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DOI: 10.1177/030981689806500105

1998 22: 35Capital & ClassPhil Mizen

Post-Structuralism'Work-Welfare'and the Regulation of the Poor: The Pessimism of

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35

The Marxist tradition of critical analysis of socialised welfare

provision has recently been subject to an intense critiquefrom an increasingly influential post-modernist and post-

structuralist literature, attracted to the claim that the post-modern condition requires new modes of thinking about welfareas a precondition for radical change (e.g. Hillyard and Watson,1996; Penna and OBrien, 1996; Thompson and Hoggett, 1996;Hewitt, 1994; Williams, 1996; 1994; Mishra, 1993; Squires, 1990).With the apparent failure of welfare statism, the inability ofcollectivism to withstand the current phase of welfareretrenchment and the growing influence of the new socialmovements and the voices from the margins, post-modernismand post-structuralism have been embraced as offering newways of thinking about welfare and social policy, ranging fromtheir critique of universalism and advocacy of a radicalisedpluralism, through to the post-modern attention to thedestabilisation of space and the rejection of essentialist theoriesof the welfare state.

Most enthusiasm, and what in many ways gives these post-modernist fragments their linking theme, however, has beenreserved for the post-structuralist notion of disciplinary power

Work-Welfare and the Regulation

of the Poor: The Pessimism ofPost-Structuralism

by Phil Mizen

Through a concern with disciplinary power, post-structuralists haverecently turned their attention to the discursive force of welfare inconstituting the poor as docile and subservient populations. Far fromrepresenting a new and fruitful mode of radical analysis, it is arguedthat the idealism of the post-structuralist position produces a rigiddeterminism. Using the recent example of work-welfare in Britain, thepessimism of this position is rejected by pointing to the continuingimportance of resistance and opposition, while considering theirwider significance for the analysis of welfare provision.


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and its applicability to the analysis of welfare. In what is endorsedas a radical departure from both orthodox Marxism and thenaive social democratic faith in progress through positiveknowledge, the post-structuralists advocate a rejection of the

modernist belief in truth and rationality in favour of aconsideration of the disciplinary effects these claims to truthentail. By giving attention to such discursive and theoreticalexpressions, they claim the idea of knowledge as somethingobjective or neutral, to be put to use by welfare experts as the

vehicle of progress and emancipation, is undermined; and thatit is through such regimes of truthi.e. systematicconstructions of knowledge containing complex technologies ofidentification, classification and control much loved by the

analysts and practitioners of welfarethat attempts to identify,define and regulate the totality of human experience take place.Against social policys claim to represent the ordering of the thesocial through rational and progressive change, they suggest thatthe modernist project itself has involved the refinement anddispersion of techniques of domination and control. Bydeconstructing discourses of welfare and the social to revealtheir hidden meanings and devitrifying consequences, theemergence of a disciplinary welfare state and the punitive

and coercive forms of social policy frequently deployed under themantle of welfare (Squires, 1990: 1) can be brought intoclearer relief.

It is this emphasis on discursive power which is identified ashaving so much to offer social policy (Hillyard and Watson,1996: 329), because knowledge and language are viewed asintegral components of a pervasive system of power andregulation. Since power is seen to reside in knowledge anddiscourse and has neither an identifiable nor reductive source, itis inherent in all social processes and therefore constitutes aninescapable force. As a totalising force, however, power is seen tooperate not in a negative way by marking repression, submissionand restraint, nor through physical force, external sanction or bythrowing a veil over the real. On the contrary, the claim is thatpower constitutes a positive force in the sense of activelyconstituting an authority of norms and values through which theindividual is both defined and objectified, excluded and

controlled; and that it is in this way that discourses of welfare areimplicated in producing docile individuals at the material leveland constituting subjects at the ideological level (ibid: 327).

36 Capital & Class #65


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Finding its ultimate goal and effect in a process of normalisation,in which psychological and social irregularities are eliminatedaround constructions of the norm, the subject of welfarespower emerges as at once both the object of these discursive

processes and the effect of these technologies of control. It isthrough knowledge and discourse that the subject is activelyconstituted and it is in this process of definition that the individualis simultaneously ordered, shaped and controlled.

It is the intention of this article to take issue with thisincreasingly influential post-structuralist thesis and its equationof discourses of welfare with powerful processes of incarceration,confinement and discipline. It does this by emphasising theequally significant counter activities of opposition and release, in

contrast to the post-structuralist focus on subjugation andcontrol. By showing that those who are the object of welfarescoercive networks of surveillance and control are not the docile,submissive or obedient subjects the theorists of discourse lead usto believe, it will be claimed that not only do people remainactive in the reconstitution of their social lives, but they do so inways which, to varying degrees of success, continually frustrateand subvert attempts at further regulation. Rather than a pervasivedomination and all-embracing modes of governance, it will be

demonstrated that inertia, resistance and opposition remain thedefining counter tendency to welfares coercive thrust and that itis here, from what Edward Thompson (1978) called social being,that future analysis should proceed. The need to encourage adialogue between social being and the concepts and organisingprinciples through which this is understood is, indeed, the secondpurpose of this paper. It is argued that the absence from post-structuralist accounts of any systematic examination of socialsubjects as active, whether as individuals or in groups,confronting, frustrating or struggling against welfares coercivedimensions is not simply an oversight, omission or a different setof discourses waiting to be revealed. The claim here is that thisconcern with authority, domination and obedience is thenecessary outcome of post-structuralisms idealist methodologyin which a self-generating realm of discourse and theory isprivileged over any systematic engagement with, or understandingof, the complexities of social life.

These twin themes are undertaken by addressing anothercommon post-structuralist claim, namely the tendency of criticsin general, and Marxist critics in particular, to erect straw post-

Work-Welfare and the Regulation of the Poor 37


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structuralist men and women only to knock them down. Thuscritics have been accused of

falling into the trap that many commentators on post-modernism

have fallen into before [by] using the term in such a reifiedwayan it if you like, which does or is such and such

(Hillyard and Watson, 1996: 322)

rather than a discrete set of ideas applied to an identifiable bodyof knowledge. Given the sheer eclecticism of much post-structuralist and post-modernist writings such practices couldperhaps be easily forgiven. Nevertheless, this article intends toavoid such accusations of obfuscation (at least) by addressing itself

to a particular literature in which the post-structuralist notion ofpower outlined above is directed to the analysis of the regulationof the destitute and the poor. In the next section, therefore, theidealism of the post-structuralist position will be explored througha number of related post-structuralist texts dealing with povertyand their tendency to position the poor as docile and obedientgroups, with little active will, volition or consciousness of theirown. In the second section of this paper, this concern withregulation and control will be contrasted to the recent experience

of the unemployed and attempts to impose upon them whathas been described as a system of work-welfare. It will besuggested that far from being constituted as a subservientpopulation, a libertarian impulse to step outside of these newinstitutions by confronting, frustrating and opposing theircoercive dimensions remains a defining characteristic of thecontemporary unemployed. This theme of opposition andstruggle will be explored more extensively in the final section,where it will be argued that it is through acknowledging theimportance of these as class struggles that future analysis shouldbe developed.

Discourse, Idealism and the Subordination of the Poor

The post-structuralist claim to represent a new radical agenda forthe analysis of social welfare provision is considerably less

impressive, however, when positioned in relation to widerdevelopments in radical thought. Ellen Wood (1995a; 1995b;1986), for instance, has meticulously detailed how the present



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concern with discourse and language represents the culminationof long-running attempts to escape the determinist legacy oforthodox western Marxism which came to dominate post-warradical discourses (see also Clarke, 1991). What began as an

attempt to establish a clear degree of non-correspondencebetween economic and non-economic forces, in its variouspost-Marxist forms (see also Miliband, 1985) increasinglyinvolved the progressive separation of the political and ideologicalrealms from any meaningful relationship with material and sociallife. Taken to its post-structuralist extremes, this has morerecently involved the complete randomisation of ideas andlanguage from the social world and the wholesale rejection ofmaterial considerations in exercising any determining influence

upon social life, through an exclusive focus on discourse, ideasand knowledge. As Wood makes clear,

the theoretical tendency to autonomise ideology and politics is,

at its most extreme, associated with a drift toward the

establishment of language or discourse as the dominant principle

of social life the ultimate dissociation of ideology and

consciousness from any social and historical base (1986: 5; see also

Anderson, 1983).

The consequences of this abstraction of non-economic forcesfrom their relationship with the material world are significant,since in practice it has involved elevating ideas, theoretical activityand language to a determining force. The consequences of suchan idealism are made patently clear in Edward Thompsons(1978) searching critique of Althusserian Marxism. ForThompson, Althussers idealism arose from a belief in theprivileged position of theoretical and conceptual activity (in hiscase a particular reading of Marx) over any meaningfulengagement with social and historical life.

Such idealism consists, not in the positing or denial of the

primacy of an ulterior material world, but in a self-generating

conceptual universe which imposes its own ideality upon the

phenomena of material and social existence, rather than engaging

in continual dialogue with these (1978: 13).

By viewing this self-generating conceptual universe as the sourceof all knowledge, untainted by any sustained contact with



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empirical and historical facts, not only did Althusser subordinatesocial and historical life to its fit with his pre-existing theoreticalconcepts. But in doing so, he reduced the complexity andunpredictability of social being to an inert, pliant kind of stuff,

with neither inertia nor energies of its own, awaiting passively itsmanufacture into knowledge (Ibid: 7).A similar point has recently been made by Anna Pollert,

where she too has pointed to the strong similarities betweenAlthusserian structuralism and post-modernism, where bothdeny that lived experience or material existence can be validatedin any way, and both operate at the level of the autonomy of ideas(in post-modernism, language) and a type of theorisation whichis self-enclosed in its own activity (1996: 651). In the same way

that Althussers rigid determinism was a product of theprivileging of knowledge and ideas, so too does the post-modernist and post-structuralist preoccupation with discourselead to similar conclusions. It too views knowledge, ideas andlanguage as the outcome of pure and untainted intellectualactivity with no meaningful relation to the social world; it tooelevates this realm of ideas to a privileged position in relation toour knowledge of the social; and it too, in doing so, imposes theseideas upon the social world so that people appear as passive

subjects patiently awaiting these theoretical and linguisticexpression to give meaning to their otherwise empty lives. AsDavid McNally makes clear, for the post-structuralists it isthrough theory, ideas and language that issues of power anddomination are resolved, since oppression is said to be rootedin the way in which we and others are defined linguistically,the way in which we are positioned by words in relation toother words (1996: 13). Moreover, as power is a function ofknowledge and discourse, our inability to transcend theboundaries of language means that it is also an irresistible forceas individuals remain forever confined within these prisons ofreceived identities and discourses of exclusions (Best andKellner, 1991: 57).

This tendency towards determinism and closure is vividlyillustrated in a growing post-structuralist literature concerned withthe regulation of the poor. Here pauperism, destitution andpoverty are no longer treated as historical and social facts

expressing conflicting material forces but derive their significancefrom their discursive force. In this way the poor laws, for example,cease to be a feature of the bitter struggles to separate the



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labouring poor from their direct means of subsistence(Thompson, 1968; Polyani, 1957) but emerge from discontinuitiesin the poverty discourses of pre-industrial England (M. Dean,1992; 1991). Through 17th and 18th century polemics, theological

tracts and economic treatises the poor were defined as a nationalasset and since this was seen to depend upon population, the scaleof which provided an index of wealth, military strength andgeneral prosperity, it followed that they should be put to work: forthe industrious encouragement, for the idle the discipline of thepoorhouse and for the impotent pity and relief. Out of theirsubsequent disarray, however, a new field of discourse wasconstituted which by the beginning of the 19th century hadsuccessfully reconstituted the idea of poverty into a necessary

precondition of waged labour. To provide relief for the destitutein anything other than conditions of less eligibility, would nowinvite both the demoralisation of the independent labourerand court the prospect of national ruin. Finding its clearestexpression in the prison-like manifestations of the redesignedworkhouse, it is difficult to find a better illustration of thesemiotics of deterrence at work (Driver, 1994: 54) than in theimposing presence of the Victorian Bastilles.

What is noticeable in this history of poverty discourse,

however, is the absence of an active poor. We need not dwell hereon the fact that the workhouse proved singularly unsuccessful ininstitutionalising those at which it was aimed (i.e. the able-bodied male pauper) or that every step to implement the 1834Poor Law was bitterly opposed for well over 50 years (e.g.Williams, 1981; Digby, 1976), other than to note how theseomissions underline the absence of any notion of a vigorouspoor. What is more to the point, however, is that within thesediscursive histories the poor appear only fleetingly as the prisonersof these linguistic worlds: the shackled, categorised, supervised,segregated and demoralised of Felix Drivers (1994) workhousefor example. More likely, however, is their confinement to anawkward footnote in the making of their own lives. It is nocoincidence that the ejection of the poor is a precondition ofPeter Squires project to elaborate and elucidate the discoursesof the social through which the conspirators (people) havesought to erect their programmes, policies and institutions, or

within which the conspirators (people) have been caught(1990: xii). Or that Mitchell Deans fastidious chronicling of17th and 18th century representations of poverty is positioned as



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analytically prior to any considerations of the wretched andstarving themselves.

It is indeed the conviction of this study that the genealogy of

poverty needs yet to be secured, and only when this has been donecan it be confidently linked with the history of the social struggles

and the resistance of the propertyless (1991: 11).

The poor, or so we are told, have little active part to play in theconstruction of the conditions of their own existence.

More contemporary examples of this trend are alsoforthcoming where modern systems of social security are heldresponsible for rendering the poor impotent through their

creation of discursive categories of need within which recipientsand claimants must accommodate themselves. These partitionsof entitlement, constructed through discourses of targetingfor instance, function as disciplinary techniques by simultaneouslycreating specific groups in need of surveillance, thus renderingthem powerless, while also identifying them as irregular anddifferent from the non-claiming population (H. Dean, 1992;1988/89). This process of normalisation again appears in thediscursive force of the dependency culture and its capacity to

define and reinforce appropriate notions of powerlessness. Herethe regulatory function of social security is seen to reside in thediscursive construction of benefit recipients as [an] apparentlymarginal, but in fact centrally supervised milieu by creatingspecific and highly visible populations whose reliance on statewelfare is depicted as both inherently negative and uniquelyproblematic (Dean and Taylor Gooby, 1992: 147). Alongsideits juxtaposition to discourses of independence, as personified byrepresentations of waged labour and the nuclear family form, thehigh visibility of claimants is not only maintained but its depictionas the antithesis to personal freedom and national prosperity iseffected.

Accordingly, the disciplinary effect of social security is not seento stem from the pressure of external sanctions like the tighteningof eligibility criteria and the withdrawal of benefit, with thehardship, deprivations and suffering this involves. Rather itsdisciplinary force emerges through the ways in which these

discourses colonise claimants who, by internalising theirmeanings, work to constitute themselves as docile, compliantand obedient subjects. By generating a sense of their own social



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identity and self-esteem from discourses of the norm (i.e.independence and self-reliance), the personal short-comingsand failures of the poor are viciously stressed. While the factthat claimants participate in these discourses along with the rest

of the population explodes the myth of the dependency culture,their failure to live up to these categories of success works tounderline their own sense of personal failure. In this way, the poortake on the identities of the dependent, internalise its associationwith failure and effectively police themselves.

The disciplinary effects of the claiming experience therefore do

not stem externally or overtly from the pressures applied by the

social security system, but internally or covertly from the conflict

between the claimants own cultural orientation (which valuesemployment) and the nature of his/her experience of claiming

(which devalues it) (ibid.: 147).

Work-Welfare and the Regulation of Labour

At one level it would be facile to deny the importance of discourseto any analysis of welfare and social policy. In a world in which

language, symbols and representations have become an integralpart of the machinery of welfare, images are central not only insetting the terms within which public and political debate takesplace but also in mediating the most personal experiences. Thecontinuing media vilification of the welfare scrounger and dolequeue fraudster are testament to this (Jacobs, 1994; Golding andMiddleton, 1982). Yet as we have seen, the post-structuralistposition takes us further by suggesting that discourses of welfareare all-powerful, as ideas and language invade and take over thesubject, and subsequently define all aspects of social life.

It is beyond the scope of this paper to assess the historicalevidence mustered to support this claim, although reservationshave already been noted. However, the evidence from the last twodecades at least suggests that far from constituting a docile andobedient population, the unemployed have remained active inopposing the increasingly punitive direction taken by the reformof socialised welfare provision. Their experiences of and responses

to these measures point to a continuing and active process ofopposition rather than a quiescent population who have endorsedor internalised its rhetorical claims. This is so despite the huge



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advertising and publicity budgets which the various initiativeshave commanded,1 as well as the increasingly draconian powersthat the benefit authorities have been given to enforce theirimposition.

This is certainly the case for what Desmond King has describedas the Atlantacist drift towards a system of work-welfare, aterm which

denotes three sorts of government policy for the unemployed:

first, placement policies to marry job seekers with vacancies;

second, training schemes, intended to augment job seekers

skills; and, third, workfare programs sometimes imposed upon

job seekers as a condition of receiving benefit (1995: xi; see also

King, 1992).

In relation to Britain, notable developments in this work-welfaredrift have included the erosion of the social insurance principle andthe consequent extension of means testing; the narrowing ofeligibility criteria and a series of stiffer availability for work tests;the denial of benefit to those who refuse places on approvedtraining schemes; the introduction of compulsory re-motivationcourses and the use of intensive periods of counselling and self-

assessment; and more recently the introduction of workfarestyle programmes, where claimants are now required to undertakework experience in return for benefits (see also Novak, 1997;Finn, 1993a; Costello, 1993; Bradshaw, 1992; Hill, 1990). With six-monthly Restart interviews at the centre of this work-welfareregime, the unemployedparticularly the young (i.e. 18 to 24 yearolds) and long-term unemployed (i.e. those out of work andclaiming benefit for 6 months or longer)are now exposed to amenu of options backed up by an expanding range of benefitpenalties and sanctions for non-attendance and refusal (Brysonand Jacobs, 1992).

Whatever the discursive force of this work-welfare drift, withits language of fresh starts, pathways to work, action, counselling,experience and training, the response of claimants themselves is asalutary reminder of its limitations. The system of Restartinterviews, for example, has been dogged by indifference, suspicionand defiance since its introduction as a national programme in

1988. The Employment Departments own research illustrateshow the unemployed have reacted with scepticism to its claims tocounselling, alongside considerable misgivings about its efficacy as



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a way back into work (Finn, 1993b). Participation is more likely theoutcome of a perceived need to protect benefit entitlement, ratherthan evidence of its rhetorical power (McCabe and Finn, 1989).Indeed, it has been the failure of Restart interviews to reconstitute

the unemployed in line with its language of action, motivationand fresh-starts, particularly the long-term unemployed, which hasprovided the impetus for subsequent change. Since 1990, a furtherseries of Employment Service initiatives, again backed up by theexpansion of the scope and scale of benefit sanctions for non-compliance, have introduced a number of mandatory programmesfor the long-term unemployed, including Restart Courses, JobplanWorkshops and, for the 18-24 age group, Workwise and 1-2-1Interviews.2 Notwithstanding their language of personal

responsibility, confidence building, re-motivation and self-appraisal, the Employment Departments own research once morepaints a picture of ambivalence, suspicion and refusal (Murray,1996). Once referred to a programme rates of failure to startRestart Courses (45 per cent), Jobplan Workshops (51 per cent) andWorkwise (56 per cent) are running at spectacular levels and ratesof early leaving are endemic (15, 7 and 28 per cent respectively). Thesignificance of these figures should not be underestimated given thatnon-compliance without good reason can now lead to the

imposition of an extended period of severe benefit penalties.Where these initiatives can claim some success, if only by their

own standards, is through their role in funnelling claimants intogovernment training schemes and work experience programmes.Restart interviews have been one of the primary sources ofrecruitment to adult training programmes like EmploymentTraining (ET) and its successor Training for Work (TfW), whichhave offered unemployed adults a programme of work experiencewith employers together with an element of off-the-job provision.These programmes have certainly attracted large numbers ofunemployed people and, at their peak, constituted significantinterventions. Nevertheless, numbers alone are not a sufficientmeasure of their disciplinary power and here too we find littleevidence that trainees are active or positive participants, or that theyhave internalised their claims. Employment Training, for instance,established as a national programme of work experience for benefitplus 10 a week had a short and singularly undistinguished history.

Originally anticipating 600,000 recruits each year on courseslasting six months, numbers were rapidly revised downwards asrecruits became harder to find. During its first 18 months, just over



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half of those referred to a scheme actually completed their four dayinitial assessment programme and among those who continuedbeyond this point, more than two thirds left early (Durning et al,1990; Training Agency, 1990a). After a year in operation two

thirds of the places remained vacant and the growing torrent of earlyleavers complained of ETs failure to live up to its much publicisedslogan to get the workers without jobs to do the jobs withoutworkers, its irrelevance to their needs, the inappropriate nature ofthe work experience placement and the lack of preparation amongtraining providers. Suspicion that work experience placementswere little more than exploitation, providing cheap labour foremployers was widespread and dissatisfaction with placementswas rife (Finn, 1989; see also NACAB, 1994; Banks and Bryn

Davies, 1990; Durning et al 1990). ET peaked in 1990 with 210,000participants before declining to 113,000 with its demise in 1992. Theintroduction of its successor, TfW, was indeed testament to thecontinuing inability of such programmes to reconstitute theunemployed in the way desired and initial assessments suggest thatit too is plagued by a similar catalogue of problems.

The lack of any systematic or in-depth assessment of theimpact and significance of these programmes no doubtunderestimates the true levels of ambivalence, disillusionment,

suspicion and opposition. This is certainly the case if theexperience of nearly 20 years of youth training programmes isanything to go by, where the modern lexicon of work-welfarewas effectively forged. School leavers have long had to sufferwork experience programmes as a solution to chronic levels ofunemployment, with their new vocabulary of vocationalismand transferable skills as a preparation for working life (Ainley,1988; Finn, 1987), yet here too we discover that its impositionshave not been suffered lightly. Indeed, during a period in whichit has become unfashionable to talk in terms of exploitation,

youth trainees have been willing to articulate its modern-dayrealities (i.e. schemes as cheap labour and slave labour) toanyone willing to listen (Mizen, 1995; Coffield et al, 1986). Thishas been as true north of the Border (Raffe, 1989; Raffe andSmith, 1987) as it has been south (Mizen, 1995; Lee et al, 1990;Cockburn, 1987), where trainees grudging acknowledgement ofthe opportunity to actually do something in the context of few

alternatives has been tempered by a sustained and deeply feltcynicism of the motives of both government and employers(Courtenay, 1989; Raffe, 1989). The bleak record of youth training



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was nicely captured in the conclusions of an extensive survey ofyoung people where despite all the Thatcher governmentsefforts to establish a universal training culture along Continentallines there were few signs that most school leavers had taken

it on (Banks et al, 1992: 44, my emphasis).The governments own research into youth training is equallyexplicit. Data from the Training Agency (TA) reveals the persistentand seemingly intractable problem of early leaving. During theYouth Training Schemes (YTS) first three years, early leaversaccounted for about half of all entrants with over one third leavingbefore half of their schemes had been completed and with traineesspending an average of only 40 weeks on programmes supposedto last 52 (Gray and King, 1986). The TAs own 100 Per cent

Follow Up Survey of Youth Training Scheme Leavers alsoillustrates that early leaving remained a defining feature of theprogramme with, at one time, as many of two thirds of traineesleaving early (Training Agency, 1990b). Early leaving rates amongblack trainees are even higher (Usher, 1990) but for all trainees,reasons given have been dominated by criticisms of the schemesperformance, doubts about the quality of training, the failure toprovide help or advice and the paucity of the training allowance.While the single biggest reason for leaving has been the prospect

of a job, considering the vast majority of first time jobs for schoolleavers continue to involve dead-end jobs in semi- and unskilledwork (Training Agency, 1989) paying increasingly lower wages,this too is more indicative of the desire for escape from schemesrather than an active participation in its discursive world. It is asobering reminder of the hostility youth training has invokedthat even today, with the official unemployment claimant countstill around one and a half million and with no other legitimatesource of income beyond a scheme or job, over 100,000 16 and 17

year olds have simply dropped out of the labour market altogether(MacLagan, 1993).

Placing Struggle at the Centre

There is no doubt that the unemployed of all ages do participatein the various institutions which comprise work-welfare, whether

a counselling or self-assessment session, motivation, trainingor work experience programme. But their participation, togetherwith the absence of any organised or highly visible opposition to



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work-welfare from claimants themselves, should not been takenas evidence of the power of the discursive to constitute docile,obedient or submissive subjects, actively policing themselvesand ready to participate in their own subordination. To do so is

to ignore the fact that it is with only the greatest difficulty andreluctance that unemployed claimants make anything more thana physical transition into Jobcentres, Jobclubs, work experienceand training schemes; and that once there they remainunconvinced of their ideological or discursive claims. At everystage of their development these new forms of work-welfareprovision have met with apathy and hostility, stasis and suspicion,not least through a deeply ingrained and enduring sense ofcynicism about their motives, together with a startling readiness

to act upon these sentiments despite the sanctions this mayinvoke. Just as Foucaults (1979) charting of the greatincarceration of the 18th century neglected the equally significantcounter-theme of excarcerationthe growing propensity, skilland success of London working people in escaping from thenewly created institutions that were designed to discipline peopleby keeping them in (Linebaugh, 1993: 23, 3)so too do hiscontemporary followers fail to acknowledge the significance ofthese continuing processes of intransigence, defiance and

resistance. Greater coercion may have been played out throughthe training programmes, narrower eligibility criteria, Restartinterviews and training schemes of recent years, but so too havethese been accompanied by the continuing disposition ofunemployed workers to resist their impositions by steppingoutside of the very institutional forms intended to close them in.

Given that the over-riding influence of Foucaults work is onthe ways in which individuals are classified, excluded, objectified,individualised, disciplined and normalised (Best and Kellner,1991: 55), it comes as little surprise that this libertarian impulsethe processes of disobedience, opposition and struggle to escapethese new forms of controlis either ignored or excluded by thepost-structuralists. Nevertheless, this emphasis on disciplineand obedience is not just a matter of omitting the wider researchmaterial or failing to give voice to discourses of dissent; althoughin both areas the accounts examined here are lacking. Theproblem is far more fundamental since, as we have seen, the

idealism of the post-structuralist position necessarily gives rise toa rigid determinism and pervasive pessimism in whichdomination and control is the inescapable function of discursive



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power. Yet each new work-welfare initiative has brought forthequally specific forms of refusal, obstruction and dissent so thatfar from suggesting categories of closure, predictability andstasis, the experience of struggle and resistance emphasises the

open nature of social relations as we can see all around us thatthe normal condition of things is one of instability (Holloway,1991: 237), uncertainty and change. Antagonism, resistance andthe activity of freedom must therefore be treated as somethinginherent in the organisation of what Thompson (1978) termedsocial being and not as a marginal or intermittent event to be re-inserted into some previously defined discursive environment. Onthe contrary, recognition of the centrality and persistence ofstruggle as a core component of social being emphasises the ways

in which social life is expressed through fragile and indeterminatesocial forms and thus opens up possibilities for social change.

Through a rejection of closure and an emphasis on struggleand movement, the continuing and fundamental importanceof social relations of class are made patently clear since, as RalphMiliband succinctly summarised, class analysis is largely classstruggle analysis 1989: 3, original emphasis). Unlike the post-structuralist neglect of class and its denial of the systemic natureof capitalist social relations of production, a focus on struggle once

more emphasises the ways in which welfare provision involves theorganisation of claimants into distinctive sets of social relations,defined by incessant contradictions and antagonisms (LEWRG,1980). Struggle points to the ways in which, in the organisationof work-welfare, more or less common experiences of suspicionand hostility are engendered in the process of claiming benefit;and that in the conscious identification of this as antagonistic totheir needs, claimants have responded with practical acts ofdefiance, opposition and even simple stubbornness as they seekto handle its impositions. It is through such notions of welfareas social relations of class and class struggle that we canunderstand how, among apparently disparate groups ofunemployed workersblack, white, women, men, old and

youngnot united by the immediate process of production oreven by the immediate experience of claiming benefits, theexperiences and perceptions, motivations and oppositions ofwelfare claimants take such specific forms. And it is through

such notions of everyday class struggle that we can reject thepessimism of the post-structuralist position, since it is from herethat possibilities for change and renewal can be found.



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