(1) Ulrich Beck, “Risikogesellschaft – Aufdem Weg in eine ander Moderne”, Suhrkamp 1986; “De overwegende meerderheid van de werkelozen blijft – nog – voor zich en anderen in de grijze zone van het komen en gaan. Het klassennoodlot heeft zich in zijn kleinste eenheid – in ‘voorbijgaande levensvakken’- versplinterd, doorkruiste biografieën, duikt hier en daar op [onderloopt grenzen, die hem vroeger heilig waren], gaat ook weer, blijft langer verhard zich, wordt echt in deze ‘levensfase-schnitzels’ of reeds weer vast tot een ‘normale’ tussengebeurtenis van de beroepsmatige standaardbiografie van een hele generatie. Het is dit levensfase-specifieke nomadenbestaan, dat de massale werkloosheid onder de voorwaarden van de individualisering voert [met intussen aanzienlijke tendensen tot het huiselijk worden], die tegelijkertijd tegenstrijdigheid mogelijk maakt: massaliteit en individualisering van het ‘noodlot’, getallen van duizelingwekkende hoogte en constantheid, die zich toch ergens verkruimelen, en verkleind, naar binnen gekeerd massaal noodlot, dat in zijn ongebroken scherpte de enkeling met de stem van het persoonlijke falen in miljoenenhoogte verheimelijkt in individueel in het geweten brand. /
(2) Passim: Op de arbeidslozenstatistiek betrokken heeft dit: de op het arbeidsbureau geregistreerde gevallen van werkeloosheid laten geen conclusies op personen toe. Aan de ene kant kunnen veer veel meer personen voorbijgaand voor werkeloosheid betrokken zijn, als de constantheid van de getallen uitdrukt. An de andere kant kunnen diezelfde personen meervoudig over een tijdruimte met onderbreking als werkeloos vermeld staan. Op het voorbeeld met het openbaar vervoer overgedragen: het aantal van de zit- en staanplaatsen valt niet samen met het komen en gaan de mensenstroom. Maar in en uit zijn ook vaak diezelfde gezichten en enige duurzame gasten onthouden, zo dat ook de aantallen van de stormen over de betroffenheden direct niet zegt: gevallen, toe- en afgangen en personen vallen in de levensfase-specifieke verdeling uit elkaar. Hiermee overeenkomend is het effect in de breedte. Werkeloosheid is in hen verdeling als levensfasespecifiek individueel noodlot geen klasse- of randgroepennoodlot meer, doch gegeneraliseerd en genormaliseerd geworden. /
(3) Passim: De levensspecifieke verdeling kentekent ook de nieuwe armoede. Zij maakt de ambivalentie, in welke zij zich uitbreiden, verscherp en toch, in het private gekeerd, verborgen blijft, begrijpelijk. Daarbij moet het voorbijgaande geenszins voorbij gaan Gaat voor steeds meer mensen ook niet voorbij, verschijnt echter vooreerst als voorbijgaande gebeurtenis. Vrouwen zijn in bescheiden mate door de val in de armode bedreigd. Kenmerkenderwijze niet op grond van vormingsgebreken of door afkomst. Veelmeer is scheiding tot een wezenlijke factor gewonden, die – vooral moeders met kinderen – in levensverhoudingen onder het bestaansminimum drukt Ook hier geld: velen leven niet onder omstandigheden die met het stereotype van de onderlaag overeen komen. Armoede is voor hen ook vaak een tussengebeurtenis. Zij zijn [naar hen zelfbeeld en gedeeltelijk ook feitelijk] slechts ‘ een huwelijk ver’ van de overwinning van de armoede verwijderd. Wanneer de armoede dan niet meer af te schudden is, zijn zij aan haar echter veel meedogenlozer blootgesteld, daar zij niet met de afschermmogelijkheden en omgangsvormen van een cultuur vertrouwd zijn die met armoede te leven weet.”
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(4) Div., “Jongeren willen echte Banen – Jeugdwerkloosheid, collectief probleem, individuele schaamte”, Netwerk Jongeren FNV 2014; “ De ervaringen van de jongeren met het UWV of gemeentelijke sociale dienst verbetert hun situatie doorgaans niet. Volgens de instanties ligt de werkloosheid van de jongere niet aan het tekort aan banen. ‘Bij netwerkbijeenkomsten die gefaciliteerd worden overheden, heerst een taboe op het zeggen dat het aantal banen een probleem is, zegt administratief medewerkster Rosan (27, drie mastertitels: Rechten, Bestuur en Organisatie en Politicologie).’Niemand durft het ook te zeggen, want niemand wil de kleine kans om een baan te krijgen verpesten.’ / Niet het banentekort is de oorzaak van werkloosheid, maar de jongere zelf is het probleem, menen UWV en sociale diensten. ‘Ik snap heel goed dat ze je aan het werk willen helpen, maar ze doen net of ik schuldig ben aan mijn werkloosheid’, zegt cesartherapeut Leon (25). ‘Ik kan er toch niets aan doen dat mijn contract niet verlengd werd? Het is gewoon de crisis. Ik vind dat ze me als werkloze criminaliseren’. Leon krijgt steeds meer stress van het solliciteren. ‘ Ik solliciteer niet vanuit mijn hart, maar vanuit mijn angst. Ik vraag me steeds af: heb ik het wel goed gedaan volgens de sociale dienst?”
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(5) Michael Harrington, “The Other America”, Pelican books 1981; “So after all the broken promises and false starts Richard Nixon was elected President and told the people that the Federal Government had tried to do too much and that the would therefore decentralize social programs ad set more modest goals. There was a half-truth and a dangerous falsehood in his analysis, and that bodes ill for the poor in the Seventies. / Under Lyndon Johnson the Administration had indeed talked as if it were undertaking, and accompishing, prodigies. One of the reasons why a disturbing number of white workers turned toward George Wallace in 1968 (even though, outside the South, they eventually voted for Hubert Humphrey) was that they were under the impression that Washington had done so much for the poor, and particularly the Negroes among them. They confused the bold rhetoric with action and did not understand that life in the ghettos had changed very little. Insofar as Nixon Taxes Johnson for having talked too loudly, he is right. But the rest of his thesis – that the government was too activist, efforts must be cut back and turned over to the states – is very much wrong. /
(6) Passim: In order to destroy this myth of the favored, pampered poor one need only consider a few of the official figures. In 1968 the National Commision on Civil Disorders – the ‘Riot’ Commision – reported that in Detroit, New Haven and Newark, the cities where the violence was the most destructive in 1967, the median percentage of those eligible who were actually covered by any one of the major social programs was 33 percent. In other words, in the United States a majority of the poor are not on welfare at all. And, the Commission showed, the national average for welfare payments is ‘a little more than one half of need – ad in some cases one fourth of need. In January 1969 a special Cabinet committee reported to Lyndon Johnson that the existing domestic programs were already underfunded by $6 billion and that a moderate expansion of civilian efforts along lines already suggested by various commissions and study groups would cost another $40 billion by 1972.
So the statistics are clear enough: the Government by its own standards is falling billions of dollars behind modest estimates of what should be done. Among the minority of the poor lucky enough to get any money there are millions who must exist on a half or a fourth of their urgent needs. Moreover these people are often victimized by what the nonpoor think of them. To many citizens, people who receive welfare are thought of as a burden upon the hard-working common man. But as Richard Titmus has pointed out, what is really happening is that many of the poor are being undercompensated for humiliations which the Government and the economy, or both, have visited upon them.”
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(7) Div., “Poverty and deelopment nito the 21st century”, Oxford University Press 2004 – Alan Thomas, “Poverty and the ‘end of development”; “Relative poverty and social excluson – One of the bestknown discusions of the notion of relative poverty comes from a work on poverty in Britian atthe nd of th 1970s by Pter Twonsend: ‘Individuals, families and groups inthe popoualtion can be said to be in poverty when they lack the resources to obtain the types of diets, particiapte int he activity and have the living conditions and ameniteits which are customary, or at least widely accetpted and approved, in the socieites to which they belong. Thier resoruces are so seriously below those commaned by the averare indivudal or family that they are, in efect, excliuded form ordinary living patterns, customs and activieties.’ [Tonsend, 1979] // This notion has been attaked by those who argue that people in industrilized countris should not be regarded as poor if, for example, they are unable to affort a television or refrigerator or a few toys for their childern, so long as they are able to maintian a minimum level of nutrituion. Conversely, there may be objections ot setting a poerty line at a higher level i industrializd countris so as to take account of the fact aht a minimum of consumer goods is necessry to take part in ‘ordinary living patterns’ in those countries compared with less developed countries, on the grounds that this downgrades the needs of those living in poorer countries.”(Als men niet mee kan doen met de heersende ‘cultuur’, levert dat ‘onderontwikkeling’ op. Als dat anders moet wooden, is daar een ander type van beschaving voor nodig)
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(8) Michael Harrington, “The Other America”, Pelican books 1981; “There is a sense in which the ‘old’ slums are new. There once was a slum in American society that was a melting pot, a way station, a goad to talent. It was the result of the massive European immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That flood of human vitality came to an end after World War I when the nation established quota systems, but the tradition of the ethnic groups survived for a generation. Symbolically, the tenements in which these newcomers lived had been built for them and had not been trickled down after the middle class found them inadequate. The neighborhoods were dense and the housing was inadequate, yet the people were not defeated by their environment. There was community; there was aspiration. / In most cities in the United States, it is still possible to take a bus or a subway into this part of the American past. The Kerry Patch, the Ghetto, Little Italy, and other ethnic slums remain. Yet, like archaeological remnants of some dead culture, they are being buried under the new metropolis. Yet, even today, there is still a unique feeling of life in the remains of the old ethnic slums. The crowding gives rise to a lusty richness of existence. The children swarm on the streets throughout the day and into the early evening, but they rarely form themselves into violent gangs. If the neighborhood is strident, it is vital, too; if it is dotted with the signs of the Old Country, it is a way station ot the new land as well. / I remember in the early fifties when I moved into a Jewish slum on the Lower East Side of New York. The first day in my new apartment, I went into a store on my block. After I had paid for my purchase, the man behind the counter said, ‘You live in 740, don’t you?’ The community was self-enclosed; it knew everyone, and could figure out the street number of a stranger within twenty-four hours. On Saturday, the streets were deserted for the Sabbath; on Sunday there was an air of festival and excitement. /
(9) Passim: From one point of view, these ghettoes were narrow, and there is no sense in romanticizing them, for they were also centers of poverty and physical misery. Yet George Orwell was right in saying that a good society would preserve one of these neighborhoods, not so much to show how bad life had been in the past, but rather to let people know how good it had been in spite of everything. Or, the insight can be put into the formal language of sociology. As Oscar Handlin wrote in The Newcomers, ‘The ethnic community supplied its members with norms and values and with the direction of an elite leadership.’ Tenements did not prevail against people. / Now the incredible American adventure of the ethnic slum is coming to an end. There are those from the old experience who remain behind – in New York, the Irish and Germans of the south Bronx, the Jews of Williamsburg, the Italians of the South Village. Some of them are elderly people who cannot wrench themselves from their past. Some are the failures who never succeeded in breaching the economic and social walls of the ghetto. So is it that a social worker in Brooklyn will tell you that some of the people evicted from tenements will move out to Long Island and buy a house. Or the priest in the church in the Melrose section of the Bronx will talk of the Irish and German poor who must come to the parish for help so their children can get the right clothes for their first Holy Communion. / But those who stay behind face a harder thask than the previous generation. They are separated from the culture of aspiratio: the best have long since gone. Their chidlren will have most of the disadvantages of the ghetto and few of the advantages, for they will grow up surrounded by those who failed and those who could never make the transition to the new land.”
(10) Michael Harrington, “The Other America”, Pelican books 1981; “Miller describes three ‘styles of life’ that are the responses of the people in the Lower East Side project. One group adopts a strategy of complete withdrawal from whatever community the project affords. They isolate themselves in their own apartments, or else they maintain ties to some ethnic group of the old neighborhood on the outside. As a result, they are utterly alienated precisely when they are in their homes. At best, they must travel for friendship and social life; at worst, they become faceless. / Another group finds ethnic or religious identification inside the project. Miller describes the ‘bench culture’ in front of the Lower East Side project: on the south side, the Jewish benches; across from them, the Puerto Ricans; and across the play area, the Negroes. Naturally enough, this situation causes hostilities and makes it extremely difficult for any effective kind of community to develop in the project as a whole, or for the Tenants’ Association to become a meaningful instrument for dealing with management. Within the income ghetto, there emerge the subghettos, and the worst aspects of the old and new slums are merged and institutionalized. / A third group, Miller notes, works with the Tenants’ Association. It is small, composed of the people within the project who are most adjusted to the world in which they live. By a predictable irony of bureaucratic practice, they have been the prime targets for eviction, for their incomes rise more rapidly than that of the rest of the project, ad they are in constant danger of exceeding the maximum established by law. These activists can find a fairly rich life for themselves, yet, as a couple who are involved in tenant work in another project sadly pointed out, they often end up talking to one another, forming a sort of elite community. They do not have the resources to prevail agains the environment. / Thus, the gang violence is but a symptom of a deeper process within the housing projects: the failure to develop a project community or (which is much more important) a community integrating the project and the surrounding neighborhood.”
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(11) Div., “Poverty and deelopment nito the 21st century”, Oxford University Press 2004 – Alan Thomas, “Poverty and the ‘end of development”; “Poverty in the Uk – The 1980s and early 1990s saw the birth of a poverty in this country [UL] which was not smply o n a scale aht had not been seen for mrore than 40 years but which was also of a kind that simply ahd never been here at all. Ths new poverty is complex … /Those communities live under immense pressure, and it is fort hat reason that significant numbers of those who live ther hadve been shovelled into crème and protituion and drugs and alcolholis and child abuse, into a life of ruthless self-interest. How else do you survive? … / So what has changed? At its simplest the poor are buried under layers of aggravations tHe First layer is the historically familiar one; they were forced out of owr and thier benifets wer cut, over and over again; those who lung on to unskilled or part-time work saw legal sagety-nets reomoved so that thier low pay fell even lower / But that is tradtional poverty. The other laers under wich they are begin crushed are new. /
(12) Passi,: The most damaging of thise is the war against rugs, which is inflctingenormousharm onthe ver people is pretendstobeprotecting … The key poinst no is not so much the narcotic effect of th drugs black market but its economic importance. If you are a 16-year-od school-leaver o none of those estates wit hno ualiifcations andno hope ofdecentjob,and ifyouwant life to provide you with other adolescnets will find in collecege and career, there is an obvious way forward … [You ge ton you bike and start dealing and you slip into a vortex of criminality and violence. // Consider, also, what has hapend tothe classic esace route ffered to the poor by state education. Ask social owrkers how theyget on nowadyas whn they call heatachers to plead for a place for dificult children on thier books. The doors to the escape route are shut. // Ther are still residets’ groups and community leaders bravely struggling to hold things together buttheyr are trying to turn a tidal wave with a teaspoon. It is not just ahtt neighbouersmay no longer hep each other; freuentely, they do not evenknow eachother. It isnotjustthat the hysical fabric of the estates is collapsing into a messof brambles and broken windows, thereis efectively no one there arenay more to reverse the decline. Te old stability has gone and, wit hit, the familiar facess tnd th eonbds bwteen them. More htan that, they have been replaced by absentee landlords who haeonly the slightest interest n the physical condition of the houses and in the community around them. //
(13) Passim,: The point of all this is that poverty is not just about being short of money. Thake material hardscip, combine it with the black market in drugs, close the door on education, kill off the comnity, add a dozen differeten other aggravations and you end up with a recipe for deep damage – physical, emotional, social, spiritual damage. When the government looks at teh notorious singel mother and thinks tahtthe sanser isot offer her a job and to bhreaten her benfit, it ignores the obstable couse of ohter problems that lie in her path. These may be clinically depressed, simply unable tofind theemotianl will to cope and/or she may be a heorin addict an/or she has no one to look afhter her child, who is robable athmatic andór she may be terrifiel to leave her house becaude she nkowsit will be burgeld [some of the estate gangs specialize in ‘total burglaries’ where they take everything, even the carpets and the ot-water tank] and/or she is scard of being assualtd by some neighbour she fellout with and/or she has unpaid fines andsheknow the courts will take whatever extra she earns and/or, and/or . Take the 18-year old boy who ois told that he will lose his welfare if he does not acept the dead-and-work he is offerd. Why should he palythat game when there is a crack cocaine supermarket offering ready , steady career prostpects on hsi doorstep? Take nay of those men, women or children who have becoem o alienatd and angry and self-destrucive and bad that they may not want to behave ina rational, self-interested way. It does not mater how much you manipulate benefits or rewrite regulations, it’s liek curring cancer with Elastoplast. The damage is deep, much more complicated than it apeears at First sight, much more difficult to reverse. // [Extracts form ‘Trhe is nothing ntural about poverty’, Nick Davies, New Statesman, 6 November 1998]”
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(14) Div., “Poverty and deelopment nito the 21st century”, Oxford University Press 2004 – John Harris, “The second ‘great transfromation’? Capitalism at the end of the twentieth century”; “The 1980s [into the 1990s] ws the decade of tuting back public expenditure [through in spite of much rhetoric it was rarely achieve in prctice: in Britain, by 1997 when the conservatige party left office th share of the national income taken by the state was still only just below 40%, little changed from the ratio whichthe party had iherited when it enterd government in 1979], of ‘roling back the state’[thoug in practivce governemnt which wer commtted ideologically to non-iterventien were often forced bye vent to be more, not less interventionist], of privatization, and of deregulating Financial markets, labour markets and commodity markets, There was a decivie ruptue wththe economic policies and withthe mode of political regulationof the years of the long boom afther 1945, but teh conditions for it were laid in th fiscal crisis of Frodism-Kennesianimsm at the beiginning of the 1970s. As Harvey suggests, the withdrawal of support for the welfare state and the attack on the real warge and on Union power began as an economic necessity in the crisis of 1973-1975 when slackening growth inevitably meant ruobel for the welfare state and the social wage, and the were ‘simply turned by the neoconservaties into a governmental virtue’.
(15) Passim: But neoconservatism also encouraged and gave legitimacy to an ethos of competitive iindividualism in western societies, pushing outthe adherence to collective values which had beenquite storng in he 1950s and 1960s, whilst also – appearent contradiciton – reasserting the ‘bascs’ [as Margaret Thatcher’s sometime acolyte, and her succesror as the British Prime Minister, John Major, described them] of family and religion, in the interest of soial stablitiy. But this was ever the contradiction to hwich the attempt to realize the utopia of th self-regulating market gave rise as Polanyi showed in his discusion of nineteenth and early twentiteh cnetury history: ‘it is at such times [rampant individualim and] of fragmentation and ecnmic insecrity [which follos when labour, notably, is rated as an comodity] that the desire for stabel values leads to heightened emphasis upon the autorrity of baic istituions – the family, religion and the sate’.”(Bij al te groot geweld, kruipt de mens – zowel indiviudueel als collectief – terug in zijn schulp)
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(16) Div., “Poverty and deelopment nito the 21st century”, Oxford University Press 2004 – John Harris, “The second ‘great transfromation’? Capitalism at the end of the twentieth century”; “Certain privileged gops of people/workers, those able to control information, have been empowerd, but many more both within individual societies, and as beween nation-states, have been proresively marginlized [a process partly reflected int he very shap increases i inquality in the United States and the United Kigdom over het last fifteen years, and in the expansion of distinct ‘underclass’] ‘What they do has become increasingly variable and uncertan and their ways of life have become inceasingly insecure. Robert Kearney shows this i the case of ther erstwhle ‘peasantry’ of Mexico. Mexican campesinnos now depend on varying combination sof informal urban employment and migrant labour, and less and less on agricutlural pursuits, though these are still caried on They are, he suggests, ‘polybians’, moving bewten difrerent forms ofemplyment and ways of life, much as ‘amphibians’, move between auatic and terretial environments. In these circumstances personeal menaing and politics a griven much more by ethnic identyity than by class positions. //
(17) Passim Such people are more disempowerd than ever they were. Forthe very many in these cicumstance the old ‘class politics’ are unperasive or, perhaps more accurately, ‘even less persuasive then ever’] and both het ways in which they construct their onindenteis and the politics which make sense tothem, ar given rather by a sense of community, defined in termsof religion, or languatge or nationhood. The argument is put with panache and lucidity by Perry Anderson, in a discusion foth social basis of ‘postmodernity’: ‘Late capitalism remained a class society, but no class within it was quite the same as before. The immediate vector of postmoern cuture was certainly bto be found in the starum of newly affluenc employees and professionals created by the growth of the service and the speculative sectors fo th developed capitalist societies. Above this brittle yuppie layer lomed th massive structure of multinationl corporations hemselves – ast servomechnisms of produciton and power, whose operations criss-corss the globel economiy, and teremine it representations. …
(18) Passim: Below, as an older industrial orde is churned up, traditional class formation have weakened, while segmented identies and localised groups, typically based on thechnic or sexual differences, multiply. On a world scale … no stable classe structure, comparable to that of an earlier capitalism has yet crystallsed. Those above have the coherence of privilege, those below lack unity and solidarity’[Anderson, 1988] // What was presumed by earlier generations of sociologists to be the trajectory of social change in capitalism, industrial societies has clearly not come to be.” (Deze onzekerheid, en de daaruit voortvloeiende vervreemding, is op dit moment – het eerste decennium na 2010 – de belangrijkste rem voor de overgang naar de socialistische maatschappij)
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(19) Div., “Manifest – Krant van de Nieuwe Communistische Partij” nr. 1 19 januari, Sticht. HOC 2017 – Zoltan Zigedy, “Karl Marx .. – De meest wereldse filosoof ”; “Marx clearly views the misery of the workers in relative terms, compared to the advancement of living standards in the higher echelons of society. If productivity increases, the standard of living of the working class can indeed also increase, but relatively less if it is compared with the achievements of the capitalist classes brought with it, but the rise in the standard of living was just common for all classes. Liberals and Social Democrats glorify this period as the golden age of capitalism “with a human face, ignoring for the sake of convenience the relative impoverishment of the labour-class, the increasing exploitation of the workers.” // However, for the greatest part-times over the past four decades, there has been both relative and absolute impoverishment of the working class, with workers’ living standards stagnating or declining. So we live in a period even more terrible and miserable than Marx predicted. // () Passim: The motive behind the relative impoverishment of the working class is the growth of what Marx calls the “reserve of the unemployed” [unemployment], a process by which the bargaining power of labour diminishes due to a readily available and desperate source of labour. the pressure on the standard of living of the working class has in our time, in the past decades, been greatly dampened by the mass detention of potential workers [with a strong overrepresentation of minorities]. The mass imprisonment of more than two million people [in the US, ed.]] Is causing a significant reduction in potential unemployment [‘the reserve army’] and additional pressure on the wages and conditions of employment. And at the same time it is a sign of the recognition by the brains of the explosive, even revolutionary potential of many young, rebellious people, without prospect of work, in the industrialized economy of the last period of the wintry century. Thus they have been kept out of the ‘reserve army’ by imprisonment. “