POLÍTICAS DE TESORERÍA

The historical trajectory of the European and North American welfare states established an interaction between social citizenship and wage labour discipline that

was reciprocally constitutive, in the sense that they were mutually reinforced in their conceptual coupling by policies of social rights premised on labour markets. At the same time, this interaction is at the heart of unresolved contradictions in the notion of social citizenship advanced by the governmentality project of the Western capitalist state. In fact, on one hand such a notion demands a universalist discourse of social rights, while on the other hand material forms of inequality, domination and conflict underpin the ways in which those rights are realized. Therefore, social welfare policies are as much about the management and reproduction of exclusion as they aim to increase social inclusion.

The combination of inclusion and exclusion as prerogatives of state sovereignty is discussed in Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) account of the state’s role in governing the “bare life” of its population to transform it into “good life”. In his view, “life” is the ultimate object of state policies, whereby “the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power” (Agamben, 1998: 6, own emphasis). “Biopolitics” here refers specifically to interventions that, with the stated aim of promoting the population’s health and well being, “politicize” the reproduction of life, internalizing its biological development and bringing it into the realm of state knowledge and power:

The sovereign decides not the licit and illicit but the originary inclusion of the living in the sphere of law or, in the words of Schmitt, ‘the normal structuring of life relations’ (Agamben, 1998: 26).

However, following Carl Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty as the power to decide over “states of exception” (whereby “exception is the structure of sovereignty”), Agamben (1998: 28) argues that having reduced life to a field of policy enables the state to constantly shift and redefine the borders between inclusion and exclusion.

These observations seem particularly pertinent to the ways in which specific groups and “risk populations” are defined as targets of particular policies, or of the way in which entitlements to social provisions are constantly redefined according to macroeconomic compatibilities decided in technocratic forms. Moreover, the extension of “social citizenship rights” is a contradictory process that at the same time extends a “norm” by continuously defining “exceptions”.

Radical critics of state “governmentality” have emphasised how institutional universalist discourses of social rights are used to contain and channel a “multitude”

of social existences, experiences and demands within unified images of “the nation”

and “the people” (Ranciere, 2002 and 2003; Hardt and Negri, 2000; Virno, 2004).

From this point of view, socialist emphases on an equally unified, homogenous

“class” mirror and reinforce those very institutional practices. According to Deleuze and Guattari (1984) the link between wage labour discipline, state institutions and the construction of subjective rights is part of dynamics of “territorialisation” and

“deterritorialisation” through which subjects’ obligations and forms of control are juridically constituted and placed in radical opposition to their own desires. The construction of social rights is therefore accompanied by the establishment of responsibilities through which collective subjects are constituted under an illusion of autonomy. The welfare state, in particular, operates as a mode of

“reterritorialisation” of workers’ desires by internalizing the sense of responsibility, moderation and control required to enjoy social citizenship rights (Guattari, 1984;

Watson, 1999).

Other authors have emphasized how the operation of social rights discourse as a mode of containment and structuration of grassroots subjectivities is produced by expert knowledge as a separate layer of policy-making. At this level, the “social question” is conceptualized, its subjects are defined and the rationale for related state interventions is elaborated (Ashforth, 1990; Escobar, 1994; Ferguson, 1994;

Mitchell, 2002). According to Timothy Mitchell (2002: 118), the role of expert knowledge confers to social policies a “state effect” which does not merely reflect social relations, but rather “formats” them, reformulating their complexity into identifiable problems with discernible causes and arguable solutions. For some authors the role of expert knowledge in policy making is not merely ancillary to powerful economic interests, but it is a specific and autonomous site of power with a unique capacity to elaborate challenges from below and define systematic responses (Skocpol and Rueschemeyer, 1996; Wittrock and Wagner, 1996). Similarly to Bourdieu’s (1998a) notion of “state nobility”, policy-making “experts” are not coterminous with bureaucratic apparatuses, but they are social groups that

autonomously produce discourses capable to conceal and “mis-recognise” the operation of the market in shaping economic inequalities.

It has also been emphasized how expert knowledge at work conceptualizes social problems by drawing from “natural” and “social” sciences in varying combinations. According to Hong (2005), modern welfare’s strategy of governmentality relies specifically on a discourse of difference through which social subjects are produced as beneficiaries and targets of government interventions. In this sense the evolution of social citizenship discourse represents a departure from earlier social policies where “poor” and “marginals” could be considered as deviations to be reintegrated within “normal” full-time employment. Instead, the growing differentiation of labour markets and the rise of mass joblessness make full employment disappear as the “norm”. As a consequence, welfare policy is no longer concerned with the “modern” aim of building social cohesion, but has more to do with the “postmodern” function of regulating difference. At the same time social differences as produced by differential labour market positions are “naturalized” as state policies categorize their subjects-targets on the basis of their capacity to compete. The naturalization of the social operated by social welfare discourse is ultimately based on claims to scientific objectivity that underpin policy recommendations according to a “hybrid” (Latour, 2001) mode of knowledge where the border between “hard” and “soft” sciences tends to disappear and the relevance of specific socio-economic interests and ideologies is concealed.

State governmentality and expert knowledge ultimately define the recipients of social programmes with objectifying terms as “poor”, “marginalized”,

“disadvantaged”, “disabled”. The universality of rights therefore becomes inseparable from the capacity of such subjects to claim rights based on the category of entitlements in which they have been inserted. At the same time, however, this carries important consequences for rights-based discourses and strategies “from below”. In fact, demanding social rights on the basis of categories constructed through state governmentality ultimately reinforces the very fragmentation, subordination and inequality that governmentality itself presides upon. Wendy Brown (2002: 430) aptly summarises the dilemmas facing social rights discourse:

Rights secure our standing as individuals even if they obscure the treacherous ways that standing is achieved and regulated; they must be specific and concrete to reveal and redress (…) subordination, yet potentially entrench our subordination through that specificity (…); they emancipate us to pursue other political ends while subordinating those political ends to liberal discourse.

Therefore the paradox of universal citizenship rights, according to Brown, has to do with the fact that they ultimately reinforce power relations that produce social subjects as objects of policy interventions, hence the dilemma: “What happens when we understand individual rights as a form of protection against certain social powers of which the ostensibly protected individual is actually an effect?” (Brown, 1995:

115). The mode of operation of such an “effect” recalls Foucault’s discussion of governmentality as structuring the citizen’s field of action (2001), which illustrates the role of macroeconomic policy constraints and viability in containing “excessive”

social demands and expectations.

As an “effect” of state sovereignty, social citizenship fits Slavoj Zizek’s (1997;

2000: 171-243) concept of “subjectivization” as the construction of society as a totality that comprehends all possible antagonisms and where the recognition of rights takes place in ways that those rights cannot be used to cause fundamental social changes (Boucher, 2002). The construction of social citizenship as a mode of disempowerment and deprivation reduces therefore the demand for social rights to, as Zizek (1993: 211) puts it, a “hysterical demand for a new master”. Recent scholarly controversies on “recognition” and “redistribution” (Honneth, 2001) have reflected such problems in trying to devise political strategies of rights that overcome established social inequalities. Arguments underlining the specific importance of recognition of identities and the politicisation of differences (Young, 2002) have opposed approaches based on the priority to mobilise for redistributive policies to tackle “structured inequalities” (Fraser, 1997). At the same time, the relationship between claims to rights and policy constructions of entitlements and target populations is of a recursive nature, insofar demands from rights from particular social positions can enable political radicalism and expectations for structural change.

Partha Chatterjee (2004: 59-60) stresses this point in his analysis of the politics of community movements in Kolkata, India:

Refugees, landless people, day laborers, homestead, below the poverty line – are all demographic categories of governmentality. That is the ground on which they define their claims (…). [But], alongside its reference to the government’s obligation to look after poor and underprivileged population groups, the association was also appealing to the moral rhetoric of a community striving to build a decent social life under extremely harsh conditions (…). The categories of governmentality were being invested with the imaginative possibilities of community, including its capacity to (…) produce a new, even if somewhat hesitant, rhetoric of political claims. These claims are irreducibly political. They could only be made on a political terrain, where rules may be bent or stretched, and not on the terrain of established law or administrative procedure.

Social citizenship, therefore, contains simultaneously an ideal of emancipation and a political practice of subjection. Etienne Balibar (1994) explains the uneasy coexistence of these two terms as internal to the “citizen-subject” as the form of political subjectivity that in modernity replaces pre-existing subjection to absolute state power. At the same time, ideology and discourse in social citizenship do not play merely a “super-structural” role, but they are factors enabling struggles and new political possibilities through everyday contestation of hegemonic discourses (Baynes, 2000; Lefebvre, 2002).

Recalling Agamben’s definition of sovereignty as power over “bare life”, therefore, the interplay of inclusion and exclusion, norm and exception in the modern discourse of social citizenship enables conflicts over the meanings and extents of rights, and over the allocation of the related resources. As Agamben (1998: 9) argues,

“bare life” is both subject and object of political conflicts, and it is both the place of state power and of emancipation from it. Following the definition introduced in the Preface, therefore, social citizenship is not to be reduced to a normative ideal, a juridical codification of rights or a combination of social programmes, but it is rather a contested field of signification. The contradictions that constitute the concept of social citizenship – as enabling claims for universal rights only on the basis of particular, bounded subject positions defined by state governmentality – is closely related to the centrality of waged employment and work ethics as criteria for access to

services. These contradictions are not, moreover, simply a matter of state and citizenship theory, but they are translated into concrete material inequalities. Critical analyses of the welfare state have, in fact, emphasized how changing institutional definitions of entitlements shape subordination and inequality across race and gender lines.

Reflecting on the trajectory of the labour-citizenship link in American society, Evelyn Nakano-Glenn (2002) elaborates on the theme of social citizenship as a boundary between inclusion and exclusion. She argues that the interaction between social citizenship and labour to differentiate benefits in relation to individuals’ wages provides an arena “in which groups have contested their exclusion, oppression and exploitation” (Nakano-Glenn, 2002: 1). She sees the development of a discourse of citizenship as coterminous with the expansion between the nineteenth and the twentieth century of the ideology of “free labour”, juridically unbounded and regulated by contract. The combination of citizenship rights and “free labour” ideologies has in her view acted to promote a view of the

“citizen worker” as white and male, whose ethical paradigms made hard work coterminous with responsible membership of the community. At the same time, the elimination of “unfree”, non contractual forms of labour in the process of industrialization refashioned, rather than superseding racial and gender inequalities. In fact, a growing separation between production and household made waged work the repository of both citizenship claims and masculine identity (Willis, 1979).

At the same time, however, racial subordination in the “free” labour market was reinforced by the lack of consideration for household care functions of black women, more easily considered as employable in low-skill, low-wage, precarious positions. “Free labour”, moreover, maintained strong elements of coercion as part of the enforcement of work ethic, to which social provisions became functional, for example through punitive means-tested allocations and laws against vagrancy, “idleness” and similar threats to productive employment and “economic independence” (Nakano-Glenn, 2002: 89; Montgomery, 1993;

Steinfeld, 2001). Not only was workers’ citizenship enmeshed in socio-economic coercion, but the racialised nature of the labour-citizenship nexus in American

capitalism facilitated the spread of ideas of upward social mobility linked to occupational advancement. The resulting “populist sense of common interest”

(Martinot, 2003: 86) between white labour and capital contributed to entrench white racism as a “ruling class social control formation” (Allen, 1994). In ways that are relevant to the South African case, in racialised societies citizenship rights were among the factors that enabled white workers to shape their claims and identities in racial terms (Roediger, 1999; Brattain, 2001). They also marginalized by the same token casual workers (especially females), immigrants and non-white workers (Davis, 1984; Davies, 1994). Twentieth century white working class politics in the USA remained shaped by these factors, especially in political orientations towards conservatism or populism, combined to a strongly productivist and “patriotic” approach to industrial unionism (Cohen, 1990).

With the expansion of US federal government provisions, racial inequalities produced by the work-citizenship nexus, more than by differential access to welfare per se (Wilson, 1990), also contributed to emphasise the stigma attached to non-working black welfare recipients. For them -- subordinated as they were on the labour market and destined to low-wage, unstable occupations -- receiving welfare benefits was therefore easily presented as a hallmark of idleness, immorality, crime, family decay, which converge in shaping the

“underclass” stereotype (Katz, 1990; Quadagno, 1994; Gans 1996; Sugrue, 1996;

Lieberman, 1998). In fact, as Linda Gordon (1995) argued, provisions that were relatively less racialised, like the Social Security Administration, were more directly and predictably linked to labour market status through payroll deductions.

In this case, therefore, social insurance reinforced the white male breadwinner role, while women’s household work was the target of more residual forms of social assistance. The growing orientation of social assistance towards

“disfunctional” families of lone mothers with dependent children further fed stigmatization and the “underclass” stereotype.