The post-war extension of state involvement in social security, education, housing, health and land use planning is over. The welfare state, however, is not dead; rather, its new slimmed-down form, in which private provision is encouraged for those who can afford it and simply 'going without' for those who can't, is struggling increasingly hopelessly with the enormous human and financial cost of unemployment benefits, work experience programmes, and the broader welfare consequences of mass unemployment and falling living standards.
As social reformers have documented for decades, welfare benefits and services have been consistently inadequate and more beneficial to the middle classes than the working class. More recent socialist writers have shown how the welfare state stigmatises and disciplines the poor, discriminates racially, reinforces the primacy of domestic and material duties for women, and provides poor working conditions and low pay for the bulk of its workforce.
The welfare state developed in response to a huge variety of struggles and pressures generated 'from below'. The withdrawal of [illegible] defend the present provisions, this is not sufficient on its own, As Elizabeth Wilson has written: 'It is never enough to ask for more of [illegible] rely on the unpaid work of women and does not sustain the present unequal family'.
Struggles in defence of services can and must challenge the disciplinary, patriarchal and undemocratic forms in which services are produced and delivered. Despite many fierce and bitter local struggles, campaigns and occupations, however, the unpalatable truth is that the majority of the organised (ie employed) working class have, thus far at least, accepted the recent decline of the 'social wage' in exchange for false promises of job security and 'light at the end of the tunnel'.
The literature on Britain is dominated by social democratic, empiricist approaches. There is a tendency to look at the British welfare state as the definitive capitalist welfare state, but there is no such thing. The balance between public and private provision, the degree of racist, sexist and repressive administration, the extent to which services meet basic needs, the degree of inequality in access to and distribution of services — all these vary enormously from one country to another.
Comparisons are difficult, for the British welfare state is very much impoverished in relation to the other social democratic states of Western Europe, where, however, the class structure of inequality is much more directly reflected in the graduated inequality of many benefits and in the use of welfare services. The welfare state in the United States is extremely unevenly developed, although it is much more extensive than is commonly realised particularly in regulating the poor and working in harness with private and corporate welfare forms. While there is a growing body of Marxist and feminist writing on the British welfare state, there is virtually no Marxist comparative and historical study of welfare states to guide militant reading. Even in Britain, it is only in pamphlets and periodicals that accounts can be found of trade union and community Organisation and activity.
The Nature of the Welfare State
The Political Economy of the Welfare State by Ian Gough (Macmillan, 1979 £4.95) — A very clear and careful Marxist analysis of state expenditure looking at its contradictions for capital rather than for the working class and concluding that the cuts are a necessity for the survival of capital in general, The class struggle within the welfare state is rather submerged in the economic forces; in fact it is somewhat deterministic, The usefulness of the many conceptual categories established is rather obscure but in unravelling the necessity of welfare expenditures for late capitalism, it is excellent.
Women & the welfare state by Elizabeth Wilson (Tavistock, 1977 £3.60) — [illegible] pamphlet. It has changed the face of social policy courses with its argument that 'social welfare policies amount to no less than the State organisation of domestic life'. it offers a [illegible] socialist feminist theory of the [illegible] of domesticity and the patriarchal 'family' [illegible] left workers. Unfortunately it is confusingly [illegible].
Society & Social Policy by Ramesh Mishra (Macmillan, 2nd edition, 1981, £4.95) — This is a useful, critical guide to the leading sociological paradigms for the study of the welfare state, including Marxism. It deals particularly well with the empiricist tradition and with Marx's analysis of the Factory Acts. The second part embarks on an international comparison of modern welfare states using a vaguely Weberian model. It does not work too well, but it's a brave attempt.
Ideology & Social Welfare by Victor George & Paul Wilding (Routledge, 1976, £3.50) — A systematic account, based on primary sources, of four major ideologies: anti-collectivism (Thatcherism), reluctant collectivism ('the wets'), Fabian collectivism (social democracy) and Marxism. The first three are very effectively presented, though the ideas are organised around Fabian categories. The importance of the distinction between reluctant collectivism and Fabian collectivism is overemphasised, and the chapter on Marxism is poor, partly reflecting the poverty of Marxism in this area.
Socialism, Social Welfare and the Soviet Union by Victor George and Nick Manning (Routledge, 1981, £5.95) — The book more or less argues that the USSR is a socialist welfare state in the Bolshevik tradition. However, the authors provide no evidence that the Soviet welfare state is remotely democratic in terms of either consumer or worker control, What is more, the performance of the Soviet welfare state is assessed relatively uncritically. More speculation and discussion on the role of the social security system in labour discipline, on the inadequacies of the health services, on the degree of poverty etc, is quite possible on the basis of the available literature. Above all, there is no mention of policies affecting women (abortion, contraception, population, family allowances, day care) upon which there is a large literature.
Mothers At Work: Public Policies in the US, Sweden and China by Carolyn Teich Adams & Kathryn Teich Winston, (Longman, 1980) — [illegible] feminist account of social policies affecting many aspects of women's lives in the three countries. The argument is that welfare state services can help achieve women's liberation by easing the dual burden of domestic and wage labour, Unfortunately for the authors, their wealth of evidence does not show that Swedish and Chinese women have been thus liberated, but rather that welfare provisions seem to have increased their dual burden.
Major welfare issues
Poverty and Equality in Britain by J.C. Kincaid (Penguin, 1975, Revised edition, £1.25) — A pioneering study of the appalling inequities of British social security and taxation, and the utter ineptitude of post-war Labour governments in worsening the inequalities and encouraging private and occupational schemes. As a student this book more than any other exploded all the Fabian myths about the decency of the welfare state into which I had been socialised. It is particularly good on the complex area of pensions. Written in a terse and ironic style, it still reads well though it is becoming dated.
Housing, For People or Profit? by John Cowley (Stage 1, 1979, £2.50) — [At] times the analysis is over-conspiratorial but [illegible] of housing. This is illustrated by his excellent account of the gentrification process in North [illegible].
Slump City: The Politics of Mass Unemployment by Andrew Friend and Andy Metcalf. (Pluto Press, 1981, £3.95) — The title is misleading — it is a slick run-down on changing working class employment and family patterns in the context of urban and regional policy. The argument seems to be that multinational capital rules the urban scene unopposed, but in its uneven development, it has created a 'swelling of the surplus population' in the inner cities, which presents a threat to social order and is met with increasing state repression. The approach is rather too deterministic, especially as one cannot build a socialist revolution with an army of the dispossessed and unemployed. The authors pay too little attention to the political power of the divisions in the working class which they so forcefully present. The politics of unemployment is not simply the politics of the unemployed.
What Unemployment Means by Adrian Sinfield (Martin Robertson, 1981, £2.75) — A short but comprehensive and readable guide to the present crisis in Britain which clearly shows how unemployment is effectively disciplining and dividing the working class. Sinfield is particularly good at portraying the reality of unemployment for the individual and [illegible]. The [book] is imbued with [illegible] and egalitarian values, but the bourgeoisie to whom the plea is apparently addressed do not seem very interested.
Poverty in the UK by Peter Townsend (Penguin, 1979, £7.95) — An encyclopaedic yet absorbing survey of poverty in many but by no means all its manifestations. The survey was carried out in 1969 but its findings are not dated, merely magnified for the 1980s. It is not just a survey, it is a chronicle of employment, housing, social security, family and other policy 'failures'. The authors seems somewhat perplexed at the 1964-70 Labour government's failure to achieve what he so powerfully argued for at the time. There is virtually no analysis of either the limits nor the possibilities of social reform within working class politics.
The Political Economy of Health by Lesley Doyal with Imogen Pennell (Pluto Press, 1979, £4.95) — A socialist feminist critique of scientific medicine developed through a history of health services in Britain and, more briefly, East Africa. The book focuses on the way in which capitalist economic development has shaped both the provision of health services and the concepts of illness and disease, The transmission of patriarchal and other oppressive ideologies through medical interaction comes out well in the chapter on [illegible] the [illegible] of the NHS from capital, but it is the best starting point for reading on health services [illegible].
International Perspectives
Northern Ireland: Between Civil Rights & Civil War by Liam O'Dowd, Bill Rolston & Mike Tomlinson (CSE Books, 1980, £3.95) — A readable and original set of essays on Northern Ireland, particularly on the restructuring of the state apparatus since the 1960s. The post-war social democratic, welfare consensus was never established in Northern Ireland where the Catholics were largely excluded from the welfare state, Since the emergence of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the subsequent war, British governments have tried to construct such a consensus, particularly through housing policies, The drastic and inevitable failure of such attempts and the consequent strengthening of the sectarian statelet is well documented. The book conveys all too clearly the utter [illegible].
In & Against the State by the London-Edinburgh Weekend Return Group (Pluto Press, 1980, £2.95) — An accessible if somewhat self-conscious discussion of the oppression of workers and consumers in, and the possibilities for challenging the capitalist form of the welfare state. This expanded edition is much more coherent than the original pamphlet, arguing that class struggle exists in a myriad of everyday, hidden resistances against and beyond the welfare state, It advocates a political practice which goes beyond demanding more welfare resources and involves building new social relations. As the postscript admits, much of the space for this has been swept aside by monetarism but this remains absolute priority reading for activists.
Regulating the Poor and Poor People's Movements by Frances Fox Piven & Richard Cloward — These two books, particularly the second, are written for the militant. The message is that 'poor people's movements' (for example the militant welfare rights movements of the 1960) are destroyed by incorporation into the web of conventional pressure group politics and the bourgeois process of social reform. The authors show that throughout American welfare history, relatively spontaneous and locally organised explosions by the poor have provoked progressive reform. Then, as the pressure from below ebbs, the reforms are bureaucratically manipulated in order to 'regulate' (ie. discipline and police) the poor. Both books deal in depth with the crises in poor relief of the 1930s and the 1960s, the former concentrating on relief policy reform and the latter on the rank-and-file organisation of both workers and the poor. Neither book is officially available in paperback in Britain (although Blackwell publish a hardback of Poor People's Movements — ironically at £10). The American paperback editions (published by Vintage) are generally available at about £2.95 each from Compendium, 234 Camden High Street, London NW1.
The Local State by Cynthia Cockburn (Pluto Press) — A sharp and virulent exposé of corporate management and community participation exercises in Lambeth local government in the early 1970s. Corporate management developed as a technique for managing the urban crisis more efficiently but it did not work well, Participation was used to police the local community and to either incorporate or destroy local grass-roots resistance. The argument is sometimes too mechanical and management's power exaggerated, The squatters proved to be a huge stumbling block which contributed to the demise of the old guard on the Labour council. An explanation of how the present Lambeth council emerged from these struggles and how it deals with management would make an important second edition.
Towards Socialist Welfare Work by Steve Bolger, Paul Corrigan, Jan Docking and Nick Frost (Macmillan, 1981, £3.95) — The argument is for a 'progressive' social work practice based in the collective organisation of social workers in close and democratic alliance with clients and communities; the [illegible] but the authors present some hard-nosed analyses of contradictions in, and some interesting reflections on progressive challenges to, social democratic strategies for social work.
Fiction
Love on the Dole by Walter Greenwood (Penguin, 1969, £1.50) — A romantic novel of the 1930s which vividly brings home the realities of that period. The individual experience of unemployment has never been so well conveyed, the way in which it divided communities, workforces, and families, the shame of claiming poor relief after the dole was cut, the prison of pauper debt — all these gradually undermine the socialist hero's health and love life, but not his conviction.
Journals
Critical Social Policy — 3 issues a year; £2.50 per copy or annual subscription £6, from the School of Social Work, 107 Princess Road East, Leicester. This new venture attempts to go beyond an academic audience and the Fabian tradition by analysing not only social policy but struggles within the welfare state from a socialist and feminist standpoint.
Bulletin of Social Policy — 3 issues a year, annual subscription £2, from 89 Mitchell Street, [illegible]. Successfully established for a number of [illegible] in an informal and open format, it describes itself as a 'socialist information journal' and provides a useful means of communication [on] policy developments and forms of [illegible].
Community Action — 6 issues a year, annual subscription £2.40, from PO Box 665, London SW1X 8DZ. A phenomenal achievement, it has been going for many years with a relentless stream of information, write-ups of local urban struggles, practical guides to taking local action over housing and other issues, and militant exposés of urban policy making and implementation, Its style is exemplary in its unpretentiousness and its appeal to the widest possible activist audience.