Freedom and Service

An homage to welfare fraud

January 18, 2023

Recently I saw two men arguing online about the welfare system in the United Kingdom (the “benefits system”). The one was arguing that immigrants are lazy and claiming benefits, which are too easy to obtain. The other works within the system itself and was in agreement that people “cheating the system” are lazy, but he felt strongly that these work-shy abhorrents are mostly British citizens.

I imagined that one of these men could be fraudulently claiming benefits from the State themselves. I felt the need to chime in and let them know that if either of them are, then it’s OK with me. It’s an open secret that most of us hate work, and if you don’t then stop and consider what most (global) jobs are like and ask yourself if you would like to do one of those.

According to this 2015 YouGov poll 37% of people in the UK are sure that their job makes “no meaningful contribution to the world” whatsoever. These are what David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs”, in a brilliant book which analyses all of the kinds of modern job which exist without any essential purpose; that are there to make middle managers feel important, tick boxes, handle bureaucracy… and perhaps most interestingly, all of those who exist either to harm/deceive others in the interests of their employer, or to prevent other such “goons” from doing so (Graeber gives many examples, including corporate lawyers and the military).

This is the tedium of millions who are employed in the corporate theatre of sending letters and documents back and forth, a highly ritualised form of sitting around and twiddling their thumbs. Behind that there are real jobs: Deliveroo couriers, Amazon workers pissing in bottles to avoid being penalised for taking a toilet break. There are sweat shops, cobalt mines, there is pseudo-slavery and there is literal slavery. Perhaps the best expressions of the anguish at the heart of this are made by Chinese migrant worker poets, a group of people who are paid essentially nothing to work into the night making silicon chips and football shirts, but who spend their sleeping hours staying up to write poetry - often about this; a firey insistence that they will reclaim the only time that they can without the loss of meagre wages proving to each other that they have more to offer than service, more to share than space. All of us share this space, and all have more to offer than service.

How did our moment-by-moment priority shift so much to service, and away from experience? It seems bizarre to me that we would demonise someone - a hypothetical benefits malclaimant - for finding an alternative way to sustain themselves within the economy. In context benefit fraud seems even a little heroic. Perhaps the hatred of some of our number comes from a place of envy, or the gnawing fear that in truth, it does not have to be this way, and that it’s up to us to change it.

We sell our labour on the market because we’re nigh forced to. Economics students are still taught that this all comes from a natural sort of individuals exchanging things, despite the fact that there is literally no evidence that this is how individuals tend to organise themselves. It’s another quasi-religious aspect of our society, the Myth of Barter. So many of us tell ourselves even that we’re all inherently selfish, Machiavellian creatures out to maximise our own interests, that the callous market is the natural evolution of our individual nature. Yet despite everything working class people have always tended to spend the income they can almost entirely on family and friends, in one way or another. Even the buying each other drinks, going to events together, the buying flashy things to make them think we’re cool. We tend to find people who “maximise their own interests” distasteful, stingy. And yet there is an anti-social class who maximise their own comfort, who extract everything they can from the earth to sell it on the market, making us miserable, destroying the water we drink and the air we breathe. They own your block, and your student debt. They’re not on welfare.

It’s a shite state of affairs to be in, and good on anyone who is able to get something out of a tight-fisted but increasingly beligerent British State. Especially if you’ve managed to steal it from right underneath its’ nose, you’re a modern-day Robin Hood. We all need to sustain ourselves and it seems to me a perfectly moral strategy.

Bollocks to perpetuating values that everyone secretly hates.



Some relevant reading