Britain is one of the richest countries in the world. It possesses advanced industry, immense accumulated wealth, world-class infrastructure, and a financial sector that spans the globe. Yet today around a million young people are not in education, employment or training.
The ruling class would like us to believe this is a mystery.
One day we are told young people lack skills. The next day we are told they have the wrong qualifications. Then we are told they suffer from poor mental health, or that they lack motivation, or that technological change has simply left them behind.
What these explanations have in common is that they locate the problem in young people themselves.
The reality is much simpler.
Young people are unemployed because British capitalism cannot provide enough secure, productive work for them.
For decades, British capital has systematically dismantled many of the industries that once absorbed young workers. Manufacturing employment has declined. Stable entry-level jobs have become increasingly scarce. Apprenticeship opportunities have failed to keep pace with need. Meanwhile employers demand ever greater qualifications and experience for jobs that often offer little security in return.
This is not the result of poor planning. It is the result of capital pursuing profit.
A capitalist firm doesn’t hire workers because society needs employment. It hires workers because their labour can be exploited profitably. When new technology, restructuring, outsourcing, or cost-cutting can reduce the number of workers required, capital pursues those measures relentlessly.
lThe contradiction is obvious. Society needs work to be done and people need employment. Capital only needs workers when they generate sufficient returns.
Marx described unemployment as a necessary feature of capitalism, not an accidental one. Every capitalist economy maintains what he called a reserve army of labour: a layer of workers who are unemployed, underemployed, or trapped in precarious work. Their existence places downward pressure on wages and reminds those currently employed that they can be replaced.
Young workers occupy the front ranks of this reserve army.
When the economy slows, it is often young people who struggle to find their first job. When firms cut costs, it is young workers who are denied training opportunities. When wages stagnate, it is young people who are told to accept insecure contracts, gig work, temporary employment, and zero-hours arrangements as normal.
The growth of higher education has concealed part of this reality. Successive governments have celebrated rising university attendance as evidence of opportunity. Yet expanding education has also served another function. It delays entry into a labour market that cannot provide enough decent jobs.
A young person spending three years at university does not appear in unemployment statistics.
This helps explain why the crisis has often appeared less severe than it really is.
The deterioration of young people’s mental health must also be understood in material terms. The liberal tendency is to treat mental health as an isolated issue detached from economic life. But young people today face soaring rents, insecure work, stagnant wages, debt, and uncertainty about their future. They have come of age amid economic crises, austerity, and declining living standards.
It would be more surprising if this did not affect mental health.
Britain’s housing crisis is another expression of the same system. Increasing amounts of young workers’ income are transferred to landlords through rent. Capital that could be invested productively instead flows into property speculation and rent extraction. Entire sections of the ruling class enrich themselves not by producing wealth, but by controlling access to necessities.
The result is a society in which housing becomes less affordable even as homelessness rises and young workers struggle to establish independent lives.
These developments cannot be separated from Britain’s wider position in the imperialist system.
For decades British capitalism has compensated for industrial decline through financialisation. Rather than investing in productive industry, enormous resources have flowed into finance, property, and speculative assets. London has become one of the principal centres of global finance while many industrial regions have been left to decay.
The profits extracted through international financial operations enriched shareholders, bankers, and landlords. They didn’t create secure employment for Britain’s youth.
This is why the crisis persists regardless of which party forms a government.
The problem is not a shortage of work that needs doing. Britain needs homes built, infrastructure repaired, public services expanded, and industries modernised. The problem is that these needs do not automatically become profitable opportunities for private capital.
Under capitalism, social need and economic activity are never the same thing.
The ruling class asks why so many young people cannot find decent work.
Marxists ask a different question: How can a society possessing enormous wealth, advanced technology, and millions of capable young people tolerate unemployment at all?
The answer lies not in the failings of youth, but in the contradictions of a system organised around profit rather than human need.
