I chose social (service) workers, because Social Worker is a protected title in many states in the US but there are many people who do not have their degree/licensure who engage in the same if not similar work so I wanted to capture that.
Gonna preface my ideas with the fact that I have a basic understanding of the classes so I could be off base and would love feedback/corrections if I’m not applying the terms correctly.
I think the kneejerk reaction from people when they hear that someone works in social services would be that they are petty bourgeois, but I believe that because the field is so broad, and there is so much overlap in work that it is both petty and proletarian. For example, licensed Social Workers can engage in private or group practice where they work for themselves. At the same time, they have the option of working in the public/private/nonprofit sector if they would like, doing the same type of work or different, where they sell their labor to their employer. They can also do both of these things at the same time, or do one and then the other as they choose to change jobs. There are also people who do not have these qualifications who do essentially the same work, but can ONLY sell their labor to their employer, and do not have the option of starting their own practice, therefore I would consider them specifically proletariat. Their wages are often very, very low, typically to the point of qualifying for different types of low income assistance programs.
I think this probably gets more complex, too, due to the fact that the work has been professionalized over time with the advent of the degree and the licensure requirements while non-professional workers are still widely used and exploited in tandem.
Or, would Social Workers and social service workers necessarily exist in different classes from one another due to the professionalization of one and not the other (in the eyes of the employer)?
So yeah I’d love to hear any thoughts on this
I will preface this by saying that I am myself a previously poor person who decided to pursue a degree in social work as my own conditions improved. The class question in this work is something I have spent a lot of time thinking about. It is full of contradictions and comes down to the very question of what is social work and waged work and would such a profession exist if society was organized in a different way. The questions of community, mutual aid, state responsibility and so much more gets tied to it as well.
The basic premise and understanding for me is that social work (as it now is in the West) is still historically and today a profession that manages the contradictions of capitalism and thereby sustains capitalism. We can look at the historical poor laws and the management of surplus populations and how this originally charity based work is tied to the development of capitalism. I recommend reading Health Communism that touches on stuff like this a lot. Social workers are tied to state power and in a western state the laws largely dictate the wiggle room an individual worker has. The stronger the neoliberal service sector and managerialism, the less we can actually materially improve the lives of clients. And at the end of the day this improvement is meant to prevent revolution and uphold the welfare state (bourgeois democracy). I therefore think that doing social work for the proletariat requires us to be class traitors.
I don’t currently think that there are ways around this and I think this is important to understand if being a class traitor is the goal. I have done this work now for about 3 years and been a client of the same profession previously in my life. In my country social work is a state mandated profession where my work is also supervised by laws. Here nobody can work in social work or the service sector without some type of degree and this is something that our current right wing government is trying to dismantle atm. This comes down to social work being a service sector profession with a decent wage currently that is dominated by women. As a worker my interest is then tied with upholding the licensing and professionalization of social work.
However there is a some wiggle room there if one is ready to put in the work and use it, but this only affects individual lives. The focus of the profession is on individuals and american style case work is still prevalent in social work (tends to ignore the structural). The profession and the science of social work has historically very much ignored Marxism and the theories most popular today come from structuralism and post-structuralism. I have just been reading about theories for social work and the so called radical social work that was stronger prior to neoliberalism was never marxist, but there were still strong currents of it there and some of the course books in the US were written by these radical social work advocates like Jacob Fisher, Bertha Capen Reynolds or Mary van Kleeck. So there is struggle and contradictions there that can be worked with.
I have been reading about this a lot and also been trying to understand how social work is done in AES countries. In China the profession was first non-existent and the push to bring it into the country has not in any means been without conflict. There seems to be a lot of Western NGO involvement and on the whole social work can also be seen as a profession globally that has upheld and upholds so called Western values & capitalism and is itself an arm of colonialism. The papers you can find in the West about this require reading between the lines and understanding the interests of western academia when framing this. One better example from Peking university here. from the history of the profession in China.
Recommended reading that I have read for example:
Marxist social work: an international and historical perspective
Marxist Approaches to Social Work
A course book we just had to read Social work and social theory : making connections (this one especially is very “Western leftist” (they all are), ignores AES states and repeats the point of view of western academia on marxism, but tries to end up into a position of some sort or marxism.
The profession is also an example of a field dominated by women that was one of the entry points of women to paid labor via the charity aspect. The women however were typically petty bourgeois/upper class and today the profession is gate-kept behind academic degrees on the level on national law. I am personally interested in writing my dissertation on the lack of class consciousness in social work in my own country and what says a lot about it, is the fact that there are none such academic work in the entire field even though it uses phrases like praxis, solidarity and equality in almost all of the material produced.
From my everyday work I would also point out how the work itself does radicalize almost all who do it to some degree. Social work itself is a sort of contradiction to me that puts privileged peoples in positions where they can no longer ignore the issues of our current system and if they do, they usually can’t do the actual work or help anyone. These are the people who go work for the private sector in all likelihood where moral ends and it becomes wholly about profit.
The union of social workers is also tied to the bourgeoisie and is a so called academic union that has never truly sided with the working class struggle. This divide is between the academic unions and working class unions in my country and has aided the divide within the working class itself and partially upheld the manufacturing of the so called middle class.
The professional mandate itself advocates us to side with the clients. If you do that with an understanding of the system and how it keeps people down, you need to basically advocate for revolution and call it like it is. You can do this within the wiggle room you are given only to a degree or you will lose your job and it rests entirely on the individual. It’s all very contradictory.
This is very helpful because there are a lot of pieces that you bring up that I was not bringing into focus when thinking about this…But as I was writing my thoughts, of course more and more questions started to come up that made me realize that this IS more complex than I thought. I think the conditions in the work here in the US is probably quite different from yours but similar. I’m gonna reread and give a more thoughtful response a bit later
It’s so complex that I find it hard to articulate as English isn’t my first language.
I really aporeciate the discussion, I’ve been meaning to discuss this here in some form after I got it into my head that I do want to pursue a doctoral thesis in social work for the sole purpose of laying bare the contradictions within it and critically examine the history of this work. It’s currently framed from a very bourgeois history-style that omits the white terror & the way social work was also a tool for fascism etc. The work with the poors is framed as charity and aid, the control aspect never gets analyzed (although it is mentioned).
Might not work a day for the rest of my life after I do this, but I will do it anyway.
Having the option to work for themselves doesn’t automatically make them bourgeoisie. Class describes people’s relationship to the product of their labour, not their potential relationships. A social worker could set up their own practice, in the same way a cleaner or electrician could become self employed - it changes their individual relationship with their labour, but doesn’t mean everyone doing the same job has that same relationship.
I think when I focus on working in private practice, I have a particular idea of the working conditions of the social workers compared to those that do not or cannot do that. I didn’t quite flesh out what those differences are. I think I also got lost in the sauce trying to classify the workers that there are other things I neglected or just straight up forgot about while thinking about this, combined with my personal experience and struggle in the profession. Glad you reoriented me, though.
I keep trying to figure out how to clarify my thoughts in response to you, but I can’t even figure out where to start because as I type things out, I keep bringing myself back to the definition you pointed out and I think disentangling some of these things would be needed before even trying to classify the workers. So I’m just gonna ramble on here and if you have any thoughts on it I think it could be really helpful in reframing the question for me.
For the rest, this is explicitly from the perspective of the US, where requirements for the profession can be quite different than that of other countries as you can guess lol.
The working conditions for social (service) workers can be radically different. In private practice, working conditions and wages are significantly improved, and the type of work, which is typically therapy, is much more focused on the individual and coping in a capitalist society. In general, positions that do not require licensure are those much more focused on case management, where one is focused moreso on trying to change the material conditions for the individual but even this is not black and white because these same workers can do crisis work, for example…But those workers are often supervised by someone who is licensed where it’s not required of case management. And supervision in this sense is not quite the same as how we would think of it in other contexts.
Referencing StillNoLeftLeft again, the work has largely functioned as an arm of the state in order to quell revolutionary potential in people by providing them with their basic needs, as well as diverting efforts of potential workers away from revolutionary activity towards a watered down version of this. But then come nonprofits. Part of the purpose of diverting jobs towards nonprofits and away from the public sector was to weaken unions. But in this, there has been the potential for freedom of work and the mission of the agency where I believe social (service) workers can and have pushed back against this mechanism. There are a subset of workers whose personal goal is to no longer have a job because the conditions under which social work is “needed” will no longer exist. An example of an agency trying to approach this issue from a broader sense than meeting peoples basic needs are trying to work alongside the homeless community and build political consciousness in that population. As you can imagine, the state tries to wrangle in and/or crush agencies that do not seek to maintain and replicate current conditions, but I feel like more and more groups with that outlook have popped up.
So, I don’t yet know how to parse all of this out because I feel like there are a lot of contradictions and that it’s quite complex. I don’t know if these are not the variables that I should be focusing on and that I’m too zoomed in but if you read all that and have thoughts, again I’d love to hear em
Ah, you’re thinking about Social Work’s relation to captalism and capitalist society rather than capital then. That’s definitely a whole different board game and one I never had the strength to engage with - my mum and sister are social workers and just hearing about their days has left me confident I couldn’t do their jobs without physically assaulting a manager - but the book my mum swears by is Clement Atlee’s The Social Worker. 1920’s reformist western leftism warning etc, but the main thrust of the book is arguing for social workers as agents of agitation and societal change rather than just solving people’s problems for them. It’s a UK perspective rather than American, but it might help you precipitate more of your thoughts.
