Last spring
Morgenbladet shockingly enough published an interview with the Torbjørn
Røe Isaksenleader of
theYoung
Right and political editor ofthe
journal
Minerva,where
he elaborated his
openly extreme views on the current Norwegian welfare politics by
naming it
“moral of weakness”.
Some months after
that Morgenbladet published a comment by one of the Welfare researchers
at
Gjøvik Høgskole who pointed out how bitterly
disappointing it was that none of
Arbeiderpartiet’s, Venstre’s, or LO’s politicians saw
it as necessary to reply
to such extreme views (by the leader of the Young Right), in order to
eliminate
its credibility.
The problem is
that it’s been months now since, and we are still waiting.Why?
It is quite clear
that we cannot believe what is really going on, namely that Samuel
Beckett is
still our best friend, since Godot is yet to appear.
The answer to the
question of why Godot isn’t coming of course arrived only after
the autumn
election, after we all voted for the new government out of despise for
the
previous, in a hope of improving the situation.
The answer is
nothing like what we might have expected, the new government intends to
not
only embrace such extreme ideas, it also intends to realise them in
practice.
What do I mean by
‘realising in practice’? As much we could read in and
between the lines so far
he intends to reform the system of welfare benefits in order to
“produce” the
money for the government’s fight against poverty. He will make social
clients
fulfil their duties in order to gain the benefits, as if the problems
they have
already now, which keep them from getting on with their lives, are not
straining and humiliating enough. On the other hand, one cannot say
that the
new government shall not take the whole thing on another level since
they are
already now promising to go through the benefits of the ill and
handicapped in
order to get some money out of them too. Does this make sense? Of
course not!
This is just
another one of those pragmatic self-contradictory attempts to take the
money
from the poor in order to give it back, preferably in as small amounts
as
possible and then be able to sit on the bench and say “I just
helped you,
didn’t I? And now it is all up to you, sunshine!”
Whatever else they
have planned as Christmas and New Years gifts for the members of the
lowest
parts of the income scale of the country we will certainly find out in
due
course.
As for the
election and other alternatives we could have chosen, Herbert Marcuse (Herbert Marcuse, One-dimensional
Man) wrote some
decades ago: Politically advanced – democratic political systems
are considered
to be systems of countervailing powers because of their
well-established
pluralism of political parties. The problem is that these so-called
countervailing powers are countervailing only per definition. Their
false
appearance is reflected in the fact that they do not ever include any
form of
power that might counter the system as a whole. They never include
powers that
might appear as opposite to what is socially desirable, and, therefore,
potentially provide one with a real alternative view.
