Right-wing discourse redefined unemployment as an effect caused by welfare itself.
Evidence
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
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The inverted-Marxist observation — the Tories structural explanation of behavior that absolves and blames individuals simultaneously — is genuinely dense; it captures how Thatcherism naturalized system-critique language.
- ADDENDUM: Relevant to complaints-about-moral-panics/political-discourse themes in this body of work about how language displacement (unemployment to welfare dependency) does political work.
- XREF: connects to: Welfare rights victories turned erstwhile New Deal supporters against the family wage consensus. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 235; Opponents of welfare suicide statistics employed mutually incompatible arguments; The Tories reframed unemployment as welfare dependency to claim paternal care — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1688
Broader Connections
- The Tories reframed unemployment as welfare dependency to claim paternal care
#corroborates(0.90) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1688