My father worked from nine to five every day, never did overtime, and was back eating with the family even before Neighbours had finished – which was shown right before the 6 O’clock News. And yet he could afford a very nice detached house with a rambling garden.
Capitalism cannot manage this for the young anymore. We all the professions are subject to constant job insecurity – something only reserved for the dockers and the miners in the past. Now in “late capitalism” (always a loaded term that seems to look forward to its imminent demise), middle class life has become miserable. Each generation seems to work harder than the generation before, and for less. The young might be able to afford their foreign holidays but they can’t step onto the first rung of the housing ladder. And in many countries, students get heavily into debt in order to obtain the minimal qualifications they need for their first job. At the end of it all they might not even be able to count on a pension. The only thing capitalism can seem to manage is a midlife crisis of massive proportions. John Gray, the political and cultural commentator, finished one of his polemical articles as follows:
“Capitalism has led to a revolution but not the one that Marx expected. The fiery German thinker hated the bourgeois life and looked to communism to destroy it. And just as he predicted, the bourgeois world has been destroyed. But it wasn’t communism that did the deed. It’s capitalism that has killed off the bourgeoisie.”
We used to quip “a successful man is the man who earns more than his wife can spend; a successful woman is the one who can find such a man”. But now everyone works, and everyone looks over their shoulder to calculate how much they will retain when the divorce comes.
These pressures partly explain why people in wealthier countries are marrying and having children much later than before. And the declining birth rate will cause serious problems down the line.