“Give me liberty
or death.”
~Patrick Henry
Before anyone suggests that this book refers to America and is not at all relevant for Australia, I’ll start with this…
“Our telling of this story has focused on low-income Americans. It would be a mistake however, to imagine that the developments we have described matter only for this group.”
There was another reference in a related book that references Australia in particular. You’ll have to forgive me, I’m having trouble finding it.
Moving right along...‘Disciplining the Poor’ is about how neoliberal paternalism has affected social welfare policy. We have been using the same guiding principles to reform our own welfare system now for decades.
Let’s not fool ourselves. Here’s a few samples from the book.
It’s hard to cover complex issues by taking quotes from the book out of context, so I have tried to put them in some sort of order that makes sense without having to read the book. This is really only to give you an idea of the general themes.
Once again, please excuse the zeds...they’re American. :)
“Neoliberalism is an effort to extend the reach of market logic, applying it as an organizing principle for all social and political relations.”
“Neoliberal governance privileges economic freedoms at the expense of political freedoms as well as democratic values such as universalism, egalitarianism, promotion of an active citizenry, and conceptions of a public good (W. Brown 2006).”
“It’s most prominent leaders in the 1980’s, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, emphisized the need to liberate markets by reducing regulations and taxes, scaling back workers protections, and giving multinational corporations greater latitude (Harvey 2005). Similar themes animated the “Washington Consensus,” which used organizations such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) to force governments in the global South to deregulate their economies (Stiglitz 2002; Peet 2003).
In all these developments, neoliberalism looks very much like a resurgence of laissez-faire, focused on “rolling back” state involvements in the market (Somers and Black 2005; Wacquant 2009). As forms of market fundamentalism, however, the two diverge in significant ways. Laissez-faire doctrines presume that market relations emerge as natural modes of human interaction when people are freed from the distortions of the state. Neoliberalism holds, instead, that functioning markets are not natural outcomes that emerge by default (Klein 2007). Markets must be actively constructed; market behaviors must be learned; and once learned, they must be deliberately extended to new arenas. Neoliberalism treats market rationality as a normative ideal to be pursued through the applications of public authority and uses it as a pre-eminent standard for evaluating institutional designs and individual behaviors throughout society.
Thus, rather than limiting the state, neoliberalism envisions the state as a site for the application of market principles.”
“Chapter 8 explores the marketization of poverty governance, revealing how privatization and the “business model” have turned service provision into a site of profitable investment and a tool for servicing employer needs. Chapter 9 turns our attention to competitive performance systems, analyzing how pressures to meet numerical benchmarks motivate perverse motivational responses, discipline frontline workers, and ultimately promote tougher approaches to governing the poor.”
“...poverty governance today operates as a cascade of policy choice points where relationships between higher- and lower-level actors tend to be structured in consistent ways. A common logic defines each link in the chain from national lawmakers to state officials to local boards to contracted providers to senior managers to frontline case managers to welfare clients. At each step, actors below control information needed by actors above and hold discretion by setting benchmarks, controlling resources, monitoring performance, promoting particular discourses and frames, and deploying rewards and penalties. In this sense, the contemporary system is guided by a consistent governing logic that applies to public officials as much as the poor themselves. Neoliberal governance prioritizes freedom of choice for lower-level actors, yet it works through a panoply of tools to maximize the chances that these actors will “freely choose” courses of action preferred by agenda-setting actors above.”
“The campaign to remake poverty governance attacked the existing regime on many fronts. Critics derided the prevailing approaches to crime and welfare as too soft and permissive to bring social order and self-sufficiency to poor people’s lives. Entitlements sustained an endless cycle of poverty by discouraging work and rewarding irresponsible choices (Murray 1984). By failing to enforce social obligations, welfare made the poor into second-class citizens, ensuring that they would not merit the respect of their fellow citizens or be able to shoulder the burdens of civic and political participation (Mead 1986, 1992). Reformers promised that the new regime would do better. Tougher criminal laws would bring peace and progress to poor communities. Welfare reform would place the poor on a work-based path out of poverty and allow them to flourish as self-sufficient, responsible members of society. Poverty would decline; social and economic well-being would improve; the poor would become full and equal citizens, earning the esteem of others as they became competent participants in public life.
In the years that followed, disciplinary poverty governance was declared a stunning success…In this chapter, we take a critical look at such appraisals.”
“Poverty governance has changed dramatically, yet there is little evidence that disciplinary approaches have led the poor out of poverty or hastened their civic incorporation. To the contrary, as we will see, neoliberal paternalism has produced a system that is less responsive to the poor, even in times of dire need, and more likely to enhance their civic marginality.”
“Reformers claimed that tough new policies would move the poor into the ranks of respected and engaged citizens. We show that nothing of the sort has occurred. Paternalist welfare policies do not advance civic and political incorporation or strengthen American democracy; they do the opposite.”
~Joe Soss, Richard C. Fording & Sanford F. Schram, ‘Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race’
With that in mind, here is a little rant I did last night regarding homelessness, gentrification and the increasing marginalisation of the poor.
https://soundcloud.com/aetherian-nathaniel-roach/a-very-scary-picture
And just for an outro...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9zRQijCN5w
Haha! Just listened to it and you can barely hear it. I'll upload a fresh one later today.
Here we go...a version without the backing track. It's much clearer. Sorry about that.
https://soundcloud.com/aetherian-nathaniel-roach/scary-picture
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