A Million Older People not having spoken to anyone for a Month is the most Miserable Statistic in History (Social Isolation in Modern Britain)

We should be honest; those ads that inform us of the terrible conditions that our fellow humans live in normally make us feel roughly nothing. Such comes not from some kind of shocking and inherent callousness that is possessed by the current generation, but seems to be the predestined fate of everyone living in a society that places desperate pleas for survival side by side with adverts for potatoes, cars and politicians. It seems inevitable that in a society which bombards us with so much information, with so much terrible, shocking and painful information, that soon we are so distracted, pulled in so many different directions, that nothing can make us feel anything at all.

But on occasion one of these ads can shock us out of our reverie, and make us feel something. The most recent example of this that I experienced is the advert commissioned by Age UK, informing us ‘’one million older people in Britain have not spoken to have anyone for a month’’. What was so different about this one that it stood out so vividly that it could make me feel something?

Surely it’s not the most terrible one, it is not a pleasant notion, but compared to child homelessness or countless numbers dying unnecessary and pointless death it does not seem so bad. What is unique about it is that it is an innovation in misery. People starving while others throw away food, people dying from diseases society is able to cure but chooses not to, war for no reason but the enrichment of the dominant class, all these things have been with us since the dawn of civilisation. But a million people not having spoken to anyone for a month is a new low for our society previously unachieved. No matter how much we have previously suffered at least we have done it in the presence of others. Quietly waiting for death, alone, as a mass phenomenon, is something unique to our age.

A million people not having spoken to anyone for a month is not a symptom of a sick society, it is the symptom of a dying one. What we have is not a problem of society, but a problem of people falling out of society entirely. The only interaction these isolated people have is with the state and the private; they do not exist within a community of persons, they only deal with abstractions and images. (Television, Newspapers and so on) Their opinions, views, beliefs will almost entirely be formed by interactions with these images, with their lived experiences (Now lacking human interaction, the most vital part) fading into the background. In other terms their reality has essentially been privatised, once their reality was formed by their experience and their interaction with the experience of others, now it can be almost entirely created by the Capitalist interests who own media, with no worry of their images clashing with lived experiences. And so come the hysterical right wing lies that we see throughout Mass Media and their politicians. If you have alternative sources of information and live alongside them it is easy to see that migrants are not people who will steal your television and kill your dog on a whim, but if the only reality you have is the one offered to you by media, why would you not believe it?

This isolation is not random or coincidental; it is the inevitable outflow of Neoliberal Ideology. As Silvia Federici notes each stage of capitalist accumulation is accompanied by a new wave of privatisation, not just of land and other previously common resources, but of ‘’Social relations’’ themselves.[1] Though what we are experiencing in 21st Century Britain is not a reorganisation of social relations, but rather of their deletion.

How the isolation of these older people comes out of Neoliberal Ideology is not hard to see. The first and most obvious factor is that of the dispersal of the family. While once the average person would spend all of their life in one city or area, (Often the one they were born in) often working at one workplace (Especially factories). Within such a system older people (Often still living with their children and grandchildren) older people are unlikely to be isolated as their family members will in all likelihood not abandon them to such a fate. But in the modern era where one moves from city to city, country to country or even continent to continent for work, such dissolves. As much as someone would wish not to leave their parents or other older relatives to drown in isolation, nothing can be done if you are on the other side of the world. This dispersal of people mirrors the dispersal of peasants during and after enclosure, thrown off their land they wandered from town to town in search of work. While some would say that this movement represents unprecedented freedom and opportunity, I’m sure some said the same when the peasants were ‘freed’ from their land.

But this growing isolation derives not only of the decay of family bonds, but of an attack on all forms of bonds that are not profitable. As the first to inflict to Neoliberalism on a country, Margret Thatcher’s notion that ‘’There is no such thing as society, simply individuals and families’’, should be seen as what it is, (Outside of the somewhat funny idea that Thatcher expected the family to make it through this Capitalist nightmare) a declaration that the bourgeoisie state will not cease until everything is turned toward the Capitalist machine. Once the Workingman’s Club was often the centre of social life in British Villages, with subsided services provided by member owned establishments, and were fundamental in providing support in Trade Union Struggles like the 1984 Miner’s Strike. But as the series of Neoliberal Governments who have ruled Britain since 1979 have continually attacked the Trade Union movement they have increasingly suffered, either closing down or being pushed from the centre of social life. But it is not as if something else has taken their place, even the Village Pub now fades from existence as youth prefer to travel to the nearest City on Friday and Saturday nights.

The attack on centres of Social Life autonomous from the state (Predominantly organised around the Trade Union Movement) was combined with the state decaying the social services it offers, from the library to the youth centre. The old have been banished to their homes and the youth banished to the streets. These groups, being the ones likely to have the smallest income, will be hit first, but we all have a world in which the only indoor parts of our cities we can enter are those we pay or consume to go inside (Although of course, parks, streets and even bridges can be privatised, we should not imagine the outdoor parts are safe either. [2] The homeless know this the best, with everything from homeless spikes to being ‘moved on’, showing that outdoor spaces for only for those who look presentable). Within a system of austerity driven Neoliberalism the commercialisation of everything is inevitable, the capitalists drive to reinvest their money in order to make more money fits hand and hand with the work of the government’s official work to sell off whatever anyone will buy as their resources are reduced year upon year (Or just to charge for what was previously free. The pensioners who will now be charged 26 pounds to fall over[3] will be experiencing the sharpest stabs of the indignity that comes with this process). And unfortunately for the old, there is little money to be made in anyone talking to them.

The old produce very little of the things that Capitalists are forced to pay us for, and so they must be sustained outside of the wage system, pensions acting as a little thank you for 50 years or more loyal service to the state and capital. These pensions, like everything else, come under more and more pressure as Neoliberalism moves onward, and so the possibility of the old even paying their way out of social isolation (The only way in the Capitalist dream) fades into the distance. Of course there will always be a minority that were either sufficiently wealthy or saved their way into a cushy retirement in which they can afford to pay for the privilege of human communication. But such will be always be a minority, as even if we deluded enough to believe that everyone earns a good wage, careful saving is contradictory to modern capitalism, which relies on people buying a new generation of expensive nonsense every few years, (New Phone, New Couch, New TV, New Car and so on) and so enforces such through the new art of advertising. As Guy Debord notes, as Capitalism advances we do not become wealthier, just the conditions for (social) survival go ever upward. [4]

So it should become clear that this Social Poverty endured by so many older people in Britain is, like all poverty, not something that comes about magically, incidentally or randomly, but is a symptom of underlying conditions, that can only be solved by attacking the conditions. So while the work of Age UK to give these people someone to speak to is fundamentally admirable, it, like most charitable work, only target the symptoms, leaving the problem unsolved. Social Isolation is swiftly becoming one of the most pressing problems of our generation, and it is something any revolutionary movement must take seriously. People suffering the extreme extent of social isolation that these older people are experiencing are not people who can form the connections necessary to engage with a revolutionary movement or cope in a world based on popular democracy. While I assume many are dismissive of the older generation of ever being any help in revolutionary moments, extreme social isolation is not limited to the old, but is also widespread among the youth. In Japan there is the notion of ‘Hikikomori’, which denotes between one and two million persons who have not left their homes for six months. How can we ever expect a person too anxious to go to the shops to engage in confrontational street demonstrations? How will a person too anxious to talk to their parents ever engage in the popular assemblies we imagine will form the backbone of our new society? Social isolation and anxiety is not something a communitarian movement can afford to ignore, and is a far greater problem than simple disagreement or apathy. Apathy and disagreement can be swayed, isolation cannot be.

[1] Caliban and the Witch, Preface

[2] http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/dec/03/thames-garden-bridge-three-half-million-pounds-public-funding

[3] http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/pensioners-charged-26-falling-fee-7033931

[4] Society of the Spectacle, Section 43-44