Ten years of welfare "reform"

by Anne Jaclard

In the ten years since the federal welfare system was "reformed" (read: destroyed), welfare has been effectively ended as a safety-net for the working poor. The welfare rolls have been reduced by 60% due to the many restrictions on federal grants, including a life-time limit of five years aid to any recipient. Recent new regulations make it even harder to obtain job training or education. Why did the government destroy a 60-year-old system which had enabled the poor, especially women and their small children, to survive? Some feminists blame ideology: the rulers hate women. While racism, sexism and years of blaming welfare for rising taxes provided the ideological justification for welfare "reform," its cause lies elsewhere.

Blaming ideology while ignoring capitalism leaves feminists with nothing to contribute toward change besides exposes and fruitless appeals to an inhuman system. Instead, we ought to show that "another world is possible" by explaining how this one operates, so that people can understand what it is we must change in order to actually lay the foundation for plenty and "the free development of all" (Marx).

Capitalism can no longer afford to provide cushions for the working poor because it needs them in the labor market. So slashing welfare was an attack not primarily aimed at women and children as it appears, but aimed at the whole working class, to force everyone to seek continuous employment. Bush's attempt to privatize Social Security is the latest effort to destroy all safety nets for all workers.

As Marx theorizes it in CAPITAL, Vol. I, capitalism requires a growing supply of labor in order to be able to expand and maximize profits. By giving people no choice but to work or starve, the system is assured of this supply. Paying them low wages not only saves money for expanding investment, but most essentially, it obliges people to return to the workplace every day. "The Roman slave was held by chains; the wage-laborer is bound to his owner by invisible threads" (Ch. 23, p. 719, Penguin ed.).

ARMY OF UNEMPLOYED

In this manner, the system creates a "reserve army" of the unemployed, a labor pool to draw on in periods of expansion and to lay off when they are not needed. This has always been the pattern of women's employment, and is the reason that so many undocumented immigrants are allowed into the country. The "reserve army" increases competition for jobs, lowering wages for everyone and discouraging organizing. Most importantly, it disciplines the workers so as to keep the supply of labor flowing. So welfare "reform" was necessary, not to save the relatively small cost of welfare expenditures, but to force mothers and others who chose not to work into the job market.

Capitalism is not INTETIONALLY anti-human. It is not driven by greedy rich people who want to appropriate the welfare funds or punish women. Rather, it is INHUMAN, that is, driven by forces without regard to the effect on people, whom it needs only for their labor power. The solution to poverty and exploitation in the U.S. and around the world is to end the capitalist production system and replace it with a system in which the workers have mastery over the economic system instead of the other way around.

POVERTY DEEPENS

Those who leave welfare for work do not become better off. The lie that they do, sows the illusion that everyone can do OK within the capitalist system. The fact is that even before 1996, many studies of former welfare recipients showed that most did not leave poverty when they began to work for wages. The government apparently has made no studies of what happened to the people who were thrown off welfare in the past decade. What we do know is that the poverty rate was the same in 2004 as in 1998 (12.7%). At first it declined because the economy was expanding, so some of those who left welfare were able to get decent-paying jobs; when the economy worsened, the poverty rate went back up to the 1998 rate. Meanwhile, the poverty rate for single mothers rose, and the number of people in so-called "deep poverty" (receiving less than half the poverty threshold) increased by a million--probable effects of welfare "reform."

The battlefront for welfare rights organizations has shifted from the federal government to the states, which provide aid of their own and administer the federal grants. Whereas there is no longer a movement comparable to those of the 1960s, '70s and '80s, many organizations continue the struggle, including Survivors in Boston, Kensington Welfare Union in Philadelphia, Michigan Welfare Rights in Detroit, Welfare Warriors in Wisconsin, and organizations in New Orleans, both old and new since Katrina.

Moreover, the new organizations of low-wage workers, often immigrants, such as janitors, domestic workers and day laborers, can be seen as the "children" of welfare rights organizations. Not only may their members have had experience in welfare groups, but they are also similar in the sense of being composed of isolated individuals with very low wages who nonetheless are organizing to improve their lives in new and creative ways. These organizations in fact hold out the prospect of inspiring and revitalizing the entire U.S. labor movement. They could be the sparks for the working class to overthrow the system.