Blaming the Unemployed for Sin of Unemployment

EXTRACT: Monstrously, mass unemployment is almost certainly here to stay - it has become normalised. During the 1950s and 60s we were told that unemployment had been more or less conquered: all that remained was ‘frictional’ or technical unemployment, as workers moved almost effortlessly from one job to another - just walked down the road to the next factory, which seemed to offer better conditions. The good times, even the ‘leisure society’, was here. But by the early 1970s the story - the lie - was starting to break down, with bourgeois commentators fearfully wondering whether the working class would tolerate unemployment levels of half a million. Perhaps massive civil unrest or even revolution beckoned if we returned to the poverty and insecurity of the 1930s, a prospect which the post-World War II welfare state was supposed to have put an end to once and for all.
Yet mass unemployment became a reality under the Wilson/Heath/Callaghan governments, and then shot through the roof under Thatcher, as large swathes of industry were destroyed in the name of ‘competitiveness’ and ‘labour discipline’ - yes, a price worth paying in order to make Britain great again. This led to the creation of a semi-permanent unemployed contingent of the working class, vilely slandered as the so-called ‘underclass’ by near endless academic idiots and horrified liberals (and, for that matter, by those infatuated with the notion that the ‘wretched of the earth’ were in fact the true revolutionary vanguard). More to the point, when capitalism made its turn to financialisation from the 1970s onward, it was doomed as a system to low growth. Bluntly, the chances of another 1950s-60s long boom are non-existent.
Therefore communists implacably defend the unemployed from the attack upon them being planned by the coalition government - the real “sin” being capitalism.
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