Workfare States and the Disciplining of the Poor

 

Workfare States and the Disciplining of the Poor
ffrom reading the book Workfare States by Jamie Peck

In the architecture of neoliberal governance, the workfare state is less a safety net than a disciplinary apparatus—an institutional solution to the problem of managing surplus populations in a post-industrial economy. Where once welfare promised income security and a modicum of dignity, workfare rebrands poverty as a behavioral defect, solvable through compulsory activation, low-wage employment, and a forced pedagogy of responsibility.

The shift is not merely semantic. Under workfare regimes, the poor are not supported—they are processed. Welfare rolls become performance metrics; job readiness becomes the currency of survival. In this theater of activation, structural unemployment is reimagined as personal failure, and the labor market’s dysfunctions are reframed as motivational deficits among the poor. The state, for its part, recasts itself not as provider, but as enforcer—a broker of precarious labor, not a guarantor of social rights.

These programs do not exist to alleviate poverty. They are designed to manage it. The genius—if one is inclined to call it that—of the workfare state lies in its circular logic: joblessness is the fault of the jobless; low wages are an incentive; and the punitive withdrawal of benefits is cast as a form of care.

Workfare thus functions as both a labor-market policy and a moral project. It polices the boundaries of citizenship, sorting the deserving from the undeserving poor, and it entrenches a form of neoliberal paternalism that speaks the language of empowerment while operating through surveillance, coercion, and institutionalized shame.

Far from “activating” the unemployed into meaningful work, the workfare state more often inserts them into circuits of low-paid, low-security, low-dignity labor—what Wacquant might call the new carceral continuum. Here, the line between the welfare office and the criminal justice system grows ever thinner.

What we are witnessing is not the shrinking of the state, but its retasking. From Keynesian guarantor to neoliberal disciplinarian, the state has not withdrawn—it has repositioned. And at the center of this transformation lies the workfare state: a machine not for justice or inclusion, but for managing the contradictions of a capitalist economy that no longer needs all of its workers, yet still demands their obedience.

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