The acquiescence of social work (original) (raw)
Social welfare agencies enhance capitalist institutions. s ocial welfare doctrines have become unsettled in the past decade. One only has to remember how liberals generally, and social service professionals in particular, once confidently defined the social services as the progressive and humanitarian sector of American society. Services in health, education, welfare, housing, child care, and corrections were taken as institutional proof that the American state had reached the stage where it was ready and able to intervene in the so-called free enterprise economy to protect people against some of its worst abuses. In other words, the United States, mainly through its public programs-and to a lesser extent through the voluntary sector-no longer tolerated the vagaries in human welfare produced by a capitalist economy, and no longer left the victims of the economy to fend for themselves. One had only to look at the splendid array of legislation, and the multitude of agencies spawned by that legislation, to know that this situation was so. Liberal Faith To be sure, liberals acknowledged that there were problems in thc social service sector. Great progress had been made, but there was still a distance to go. The problems were largely attributed to the underfunding of social service programs; the agencies were inhibited by lack of money from doing what they knew how to do and urgently wanted to do to From Radical Social Work with an introductory chapler by Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. Edited by Roy Bailey and Mike Brake.
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