The ‘self-reliance’ fraud
Social services minister Kevin Andrews’ recent warnings that “relentless” growth in welfare spending is “unsustainable” and lectures from the Liberal Party that senior citizens, the sick and the unemployed need to be more “self-reliant” throw into stark relief the sort of society this government wants to create.
“Pick yourself up by the bootstraps” is more than a motto for the conservatives; they think it is the foundation of moral order. Absent individual responsibility, we’re told, there is nothing but cheating, theft and social decay. Not to mention economic bankruptcy.
The model citizen for the Liberals is the one lionised every so often on the front pages of the city tabloids: “I lost the house and all my possessions in the fires. Broke my leg saving Fido from the attic just before the whole place went up. No insurance and the government won’t help. That’s life. I’ll survive because that’s what being a Queenslander is all about …”
It’s the stoicism epitomised by Depression-era New York heavyweight boxer James Braddock, who, the story goes, only with great reluctance, and primarily due to his family enduring ruinous and crippling poverty, accepted government welfare payments when he was unable to secure work.
Once on his feet again, after incredible upset victories in the ring, the champion returned in full to the government the money he received when down and out. Braddock’s was an incredible story – so incredible that he was nicknamed “Cinderella Man”. His life was later turned into a big production biopic starring Russell Crowe.
The message, similar to that embedded in the scripts of many Hollywood blockbusters along with the tabloid stories, is that, with grit and determination, anyone can survive and prosper.
The “survivor tale” has a dual purpose. On one hand it embeds the idea that “the world doesn’t owe you anything”. On the other it shames those who can’t keep their trousers patched as not determined enough or too lazy to take their chances. In failure, the crippling weight of the world is deservedly ours alone to bear.
The two sides of the message sit together uneasily. Those who do manage to survive – or better, prosper – are extraordinary; those who don’t are miserable specimens. This is the ideological carrot and stick for the working class: suck it up or be disgraced.
Being often associated with true stories of adversity and triumph, the survivor tale gives seeming veracity to the barren claim of conservatives like Tony Abbott that “empowered citizens can do more for themselves than government will ever do for them”.
It also helps governments stigmatise the poor – those on Centrelink, those needing public hospitals and bulk-billed doctors’ visits – as wretched, parasitical or a combination of the two. Just think of federal Liberal MP Ken O’Dowd’s ugly comment that people on the dole “don’t care about the community – they care about themselves”.
The message can also resonate with people because, ultimately, everyone knows they are alone in this world: if you don’t look out for yourself, you really will end up destitute.
Yet the deployment of self-reliance as a moral imperative serves to obscure more than it reflects in reality.
One of the key features of capitalist society is that wealth is produced socially, i.e. through the collaborative efforts of workers, yet the proceeds are appropriated privately by a minority of people who control the process but contribute very little.
The Liberal politicians, the tabloid editors and owners and the Hollywood producers don’t dig up the coal or build the power plants that provide us with electricity.
They don’t till the soil to grow the staples we eat. They don’t stack the supermarket shelves or transport goods around the country. They don’t build the computers or lay the fibre-optic cables through which we communicate.
Nor do the owners of these industries perform the necessary labour. They all rely on the labour of workers, without which they wouldn’t survive.
Perversely, the workers, under this system, also depend on the bosses. Because the productive apparatus of society – the mines, the office buildings, the land, the transport and telecommunications infrastructure etc. – is controlled by a tiny minority, the only way for a worker to access it is to sell their capacity to labour to that minority in return for a wage.
Yet if the bosses can’t get more out of worker than they pay them in wages, if they can’t make money out of someone, they will either sack them or refuse to give them a job in the first place.
That is the cause of unemployment: the refusal of the wealthy to allow society’s resources to be used unless a profit can be secured for themselves.
And they carry on about individuals taking responsibility for their own destitution!
The ideology of “self-reliance” is really just about convincing workers to accept a world of gross inequality. It is a way of turning working people against each other, to distract us from the parasites at the top who live off the labour of those at the bottom.
