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Without a doubt, the practical establishment of this world of struggle would not succeed so completely without the complicity of all of the precarious arrangements that produce insecurity and of the existence of a reserve army of employees rendered docile by these social processes that make their situations precarious, as well as by the permanent threat of unemployment. This reserve army exists at all levels of the hierarchy, even at the higher levels, especially among managers. The ultimate foundation of this entire economic order placed under the sign of freedom is in effect the structural violence of unemployment, of the insecurity of job tenure and the menace of layoff that it implies. The condition of the "harmonious" functioning of the individualist micro-economic model is a mass phenomenon, the existence of a reserve army of the unemployed.

Economists may not necessarily share the economic and social interests of the true believers and may have a variety of individual psychic states regarding the economic and social effects of the utopia which they cloak with mathematical reason. Nevertheless, they have enough specific interests in the field of economic science to contribute decisively to the production and reproduction of belief in the neoliberal utopia. Separated from the realities of the economic and social world by their existence and above all by their intellectual formation, which is most frequently purely abstract, bookish, and theoretical, they are particularly inclined to confuse the things of logic with the logic of things.

All direct and conscious intervention of whatever kind, at least when it comes from the state, is discredited in advance and thus condemned to efface itself for the benefit of a pure and anonymous mechanism, the market, whose nature as a site where interests are exercised is forgotten. But in reality, what keeps the social order from dissolving into chaos, despite the growing volume of the endangered population, is the continuity or survival of those very institutions and representatives of the old order that is in the process of being dismantled, and all the work of all of the categories of social workers, as well as all the forms of social solidarity, familial or otherwise.

The 1919 Zurich gathering is where the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom first took its name. You could say the League was born out of profound dismay at the unjust outcome of Versailles. A worn old volume is our one extant copy of the report of that conference. Holding it in our hands as we prepared this article, we saw anew just how central had been the women's preoccupation with economic issues.

This demoralizing sense of 'no alternative' has impacted on the thinking of the peace and women's movements too. Yet, we are resourced today with factual evidence of the economic oppression and inequality at the root of war, data of a scope and accuracy that the women of 1919 sorely lacked. The UN’s Human Development Report provides us annually with a clear picture of who profits and who lives in poverty.  The recent scandal of the so-called Global Financial Crisis has brought to view hard evidence of the subsidy made available to the financial institutions and individuals responsible, while a hyper-capitalism is imposed upon populations through austerity measures that attack public services, and on labour standards and conditions hard won over decades. Today, given the palpable rivalry of corporate interests and their national backers for control of resources and markets, peace activism can scarcely afford to ignore the causality of capitalism in militarization and war.