28th May 2026 | SolidarioGB
For every five young people aged 18 to 24 in England, one is not studying, not working, and not looking for work. The official figure — 16% NEETs (Not in Education, Employment or Training) — is not an absolute record: in 2011, following the financial crisis, the rate for the 16-24 bracket peaked at 16.9%. But comparing these two moments is like comparing an acute wound to a chronic illness. In 2011 there was mass unemployment, but also expectation of reabsorption. In 2025 there is structural expulsion, and what looms is not a pending recovery, but a civilisational fracture.
I. The Evolution: From Cycle to Structure
The trajectory of the British NEET traces the breathing of monopoly capital. Between 2000 and 2007, the rate moved between 10% and 12%: the financial services “boom” and the property bubble absorbed youth labour with relative efficiency. The 2008 crisis broke that equilibrium. Between 2009 and 2011, youth unemployment skyrocketed, reaching its peak in the third quarter of 2011. It was classic, cyclical unemployment, linked to overproduction collapse.
The subsequent “recovery” was, to a large extent, artificial. The 2013 Act raising the compulsory participation age to 17 (and later 18) did not create employment: it simply hid young people within the school system. The 2020-2021 pandemic produced an even more illusory drop: with the labour market paralysed, many young people simply did not leave education because there was nowhere to go. The low of 9.5% was a mirage.
Since 2021, the curve has climbed relentlessly. Taking the 16-24 range for the whole United Kingdom, the seasonally adjusted figure hovers around 12.8% — some 957,000 young people — the highest level in fourteen years. But the aggregate figure conceals the true transformation. The 16% of 18-24 year-olds in England is not comparable to the 16.9% of 2011 because the composition of the reserve has changed radically.
II. The Mutation: From Unemployed to Inactive, From Rebel to Invisible
In 2011, most NEETs were unemployed people actively seeking work. Their condition was one of frustration, but also of connection: they belonged to neighbourhoods, to networks, to public life. They had demands directed at the system. The August 2011 riots were, in part, the expression of that blocked energy.
In 2025, the picture is different and far more disturbing:
- 57% are economically inactive: they are neither looking for employment nor studying. They are not waiting for an opportunity; they are outside the circuit entirely.
- 60% have never had paid employment. They are not “ex-workers” on the dole; they are a generation that the labour market never incorporated.
- 48.4% report having some disability — more than double the 2011 rate — and the vast majority of these cases are mental health disorders: depression, anxiety, panic disorders.
- 44% do not claim any state benefit. They are invisible to administrative records, inaccessible even to social services.
This is not a “floating industrial reserve” in the classical sense. It is a stagnant and latent reserve, a population that is not in active rebellion because it is not, strictly speaking, in society. Its disconnection does not produce street riots; it produces atomisation, depoliticisation and detachment. The disorder it generates is not public violence, but civilisational void.
III. The Logic of Capital: Why the NEET Is Necessary
From a materialist perspective, the fundamental error is to read this phenomenon as a “problem” requiring a “solution”. The discarded young person is not a system failure: it is the system functioning according to its own laws.
Marx established in Capital that capital requires an industrial reserve army: a mass of superfluous workers that exerts downward pressure on the wages of the employed workforce. Without this reserve, competition for labour would raise the cost of labour power and compress the rate of surplus value. The NEET, therefore, is not an anomaly: it is a condition of existence of capital.
But the reserve of 2025 has mutated. It is no longer a cyclical reserve — expelled by crisis and reabsorbable by recovery — but structural, product of three contradictory tendencies of late capital:
First: automation and the decomposition of simple labour. Artificial intelligence and robotisation have destroyed traditional entry-level positions: retail, basic logistics, administrative services. Capital no longer requires unqualified youth labour in the quantities of decades past.
Second: financialisation and parasitic deindustrialisation. The United Kingdom is a rentier imperialist economy. Its centre of gravity lies in financial services, property ownership and speculative flows, not in the industrial production of surplus value. In this parasitic mode of production, working-class youth has no structural place.
Third: monopolist centralisation and the tendential fall in the rate of profit. The concentration of capital reduces the capacity to absorb new labour power. Small and medium enterprises — historical employers of youth — are absorbed or go bust, whilst monopolies operate with ever leaner, more technified workforces.
The result is a reserve that no longer awaits reabsorption. Capital has expelled it not as a temporary measure, but as a permanent condition of its expanded reproduction.
IV. Mental Health as Ideology: Pathologising the Contradiction
The dominant discourse reads the “epidemic” of mental health among expelled youth as a biological or psychological crisis requiring “more NHS”, “cognitive therapy” and “awareness-raising”. This reading is deeply ideological.
Materially, the anguish, depression and paralysis of the NEET youth are not individual pathologies. They are the subjective form of an objective contradiction: late capitalism has destroyed the material conditions for the reproduction of life (decent work, accessible housing, a foreseeable future), and individual consciousness responds with the symptom. The depression of the 22-year-old shut in an exorbitantly priced rented room is, ultimately, the introjection of capital’s crisis. Their psyche registers what dominant ideology denies: that there is no place for them in the mode of production.
The ideological apparatus of the state — schools, health services, media — pathologises this response to fulfil three precise functions:
- Depoliticise misery: convert a problem of social production into an individual defect.
- Justify exclusion: the young person “cannot” work, not “the system does not allow them to”.
- Open new markets: expand the mental health, pharmaceutical and therapeutic industries as a new source of accumulation.
Lenin characterised imperialism as parasitic and decaying monopoly capitalism. The decay is not merely economic; it is civilisational. The destruction of the psychic health of entire generations is the clearest symptom of a mode of production in historical decline.
V. The Bourgeois State and the Limits of Reformism
Faced with this crisis, the British state deploys its classical instruments for managing the contradiction. Universal Credit already covers 530,000 young people (a 24% increase since 2019). “Independent investigations” are launched and programmes like the Youth Guarantee — with 43,000 places, a drop in the ocean against nearly a million affected.
None of this seeks to eliminate the reserve. Social spending fulfils structural functions for capital:
- Cushion the relative overproduction of population: prevent the discarded mass from generating immediate conflict that would disrupt accumulation.
- Keep the reserve latent: the minimum subsidy prevents the physical death of the reserve, preserving it available for hypothetical expansionary phases.
- Reproduce meritocratic ideology: the young person “must look for work”, “must upskill”, displacing responsibility onto the individual.
Reformism proposes “more investment in education”, “better labour market matching”, “youth employment programmes”. In essence, it proposes to administer the industrial reserve better without touching the relations of production that generate it. It is curing the fever without eliminating the infection. Marxist-Leninist analysis rejects this path: there is no solution within capitalism because the NEET is functional to capitalism.
VI. The Subject and the Horizon
Here arises the decisive question. The expelled youth of 2025 is not the youth of 1968. It is an atomised youth, disconnected from centres of production, with no experience of collective organisation at work. Its alienation is no longer that of the worker before the machine; it is that of the human being before society itself.
Marx defined the working class as revolutionary subject by its position in the production process: concentrated, with the capacity to stop the machinery, with consciousness of its collective strength. The 2025 NEET lacks this structural position. Their disconnection is not, for now, revolutionary consciousness, but passive disaffection.
But dialectics does not operate linearly. The same atomisation that paralyses today may be the breeding ground for unpredictable explosions. When the subsidy is cut, when the eviction is executed, when physical reproduction becomes impossible, the stagnant reserve may transform into explosive mass. The young person who today is inactive due to depression may tomorrow be pushed into action by the mere struggle for survival.
The question is organisational: is there a vanguard capable of articulating the objective interests of this discarded youth into a programme that goes beyond “more jobs”? Reformism offers “opportunities”. Revolutionary socialism must offer abolition of wage labour, social planning of production, the right to existence independent of the capacity to generate surplus value.
VII. Conclusion: Decaying Imperialism and Crisis of Legitimacy
The United Kingdom is a declining imperialist power. Its economy cannot sustain the historical living standard of its population without extracting superprofits from abroad. Youth disconnection is, in part, the impossibility of continuing to distribute imperialist rent downwards. When a system cannot integrate its youth through work or the ideology of progress, it enters crisis of legitimacy.
The “social disorder” that looms will not necessarily be proletarian in its classical form. It may take chaotic, lumpenised, depoliticised directions. But in the absence of revolutionary outlet, the void will be filled by reaction: xenophobic nationalism, punitive discourses against “scroungers”, militarisation of discarded youth.
The materialist lesson is terminal: every “youth guarantee”, every training subsidy, every course of cognitive therapy is, at best, aspirin for cancer. The NEET is capitalism showing its real face: a system that produces human superfluity as a condition of its own existence. The abolition of the NEET condition demands the abolition of the mode of production that generates it. Everything else — every programme, every public policy, every promise of “inclusion” — is the management of misery.
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