Beyond dependency or beyond capitalism? A critique of New Zealand's drive towards workfare

Abstract

This paper attempts to critique, from a Marxist standpoint, the move towards workfare in New Zealand by examining the neo‐liberal assumptions underlying the concept of ‘welfare dependency’. Its focus is the Beyond Dependency Conference organized by the NZ department of Social Welfare, among other organizations, in April 1997, to promote the ideology of ‘well‐being’ resulting from work. The Beyond Dependency Conference brought a number of ‘overseas’ experts to NZ as part of the Coalition Government's drive towards the Community Wage, which is designed to replace the Unemployment Benefit. The paper concludes that this is a clear move to provide an ideological justification for forcing the unemployed into the reserve army of labour, in order to reduce the labour costs facing NZ employers who must now compete in an open, deregulated market. The paper also critiques the most common market‐liberal responses to the market‐liberal policies and finds that the Keynesian assumptions on which welfare‐liberalism rests, while always deficient in their grasp of how capitalism works, have been outmoded by the demands of the global economy on the NZ state. It concludes that a revolutionary transformation of the social relations of production will be necessary in order to go beyond dependency, and beyond poverty.