This is the
usual socialist informed academic approach to solving poverty and fails for
precisely the same reason it must always fail.
It is never useful to provide a financial safety net which is not a
safety net but a system of entitlement.
It is profoundly useful to provide a labor market fully local and a base
to all other wage agreements. By this I
simply mean that a community does internalize its potential labor resources and
ensures availability of employment on a continuous basis. Even the generally well paid then have the
simple option of maintaining sustenance during off periods.
In short, we no
longer just set a minimum wage level but we ensure such a job is instantly
available. That minimum wage is also set
to optimize a package of assurances such as medical and dental and
training. As well we can regulate other
aspects of general remuneration as well to ensure respect.
The result is
one hundred percent employment and maximal purchasing power from the base
upwards while leaving ample opportunity for wage competition in a strengthening
economy.
Once this is
done, we must also establish rules that ensure rocketing competition when
monopoly pricing sets in. As simple as a
plumbers labor monopoly driving wages to ten times minimum wages should
instantly promote a doubling of trainees in an accelerated fashion. The same holds true on capital driven false
monopolies were competition has been bought out. That is easily altered though regulatory
fiat.
Frances Fox
Piven | Extreme Poverty Has Been Used to Divide and Terrify Working People for
Centuries
More than 30 top progressive thinkers have joined
together to Imagine Living in a Socialist USA, a new book from
HarperCollins edited by Frances Goldin, Debby Smith and Michael Steven Smith.
In the following excerpted chapter, scholar Frances
Fox Piven argues that the guarantee of a universal income would facilitate a
new economic fairness and stability to a financial system careening out of
control.
Most of the world is now in the grip of
hyper-capitalism, what we call neoliberalism. This new system has brought us
careening economic instabilities, worsening ecological disasters, brutal wars,
a depleted public sector and poverty in the affluent global north, and the
prospect of mass famine in the global south.
[
none of this is even slightly true or even reasonable. – arclein ]
It seems high time to think about alternatives to
the capitalist behemoth. I don’t know whether we will ultimately call the new
ways of organizing our society "socialist," but the values that have
inspired movements for socialism in the past should inform our search. Those
values include a society with sharply reduced inequalities in both material
circumstances and social status. Socialist movements also aspire to lessen the
grinding toil now imposed on those who work for wages. They dream of an
inclusive culture. They fight for democratic practices and policies in which
influence is widely shared. And they believe in eliminating the pervasive
terror in everyday life that is produced by the exigencies of capitalist
markets and the arbitrary power of the state regimes that support those
markets.
No matter how successful the new society is in
equalizing earnings and assets, however, we will have to be concerned about the
potential for poverty and hard times. This might result from exogenous shocks,
such as a drought or earthquakes, or from internal economic disorganization,
including the instabilities produced by efforts to transform our institutions.
Moreover, there will always be people who are not well suited to the work that
is available because of their physical health or personal disorganization.
How our society treats these people is of great
importance. Morally, it is important because it is unnecessary and cruel for an
affluent society to impose impoverishment and humiliation on some of its
members. It is less often recognized that the treatment of the poor has a large
bearing on the well-being of the entire society.
The poverty policies characteristic of capitalist
societies, especially the United States, form a template for what we
should not do in the new society. They also suggest an agenda for
constructing the institutions that will lead to a more equal, more democratic
and more humane society.
In Regulating the Poor, Richard Cloward and I
argued that the treatment of the poor in modernizing Western societies could
only be understood in relation to the problem of enforcing and regulating
labor. That problem
became more salient as labor markets supplanted the feudal system, which had shackled
people to the soil and the lord. Of course, for much of our history, the
majority of working people were poor. But we meant a stratum of people worse
off than the main body of workers - people who had been stripped of social
respect.
The system of discipline and assistance usually
called "poor relief" dates from the early days of capitalism and
industrialization. Relief systems were usually inaugurated after outbreaks of
disorder by starving people. But their management was more importantly shaped by
their role in disciplining workers. They gave meager assistance, and the terms
of that assistance were harsh. Just as important, those who turned to the
parish or the county for relief were subject to sustained rituals of public
degradation.
That harsh treatment and degradation have always
constituted a dramatic warning to the mass of working people trying to survive
on their earnings. The practices of relief or the workhouse or welfare sent the
message that there was a worse fate than low-wage work: to fall into abject
poverty and become a pauper.
More recently, as China changed over to capitalism,
it, too, developed programs similar to Anglo-American poor relief. The Chinese
economy’s astonishingly rapid growth in the past thirty years was made possible
by the exploitation of masses of migrant workers from the countryside and what
historian Peter Kwong calls the "systematic depreciation of the value of
their labor." The old "iron rice bowl" system was dismantled,
with programs supporting subsistence farmers cut back and urban workers’ job
security reduced.
As the older Chinese system of social benefits
attached to employment disappeared, new programs were created, including one
billed as a final resort for the most desperate of those laid off, most of whom
were chronically ill or unskilled or disabled. The benefits offered were set by
local authorities according to the Western principle of "less
eligibility," which ensured that no one on the dole would receive as much
as the worst-paid laborer. They were distributed in ways that morally
stigmatized the recipients, much like our welfare system does.
Extreme poverty and its institutionalized insults
have been used to divide and terrify working people for centuries. Now, with
shrinking wages, work becoming more insecure and irregular, and the escalation
of the war against unions, extreme poverty has again increased. So have its
uses to intimidate the workers who are still managing to stay afloat. This
strategy has been boldest in the United States. But while there are striking
continuities in the law and practice of poor relief across time and across
borders, the institution has also been periodically overhauled, sometimes to
respond to popular rebelliousness, and sometimes reflecting deep-seated changes
in labor markets.
In this neoliberal era, wages and labor conditions
have been deteriorating worldwide, as workers in the developed world are pitted
against desperately impoverished workers everywhere. Recent cutbacks in the
so-called safety net in the United States reflect this. These cutbacks also
take into account the vastly expanded domestic pool of wage laborers which
include most women, as well as large numbers of African Americans and Latinos
after they were displaced from traditional agriculture.
The results have been brutal. And the situation of
the poor in the United States is worse than the official poverty figures
suggest. For example, in 2006, interest payments on consumer debt put over four
million people who were not officially in poverty below the line, making
them debt poor. Similarly, if child-care costs, estimated at over $5,000 a year
in 2002, were deducted from gross income, many more people would be counted as
officially poor. The numbers would be higher still if homeless working people,
adult children living with their parents, and doubled-up families had to pay
full housing costs.
The United States also employs a different and
harsher measure of poverty than most other countries. In the United States, the
official poverty line is an absolute measure of subsistence needs. It’s simply
three times the income needed to cover a minimal food budget, one created in
1959 and adjusted for inflation in food costs. Most countries, however, measure
poverty in relative terms, generally counting people as poor if they make less
than half the median income—thus comparing the circumstances of those at the
bottom with the society’s overall living standards.
If poverty is measured that way, the United States
has far higher poverty rates than other rich countries. Indeed, poverty rates
in the United States may be comparable to those in some parts of the global
south. The poverty rate in New York City is just under 20 percent. If New York
City were a nation, reports James Parrott, "its level of income concentration
would rank fifteenth among 134 countries, between Chile and Honduras."
Wall Street is less than 10 miles from the Bronx, the nation’s poorest urban
county.
Some of this is the result of the rising
unemployment and reductions in take-home pay associated with the Great
Recession. But it also reflects the high levels of poverty in the United States
before the economic meltdown of 2007–2009. In the six years preceding that, the
poverty rate actually increased for the first time on record during an economic
recovery, from 11.7 percent in 2001 to 12.5 percent in 2007. Poverty rates for
single mothers in 2007 were 50 percent higher in the United States than in
fifteen other high-income countries. Black employment rates and income were
declining before the recession struck in 2007. And there is simply no evidence
to support the familiar bromide that poverty in the United States today is a
temporary condition associated with youth or hard luck. Our national myths
notwithstanding, the United States is a low-mobility society.
Another cause of high and rising poverty levels is
the decades-long business mobilization to reduce labor costs and weaken labor
organizations in the workplace. That mobilization began in the 1970s, when
employers trying to hold down wages became much more intransigent in
negotiations. Since then, they’ve busted unions and restructured the labor
process to make work more insecure. Business also mobilized to change
government labor policies, resulting in National Labor Relations Board decisions
much less favorable to workers and unions. Workplace regulations were not
enforced. The minimum wage lagged far behind inflation.
Safety-net programs for the unemployed or the
unemployable became more restrictive, and benefit levels fell—although the
Earned Income Tax Credit, which effectively provides a taxpayer subsidy to
low-earning workers and their employers, expanded enormously.
Inevitably, this campaign to reduce labor’s share of
national earnings increased the proportion of the population unable to earn
even a poverty-level livelihood. But the programs that provided assistance to
the poor were singled out for especially steep cutbacks, and the poor
themselves were singled out in a sustained campaign of venomous insult. A host
of new think tanks, political organizations, and lobbyists in Washington
carried the message that the country’s problems were caused by the poor, whose
shiftlessness and sexual promiscuity were being indulged by a too-generous
welfare system.
By the election of Ronald Reagan as president in
1980, this propaganda had smoothed the path for huge cuts in programs for poor
people. Means-tested programs (such as food stamps, Medicaid, and Aid to
Families with Dependent Children) were cut by 54 percent, job training by 81
percent, housing assistance by 47 percent. These cuts accumulated to erode the
safety net that protected workers too, especially low-wage workers, who were
primarily women and racial minorities.
By the 1990s, the Democrats had largely joined the
Republican campaign against the poor and blacks, as they floundered for
electoral strategies to ward off the worst of the Republican demands and to
raise campaign funds from business. It was Bill Clinton who campaigned with the
slogan "End welfare as we know it."
Much of this effort was played out in state politics
as well, with cutbacks in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children
(AFDC) and state-level general assistance programs. AFDC was a federal
grant-in-aid program targeted to impoverished single mothers and their
children. It ceded considerable authority to the states, and often the
counties, to set benefit levels and determine who was eligible.
When black insurgency escalated in the 1960s, the
federal government issued a series of rulings that restrained state and local
governments from their customarily restrictive welfare practices. Not
surprisingly, the rolls rose; benefit levels reached their peak in the late
1960s. Then, as the protests subsided, federal oversight was withdrawn. Between
1970 and 1996, the average level of maximum benefits fell by more than half
when adjusted for inflation, to the point where the income they provided for a
family of three was well below the poverty line.
Finally, in 1996, the AFDC program was eliminated,
to be replaced by Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), a block grant
that gave the states almost total leeway to limit access to assistance, and
also to steadily reduce benefit levels for those who received it. The law also
gave the states a remarkable incentive to limit assistance, since they received
the full amount of federal funding regardless of how many people were on the
rolls or the benefits they received.
If we want to strive for better policies in a
transformed society, at least three principles must be observed. First, we
should try to provide at least a subsistence-level income for everyone.
Obviously, this would hugely benefit the poor, as many impoverished people are
not helped at all by current assistance programs, and the ones who do get aid
receive such meager benefits that they remain desperately poor. For example,
the maximum benefit for a family of three lucky enough to receive Temporary
Assistance to Needy Families in New York City is now $577 a month, far below
the cost of renting even a squalid and tiny apartment, with nothing left over
for other expenses.
It would not only be the very poor who would benefit
from an income guarantee. The old English principle of "less
eligibility" was based on the understanding that relief benefits set a
kind of floor below which wages could not fall, for the simple reason that many
people might then forsake work for relief. The implications of this logic are
clear. A guaranteed income not conditioned on work would strengthen the market
power of low-wage workers. It would have a liberating effect on many other
workers as well. Not only would it reduce the pervasive anxiety caused by fear
of losing your job, but at least some of these working people could take
advantage of the new income guarantee to explore different endeavors, to try
their hand at a new trade, to learn music or write poetry, to develop hitherto
untapped potentials for creativity. A transformed society should aim to free
people from material anxiety and the tyranny of wage slavery. And if it did,
the results would contribute to continuing the process of transformation.
Second, as we know from the experience with American
programs to support the poor, income-support policies would confront opposition
from both employers and people animated simply by envy and anxiety. So we would
need to anchor our income guarantee firmly to garner popular support. This
would require more than declaring that income supports should be a matter of
right. "Rights" are too easily subverted or ignored. The best way to
anchor the guarantee would be by making it universal, applying not only to all
citizens but to all residents of the country.
The reason for this last proviso is key. If we
exclude permanent immigrants from our income protections (as we now do in a
number of programs) we would still have large numbers of people in poverty, as
we do now - except that they would all have foreign names.
Finally, a universal income-support program should
be administered with a minimum of interaction between the people who receive
the supports and the bureaucracy responsible for distributing them. Checks
could be mailed, or funds deposited in accounts electronically. That would
eliminate the opportunities for systematic degradation associated with welfare
programs in the past.
Where would the money come from? The United States
is a fabulously rich society. We can afford to fight endless wars across the
globe, and at home we let the wealthy cannibalize government and our
communities. Even so, we are not as a people so badly off. Social
transformation in the pursuit of equality, inclusion, democracy, and social
justice requires that we find ways to take back the wealth stolen from ordinary
people here and elsewhere by capitalist elites, especially the wealth stolen
from those who are the worst off among us.
More than 30 top progressive thinkers have joined
together to Imagine Living in a Socialist USA, a new book from
HarperCollins edited by Frances Goldin, Debby Smith and Michael Steven
Smith.
Copyright 2014 by Frances Goldin, Debby Smith and
Michael Steven Smith. Not to be reprinted without permission of the editors or
HarperCollins.
1 comment:
Piven forgets her & Cloward's work to increase welfare roles expressly for taking down the US financially.
Cloward And Piven Strategy is an important read for Constitutional patriots. Get to know what the enemies of freedom are up to.
Rules For Radicals is a must read as well.
Liars & deceivers like her & Cloward use the old gambit communists use, propagandize the 'poor' to hate the rich. Seems like they & many in DC have been working that line for decades.
She n& those who also live in a mental cesspool don't like to have it known that it was NOT socialism that made this nation the great & wealthy power we once were.
SamFox
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