Dole Animators

Walker’s (2000: 97) review of unemployment literature was able to conclude that ‘the evidence is clear that very few unemployed claimants prefer welfare benefits to a job’, and his conclusion is echoed by recent research (e.g. Shildrick et al., 2012).

The UK is now a country in which a measurable proportion of our population are being knowingly starved, and the Tories know that this situation is only democratically sustainable if the population thinks people deserve it.

Listen carefully and the Tories, with their relentless messaging of “for hard-working people”, are trying to change class consciousness; so that workers define themselves against those who do not work, rather than the bosses who exploit both of those groups for their own ends.

More broadly though, what the ongoing welfare war shows is how deeply engrained victim-blaming is in our culture.

It is one of the characteristics of victim blaming that the inequality of Capitalist society is not questioned, but rather the blame for certain suffering and social problems is instead shifted to become a problem inherent in the victim. It is this middle class status quo attitude which is at the heart of victim blaming, and thus is found at the heart of too much of what passes for ‘liberalism' in the world. These liberals want to preserve the status quo, since they benefit greatly themselves from the way things are, but at the same time they are disturbed by the suffering and poverty along the margins. What they do not want is any sort of fundamental change which might result in a reduction in privilege for themselves, and at the same time they do not want poverty and injustice in the world, and perhaps unconsciously, they begin to tilt towards ‘solutions' that involve blaming the victim. Such solutions are not always transparently obvious as ‘victim blaming' and can even superficially appear to be ‘progressive', and this is not surprising since it is important to this middle class liberal mindset to incorporate a self image as one who is not an oppressor.

The ideal rate of unemployment is one that keeps a steady supply of workers available while keeping their wages down (in otherwords rather than a ‘sellers market' where workers could set their price, unemployment is permanently maintained in the economy so as to establish a permanent ‘buyers' market which favors the employer, who can offer less in wages, even demand cuts in wages, backed up by many millions of unemployed people who provide a kind of surplus which keeps workers in line, since they can easily be replaced.)

Listen carefully and the Tories, with their relentless messaging of “for hard-working people”, are trying to change class consciousness; so that workers define themselves against those who do not work, rather than the bosses who exploit both of those groups for their own ends.