The Brutal Reality of Neoliberal Destruction & Why I Want To Be A Social Worker
My social work class today was charged with a burning intensity that I haven’t felt in a long time; leaving the room after an hour and half of intensely life-giving discussion, I felt like I had some kind of explanation of why things in this country have felt so hopeless.
As social workers, we have to understand why our clients are poor. They are the group that we work with most frequently – the poor, the oppressed, the struggling, the marginalized, the minority. But why are they poor? And where did that start? Today I started to unpack that “why” for the first time – and for the first time, I began to understand.
It has everything to do with our economic system – specifically, the idea of neoliberalism & capitalism.
For the past 35-40 years, the United States has operated as a neoliberalist society. What that means, to put it in extraordinarily simple terms, is the concept that government is bad, and private business/free markets are good. We haven’t always been like that – we have shifted from a hunter-gatherer economy, to slave-based, to capitalist, with many smaller shifts in between. Now, we have settled into this idea of “Reaganomics”, which has pursued a rhetoric that consistently rewards the elite with tax cuts, attacks social & government funded programs, and encourages the privatization of business.
Terms that are tossed around so frequently on the media such as globalization, the free market, and trickle-down economics all allude to the same overarching concept: neoliberalism. We have all been saturated in the idea that the government is inefficient and, to speak frankly, shitty – we are a society of complainers. Complaints about the inefficiency of the post office, of the Department of Motor Vehicles, of almost every government-run process, have been inundated into our minds and convinced a large majority of the population that somehow, if we cut public expenditure for social services and other government run programs, that the unregulated market will somehow benefit everyone. That by eliminating the idea of a “public good” and encouraging individual responsibility for their own circumstances, the poor will somehow stop being poor. We have lost the idea of community – of what it means to care for each other.
But before I dig into the emotional implications of this neoliberal society, I want to touch on the idea of unemployment and capitalism.
Capitalism is all about personal gain. It’s the act of acquiring wealth on your own through private ownership, without relying on any other source to make money. It means we commodify; we turn things originally without market value into something sellable. This includes our bodies – one commonly referred to example is sex workers and visual, musical, and performing artists of all kinds. Through the commodification of our bodies, talents, skills, ideas, and minds, we have the opportunity to generate income for ourselves. It could be argued that every working individual has commodified themselves in some way in order to gain personal resources. That is the root of capitalism. Putting my personal values and moral complications about capitalism aside, this is the nation we live in.
Our guest professor demonstrated that every economist agrees that some level of unemployment is necessary for capitalism to function, albeit disagree about what percentage it should be. There has never been a day of full employment in the history of the United States of America. When theorizing about full-employment, economists understand that when there is more “money” going around, people are spending more which incentivizes businesses to increase their costs. Cost of living increases, which means workers need pay raises, which means there’s more money, et. cetera et. cetera. It’s a cycle. That’s inflation. This means that full-employment would cause prices of goods to skyrocket, crippling the value of the dollar. Therefore, unemployment is, to a certain degree, necessary for a functioning capitalist society.
Capitalism requires unemployment.
That means there is always going to be a loser. The economic system that was created during the founding of the United States of America requires that there be a loser, and all of the systems of oppression determine who gets stuck as the loser. Racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, ableism: all of these things are keeping the struggling down and enriching the elite.
As social workers, we are the people who work with those who are unemployed – the people who got the short end of the stick. These are our people. The losers of this economic system are not the corporate elite; they are the poor, the addicts, the single-parents, the manual laborers, the immigrants, the uneducated, the young, the elderly, and the marginalized. While the safety net for the poor is reduced to almost none, opposition of government subsidies and tax cuts for businesses is encouraged by the people who hold the power over the rest of the country.
This leads me back to the emotional implications of such a hypercritical society, the product of this neoliberal paradigm. I mentioned before that we are a society of complainers; we are also a society of blamers. We blame the poor for being poor, but we promote anti-worker and anti-human rhetoric that completely undermines this blame. We push the poor further and further into poverty whilst shouting they aren’t working hard enough. The hypocrisy of the way we live absolutely blows me away.
We get about as compassionate as, “Well, it sucks to be you” while simultaneously stripping away every social program that offers any kind of buffer against the privatization and concentration of wealth in the hands of only a tiny percentage of the country.
I am still reeling from the emotional impact of this brutal, unforgiving reality of neoliberal destruction. I finally feel like I have an answer to why my people are in the circumstances that they’re in. By buying into the toxic idea of “Why should I fund something that I’ll never use?” instead of “What does my community need right now?”, we are tearing each other apart.
We are forgetting about the love and compassion we need to have for each other.
this is why I’m studying to become a social worker.
That need for love and compassion is the reason why I’m working with the “losers”, the people who lost the game before they were even brought into the world.
The next step is to figure out how I want to create change for the people I’m working for, with, and next to. I’m still mulling over my own call to action but now I can take a deep breath, knowing that my newfound understanding of why the system is so broken can push me towards more compassionate growth & courage as a social work student.