Peter Frase

Mixed in with the usual litany of concessions to billionaires and businesses, the Trump administration delights in a petty and banal sadism that at times seems to serve no significant purpose, if we take the purpose of right wing politics to be the accumulation of capital by the rich. Although nobody should be under any illusion about Trumpism, any idea that it is anything other than, as [Corey Robin](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/11/trump-corey-robin-reactionary-mind-interview) will happily tell us, a familiar iteration of conservatism, just a bit more crass and unmasked.

The latest and best in this cabinet of miniature horrors: a [revision](http://pix11.com/2018/02/12/white-house-wants-to-deliver-food-to-the-poor-blue-apron-style-in-place-of-nearly-half-of-cash-benefits/) of the food stamp program that seeks to replace food vouchers with "a box of food that the government describes as nutritious and 100 percent grown and produced in the U.S.", on the model of Blue Apron and other purveyors of pre-fabricated (and ecologically [terrible](https://www.buzzfeed.com/ellencushing/these-are-the-trashy-consequences-of-blue-apron-delivery)) meal kits.

This would, of course, be bad. And it hits the right venal notes of your workaday reactionary politician: if we must have a welfare state, how can we turn it into pork for my petit-bourgeois constituents?

But the food stamp program was already bad, and this merely intensifies its patronizing and paternalizing logic. Those of us who advocate things like the [Universal Basic Income](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/05/curious-utopias/) from a left perspective do so, in part, because we view the unconditional redistribution of money as something superior to--and more radical than--programs which require recipients to meet requirements and satisfy bureaucrats.

Food stamps are already like that. There are complex restrictions on what food you're allowed to acquire with your vouchers. Hot or toasted food, for example, is [considered](https://eligibility.com/food-stamps/what-kinds-of-products-cannot-be-purchased-with-snap-benefits) an unacceptable luxury. And don't even dream that poor people might deserve access to things like [diapers or tampons](http://meloukhia.net/2015/12/why_cant_you_get_diapers_and_tampons_on_government_assistance/). Hence the argument that instead of intensifying this logic with something like the Trump meal-kit proposal, we should go the opposite way, and just hand out cash.

For certain kinds of social-democratic traditionalists, such arguments are dangerous heresy. For people like [Daniel Zamora](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/foucault-interview), they are worse than useless--they are, in fact, concessions to neoliberalism, as packaged by such dangerous figures as Michel Foucault.

But without [Foucault](https://www.viewpointmag.com/2018/01/23/postmodernism-not-take-place-jordan-petersons-12-rules-life/), or someone like him, how are we to understand something like this latest Trump atrocity? Yes, on one level it's simply a patronage handout to business. But we're also dealing here with "governmentality", and perhaps too "biopower", those terms concerning the way that states regulate and control the biological functions of their subjects. For it turns out that our political line can't simply turn on a distinction between reliance on "states" versus "markets", even though the right might like to pose the question that way. Capitalism is a state-dependent project all the way down, and the crucial question is *what* the state does, and to whom.

So here we come to a leftist perspective on the welfare state, which cannot just be a one-sided defense of welfare capitalism but also must be a dialectical *critique* of its authoritarian functions. That's where the Foucault comes in. As I've said [elsewhere](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/07/socialism-liberalism-left-frase), we seek to build the welfare state only so that we can break it. And the capitalist class, for all its showy gestures about tearing down the state, builds it too--but it builds it to break *us*.

And there we find our task, when confronted with conservative welfare governmentality in its absurd Trumpist iteration. We fight for social rights not simply to win benefits, but to get free--free of what Marx called the ["double freedom"](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch06.htm), where we are free to sell our labor, but also free from the means to do anything else.

Decommodify, [decommodify](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/06/de-commodification-in-everyday-life/)! That is [Moses and the prophets](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch24.htm)!

Or to put it another way, we are [Taking these](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqub4O3-NTY), if you don't please.