The Grouch Reads

Today, a brief excerpt from Loïc Wacquant's book, Punishing the Poor:

....Durkheim taught us that punishment is a communicative device , a "language" delivering messages not so much to offenders as to the witnessing public--in this case the working citizenry. For the latter, the punitive makeover of social policy [through the so-called 'Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act'] signifies without equivocation that nobody can opt out of wage labor without exposing themselves to a material and symbolic degradation worse than the most demeaning job. And it reminds all that you must count on no one but yourself in the "war of all against all" that is life in a society subordinated to the market.

---Bracketed material supplied by blogger;quotation taken from Chapter Three, "Welfare Reform as Poor Discipline and Statecraft", p. 108.

Plainly, as this remark occurs at the end of the chapter, its power depends in large measure on the extent to which Wacquant has demonstrated in the pages that preceded that so-called "workfare" is a form of punishment, and an expression of contempt toward human beings who are poor.