Making the Welfare State Work for Extraction: Poverty Policy as the Regulation of Labor and Land
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although the welfare state has been widely theorized as a mechanism for the management of capitalist crisis, these analyses have often pivoted on the problem of social regulation. Drawing on the case of Canadian resource extraction, this article builds on these theories by interrogating the geography of welfare state regulation. Analyzing the history of the Canadian welfare state in relation to specific historical geographies of extraction, I argue that Canadian welfare policy has been a powerful tool in state efforts to make and regulate labor markets for resource extraction. The postwar period in Canada marked not only the heyday of welfare state expansion but also the intensification of industrial resource extraction and an overarching state anxiety about national productivity and waste. During this time, poverty policy emerged as a key mechanism for the state coordination of surplus: on the one hand, surplus labor; on the other, surplus land and production capacity. Drawing on interviews and government archives, I illustrate how planners and bureaucrats drew on welfare state capacity to produce, manage, and mobilize peripheral and surplus populations in relation to dispersed and crisis-ridden geographies of resource extraction. In helping to manage unemployment and poverty in relation to staples production, Canadian welfare policy has served as a tool for expanding extraction, deepening the colonial resource frontier, and consolidating territorial control. In this sense, my argument underscores the role of the welfare state in regulating not only labor but also, and inseparably, land. Key Words: labor, labor markets, resource extraction, uneven development, welfare state.尽管福利国家被广泛理论化为管理资本主义危机的机制, 这些分析却经常以社会调节问题为核心。本文运用加拿大资源搾取的案例, 建立在这些理论之上, 探讨福利国家的调节地理。我分析加拿大福利国家的历史之于资源搾取的特定历史地理, 主张加拿大的福利政策, 是国家致力于为资源搾取创造并调节劳动市场的有力工具。战后的加拿大, 不仅达到了福利国家扩张的巅峰, 同时也是工业资源搾取的密集化, 以及国家对全国生产力与浪费的全面性焦虑。于此时期, 贫穷政策浮现作为国家调控剩馀的机制：一方面是剩馀劳动力, 另一方面则是剩馀土地和生产力。我运用访谈和政府档案, 阐明规划者和官僚如何运用福利国家的能力, 生产、管理并动员与分散且危机导向的资源搾取地理有关的边陲及剩馀人口。在协助管理有关日常用品生产的失业与贫穷中, 加拿大的福利政策提供作为扩大搾取、深化殖民资源前线、以及巩固领土控制之工具。就此意义而言, 我的主张强调福利国家在调节不仅是劳工、同时也是与其不可分割的土地中的角色。关键词：劳工, 劳动市场, 资源搾取, 不均发展, 福利国家。Aunque el estado benefactor ha sido ampliamente teorizado como mecanismo para el manejo de la crisis capitalista, estos análisis a menudo han girado alrededor del problema de la regulación social. Con base en el caso de la extracción de recursos canadienses, este artículo elabora sobre estas teorías interrogando la geografía de la regulación del estado benefactor. Analizando la historia del estado benefactor canadiense en relación con las geografías históricas específicamente aplicadas a la extracción, sostengo que la política canadiense del bienestar ha sido una poderosa herramienta en los esfuerzos del estado para crear y regular mercados laborales para la extracción de recursos. El período de la posguerra en Canadá no solo marcó el auge de la expansión del estado benefactor sino también la intensificación de la extracción industrial del recurso y un dominante estado de ansiedad acerca de la productividad nacional y el desperdicio. Durante ese tiempo, apareció la política sobre la pobreza como mecanismo clave para la coordinación estatal de excedentes: por una parte, exceso de fuerza laboral; por la otra, sobrantes de tierra y capacidad de producción. Basándome en entrevistas y archivos gubernamentales, ilustro el modo como planificadores y burócratas se aprovecharon de la capacidad de atención social del estado para producir, manejar y movilizar poblaciones periféricas excedentes en relación con las geografías de extracción del recurso dispersas y poco menos que en estado crítico. Ayudando a manejar el desempleo y la pobreza en relación con la producción de bienes, la política de beneficencia del estado ha servido como una herramienta para ampliar la extracción, ahondado la frontera del recurso colonial y consolidando el control del territorio. En este sentido, mi argumento enfatiza el papel del estado benefactor para regular no solo el trabajo sino también, e inseparablemente, la tierra.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".