The welfare state is plagued by capitalist ideology – stigmatization exacerbates poverty

Poverty has always been stigmatized or criminalized in the United States. In the context of capitalist social philosophy, it is the failure of the individual and can only be alleviated by redistributing personal wealth, income, profits of productive people; an anathema to the prerogatives of individual capitalist accumulation. Taken to its logical extremes in the practical application of labor policy in US capitalist political economy, poverty was seen as a social deviation that needed to be punished. This underlying, ideological foundation of US capitalism was first generalized through the development of the “poorhouse,” a municipally funded housing tenement system for incapacitated or unemployable workers and other sections of the population structurally or cyclical squeezed out of the wage labor economy and into poverty for extensive periods of time. In exchange for shelter, the workers could be made to perform labor as punishment or sold to local farmers or other employers to work off the costs of their occupancy. The threshold of tolerance, support, and funding for poorhouses in nineteenth-century US was so meager, that the poorhouses themselves were maintained at a level of degradation to discourage indigence. According to Michael B. Katz (1996: 3): Poorhouses, which shut the old and sick away from their friends and relatives, were supposed to deter the working class from asking for poor relief. They were, in fact, the ultimate defense against the erosion of the work ethic in early industrial America. Miserable, poorly managed, underfunded institutions, trapped by their own contradictions, poorhouses failed to meet any of the goals so confidently predicted by their sponsors. By the turn of the twentieth century, the paltry welfare and healthcare programs that existed for poor and destitute working-class people were increasingly stripped of dignity and privatized into a humiliating form of individual charity. Municipal governments then began to expand punitive measures toward family impoverishment by targeting non-productive 5 THE PUBLIC CHARGE: THE CAPITALIST POLITICS 121 male heads of households, especially those that abandoned women and children. Male family desertion was referred to Domestic Relations Courts, created in 1910, which were given jurisdiction over matters involving “all persons charged with abandonment or non-support of wives or poor relatives.” Defendants were charged with being “disorderly persons” and were subject to criminal penalties, including imprisonment. Furthermore, the courts put the burden on locating the deserter on the family, typically the women, effectively out-sourcing enforcement to the impoverished family itself. If a woman had any property or possessions that charity workers believed she could sell, she was required to do so. Destitute women and children received only the minimum support necessary from local government, such that the stigma of being on relief became a feared and despised status. “Welfare” is hated by the prosperous and the poor, by the women who receive it and by those who feel they are paying for it. It stigmatizes its recipients, not least because they are so often suspected of cheating, claiming ‘welfare’ when they could be working or paying their own way. It humiliates its recipients by subjecting them to demeaning supervision and invasions of privacy. Yet it does nothing to move poor women and their children out of poverty and often places obst