Neoliberalism and social work (truth, lies and power)

SWAN CONFERENCE –2016 – Ian Hyslop

In the following ‘presentation’ I will be suggesting that:

Neoliberal states – such as New Zealand - have become increasingly active in promoting the global interests of corporate capital and controlling those who are unwilling or unable to re-moralize themselves as effective market players.

The current reform of the child protection system under the umbrella of the social investment state is entangled in this agenda – kicking the door down for the neoliberal project.

We should (and can) do something about this.

Discipline and punish

A restructuring of the relationship between capital, workers and the state over the last three decades has resulted in a radical redistribution of wealth in Aotearoa – New Zealand.

In policy terms we have moved from a welfare state – to a social development state – and now to an investment state.

This orientation has profound implications for social work.

Changing economic times …

Why?

“ I think it would be really easy to say that the majority of the clients who I’ve worked with have come from across the board but it’s not true. I think that’s what everyone wants to say but in actual fact it isn’t true. The majority of the people I have seen, whether it’s been in mental health, drug and alcohol, basically life problems, it’s mostly the lower socio-economic scale. You can’t get away from that and one of the main problems people are suffering from is poverty. End of story.”

Research Participant

Connected (enmeshed) with the development of capitalism.

Connected with the older liberal tradition.

Neo - (new) – liberalism is connected with the shrinking Welfare State and the associated rejuvenation of “flexible” capitalism from the 1970s: in response to a global crisis in profitability.

Neoliberalism: What is it?

For the mathematically minded:

Liberal fundamentalism + pragmatism + cynicism = neoliberalism.

It is the political vehicle for late capitalism - where market relations colonise every sphere of human endeavour.

An equation?

Left to their own devices ‘markets’ do not necessarily allocate resources effectively or efficiently.

Neoliberal governments are ‘active’ in two ways:

I. Providing a regulatory environment that facilitates corporate profit.

II. Discipline of the disadvantaged.

‘Free’ markets and the state

Neoliberal theory provides global capitalism with a very powerful ideological script:

Responsibility for social success or failure is located at the level of the individual as opposed to being a function of the economic system.

The power of ideas

The Poor Law distinction:

“ So that instead of saying, ‘There is the working class and the marginal,’ we would say, ‘Within the overall lower class, there is a divide between those who work and those groups who are not part of the system of production.’ The institution of police, the legal system, and the penal system are one of the means to deepen this partition, which is needed by capitalism.”

(Foucault, cited in Chambon et. al., 1999,pp. 94-95)

The threatening underclass

State benefits (in contrast to insecure and low paid work) are morally corrupting -?-

Cummins (2016) addresses the recurring image of beneficiaries as “Feckless Scroungers”:

“As Welshman’s (2013) analysis demonstrates, this discourse has been in existence for over two hundred years and seems to be recast in a new form every twenty or thirty years. However, it appears particularly virulent in its current iteration.”

Scarecrows and Demons

Historical continuities:

A man named Dr Duncan McGregor was in charge of the system – which was our equivalent of the English Poor Law:

“Outdoor relief is as catching as small pox and just as deadly … All over New Zealand the state subsidy for indiscriminate outdoor relief is the most effective scheme that could be devised for the systematic cultivation of social parasites.”

Charitable Aid in New Zealand

Capitalism is a system of economic and social organisation which is driven by profitability and innovation.

Material inequality is a function of capitalism. Poverty is produced in the same way as wealth.

Those who fail to adapt are – necessarily – ‘left behind’.

This is not a moral failing: it is a systemic function: this is why the Welfare State was developed.

Illusions and realities …

White Paper - VCA - Rebstock CYF Review - Productivity Commission - Social Security Reform - Social Investment:

The notion that a limited number of identifiable high risk families pose a danger to the moral and physical safety of our children.

That the problem of child maltreatment can be solved if such high cost / high risk families can be located, monitored, treated, or punished (or their children removed into safe care).

Ideological Threads …

Neoliberal states adopt a punitive approach to those who are pushed to the social margins.

A muscular or authoritarian turn in social work and child protection (Parton, 2014).

Featherstone, White & Morris (2014) describes a “demonising” of (and a “distancing” from) the working class poor - a focus on problem families rather than families facing problems.

Parallel U.K developments

An underclass threatens the physical and moral safety of New Zealand’s children:

Social suffering and fiscal costs (in terms of welfare benefits and prisons) are reproduced inter-generationally by dangerous and dysfunctional families.

If the children of such families can removed into permanent safe and loving (middle New Zealand homes) the cycle will be broken -?-

Convincing? – perhaps. Eugenic? – most definitely!

Fear and loathing in Wellington

Social workers engage with those who are socially marginalised – we look to include the excluded; the disrespected, the ‘left behind’.

Why do we do this and who do we do it for?

Nothing “neo” under the sun

“ In an important sense, child protection systems have chronically enmeshed with certain kinds of high - risk children and families for as long as there has been a child protection movement. There is a discernible intergenerational transmission of child protection work where generation after generation of the same family (or types of families) and welfare systems are caught up in intense relationships. This is reflected in a core pattern of long term, multi-problem, multi-referred cases which keep coming (back) to professional attention and which are at the heart of high risk work. ”

(Ferguson, 2004, p.199)

Child protection and disadvantage

Charles Booth engaged in a s scientific study of poverty in London in the 1870s:

Booth identified three distinct ‘classes’ within the ‘poor’: Class A – the irregularly employed but honest poor; Class B – the failing poor into which the honest poor could fall, and lastly Class C – an incapable and dangerous underclass.

(Himmelfarb, 1991).

Disturbing echoes

The Productivity Commission has borrowed Charles Booth’s late Nineteenth Century conceptions of causation and produced its own equally crude typology – social service recipients fall into four categories in this iteration – A, B, C and D.

It is class D who are the difficult and dangerous ones who are repeatedly referred to in the document as ‘these people’.

This designation distinguishes this ‘other’ from the deserving citizens who are imagined in such a discourse.

Productivity Commission Report 2015

A return to rescue mentality foster care.

Earlier removal of children and earlier permanent placement of children in safe and loving homes.

Trauma prevention leading to lower down stream costs.

CYP&F Act practice vison and social work blamed as opposed to management and resourcing.

Expert Panel and “Modernisation”

Review process / outcome was preconceived.

Construction of a “business case”.

A specific ideological lens.

Trojan Horse: Problems (and solutions) for failing ‘care’ system conflated with solution for entire system.

Context of reform

Final Report suggests a redefinition of social work in child protection.

The argument is that vulnerability (*costed vulnerability) will be significantly reduced if families that cause it can be fixed – forcibly broken and re-made if necessary.

This is the central lie of social policy in the neoliberal investment state.

It will mean the removal of poor, disproportionately Maori children for placement with middle class carers.

Social work de-centred …

I would also like to pose a rhetorical question:

Should we accept that the social and economic structure of Aotearoa - New Zealand produces and reproduces ‘problem families’ who are morally unfit to care for future citizens and that the most effective to deal with this is the authoritative removal of said children ?

He Patai:

So … what is to be done … ?

In a politically orchestrated environment that is bent on divorcing social work from a concern with increasing structural injustice and focusing us on the detection, re-moralisation and/or punishment of deviant abusers - ? -

Against the wind …

The practice of social work is positioned in a particular socio-political space:

Location of social work?

What do the social workers see and know?

What do social workers know?

What do social workers do when re-inclusion is no longer on the agenda?

Efficient control of identified problem families?

Is this where your heads and hearts lie?

What was once main-stream ‘relational social work practice’ is increasingly a practice of dissent.

Should we roll over or act in our own defence?

What did you sign up for?

Are poor people morally responsible for their poverty?

Do the causes of social problems like child abuse reside in a dangerous, threatening, work-shy, criminal, immoral underclass that reproduces itself?

Are ‘these people’ different from ‘us’: deserving of a lesser set of social rights?

Social workers understand the influence of power and context in people lives!

Critical Food for Thought

The disjunction between what social workers see and know and an increasingly punitive practice environment inevitably generates resistant voices.

Social workers engage with the lived realities of multi-stressed families - not inventories of risk and future cost.

The social work voice is both more threatened by – and threatening to – the state.

Beneath the illusions and simplifications

It does not take a miracle of analysis to deduce that inadequate incomes, second rate education, inadequate housing, poor health … increase the likelihood of child abuse.

It is – perhaps - socially conditions that reproduce disadvantage rather than morally irresponsible families?

(*Shhhhh - !!!!! – keep such dangerous thoughts to yourselves - Silence about what we know is complicity!)

Inverted cause & effect

Removing the children of the poor to a magical land of Mum and Dad investors may not prove to be a lasting cure for the reproduction of social disadvantage.

Engaging effectively with multiply stressed and disadvantaged families – often whanau Maori / the brown proletariat is what capable social workers do well – they apply respect and care.

There is no ‘us’ and ‘other’ – we are all made of clay.

Some counter-narrative …

In a neoliberal capitalist economy (like ours) poverty and disadvantage are the flip side of social and economic arrangements which promote the accumulation of private wealth ahead of social care.

We need political solutions which to come to grips with the contradictions of our increasingly divided and unequal society.

We don’t need Nineteenth Century solutions disguised as accountancy and science! (#we are not stupid people)

(##2)

Social workers witness the real consequences of structural disadvantage every day.

“Entering the homes and lives of those who continually experience disrespect is a privilege but it is not a job for the faint-hearted, especially in societies that are increasingly driven by hostility to those who are vulnerable and in need” (Featherstone, White & Morris, 2014, p.1)

Voice for Social Justice?

Urge social work to …

“ … abandon its belief in its essential innocence and to recognise its history under all sorts of highly problematic political regimes. The dominant child protection paradigm fits within a highly individualistic approach to families and, in essence, is compatible with a neoliberal emphasis on individual solutions to what are public troubles manifesting in private pain and sorrow. ”

(2014, p.36)

Featherstone, White & Morris

What is to be done? : organise, educate, advocate!

“ Social workers engage clients in exchanging knowledge about their life experiences so that their voices can be heard and their stories can expose the inadequacy of official constructions of their lives. By supporting the creation of counter discourses social workers assist those outside their circles to understand the world from client perspectives.”

*(Dominelli, 2004, p. 38)

Or are we a dying profession?: the answers are yours

Push-back

?’s…

Discussion …

Chambon, A. (1999). Foucault’s approach: Making the familiar visible. In A. Chambon, A. Irving, & L. Epstein (Eds.), Reading Foucault for social work (pp. 51–83). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Cummins, I. (2016). Wacquant, urban marginality, territorial stigmatization and social work. Aotearoa New Zealand Social Work, 28 (2), 75-83.

Dominelli, L. (2004). Social work: Theory and practice for a changing profession. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Featherstone, B., White, S., & Morris, K. (2014). Re-Imagining Child Protection – Towards humane social work with families. Bristol, UK: Policy Press.

Ferguson, H. (2004). Protecting children in time: Child abuse, child protection and the consequences of modernity. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Himmelfarb, G. (1991) Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc.

Parton, N. (2014). Social work, child protection and politics: Some critical and constructive reflections. British Journal of Social Work, 44(7), 2042–2056.

References