Racial Capitalism and Expropriation in American Welfare Reform

Abstract

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, or PRWORA, is a major act of US welfare legislation that was signed in 1996 by President Bill Clinton. Under the program it authorized, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, welfare recipients can only receive benefits for up to 60 months lifetime and must maintain full time employment as soon as required by welfare administrators. As a result, welfare enrollment and the quantity of benefits distributed have decreased significantly since PRWORA was passed. The implementation of a welfare work requirement was a key goal of an anti-welfare policy position that became highly influential in both major American political parties through the 1980s and 1990s. The success of this position came about at least in part because of racialized and derogatory images of welfare recipients advanced by politicians and the media. This suggests particular connections between class, race and the state that are central to the theories of racial capitalism and expropriation advanced by Cedric Robinson and Nancy Fraser. Their theoretical outlook indicates that PRWORA s main effect was to produce a large expropriable labor class whose existence is justified through the racial images latent in welfare reform rhetoric. Introduction In 1992, Bill Clinton campaigned for the presidency of the United States on a platform to end welfare as we know it. In 1996, that promise was fulfilled as he signed the Personal 1 Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, or PRWORA. The bill would introduce a work requirement that required the vast majority of welfare recipients to find paying work within two years or lose all benefits – regardless of whether they had children or a partner 1 Edelman, Peter. The Worst Thing Bill Clinton Has Done. The Atlantic. February 05, 2018. Accessed May 25, 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/03/the-worst-thing-bill-clinton-has-done/376797/. living with them. What followed was a reformation of US labor classes, as has happened many times before in the nation s history, and as has frequently been the case race was a major factor in how those labor classes were assembled. Welfare reform as a policy mission has been intimately linked with race since the mid-20th century, and while PRWORA was necessarily crafted to be racially neutral, it would not have been possible without its implicit promise to remove Black welfare recipients from the rolls. Welfare reform only picked up significant traction when programs began to admit significantly more African-Americans and congressmen began to bring cases of alleged fraud to the House floor – some legitimate, many fabricated. When PRWORA was passed, Black welfare recipients bore a disproportionate burden from the withdrawal of benefits and the introduction of burdensome requirements. While scholarly discourse has noted the effects that PRWORA had on the American economy and on groups that were targeted in welfare reform rhetoric, the close functional connection between the two has yet to be shown. I will do so by way of Cedric Robinson s theory of racial capitalism and Nancy Fraser s account of expropriation under the racial capitalist system, which describe how labor class formation proceeds in capitalist economies that are strongly affected by racial dynamics. Over the course of this thesis, I will develop a theoretical framework of expropriation under racial capitalism and apply it to PRWORA, showing that the policy serves primarily to create a large expropriable labor class that is defined by the racial images that drove welfare reform rhetoric. Theory and history of capitalism Historicizing capitalism The theory of racial capitalism begins with an understanding of capitalism itself as a historical phenomenon, only existing in a particular, relatively recent period. A more conventional understanding of capitalism is that it has defined human actions since time immemorial, perhaps reflecting a fundamental impulse to trade, passed along through the activity of merchants and bankers. This explanation is, for one, unhistorical – capitalism only emerged in the wake of a socioeconomic shift in western Europe during the seventeenth century – but it also elides that what defines capitalism is not the petty exchange of currency between merchants, but the systematic definition of entire labor classes by their dependence on the market for survival. This definition of capitalism is best explained by its initial case: agricultural laborers who once paid rent on their land to a feudal liege lord were evicted and became wage laborers, having to sell their labor and then use wages to buy subsistence on the market. The difference is not in the type of labor – though capitalist class structures are far more efficient at industrial work – but in the relation between workers and the market. Capitalism was less an expansion of the lifestyles 2 of the urban merchant class than a redefinition of the rural peasantry. This account of capitalism s beginnings reflects the outcome of the Brenner Debates, which uprooted the study of the history of capitalism after the publication of Robert Brenner s 1976 article Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe . Here he introduced an account of capitalism s beginnings that acknowledged diverse economic and demographic factors leading to a general shift in class relations that characterized the transition, taking place in England and proceeding through northwest Europe. [I]t is the structure of class relations, of class power, which will determine the manner and degree to which particular demographic and commercial changes will affect long-run trends in the distribution of income and economic growth and not vice versa. 3 2 Wood, Ellen Meiksins. \u200bThe origin of capitalism: A longer view\u200b . Verso, 2002: 90-95. 3 Brenner, Robert. Agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe. \u200bPast & present 70.1 (1976): 31. Brenner s emphasis on class relations and power proves far more descriptive of capitalism over the long run. The history of capitalism shows that it has persistently coexisted with systems of non-class hierarchy on the basis of race, caste, religion, gender, and other social categories. Much as capitalism may be presented as functioning on the basis of economistic laws that exclude social conditions, there is always an intersection between the economic and the social in the relations of production. Cedric Robinson s work builds on the foundation of Brenner s social account of the capitalist transition, showing that class relations – between who owns and who rents, who receives surplus and who is paid wages – have been conspicuously arranged in capitalist societies, such that racial images and class status are often closely tied. Racial capitalism We should not be surprised that capitalist has tended to reproduce racial hierarchy along with class hierarchy. Both are firmly planted in the European tradition from which capitalism came: The historical development of world capitalism was influenced in a most fundamental way by the particularistic forces of racism and nationalism. This could only be true if the social, psychological, and cultural origins of racism and nationalism both anticipated capitalism in time and formed a piece with those events that contributed directly to its organization of production and exchange. 4 Practices of racial class assignment and racial persecution were commonplace in Europe throughout capitalism s development. Many industries were ethnically homogenous, and ethnic groups were often defined by their customary industry. Distance traders tended to be Jewish or Italian; cotton workers were often Flemish. Robinson contends that this practice became an integral part of capitalism, persisting in various forms as capitalism became a dominant world 4 Robinson, Cedric J. \u200bBlack Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition\u200b. Univ of North Carolina Press, 2000, 9. system through colonization. Slavery, under this account, is not a primitive, yet-to-be-subsumed 5 labor form. It is legally permissible theft of life and labor, justified by the racialization of the group that is enslaved. Other scholars have alternately contended that slavery was the result primarily of economic necessity or racial prejudice. Eric Williams, in his influential \u200bCapitalism and Slavery\u200b, wrote that slavery in the Caribbean has been too narrowly identified with the Negro. A racial twist has thereby been given to what is basically an economic phenomenon. On 6 the contrary, Robinson argues that economic phenomena have masked a broader transit of European cultural values and practices through the vehicle of capitalist production. His model of racial capitalism suggests that both extreme exploitation and racialization are fundamental parts of the capitalist toolkit. Capitalism was less a catastrophic revolution (negation) of feudalist social orders than the extension of these social relations into the larger tapestry of the modern world s political and economic relations. And from its very beginnings, this European civilization, containing racial, tribal, linguistic, and regional particularities, was constructed on antagonistic differences. 7 From its beginnings, capitalism employed racial difference as an active part of its political activity. The mechanisms by which it does so have changed throughout its history, but during the period studied Fraser s mechanics of racial capitalism Fraser begins her article Expropriation and Exploitation in Racialized Capitalism with a similar rebuttal of naively raceless conceptions of capitalism: exploitation-centered conceptions of capitalism cannot explain its persistent entanglement with racial oppression . In short, simple 8 5 Ibid, 13. 6 Williams, Eric. \u200bCapitalism and slavery\u200b. UNC Press Books, 2014: 7. 7 Robinson, 10. 8 Fraser, Nancy. Expropr