No issue, no politics: towards a New Left in social work education

Undoubtedly, one of the great virtues of social work is that it continues to think politically in these unpropitious times of austerity and the dismantling of public services. Its foundational values of equality and justice have always been compounded with freedom as core political ideals. The search for structures that might realise these moral ambitions and taking a political stance in their defence has been a consistent feature of social work. Therefore, the complete absence of a political charter in the Global Agenda for Social Work and Social Development (IASSW, ICSW, IFSW 2012) gives cause for concern. This chapter presents current research on political mobilisation to explain why this is a problem for social work. Recent sociological research suggests that people tend to get organised around an issue of common concern or an object of controversy (Marres 2005, 2007, 2012). Therefore, for social workers to organise around the objectives of the Global Agenda, the issue being contested or around which we want social workers to get organised needs to be named and fully articulated. There is widespread agreement in social work that, at root, the issue it constantly has to address in daily practice is the manifestations of neoliberal capitalism and its partner public management regimes of power. The pernicious effects of neoliberal market-oriented policies are seen daily in austerity measures, welfare rationing, punitive managerial regimes, zero-hour employment contracts, growing inequalities and discriminatory labelling of welfare recipients which are impacting negatively on social workers and service users alike. It is therefore important to ask what the relationship is between the Global Agenda set out by the various international professional social work associations and the issues impacting directly on daily social work practice. The fact that the Global Agenda does not name the underlying issue it seeks to address is thus deeply problematic. Gray and Webb (2013) have taken this a step further by arguing for a renewed progressive political Social Work Left to articulate its role in combatting the exploitative capitalist, neoliberal economic order and its new public management regime. If the goals of the Global Agenda and a new Social Work Left were aligned, and the issue named as neoliberal capitalism, only then would the forces defacing the realisation of the moral standards to which social work commits itself be eradicated. However, having said this, political action requires more than adherence to principles and values. As current research shows, it needs a materiality of practices or object of participation to effectively mobilise social workers around an issue of contestation. We need to identify clear cases of the displacement of politics from sites of local, regional and national politics to a global forum. In short, contemporary social research tells us issues call publics – and protests – into being.

This chapter articulates this ‘new politics’ for social work in light of its public statements on confronting injustice and inequality (IASSW, ICSW, IFSW 2012). Social work explicitly adopts justice as a normative value. This means it exhorts social workers to take an ethical and political stance. However, it does not necessarily define how its commitments might be mobilised. Hence, this chapter is in part a call for social work educators to renew their political commitments and engagement with radical thought and issues and impart this to their students.

Reisch and Andrews’s (2002) examination of radical social work in the US shows social work’s lack of militancy in confronting the system of capitalist power that delimits and rejects the core values of social work. Politically, social workers are unorganised and do not usually have the energy, time, resources or assertiveness to take up active political roles (Gray et al. 2002). This exposes the weakness of social work as a professional pressure group and helps explain the strength of the neoliberal capitalist state and its managerial agents in determining our ability to respond with political verve, courage and commitment (Marston & McDonald 2012). These ultimately are the central objectives of a renewed social work politics, which begins with grappling with enduring ideas about what a ‘just society’ might look like and how injustice manifests itself in everyday relationships and institutional structures of domination and exclusion that lead to injustice. It continues with locating the issues leading to this unjust state of affairs, taking a stance and confronting, unsettling, agitating, and seeking to transform the oppressive relations and unjust structures that maintain them. In this respect, building solidarity across borders in social work education means providing examples of social protest successfully staged in the transnational arena and focusing on the ‘materiality of struggle’ (Marres 2005, 2007, 2012).

A renewed politics of social work

A first step in conceiving a renewed politics of social work education hinges on two important contemporary incursions within the social sciences, one from social theory and the other from political philosophy. The fact that they criss-cross in instantiating new forms of political action is particularly helpful in advancing a new politics for social work education. The former focuses exclusively on debates in theoretical sociology, galvanised chiefly by Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth (2003) and often referred to as the ‘integrated model of social justice’ framework. The latter is derived from French political philosopher Alain Badiou, particularly his reworking of the communist hypothesis as part of his larger project of reconstructing a model of political action derived from Marx’s historical materialism (Badiou 2010). Taken together, they have the potential to galvanise a new politics for the education of social workers by innovatively reworking agendas on social justice, and of political possibility. Each rests on transformative ideas relating to universal emancipation and freedom from exploitation and oppression (for a fuller discussion of the social and political theory underpinning the arguments in this chapter, see Gray & Webb 2013).

These fresh insights from sociology and political philosophy observe a significant shift in social and political thought that can act decisively on social work education. Broadly, this shift is based on renewal and crisis:

• Renewal is situated largely at the level of political ideas and values, especially as they relate to the development of a progressive left agenda that emphasises social justice, freedom and equality.
• Crisis refers to the vulnerabilities of neoliberalism and state capitalism on a global scale to the extent that many political commentators believe we are now entering a new phase: a protracted, long downturn in the fortunes of capitalism.

These shifts are particularly relevant in considering how we devise a critical role for the education of social workers in confronting the contradictions of the logic of capital accumulation and greed based on the notion of endless growth (Coates 2003; Gray et al. 2013). Social work owes it, as much to itself as to its clients, to confront the dominant capitalist and neoliberal apparatus with every tactic at its disposal. Social workers have to get organised and find one another. This quest for solidarity underlies the Global Agenda but without any direct reference to the problems we are confronting or their causes.

Those in social work seeking a new politics are situating the debate within this much invigorated New Left grouping of thinkers that coalesce around critical considerations of community and progressive political agendas who believe universal justice is not possible without the abolition of capitalism. Having abandoned ‘class struggle essentialism’ for the plurality of antiracist, feminist and postmodern resistances, ‘capitalism’ is now clearly re-emerging as the name of the problem social work must confront (Ferguson 2008; Ferguson & Lavalette 2004; Ferguson & Woodward 2009; Ferguson, Lavalette & Whitmore 2004; Lavalette 2011; Garrett 2013).

As a consequence, today we are witnessing within social work the return of a new theory and practice of resistance that focuses on public controversy and issues of democracy (Garrett 2013, Gray & Webb 2013). This fertile ground of thought can frame the way a radical social work can be instantiated under the banner of a ‘New Social Work Left’ and take a political stance that is inherently antagonistic to its adversaries: neoliberal capitalism and new public management. This has long been the object of the emancipatory activism of new social movements, not least the green or environmental politics gaining ground in social work that seek to tackle the longstanding problems of economic inequality and social injustice head-on.

It heralds a new phase for social work education faced with the difficult challenge of persuading educators and students that there is something worthwhile to be gained in engaging with the radical project of a new issues-based politics. Through curriculum design and content, mainstream social work education can limit and even dislodge student experience of what is important and urgent (Lingis 2007). Importantly, for social work students, inculcating a critical approach to politics means becoming involved in public controversies around issues of local and regional significance that can take on global proportions, such as discriminatory forms of employment, climate change, population overshoot, capitalist austerity measures, and freedom from censorship.

A New Social Work Left can inspire core supporters and win over potential allies by demonstrating the chain of equivalences that exist among the various issues impacting on social workers – from the ecological crisis to the exploitation of the poor – against different forms of subordination (Gray et al. 2013). It can do this by reactivating older radical traditions in social work and, if there is a real shift in the point of contestation with this new politics of social work, it is precisely because of the signs of innovation and controversies that are happening on the wider social, economic and cultural plane under which social work is operating.

Within this context, the International Association of Schools of Social Work and the International Federation of Social Workers together with the International Council on Social Welfare have produced a Global Agenda for Social Work and Social Development (IASSW, ICSW, IFSW 2012). In our endorsing a critical social work agenda for education, a challenge for these international organisations would be to openly declare their opposition to neoliberalism and the destructive nature of state capitalism. These organisations should be launching militant agendas, around issues of poverty, unemployment and workplace relations. We wonder what it would take for these international organisations to lead such a progressive agenda and to stand up in defiance?

An important locus for a new politics is social work education, given students come in motivated by a desire for change, searching for fresh perspectives around social justice. Thus, as it did in 1968, this reactivation of the radical project might well begin with students. However, it is not merely a matter internal to mainstream social work. Many issues and events central to contemporary understandings of society belong to fields of operation that are external to social work and cannot be reconceptualised in terms of social work categories alone. We therefore need students to have a strong grounding in the social sciences, with a sound knowledge of political philosophy and theoretical sociology. This is because we are working within a discursive rupture that has recently occurred within progressive left thought that gains salience only through continuous critical discourse about the oppressive and violent regimes we wish to oppose and replace. For certain, social work has been shaped by wider political attitudes towards class, gender and race. Moreover, social work operates in a position of objective structural disadvantage, which has been vividly exposed in European countries currently undertaking public sector austerity measures and the aggressive de-funding of social services, such as Greece and Spain. External structures impact decisively on social work, and social work students need to understand this broad macro context that shapes their work. This is one very good reason why contemporary social and political theory offers a sound basis for constructing a new politics. The strands drawn upon, indebted to progressive thought, demonstrate how a New Social Work Left must be concerned with new political forms of resistance, interruption and struggle (see Smith 2012).

To this end, social work education needs to forge new ways of ‘thinking the political’ and devising strategies and tactics for active political engagement (Gray & Webb 2013). It needs to engage in real debate over fundamental principles as well as concrete public issues and controversies. The desire here is for a testing and proving of critical thought around specific public issues which should be capable of bringing together social work’s role in demands for justice and anti-oppression. The New Social Work Left seeks to renew and reactivate the radical tradition of the 1970s and develop a more solid base for political and ethical work to which the Global Agenda might align itself.

Initiating a ‘new’ politics for social work education

Any new ways of thinking about politics must be constructed in a way that enables students to imagine a different world than one enslaved to capitalism and neoliberal managerialism. Politics then becomes about imagining a better future – one in which justice and equality prevail, in which people have an equal share of earth’s finite resources. For some, the environmental crisis is forcing us to envision and implement a new ecological paradigm because voracious capitalism is no longer tenable or sustainable (Coates & Gray 2012; Gray & Coates 2012; Gray et al. 2013). Capitalism has significantly contributed to the crisis over climate change. It is this view of politics that motivates a new politics of social work, one that will enable us to envision a new future for social work. Though social workers fight daily in their organisations against punitive welfare cuts and oppressive policies, through their acts of resistance and interruption, they also need to envisage alternative ways of imagining political life, relations between professionals and service users, and justifications for militant opposition: a new politics is needed to articulate this new political agenda for social work to oppose the injustices of capitalism and its neoliberal economic rationality, austerity measures and managerial control.

It is in this spirit that the ‘new politics’ of social work must be approached by adopting a backward and forward gaze as we face challenges reminiscent of radical social work in the 1970s and 1980s and seek to revivify radical action, given its ongoing relevance in contemporary social work (Ferguson 2008; Ferguson & Lavalette 2004; Ferguson & Woodward 2009; Ferguson, Lavalette & Whitmore 2004; Lavalette 2011). There is ongoing relevance in collectivist-based activism and resistance to specific instances of public unrest and oppression. Ideologically situated on the left, most critical social workers continue to see merit in ethical socialist ideas, though are faced with the need for a reconstructed radical agenda since the demise of European communism.

Social work educators need to be aware that the ‘overtly academic’ nature of radical social work has, over the years, enjoyed little support from frontline practitioners (see Carey & Foster 2011). However, in their teaching, they need to emphasise the importance of the critique that a critical social work brings to emancipatory practice. By enlarging students’ critical thinking, more effective methods to counter restrictive procedural and managerialist practices can be envisioned. Out of this comes tangible, practical ways of meeting the pressing, crisis-oriented, micro needs of service users that practitioners encounter on a daily basis. The strength of critical social work has always been its broad, general, ‘macro’ dynamic or ontological themes, ‘such as the role of social work within a diminishing welfare state apparatus, the underlying causes of greater regulation within social work organisations, [and] the wider impact of globalisation’ (Carey & Foster 2011, 577). However, we use the word ‘global’ too uncritically in social work (Gray et al. 2008, 2013; Gray & Webb 2008). What exactly does it mean? If we are to grapple with the meaning of solidarity in the ‘global’ agenda, we need to be mindful of research that repeatedly shows that, rather than participate in mass action or public dissent, social workers tend to engage in small acts of interruptive resistance. The nature of such resistance must remain surprising and unanticipated, so as to defy managerialism, regulation and control. In exercising discretion, managers, too, resist and undermine hegemonic ‘managerial’ discourses (Aronson & Smith 2010; Carey 2009).

Carey and Foster (2011) highlight why radical social work must, to some extent, remain at a level removed from the daily practice of social work. Its role is to engender a political understanding of how managerial ‘prescriptions connect . . . with the day-to-day practice of social workers and the organisational conditions of social welfare’ (Pearson 1975, 140). Its function lies in the generation of ideas and a language through which practitioners filter their daily experiences. This critical lens creates a space for separate ‘realms of theory’ (Althusser 2003) essential to progressive social change. It is in this spirit that we need to approach the ‘new politics’ of social work, which inevitably will contain something of the old while providing a new language with which to analyse what is wrong with the world and the policies engendering injustice. The ‘global’ agenda would benefit considerably from more overt statements about the causes of poverty, inequality and injustice it seeks to attack and by aligning itself with the New Social Work Left (Gray & Webb 2013).

Though critical social work thinkers are up against a profession of social workers prepared to surrender or compromise their ‘technical’ and ‘ideological’ autonomy within a ‘highly rationalised care management labour process’ (Harris 2003), we would do well to remember that employee resistance and rule breaking remains common, and recalcitrant social workers have ‘not disappeared but merely adapted their behaviour or attitudes to accommodate changing circumstances’ (Carey & Foster 2011, 583) as they have always done. As Kemshall (2010) points out, even highly regulated systems can be negotiated, circumvented and resisted in myriad ways by skilful social workers. Rather than the ‘new politics’ of social work being in grand, overambitious ideals, there is a trend which highlights the importance of a ‘micro politics’ – small deviant acts of resistance at the coalface. For radical social workers, social work has always been about how the personal connects to the political, and educators need to teach students how this ‘micro politics’ connects with ‘public’ issues and structural change.

The making of politics around public controversy and issues

Central to recent empirical research on what constitutes a politics for the public is the question of the extent to which the material spaces we inhabit and the objects with which we interact shape our politics and, in turn, become the issues and targets of political struggles. Here the public is seen to comprise a set of material elements that intermediate collective relations. As Dewey (1991) noted, ‘indirect, extensive, enduring and serious consequences of conjoint and interacting behaviour call a public into existence having a common interest in controlling these consequences’ (15–16). His politics of the public is best described as an entanglement of relations among entities that do not belong to the same social world but are connected through an issue that affects them jointly.

This has direct resonance for social work and its Global Agenda, which can draw immediately from contemporary social research showing that democratic politics in contemporary society involves particular practices of issue formation (Marres 2005). This insight comes from an ‘object-oriented’ perspective on politics in Science and Technology Studies (STS) which gives pride of place to the ‘objects’ of politics, i.e. to defining and solving issues. Emulating Dewey’s ideals of participatory democracy and his ‘socio-ontological’ understanding of issues, it suggests that people’s involvement in politics is mediated by problems that affect them (Marres 2007). It holds that public involvement in politics is dedicated to the articulation of public issues. Issues drive people to involve themselves in democratic processes, not democratic values or democratic ideals of inclusive opinion-making and accountable decision-making (De Vries 2007). Several points bear emphasis here for social work education:

• Relevant communities involved in decision-making are demarcated on the basis of issues rather than democratic values like ‘citizen representation’, ‘inclusive debate’ and ‘rational deliberation’ (Amin 2012). Contemporary research on social capital supports the need for more, not less, public involvement in politics (Putnam 2004).
• ‘Theories of agenda setting regard issue definition as the decisive factor in democratic institutional politics, as it determines which actors can get involved in political process, and on what terms’ (Marres 2007, 761). The goal is to counteract tendencies in modern society to leave the big decisions to the experts in the belief that only they understand the complexity of the political structures and processes they themselves have created.
• Public affairs are defined by the networked entanglement of social associations.

In learning from this fresh perspective, social work may ask who are the actors in the Global Agenda? How are they summoned into being around concrete issues and controversies? Are they merely the IASSW, ICSW, IFSW or their representatives working at a national or international level? How will they involve national social work associations and how do they plan to move social workers beyond mere advocacy of a Global Agenda towards a more considered involvement and their implication for wider publics, such as service users? How are they going to persuade social workers of actions they need to take to fulfil the goals of the Global Agenda? How binding is the agenda and exactly what do issues do in making them a reality? We argue here the answers to these questions lie in a clear articulation of the issues around which to mobilise social workers to combat social and economic injustice. To this end, there is a need for new theoretical resources to bring the missing politically active social work ‘public’ back into the profession, and social work education can provide this.

Certainly the Global Agenda is a first step in making issues publicly visible, thereby forcing them onto the political agenda (Habermas 2001). But social work draws too heavily on perspectives on democracy that adopt procedural models of public participation developed in political science, with discussions on participation, particularly service-user participation, being preoccupied with the method and processes of democracy: participatory procedure and representative participation. Social work education would do well to embrace the insights that the new sociology of material practices offers, such as its commitment to follow practices-in-the-making, and the more general conviction that prescriptions are likely to impose impossible demands (Hinchliffe 2001).

Most importantly for the Global Agenda, the politicisation of an issue is an essential precondition for a democratic processing of these matters of concern. Social work needs to find and teach examples where social workers have attained political success in entanglements around a particular issue and achieving change for service users. By studying ‘best practice’ models of political entanglement they might discern the processes that placed the issue on the political agenda and led to direct action to address the problems caused by the issue.

So what is to be done?

So what can the Global Agenda do about our main adversaries – neoliberalism, capitalism and managerialism? First it needs a perspective on the issue, a particular way of framing the problem that comes from the way in which we think about it. This is what theory provides. Contemporary social theory tells us that, despite the global financial crisis, neoliberalism, with its global ambitions for profit and accumulation, is far from done (Harvey 2011). It has proved impervious to the uncertainties facing capitalism, the fragility of national governments and risks associated with marked increases in inequality and remains in ascendancy across the globe (Harvey 2005, 2011). In Marxist terms, this is confirmation of ‘the long-term systemic risks that capital poses to life on planet earth’ (Harvey 2011, 262).

In ‘Down with existing society’, French political philosopher Alain Badiou (1987) railed against this state of affairs:

From a social work perspective, what is required is a more detailed examination of power relations at work: how they are configured as part and parcel of capitalism and how social relations and control structures are managed. A key focus for social work is managerialism and oppressive micro-management regimes, since the main stalwarts of the neoliberal apparatus are its managers (Boltanski & Chiapello 2005). Management is crucial in authoritatively accepting, legitimating and delivering the justifications for profit and greed in this phase of capitalism, since management discourse does its most decisive work in the economy. In effect, if state law and the military are always ready in reserve, it is managers who are the glue that hold capitalism together, delivering its command and regulatory structure at the level of the everyday. As such, it is the rationality of management, its agenda and micro practices that must be a central target for a sustained social work critique and radical confrontation, for social services management supports, maintains and deepens the neoliberal apparatus.

A Global Agenda aligned with a New Social Work Left could develop counter-acts and oppositional tactics against the totality of neoliberal and managerial domination. In identifying with the ones excluded from community, it could mobilise groups, such as poor slum dwellers, migrant workers or what is being called the ‘precariat’ as a political community of issues involving the entanglement of social work and those excluded (Standing 2011). The violence of neoliberalism, aided and abetted by its policing state and law, has led to Italian historian and political philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s (2005) claim that we live in dangerous and unprecedented times, under what he calls a state of exception whereby, at any time, law can be suspended to preserve a juridical state order predicated on the blurring of legal and illegal, public and private, citizen and criminal, terrorist and freedom fighter. Stephen Graham (2010) critically examines the subtler and more familiarly overt modes of social control and surveillance that are being put to use in troubling ways in modern cities, not least an increasing dependence on methods of local policing eerily similar to Western military behaviour on the battlefield. At times of emergency or crisis, the State abandons all pretence to popular democracy and takes on a militarised, legal mode often against its own citizens:

Indeed, the state of exception has today reached its maximum worldwide development. The normative aspect of law can thus be obliterated and contradicted with impunity by a governmental violence that – while ignoring international law externally and producing a permanent state of exception internally – nevertheless still claims to be applying the law (Agamben 2005, 87).

Where does social work situate itself in relation to the evil of neoliberal capitalism? And what stance does it take in constructing new political forms? In the words of the World Social Forum, ‘Is another world possible’ or is capitalism the only game in town? Where is the vanguard of a progressive politics in all of this? Who will magically work the transformation of subordination and exploitation into political agency? And where are the sustained acts of resistance with which writers from Althusser to Foucault tried to console us?

What most diagnoses fail to offer, including postmodern social work, is any working out, in a meaningful fashion, of concrete forms of resistance. We may speculate, however, whether it is possible to identify a rising opposition to confront the situation that has been imposed upon us. Moreover, does a radical alternative inhere in Marxism and, by implication, a Marxist social work when ‘Marxist literature, although plentiful . . . has a depressing air of sterility and helplessness’ (Kolakowski 1978, 29). Does this suggest a deep structural fault line in the thinking of the Left that should be avoided at all costs in developing any new politics? British Leftist historian, political scientist and one-time editor of the New Left Review, Perry Anderson (2000), thinks so. In confronting present forms of neoliberal violence, he urges us to avoid the ‘consolation’ of the Left, which is based on the need to have some message of hope and has a ‘propensity to over-estimate the significance of contrary processes, to invest inappropriate agencies with disinterested potentials and to nourish illusions in imaginary forces’ (10). Hence, we are often left with a pluralistic politics resting on the activation of new social movements that embody a hesitant and weak critique of advanced capitalism, but does this best capture the uneven journey and immediate prospects for a new politics of social work?

There is little doubt that social work reflects aspects of the wider impasse in contemporary political activism: ‘There are innumerable blueprints for utopian futures that are, in varying degrees, egalitarian, cosmopolitan, ecologically sustainable, and locally responsive, but no solution to the most intractable problem of all: who is going to make it happen [and how]?’ (Bull 2005, 19) This absence of agency is a structural effect conditioned by the disappearance of a politically influential working class.

The vexed issue of identifying a primary agent of radical change links explicitly to social work’s agenda because of its foundational consideration of equality, justice and emancipation; but are social workers, too, subject to ‘the seductions of the market, the norms of disciplinary power, and the insecurities generated by an increasingly unbounded and disorderly human geography’ (Brown 2011, 55)? Like the majority of Westerners, have they, too, ‘come to prefer moralising, consuming, conforming, luxuriating, fighting, simply being told what to be, think, and do over the task of authoring their own lives’ (Brown 2011, 55). Are they, too, ‘largely oriented ‘towards short-run gratifications rather than an enduring planet, towards counterfeit security rather than peace, and disinclined to sacrifice either their pleasures or their hatreds for collective thriving’ (Brown 2011, 56)?

The winds of political change

How can social work education actively pursue an agenda of emancipatory politics fashioned towards freedom, justice and equality? The practice of social work inevitably operates within a ‘grand tension’ of refusing the dominant order, while at the same time being contaminated by and maintaining this order. For radicals, the tensions to which this situation gives rise are best dealt with by political discipline, developing local clusters of solidarity and being critically reflective. This will enable social workers to live with these tensions and sustain their refusal of neoliberal management practices.

Radical interventions in social work are tactically best suited to specific issues via small groups. In our recent empirical work on community engagement, we were most surprised to discover just how multinational corporations and local state bureaucrats are terrified of social protest and radical mobilisation. This is especially true when a public issue gains salience with the media. Many protest groups are not aware of the panic they excite in the minds of the bosses. Big business and their state bureaucrat allies are utterly risk aversive about inciting public protest and controversy. They neither understand nor can account for what they see as the ‘emotive and irrational public’. Thus talking about and organising around social inequality and injustice is a threat to political power. Badiou (2012) constantly reminds us that successful protests and uprisings in different domains have often taken place because of the actions of minorities.

Through education, social work can become a politics of refusal or what Agamben (1999) refers to as an ‘I would prefer not to’ strategy. It can discover a new sense of promise and negate and react against the violence of neoliberalism and the social inequalities it engenders. In these dark times of neoliberal violence, social workers have to, once more, stand together in solidarity. Social work educators can invite students to consider what new forms of collective life are possible and how social work may take part in a fresh demand for equality, justice and universal emancipation.

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