A BBC piece with Darcus Howe on the current UK upheaval went viral and was cited on Pen-l a few days ago. In Counterpunch's weekend edition, Aug 12-15th, Alex Cockburn reprises parts of a 1981 interview with Darcus Howe, after the then current riots.
http://www.counterpunch.com/ Quite an interesting piece by Cockburn, and insights by Howe included in this exchange in 1981: AC: “Let’s look at a likely future for Britain: enormous structural unemployment, the creation of a permanent underclass..” “Permanent unemployed, that is what is on the agenda, with the revolutionizing of production, with the microchip. Now what the British working class has to do is break out of this demand for jobs, which characterized the 1930s, the Jarrow marches, and so on. They will have to lift themselves to the new reality, which will of course call for the merciless shortening of the working day, the working week, and the working life, and a concentration on leisure and the quality of work… They say, ‘March for jobs.’ What jobs?” AC: It’s stimulating to hear you say this, because the left seems to have a lot of illusions about this. The slogan should really be, ‘Less work,’ not ‘More work.’ “’Less work, more money.’ And that’s a vulgarity too. ‘Less work, more leisure.’ We have built up over the centuries the technological capacity to release people from that kind of servitude.” AC: So then you have to talk about redistribution of wealth. “Free distribution. A completely new ethos. And we are on the verge of it. “ Coming to a country near you. Gene Coyle
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