Welfare State Capitalism Research Articles

Opportunities and limitations for social justice in Germany’s climate adaptation policy

In the quest for (more) effective adaptation, demands are rising in adaptation policy practitioners to address systemic injustices. In practice, however, adaptation incrementalism dominates, i.e. small-scale, reactive solutions, especially as it relates to addressing vulnerable populations. Germany is exemplary of these tensions. Little research investigates the larger context factors which impede the root causes of vulnerability from being addressed, how to transition away from incrementalism, and the role environmental agencies can play in this. Applying historical materialist policy analysis, the article follows a three-step approach which examines context, actors, and processes. The context analysis demonstrates how effective means for social redistribution were reduced since the mid-1980s in Germany’s capitalist welfare state. This corresponds with heightened social vulnerability to climate change. The actor landscape is diversifying. In the past, social policy actors (and tasks) were underrepresented but are becoming more important. The policy process indicates a greater focus on vulnerable populations. Yet, the understanding of the structural root causes of peoples’ vulnerability and financial resources of the policy field remain limited. This corresponds with informatory instruments of shallow depth. An improved root cause analytic coupled with new alliances and policy mixes are a good starting point towards greater social justice in adaptation.

Can Democratic Equality Justify Capitalism?

Jeppe von Platz has recently argued that welfare-state capitalism can be justified by a theory of democratic equality, challenging John Rawls’s critique of capitalism. Von Platz develops his argument by introducing a social democratic interpretation of democratic equality as an alternative to Rawls’s justice as fairness. Unlike justice as fairness, in which there is only one possible principle of reciprocity (the difference principle), social democracy includes four possible principles in an eligible set that could be chosen as a principle of reciprocity. However, I argue that von Platz’s conception of reciprocity still fails to justify welfare-state capitalism. Of the four principles of reciprocity in social democracy’s eligible set, one of them, the principle of utility, does not express a notion of reciprocity and thus does not belong. The other three – the principle of equality, the difference principle, and the principle of equity – are not compatible with welfare-state capitalism. Thus, since capitalism cannot satisfy a principle of reciprocity in the (revised) eligible set, it is incompatible with the social democratic interpretation of democratic equality.

Scandinavian Imperialism

Abstract This article is about Scandinavia—mainly Sweden’s—integration into and role within global capitalism. I focus on Sweden because it is the most important in economic terms; and “the Swedish model” is the ideal type of capitalist welfare state and social democracy there is most advanced. It covers the period from colonialism to present-day global commodity chains. It also describes the impact of imperialism on the working class in this process. Finally, it takes up Scandinavia’s current role in the imperialist system. The Scandinavian country’s economic and political systems cannot be understood without this long and global perspective. The development of global capitalism has significantly influenced the national contradictions that have come to define the “Scandinavian model.”

Irrational or Rational? Time to Rethink Our Understanding of Financially Responsible Behavior

Models of finance rationality expect individuals to actively prepare for retirement by consistently investing and building a diversified asset portfolio, with any behavior deviating from these expectations being identified as irresponsible. This framework of (ir)rationality and (ir)responsibility ignores the role of constraints in shaping financial behavior. Extending economic geographic insights on everyday financial practices as complex processes of meaning-making, we reveal how varied approaches to retirement savings are shaped by the experience of constraints inherent in a capitalist welfare state. Using the accounts of forty-two interviewed women and people with a minority ethnic background in the UK, we show how the interplay between everyday rationalities and structural constraints construct variegated financial subjectivities and practices that reflect the context that individuals face. Our findings contribute to the theorization of variegated financial subjects and disrupt the application of corrective policy measures, such as financial education, which put more pressure on individuals rather than tackling the inequalities inherent in the capitalist welfare state broadly and in the pension system specifically.

Gendered racism

This article examines the intersecting oppressions of Danish welfare politics and its emerging interest in emancipating ‘immigrant’ women and girls. It draws on Patricia Hill Collins’ notion of controlling images and, based on a documentary text corpus, it identifies how the images of the unfree immigrant housewife and the inhibited immigrant girl are formed through oxymoronic liberal arguments of care and control. The article demonstrates how this plays out in an assemblage of policy documents and suggests why welfare professionalism is called upon to ‘rescue’ ‘immigrant’ women and girls, situating welfare politics and professionalism within the racial welfare state and its racial capitalist and Orientalist logics. The analyses demonstrate how gendered and racialized signifiers help to structure welfare politics and professionalism, and how a space of emancipation is intertwined with a global economic division of labor. The article suggests that racialized welfare politics and professionalism are permeated by the desire to emancipate women, which remains a powerful impulse within Danish welfare state capitalism, liberalism and social-democratic reasoning.

RAWLS, INEQUALITY, AND WELFARE-STATE CAPITALISM

RAWLS, INEQUALITY, AND WELFARE-STATE CAPITALISM

Emancipating human rights: Capitalism and the common good

AbstractThis article begins with a study of the political economy of welfare capitalism to demonstrate how the private quest for profit was never going to be undermined by the advance of socio-economic rights. Contrary to the conventional view among human rights lawyers, capital draws power from its rights or welfarism. It is in recognizing the role that socio-economic rights play in serving capitalism that the field of international law concerned with structurally transformative human rights can begin to explore how socio-economic rights inhibit alternative forms of social organization. This work then turns to recovering property rights through a study of recent evictions and housing rights case law of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights that problematizes structural inequities and calls the financialized capitalist system into question. Next this work investigates radical legal positivism in international indigenous rights jurisprudence for how it transcends the private ownership of indigenous lands and control over the means of production. The social function of property rights is then revisited and extended, drawing to a close an article that unearths how socio-economic rights might yet emancipate people from capitalist property relations, alter the underlying structure of the economy, and, in time, sever its concordance with the capitalist welfare state.

Addressing the rise of inequalities: How relevant is Rawls's critique of welfare state capitalism?

Addressing the rise of inequalities: How relevant is Rawls's critique of welfare state capitalism?

Democratic equality and Rawls's criticism of welfare state capitalism

Despite the accusation of developing an abstract theory, detached from real conditions, depoliticizing, and ultimately inclined towards the status quo, Rawls did not fail to analyze, since 1971, the political-economic conditions in which his theory could become viable. The analysis of this topic concludes with the statement that the principles and ideals of his theory could not be satisfied under capitalism in any of its forms.
 This article discusses the possibilities of making justice as fairness compatible under a capitalist welfare state and shows that the reasons Rawls presented for denying this possibility remain perfectly valid. The difficulties of a welfare state to curb the tendencies of capitalism towards undemocratic inequality make it unviable. The article defends that, although it is a noble ideal to avoid that no one should fall below a certain social minimum, the requirements of the principles of justice are much more demanding. The article concludes by defending Rawls's methodology and main arguments and showing that far from having depoliticizing effects, justice as fairness allows us to broaden the political imagination both to denounce the high oligopolistic character of capitalist economies and to combat the omnipresent inclination of neoliberalism towards economic efficiency.

From altruism to sociality: A switch in perception

AbstractThe article critically reviews concepts and uses of the term altruism in relation to the emergence of the capitalist welfare state. It argues that altruism may be regarded as a fetishized representation of ‘sociality’ and that notions of altruism tend to obscure or distort understandings of the essential social interdependence that characterises humanity as a species. The article reaches back to anthropological evidence, to religious and philosophical influences, and to insights from scientific inquiry and it makes a case for a humanistic switch in perspective within the study of social policy.

Finding Work in Israeli Fiction

ABSTRACT In this article, I argue that contemporary Israeli literary criticism posits the nation as its horizon of interpretation, which has eroded Israeli literary criticism’s ability to detect newness in its objects of inquiry, and to present Israeli literary history as advancing through engagement with new social problems. I examine three literary works: A.B. Yehoshua’s 1963 novella “Facing the Forests,” Etgar Keret’s Missing Kissinger (1994), and Rutu Modan’s Exit Wounds (2007). For each, I show how critical commentary puts the nation as the center of interpretation. I then elaborate a critical position that sees the nation not as the point of critique’s termination,but as means toward trying to solve, in imagination, real social contradictions of its time. Thus, I argue that the fire in “Facing the Forests” is a figure for the threat of proletarian revolution under welfare-state capitalism; and that the fusion of realist narrative and its interpretive code in Keret’s Missing Kissinger signals a crisis of historicity whose origin is the proletarianization of Palestinians after the 1967; and lastly that Exit Wounds reestablishes Israeli historicity, using events of national significance – such as Palestinian suicide bombings – to represent the experience of precarious labor under neoliberal capitalism.

Rawls, Inequality, and Welfare State Capitalism

Rawls, Inequality, and Welfare State Capitalism

Targets and overwork: Neoliberalism and the maximisation of profitability from the workplace

Drawing on 25 qualitative interviews, this paper attends to and critiques neoliberalism to demonstrate how management’s enforcement of targets and the expectancy to overwork in various workplaces corrodes the relationship between managers and employees. First, the paper briefly charts how the shift from post-war Keynesian welfare state capitalism to neoliberalism in the global north placed renewed emphasis on maximising profitability, and what this meant for working methods and innovations that managers now use to make an organisation more efficient. This is often regarded as ‘management practices’. It then connects management practices to the political economy and therefore sheds further empirical light on how management practices under neoliberalism impact adversely on workers, generating psychological distress, instability, pressure and a negative working environment. The paper closes with a discussion of how managers potentially perform an ideological function, directing workers’ attention away from neoliberalism and cementing capitalist realism; the negative ideological belief that there is no alternative to the current political economy.

Exploring Economic Populism, a Neglected, but Growing, Phenomenon

What is the relationship between economic crises and populism? Once almost exclusively the domain of Latin Americanists, the study of populism has emerged as a leading research agenda for scholars who study Europe and the US. However, researchers have hitherto failed to systematically account for the logic of economic populism and the fact that populists emanating from either the left or the right tend to converge on a similar political economic model: protectionism, crony capitalism, and inveterate rent seeking. We provide a framework to make sense of this pattern and explain the systematic, mutually reinforcing association between crises and populism. We also adduce supporting evidence from very different places, Argentina, Chile, Greece, and Italy, and across disparate time periods. We argue that populism almost always threatens both liberal democracy and welfare state capitalism and ushers in economic collapse. We posit that a key reason for this is that, rather than seeing economic interactions as “win-win” situations, populists are obsessed with zero-sum thinking. We also speculate about what might be in store for European politics in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Poza marksizm. Hendrik de Man, „planizm” lat trzydziestych i przemiany europejskiej socjaldemokracji

Interwar period in history of European Social Democracy was a time of great hopes, but also huge, even dramatic failures. However, in the following article I argue that two decades between world wars (especially the 1930s) were a time of deep ideological reassessment in major European Social Democratic parties too. Inspired by Tommaso Milani’s work „Hendrik de Man and Social Democracy. The Idea of Planning in Western Europe, 1914-1940”, I try to present a portrait of Hendrik de Man, one of the most original, but also the most controversial, thinker of interwar Social Democracy. At first, I closely studied the intellectual roots of de Man’s „planism” – agenda, which was to be the ground-breaking answer for the deep political crisis of Social Democracy in the first half of the 1930s. De Man’s „Plan of Labour” (Le Plan du Travail) was a package of structural reforms, which should – according to de Man himself – boost economic growth in the short term, but also create firm foundations for the planned economy in the long term. In contrast to the Marxist orthodoxy, de Man believed that socialization of already monopolized heavy industry and state control over the banking sector are sufficient conditions for an effective planned economy. Furthermore, „Plan of Labour” propaganda campaign was to inflame enthusiasm among the working-class constituency of the Belgian Social Democracy and attract potential new, non-proletarian supporters. De Man’s „planism” in the middle of the 1930s aroused interest among socialists and social democrats in the whole Europe. Despite of the anathema caused by de Man’s collaboration with Nazis during World War II, the sole idea of „planism” represents important episode in intellectual history of Social Democracy and might be perceived as an early symptom of the evolution, which led to rejection of the Marxism and adoption of capitalist welfare state model after World War II.

The Aging Enterprise: A 40-Year Retrospective

Dr. Carroll Estes has long been recognized as one of our most influential social gerontologists beginning with the publication of the Aging Enterprise over 40 years ago. This book quickly achieved iconic status among gerontologists and other social scientists as one of the founding texts in critical gerontology, which Dr. Estes has played a leading role in developing with numerous publications over the course of her illustrious career. The panelists will focus on Dr. Estes’ application of the theoretical frameworks offered by the social construction of reality and the political economy of aging to a critique of federal and state policies designed to improve the quality of life of older Americans. Many of the programs and policies included in Dr. Estes’ critique are still in place, including the Older Americans Act and the nonprofit aging network. On the other hand, much about the aging enterprise has changed since 1979. The panelists, Drs. Chris Phillipson, Pamela Herd and Larry Polivka, will discuss the value of and challenges to these theoretical and empirical perspectives within the current contemporary neoliberal political economy that has gradually displaced the welfare state capitalism of the postwar period. As this shift has occurred in the political economy, a neoliberal policy agenda featuring for-profit privatization of public services, including aging services, has become dominant at the federal and state levels. Dr. Estes will respond to the panelists’ presentations and discuss the future of critical gerontology. Women's Issues Interest Group Sponsored Symposium.

Democratic Equality and the Justification of Welfare-State Capitalism

Is capitalism compatible with democratic equality? Rawls’s critique of welfare-state capitalism implies a negative answer. I argue that Rawls’s critique fails and that welfare-state capitalism can ...

Domination, Power, Supremacy: Confronting Anthropolitics with Ecological Realism

In this article, we study politics as domination. From our point of view, domination, especially in the Anthropocene, has had two vital components—power and supremacy. In order to dominate, one has to have power over others. In addition, the politics of domination, such as colonial oppression of Latin America, has required reasoning, justification, and legitimation, often connected to superiority (because of religion, society, or civilization) from the oppressor’s end. Past and present political ideologies and programs, such as colonialism, imperialism, but also welfare state capitalism, neoliberalism and increasingly popular Green New Deal are examples of what we call “anthropolitics”, an anthropocentric approach to politics based on domination, power, and supremacist exploitation. In contrast to the prevailing anthropolitics, this article discusses post-Anthropocene politics, characterized by localization and decentralization, as well as a steep reduction of matter–energy throughput by introducing a theoretical frame called ecological realism.

What Is the Argument for the Fair Value of Political Liberty?

The equal political liberties are among the basic first-principle liberties in John Rawls’s theory of Justice as fairness. Rawls insists, further, that the “fair value” of the political liberties must be guaranteed. Disavowing an interest in fair value is what disqualifies welfare-state capitalism as a possible realizer of Justice as fairness. Yet Rawls never gives a perspicuous statement of the reasoning in the original position for the fair-value guarantee. This article gathers up two distinct strands of Rawls’s argument, and presents it in a straightforward sequence. Justice as fairness is contrasted to a competitor political conception of justice that is just like it but without the fair-value guarantee. A schema of the two-strand argument is presented in the Appendix.

Private Law, Double Distortion Argument, and Property-Owning Democracy

The article discusses an argument against the use of private law for distributive purposes, Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell’s double distortion argument (Kaplow and Shavell, 1994). It is sought to ascertain whether one of the theses on which this argument rests, the thesis of equivalence, can be confirmed in the light of John Rawls’s theory of justice. According to the thesis of equivalence, an arrangement constituted by a private law sensitive to distributive justice can be replaced, without loss to justice, by an arrangement containing an efficient private law and measures of taxation and transfer of income to achieve distributive objectives. The paper tests this thesis against two interpretations of the difference, emphasized by Rawls in late writings, between two types of institutional regime, property-owning democracy and welfare state capitalism. The idea is to verify whether an efficient private law (accompanied by taxation and transfer measures) is compatible with property-owning democracy. It is argued that Rawls’s ideas about this type of regime refute the thesis of equivalence, with varying implications depending on how the difference between property-owning democracy and welfare state capitalism is understood.