Letter from The Cape
Episode 11
July 14, 2023


Hello, here is another episode in the Letter from The Cape.

In 1996, French journalist and essayist Vivian Forrester published a book - L'horreur économique (the Economic Horror) - which was a devastating critique of global capitalism and the abandonment of the commitment to full employment by governments around the world.

She noted that the rise of the 'free market' narrative was reinforced by approaches by government that sought to alienate the unemployed.

The book ventures into the notion that governments have made the unemployed dispensable to ‘capitalist production and profit’ and have instead been content to keep them alive.

But soon, why would it not be implausible to declare this growing group of disadvantaged citizens totally irrelevant.

A black future then unfolds.

It was a prescient reflection of the times.

The interests of capital took advantage of the chaos associated with the oil price crisis and the inflation of the mid-1970s, to argue that governments must abandon their commitment to full employment and instead use mass unemployment as a policy tool - a weapon - to discipline trade union wage demands.

By creating a large pool of idle labour, employers could suppress wage demands and generate higher profits.

This was the start of the neoliberal era and it has been spectacularly successful in achieving shifts in national income towards capital.

We were told that there was no alternative - the TINA mantra.

The path was set and we have followed it ever since.

But at that time, the deliberate creation of mass uemployment created a political problem for governments.

The long period after the Second World War of full employment, job security and growing real wages had conditioned citizens to see unemployment as an avoidable evil and to understand that government had the policy capacity to ensure no one who wanted to work would go without a job.

So the problem then became - How to handle the public perception that mass unemployment was a policy failure?

The solution adopted was to use divide and conquer strategies to vilify the unemployed and shift the focus from a systemic failure to create enough jobs to one where the unemployed were to blame for their joblessness.

They were characterised as idle and lazy and a pernicious nomenclature was created to reinforce the message - dole bludgers and all of that.

The 'blame the victim' approach gave the government cover and it has been all down hill from there.

A new industry was created - the unemployment management industry - and in Australia the government employment service, that had provided excellent support to anyone who was looking for jobs was privatised and a host of 'mendicant' private job service providers arose who adopted a culture that the unemployed were just a vehicle to generate profit from.

And that system was extended by the Australian government into a vicious and punitive system under the guise of mutual responsiblity that made it difficult for the unemployed to remain on income support - even as the income support provided was increasingly below the accepted poverty line.

Then the sociopaths in government decided to create a system where income support recipients who might find part-time work to supplement their incomes, which was allowable under the system, were assessed by a computer algorithm to be in breach of their eligibility and debts were raised.

Debt collectors were sent in.

People committed suicide under the constant harassment to repay the debts.

While this system was tyranical it was also illegal under Australian law and we now know that most of the debts were fabrications of government because the algorithm was flawed.

Last week, the Royal Commission into this scandal reported and found the conduct of government at the time to be venal, illegal and lacking in humanity.

We are waiting to see which of the politicians and top public sector employees who lied and knowingly continued this illegal scheme will be punished.

I am not holding my breath.

Viviane Forrester saw this abuse of the unemployed clearly and like her we should demand that it ends.

But then, the divide and conquer strategies deployed by governments that began in the 1970s have coopted us into being part of this abuse.

Unless we start to understand that the government can always ensure there are enough jobs for all who desire to work we will remain pawns in this scandalous abuse of the most disadvantaged citizens in our society.

The fact that governments continue to use mass unemployment as a tool to advantage the employers is one of the scandals of the neoliberal era and is in no small part the result of our indifference to the calamities faced by the most fragile in our society.

That's it for today.

See ya later.