Viviane Forrester : The Economic Horror

by Viviane Forrester

• I think that each of us, whatever our walk of life, should feel concerned about the present state of the world, which is entirely governed by economics. If Shakespeare were to come back to life today, I think he would be fascinated by the tragic interplay of powerful economic forces which are stealthily transforming the lives and destinies of the citizens or rather the populations of all countries.
• To my mind we are witnessing a profound change, a transformation of society and civilization, and we are finding it very hard to accept. How can we say good-bye to a society that was based on stable jobs that provided a safety net and the basics of a decent existence? Job security is on the way out.
  For the first time in history, the vast majority of human beings are no longer indispensable to the small number of those who run the world economy. The economy is increasingly wrapped up in pure speculation. The working masses and their cost are becoming superfluous. In other words, there is something worse than actually being exploited and that is no longer to be even worth exploiting!
• The managers of the economic machine exploit this situation. Full employment is a thing of the past, but we still use criteria that were current in the nineteenth century, or twenty or thirty years ago, when it still existed. Among other things, this encourages many unemployed people to feel ashamed of themselves. This shame has always been absurd but it is even more so today.
  It goes hand in hand with the fear felt by the privileged who still have a paid job and are afraid of losing it. I maintain that this shame and this fear ought to be quoted on the stock exchange, because they are major inputs in profit. Once upon a time people pilloried the alienation caused by work. Today falling labour costs contribute to the profits of big companies, whose favourite management tool is sacking workers; when they do this, their stock market value soars.
• Today we hear a lot about "wealth creation". In the past it was simply known as profit. Today people talk about this wealth as if it will automatically go straight to the community and create jobs, yet at the same time we see highly profitable businesses cutting down heavily on their workforce.
  Today the great thing is to be "profitable", not "useful". This raises a very serious question: Should people be profitable in order to "deserve" the right to live? — Viviane Forrester
  When people talk about society's "movers and shakers", they aren't talking about the bulk of their country's population but about business leaders who relocate at the drop of a hat. Politicians make jobs their priority, but the Stock Exchange is delighted whenever a big industrial complex fires workers and gets worried whenever there's the slightest improvement in the unemployment figures. I wanted to draw people's attention to this paradox. A company's stock market quotation depends largely on labour costs, and profit is generated in the last analysis by reducing the numbers of those who have a job.
• The present situation raises a vital question for the future of the people of our planet, above all for young people and their future. Today the great thing is to be "profitable", not "useful". This raises a very serious question: Should people be profitable in order to "deserve" the right to live? The commonsense answer is that it is a good thing to be useful to society. But we are preventing people from being useful, we are squandering the energies of young people by regarding profitability as the be-all and end-all.
• Most countries have lost their sense of priorities. There is a greater and greater need for teachers and medical staff, but governments are increasingly aggressive towards them. These are the professions where posts are abolished and funding is cut. Yet they are indispensable to the welfare and future of humanity. This confusion between "usefulness" and "profitability" is disastrous for the future of the planet.
  Young people live in a society which still regards salaried employment as the only acceptable, honest and lawful way of life, but most of them are deprived of the opportunity to achieve this. In deprived inner city areas this is a major problem.
  At the same time I often meet young people with armfuls of degrees who are out of work. What inexcusable waste! For generations study was young people's initiation into social life. I admire young people today because they go on with their studies fully aware that they are running the risk of rejection by society.
• Only twenty or thirty years ago, there was still reason to hope that the relative prosperity of the North would spread all over the world. Today we are seeing the globalization of poverty. Businesses based in the North that set up in the so-called "developing" countries, do not create jobs for the people of those countries but generally make them work without any kind of social security protection, in medieval conditions. The reason is that the workforce underpaid women and children, as well as prisoners costs less than automation would cost in the country of origin. This is colonization in another, equally heinous, form.
  I am not pessimistic, far from it. The pessimists are those who say there is no alternative to the present situation, that we have no choice. My book is an attempt to describe what is going on. It's true that the situation is dramatic. All the same I am, like many other people, the citizen of a country whose democratic regime makes it possible to reflect and freely resist the growing pressure that the economic factor is exerting on our lives.
• I would like there to be checks and balances, alternative thinking, conflicts of ideas and interests. Not violent conflict, of course, but we should wake up and stop being petrified, prisoners of hackneyed thinking. Already in countries where my book is being translated-especially in the United States, Brazil, Mexico, Lithuania, Poland and in others such as the Republic of Korea it is causing something of a stir even before publication.