New offensive against the unemployed

The Ontario minister of Social Services, John Baird, presented at the beginning of May a five-point plan to restructure the provincial welfare system. Two parts of this plan require particular attention. One of these measures provides for mandatory blood and urine tests for welfare recipients. The minister claims that he wants “to help the alcoholics and drug addicts to find employment”. In fact, the plan will reinforce social control and the repression of workers all the while saving a lot of money. After a battery of abusive tests, of which we are still unaware of the frequency and scope, people will have to follow treatment under pain of losing their benefits and ending up on the street, without any resources. The capitalist state will be the sole judge of what represents drug or alcohol dependency and will act as it sees fit to preserve what it considers favourable conditions for this ”huge reserve army of labour”. (1)

The second important aspect consists of mandatory proficiency tests for all persons surviving on welfare. These exams will focus on reading, writing and comprehension of mathematics. If the state considers that the knowledge of these is insufficient, it will impose remedial “classes”. These classes, occasionally bona fide, will of course be completely adapted to the needs of the market. However it’s a strong bet that they will most often be sham classes only aimed at disgusting and finally entrapping the jobless. As in the previous case all refusal to comply will automatically entail a complete cut in income, with the inevitable dramatic results.

Why is the Ontario government doing this? It goes without saying that it is necessary to exclude from the outset any real concern on its part about the state of health and education of the people on welfare. It’s a well known fact that all the major repressive campaigns “against drugs”, waged in American working class neighbourhoods, had no other effect than to fill that country’s prisons to the hilt. Indeed, this new selective “prohibition” (based on social position) will have no other effect than to greatly jeopardize the living conditions of its reserve of workers, the result being flexibility to the needs of capital. It is therefore, evident that the alleged intention of Minister Baird, “to aid the illiterate and the victims of addiction”, is a hoax.

Does he act this way because he is “right wing”? Because he is stupid and mean? From his point of view, it is not a question of morals or intelligence, but simply a question of interests.

Capitalism lives off the labour of the worker. It only provides work and uses the workers that perform it if it has an profitable result. As the British steel magnate, Sir Brian Moffat recently said:

I am interested in making money, not steel.

In Capital, Marx already had determined that:

The worker belongs to the capitalist class as a whole before he sells himself to an individual capitalist.

The policy of Baird is the policy of the capitalist class. It uses state power to crush the working class, in order to extract all possible profit. In periods of crisis or recession, the ruling class squeezes the lemon to the last drop if necessary... This is what they are preparing to do to the unemployed in Ontario and elsewhere.

A government of the capitalist left would not act otherwise. Capitalism, like the proverbial leopard, does not change its spots in relation to the political stripe of its governments. We can therefore expect the geographical expansion and worsening of its policies, according to the needs that the crisis imposes upon it. Despite the extraordinary development of the productive forces, poverty is expanding everywhere. That is because the political framework (based on the existing relations of production) is too limited to fully utilize the liberating potential of these productive forces. This political framework, this mode of production called capitalism has become the sole cause of misery throughout the world. Getting rid of it is a matter of public health.

(1) The reserve army of labour is made up of those workers that capital cannot consistently employ, but can be employed or will be employed one day.