Youth As A Class (1968)

In a long and closely argued article "Youth as a Class" (International Socialist Journal, February 1968), John and Margaret Rowntree take the bull by the horns and declare that youth is now in "the crucial pivotal class position within the United States," and that the young are increasingly becoming culturally and politically conscious of their class exploitation. Three propositions are used in support of this argument:
1. The American economy is increasingly dominated by two industries that are large, public and rapidly growing - defence and education.
2. The defence and education industries serve crucially as successful shock-absorbers of surplus manpower, particularly young manpower.
3. Economic exploitation in the United States is increasingly directed at the young.

The Rowntrees tell us that total employment directly related to the defence industry in the US was estimated by the Department of Labour to be 7 million jobs in 1962; 1 in 10 employed workers in 1962 were directly employed by the defence industry. (They deliberately select figures which do not relate to current war spendlng.) Educational outlay in the US has been rising by 10Yz per cent a year for the last jecade making it one of the major US growth industries. They quote Clark Kerr, ex-president of the University of Califorlia, as saying in his book The Uses of the 'University: "The university has become a prime instrument of national purpose. This s new. This is the essence of the transformation now engulfing our universities. Basic to this transformation is the growth of he 'knowledge industry', which is coming o permeate government and business and to draw into it more and more people raised to higher and higher levels of skill. The production, distribution and consumption of 'knowledge' in all its forms is said to account for 29 per cent of gross national product, according to Fritz Machlup's calculations (in Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States); and 'knowledge production' is growing at about twice the rate of the rest of the economy."

Defence and education between them have absorbed not only huge numbers of young people, but a rapidly increasing proportion of the potentially productive population. "The growth of the defence and education industries are the crucial modifications in the organization of the US economy that have led to the formation of youth as a class. It is know-how and force that keep the capitalist system together; and the exploited workers in these two critical industries are, overwhelmingly, young." The way, they say, to evaluate exploitation in the armed forces is to see how much it would cost to recruit volunteers. (Milton Friedman, in advocating a volunteer army declared that "Conscription is a tax in kind - forced labour exacted from the men who serve involuntarily. The amount of the tax is the difference between the sum for which they would voluntarily serve and the sum we now pay them. . .") As to students: "Since school is a full-time but unpaid job, most students work part-time or not at all, living on loans or family charity. Professor Theodore Schultz estimates that 55 percent of the costs of a college and 43 percent of the costs of a high school education are foregone income. The Council of Economic Advisers' foregone earnings estimate of $20 to $30 billion, can also be seen as an index of exploitation. This estimate implies that, for all students 16 and over, foregone earnings amount to about 40 to 60 per cent of their 'investment in human capital'. This is roughly $2,000 per student 16 and over. These estimates are themselves exploitive, since they assume high unemployment and low wages. Yet students, like soldiers, lack real choice: they must stay in school (and be exploited), face the draft (and be exploited) or face exploitively high unemployment rates and/or low wages."

It is clear, they say, that the American young, "while they might not prefer to join the military or go to school and live at a low standard of living, have limited alternatives when they face unemployment rates three times those of the labour force 25 and over. . .What are our conclusions? Increasingly, young people are labouring in the two dynamic 'socialised' sectors of the administrative imperialist system. If they venture outside army or school they are rewarded with unemployment rates two or five times the average. The young therefore form the new proletariat, are undergoing impoverishment, and can become the new revolutionary class. This new class is not a lumpenproletariat, like pensioners, welfare recipients, and the disabled. Instead they are in the classic proletarian position, growing worse off within an industry that is itself the engine of prosperity in the economy. They may not be the poorest group; nor are they by any means, the only exploited group."

In the United States students comprise 30 per cent of their age group there, as opposed to 11 per cent in Britain (the
pre-war figure here was 2.7 per cent). Paul Goodman declared in his "Thoughts on Berkeley" early in 1965 that "At present in the United States, students - middleclass youth - are the major exploited class. (Negroes, small farmers and the aged are rather out-caste groups; their labour is not needed and they are not wanted.) The labour of intelligent youth is needed and they are accordingly subjected to tight scheduling, speed-up, and other factory methods."

Anarchy, London, August 1968