Black Flag 217 index
Exterminate all the Brutes!
the origins of welfare as a means of social control
"Can't everybody see that there is nothing in the least bit admirable aboutidle remnants of the proletariat, that dwindling few with their hideousclothes, revolting food, trashy newspapers, filthy children, disgustingmanners, vile wallpaper and violent and dishonest dispositions?" (qu DAILYTELEGRAPH editorial)
Welcome to Blair's Britain. We're all middle class now-except for those of ustoo stupid to manage the transition.
The Office of National Statistics is about to abandon its currentclassification scheme for collecting data about occupation and class, toreplace it with one where everyone from an operator in a call centre to thehead of British Gas becomes "middle class."
Meanwhile, Tony Blair announced to a conference called by the Institute forPublic Policy Research his intention to create a "middle class that willinclude millions of people who traditionally see themselves as workingclass.." In a society where according to the Child Poverty Action Group,23~live in poverty New Labour tells us we live in a "modern Britain" where"everyone has the chance to fulfil their potential." Those who remain poor,therefore, have only themselves to blame. The right wing sociologist CharlesMurray spins a folk tale from his Iowa childhood to tell us what conclusionsthis ought to lead us to draw:-
"There were 2 kinds of poor people .One class of people was never even called"poor". I came to understand that they simply lived on low incomes, as my ownparents had done when they were young. There was another set ofpeople...These poor people didn't just lack money. They were defined by theirbehaviour. Their homes were littered and unkempt. The men in the family wereunable to hold down a job for more than a few weeks at a time. Drunkennesswas common. The children grew up ill-schooled and ill-behaved and contributedto a disproportionate share of the local juvenile delinquents. To HenryMayhew...they were the "dishonest poor"
(gu C Murray-The Emerging British Underclass-IEA Publications)
So there's the deal. Everyone has the chance to be middle class. Anyone whodoesn't make the grade has chosen a life of indolence, has opted to live atsociety's expense. Some of this may sound familiar. In 1971,in a pamphlet"Down With The Poor" the Conservative MP Rhodes Boyson observed "No onecares, no one bothers-why should they when the state spends all its energiestaking money from the energetic, successful and thrifty to give to the idle,the failures and the feckless?" Boyson went on to become a junior ministerunder Margaret Thatcher and help to push through the social security reformsof the 1980s.The Child Poverty Action Group has described the ideologicalbase of Thatcherism as being about "incentives and disincentives." But theysaw financial incentives operating very differently on the rich and on thepoor. According to their arguments, if the rich were not working andinvesting it was because they were not receiving enough financial incentivesto do so. It was therefore essential to provide them with added incentives(for example, through cuts in income tax and tax free investment schemes).Butif the poor were not working it was because they were receiving too muchmoney from the state and lacked the incentive to work. And so, they argued,the poor needed financial disincentives to claiming benefits, to spur them onto greater effort." (qu Dee Cook-Poverty, Crime and Punishment-CPAG)
The Thatcher/Major governments pursued a strategy of inequality ,primarilythrough changes in taxation, designed to make the poor poorer. The changesincluded reductions in the higher rate of income tax for the rich from 60% to40%ihigher thresholds for inheritance tax for the rich, a shift from directto indirect taxation (principally through VAT)which fell primarily on thepoor, the introduction of the poll tax and the council tax. By 1991,52% ofthe tax cuts implemented since 1979 had gone to the top 10% of incomeearners. The incomes of the poorest tenth in 1991/92 were 17% lower in realterms than in 1979.The society inherited by the New Labour government was asociety premised upon the deliberate maintenance of inequality. During the1980s,income inequality grew faster in the UK than in any other developedcountry bar New Zealand. Since May 1997 enough has been said and done toalert us to the fact that Blair's government is committed to the samestrategy, and for the same reasons. As Trade Secretary Stephen Byersoutlined, this is a government committed to "wealth creation" not "wealthredistribution·" When the Bank of England's head, Eddie George, said that anincrease in unemployment in the north east may be a necessary price to payfor low inflation, he did no more than illustrate New Labour's recognitionthat the preservation of a low wage economy in the interests of the richrequires a reserve army of labour to hold wages down. Labour's coercive NewDeal is designed to make sure that the unemployed do what they're supposed todo-take up low paid work.
New Labour's "Decent Society" will continue where Thatcher and Major leftoff. As Labour's former Social Security Minister Frank Field said on cominginto office, "We are most grateful for what the last government did, but itsthe beginning of the story, not the end." (gu The Times 9/5/97)
So why are we being sold the myth of an expanding middle class, when clearly,poverty and insecurity are on the rise? Why is even the notion of selfidentification as working class greeted with a mixture of amusement andderision ? Britain remains, as George Orwell described it "The most classridden country under the sun", yet the working class as a class appears onlyas a hate figure in the popular press, the "layabouts and sluts whose progenyare 2 legged beasts" Spectator editor Bruce Anderson so frequently railsagainst.
In truth Tony Blair is shit-scared of the working class. Margaret Thatcheronce observed that "Class is a communist concept...The more you talk aboutclass-the more you fix the idea in peoples' minds." What Blair dreads is thatordinary people stop buying his middle class pipe dreams. and begin to act intheir own interests. Journalists Andrew Adonis and Stephen Pollard note that"Far from diminishing, class divisions are intensifying as the distancebetween the top and bottom widens and the classes at both extremes grow insize and identity. This should be obvious to all. Indeed, we contend it isobvious to almost all in today's Britain-except, crucially for much of thenation's elite, which for reasons of fear and self-interest is struggling toeliminate class from the realms of respectable debate. It is doing so by twosleights of mind. The first is the use of the term "underclass" to denote aminority isolated from the mainstream majority. The second is thetransformation of this mainstream into a "classless society", defined byconsumerism, mobility and meritocracy, operating on that quintessentialBritish arena; the level playing field. This is myth and distortion in equalmeasure." ( A Adonis and S Pollard-A Class Act -Hamish Hamilton Ltd).
Meanwhile, in 1996,the British Social Attitudes Survey found that 87% thoughtthat the gap between those with high and low incomes was "too large",66%agreed that "there is one law for the rich and one for the poor". A 1995Gallup survey found 81% answered "yes" to the question "Do you think there isa class struggle in this country or not?". Enough to cause a few sleeplessnights in Knightsbridge and Holland Park.
It is nevertheless the case that, by any usual indicator, the level of classstruggle in the UK is at a low point-whether determined by work days lost tostrike action, support for politics outside the status quo, or numbers ondemonstrations. So what prevents a recognition of class inequalitymanifesting itself as a recognition of the need for working class people toact in their own interests? This article proposes that the main block toworking class self recognition and self emancipation-the working class actingas a class "for itself"-is something which the "left" in the UK has seen as again for working people-the welfare state.
Marx in Capital volume one, quotes from Bernard De Mandeville's The Fable ofthe Bees wherein we are told that "those that get their living by their dailylabour...have nothing to stir them up to be serviceable but their wants,which it is prudence to relieve, but folly to cure." It is this ethos whichguides the provision of minimal welfare by the state. The working class arekept from starvation and revolt, but not to such degree that they lose allincentive to labour. "The foundations of property are made more secure whenno real grievance is felt by the poor against the rich", as JosephChamberlain noted in 1892.Provision of state welfare means that working classpeople recognise themselves as poor, or as working class, or as part of some"underclass" not in relation to each other, but only in relation to thesatisfaction of their basic needs by the state. In his 1985 essay "BeyondSocial Democracy", Ralph Milliband observed that "For most social democraticpoliticians, capitalist society (in so far as the existence of capitalism isacknowledged at all) is not a battlefield on which opposed classes areengaged in a permanent conflict, now more acute, now less, and in which theyare firmly on one side, but a community, no doubt quarrelsome, but acommunity none the less, in which varied groups-be they employers, workers,public employees-make selfish and damaging demands which it is the task ofgovernment to resist for the good of all." We need to go further than this.If the modern welfare state is the crowning glory of social democracy it isalso the precise means by which the working class is reduced from a classfor-itself to just one more interest group. When the New Right talk aboutdependency culture, their main concern is to seek means by which the cost ofwelfare provision can be transferred onto the shoulders of the working class.The fact that those with least to gain from capital's survival are wedded tothe state concerns them not at all. It should, though, concern us.
Prior to the introduction of the Liberal reforms which were the precursors ofthe modern welfare state, there was considerable debate within workers'organisations as to whether welfare proposals should be supported, or seensimply as means of evading just demands for higher wages and regular work. Asthe historian Pat Thane observed ,(Historical Journal vol 7,no 4 1984)"...theemployers supported social reform because it was cheaper than increasingwages, the more so because "welfare" would be paid for by the working classthemselves." The Forester's Miscellany, journal of the Ancient Order ofForesters, the second largest "friendly society in 1899,with 666,000 members,carried the following editorial comment, "The aim of the working class oughtto be to bring about economic conditions in which there should be no need ofdistribution of state alms. The establishment of a great scheme of statepensions would legalise and stamp as a permanent feature of our social lifethe chronic poverty of the age. "In 1899,the AOF recognised that the purposeof state welfare would be the administration of poverty, not its abolition!
The abolition of feudalism which inspired the peasant revolts of thefifteenth and sixteenth centuries cut the peasantry adrift from the land, sothat "freedom" became only the freedom to work or starve. As Marx put it"When...the great English landowners dismissed their retainers who had, withthem, consumed the surplus product of the land; when, further their tenantschased off the smaller cottagers ..then...a mass of living labour power wasthrown onto the labour market, a mass which was free in a double sense; freefrom the old relations of clientship, bondage and servitude, and secondlyfree of all belongings and possessions, and of every objective, material formof being, free of all property; dependent on the sale of its labour capacityor on begging, vagabondage and robbery as its only source of income." (KarlMarx-Capital Volume 1)
The refusal of the dispossessed to accept their fate as a limitless supply ofexploitable labour is the source of all state regulation of poverty. Thefirst of the Poor Laws, the 1349 Statute of Labourers, was introduced becauseof a perceived "great scarcity of servants" and the fact that "some will notserve unless they may receive excessive wages, and some rather willing to bein idleness than by labour to get their living." In ordering that "every manand woman of our realm of England...not living in merchandise, nor exercisingany craft nor having of his own whereof he may live, no proper land...and notserving any other...shall be bounden to serve him which so shall himrequire." In neither language nor coercive intent is there any realdifference between the law of 1349 and the New Deal strategy of Labour today.In the 1920s,faced with rising unemployment and economic slump, thegovernment of the day introduced the Genuinely Seeking Work Test to ensurethat the restructuring of capital took place with access to a pool of cheap
labour secured.(Fear of working class militancy leads to concessions fromcapital as surely as working class docility is exploited. Following the 1886Trafalgar Square riots, donations to the Mansion House Fund for charitablerelief of destitution suddenly increased!).
The 1906 Liberal government is seen by many ,not least among them Tony Blair,as one of the great reforming governments. It is clear though that whateverconcessions it made to labour were predicated upon an attempt to containworking class self organisation (principally manifested through the formationof the Labour Representation Committee and the election of 29 MPs on a Labourplatform in the 1906 election.) The formation of the Labour Party gave littlereal cause for alarm, however, as the pro Liberal journal, the IndependentReview noted; "We heartily welcome the new Labour Party which is now to makeits first bow to the House Of Commons...We cannot suppress a smile whennoticing the alarm caused in a section of our press by the victory of theworkers. The latter are asserting that the rich are now confronted with agrave peril...We hold a different opinion. Probably no less than 23 of the 29new MPs will call themselves socialists. But their socialism is rather anideal, a point of view, than a programme of action."
(We should pause though, at the fact that the "restructuring" of the welfarestate by New Labour is taking place at a time when even the "ideal", the"point of view" of a self-organised working class is absent from politicallife.)
The Liberals determined that the existing system of poor relief, whileserving to regulate the necessary supply of cheap labour fostered also toogreat a degree of discontent. One commentator reflected "It is not enough forthe social thinker in this country to meet the socialist with a negative. TheEnglish progressive will be wise if, in this at any rate, he takes a leaffrom the book of Bismark, who dealt the heaviest blow against Germansocialism not by his laws of oppression...but by that great system of Stateinsurance which now safeguards the German worker at almost every point in hisindustrial career." The Liberals' assimilation of the socialist agenda wassupported by the Labour Party itself and the state socialist Fabian Society.Within the wider working class movement, hostility to the state and stateprovision of welfare, remained alive, despite the eager surrender of theLabour Party to the seductions of Parliament. George Holyoake, a leadingmember of the co-operative movement, observed "State socialism means thepromise of a dinner, and a bullet when you clamour for it."
The Liberal reforms were driven by fear of working class militancy. By 1908unemployment had reached 8%.Violence broke out in several major cities.Anti-government demonstrations attracted massive support. On October 10th1908 20 separate hunger strikes converged on London. When Parliament wasforced to convene 2 days later it met surrounded by a cordon of 2500 police."That same year ...saw the beginnings, in a strike and subsequent lock out inthe textile industry, of a wave of industrial action that was to developthrough many key industries into a movement of revolutionary syndicalism,rejecting Parliamentary politics and advocating direct workers' control."(Tony Novak-Poverty and the State).The setting up of a national system oflabour exchanges and a National Insurance scheme to enable provision of nonmeans tested benefit were intended to head off the revolutionary impetus ofthe working class movement. In Churchill's words "The idea is to increase thestability of our institutions by giving the mass of industrial workers adirect interest in maintaining them. With a stake in the country in the formof insurance against evil days, these workers will pay no attention to thevague promises of revolutionary socialism...It will make him a bettercitizen, a more efficient worker, and a happier man." In providing a "stake",however, the government ensured also the preservation of the machinery of theregulation of labour supply which was the hallmark of the poor laws, andremains the unstated agenda of state welfare today: "The scheme should avoidencouraging unemployment, and for this purpose it is essential that the rateof unemployment benefit should be relatively low." It was Charles Booth whosaid that "our modern system of industry will not work without someunemployed margin, some reserve of labour". The purported "architect of thewelfare state" William Beveridge, in 1909 explained that the establishment ofa system of centralised welfare "is in essentials a problem of businessorganisation -that of providing a reserve of labour power to meetfluctuations in such a way as to not involve distress." Th end result of asocial-democratised left's consistently uncritical support for state welfareis a working class that, politically, exists now only as a "reserve of labourpower" and not as a class with political weight, a class for-itself. AsJoseph Lane had it "It is possible that the governing classes will make ashow of legislating in the direction of palliatives; their doing so wouldcertainly put off the revolution which we aim at. True Socialists, therefore,should not take up such cries."
So where do we go from here? With Labour determined to dismantle all but theentirely coercive aspects of the welfare state, and with so many nowaccustomed to having to seek the support of the state to survive, we cannotsimply wish away the chains of welfare.0ur task has to be to re-establish theconcept of working class independence through practicalinterventions-establishing claimant unions to rebuild working classconfidence and self identity in dealing with the welfare state, occupyingcommunity based projects when they are under threat of closure so thatbuildings, services etc are not withdrawn by the state but maintained undercommunity control. The Black Panther Party used to run breakfast clubs sothat poor families had access to decent food, and to re-establish the notionof solidarity-of people taking care of each other instead of looking simplyto the State for support. During the First World War, Sylvia Pankhurst'sWorkers' Socialist Federation established a cost-price restaurant andco-operative workshop in East London. "Dinner cost 2d,or just Id. forchildren, but those who could not afford that ate free. Around 400 peoplewere served every day...Awareness of the conditions of maternity wasstimulated by infant and maternity welfare centres such as Sylvia Pankhurst'sMothers' Arms, set up in an old pub called the Gunmakers' Arms. It included ababy clinic giving out milk and advice along with a day nursery usingMontessori play methods of education." (qu Sheila Rowbotham-A Century ofWomen).
The last words written by Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darknessare "Exterminate All the Brutes." Conrad's friend, the Scottish socialist R.BCunningham Graham in 1897 published a parody entitled "Bloody Niggers!",which described the "lower orders" as a kind of "European nigger"-"the vilestof our vile, more vile than beasts." A century later the attitudes mocked byGraham are commonplace in the editorials of the highbrow press and madepolicy by politicians like Jack Straw. If those of us who call ourselvesclass struggle anarchists are to resist the cultural extermination of ourclass, we have to go back to basics, recover an earlier tradition ofsolidarity and working class self emancipation and apply it with due vigourtoday. The contempt for our class manifest in the media is a reflection ofthe extent to which our class as a class for-itself has faded from view If wewant to respond to this agenda, we would do well to seize for our own ends aslogan used by the Spanish fascist Falange; "Let them hate so long as theyfear!"
The cultural studies theorist,a nd former Marxism Today writer, Stuart Halllonce wrote that the "statist oriented brand of socialism " had rewrittenhistory to appoint itself sole keeper of a flame for which it "had to contendwith many other currents, including, of course the strong syndicalistcurrents before and after World War l, and the ILP's ethical Marxism laterwith their deep antipathy to Labour's top-downwards,statist-orientation...0ne of the many tricks which the retrospectiveconstruction of tradition on the left has performed is to make the triumph ofLabourism over these other socialist currents-the result of a massivepolitical struggle in which the ruling classes played a key role-appear as anact of natural and inevitable succession."(qu Sheila Rowbotham-ThreadsThrough Time-Penguin).In recovering our history we can recover our identityas a class.