Unemployment is a permanent and growing feature of capitalism as American men disappear from the workforce

The capitalist mass media talks of an improving economy and cites lower unemployment rates as proof not to mention surging profits.  The unemployment rate, US  Labor Secretary Hilda Solis boasts, fell to 8.8% from 9.8% in four months, "its largest decline since 1984".

But the unemployment rate is not really an unemployment rate at all. It is measured by the number of applicants for benefits.  But there are literally millions of people who have given up looking for work. The number of unemployed American men is rising and has even become a concern to the US bourgeois.  Business Week points out that the share of American men between the ages of 16 and 64 who are working has gone from 85% in the early 1950's to under 65% now. *

Crime, homelessness, the collapse or deterioration of personal relations are all a by-product of such objective developments as the need to produce, crucial to all human beings is denied us by the so-called free market.  It is not profitable to hire people, to buy human Labor power.  Improvements in Labor saving devices and technology contributes to such conditions as the ownership of the means of production is in the hands and production set in to motion by private individuals whose motive is personal gain. Instead of creating more leisure time so we can involve ourselves in the runnign of society it increases profits and throws workers on to the dole line.

As always, the crisis is even more acute for specially oppressed minorities; unemployment for black teenagers is over 40%.  And that is official so it is more likely more than that, plus, those working, as with so many youth today, are working more than one job.  They have to work more than one job to make a living and often, one of those jobs will be selected on the basis of paying some form of health benefit, inadequate but better than nothing.

One man tells BW: "It's not healthy for me, people were designed to work."

How right he is.  Human beings are productive creatures, without production there is no life.  We were designed to interact with nature to produce the necessities of life.  How we produce those necessities is the issue.  We work to produce needs, to produce what economists call, use values. Capitalists don't set production in motion to produce things we need; this is incidental.  They do so to produce exchange value, to expropriate surplus value from those that work and they do this through their control of the production process and all the social structure that perpetuates this coercive arrangement from the state to the police.


Amid great wealth human Labor power sits idle.  Detached from the administrative functions of society humans lose our humanity, our creative desires.  I am not religious in any way, but that in Job it says, "Man is born to Labor and the bird to fly".  But slums, jails, wars and environmental disaster is what capitalism offers the future.  Capitalism socialized production and it is our task to socialize ownership of how we produce, what we produce and how we distribute it. Society needs new managers.

*The Hidden Job Crisis For American Men Business Week 4-11-11