Digital Mind 🧠

🪵 The Threshold

Opponents of welfare suicide statistics employed mutually incompatible arguments

Properties2
tagsja-picks, factual_claims, singleton, xref, category/factual-claims
aliases@fisher_k-punk_2018, loc. 1597, @stoler_along_2009, loc. 971

4 min read

Opponents of welfare suicide statistics employed mutually incompatible arguments

Evidence

Welfare suicides don’t exist. Suicide is a mental health issue.” That line, by the former Labour official Luke Bozier, pretty much sums up the standard right-wing response to the website Calum’s List. According to its founders, the aim of Calum’s List is “to list the number of deaths where welfare reform has alleged to have had some culpability, and to make the best effort possible to work towards reducing this death toll.” — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1597 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The Tories have long been struggling with the problem of how to escape Thatcher’s shadow while continuing her project. Last week, we saw their quest to square a circle — how to lose their “nasty party” image while actually intensifying the attack on the remnants of social democracy — bearing some fruit. Helmed by the reinvented IDS, now cast as a caring but tough-minded friend of the poor, the simple strategy has involved the displacement of the concept of unemployment by that of welfare dependency. The idea of welfare dependency is inherently obfuscatory, part of the inverted world of magical thinking the Tories have been all too successful at pushing in opposition. In Thatcher’s day, unemployment was the price to pay for reconstruction; now, insofar as the Tories now mention unemployment at all, it is posited only as an effect of welfare dependency. Just as the state “crowds out” private sector entrepreneurialism, so — we are solemnly informed — the benefit system obstructs the capacity of people to act in their own interests. The Tories now can sound like inverted Marxists who aren’t attacking individuals, but the system which produces their behaviour. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1688 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Nor were the assessments of a civil servant cadet, newly arrived in the Indies (and perhaps newly posted in the region, since promotions entailed transfers every few years), ever subject to question. For this was credible knowledge that circulated widely and was already implicitly shared. Claims to know the moral dispositions and desires of the disadvantaged and the distributions of their affective states were expressions of an epistemology of race. Such sanctioned knowledge constituted the psychic and material privilege and violence of empire and the inequities that it so guarded and nurtured. These were the grounds on which the allocation of new resources was rendered unnecessary and unwarranted, as was the state’s responsibility for social welfare. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 971 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: Right-wing commentators denied welfare suicides could be evidence against reform — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1597; Unsourced impressions replaced hard statistics and justified denying welfare resources — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 971; Policies addressing one marginalized group frequently contradict policies for other groups — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 135 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

✉️

Backlinks