shareholders and especially the executives who've diverted what should go to shareholders into their own profits by way of bonuses and what they disgustingly term 'compensation' (for what?).

We have a problem. In the old days workers sold their labour, and owners profited from it by selling physical goods. The UK has abandoned goods in favour of intellectual work - rather than ripping stuff out of the ground, business monopolises the fruit of state education and workers' ingenuity. This makes executives rich, but it privatises intelligence and - more pressingly - leaves massive swathes of the country not just unemployed, but unemployable. What are they to do? In the boom times, taxes from the City covered the benefits payments and we left these people to a life of not-very-pleasant indolence. Now that cash has gone and the government's suddenly discovered that these people are 'benefit scroungers', feckless, idle people 'too comfortable on benefits' (as Uppal and one hysterical audience member claimed last night).

I don't think they are. The problem is that there are 60 million people in Britain and we've abandoned mass employment. They aren't unemployable because of their individual failings: they're unemployable because our economic structure is designed to exclude them. Capitalism relentlessly replaces workers with machines and - in the modern period - physical work with mental work. We used to pity those with arduous jobs: now millions of people envy those lucky enough to be struggling along on the minimum wage in some dead-end drudgery.

Governments used to be 'for' the people, at least in theory. Now they operate in the interests of capital without any qualms. They shrug their shoulders and point at China: how does the British worker compete with a billion people ready and willing to work harder, for longer and for massively lower pay? The government's answer, of course, is that we should join the race to the bottom: safe in the knowledge that the political class and their children will never have to suffer personally. It's ludicrous anyway. Those jobs aren't coming back. When the Chinese demand too much money, the British, American and European corporations which control industry will move the factories to somewhere willing to accept even less. The needs of the workers here and in China will be left far behind in the pursuit of even greater profit margins. We're used to thinking of unemployment as a temporary, shocking aberration which happens on a mass scale at moments of crisis: we need to start thinking of it as a permanent and necessary condition of successful capitalism. Lots of unemployed = ever lower wages. Increasing mechanisation = ever-increasing unemployment = permanently declining wages.

But what should we do? Is there meaningful, non-exploitative work to be done? I think there is: our infrastructure is, you may have noticed, knackered. The problem is that nobody wants to pay for it. The corporations which depend on the transport, education and health system to provide decent staff (this is how they privatise the common wisdom or what Marx called the 'general intellect') spend their time exporting jobs and hiding profits from the taxman, while citizens have been encouraged to see taxation as extortion rather than the subscription we pay to join a civilised society. The Greeks bought off their middle classes with massive state employment - and now the bond markets are taking their revenge. In the meantime, billions of people sit around, unwanted. In first world countries, contraception slowly reduces their numbers, but that's a very long-term and quite sinister solution. In developing countries, poor health care, high mortality and manual labour encourages large families - reducing the chance of developing an educated society in a vicious circle of deprivation.

The logic of this is the total abolition of international proletarian solidarity, and the dissolution of national solidarity too: the upper classes are walling themselves into gated communities, living off their bonuses and share options, hating and fearing the not-wanted-on-voyage poor: many of whom have been educated just enough to understand what's been done to them. This is of course quite useful: as Paul Mason frequently points out, the conditions of revolution require a vanguard which is educated, articulate and excluded - all those graduates suddenly finding that they're poorer than their parents.

How the state buys off these potential revolutionaries is as yet unclear. Apprenticeships and internships might help a tiny minority, but the fervent hope of the ruling classes is that the education system is so dedicated to the maintenance of the hegemonic elite that the disenfranchised youth won't have the tools to elucidate their situation. I disagree: it will take a long time, but consciousness will return.

National Unemployed Workers' Movement

What seriously depresses me is the passivity of the long-term unemployed. In the 30s, across the US and Europe, militancy rose quickly and gloriously - perhaps because unionisation was prevalent, and because the workers knew that mass employment was the normal condition in industrial societies. Now, mass unemployment is a fundamental element of the capitalist structure. They've got used to it, and nobody has any trust in governments any more: the state works for the banks and the City, everybody can see that.

The working poor aren't going to strike - it's been made legally difficult and self-harming. When the university staff went on strike recently, virtually all the picket-line crossers were the lowest-paid: cleaners, caterers, security guards. Why? Because they're desperate to retain the tiny stake they have in society, however oppressive. They're all on zero-hours contracts: sackable in an instant. During the academic holidays, they're left to fend for themselves, unpaid. We teachers, conversely, have pensions and contracts (however temporary): we're not yet proletarianised and we're fighting desperately to stay that way. For the cleaners, the battle's over and they've lost. If a university can't treat its staff properly, what hope for contract cleaners at merchant banks or supermarkets? The militant student isn't fighting alongside the ex-working class: s/he's fighting to avoid joining it. When the underclass does revolt - as in the riots last August - the mode is one which horrifies or baffles the rest of us. Smashing up Snappy Snaps and nicking water bottles might seem stupid to us, but it's a mark of the depoliticisation and dissolution of a class which in the 1930s was capable of sophisticated analysis and concerted action.

Instead of meaningful work, we've become the willing servants of the information economy: every time I blog, and every time you add something to Facebook, we're handing over a free product to be sold to advertisers and corporate interests. They know that information is a commodity: we haven't yet caught on. The old solution was to kick out the bourgeoisie and circulate the profits of industry amongst the actual workers: now there's no work and the profit is in intangible, low-employment activity. I suppose we could all work in Farmville or playing MMORPGS to generate online goods like magic swords for sale to talentless rich kids (as featured in Ready Player One) but it's a minority pursuit and not good for social cohesion.

I don't know what to do about the millions who would have once made things. We're in the process of taking away the benefits designed to keep them calm and obedient: is the government sure it knows what to do when these people start to lash out?

This just in…

OK, this is old but I only recently got the email circulating. Perhaps I shouldn't mock, given that I'm part of the Olympics set-up, but it's funny…

Recipe for social decay

Andrew Maxwell, who is a comedian, knows why we're in a mess. He's a comedian, which suggests that the days of the fool speaking truth to power are coming back.

Create a society that values material things above all else. Strip it of industry. Raise taxes for the poor and reduce them for the rich and for corporations. Prop up failed financial institutions with public money. Ask for more tax, while vastly reducing public services. Put adverts everywhere, regardless of people's ability to afford the things they advertise. Allow the cost of food and housing to eclipse people's ability to pay for them. Light blue touch paper. 

Hard to disagree with any of that.

Meanwhile, it's come to my attention that - rather ironically - the Tory Party's 2007 Conference was soundtracked by Jimmy Cliff's 'You Can Get It If You Really Want', which would fit rather nicely with images of looters trashing Carphone Warehouse.

I'd suggest a Rolling Stones track. No, not 'Streetfighting Man', but 'You Can't Always Get What You Want'.

The wanderer returns to a scene of devastation

To judge from the media coverage, I was returning to a smoking, post-apocalyptic ruin, or - as the BBC's celebrity Tory slaphead Nick Robinson put it - 'a city living in fear'. What do I see? Ok, there are lots of shops boarded up, but most of them were before the riot. The major vandalism that greets me is the economic vandalism of a government which puts its financier friends' interests before those of the citizenry.

Obviously I haven't been back to my flat yet (work first!): if that's looted, I'll join you in the queue for a pitchfork and a copy of the Daily Mail. But in the meantime, let's do a little light thinking.

There's a dead French philosopher called Jean Baudrillard. He liked getting headlines with gnomic pronouncements guaranteed to annoy empiricist Englishmen, but sometimes he made very salient points.

One of these is the notion of potlatch and the gift, which he tripped over during his anthropology/sociology days. Gifts, in most cultures, create obligations. Except of course, for those of my social circle who remain unfamiliar with the concept of buying one's round. Now, if you're permanently placed in the position of recipient with no hope of ever reciprocating, you're in a hard place: shame, resentment and anger are common responses.

We could think of these street rioters as eternal recipients of gifts they neither want nor need, often in the form of ineffectual schemes, politicians of photo-opportunities, or simply the constant presence of wealth, always out of touch: in London or on TV. The response to this 'gift' is fury.

These kids aren't political, but they are - as all mobs are - part of politics, though they lack the language to express it (partly because politics has become a private and self-perpetuating tribe). They've been encouraged to consume even as our leaders have deliberately removed all the opportunities to legally acquire: EMA withdrawn, university access removed, decent wages cut - and at the same time, the rich are becoming obscenely richer, even those who've smashed our economy to pieces in pursuit of private gain.

You know I don't condone the random violence we've seen; but that doesn't mean I can't understand where it's coming from.

One of the most disgusting responses I've seen over the past few days is the plan to throw offenders out of their council houses. A few problems with this:
1. Councils have a legal duty to house the homeless. So they'll just be moved on.
2. Offenders' families are being thrown out too - made homeless because of the actions of someone else.
3. This means that poor criminals are being punished twice. I rent my flat privately, so if I go looting with a lad from a council house, I'll only get half the punishment he does.

This last point is serious: we have a legal system which supposedly hands out impartial punishment. But then, David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson were once part of a gang which operated in the Oxford area, the sole purpose of which was to smash up law-abiding people's property. After they'd had their fun, they'd hand over bundles of banknotes to hush it up. They clearly think there's a difference between 'pure criminality' which requires a crackdown, and 'high-jinks'. I wonder if their victims agree. So does this gentleman.

Recipe for a riot

I don't know, take one measly holiday and the social fabric falls apart. But people of Tottenham, looting ALDI? Have some ambition, for Christ's sake.

Last year, a lot of people expressed their disquiet at the police tactic of 'kettling' student protesters - confining them for long periods, in poor conditions, for no apparent reason - leading to anger and mindless violence. 

What have we done if not 'kettled' our urban poor and ethnic minorities? Insane property prices, low pay, racial discrimination, poor education and political failure have concentrated those denied a stake in society in desolate quarters, kept in place by a racist or (at best) disconnected police force, neglected by the institutions meant to improve their lot. Regardless of your view of what they've done this week, it's not unexpected. 

OK, how do these things happen? Well, there's always a strong dash of opportunism: the element that likes a) free stuff and b) a bit of violence, though they're likely to be at the back of the queue for a truncheon sandwich. Along with the political opportunists and the 'community leaders' who always emerge on these occasions.

But below the surface, all the ingredients are there. At a really basic level, long hot summers produce tense situations that can easily turn violent - New York in the 1970s was a classic set of circumstances.

At the risk of reinforcing my reputation for being a wet liberal (undeserved: I'm a hardline lefty), I will say that institutional contempt and deprivation lead to riots. The specific cause is bad enough - a young man shot dead by the police. But if the police had a reputation for talking before they fired, for treating the poor and brown the same as they treat the rich and white, this riot would never have got off the ground. It's largely not what the police did this time - we don't yet even know what that was - it's what they've done with Menezes and with all the ethnic kids who get stopped whenever they leave their homes.

Add to this the government's withdrawal of youth services in the name of 'austerity': thousands of school kids, often lacking social restraints provided by structured communities, on the streets with nothing to do for 3 months, are likely to find themselves in trouble. To them, government isn't a provider of services: it's simply oppressive bodies such as the police - aggressive and not looking very like their community.

Does this mean I think it's OK to trash the place? No, obviously not - apart from anything else, it's totally unfocussed. Aldi and Carpetright aren't the primary element, unless someone's going to claim that this was an anti-capitalist uprising. I wish it were, but it isn't.

Funnily enough, I've been reading Butterworth's The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents. The problem facing the 19th-century anarchists as they sat in London slums working out the future was the split between 'positive' anarchists, who looked forward to a (possibly violent revolution) and the 'individual' anarchists, who seemed to use the doctrine as an excuse for the worst kinds of terrorist outrages.

To some, outbursts of the most savage violence were natural consequences of the way the underclass were treated - an argument which you might well hear in the coming days. To others, individual murders or bombings became indelibly associated with violence: a great shame given the wonderful premise of anarchism (that without institutional oppression, humanity was capable of altruism, leading to a co-operative paradise).

I'm somewhere in-between. Some of these rioters are the people who'll trash anything, for fun. Some are freelance capitalists, taking their opportunities wherever they can. Some will be politically motivated, though lacking the intellectual skills for concerted, directed action, and despairing at politicians' inability to articulate the needs of a community which has largely been abandoned by the state: just like 19th-Century London

In other respects, the situation is quite different. Malato wrote this of London in The Delights of Exile:

Oh, great metropolis of Albion, your atmosphere is sometimes foggier than reason allows, your ale insipid and your cooking in general quite execrable, but you show respect of for individuality and are welcoming to the émigrés. Be proud of these two qualities and keep them.

Ah well. The beer and food have certainly improved, but we've been conditioned to hate and fear émigrés - leading to the kind of social decay we see this week.

My solution? Not the 'infantile Leftism' Lenin described, which sees immediate violence as the solution to everything. Instead, we need William Morris's formula: 'Agitate. Educate. Organise'.

Here's some John Henry Mackay, cited in Butterworth's book:

Like and enormous black, motionless, giant Kraken, the poverty of London lies there in lurking silence and encircles with its tentacles the life and wealth of the City and of the West End'

and here's Morris himself:

Affluent London was 'so terrified of the misery it has created that at all hazards it must be swept out of sight'. 

This is what we've done: created massive areas of our cities left to rot. In them, the low-paid (the majority of officially poor people are in paid employment) and the unemployed. Next to them, vanity projects, 'iconic' buildings, gated 'communities' (they're not really). It's Ballard's airport landscape writ large: shiny surfaces, anti-crowd architecture, fast transport from investment bank to gated bourgeois ghetto with no smelly, sticky contact with the poor in-between. The bankers don't even see their cleaners: daylight is for the rich, midnight for the poor.

Last year, a lot of people expressed their disquiet at the police tactic of 'kettling' student protesters - confining them for long periods, in poor conditions, for no apparent reason - leading to anger and violence.

One more thing: the EDL smash things up wherever they go, without the kind of coverage this riot is getting. Why? Because the media laps up pictures of angry black folk. It fits with the framing they've acquired from history: they always present black people as naturally violent, inarticulate and so on, whereas white rioters are always 'bad apples'. Like Breivik being insane while Islamic killers are 'ruthless/organised etc.'

Don't feed this prejudice. Don't riot. Demonstrate. If you must use violence (and I'm not advocating it), target your anger. You know how these pictures are used by media and politicians. Don't give them easy targets.