The Unemployed Caste. How the Serving Man is Created
The McKinsey Institute predicts that by 2030, 400 to 800 million people will lose their jobs, mostly in the core of the capitalist system. This will lead to a dramatic decline in incomes – in the case of workers, by 26 to 56%. If the main victims of automation will be primarily workers, the main impact of robotization will be somewhat higher – on the “intellectual” part of the middle class: engineers, accountants, machine operators.
The result will be:
a) a sharp deterioration in the situation, the impoverishment of some segments of the middle class and the working class, some of whose representatives will certainly join the ranks of the precariat (a class of socially disorganized people who do not have full job security);
b) the impoverishment of the already poor to poverty;
c) the emergence of not only a class, but, as the IMF report emphasizes, a caste of the unemployed.
As Y. Noi-Harari noted, the consequence of these processes will be the creation of two castes – “superhumans” and “superfluous”. Castes will differ – I have already had to write about this – not only socially, but also biologically: height, weight, skin color, body structure, life expectancy – similar to caste differences in India. This is, of course, not the closest view; the closest is what was mentioned above, and of course the enormous increase in social inequality. The IMF predicts it as a consequence of automation/robotization, and the rector of the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology says about the increase in social inequality in the next decade:
“It is as inevitable as sunrise”.
For the weak of this world, for the precariat, it is rather a sunset. Among the precariats there are especially many young people and women. The feminization of work (and the feminization/demasculinization of life in general) in late capitalist society is a very important aspect of precarization. Propaganda in the post-Western world presents women’s employment as their emancipation, self-realization, and the acquisition of identity. In fact, the attitude towards women’s employment, like the quasi-ideology of feminism, solves a number of important political and economic problems for the upper core of the capitalist system. From an economic point of view, it enlarges the labor market, increases competition in the labor force, and thus allows for lower wages, super-exploitation – and super-profits.
A significant part of the precariat is made up of young people. Typical precariats are “eternal interns” and “eternal students”. An intern is accepted for a trial, then rejected, and his place is taken by new interns – and this is non-stop. The type of “eternal student” is found mainly in American universities (I have seen quite a few of them there). In essence, this is a temporarily unemployed person and at the same time a precariat. If we take into account that in post-Western countries (as well as in Russia) education has become a commodity, a service, i.e. j. has been commodified, which is accompanied by a decline in its level and the displacement of real education by the accumulation of “competences” in standardized courses and computer training, it is clear: an increasing proportion of young people will join the ranks of the precariat, where they will, incidentally, face fierce competition from older people on the one hand and migrants on the other. Part of the migrants who are ready to work will replenish the precariat.
It is not surprising that a significant part, if not the majority of the precariat finds itself in the shadow (“informal”) or even criminal economy. This is especially true for seasonal workers. It should be noted that seasonal workers are characteristic not only of the core of the capital system (and its enclaves in the south), but also of the semi-periphery and even the periphery. For example, in the rich countries of the Persian Gulf, several million Indians work (of the 5 million Indians seasonally working abroad, 90% work in the Persian Gulf zone), Pakistanis, Bangladeshis.
The author of an excellent study on the precariat, Guy Standing (“The Precariat – A New Dangerous Class”), distinguishes mainly the negative social and socio-psychological consequences of being a precariat, which are caused in him by the “behavioral economics” of late/dynamic capitalism. First of all, the precariat is formed as an anxiously repressed psychotype, living with fear, often simply incapable of a rational perception of life. This leads to a desire for occult and magical forms. The situation of precarism is destructive, especially for the female psyche and for the family as an institution. Among other things, precariatists are one of the main targets of such a form of crime against humanity as juvenile justice.
White women aged 45+ make up 58% of all regular (5 years or longer) adult antidepressant users in the US. White men aged 45+ are in second place by a wide margin. Women have seen a monstrous jump since 2010. In addition to the world of occult and magical forms, social networks are becoming the social space of the precariat. They are the main zone of its social life. I used the term “zone” for a reason: like every “networker”, the precariat is also under global network surveillance, which, among other things, destroys private life as such.
Two other functions of networks are to replace live communication, in the course of which class consciousness can be formed, with electronically irresponsible communication and to drown the individual in a flood of information garbage and deprive him of the ability and skills to make decisions. Since the precariat, especially its young part, is cut off from real culture and school education is replaced by dressage (in the Russian Federation, such dressage is the Unified State Exam, which is often carried out in forms that humiliate human dignity and young people get used to it as the norm), it cannot realize itself as a group, and even more so, as a class. In theory, they are not a class in themselves, but they can hardly become one in practice. In this respect, they are very similar to the “dangerous classes” of the West, which shook it with their revolts (the bourgeoisie transformed them into revolutions for the final acquisition of the integrity of the capitalist system, i.e. for its transformation into a full-fledged System) at the end of the 18th and in the first half of the 19th century, and in the second half of the 19th century they transformed themselves into the working class – first in England, then in France and Germany.
In recent decades, the opposite process has developed: the working class has degenerated into new “dangerous classes”. They are not capable of class struggle, but under certain conditions they are more than capable of a furious all-destructive revolt, which can turn into a revolution that will sweep away (together with the most dangerous classes) one system and establish a new one.
At the end of the 18th century, more precisely in 1787, I. Bentham proposed that the “dangerous classes” be brought into the organizational form of a panopticon society. Two years later, the “dangerous classes” in France showed that this process can also proceed according to a completely different – guillotine – variant. It seems that the current world elite, at least part of it, is ready to go the way of creating a new version of the panopticon based on NBICS-technologies (the supposed core of the 6th technological mode, based on the unification and synergistic strengthening of the achievements of nano-, bio-, information and cognitive technologies), psychological and even genetic control over a person, up to the breeding of a new type of homo-“servant man”.
Studies are in full swing, noting, for example, that people with one version of the HTR 2A gene are more prone to obedience, and men with low testosterone levels more easily accept control over them. If we add to this the new electronic technologies of social control, a new panopticon is indeed emerging, one of the main characters of which is the precariat.
From Alexander Berezin’s article “Testosterone: Something Went Wrong”.
“Over the past half century, men’s testosterone levels have been steadily declining. Their muscle strength has also been steadily declining, despite the fashion for gyms and a healthy lifestyle. The same is happening with sexual activity. However, new work shows that the hardships associated with a lack of this hormone may be much wider. It seems to increase the likelihood of developing diabetes – and perhaps other not-so-pleasant things. We tend to imagine the history of humanity as a development in which the next phase supersedes the previous one. However, there are many examples in life that this is not the case. For example, it is reliably known that the incidence of cancer in society is constantly increasing, as are a number of other diseases. Moreover, the cause is not mainly pollution, but aspects of human life that are generally considered progressive. Nevertheless, the idea of \u200b\u200ba kind of progress that penetrates all areas of people’s lives and constantly improves their lives does not lead anywhere. A typical example: many people think that people today do much more sports than they used to, and that their sex lives are more active than in the past decades, with known sexual biases. In both cases, the opposite is true.”
The Wall Street Journal reports that more than 35 million Americans live alone. The percentage of lonely people has doubled since 1960. According to the General Social Survey, conducted since 1972 by the University of Chicago, the number of Americans who have an intimate relationship at least once a week has fallen from 45% (2000) to 36% (2016).
Andrej Fursov
