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.