(en) Britain, Love don't pay the rent: Comments on Cameron's speech by anarchist specifist Collective Action

Collective Action offer some initial and cursory remarks on David Cameron's speech today
in which he announced his party's intention to make further massive cuts in welfare and to
scrap housing benefit for the under-25s. These comments are to be followed by a more
substantial look at what these cuts mean to the working class. ---- 1. The high
proportional cost of housing benefit relates less to the value of the existing (and
depleted) social housing stock and more to the over-inflated rates of private tenancy. Any
kind of state regulation in this sphere, however, would be political suicide considering
the millions that all parties (but especially the Tories) receive from wealthy property
developers and the economic impact this would have on the sector.

2. Cameron's comments on the "unfairness" of benefits rising with the rate of inflation,
while wages drop, re-affirms the disciplining role of unemployment and the unemployed to
the workforce. In essence; claimants are poor, but not as poor as they should be.

3. The proposed scrapping of housing benefit for the under-25s should not only be
recognised as a further attack on a lost generation but an attempt by the state to shift
the responsibilities concerning the reproduction of labour power. This is a dynamic that
can be seen also in the scrapping of the education maintenance allowance, workfare
placements and spiralling rates of student debt. All of which disproportionately affect
young people but also modify the material conditions (and "self-investment" needed) for
entering the workforce.

4. In scrapping housing benefit the state wants to go further by shifting the burden of
housing young proletarians back on to their parents, perhaps in the hope that they might
learn a thing or two from this "bought" generation - those who are the products of
Thatcher's social engineering, who are getting poorer but are predominantly
property-"owners" (mortgaged) and relatively economically stable. In this sense Cameron
hopes to rely on past compositional changes in the working class - in the original
sell-off of the social housing stock - to both stabilise and discipline an increasingly
precarious young workforce. A young workforce which both trashed his party headquarters
and burnt and looted the capital in August. This attempt to move reproduction back into
the private sphere is something that can be likewise seen in the (less popularly covered)
attacks on disability allowance. This is what the rhetoric of the "Big Society" denotes,
that proletarians have to now accept the burden of social reproduction (something which
was previously paid via taxes and guaranteed through welfare). It should therefore be
understood not as further attacks on minority sections of the class (the young, the
unemployed) but a generalised attack on the conditions of all workers.

Bron : a-infos-en@ainfos.ca