ABSTRACT
The professionalisation of social work has been a governmental project of capitalist and colonial states, with the intention of reducing the individual consequences of the capitalist, marketised system in Western countries and its exploitation of colonised people. Although social work has, historically, been engaged in the consolidation and globalisation of capitalism, its neoliberalisation has reinforced its oppressive role. Critical thinking in social work, which had made some progress in helping to shape the profession and its education and research output, has been under severe attack as a result of the aggressive neoliberalisation of societies around the world. Through established mechanisms of symbolic violence, resistance to the neoliberalisation of the research, education and practices of social work is punished and compliance is rewarded. Intensification of governmentalisation of students, educators and researchers of social work in recent years has reinforced social work as an all-administrative and managerial profession. In such circumstances, when our natural and social worlds are in great danger, social work cannot continue to ‘simply’ adjust itself to the demands of the oppressive structures of neoliberal racial capitalism. A new and global revolutionary social work must be developed in order to defend human rights and social justice for everyone – irrespective of their socioeconomic position, place of birth, gender, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality and other social and potentially otherised categorisations.
