Unemployment is no longer the fate of the industrial working class alone. It is becoming quite clear that previously privileged sectors of the labour force-those in occupations requiring capitalist society.
been a dogma of economists and social planners alike that the capitalist economy had an unlimited need for technologically trained manpower. One very influential school of thought even argued that education, seen as "human capital" development, was the motor force of economic growth in advanced capitalism. This ideology now has the impossible task of explaining away an ever growing surplus of highly educated manpower throughout most of the capitalist world. At the same time, the existence of serious unemployment in this sector of the work force strikes a major blow at another principal tenet of bourgeois ideology: unemployment is a product of individual failure, and mismatching between the skills in exsitence and the needs of the economy; extensive educational upgrading and retraining is the answer for the individual and society alike. How then can growing unemployment among the most highly educated sector of the work force be explained? Is it possible to take seriously Heath's proposal that unemployment could be reduced if school leavers would stay on past 15 when more and more university graduates (including even those with higher degrees) are having difficulty finding work? This clearly will not do. But it is not just a question of sending a few ideologistsback to the drawing boards to come up with arguments more consonant with reality. The whole of governmental policy on manpower planning and the educational system has been founded upon premises that are being daily ground to dust. The vast machine of state policy continues to move inexorably towards producing more students with university entrance qualifications, more places in further and higher education, more highly trained graduates, while the current level of output of the educational system is already overflowing the reserviour of industrial governmental requirements. The crisis in bourgeois ideology is paralleled by a crisis in bourgeois state policy.
GRADUATE UNEMPLOYMENT-FACTS AND FIGURES At the present time data from university careers services indicate that unemployment among this year's graduates is running at about 14%; if those who have entered teacher training courses or are doing a higher degree are eliminated, the figure ismore like one-third.' Even by the end of the yearthe date usually chosen for the U.G.C's survey of graduate employment-the figure is expected to be about 10%; for male graduates this will be almost double the 1970 level of 5.4%.2 A survey taken by the Times Higher Education Supplement indicates a wide variation in the figures from university to university: unemployed graduates represented only 6% of the total at Oxford, Loghborough and York but 18% at Sussex, and an astounding 43% at Swansea.S At Manchester, Mr. Holloway said: "At September 30, 1970 of physics, metallurgy and electrical graduates engineering graduates (including electronics) 116 had obtained jobs in industry or public utilities; at September 20, 1971 the corresponding figure was 49. For physicists alone the figures were 30 and eight respectively. Mechanical engineers are in severe difficulty and there is just no point in many scientists and engineers hoping to get jobs within their disciplines."
The problem for graduates seem to be serious, but they are even worse for the smaller number of Ph.D. holders who now seek employment. The secretary of the appointment Oxford University Appointments Committee, Mr. Tom Snow, commented: "Post doctoral scientists are almost unemployable. Of the 12 post-doctoral chemists on our books only three are known to have jobs." The University of Wales also had "some good Ph.D's in science" on their CONCLUSION A systematic analysis of the roots of graduate unemployment should be the theme of another article. However, there can be little doubt that this problem is very intimately linked with the general crisis of British capitalism. On the one hand the cut-backs in social service and educational expenditures by the government, on the other the crisis of British industry: these are the twin pillars on which the decline in graduate employment opportunities rest. The first affects primarily arts and social science graduates, the latter those from the science disciplines. There seems considerable evidence that this year was the beginning of a qualitatively new phase in the deterioration of demand for graduate manpower. Events on a much more dramatic scale than we have previously witnessed appear in the offing. It seems inevitable that a problem on this scale would be the source of a whole new range of social conflicts. Their revolutionary potential lie in the fact that there is no foreseeable solution except the elimination of the contradictions of the capitalist economic system, which must necessarily ential the destruction of that system itself. The sole bright spot on the capitalist horizon might be the impact of common market entry. But here, as in most other areas of the British economy, this development will carry with it numerous curses and only very mixed blessings. The prospect is a continuing crisis accompanied by major changes in the political outlook of the entire sector of highly educated technical and administrative personnel.
1. Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) no. 2, October 22, 1971, p.l.
2. "Why is there a science job crisis by Barrie Sherman New Scientist, 19 August, 1971, p.415 3. THES, op.cit. 4. Both in THES, op.cit., p.1, & p.24. campaign of the Footite lefts' against Common Market entry. In Trafalgar Square it was indeed Michael Foot who spoke with the greatest emotion and demagogy. Adding fuel to the fire of national chauvinism over this issue has emerged as the last resort of a Labour'left which has passed far beyond the point where it could give half hearted, or even a convincing token lead in the struggles of the working class. In what is purely and simply a struggle for their own existence. The camp followers of left social democracy have seized upon Common Market entry as the only possible issue that might obscure the balance sheet of their treachery.
Revamped from the deeply rooted imperialist ideology of the British Labour Movement, and culled from the discarded trappings of Conservative nationalism, chauvanism is the natural last diteh stand for a 'left' bankrupt of political ideas. For them to take any other road in such a period of sharpening class struggle would have meant an all out struggle with the Labour right and a split in the Labour Party forcing them to take up the leadership in the fight for the workers' independent interests. Having definitively rejected that alternative there is no choice for them but to oppose Common Market entry on the most nationalistic lines. And it was not many steps to a situation like the October 13th demonstration where Michael Foot consummated an alliance with the whole spectrum of the reactionary right.
Thus in the developing crisis of British capitalism social democracy seeks a way out of its impasse by taking up the traditional Tory Party role of defending the 'nation'. Mean while the Tories are making hay. While the Labour Party panders to lowest petty nationalist instincts of the working class, the capitalist class has grown more confident of their strategy and more united. Dissension, which might have opened up on the basis of divergient economic balance sheet of EEC entry, has been smothered over by a broader hegemony. The bourgeoisie is not so foolish as to risk its clas interests in a nationalistic crusade that less and less serves its real interests.
Yet now the class interest: of the workers is clearly more and more at risk. The real and correct apprehension the workers' have over this new venture by British capitalism are in the hands of Michael Foot and his fellow social-chauvanists directed into a campaign to defend the rotten state that has been their direct and main oppressor for generations. If we rightly reject the Common Market as a capitalist solution we also-now even more strongly-reject any campaign to prop-up the capitalist nation state. That task we can leave to the capable hands of the petty-bourgeois rabble of the Monday Club and the National Front.
The new posture of national chauvinism by the Labour "left' has consequences which go beyond the outcome of the Common Market struggle. Chauvinism and racism in their every overt or subtle manifestations hamper and cripple the chances of the workers in their class struggle from the shop floor dispute to the position of the workers movement in the international class conflicts. It is an imperialist ideology through and through which robs the workers of their basic class senses. It is the antithesis of proletarian internationalism which is th very life blood of the struggles of the working class
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"professional" qualifications and higher education— will not re- main insulated from the deepening crisis of British capitalism. The current panic over "graduate unemployment" is only the beginning-the future holds the prospect of even larger crises affecting not only new graduates but those already em- ployed in the technical and administrative bureaucracies of
Even the present scale of the problem presents the post-war ideology of bourgeois society with a major challenge. It has