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I have worked as a social worker in the US for three years. Over this period, I have worked with homeless individuals and families. I have cried with them as their pain and suffering reached crisis proportions. I have experienced the way agencies enact both subtle and overt forms of punishment and torture onto the already tormented lives of the poor. I have also dealt with the material and psychological effects of oppressive management, an all too common experience for social workers. Enough is enough. Social workers need to act.

Social workers in the United States are on the front lines of every social problem in this country. Social workers treat the mentally ill, aid the poor, and stand up for the rights of the oppressed. This is the official mission of the profession. But the profession lives within the context of a thoroughly exploitative social system. Social work can thus feel more like the management of exploitation rather than the eradication of it.

Social workers are employed within institutions that manage oppression. Social services and social welfare policies are not set up to eliminate the problems they address. In the text Radical Social Work, welfare activists Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward conclude that social welfare reforms of the early to mid 20th century stabilized social problems and gave way to their expansion. Many services, such as public housing, were influenced by corporations seeking social peace. These programs were chronically underfunded and means-tested to ensure that the thought of universal services in healthcare, housing, and employment was discouraged.

This is the terrain social workers have been forced to navigate. More often than not, social workers have little space to question agency policy let alone the power structure that dictates it. Social workers are often non-union workers and work long hours for little pay. Many agencies, especially in the overworked and underfunded public sector, possess cultures of despair and cynicism. In the private sector, non-profits inculcate a culture of "innovation" yet exacerbate the very problems they seek to address.

Social workers need to know how society works in order to effectively work with clients who are navigating the dehumanizing and complicated social services system. This is another core principle of the profession. But social workers need to be organized on a mass basis because the profession is just as fragmented as the services they provide. Social workers that work in hospitals will not necessarily possess the same understanding about society as social workers in anti-poverty agencies. Social work activists need to come together to chart a course for how the profession can help strengthen the insurgent movements of today.

Social worker activists need a manifesto, or a guide to action. Individually, social workers have no choice but to serve the oppressed within the terms and conditions provided by agencies, institutions, and the US capitalist system at large. Progressive change appears remote in a period where problems such as poverty, police brutality, and war are only worsening. The US capitalist system is not broken, it is in crisis. War, austerity, and repression is all the system has to offer. Without them, the wealthy owners of private capital would not be able to accumulate massive profits in the midst of a worldwide slowdown in production.

Social workers must resist becoming mere mechanisms of social control for the ruling class. At the very least, we should spend every possible moment learning the ways in which our services help to facilitate a broader agenda of exploitation. Such knowledge will not only help us do the least possible harm in our day to day work but also give us an idea of where we can assist radical grassroots movements. The social work profession is not set up to be the vanguard of a revolutionary movement to transform society. In fact, the War on Poverty was a response to the Black rebellions in US urban centers that occurred in the 1960s. These rebellions challenged racist police brutality and economic policy at the source. Reforms such as the "War on Poverty" were thus instituted to weaken rebellion and turn what then President Lyndon Johnson called "tax eaters" into "tax payers."

In periods of capitalist reform, social workers have been historically used to undermine grassroots social upheaval. Social services have attempted to smooth over the sharpest forms of exploitation. Yet more and more people in the US continue to fall into economic despair and social isolation. The social relations of capitalism, racism, and imperialism are predicated upon the exploitation of masses of people. Moreover, social services rely on funding from public and private sources that demand agencies prove they need it. In other words, social services have always possessed a vested interest in maintaining the very social problems they claim to address.

This period of dead-end monopoly capitalism has brought into being a severe attack on social programs, especially those funded by the public sector. Indeed, the defense of public education, Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security is absolutely paramount to the future of social work. The era of privatization that began in the late 1970s shows no signs of ending on its own. There is profit to be had, and the public sector represents one of the last sources of potential capital investment that exists in this period. Social workers must be on the front lines in the struggle against privatization.

But defensive struggle is not a recipe for social transformation. The public sector has always been vulnerable to corporate attack since means-tested services pit workers against the unemployed, unionized against non-unionized labor, and white Americans against peoples of color. The capitalist system uses such divisions to create the image of a "worthy" and "unworthy" poor. You are worthy if you are white, employed, and do not complain. You are unworthy if you happen to find yourself in the opposite situation. This does not mean the public sector should not be defended, but a broader vision of what society should provide must be incorporated into such struggles if we ever hope to live in a completely new society all together.

Social workers need to become organizers and theoreticians if they are to contribute to the struggle for freedom and liberation. Social workers must recognize their role in oppression. It is also imperative to understand that many people who work in the social work profession are one pay check away from poverty or already live in poverty themselves. Educational institutions and employers that teach social work will not assist in developing a radical orientation to social work. It is up to class conscious social workers to participate in the grassroots movements that are growing in strength and help other social workers do the same.