[Peace-discuss] "The Unnecessariat"

[Stuart Levy]

This is the article I'd mentioned on Saturday and today *- "The
Unnecessariat".*    It's a rich article in several directions, worth
reading in full, as are many of the comments that follow it.   Thanks to
Naked Capitalism <http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/> for the pointer.

I remember reading a related theme in some book by Jeremy Rifkin, where
he was writing about the migration of Black people from the South as
agriculture became increasingly mechanized - 'they went from being
exploited to being useless labor'.

https://morecrows.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/unnecessariat/

Some quotes are below ...

"The word “community” is much abused now, used in journo-speak to mean
“a group of people with one salient characteristic in common” like
“banking community” or “jet-ski riding community” but the gay community
at the time [of the AIDS epidemic] was the real deal: a dense network of
reciprocal social and personal obligations and friendships, with second-
and even third-degree connections given substantial heft. If you want a
quick shorthand, your community is the set of people you could plausibly
ask to watch your cat for a week, and the people they would in turn ask
to come by and change the litterbox on the day they had to work late.
There’s nothing like that for addicts, nor suicides, not now and not in
the past, and in fact that’s part of the phenomenon I want to talk about
here. This is a despair that sticks when there’s no-one around who cares
about you."

...

"In 2011, economist Guy Standing coined the term “precariat” to refer to
workers whose jobs were insecure, underpaid, and mobile, [...] Looking
back from 2016, one pertinent characteristic seems obvious: no matter
how tenuous, the precariat had jobs. The new dying Americans, the ones
killing themselves on purpose or with drugs, don’t.  Don’t, won’t, and
know it.

Here’s the thing: from where I live, the world has drifted away. We
aren’t precarious, we’re unnecessary. The money has gone to the top. The
wages have gone to the top. The recovery has gone to the top. And what’s
worst of all, everybody who matters seems basically pretty okay with that."

...

[during the AIDS epidemic] The gay community didn’t just roll over and
ask nicely for recognition, they had their shit together enough that
they could fight their way, literally, into the studios of one of the
top news shows in America, into the US capitol, the UK parliament, into
the streets of every major city at rush hour. AIDS galvanized them, but
it was their mutual recognition as friends, allies, comrades-in-arms
from years of fighting for urban space to hook up in that made that
galvanic surge possible.

...

So far, the quiet misery of the unnecessariat has yet to spark its own
characteristic explosion, but is it so hard to see the germ of it in
Trump’s rallies? In the Lavoy Finicum memorials?

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