What's the facts with the welfare state? Is there any truth to the Rightist arguments that it actually contributes to poverty, destruction of black families, single motherhood, etc.? Why does it exist in the first place, how do the bourgeoisie gain from people having an alternative to work or starve and a standard baseline of living that a job will at least have to provide, paid with by their own money? Does it exist entirely to maintain a reserve army of labor to drive wages down and to keep the proles from becoming militant when they're starving because of unemployment, or is it because politicians use it to buy votes? Is it true US blacks and other poor people have a welfare culture where they'll live off of welfare instead of getting a job, or where mothers will intentionally have more kids in order to get more welfare, i.e. the idea of welfare queens?
Mods, this is a genuine thread, don't bumplock it because I used a meme-image when I couldn't think of anything else.
Yes. It needs to be revised so it doesn't trap people into horrible leech lifestyles. They don't benefit. With the overwhelming surplus of goods and services in our decadent society, however, it is easy for the bourgeois to pay for these people. Both of these things. "Why the fuck would blacks vote republican, don't they know what's best for them?" ring any bells? The democrats are a party used to funnel underprivileged minorities' anger into the system, while republicans exist to funnel right wing anger into the system. Democrats = welfare, republicans = welfare but less welfare than democrats. Democrats = abortion, republicans = abortion, but it becomes an underground business.
Cameron Williams
A real socialist critique of welfare capitalism should be: not only does it destroy revolutionary potential, it also destroys communities.
Before the welfare state, social services were provided by others in the community. Neighborhoods were much more mutual-aid based and a collective need for things like stability, health care, etc. drove people to help each other out instead of demand help from outsiders.
Even today, the biggest examples of genuine socialism we have in the West are insular religious communities, namely the Amish, Chassidic Jews, and Muslim neighborhoods in European cities (part of shariah is the emphasis on mutual aid).
Luke Martin
How does it do that. Why do they?
That's a good point.
Evan Howard
Bump
Nathan Sanchez
Yeah, there are many instances where if you increase your income from working, you lose benefits and have a net loss in total income. This creates perverse incentives where people find it easier to be impoverished and unemployed than impoverished and working. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_trap
Welfare states are also likely creating dysgenic effects on the countries they inflict themselves on, but Holla Forums doesn't like to talk about that.
Nathan Cruz
Well as a member of the working class I also don’t want to shoot myself in the foot either while hoping for revolution. Waiting It’s nice to know welfare exists as a safety net. I’m not at all arguing in favor of a welfare state and this should never be seen as the end goal but I’d also rather not die of starvation if I lose my job
Josiah Hall
Well, something totally eviscerated black families and communities at some point in the last half decade. Welfare is the most likely culprit, but other factors certainly contributed.
Asher Davis
this is also the right wing/traditionalist/communitarian critique
Evan Wood
None of this is true. Stop peddling reactionary myths.
Camden Morgan
...
Jason Jones
Deindustralization was unleashed first, to be black in America is to get the front row seat on Porky's rollerciaster of beatdown tactics
Juan Rogers
Do you have any idea how retarded it is to link the growth of unmarried women to welfare when all races recorded experienced such growth (what, was everyone using welfare???) and people like Reagan and Clinton reduced the re-distributive role of government? And people like Nixon opened the doors to free trade with undeveloped countries, massively impacting lower-skilled workers?
Sage for idiocy.
Levi Powell
Religious communities are much closer than secular ones who depend on the gov. Just compare the Amish or any communalist Muslims to your average white atheist.
Sebastian Collins
Single mothers and welfare go hand-in-hand. These two things combined have killed the black community.
Hudson Peterson
Religious communities by themselves do not do enough to alleviate the problem of poverty. FFS this "dude just let everyone be charitable lmao" attitude died off in the early 20th century BECAUSE IT WAS INEFFECTIVE. Those with wealth simply don't give enough of a shit about the lower classes to fund opportunities for them.
Brayden Thomas
Only in the sense that it keeps workers from mobilizing to protect their own interests when their at the work-place. FDR and many of his advisors said over and over again that they'd rather just pass a law mandating new wages, regulations etc. than institutionalize the unions.
Just think about it, if the government passed a law making the new minimum wage $15 an hour then that might be the first progressive gain in income for workers in decades (minimum wage in 1968 was $11 inflation-adjusted) but assuming a fairly conservative and standard 2% annual rate of inflation that means that 20% on the wage overall and about a 40% loss of the gained income that had been made over the old federal minimum wage of $7.25
So, the bourgeoisie can take back what they've given away very easily and breaking through the political gridlock of Washington can take decades and/or major crises. The thing about Unions is that they don't have to wait around for parliaments to push for wage increases. They can and have pushed for higher wages when inflation and/or increased productivity threatens to increase the exploitation of the working class.
In European countries, the trade unions actually come together to bargain collectively on an epic scale and according to Michael Lind the effect is that even though the growth of worker productivity is half that of the United States in Europe the gains are more equitably shared in European countries on paper at least.
Now, I'm not saying that Europe doesn't have any welfarist-type political economy but it seems obvious to me that the degree of worker control is actually the most obvious difference between the two economies. IRCC there was no minimum wage in Germany but the labor establishment of that country was strong enough that I'd say most German workers are better off than the US, at least until recent neoliberal reforms.
Only in the sense that reigning capitalist morality has for sometime prioritized the needs of women and children over men of working age. There are various conspiracies about this, which may or may not be true. But I think a wrong-headed approach to aid, high black unemployment levels, and mass incarceration are better explanations than the idea that "welfare states cause unwed mothers" as some MRA ideologues claim.
In England, it has its origins in poor relief from feudal times and much of the Western welfare state did borrow from the Victorian British model, including the more famous and arguably more successful model of Imperial Germany under Bismark. It keeps potential workers alive and subsidizes those workers whose wages are not high-enough to survive on that alone and, by proxy it subsidizes those industries that fail to pay a living wage, or the price of labour-power in Marxist terms. Usually, the states of Western governments use the income taxes/sales/ VAT taxes collected from other workers to pay to keep the poorest among the working class and the lumpen alive. It isn't nearly as charitable as the bourgeoisie makes it out to be but suffice it to say that some factions are satisfied with it and other more vicious/ambitious sections think they can play with fire.
Idk, a lot of welfare recipients also have jobs, like a lot fo entry-level retail positions pay so little that full-time workers qualify for food stamps. Even working minimum wage part-time you make more than you would on welfare.
But honestly… I understand why someone would choose to take welfare if they could, you bust your ass all day in many of these hellholes and at the end of the day you still can't scratch out a decent life. For some it may make sense to make due with less and do nothing then to 9-5 at McDonald's for years on end.
Of course, as I mentioned before, there are some capitalists who want to do away with welfare, the effect will be in the long-term to kill off surplus workers and retirees. In the short-term, major pressure is put on individuals to get into the workforce and therefore to expand it in the short-term. But the factor of labor enthusiasm is one aspect of the welfare state that its reactionary critics fail to comprehend– sure you can bring back child labor and lower the minimum wage but that doesn't necessarily mean people will work harder. Labor enthusiasm is already terrible in the US and the minimum wage already doesn't provide enough to really survive on. At some point the carrot does work better than the stick and as for the "surplus population" well they usually fight back when they understand that they are slowly being killed.
Colton Roberts
Nope. The drug war and de-industrialization did that. Stop swallowing Sowell's shrivelled dick.
Sebastian White
kill yourself immediately and get off this board
Justin Adams
What if the introduction of new drugs, single mothers, the welfare system in its current form, AND de-industrialization combined, ALL caused the death of the black community?
Anthony Hill
iirc manufacturing died in the united states in the late 1990s and early 2000s, whereas major welfare legislation went into effect in the mid 1960s.
Like I said, it's probably a number of factors. But it's silly to assert that removing disincentives for single motherhood would not effect the rates of single motherhood.
Parker Ross
Manufacturing went south (literally, as in it went to the southern states) during the 50s-70s. Black families literally could not move there due to redlining and even if they could many chose not to because it's the fucking south. So they stayed behind in a jobless city that went to shit.
The same thing is happening to whites in PA and elsewhere. They even have their own drug epidemic going on.
Lucas Sullivan
This is what leftists are always complaining about, the lack of a welfare requiring people to care for others.
Jace Scott
Blacks suffered the most from the Reagan recessions of the 1980s and it can be argued that both jobs and benefits that would have otherwise went to blacks went instead to Hispanic and other immigrants instead.
Everyone knows that the CIA unleashed the heroin and crack cocaine epidemics in the inner-cities. The mainstream scholars who even dare to touch this issue say it was to fund CIA operations elsewhere…but many radicals and other dissident thinkers believe that it was a form of war unleashed against the black population by their own government, not dissimilar to the Opium wars in China or counter-insurgency strategies developed in Thailand.
Whatever the actual motivation of the government for doing this, it can be very plausibly argued that a result was a higher proportion of blacks involved in the illegal drug trade and ruin of the health of black workers, their wealth, and their educational prospects.
Daniel Reyes
When the pay and benefits from the bottom barrel jobs is lower than what you get from welfare, you're not going to be going out looking for work and ending up with a net less to your income.
Colton Sanchez
Which is why we need to ban drugs, when black people see them, they use them and become junkies. We need a war on drugs. I do not remember a CIA naval bombardment of new york city in response to america banning heroine and cocaine.
Jordan Sanchez
Chassidic Jews in Williamsburg live better than the hipsters. Why? Because 1. their communities are extremely close-knit, everyone gets married young and has a large family, and everyone is expected to help each other, 2. their theology teaches that the world is an illusion similar to the Matrix or Baudrillard so they shun all the porky propaganda, 3. their theology holds their relationship to God is more dialectical and emphasizes direct action over just "believing", and 4. many of them are the descendants of Holocaust survivors so they naturally distrust the state, meaning the only mutual aid they willingly receive is from each other.
Take into account most of these Jews were fucking poor when they came to NYC post-Holocaust and yet they live extremely well, even compared to most white people in the city.
Blake Sanchez
How does welfare create incentives for single motherhood? Have you ever even tried living on welfare dumbass? Hint: It's not comfortable and it's not going to give you three meals a day every day. Now try raising a kid on top of that.
By 1960, 19.7 percent of black autoworkers in Detroit were unemployed, compared to just 5.8 percent of whites. Overt discrimination in housing and employment had for decades confined blacks to segregated neighborhoods where they were forced to pay exorbitant rents for slum housing. Subject to residential intimidation and cut off from traditional sources of credit, few blacks could afford to follow industry as it left the city for the suburbs and other parts of the country. Detroit devolved into a mass of unemployment, crime, and crippled municipal resources. When riots rocked Detroit in 1967, 25 to 30 percent of blacks between age eighteen and twenty-four were unemployed.
Deindustrialization went hand in hand with the long assault on unionization that had begun in the aftermath of World War II. Without the political support they had enjoyed during the New Deal years, unions such as the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the United Auto Workers (UAW) shifted tactics and accepted labor-management accords in which cooperation, not agitation, was the strategic objective. This accord held mixed results for workers. On the one hand, management encouraged employee loyalty through privatized welfare systems that offered workers health benefits and pensions. Grievance arbitration and collective bargaining also allowed workers official channels in which to criticize and push for better conditions. At the same time, unions became increasingly weighed down by bureaucracy and corruption. Union management came to hold primary influence in what was ostensibly a “pluralistic” power relationship, and workers—though still willing to protest—by necessity pursued a more moderate agenda compared to the union workers of the 1930s and 40s.
The decline of labor coincided with ideological changes within American liberalism. Labor and its political concerns undergirded Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition, but by the 1960s many liberals had forsaken working class politics. More and more saw poverty as stemming not from structural flaws in the national economy, but from the failure of individuals to take full advantage of the American system. For instance, while Roosevelt’s New Deal might have attempted to rectify unemployment with government jobs, Johnson’s Great Society and its imitators funded government-sponsored job training, even in places without available jobs. Union leaders in the ‘50s and ‘60s typically supported such programs and philosophies.
Widely shared postwar prosperity leveled off and began to retreat by the mid-1970s. Growing international competition, technological inefficiency, and declining productivity gains stunted working- and middle-class wages. As the country entered recession, wages decreased and the pay gap between workers and management began its long widening. The tax code became less progressive and labor lost its foothold in the marketplace.
Racial discrimination coupled with lack of good jobs killed black families, not your imagined "omg welfare makes everyone lazy" idiocy.
Gavin Lewis
They also commit ungodly amounts of literal welfare fraud. So much for welfare discouraging traditional lifestyles.
Brandon Peterson
got any links about this?
Landon King
Not really. There do arise occasional problems with specific elements of the system that encourage sub-efficient action, but the costs that result are essentially null compared to the costs of abolition.
For example, you can "trap" someone on welfare if they'd wind up paid less taking a job due to conditionality, which - if people were promoted fairly - would deprive them of a long-term improvement as they worked their way up. Attempts to get around this have if anything just made the problem worse, though. You can see that in Universal Credit in the UK - the idea was that they'd move towards a taper system, so as you work more you get less welfare, but the welfare amount goes down by less than the extra you earn so you're always richer working - in practice, the treasury imposed harsher cuts than even the quite conservative minister of the time wanted and this element of the system was one of the first to suffer.
The actual question as to how it arises is complicated. In part it staves off revolution. In part it buys votes. In part it's a more profitable way of maintaining unemployment for the capitalist. In part even if the capitalist doesn't recognize it, it has a countercyclical effect and amounts to a de-facto Keynesian policy. (Recession happens, unemployment goes up, welfare spending goes up, government deficit by nature must go up, drop in demand is mitigated somewhat. Economic boom happens, unemployment goes down, welfare spending goes down, government budget deficit shrinks/turns to surplus, inflation is mitigated somewhat.) and even - believe it or not - In part it arises because some people are actually nice and kind and trying to help without an ulterior motive. These all come together and that's partly why policy is such a mess.
so romanticised as to risk a lawsuit from the government of italy for copyright infringement. yes i know that's not what romantic means. ah yes let me just turn to my community for medical aid yum yum delicious homeopathy pills wonderful i can feel my condition improving already *dies* although i will adopt a more serious consideration of this: there is no reason that social services cannot be provided by the state but administered by the community itself. there is no reason, for example, that a job-centre cannot be run based on considerations of local needs while being funded and organised on the whole around centralized transfers of funding. this is undoubtedly a more reliable approach than expecting people to offer mutual aid when considering the problem of unemployment: who are the most likely to take up concern for the unemployed? why, the unemployed… and if you have a cluster of unemployed people (say, a town that loses her key industry) then what happens? well, you have a lot of people who care about the unemployed… problem is, they're all unemployed and have no money to share with one another. there is nothing wrong with making rich outsiders pay for poor insiders. also if we look historically you conveniently overlook fun things like workhouses.
dysgenics is a meme
Theoretically it works like this, but there are interesting social factors here. Pay and conditions for coal miners in the UK were always a bit shit, and the welfare state was comparatively generous in the 1970s/80s and the requirements to claim welfare were basically null. (Hence why so many bands got to be bands, because they'd say "yeah i looked for a job" and the guy at the DSS would say "okay, here's your weekly stipend" rather than "prove it or you get nothing, dolescum") In such circumstances you would expect to see people just saying fuck it and enjoying living on welfare even if their incomes were lower, but instead you see large-scale militancy aimed at keeping their jobs. (Most notably the slogan of 'Coal not Dole')
The idea of large-scale voluntary welfare use is largely a meme arising from the fact that unemployment has been (broadly speaking) "permanently" increased by the structural adjustment of western economies during the 1980s following the crises of the 1970s. Even where people genuinely aren't looking for jobs in some cases it's easy to assign to the fact that they're right to assume the appropriate job isn't out there waiting for them.
Robert Thompson
Most of them don't commit fraud. The only reason why it seems that way is because NYC news channels love highlighting the few cases just to drum up hatred against any population resistant to capitalism.
Cameron Thomas
Oy vey it looks like fucking nothing. So much for mutual aid.
They live very well considering their poverty, that's my point. Who gives a shit about being able to buy an iphone if the community meets all of your basic needs?
Oliver Stewart
It's an analogy, its not perfect but it still holds. US government complicity in drug trafficking into home soil goes back to the 1920s when the FBN looked the other way with all the sweet heroindies coming into the US from its butt-buddy Nationalist China.
It never really stopped and even the FBN and later CIA/DEA's toleration and complicity in the illegal drug trade was just the outgrowth of the long-history of the American elite in the opium trade in China. FDR's grandfather was an opium-runner for example.
Btw the FBN was pretty insane, many of its agents were addicted to heroin, it wasn't uncommon for agents to kill other agents with hotshots, and FBN agents killed at least 26 of their own informants that we know of. They were busted up because they were so corrupt but there's really not a happy ending there–the most successfully corrupt bastards were brought into lead the DEA while the small fries got axed.
Kayden Mitchell
They live well despite being "poor" because they fleece money from the state. That's the whole point.
Xavier Phillips
naval bombardment is so 19th century, we have airplanes now.
Aaron Gonzalez
No your point was that they "live extremely well, even compared to most white people" aka have a high standard of living, which they fucking don't. Now off yourself.
Even if everything you state is correct, it's still a bogus analogy, rhetorical fodder that muddies your own view and makes it unappealing to those who know their history regarding the opium war. It would only hold if the U.S attacked itself to stop the war on drugs the U.S was waging.
Bourgies have always used ideas of deserving and undeserving poor to divide and rule the working class, and encourage working class people to buckle down and submit to capitalism,
Why did the welfare state happen?
1. Bourgeois regime legitimacy. The Soviets had the first welfare state, then the Nazis copied. The liberal states needed to copy too, else they'd turn either communist or Nazi. Notice how they dismantled it around the time the USSR collapsed.
2. To defuse unrest. They didn't want a repeat of the post-World War 1 revolutionary wave after World War 2.
3. Economic regulation. Capitalism goes through different phases - upturns and downturns. During upturns, it needs a lot of labor and consumption. During downturns, it makes cuts. The welfare state helps stabilise the labor market.
Yes it's better to have community welfare in a small-scale socialist society, but if you want a big modern society, you'll need something like a welfare state.
How about CIA-funded hard drugs, repression against the black movement, police brutality and occupation, consumerism, destruction of industry… There's the same problems in countries with no/weak welfare states - India, Mexico, Egypt, South Africa - and they didn't occur in countries like Sweden and France until the welfare state began to be dismantled.
Only if you believe that people are robots who respond to incentives. Single motherhood has always been common in black communities. Nobody benefits economically from being a single mother, although people might fake it to increase benefits.
A healthy capitalism would rectify that by raising the wages of the bottom-end jobs, so why don't they?
Banning =/= effectively suppressing. Banning actually raises prices, and well-connected people can corner the trade.
Police occupation of black and subcultural neighborhoods has done a lot to destroy community. There was a lot of mutual aid in black US ghettos in the 50s-60s, and in anarcho ghettos like Kreuzberg later. The state doesn't like it. theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-state-its-historic-role
Well, it did attack itself, it attacked its own black citizens using drugs. That's documented and even in the Congressional record although its true import is very much minimized. You sound like a shill tbh
Leo Morgan
This.
Parker Ross
"Welfare", as in getting a check from the government for nothing, doesn't exist anymore, at least in Burgerland.
Welfare programs, as they currently exist are limited to: SNAP - "food stamps", supplemental income for those with food insecurity, can only be spent on food at qualifying grocery stores.
Public/Section 8 Housing - Housing owned either by the government (public) or privately (section 8) that basically just costs less rent, you still have to pay rent (they usually shoot for 30% of your income)
WIC - Supplemental income for families with very young children, basically SNAP for people with babies
Unemployment - Income you receive if you get laid off (and ONLY if you get laid off, you also need to prove that you're actively seeking work to continue receiving benefits)
Disability - Living stipend for those unable to work due to disability
Aaaand that's basically it. Conservatives need to stop living in the 20th century. Welfare as we know it has been dead for decades, what we have left is a bare-bones apparatus meant to help the poor from being completely fucked, there is no dole.
No, welfare doesn't keep people poor, this is the stupid bootstraps meme.
No, black communities were destroyed by the War on Drugs and other programs aimed at suppressing and terrorizing their communities, nor welfare.
I want Holla Forums to leave and never come back.
Isaac Myers
iirc black america used to be on par with poor white america in terms of single motherhood.
Eli Torres
The reason why they don't is that bosses want to drive down wages to drive up profits. Also, they don't need to, because they can rely on rightsless migrant workers, prison labor, five-year old Bangladeshi orphans, etc.
But it's absurd to say that welfare undermines jobs because it pays more than jobs. If true, the market would rectify that very quickly. Higher welfare, easier to get, would push wages up by strengthening workers' bargaining position. Lower, less reliable, or more humiliating welfare also undermines wages for the same reason.
Adam Watson
Yeah but you forget the point of capitalism isn't to keep workers comfy but to maximize profits.
James Collins
Interesting, what would drug legalization amount to then, a total war on all citizens?
Just admit that you carelessly made a superficially apt comparison for dramatic effect, it's better than making Peter Hitchens look like an anarchist.
Nancy Reagan, revolutionary hero in the war against the drugs pushed on blacks to destroy them. Just say no to legalization and ban the sick filth.
Chase Diaz
M8, you're not making a very compelling case here.
The "War on Drugs" effectively targeted small offenders. The most telling example I can think of, though, came from a friend - he served in the invasion of Panama, and told me that during his time there he also witnessed CIA men loading huge bags of coke onto a plane to go to the US.
Thomas Price
Ok, the druglords in Panama weren't small offenders - it was weird to go straight to that. But most of the people locked up in America were, while government agents and American elites were effectively immune.
Nicholas Gutierrez
If I sell drugs to you, am I then attacking you?
Nathaniel Russell
And they have other stipulations for this - dunno if it's true in every state, but when I tried to apply I was told that I hadn't worked at the place long enough. I got fired (yeah, we didn't get to the point where that came up) at what turned out to be exactly the time before I'd have become eligible for unemployment.
Adam Ortiz
Go back to ancapistan. You have some growing up to do.
Levi Cook
Depends on what you've got.
Did you hear about Lil' Peep?
I, personally, would not mind such an attack but when you give that stuff to just regular people and casual users (of anything) you can achieve the same effects whether they like it or not.
Evan Gomez
You said it.
Attacks, like everything, are okay in moderation. Knowing that, I'd like to have an answer on the question how people who push for drug legalization can honestly describe the drug trafficking done by the CIA as an act of ethnic cleansing, excluding the option that they want to legalize drugs to destroy black people with them, that is.
Nathaniel Reed
Those are both inadequate and entirely arbitrary. Community is generally nice to have, but if people don't have a fallback outside their community, human misery follows in its wake.
