THE REAL WELFARE SCANDAL
by Walter Lippmann and Cliff Conner
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This article first appeared in the International Socialist Review, May 1973, pp. 16-23. It was later included in the anthology Life in Capitalist America: Private Profit and Social Decay (Pathfinder Press, 1975), pp.103-120, from which this was scanned in 2012. The George Tooker image appeared in black-and-white in the ISR version of the article. This version was taken from the Internet.

















George Tooker: Government Bureau (1956)

What is welfare? Webster's Unabridged defines the word as meaning: “The state of faring or doing well; thriving or successful progress in life; a state characterized especially by good fortune, happiness, well­being, or prosperity. . . .” In the United States in 1973 some 16 million people are on “welfare,” but for them Webster's definition can only hold the bitterest sort of irony.

These 16 million welfare recipients—nearly 8 percent of the American population—live in poverty. Their existence will be characterized by dilapidated housing, unsanitary and unsafe living conditions, hunger, dreariness, disease, and degradation. Virtually none will enjoy even a minimal level of the basic necessities for a decent life—in the midst of the richest society in world history. This is the real American “welfare scandal.”

Adding insult to injury, almost all federal, state, and local politicians are attempting to make these victims out to be villains. In the loud debate over the need for "welfare reform," the constant implication (frequently made explicit) is that people on welfare are typically lazy, shiftless, and dishonest. In addition, there are attempts to play on the deep-rooted racism of whites by oblique hints that their rising taxes are caused by Blacks and Latinos who refuse to work.

By this logic, the "welfare bums"—who are stealing the wealth of the country and getting a free ride at everyone else's expense—are a root cause of the United States' obvious social and economic predicament. This is the viewpoint that tends to dominate the mass media's treatment of the welfare problem.

To divert the public's attention from the real problem of poverty in America and its causes, the "welfare mess" has been made a political football. A leading ballhandler has been Richard Nixon, who publicly hailed a popular song ("Welfare Cadillac") that portrays welfare recipients getting rich and living lives of leisure at public expense. At the same time, his administration has attempted to camouflage measures designed to increase the oppressiveness of the welfare system as a "welfare reform" program. The axis of political debate on this question can be gauged by the fact that Nixon's "reform" proposals were blocked by congressional right-wingers and were supported by some of the liberals.

In reality, the system of welfare payments in the U.S. amounts to doling out benefits with the proverbial eye-dropper, keeping millions of Americans at the barest subsistence level and preventing them from breaking out of their impoverished condition. The genuine social problem that the rapidly increasing welfare rolls indicate is the growing incapacity of the American economy to provide enough jobs.


Who are the welfare recipients?

The welfare rolls are indeed growing by leaps and bounds. In the ten years since 1963, the number of Americans on welfare has more than doubled. In January 1969, at the beginning of "Work Ethic" Nixon's first term, the number was still under 10 million, but in 1972 it passed the 15 million mark.

Who are these welfare recipients? A breakdown of the statistics clearly refutes the widespread notion that they are able, but unwilling, to work for a living. There are four federally-subsidized welfare programs: Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), Old Age Assistance (OAA), Aid to the Blind (AB), and Aid to the Permanently and Totally Disabled (APTD). Also, some local areas provide general relief or assistance funds.

According to the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, there were nearly 15 million people drawing benefits from one or more of these programs in January 1972. Of these, 10.7 million were parents and children on AFDC, 2 million were aged, 1.1 million were blind or otherwise disabled, and 1 million were on locally-funded relief or assistance programs.

The biggest category, accounting for 72 percent of the total, is AFDC recipients. These 10.7 million people were almost all either children or mothers of dependent children.[Footnote 1] Only in a very limited number of cases is a family with two "able-bodied" parents allowed to draw welfare payments, no matter how destitute they may be. Therefore, the overwhelming majority of those on welfare are clearly: 1) too old to work, 2) too young to work, 3) unable to work because of lack of child care for young children, 4) blind, or 5) disabled. These figures expose the demagogy of "workfare" schemes and Nixon's contraposition of "the work ethic" to "the welfare ethic."

But these statistics conceal another important aspect of the welfare system; that is, that the welfare rolls are a manifestation of disguised unemployment. Many recipients are mothers who are unable to work due to the lack of day-care facilities for their children. And many of those recipients who are physically unable to work are dependent on welfare because their former means of support joined the ranks of the unemployed.


Disguised unemployment

The sociologist Herbert Gans, writing in the March 7, 1971, New York Times Magazine, put his finger on the real cause of the poverty that forces millions onto welfare: "When an economy cannot provide work for everyone, some people have to be excluded from the work force." The capitalist system of production for private profit cannot exist without some degree of unemployment built into the system itself.

In Capital, written over a century ago, Karl Marx explained this in terms of capitalism's need for a "reserve army of the unemployed," which serves to hold wages of employed workers to a minimum and provides a ready pool of labor to be tapped when the business cycle enters a period of economic expansion. Marx, describing this "surplus laboring population," wrote: "It forms a dispensable industrial reserve army, that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost. . . . it creates, for the changing needs of the self-expansion of capital, a mass of human material always ready for exploitation."

This is an unavoidable result of the drive to maximize profits in an anarchistic, unplanned system of production for an unknown market. That some degree of unemployment is inevitable in their economies is tacitly acknowledged by capitalist governments when they define "full employment" as some "tolerable" level of unemployment. In the United States, for example, government bureaucrats (who are not only employed but highly paid) have indicated that 4 percent unemployment is, to them, tolerable. Since the American labor force now stands at 83 million workers, 4 percent unemployed equals 3.3 million people.

But the actual level of official unemployment is now over 5 percent, accounting for well over 4 million workers, and the government has given no indication that it considers this higher level intolerable, either. The millions of unemployed workers themselves, of course, are not likely to share the government's cavalier appraisal of their deprivation of livelihood as "tolerable" and "acceptable."

Furthermore, it is widely recognized that the official U.S. unemployment statistics fall far short of revealing the full extent of joblessness in America. The more than 4 million officially unemployed only include those who are registered at state employment centers as seeking work. Many millions more have concluded that pursuing nonexistent jobs is futile and have dropped out of the statistics altogether. These discouraged job hunters account for much of the widespread poverty that finds its reflection in the burgeoning welfare rolls. That explains the fact that the numbers of welfare recipients continued to climb rapidly even in the mid-sixties, when by the capitalists' standards, their economy had reached a "full employment" level.

While some level of unemployment has always been characteristic of capitalism, the problem has become qualitatively more critical in the United States since World War II. Here it is necessary to distinguish between two kinds of unemployment: conjunctural and structural. Conjunctural unemployment is directly related to the ups and downs of the business cycle. Structural unemployment, on the contrary, results from the introduction of more productive machinery so that more goods can be produced with fewer workers. This latter kind of unemployment, marked by a permanent loss of jobs regardless of the market, has continued to rise in the United States.

There are several reasons for the changing employment pattern in American industry. Increasing foreign competition has led American monopoly capitalism to mount a productivity drive, resulting in the introduction of "labor saving" machinery at an accelerating rate. Combined with speedup and rationalization of the labor process this has meant that the creation of new jobs has not kept pace with population growth and the elimination of old jobs. In particular the advances in technique, especially automation and cybernation, have contributed to major increases in structural unemployment.

While the American economy has continued to employ a steadily growing number of workers, the proportion of the labor force unable to find jobs has also increased. In the past, the reserve army of the unemployed was generally put to work during boom periods. However, during the height of the mid-1960s boom unemployment remained in the millions.

The continued rise of structural unemployment is the fundamental factor underlying the rapid increase in welfare dependency. This type of unemployment has hit Blacks the hardest. Blacks are the last to be hired and the first to be fired. The displacement of sharecroppers in the South by corporate farms during and after World War II sent millions of poor Black farmers to the cities looking for jobs. Despite the postwar economic upswing, the urban labor markets failed to absorb many of them. These people and their descendants make up a substantial proportion of the welfare population.

The changing social composition of Newark, New Jersey, illustrates this process. The Black proportion of the city's population increased from 34 percent to 54 percent between 1960 and 1970, and today over 25 percent of Newark's inhabitants are on welfare. While the Black population in the U.S. is 10-15 percent of the total, 43 percent of the country's welfare recipients are Black.[Footnote 2]

When it becomes clear that American capitalism creates widespread poverty by spawning unemployment, it becomes equally clear that welfare victims can in no way be held individually responsible for their own impoverishment. Far from bearing the blame for America's social ills, they are among the most severely oppressed by the present system of social organization. And the millions on welfare are not the only poverty-stricken Americans. Herbert Gans, in the article cited earlier, estimated that some 30 to 50 percent more people are eligible for welfare today than are in fact on the rolls. Welfare rules and regulations are designed to discourage and prevent as many people as possible from applying for and receiving any form of relief.


Welfare: What's in it for the capitalists?

Therefore it is not surprising that, even by the government's conservative estimates, in addition to welfare recipients another 11 million Americans were living in poverty in 1970.

In their frequent rantings about the "welfare mess," Democratic and Republican politicians leave the distinct impression that they think most welfare programs are unjustified and should be scrapped. Is there any chance that they might decide to do away with the welfare system altogether and leave the present recipients to their own devices for survival? This is highly improbable.

A report issued by the New York City Department of Social Services gives a partial indication of the effect such a cutoff would produce in that city:

"A seventh of the city's population would be without food. There would be no rent payments for those people on welfare. Several hundred thousand would have to be placed in institutions at a cost 6 to 8 times greater than that required to keep them with their families. There would be a great likelihood that the number of deaths among the elderly would go up." [Footnote 3]

Commenting on this report, the New York Post pointed to "the tremendous social consequences which could arise if welfare, or another sort of relief program, were not an integral part of the American system. 'People just won't sit home quietly and starve to death,' said one official."

The welfare system serves an absolutely essential function in a modern capitalist economy. The state dole to the poor acts as an anticyclical device that tends to minimize the threat of economic and social convulsions.

Welfare not only sustains the reserve army of the unemployed that the capitalists draw upon during periods of expansion; the huge government expenditures also serve to moderate the upswings and downswings of the business cycle. Above all else, the capitalists hope to avoid the turbulent "boom-and-bust" cycles that led their system to the brink of doom in the 1930s. Welfare payments distribute purchasing power—money for rents, utility bills, groceries, etc.—to millions of people deprived of any other means of earning it. If they were cut off, the economic shock waves would be felt far beyond the ranks of the recipients themselves. The food stamp program, for example, since it restricts purchases to foods grown in the U.S., acts as a subsidy for American agribusiness. [Footnote 4]

The ultimate danger that the capitalists want to avoid is the social explosion that could result from a deep economic crisis. That explains their willingness to make welfare payments in order to absorb social tensions and to curb extreme swings of the economic pendulum. In fact, in most advanced capitalist countries welfare, unemployment insurance, and Social Security payments are the primary anticyclical device in the governmental budgets. In the United States they are second only to the Pentagon's expenditures.

Another function of welfare payments in the American economy is to subsidize marginal businesses. An underemployed worker—a borderline case between the employed and unemployed—is low-paid and may be forced to rely directly or indirectly on welfare checks for survival. L.V. Jones, a seasonally employed farm worker, testified in Cairo, Illinois, before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that he receives welfare benefits during the winter, but is cut off completely every May: "Sometimes I don't make $20 a month, but they don't care. They don't ask you is that enough or nothing. When work is opened up I am supposed to go to work regardless whether I can get a job or not." Reverend Cobb of the Cairo NAACP, testifying before the same commission, revealed that these workers were being forced to accept jobs paying fifty cents per hour!

Also, some local governments are now attempting to reduce their payrolls by replacing civil service workers with welfare recipients. The New York City Parks Department, for example, has eliminated nearly four hundred jobs in this way since 1970, paying welfare clients $2.65 per hour instead of the $5.43 civil service wage for the same work.


How much welfare does welfare provide?

In 1970, the Office of Economic Opportunity reckoned that the poverty line for a single person would be $153 per month. In reality, of course, this figure is very conservative, but it is useful as a basis of comparison with welfare payments.

The central core of the welfare system is the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program. In 1971, the national average monthly allowance per person given by AFDC grants was $48.70. These grants varied widely from state to state and from region to region: from $12.05 in Mississippi, $9.00 in Puerto Rico, and $15.20 in Alabama, to $70.95 in New York, $69.15 in Massachusetts, and $70.40 in Alaska. Thus New York State, with the largest average monthly per-person payments in the nation, grants less than half of the $153 that OEO designates as the upper limit of poverty.


Most AFDC programs are based on the assumption that a definite amount of income is necessary to allow each welfare family to subsist—a specified "need standard." The states then purposely give the families less than this amount. This is what the welfare ideologists call a "work incentive." If welfare clients do succeed in getting part-time or substandard jobs, a certain percentage of their welfare allotment is taken out for each dollar they earn. They are usually allowed to earn slightly above the "need standard"—still below the accepted poverty lines—before welfare is cut off entirely. But what about those who cannot work? For the great majority on welfare the so-called work incentive is merely an excuse to reduce their payments to an even lower level of bare subsistence than the penurious "need standards" established by the welfare offices.

Timothy Sampson, in Welfare: A Handbook for Friend and Foe, gives a dramatic comparison of welfare allocations and official poverty standards. He shows that the average AFDC family of four with no outside income (which represents about 60 percent of the total) lives on $2,364 per year. Those with additional income average $2,784 per year. By comparison, the 1971 Social Security Administration's estimated poverty line for a family of four was $4,137, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics "Lower Budget" (considered the minimum for a decent standard of living) was $7,214 for a four-person family. Since welfare grants have by no means kept pace with inflation, those on welfare today are in worse shape than they were when these comparisons were made.

The welfare bureaucracy, ever vigilant, has crammed the system full of checks and balances to keep the recipients from rising above absolute destitution. In the AFDC program there is a proportional cutback in welfare payments for earned income above the "need standard," with the absolute cutoff usually at one-third over the "need standard." For the aged and disabled, however, there is a dollar for dollar reduction in welfare for every periodic raise in Social Security benefits.

Welfare mothers, marching on picket lines against welfare agencies all over the country, have sometimes carried signs saying: "Thanks for nothing." While better-off citizens may mutter "ingrates" under their breath, the welfare mothers are more than justified in their contempt for their "benefactors."

In addition to impoverishment, the welfare system generally dishes out a large helping of degradation to the recipients. While rank-and-file welfare workers all over the country have at times tended to ally themselves with their clients, the welfare bureaucracy has stepped up its efforts to ensure that nobody beats the system out of an extra nickel or dime. Welfare workers are required to play the role of cops in enforcing the restrictive regulations.

In the first place, in order to qualify, the clients are confronted with mountains of confusing paperwork and other red tape. Much worse are the customary invasions of privacy. Midnight raids by welfare investigators, for example, checking up to see if an "abandoned" welfare mother is having a sex life, still occur, although such blatantly outrageous practices have declined as clients have begun defending their rights.

Until a recent court decision, welfare benefits in Los Angeles were routinely denied if the client refused to identify, give the whereabouts of, or sign a complaint against an absent parent. After the court decision struck down this degrading rule, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services informed its case­workers that "No applicant/recipient can be denied be­cause of (1) refusal to be interviewed by the District Attorney, or (2) refusal to give the identity or whereabouts of an absent father. . . ."[Footnote 5] However, in the next paragraph, entitled "Policy," the caseworkers were told: "It is NOT required that an applicant or recipient be told that she has no obligations to answer questions or to be interviewed by the District Attorney concerning these matters and, in accordance with state instructions, she should NOT be so advised." (Emphasis and double emphasis in original.) A government agency specifically instructs its employees not to tell the welfare clients what their rights are! While it is certainly rare to find such a straightforward example of welfare hypocrisy in the form of a printed, official directive, this typifies the actual relationship of the welfare system to those it purports to be helping.


Welfare "reform"

A fundamental tenet of the American welfare system is that no recipient should be allowed to draw benefits that even approach the wage level of the lowest-paid workers. An early formulation of this conception was contained in a report of the English Poor Law Commission in 1834, which stated:

"The first and most essential of all conditions . . . is that [the welfare recipient's] situation on the whole shall not be made really or apparently so eligible [i.e., desirable] as the situation of the laborer of the lowest class. . . . Every penney bestowed, that tends to render the condition of the pauper more eligible than that of the independent laborer, is a bounty on indolence and vice."

It was only in 1898 that the first state public welfare plan, for aid to the blind, was instituted in the U.S. In 1912, Illinois adopted the first statewide program of family aid. The federal government took no responsibility for welfare programs until the time of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

In 1935, under the public assistance titles of the Social Security Act, the federal government agreed to pay a percentage of state welfare allotments under a cost-sharing formula. This system persists today.

In August 1969, Richard Nixon went on national television to announce a new welfare reform scheme, which he dubbed the Family Assistance Plan (FAP). Although it was formally discarded early in 1973, the FAP was the focus of public debate over welfare for almost four years. It called for establishing a "national income floor" for a four-person family at $2,400 per year, a little more than half of the CEO's poverty line. It also incorporated the concept of "workfare" by stipulating that every welfare family member designated "employable" would have to accept work or job training of any kind offered by the government under threat of termination of benefits. "Employable" was to include anyone not physically ill, under sixteen years of age, or responsible for children under age six (this was to have been reduced to age three in 1973!).

But in spite of the FAP's total insensitivity to the real needs of people on welfare, congressional conservatives still thought it overly generous. In 1971 the Senate Finance Committee rewrote the plan and Tom Wicker, a New York Times columnist who was sympathetic to the original FAP, described the revised version as "a horrendous concoction called a 'guaranteed employment program' that virtually abolished welfare as such and would force family heads to work at substandard wages, in either public or private jobs, at $48 a week for those who could not find them elsewhere. This is a cheap-labor scheme to provide a big pool of workers who would be forced to accept less than the minimum wage, with starvation their alternative."[Footnote 6]

While this particular bill was never passed, the general description could apply almost as well to the Talmadge Amendments to the 1972 Social Security Act, which were passed by Congress without a word of discussion and put into effect on July 1, 1972. Under the Talmadge provisions, every mother with a child over age six must register for work or training at employment offices (sometimes referred to as "human resources development" offices). She has the choice of either accepting whatever job or training program is handed out or losing her welfare payments. In essence, this legislation put the forced-work provisions of the FAP into federal law without setting even the meager $2,400 floor under incomes. (Talmadge and other southern senators led the opposition to a nationwide guaranteed income figure, because equalizing welfare payments in every state would have required substantial increases to southern recipients, thereby undermining the low-wage structure enjoyed by industry in that part of the country.)

Putting "workfare" legislation into the lawbooks and implementing it, however, are two different matters. In most instances welfare officials have proceeded with caution, experimenting with small numbers of recipients in "pilot programs" with the hope of gradually extending them to cover the whole welfare population. Even so, the welfare clients have not remained passive in face of these measures designed to further exploit them and drive them off welfare without providing decent jobs. Thus far the states have not carried out any large-scale forced-labor schemes.

Even the pretense of reform, which was never really supposed to ease the lot of the impoverished recipients in the first place, was dropped on January 29, 1973, when Nixon announced his budget for the 1974 fiscal year. While increasing the allocation to the Pentagon by $4.7 billion, to a whopping $81.1 billion total, Nixon's proposed budget called for sharp cutbacks of some seventy domestic programs in the fields of education, social services, welfare, child care, and others.

The president's budgetary trimming was not greeted by public indifference; on February 20, in a demonstration called only a few days earlier, 10,000 people marched in protest in Washington, D.C. Dozens of similar protests, led by the National Welfare Rights Organization and other groups, took place all across the country in early April.

The reductions in federal support to child-care programs are expected to force many working women from productive employment onto welfare. The Los Angeles Times, for example, estimates that some 40 percent of the children presently in day-care programs in that city will be turned out. For that reason, feminist and welfare rights organizations have responded by demonstrating behind the slogan: "Child care, not welfare!"

The entire national debate over welfare, as carried out in the halls of Congress and in the mass media, has been based on false premises. The conservatives' "workfare" and "work incentive" concepts ignore the fact that the poor cannot create their own jobs. The liberals' plaintive cry for "more jobs" is not as repugnant, but is equally useless in that it assumes the American economy, as presently structured, to be capable of providing an "adequate level" of employment. And those liberals who call for "more money" to the poor are far too timid in their perspectives. When militant welfare clients led by the National Welfare Rights Organization broke into the debate with a demand for a $6,500 guaranteed yearly income, the liberals became nervous. The New York Times expressed this queasiness editorially:

"The 'welfare rights' lobby has needlessly and unhelpfully complicated liberal efforts to reach an understanding with the administration by its insistent demands for a guaranteed income of $6,500 a year and by its strident attacks on the Administration plan. "There is no chance of attaining that utopian figure. [Could the arrogant editorialist live in utopia on $6,500 a year? The argument in Congress has always ranged between $2,400 and $3,000 a year for a family of four." [Footnote 7]


What are the solutions?

If the great national welfare debate is so obviously founded on fallacies, why do the Democratic and Republican politicians generate such heat over it? What function does the continuation of this inane discussion serve for them?

As previously noted, it provides a diversion from the genuine social problems. More specifically, by promoting the idea that welfare clients are loafing chiselers living at the expense of working people, it aims to divide the very forces that could actually solve the problem—the employed and unemployed sections of the working class.

Welfare recipients do not constitute a special caste that is unique unto itself. They are not a group of people who are congenitally incapable of making valuable contributions to society. People on welfare are a subsidiary category of the unemployed—part of the working class that, through no fault of its own, is excluded from the ranks of productive workers.

The social problem manifested by the present welfare system can only be successfully tackled by united action on the part of employed and unemployed workers. Such unity could take the form of the organization of the unemployed into the trade union movement. Another form of unity could be alliances of organized welfare clients and organized workers. Whatever the organizational forms, the key to such joint action is a program of demands that can unite the two groups for a fight in their common interests.

Such a set of demands would have to include a crash program to provide adequate jobs for those who can work, and full union-scale wages for unemployed workers. The latter demand, if won, would eliminate the poverty of the unemployed and protect the economic security of employed workers. But this is obviously not a demand that can be presented to individual employers on a one-at-a-time basis by local unions; it would have to be presented to the capitalists' government in Washington and would need the united strength of the entire working class behind it. If the government pleads poverty, the workers need only point to the more than $81 billion that the Pentagon has budgeted for imperialist war and demand that it be put to constructive use instead.

Such an occurrence would certainly be anathema to the capitalist rulers. Is it any wonder that they go to such lengths to portray those on welfare as social parasites sucking the blood of the working class? If the New York Times indignantly rejects the $6,500 annual income demand as utopian, can you imagine their reaction to a call for full union-scale wages for the unemployed?

The objection many workers might raise to such a proposal comes from the politician/media barrage concerning "work incentives": "If everyone were guaranteed a decent standard of living, nobody would bother to work." This, again, echoes the lie that welfare recipients are responsible for their own plight, when it is actually American capitalism that is to blame. The victims of the system should not be required to pay for its shortcomings by being forced to live in poverty. A guaranteed decent standard of living for the entire working class is precisely the minimum goal to be fought for.

The central programmatic demand around which employed and unemployed can unite in struggle is the demand for a reduction in the workweek with no loss in pay. If there are not enough jobs to go around for the whole American working class, then the jobs that do exist should be shared. Instead of three thousand people working at a given factory for forty hours per week, why not employ four thousand workers for thirty hours per week? This more equitable distribution of jobs should be effected at the capitalists' expense; the three thousand original workers should not be forced to take a cut in pay to provide jobs for the other one thousand. After all, it is not the workers' fault that their employers' drive for maximum profits excludes millions of people from employment.

If the community of interest between those on welfare and organized labor has not always been readily apparent, it is rapidly becoming more so. According to the April 3, 1973, issue of the Wall Street Journal, “The Nixon administration's line is hardening on the politically explosive issue of paying welfare benefits to strikers." Nixon's aim, of course, is to limit the ability of workers to strike. This is an important challenge to the labor movement, and the AFL-CIO has announced its intention to support the right of striking workers to at least the minimal economic security of welfare payments.

Unfortunately, the ossified AFL-CIO hierarchy, tied to the capitalist political parties, cannot be counted upon to lead an effective fight in defense of this right. The much more fundamental struggle for changes that can eliminate poverty and unemployment and remove the need for the rotten welfare system altogether will require an entirely new leadership for the organized working class. George Meany and the whole bureaucratic stratum he represents will have to be replaced by militants capable of leading an uncompromising struggle in the interests of all workers, including the unemployed.

While the labor movement has the decisive power to bring about the necessary changes—ultimately a socialist society—it will have many allies, and some of them are already in motion. Welfare recipients themselves have organized and fought for their rights during the past few years on a scale not seen since the unemployed movement of the 1930s, and they have been successful in striking down many of the barriers used to deny relief money to applicants. The feminist movement has organized actions in defense of working and welfare women, particularly around the issue of child care.

The Black and Chicano liberation movements, demanding control of social institutions in their communities, and the student movement, representing an important segment of the American proletariat of the near future, also have a large stake in eliminating the inequities of the present welfare system and can be counted on to play a significant role. With adequate leadership and program there can be no doubt that these social forces will be able to resolve the "welfare problem."


NOTES

1. In 1971, only 323,000 (3 percent) of the 10.2 million AFDC recipients were adult males. Of these, 197,000 were incapacitated and unable to work. These HEW figures were cited by Congressman Ben Blackburn in the April 9, 1973, Congressional Record, p. H2497.

2. Another 48 percent are white; the remainder are Asians, Native Americans, and others. The statistics fail to indicate whether Chicanos and Latinos are classified as "whites" or "others."

3. Quoted in the New York Post, March 29, 1971.

4. Except for coffee, tea, and bananas.

5. Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services, Manual Letter Number 154, dated March 19, 1973.

6. New York Times, May 21, 1972.

7. New York Times, August 1, 1972.

WALTER LIPPMANN is a member of the California State Executive Board of Social Services Union, Local 535 and was recently a Socialist Workers Party candidate for School Board in Los Angeles.

CLIFF CONNER is an associate editor of the ISR.