China’s College Graduates Join Other Corporate Capitalist Societies With Dim Employment Prospects
Many years ago I wrote that China’s coming economic crisis would be exaggerated because it had not yet created social safety nets as its central planner’s policies pushed tens of millions of people out of generally self-sufficient rural existences to state-reliant existences in cities. This push by the communist party was needed to feed global demand for cheap corporate labor. That many of these urban dwellers are now highly educated and motivated yet without economic opportunity presents a serious social problem. Most certainly not the only social problem in China.
Rural communities and people are generally much more self-sufficient and rely to a greater extent on agrarian, skilled trade and craftsman economies needed to support a system of self-sufficiency. Thus, China’s rural population will likely be more able to weather any coming economic shocks created by corporate capitalism. With no effective social safety nets for those who have given up an agrarian or rural existence to fill China’s factories and corporate positions, China is essentially looking much like the U.S. was entering the Great Depression; a rapid industrialization that drove populations into cities without any forethought of what happens if the system experiences terminal failure.
The rest of the world is in little better condition now that their social safety nets and social uplift programs are being butchered by corporate states. How will China deal with the lack of economic opportunity or unemployment that develops within cities that have been built to serve the endless growth of corporate state employment? As I have noted before, China’s central planners very well could have embraced corporate capitalism just as it was in a cyclical and systemic mode of global failure. That would be par for the course for the endless ignorant arrogance of central planners.
As I have noted before I grew up in a rural area. It has obviously been many years since I used some of those skills but I learned how to grow and hunt my own food, metal fabrication, construction, engine and mechanical repair, plumbing, electrical work, agriculture, butchering, laying block and on and on. You learn to be everything you need. Often because of cost and often because of necessity. It’s amazing what I was exposed to when I think about my reality today. If given the resources or necessity, I could brush off those skills and return to that lifestyle. And before I take a dirt nap, if the opportunity presents itself, I might actually do that.
Many people who grow up in cities rely to varying degrees on someone else for everything being that they have lost those skills over generations. Working in the office cubicle pushing around paper makes one completely ignorant to the realities of life. Believing that we are all going to college for an endless number of paper-pushing jobs under the dull hum of florescent lights of korporate nirvana is not going to materialize in China, the U.S. or elsewhere. Period. As I have noted on here ad nauseam, most jobs today are already make-work and create zero wealth. With well over 100 million make-work jobs in our economy, we aren’t going to restart our economy with an Obama jobs program or corporate tax breaks as our fearless king wishes us to believe. Well, and ignorantly believes himself. We are in the midst of systemic failure of this economic system.
Every once in a while I see some article citing some variation of a theme around this being the last generation to know what it’s like to be human. That our corporate-inspired society has become so sterilized and insulated from reality that we have lost that humanity. That certainly is true to some extent that we have disconnected from what it is to be human. That, in many ways, our existence in modern corporate capitalist society has lost all meaning. Hyper-consumerism, shopping as a hobby and pushing meaningless paper around in an office cubicle is destabilizing to the human condition. But I believe just the opposite is probably going to define this moment in time. That is, this will be the last generation to not know what it’s like to be human. That this experiment of corporate capitalism as we know it has failed. And more of an agrarian existence or one closer to nature, even in cities, and a craftsman and skilled trades economy will define a very substantial part of our future. We all share some innate connection and need to be part of the natural world around us. Even if it is suppressed by an unstable or delusional ego, which clearly is the case with many in the very ego-driven modern corporate capitalist society.
Some years ago I was in Japan and while talking with fellow earth citizens I found out the most popular vacation for city dwellers in Tokyo was for young people to leave their sanitized, corporate existence to head to rural areas to relearn the crafts and skills of generations gone by. That included how to grow food, make sake, plant rice, etc. Sound familiar? It should. Because years later the local food movement and craft alcohol movement in the U.S. are booming. There is something spiritual about sticking your hands in a mound of dirt or being close to nature. And we fill that void in our Godless existence by shopping and working longer hours than people did thousands of years ago. We literally live to work and to consume.
In many ways corporate capitalist societies are really defined by two economies. One is the rural economy that is generally representative of Thomas Jefferson’s view of democracy and freedom and the other is the urban economy more heavily influenced by Alexander Hamilton’s view of transplanted European corporate capitalism. Obviously, I have been writing that the latter is almost certainly in the process of terminal failure. We obviously aren’t going to see a mass exodus of humanity from cities to the countryside….. or are we? Haha. If contract law in this nation fails as I have noted it may with a possible debt repudiation, we could see a squatter’s movement where land possession essentially becomes who’s claimed what by rights of sitting on what’s available. Who really knows? Seriously?
As I have noted quite a few times on here, there was an unspoken covenant that took place in our history that has been broken. When people gave up much of my democratic freedom of an agrarian existence a century or so ago to come work in the corporate capitalist’s factories, there became an entwined bond of shared success that was necessary. We gave up some of our freedoms so that we both may prosper through shared success of industrialization. You can call it noblesse oblige or something else but it is both the government and private capital’s responsibility to ensure that social structures and economic opportunity exists to guarantee our freedoms are maintained as we moved from an agrarian to a capitalist economy. That includes a guaranteed living wages for people willing to be responsible and participate in our democracy and our economy.
This bond or shared prosperity has always been strained but it has failed systemically and globally for quite a few decades. The beliefs that this system would grow forever and offer college graduates an abundance of corporate jobs are based on happy thoughts and fantasies. Welcome China’s new college graduates to a global reality. That is, university was never created to provide guaranteed corporate work until corporate capitalism hijacked universities and turned them into factory farms for obedient workers rather than the hotbeds of exchange for small “l” liberal ideas about human and social progress, freedom of expression, discovery and sharing of knowledge that they once were.
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