The latest official statistics show that 5.7 million working families, with 9.2 million children between them, were receiving tax credits as of the end of 2011. (BBC Business News 23 February 2012.) We know this is a subsidy to employers paying poverty wages gathered from the rest who work.

The Guardian series on poverty in Britain based on research by Experion (18 - 22 June) showed 7 million who work face 'financial disaster.'

The research found that 2.2 million children live in families teetering 'on an economic cliff-edge' – despite one or both adults earning a low to middle income. The households in trouble include couples without children who earn a gross annual income of between £12,000 and £29,000, or couples with two children on between £17,000 and £41,000.

A report by Oxfam last week indicated that more people in poverty were working than unemployed and those in work but claiming housing benefit had more than doubled since 2005, to nearly 900,000. People in work were increasingly turning to charities for help, Oxfam said, with thousands more accessing food banks this year than last. The big society?

And since May 2008 until April 2012 total employment has dropped by 300 000; but the pattern of future employment gets clearer and clearer. Full time workers have dropped by 761 000; the number of employees has dropped by nearly 600 000; part time work has risen by 471 000 and the poor sods working themselves to death by becoming 'self employed' (the Experion Report singled them out as particularly badly hit) has risen to 335 000. (FT June 21)

Meanwhile ...

The number of people aged between 16 and 24 who were out of work hit 963,000 in the three months to February – 12,000 more than in the previous quarter. This pushed Britain's youth unemployment rate up by 0.1 percentage points to 20.4%. (ONS 13 April)

And Bullingdon boy-Cameron told us what he wants to do about them (Mail on Sunday 24 June.) He says; scrap most of the £1.8 billion in housing benefits paid to 380,000 under-25s, worth an average £90 a week, forcing them to support themselves or live with their parents. Plus, for good measure he demands we stop the £70-a-week dole money for the unemployed who 'refuse to try hard' to find work. And he wants to force claimants to do community work after two years on the dole – or lose all their benefits.

The fitful growth in US jobs is along similar lines, as is the official reaction to the unemployed (see previous blogs.) Lousy, unsocial shit-jobs, part time or deeply unsocial hours, subsidised by other workers via the tax system - until you can break away to get in the music biz 'for yourself' (in London) or take on a franchise to sell us all some piece of crap; or to 'be your own boss' by cleaning windows or walking dogs for the rich.

This is all nothing less than the destruction of the working class. Its pulverisation and impoverishment into social dust. Its independent agenda and its dream of a different society never again to surface to trouble the owners and controllers of our world.

But what's that phrase of Marx about grave diggers? The problem for western capitalism in this horrible future they are creating for us is productivity. If you push labour into penury and unproductive activity you are doing to work what big finance did to the property market. You are turning into an 'asset' which does not produce value. You can create short term profit by 'managing' the process (setting up agencies which offer services by workers to the rest of us.) You can speculate on their likely rise, and fall, in price terms. You can even build that up, bundle it together and begin the financial merry go round we have seen before. But you cannot get round the fact that this type of work is deeply unproductive (it does not produce new technology, new creations, new things) and therefore, intrinsically, it does not produce long term profit. It does not solve the crisis of capitalism, it makes it worse.

Ok. The system has no way out. But how, in the west, can we challenge this deadly process?

Well ... we've been here before. The Chartists in the late 1830s and early 1840s brought together an emerging working class based on its fight for political rights. At that point most workers came from the land, or worked at home on their hand-looms, or with their families grubbing out coal on contract, or were itinerate labour, home from the imperial wars, drifting from town to town, and yes, walking dogs and cleaning windows. Wellington, who toppled Napoleon at Waterloo, was scared to death of the Chartists.

Again, of the 8000 members of Marx's 1st international in Britain in the 1860s, the majority were were workers and small masters in the London shoe making business.

And most important, in Britain and even in the US there are still huge reservoirs of organised labour in unions. And anybody involved in their current battle for survival and in defense of hard won benefits and wages knows that being a union member in today's conditions means that it is very hard to be anything other than anti-system. It is obvious that this provides the core for a recomposition of the working class, socially well as politically - and that recomposition will be achieved in the struggle against what is now to be never ending austerity.