I learned a new word yesterday, … Precariat, which Wiki defines as
“In sociology and economics, the precariat is a social class formed by people suffering from precarity, which is a condition of existence without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare.”
This class has been tagged as “The New Dangerous Class”, in the blog Working Class perspectives, which appeared in October 2014, just as the book entitled A Precariat Charter was published, both penned by Guy Standing, Professor of Economics, SOAS, University of London.
I came across the blog by chance while following a line of enquiry in my own low level flights through the blogosphere. I have a very large hornet buzzing round my bonnet about the current political theatre we are enjoying in the US and the UK, the first two acts of which have been Brexshit, and Trumpshit respectively.
Together they form the most irrational human behaviour I have ever come across on my three score years and ten, matched only by various outbreaks of hideous behaviour in the middle ages caused by Ergot poisoning, known as St Anthony’s Fire.
I know the political system in both countries is twisted and effectively corrupt, but honestly, two supposedly sane nations acting upon the words of Trump, Farage, Johnson, Gove & Co? Somebody must have slipped something in the water surely?
My personal opinion was that we are all being softened up for the “Big Shove”, by the Corporate Bulldozer, over the edge and into the landfill labelled Hunger Games, and all the pieces of the puzzle fit together.
Recipe for disaster,
Blend together equal parts: –
Think Tank, Lobby system, Farage, Media control. TTIP, Propaganda levels, Post Truth era, Privatisation on Steroids, Trump, Gove, UKIP, CETA, Russian election hacking, Murdoch, Frunobulax (A giant Poodle dog from a F Zappa track), Bojo Johnson.
Switch off the blender and think carefully about what you have done, as you hold the equivalent of the Primordial Soup of The Day, ( You know, the one that all life forms are supposed to have evolved from, but this time in reverse.)
It is the soup we are all stewing ourselves in right now as our once stable societies just fall apart like meat off a well stewed bone.
Meanwhile, I came across the expression while I was Searching the Bilderberg Group website, to see if there had been any developments within this shy beast, that might help me understand the recent lunacy, and came across this Press Release.
The agenda is always interesting, but what caught my eye was Item 9 Precariat and middle class. I confess that while I was able to have a stab at what the Precariat was, it would probably pay to look a little deeper.
That took me to the Working Class perspectives, blog, which in turn led me to the author Guy Standing. Now I don’t know about you but the blog resonated with me, to the point that I discovered pretty quickly that I am a member of the Precariat myself, the blog states …
The precariat has distinctive relations of distribution. It relies on money wages, without pensions, paid holidays, retrenchment benefits or medical coverage. It has been losing those benefits, which is why conventional statistics understate growing inequality.
Which describes to a Tee how my life has been for the last 20 years, before I retired (With a negligible pension) last year.
It also fits with the nutty things like Brexshit going on. The UK politicians are headless chickens even 9 months after the referendum, and still can’t get their tiny minds round the fact that leaving the EU isn’t anything to do with a particular political party at all.
It is just a bad joke based on a pack of lies, and doesn’t fit any political model in the known universe.
I wanted to remain in the EU, I live in the EU, it is great to be a foreigner, it’s good to talk in a different language, it exercises the mind, you actually have to think what you are saying, it’s called communication, and I like it.
With our faces almost permanently fixed on an IPhone screen, we are losing the very human art of having a face to face conversation, with all of the face reading and body language that goes with it. These are important, they are the signs that tell us of honesty and truth and openness which doesn’t get sent as an attachment along with a Tweet or an Email.
So having established that there is a group in which I fit, I went back to the Bilderberg Site to finish off what I started, downloading the list of attendees for the meeting 9th – 12th June 2016. I wanted to see who was present in terms of the makeup of the group, not the individual names, but the number of Bankers or Industrialists etc.
And then I saw that Guy Standing was Invited
And he is the man who described the likes of me as the “Dangerous Class” a group with no representation, wandering about waiting for a movement to happen.
And the penny dropped, Trumpshit and Brexshit are what happen when a large number of people just don’t agree with the “Ruling” part of society.
For my part, I don’t agree with the Inequality, the fact that a handful of mega rich families have more money than half the world’s population.
I don’t agree with Nigel Farage whipping up racism and hatred against a minority group.
I don’t agree with 95% of UK politics 95% of the time.
It is as frustrating as hell, and it makes me very angry. Angry enough to vote for nothing, or vote for something just to wake people up, or to look at an opinion poll and vote against its stupid assumptions just because I feel bloody minded. I would vote for Frunobulax if I could sneak the name onto a ballot paper
The politicians we are presented with are 95% died in the wool, Nose in the Trough Self-interested Oxygen Bandits, who have taken the work of 200 years in civilising and developing the United Kingdom and sold it off to the highest bidder while rewarding themselves with Knighthoods, Money, Fame and portfolios of shares of all the Public services they have stolen and sold these past 40 years.
Professor Standing is right, the Precariat aren’t even organised yet and they are very dangerous, imagine what is going to happen when we all put our heads together and formulate a world where it’s going to be done our way…or it’s not going to be done at all.
I have in my mind’s eye a General election in the UK where the turnout is Zero, and then again, we might come up with something completely different, and even more dangerous
In the meantime, I must finish reading “A Precariat Charter”
By the way, the Blog, as of this morning, had only 8 “Likes” which is pretty shabby for a work of this calibre, and especially as it was posted 30 months ago.
If ever an idea needed to go Viral this is it
Bloemenstein-Whistlehuizen
Feb 2017
Another great site by the Dangerous Globe
