Since my family and I owe our lives many times over to Food Stamps and HUD, I’m not going to pretend I’m not biased. Obviously any welfare system is deeply predicated on state violence in the form of taxation and puts a superficial bandaid on the immediacy of capitalism’s crimes.
But if you think welfare leaves the poor a bunch of lazy queens dependent on the system and defensive of it, you’ve never been forced to sit and wait while your life hung on the whims of government bureaucracy. Socialist programs that keep the poor alive are always a good thing, strategically.
They sustain the class most likely to lead any insurrection and at the same time inspire in that class a fierce hatred of the government as well as a lasting critique of its inefficiency compared to self-organization. All are reasons to momentarily avoid directly attacking such programs, but in no means are they reasons to avoid conflict with them. As with any statist means, socialist projects will ultimately only further statist ends. But if by accident they give us any breathing room we, as prisoners, are obliged to seize it. To fight tooth and nail to build our own capacity for charity, mutual aid and self-sufficiency when they’re not looking. The only solution to socialist programs is to make them irrelevant.
-rechelon, humaniterations.net
