Nick G.
It seems to be in the very genes of the rich that they
can only rationalise the existence of the poor in terms of some fault or
shortcoming in the latter.
And because it is the fault of the poor that they are
poor, punishment and coercion are required in dealing with them.
Bloody
legislation against the expropriated
Marx wrote a fascinating account of such punishment and
coercion in Chapter 28 of the first volume of Capital.
“The fathers of the present working class,” he said of
people who had been forcibly thrown off the land at the end of the 15th
and during the whole of the 16th centuries, “were chastised for
their enforced transformation into vagabonds and paupers. Legislation treated them as ‘voluntary’
criminals, and assumed that it depended on their own good will to go on working
under the old conditions that no longer existed.”
He reports how, during the reign of Henry VIII, a law in
1530 provided that those who had no work due to age or incapacity should be
issued with a beggar’s licence. Those
who were able-bodied but unable to find work were damned as vagabonds and “tied
to the cart-tail and whipped until the blood streams from their bodies”. A further piece of legislation condemned them
to a repeat whipping and the slicing off of half the ear if they were caught
idle a second time, and for a third offence, executed as a hardened criminal.
His successor, Edward VI, ruled in 1547 that “if anyone refuses to work, he shall be condemned as a slave to the person who has denounced him as an idler.”
“The master can sell him, bequeath him, let him out on
hire as a slave, just as any other personal chattel or cattle. If the slaves
attempt anything against the masters, they are also to be executed. Justices of
the peace, on information, are to hunt the rascals down. If it happens that a
vagabond has been idling about for three days, he is to be taken to his
birthplace, branded with a red-hot iron with the letter V on the breast and be
set to work, in chains, in the streets or at some other labour.
“If the vagabond gives a false birthplace, he is then to
become the slave for life of this place, of its inhabitants, or its
corporation, and to be branded with an S. All persons have the right to take
away the children of the vagabonds and to keep them as apprentices, the young
men until the 24th year, the girls until the 20th. If they run away, they are
to become up to this age the slaves of their masters, who can put them in
irons, whip them, &c., if they like. Every master may put an iron ring
round the neck, arms or legs of his slave, by which to know him more easily and
to be more certain of him.”
Workhouses
– “Poor Law Bastilles”
(Above: women in a workhouse unpicking old rope and cordage to produce oakum, used for caulking or packing the timbers of wooden vessels. Inmates could be punished for producing less than two pounds of oakum per day)
Writing in 1845, in his Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels reported how: “They accordingly brought in the New Poor Law, which was passed by Parliament in 1834, and continues in force down to the present day. All relief in money and provisions was abolished; the only relief allowed was admission to the workhouses immediately built. The regulations for these workhouses, or, as the people call them, Poor Law Bastilles, is such as to frighten away everyone who has the slightest prospect of life without this form of public charity.
“To make sure that relief be applied for only in the most
extreme cases and after every other effort had failed, the workhouse has been
made the most repulsive residence which the refined ingenuity of a Malthusian
can invent. The food is worse than that of the most ill-paid working-man while
employed, and the work harder, or they might prefer the workhouse to their
wretched existence outside.Writing in 1845, in his Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels reported how: “They accordingly brought in the New Poor Law, which was passed by Parliament in 1834, and continues in force down to the present day. All relief in money and provisions was abolished; the only relief allowed was admission to the workhouses immediately built. The regulations for these workhouses, or, as the people call them, Poor Law Bastilles, is such as to frighten away everyone who has the slightest prospect of life without this form of public charity.
“Meat, especially fresh meat, is rarely furnished,
chiefly potatoes, the worst possible bread and oatmeal porridge, little or no
beer. The food of criminal prisoners is better, as a rule, so that the paupers
frequently commit some offence for the purpose of getting into jail. For the
workhouse is a jail too; he who does not finish his task gets nothing to eat;
he who wishes to go out must ask permission, which is granted or not, according
to his behaviour or the inspectors whim; tobacco is forbidden, also the receipt
of gifts from relatives or friends outside the house; the paupers wear a
workhouse uniform, and are handed over, helpless and without redress, to the caprice
of the inspectors.
“To prevent their labour from competing with that of
outside concerns, they are set to rather useless tasks: the men break stones,
“as much as a strong man can accomplish with effort in a day”; the women,
children, and aged men pick oakum, for I know not what insignificant use. To
prevent the “superfluous” from multiplying, and “demoralised” parents from
influencing their children, families are broken up; the husband is placed in
one wing, the wife in another, the children in a third, and they are permitted
to see one another only at stated times after long intervals, and then only
when they have, in the opinion of the officials, behaved well. And in order to
shut off the external world from contamination by pauperism within these bastilles,
the inmates are permitted to receive visits only with the consent of the
officials, and in the reception-rooms; to communicate in general with the world
outside only by leave and under supervision. “
Bosses
never reconciled to workers’ win on welfare rights
The Poor Laws and associated Workhouse punishments
remained in force until after World War 2 when the working class was strong
enough to demand their replacement with welfare payments.
However, the attitude of the bourgeoisie towards the poor
whom their system creates remains one based on notions of punishment and
coercion.
When a few misguided individuals took up Timothy Leary’s
1967 call to “drop out”, often at tax-payer expense, the bourgeoisie found a
new gold-mine of ideological abuse to hurl at the genuinely unemployed. The Bulletin
raised the flag of battle in 1976 with its use of the term “dole bludger”,
which is never very far from the lips of those fortunate enough to never
require the dole.
Compulsory
income management
The demonising of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
communities through the racist NT intervention introduced compulsory income
management (CIM) as a coercive measure.
Implicit in this was the belief that ATSI people were to blame for the
oppressive conditions that exist in many of their communities, that is, that
they were underserving and squandered the benefits they were paid. Great things were promised of CIM in the NT,
and it has now been rolled out in “trials” in five low SES urban communities,
the APY Lands in SA, and in parts of the Pilbara in WA. This is despite various studies that have
said that in the NT it was a disempowering control measure and that there was
little evidence it was helping people.
Attacks
on single parents
The same attitude is behind Gillard’s decision to move
nearly 80,000 single parents from their insufficient Parenting Payment to the
criminally low Newstart Allowance. This
represents a loss of around $100 per week to families in poverty, most of them
headed by women.
On numerous occasions, Gillard has described this
reactionary measure as one designed to “provide an incentive to bring people
back into the workforce”. Others have
described it as “designed to coerce”.
Following
a complaint about this reactionary measure by the Australian Council of Social
Services, the UN Special Rapporteur on
extreme poverty and human rights and Chair-Rapporteur of the Working Group on
the issue of discrimination against women in law and practice wrote on 19
October 2012 to the Australian Government seeking an explanation of a decision
it described as “threatening the enjoyment of human rights of
some of the most marginalized and impoverished members of Australian society”.Through centuries of struggle, the working class has forced the ruling class to modify and amend some of its vilest anti-poor practices, but measures like CIM and putting single parents onto Newstart illustrate that the ideological core of their contempt for the poor remains.
Barbara
Shaw from the Mt Nancy town camp near Alice Springs has not been branded on the
forehead, but she, and many ATSI people like her, feel the stigma of
identification and branding by having to carry and use the
BasicsCard of CIM.
BasicsCard of CIM.
The
bourgeoisie, the class that rules capitalist society, will always push down on
the working poor and the unemployed.
It
really is in their genes
………………
Further reading:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch28.htm Marx’s account in Capital Vol 1
http://www.workhouses.org.uk/Manchester/
History of the Manchester Workhouses
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/ch13.htm
Engels on the attitude of the
bourgeoisie to the proletariat
http://www.acoss.org.au/media/release/un_asks_australian_government_to_explain_violation_of_single_parents_rights
ACOSS statement on single parent rights
https://spdb.ohchr.org/hrdb/22nd/public_-_UA_Australie_19.10.12_(2.2012).pdf
UN request for Australia to explain
attacks on single parents
designed to coerce: http://www.independentaustralia.net/2012/politics/bashing-single-parents-is-bad-policy/
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