Re: AUT: Harald, welfare state

["cwright" <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I think that you are all on to something here.  My take is that the welfare
state has less disappeared and more been increasingly turned into a policing
apparatus of enormous proportions.  So while funds that go directly to
working class people are cut, so that they have less access to money not
directly gained from waged labor, the apparatus of control put into place is
actually as big as ever, but the money goes to the agencies which intervene
in and take control away from working class people, such as DCFS (Department
of Shildren and Family Services), which can take kids away from their
parents, for example, of the reorganization of welfare into workfare and
other such moves.

I also like Michael's point.  My partner is a teacher and she is very aware
of the class (often racialized and gendered) war aspects of these programs
in education.  In a nearby semi-affluent suburb, a very, very high
proportion of the African American kids (who are overwhelmingly working
class) in the high school are put into remedial programs.  It is clearly
punitive.  But I also think that this remedial program process has a lot to
do with the ways that the state attempted to rediscipline the Black working
class in the US after the Civil Rights and Black Power movements (alongside
massive increases in the flow of drugs into Black and Latino communities and
massive upping of police presence.)

Just my two cents.

Cheers,
Chris




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