EDWG – Economic Dependency Working Group ESA – Employment
and Support Allowance SJPG – Social Justice Policy Group SRA –
Strategic-Relational Approach SRSSC – Social Rented Sector Size
Criterion.
Now that's music to my ears?
George GIDEON Osborne
The Euro-American state is a cowardly lion, a weeping bully, a plaintive lover to finance capital. It cannot bear to admit that having grown its own administrative limbs to serve at the pleasure of the new sovereign of privatized wealth, that the wealthy feel no obligation to feed the state.
(...)
I don’t think it’s about converting shame, therefore, into
pride or anything. I think it requires a hard confrontation with and a very
difficult process of changing what the reproduction of life means in both
pragmatic and phantasmatic terms. What this means will vary, but its impact on
the political and on the social relations of labour will be astonishing,
because it has to happen: there will be politics, and there will be sacrifice,
and there will be a chaos of wants responded to badly and with a bigger burden
on the already vulnerable unless they converge to rethink their own investments
in inequality and xenophobia, the ready-to-hand fear formations.
Lauren Berlant
For the One Nationers, New Labour had dramatically increased welfare spending to a maddening level. It had given the public too much, too soon, too fast. It had failed, at once to economically have the intended effect on poverty & deprivation; the expressed Forgotten People, the people of Broken Britain, child poverty, slum estates, the whole package was illustrated by the Conservative critique of New Labour’s income-based concept of relative poverty. The false question to the problem was devised:
How is it possible for the state to spend so much money,
to devote so much energy, to fight poverty – only for poverty and inequality to
win the fight?
Here, the claims that New Labour's welfare state had in fact
endorsed its opposite, had ensured poverty had won and inequality ruled. Time
for austerity. Time to end irresponsible spending.
Time to Button the Fuck up.
George Osborne, or simply GIDEON said that the
Conservatives had aligned its thinking with ‘Working Britain’; ‘the shift
worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning’, contrasted with
‘the closed blinds of their next-door neighbour sleeping off a life on
benefits’. This ‘heating up’ would soon be keyed in by the chief architect of
Universal Credit (IDS) via a means-tested overhaul. Many other faces shrouded amid
its creation, namely Iain Duncan Smith's thinktank the Centre for Social
Justice, Tim Montgomerie & Philippa Stroud, Baroness Stroud Member of the
House of Lords of the United Kingdom & an American management consulting
firm named Oliver Wyman. On the first inlay page of their 2009 report, Dynamic
Benefits:
In addition to policy development, the CSJ has built an
alliance of poverty fighting organisations that reverse social breakdown and
transform communities. We believe that the surest way the Government can
reverse social breakdown, and poverty is to enable such individuals,
communities and voluntary groups to help themselves.
The CSJ was founded by Iain Duncan Smith in 2004, as the fulfilment of a promise made to Janice Dobbie, whose son had recently died from a drug overdose just after he was released from prison.
Further in the report it adds:
This emerging underclass lives in communities consistently
defined by five characteristics, which become the pathways to poverty: family
breakdown; educational failure; drug and alcohol addiction; severe personal
indebtedness; and economic dependency – caused by intergenerational
worklessness.
The five-pronged attack would soon be undertaken by a
brooding batch of ‘Compassionate Conservatives’ with heavy links to the
Religious Right of Britain. The ‘brochure’ at some point refers to dynamic
modelling – a method used extensively in the private sector. In other words,
the Dynamic Model System is a vitriolic reset by the likes of Lloyds Banking
Group & people who have 20 years’ experience running private equity-backed businesses.
Benefits are no longer ‘just a passive money dispenser; it is also an active
player in determining whether people work’. And yet, Iain Duncan Smith, known
as IDS from henceforth tended to prefer or imply that the ‘system’ is the thing
that traps people into that dependency & that the insufficient drive to
‘remove oneself’ or ‘cancel/self-abolish’ from this ‘urge to depend’ is
something like an overture of the New Labour ‘culture of excess’.
So Big Society. IDS, Responsibility, Fairness & finally
Compassion. Hard Working people & benefit dependents, ‘detoxification’
under Cameron. Cuts & the programme of austerity.
The explanation was clear as day, it was so obviously to do
with a ‘culture of entitlement’ to state support, in which there is ‘less
expectation to take responsibility’. Today the State is ever-present:
either doing it for you, or telling you how to do it, or making sure you’re
doing it their way. So BigSociety & its ‘centrist’ methodology of
abstinence & hope were to be implemented:
A country not just back in the black but back in business. A big society. A prouder people. And we know the values that are going to get us there. Responsibility. Real fairness. Compassion.
A poem, written 2016. 11th of July, immediately after
Cameron’s resignation. Today, 8 years on.
For workable antinomy
new decimal impressed
on the condition of
intense purified awareness
of the young & The State
of their coherence is to
make distinct concentratedly
despite throbbing uncertainty
of being just right relief
to the social kernel of abolition
patter the balance looks
like austerity produced this
urban stampede and the unkillable
infants with no name or place
stiffen in the air preserve
this basmati as a living
thriving literalness
taking in a 360 degree
revolution of a world and says:
'I'm not a piece of shit,
I'm a piece of society'
will never be exhausted
by feeble sketches or
piloted extinctions
in tinctures with lease
go down our debt is
mind-dependent & a negativity
so negativity you say a tungsten
ring is forever but the basmati
is still a living
thriving literalness
The political climate in the UK found a new register with
the financial crisis: the invocation of public and personal shame. Stuff
of wholly Victorian demarcation, the deserving and undeserving poor,
moral panics of youth deviancy emerging straight from the privilege of EMA,
straight from the communitarian authoritarianism on New Labour social policy.
It was that during this period, wherein GIDEON would chastise those that
exploited the public without generating wealth, those that flouted it through a
culture of ‘dependence’, that he would sometimes label an ‘excess’, much like
the very same nervous excess carried by those with insomnia, depriving them
from the ability to sleep or maybe it was a perpetual wakefulness, ‘the closed
blinds of the next door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits’ their
dependency a ‘cultural choice’. Shameless milking of state benefits enables
these reckless personal habits to grow uncontrollably burdensome to (our
collectively) cash strapped public services. The register of shame and excess,
outlined against an assumed notion of a common-sense decency still to be found
in the working-class heartlands. As the late, great Marina Vishmidt had
written, in terms of the roles around shame & shaming within the political
climate of post 2010, ‘the language of personal responsibility shaped the
political discourse of ‘austerity’... There is a sense that such language acts
conservatively in how social and economic problems are conceived, including
their causes and solutions, that it both permits and excludes certain types of
policy approaches and certain types of defenses and criticisms of those
policies. The relationship between shame and indebtedness is a major example,
how the link of credit to credibility becomes a cipher for all kinds of social
violence.’
Libidinal satisfaction to the non-negotiable imperatives of austerity
or rather the question of how can we reroute shame? How can there be a
re-formulation of the terms around which shame and its punitive assortments,
its empanelment in daily life can be revolted against. As Berlant noted:
Austerity sounds good, clean,
ascetic: the lines of austerity are drawn round a polis to incite it toward
askesis, toward managing its appetites and taking satisfaction in a
self-management in whose mirror of performance it can feel proud and superior.
In capitalist logics of askesis, the workers’ obligation is to be more rational
than the system, and their recompense is to be held in a sense of pride at
surviving the scene of their own attrition.
On this subject Berlant is too inimitable & so I have to
quote at length again:
What ‘shame’ is is to be seen
seeing one’s own forced adjustment, to be seen seeing the wearing away of the
old anchors for being tethered to the world, to be watched or encountered as
one displays profoundly not knowing what to do, to be seen frantically treading
water or to be encountered in paralysis (again, there is a whole range of
proprioceptive performances through which we learn to register feeling the
contingencies of survival and the negativity of encountering ourselves as
subjects who make sense either in our fantasies or the world.
There has been much here that has devolved into a new
literary gauge for many lower working-class artists, I emphasise ‘lower’ as
a definitional category status. I will try to first broach the subject here,
with the intent in exploring it more heartedly elsewhere. I mean it. The
profound stratification and fragmentation of the working-class & how this
manages itself into the effective
Now that's music to my ears?
The closer you are to the forms of punitive systems such as
the DWP, the more the relation of social negativity to subjectifying effects is
a reactive intensity. But it is also a birthright. Rendered in blood. Mended
into your sensibility, just not experienced vicariously. It is a
cartography, you hold it in your sternum. It is the intensive build of the
self. Within the Big Society narrative Burkean ‘little platoons’ largely rested
on the ‘vigorous values’ of moral responsibility to work & to self sufficiency.
That is, the historical fracture lines around the English working class,
post-1980’s disintegration & disenfranchisement, 90’s reinfranchisement as
a cipher, a symbol re-liquidated, primed & pasted. The epiphenomena of
class obsessed over by marketers, psychologists, and rock musicians & so
what approach is to be taken with regarding to the post Big Society clutch on
the throat of the disintegrating integers of ‘working class culture’ other than
the opined death wretch of its junk the necessary traps, its clobber its
gubbins its odds & sods its dunnage equipage.
As Huw Lemmey lays out; That fancy dress is especially popular when young people attend university, searching to find an identity that fits and distinguishes them from the dreaded label of being middle class. English universities are full of people using their miner grandfather to offset their stockbroker grandfather. The impossibility of Bossnapping in the Mind of Someone Dead. Or whatever the Hirst work was called,, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living……
And to at least, in respite mode attempt an ending, or edging to an end. Fisher on the experience of class, as it bifurcates as it irritates your skin, eyes, nose, or throat. In epistemic terms - i.e. in terms of knowledge of the true nature of the social - the subordinate group is in the privileged position precisely because its experience is incommensurate and discontinous, precisely, you might say, because it experience is not (a consistent or quasi-natural) experience at all. It encounters the social field not as some natural(ised) home, but as a series of irreconcilable antagonisms and discrepancies. But this sublime and traumatic ‘experience of the unexperiancable’ is an encounter with the social field as such - which, in class societies, is not contingently but necessarily and inherently distorted by class antagonism. The working class becomes the proletariat when it recognises this - when, that is to say, it begins to dis-identify with the ‘class fantasy’ which has kept it in its place.
To repeat, when it begins to ‘dis-identify with the ‘class
fantasy’ which has kept it in its place, in other words when the class itself
is abolished. When the class abolishes itself. The antagonism at the heart of
this quote, is seemingly obvious when you think the condition in which class is
coincident and therefore experienced as a collective ‘oppression’ or a
structural position has been increasingly fractured. The forms in which Big
Society has opened out the space wherein the experience is individuated is so
vast as to effectively mirror the transformation itself. In the ways in which,
‘Responsibility. Real fairness. Compassion’ migrate themselves into the forms
of privatised social justice, in the ways in which the eviscerated welfare
state dissolves the casing around a collective Dole Mentality that had a kick
on reactive cultural movement. What then? What happens when the enfranchisement
of the disenfranchised are rendered null & void, HERE insert. Weatherley
Law, 2012.
Michael Richard Weatherley, now dead, was MP for Hove
from 2010-2015, which following his election he campaigned an EDM alongside
Kenneth Clarke to criminalise squatting in residential properties.,
SQUASH (Squatters' Action for Secure Homes), a pressure group which reformed to
oppose section 144 included the likes of John McDonnell in helping organise a
meeting for the at the House of Commons. McDonnell said, ‘"there was no
need for a new law. It was put through on the basis of prejudice … to
pander to the media and the right wing of the Conservative party. We are
now finding young homeless people being sent to prison at great cost to
themselves and to the exchequer.’ 34,080 families were homeless in 2012 which
was a 12% increase on the previous figures. The campaign itself
received Royal Assent on May 1st 2012. Its title was Legal Aid, Sentencing
& Punishment of Offenders Act & its enforcement ranged from 51 weeks in
HM or hefty ‘fines’ & of course a criminal record.
Weatherley noted in Valedictory debate, that ‘scrubbing the
law on squatting was a huge deal, and it has virtually ended squatting in
residential properties in the UK. Wikipedia now lists it as Weatherley’s law.
We won.’
