[MA]

It doesn't matter how much reactionary rhetoric the right-wing press spew about the unemployed, nor how often government ministers and DWP employees call people without jobs "idle" or "scrounger" and complain that they are getting "handouts" - thier bile doesn't make mandatory labour confiscation schemes any less wrong or any less economically illiterate.
The tendency to vilify the unemployed is a classic example of the "blame the symptom, not the cause" propaganda strategy.

The real people to blame for the scale of unemployment are the politicians and central bankers that believe in the neoliberal equilibrium unemployment theory. This orthodox economic theory states that greater profitability can be achieved by deliberately driving down wages and working conditions through the creation of false abundance in the labour market by retaining a permanent pool of unemployment. This deliberate economic policy is known as the "reserve army of unemployment" as Marx defined it in the 19th century, or as the "price worth paying" as it was described by former Tory Chancellor Norman Lamont in 1991.

The whole idea of maintaining a huge reserve of unemployed people is ludicrous. A vast standing army of unemployed people may reduce wages and appear to create private sector profits, but these profits are eclipsed at the national scale by the increased cost of welfare for this vast pool of unemployed labour. Then there are the stunningly obvious fact that national productivity is reduced if millions of workers have no jobs to go to, and aggregate demand is reduced if millions of people have no wages to spend.

Think of it this way: The vast majority of unemployed people are just ordinary working people who happen to be without jobs because of the way the economy is being deliberately mismanaged. They are not getting "handouts" because they paid for their benefits through National Insurance contributions when they did have jobs. Yes there are some feckless people, but they are massively outnumbered by the unemployed who have worked before and would much rather earn a decent wage instead of living on the pittance that the state provides to those without work.

If you must get angry at the unemployment situation, perhaps it might be a tad more rational to get angry at the people who have been deliberately mismanaging the economy over the last three and a half decades in order to create a huge supply of surplus labour in order to drive down wages and subsidise corporate profits..

As it is now, there are millions of unemployed people chasing hundreds of thousands of jobs. In many areas there are literally hundreds of applicants for every single menial low paid job. Once you recognise that there are more unemployed people than there are jobs, and that this is a result of deliberate macroeconomic policies, you must recognise that it is the system, not the unemployed people themselves that are to blame for high levels of unemployment.

It will only be when the public put pressure on the state to abandon the defunct neoliberal pseudo-economic theories that demand a constant pool of unemployed people, that full employment will return.

If full employment ever does return, and there are plenty of vacancies for everyone that wants to work (like there were between the early 1950s and the mid 1970s) then feel free to return to getting angry at the minority of people who still choose to be unemployed when there are plenty of jobs to go around, but until then, perhaps you should use your brain and direct your anger at the real culprits.

holy shit we should burn the tories. seriously. we should do Oliver Cromwell again, but better.

I AM NOT A NUMBER etc