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Jean Osinski lives in Forbach, where he was born 27 years ago of Polish and Slovene parents. Jean does not work. He is one of the many jobless in a city that was deeply changed and depressed by the changeover from one era to another, from smokestack industry to a global speculative economy. Forbach was savaged by the closing-down of its coalmines, since it was entirely structured around them. A former flagship of French heavy industry, Forbach is nothing now, merely a grey dot on the map of a Europe whose prosperity no longer requires full employment — but demands, on the contrary, tens of millions of unemployed. Jean is one of those whom our economic system needs to remain idle. Today’s globalisation, driven by economic law, is blossoming in such a manner that it requires employment in heavy industry to become increasingly scarce in the western world. A major part of Western output is no longer profitable because of the new organisation and economic model of world trade, against a backdrop of dramatic inequality in social rights between the North and the South. Consequently, a society driven exclusively by a philosophy of profit now deems entire sectors of its direct production useless. It therefore discards them and focuses only on trading — and speculating on — goods manufactured elsewhere or produced by ever-more autonomous machines, thereby drying up the need for human input in production. Inactivity is now one of the major driving forces of the West’s current economic boom: be it unemployment in Forbach, as in so many other former industrial Meccas, or the idleness of Jean, similar to that of millions of other people in Europe. Inactivity is now a prerequisite for maintaining the West’s supremacy and its wealth to the detriment of the rest of the globalised world. Nevertheless, inactivity remains culturally and politically unaccepted and is not at all seen as the fantastic value that it actually represents. Work alone, although it is disappearing, still provides a status in society and, thereby, an identity for an individual. Although it is organised (cf. the notorious planned redundancy schemes that amount to the professional and social extermination of entire social categories), and inevitable (in an exclusive rationale of price competitiveness), inactivity remains either pathetic, contemptible or scandalous — in any event, unacceptable. It is therefore simultaneously required by the economy and forbidden by society. It is a typical double bind (“stand up but please remain seated”), and one can only wonder to what extent it depresses those who are doomed to idleness and criticised for doing nothing and, as a result, to existing without being (“I don’t do anything, therefore I am nothing”).
The labour force shrinks further every day, but nobody — or hardly anyone — so far can simply assume the status of idleness and live it in full peace of mind. Heavy guilt crushes all those our booming modern economy refuses to include, or “disincludes”. Such a feeling is utterly insane, and our era that has created it is in no hurry to do anything to correct it. One therefore needs to understand that the feeling itself is in fact profitable for the economy, the queen of all policies. Undermined, stripped of their dignity and rights, through no fault of their own, the unemployed are ready to put up with anything rather than their shame at being rejected since they believe it is their fault. The US economy exploits them to feed the pool of working poor, taking up some of them to meet its needs for an under-class at the orders of the “nouveaux riches” in a condition that is directly comparable to slavery. Europe's last shreds of pride require extra time for it to make up the lost ground before becoming a perfect copy of the US model. It prefers using them to satisfy its bourgeois leaning for compassion — as if the arrogance of this profit were lesser! It unceasingly films and photographs the new victims of its prosperity, putting them on stage or dragging them onto talk shows, using them as witnesses or material for writers’ workshops. They are never said to have been doomed to unemployment — this is a taboo subject — but are described as unemployed, homeless, deprived, underprivileged, etc.
Jean Michel Bruyère.
30 mai 2000 |
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