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Welfare dependency: the need for a historical critique: understanding the social origins and developments of ''dependency'' can help to destigmatise welfare recipients.

Article Excerpt
The welfare state is under sentence of death, and the charge is supporting a culture of 'dependency'.

The problem with welfare is that it operates too much like charity ... Patrons exercise their power and control without an expectation of reciprocity. Clients are denied a sense of social worth and equality. Dependency is the inevitable result ... unconditional welfare is a crime against the poor. (Mark Latham, The Enabling State, 2001)

A Labor government would be in a better position to carry out this sentence, in fact, than any conservative government. As absurd as Latham's notions of 'mass capitalism', 'mutual responsibility' and 'self-reliance' are, they must be taken seriously.

The idea of 'dependency' is at the centre of all critiques of the welfare state and is a notion that has considerable traction right across the political spectrum. Dependency is a historically constructed notion and working out a critique of the existing range of welfare policies requires a deconstruction of the whole notion of dependency itself.

Approaches to the problem of dependency must look into how it is constructed, both as a concept and as a psychological, moral and social condition. Philip Mendes raised these questions in Arena Magazine No. 69, investigating the causes of dependency. However, it is not just that relations of dependence are structurally imposed, but that one and the same relation of dependency may be enjoyed as a powerful and respected social position, according to its political-ethical evaluation. Dependency is not just something to be cured.

Nancy Fraser's 1997 book Justice Interruptus contains her article, co-authored with Linda Gordon, tracing the genealogy of the word 'dependency'. Much of what I have to say below draws on insights provided by this article, though I also depart from Nancy Fraser's analysis at times.

Over a period of two hundred years the meaning of dependency has moved from the honourable social condition of the overwhelming majority of the population to a highly stigmatised personality disorder. From beginning to end of the long history of dependency, however, the word has contained a curious contradiction.

In pre-modern times, dependency meant being part of a social unit (estate, family, empire) that was headed by someone else. Dependants (such as servants, retainers and peasants in a feudal estate, as well as wives and children) were 'dependent' in the sense that they had no legal status in society at large, and were 'represented' by their 'master.' But in actuality (in retrospect, if you like), the master was dependent on everyone else in the unit for their material existence.

The young, single mother is today the icon of dependency and yet it is not she who is dependent in any material sense, but the children she looks after. If she did not accept legal responsibility for the child, then she would not need welfare payments. But she raises her children, generally under incredibly difficult conditions, while the father and the state, who are both also responsible for the support of the child, are free-riding on her efforts--depending on her, in fact--to do what they will not.

In Australia, the other icons of dependency are Aboriginal communities: the settler nation is able to exist only by occupying their land and excluding Indigenous people from the traditional use of their land. And yet, the ideology of dependency holds that it is they, not us, who are dependent.

The stigma of dependency seems to rub off on the people who do the supporting. Being independent, on the other hand, is a socio-legal relation enjoyed by people who are supported by the labour of others.

Pre-Capitalist Society

The earliest definition of the verb 'to depend on' in the Oxford English Dictionary is consistent with the usage of the word in Hegel's Phenomenology in the section...

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