market individualization

I woke up today from a dream that provided me with a storyline for a novel. It sort of worked in line with the research I've been doing on welfare states. Sounds boring right? Wrong. So the premise is - what happens when the state can not only no longer provide welfare to its citizens (collective social investments) but also can no longer provide work? What happens when there is no need for people anymore, only power? I am constantly reading about welfare restructuring and how the welfare systems of advanced industrialized nations of the West are in crisis. Structural challenges to the long-running welfare regimes in Europe call for new models, but the only model we are met with is neoliberal market individualization, where risk and economic uncertainty is individualized and more and more of the domestic economy is deregulated, leading to less and less money for social investment. Globalization and national deregulation contradicts the rule of law of an international order of sovereign states, but pay no mind to that....

New social and economic conditions are not being met with new (reconstructed) social support systems. And the state is losing traditional power due to reductions in legitimacy and collective spending, more economic insecurity and higher unemployment (and higher rates of part-time and temporary work). Work doesn't exist to consumers or to citizens.We tend to forget that even though welfare is in a period of restructuring, so is work and the nature of jobs in general. Postsocialist countries know this harsh reality, yet Western capitalist countries are only beginning to confront it. One can live without welfare, but certainly not work. What does the reconstruction of work in general mean to citizens?

It seems like welfare and work are being undercut for people in general. And even a conservative would have to agree that you can cut welfare, but certainly not WORK. That this is possible proves that people are largely expendable in postindustrial countries (it's like we are becoming third world). This is the outcome of amoral technological progress combined with market individualization that destroys any possibility of collective goods/security and humanistic goals.

And so I woke up with a dream about an army of helmet-wearing robots that arrive on a city bus to replace middle class technical workers in a not-too-distant future city. The middle class rebels by striking in the building against the robot army and the employers but the mood is really what caught me in this dream. I'm really interested in what kind of social and economic order is emerging in the world, because hardly anyone can define it but everyone knows we are going through some sort of transition (and the welfare state is partially what made this present situation possible). It's more than just this vague notion of post-industrial technological consumerist society; we need new words. I know the dream sounds very Bladerunner-esque but I was thinking if I put a welfare reform commentary spin on it, it might work. Problem is I have problems writing stories because I am primarily a nonfiction writer, I do my best work in essays. It's as if I can come up with the concepts and overarching story, themes, motifs, but as for the substance of the story and description, I'm at a loss. So here's more of the theoretical background for the story:

What happens when people are no longer necessary to the societal order/economic processes? What use are humans was a question that should have never been asked. But it had always been one of the primary questions of modernity. Evaluative standards had always been of more importance than moral standards toward some collective goal for the good of society. And now more than ever it was humans who decided what use humans existed for. Nature provided this answer for millions of years but somehow it ended up in the hands of one of its own progeny. Humans were able to conceptually conceive of such a question and therein (and precisely because of this) answer it. It's a question which should not have to be answered because its a question that should not have to be asked. To conceptually conceive of something is to make it reality.

Work became a technical problem and power did not intend to find a social solution to it.
Is welfare a social solution to a technical problem? The technical problem: what are humans for in an automated society where the ends justify the means and there is no collective end or goal for a society except power in and of itself? The ideology of the market. Democratically, these questions should be answered by the rule of the people (and not by God or monarchy). Yet the market functions as the people at this stage of the metanarrative (human progress and technological rationalism).

The reason the state can't provide for work is because the state has less and less control over the providing. Less and less involved in securing work for worker-citizens, the market is more or less in charge. Problem with the market is it has no legitimacy, no basis of rights (or duties), no possibility for institutional frameworks (rules of the game created for the benefit of the collective), and no overarching societal goals. So it's the market that takes over what both the state and market should govern in conjunction. As this happens we are edging toward a neutrally authoritative world order where a majority of the earth's population will have no entitlements to jobs or security. And how is this not like communism just with the market neutrally having no stake in the well-being of humanity; just as power under state socialism had no stake in the general well-being/greater good?