The under-30 unemployment rate in Spain has just hit 44 per cent, twice the adult rate. Italy also has passed the 40 per cent mark, and Greece has gone even further. If you count all the people who’ve given up looking, it means the number of people between 20 and 30 who have any form of employment in these countries is something like one in five.
An entire European generation is leaving school to discover they have no place in the economy.
This is what is happening in Europe - the industrial work has been exported along with the jobs - the jobs are just not there.
Is this not true at home as well?
The classic Political work is to get "jobs" but the pool of jobs is empty - unless you want to harvest fruit, serve coffee, kill chickens, blow leaves etc. Even on PEI our "slave jobs" in fish processing are no longer filled by locals but by people from Russia, India etc - people who want an entry point to North America.
So what to do?
I think that this starts with food It was food that was the entry point for the destruction of communities it will be food that is the entry point for their restoration.
Our system has destroyed community. Food is now "made" in industrial settings far away from the consumer - where machines or "slaves" do the work. I use the term "slave" deliberately as people who do crushing hard and boring and often dangerous work for just enough to feed them.
This is what happened in Rome. The thousands of local farms - the source of the manpower of the legions and the votes in the republic - were bought up by a few. The unemployed farmers had to come to Rome where they were bought off with bread and circuses. The now huge corporate farms were manned by slaves. The result - a vast underclass and a tiny elite and a system all built upon the muscle power of slaves and the use of capital.
Is this not our story? We have seen our own equivalent of the "Republic" a nation based on resilient communities settled by people who were largely self sufficient and so independent transformed into "Rome" where millions depend on the system for every part of their lives.
It was only 100 years ago, when 80% of Canadians and American lived this way in thousands of small communities where the economy was based on local food production. Like in Rome, these small farms have been squeezed out by capital and by regulations that punish the small. On PEI there were 14,000 farms - now there are maybe 200 that struggle. The people at first got jobs in factories that made the transition hard by in the end bearable in North America where pay was good in the new manufacturing.
The pattern was the same in England but the transition was harder.
For it happened 100 years earlier and there were on,y slave jobs waiting for the masses or emigration. This was the "Enclosure" time when land owners saw that they could get a higher ROI by replacing their people with machines or capital. So millions of country folk were driven off the land that they had lived on for millennia and either emigrated to America or Canada or went to the cities where they became "labour" or servants.
In time the manufacturing sector paid well. But a new form of Enclosure has taken place. People have ben replaced by machines, capital and by a global distribution system that draws on a labour pool of 6 billion. This is why wages have been going down in real terms for 40 years. This is why 2 people cannot support a family anymore. The result has been that many of us have gone into debt to cover the difference.
This is why nations themselves are so far in debt that they too have to cut themselves off from their people to serve the bankers.
For all those unemployed and for all our children - there are no good jobs that will come back - not with this system.
For the Good the factory jobs have been exported - they are not returning. Now many of the middle management jobs have gone. Many of the tech jobs and even higher end jobs have gone.
Like Rome, there are now only "slave" jobs or TV and fast food and despair.
So what to do?
The starting point is food - as it was when communities were destroyed by enclosure and by exporting manufacturing.
The road home to viable communities and viable lives is emerging naturally in the local food movement. Our food system is always the system that shapes society.
A new system is emerging that is intensely local but with a difference. It is not farming as we knew it but a system of very small intense operations linked in a network - like the web.
If we grow food this way locally all the work related to this - the growing, the servicing, the processing, the sales and distribution - all return home. We start to create the habit and the systems for doing things locally.
From that will grow a local series of other services and products - equipment would be first - but a new distributed model might break the central model for nearly all things. Why not local distributed manufacturing? Surely local media?
A new networked food system will be the foundation of a new society.
It will not be a mandated top down shift - but a shift of desperation. We see it in places like Detroit where the only way left is local. With millions unemployed, how will they eat?
What times we live in!
