Steve Bolger, Paul Corrigan, Jan Docking and Nick Frost: Towards Socialist Welfare Work, Macmillan, 1981, £3.95.
Social workers are easy prey for criticism and attack: from the right for irrelevance and ineffectuality; from the left for the 'soft policing' functions which underpin their practice. By providing (inadequate) services to be imposed on people, rather than developed with them and in response to their needs, the Welfare State has induced passivity and alienation. For some consumers at least, this has led to a rejection of the concept of collective state responsibility and certainly buttressed the appeal of the Tory party to many working people at the 1979 election.
This book analyses some of these issues and goes on to offer some beacons for the development of socialist welfare practice. While a coherent socialist practice is not possible under capitalism, the development of 'prefigurative forms' and 'alternative plans' for welfare services has not attracted the attention from welfare workers and academics that it warrants. The publication of this book is therefore to be welcomed.
Its authors are all socialist practitioners or teachers of welfare work. Their arguments are addressed both to socialists in welfare services and to socialists involved in other forms of struggle. The book begins with a discussion of various ideologies of welfare (social democratic, Thatcherite and 'democratic socialist') and of the crisis in the British economy since the early 1960s. The three central chapters proceed to look in detail at their impact on the organisation of social services departments, child care and community work.
The attempt to link political economy and ideology to specific practice situations is [rigor]ous and comprehensive. Rather than viewing welfare as an ideologically unitary [illegible] and the social democratic consensus. Welfare structures are not simply seen as the result of the now proverbial 'iron fist in the velvet glove' but as consequences of a struggle between [illegible] between academic analysis of the state and its [illegible] political economy of welfare [illegible].
The vast majority of social workers are employed by statutory-based social services departments, and the book provides a useful account of their history and values. Set up in the early 1970s following the recommendations of the 1968 Seebohm Report, they reflect many of the contradictions between the needs of capital and those of working people. The committee, chaired by Seebohm, a prominent banker, and included many other well-known establishment figures in its ranks. There were no representatives of working class organisations and, inevitably, women too were poorly represented. This was hardly the kind of body which could speak either for the direct providers of welfare services or their recipients, Unsurprisingly, it made highly centralised, hierarchical management one of the organising principles of the new social services departments.
Towards Socialist Welfare Work argues that social democratic influences on the Committee's deliberations did, nonetheless, provide the seeds of a progressive practice. The stress on centralisation in Seebohm was partially offset by a parallel emphasis on the importance of locally-based area teams which would create 'conditions favourable to community identity and activity' (Seebohm Report, para 483). To some this may sound like a bit of myopic optimism, yet it was a crucial aspect of the report since it provided an opportunity to break away from the previously dominant individual pathology casework model and construct a more collective form of social work.
Whether social workers can effectively respond to this challenge is discussed on an [analysis] of the effects on them of de-skilling and trade unionism. Intensified managerial control, mushrooming workloads and increased paperwork were factors in the background to the social workers' strikes of 1978-9 which, the authors argue, heightened social workers' consciousness of themselves as workers rather than the 'autonomous professionals' encouraged in their social work training. In Leeds, in particular, social workers in NALGO began to develop a more politically-informed and community-oriented strategy for social services offering the beginnings of 'alternative plans' for the welfare services.
The Children and Young Person's Act of 1969 hovers uneasily between welfare and justice models of response to children in trouble [and has been the subject of] recent radical critics who [call for] its abandonment in favour of a return to a judicial system where clear punishment for specified offences would replace vague and often oppressive 'treatment' with the very substantial, and sometimes abused, discretion that the latter entails for social workers particularly in relation to children in care. Rather than revert to a retrograde system of individual blame and punishment, they propose extension of the welfare model but on a firmer and explicitly socialist basis. For them this is the only way that working class children have any chance to offset their institutionalised subordination. They have a point. Juvenile Court benches are the last people to respond to 'delinquent' acts with a democratic socialist mind!
More positively, the authors point to recent moves by young people to organise themselves autonomously (through the National Association of Young People in Care) as opening up new possibilities of alliances [illegible] further undermining their notional roles as expert professionals. While the realities of the social [work] of the local [state illegible] this role does not preclude some space for progressive manoeuvre and various other possible areas for this are suggested.
The third of the author's trilogy of practice areas is community work. While interesting and thorough, this section of the book breaks considerably less new ground than the preceding sections and provides little new for the many community workers who are struggling to maintain a feminist, anti-racist and socialist perspective in their work. Without any doubt, social work urgently needs the challenges that this book offers, The possibilities the authors outline offer important insights into ways socialists working for the state can engage with the contradictions endemic to their jobs. The main gap lies perhaps in their failure to infuse adequately their Marxist analysis with feminist and racial perspectives. The needs of women and blacks, together with their different histories of oppression cannot always be easily subsumed under the interests of working people. Recent research, for example, has highlighted how girls are likely to [receive] very [different treatment illegible] to boys from welfare agencies. [Girls] in care are often 'doubly judged': first in terms of the criminal offences they may have committed, and second in terms of their 'offences' against popularly-held ideas about how girls should behave. Care may thus often become a forum for the social control of young women's sexuality.
But the authors implicitly recognise that their analysis is 'unfinished', it is to be hoped that they, along with others, will gradually develop a more comprehensive critique and assessment of the possibilities of progressive practice.