Co-Operative Socialism

Precarity


    'Precarity', a condition in which life is in a very vulnerable and unstable state of affairs, is by no means a new phenomenon. In fact, it has perhaps always been around, as long as orbital ellipses have collided, suns have waxed, transitioned, and waned, long immemorially    predating human experience. With a changing climate, the 'Ice Age' wiped out the dinosaurs, though of course, they didn't cause it. about 12000 years ago the ice melted again, lifting the sea level, wreaking societal havoc in its wake, and forming the English Channel. Of course, again, it was not the human being who caused this.In the 14th century the Bubonic Plague made life very precarious across the entirety of the populated world, and resultingly 30 to 60% of Europe's human population was wiped out. Again, we did not cause it : instead, it was  fleas incubating on small rodents. Two millennia ago, Juvenal, the  poet, described a Roman world in which precarity featured very prominently : he mockingly busied his literary canvass with frequent description of ne'er-do-well Roman citizens and foreigners scratching on the edge of society : he refers to  outsider prostitutes and  Jews loitering in the environs of the aqueduct-dripping 'Porta Capena'. There have always been people who live on the edge, overcast in the shadows. 19th century England saw Lord Shaftesbury campaign and bring into law, controls to prevent ruthless factory and mine owners employing children, though this practice is still rife today in many parts of the world :  in Utter Pradesh, a global major centre of glass-production, children as young as 5 still prepare the glass many of us in the West find in our windows, and they involve themselves in the terribly dangerous process of glass-blowing, without adequate protection, whilst bare-footed they are exposed to myriad glass shards and bare electrical wires, that would go nowhere near meeting a factory's health and safety regulations in the UK. Yet, our...