Remembering the Case Con Manifesto

The Case Con Manifesto was written by a group of radical social workers who published Case Con magazine in the early 1970’s. The Manifesto served as a critique of the place of social work in society and also an optimism of a more civilized time where prospects for social justice were possible. The entire text is available at the following website - http://www.radical.org.uk/barefoot/casecon.htm.

It is important to consider the points the Case Con Manifesto raises in our time in regard to social work practice in 2006; how far we have drifted from social justice… Here is an excerpt, “Every day of the week, every week of the year, social workers (including probation officers, educational social workers, hospital social workers, community workers and local authority social workers) see the utter failure of social work to meet the real needs of the people it purports to help. Faced with this failure, some social workers despair and leave to do other jobs, some hide behind the facade of professionalism and scramble up the social work ladder regardless; and some grit their teeth and just get on with the job, remaining helplessly aware of the dismal reality. Of course, some do not see anything wrong in the first place.”

The Manifesto addresses the historical context of the atmosphere necessary for real social change. It explains that “[t]he welfare state was set up partly in response to working-class agitation and mainly to stabilize the upheavals generated by wartime conditions. It was recognized that improvements in the living conditions of workers helped provide capitalism with a more efficient work force and could nip militancy in the bud. Furthermore, the threat of withdrawal of benefits under certain conditions (being on strike or cohabiting, for example) could be a useful technique of social control, During the post-war boom, wage rises came fairly easily: in the euphoria about the supposed end of inequality, means tests were gradually reintroduced and the principle of universal entitlement to social, educational and health services gradually eroded. As the boom subsided, cuts in welfare expenditure were justified in the attempt to control inflation and are now used ideologically to create an impression of scarcity as an explanation for the crisis of capitalism.”

One aspect of social work practice still under debate in 2006 is the issue of “professionalism” especially in light of the persistent capitulation to the conservative ideals destroying social services and their successes in conquering the welfare state i.e the people’s state. The Manifesto speaks to this phenomenon with clarity and strength in the section that states, “One important tool of professional social work has been casework - a pseudo-science - that blames individual inadequacies for poverty and so mystifies and diverts attention from the real causes - slums, homelessness and economic exploitation. The casework ideology forces clients to be seen as needing to be changed to fit society. Social work has now expanded to include new (and not so new) tricks, such as community work, group work, welfare rights work, etc., which, when professionalized, end up by becoming the same sort of mechanism of control as traditional casework, often with the additional merit of being less expensive for the ruling class. Professionalism is a particularly dangerous development specifically because social workers look to it for an answer to many of the problems and contradictions of the job itself - i.e. being unable to solve the basic inadequacy of society through social work. It must be fought at every opportunity.” Unlike many social work texts (Unfaithful Angels by Harry Specht and Mark Courtney comes to mind) that criticize the field but offer no viable alternative. The Case Con Manifesto devotes an entire section to “How We Must Organize” which explores other options to conservative values such as the bigoted meaning of “personal responsibility” when they write “We are supposed to 'help' our 'clients' by making them 'accept responsibility' - in other words, come to terms as individuals with basically unacceptable situations. We must counter-pose this to the possibility of changing their situation by collective action.” This speaks to the power of cooperation rather than competition to meet challenges.

Case Con Manifesto comes to a solution that all social workers should consider; a “Socialist conclusion”. “Case Con believes that the problems of our 'clients' are rooted in the society in which we live, not in supposed individual inadequacies. Until this society, based on private ownership, profit and the needs of the minority ruling class, is replaced by a workers' state, based on the interests of the vast majority of the population, the fundamental causes of social problems will remain.” The value of this document is in its relevance to today’s field of social work, to all: social workers, clinicians, policy, administration, case managers and activists alike.