Poverty and Pacification by Dorothy J. Solinger

Author:Dorothy J. Solinger
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2022-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

Pacifying/Policing as Prod to Welfare

Christian Aspalter considers the hope of instilling political stability and peace in society, along with economic growth, to be two distinct regime goals driving social policy in East Asia.49 Relatedly, Alex Segura-Ubiergo contends that many Latin American countries introduced social legislation to control mobilized labor movements, citing Chile and Argentina as instances.50 In this same vein, Barrientos remarks that this impulse to appease opponents and silence troublemakers frequently feeds plans of social protection.51 In the welfare literature, China and the United States are two outstanding cases in which leaders’ concerns over possible loss of state control owing to popular opposition and disorder—especially at times of massive unemployment—have disposed them to design projects that distributed allowances to the needy.

To begin with the United States, Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward suggest that Franklin Roosevelt’s angling for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in the midst of the Great Depression—during which millions of unemployed were clogging the roads in protest—sparked his bond with the unemployed and others in need. Among the raft of new policies his speeches pledged, a major one entailed the federal government taking on responsibility for relief where states had failed to execute their own programs. According to this reasoning, Roosevelt’s storied New Deal program was born out of electoral considerations.52 But “turmoil”—in reference to the laid-off thronging the streets and clamoring for help—was, these authors bluntly judge, the prompt that produced the subsidies and aid dispensed during Roosevelt’s administration. Piven and Cloward also point out that, as the upheaval calmed—even in the face of persisting and stubbornly elevated unemployment—relief was cut back. An apt quotation establishes what they term “the moral point”: “A placid poor gets nothing but a turbulent poor sometimes gets something.”53

Appraising procedures in more recent times, Joe Soss and his co-authors attest that programs billed to benefit the poor in the United States have as a major purpose limiting disruptiveness and making the indigent “more manageable.”54 Andrea Campbell agrees, arguing that assistance for the poor can be used as a kind of punishment, as in the case of supplemental social insurance, which condemns its recipients to the most meager level of subsistence imaginable.55 Sanford Schram, commenting on the aftermath of the 2008–2009 Great Recession in the United States, holds that the working class and the poor, who had already suffered from this setback, were further disciplined by the state for their inability to manage in an economy that offered them no decent place—that is, they were forced to labor in precarious, substandard jobs just to stay barely nourished.56

In like vein, both administrators and policymakers in China explicitly instituted, assess the success of, and defend the dibao in large part in light of its role in quieting social disorder. They have specifically pointed to its function in appeasing the tens of millions of laid-off workers whose jobs were terminated at one stroke without warning. Patricia Thornton contends that the Communist Party handles those on the “lower rungs” of society with surveillance and “preemptive cum coercive strategies of control.

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