Some essential imaginings on a moist afternoon in late November, Tamaki Makaurau, Aotearoa New Zealand. Can social work escape the care – management (assist – surveillance) bind? Social work companies are offered to a selected part of the inhabitants – these on the backside of the social and financial heap. Social work ‘assists’ these on the margins to manage/survive. Nonetheless, the ‘place’ of those that are constructed as ‘purchasers’ is structurally generated – a operate of capitalist social and financial relations. Capitalism is unjust by definition by way of course of and outcomes. It requires an exploitative relationship between house owners and staff. It’s a system that produces and reproduces inequality. What the expertise of social work follow does do – for these with eyes to see – is expose the human penalties of structural injustice. Nonetheless …
… the difficult bit comes when social work claims to be a career that’s involved with the elimination of injustice. Social staff ship or administer practices of care however in addition they handle the implications of a system that generates social struggling. The career exists inside a set of unequal energy relations. Regardless of the lip-service paid by aspirational skilled codes, social staff are usually not funded, mandated or employed to handle the foundation causes of poverty and drawback: not ‘actually’. The liberal state is just not about to fund a workforce devoted to the unconventional transformation of the capitalist system of manufacturing, distribution and change, now could be it? (or a means of radical decolonisation for that matter?).
So the query for me, turns into, “Is that it”? – Do these constraints govern the situations of possibilty for social work improvement? The straightforward reply is “sure, however social work nonetheless supplies a helpful operate for folks in want”, so soldier on we should. I believe that is legitimate – not less than doubtlessly – though critique of the classed, raced and gendered historic abuse and oppression that social work has been half and parcel of has sparked latest requires its abolition (Maylea, 2021; Roberts, 2022).
There are actual existential issues for social work in all of this. The argument that social work has been hijacked, lowered and commodified beneath thirty or forty years of neoliberal hyper-capitalism is all very properly till we look at the injury inflicted within the identify of care throughout the Welfare State period. Our ‘career’ doesn’t have a fairly historical past and the “properly, oh expensive, how unhappy, by no means thoughts / that was then, that is now” response isn’t adequate for my part.
This takes us to a different query, and to the potential for different solutions. If we had a social work outdoors of those systemic constraints, what may social staff do? What may / would a social work developed outdoors of the coordinates set by liberal capitalism appear like? Many social theorists counsel, in fact, that there isn’t a ‘outdoors’. I believe that is flawed, as a result of, if it isn’t, ‘undertaking humanity’ is in deep trouble.
The worldwide attain of company capitalism is at a stutter level. There isn’t any juice left within the after-burners. The mantra that capitalist social relations are pure and unattainable to vary is critically undermined by clear and current environmental and geopolitical realities. It’s turning into more and more apparent that the crucial of progress, commodification and manufacturing of (usually meaningless) client items for a industrial market – which ends up in ever-greater progress and/or unequal non-public accumulation – can’t be sustained. We now have achieved this for 200 years now and we in all probability can’t do it for an additional 50: a finite planet gained’t enable us to.
If capitalism as we all know it has an inevitable end-game, so does social work beneath capitalism. If we settle for this as a sound argument, I believe we are able to then start to think about what operate social work / social care may play in an actual new world order. I don’t suppose it’s only a query of chickens and eggs – that we should await radical revolutionary eruption and/or environmental collapse earlier than we think about and start to enact social change. Evaluation is necessary but it surely should not disable us. I don’t suppose the form of political pondering and performing that’s wanted can occur inside social work because it at the moment exists however we are able to all be half – in huge and small methods – of shifting the purpose posts: organising, educating and agitating for a distinct future for ngā mokopuna. Or ought to all of us roll over, as Maylea suggests, and slide into the ocean like a forgotten career? Simply saying / asking …
Picture credit score: aslam karachiwala
References
Maylea, C. (2021). The top of social work. The British Journal of Social Work, 51 (2), 722-789. Https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcaa203
Roberts, D. (2022). Torn Aside: How the Baby Welfare System Destroys Black Households – and How Abolition Can Construct a Safer World. Primary Books: USA.
