I had a bit of an arguement on Saturday with somebody that was at the ICC meeting that I went to, they were saying that the welfare state, the NHS etc, weren't really gains for the working class (i didn't really understand their argument as to why not), whereas I was saying that the huge amount of social pressure after the war meant that the ruling class of the country had to introduce these "concessions" in order to prevent social unrest or prevent a revolution from taking place, and that they wouldn't have introduced something like the NHS if they hadn't been forced to.
What is the argument for saying that the social welfare system and the NHS weren't gains for the working class? Surely the NHS is an example of something that's run according to people's needs rather than profit (well originally anyway) I don't see how this isn't a good thing, or worth defending?
or have i got this wrong? Perhaps I misunderstood what the person was saying. Because surely saying that things like the NHS weren't really gains etc could justify thinking that privatisation wasn't a problem and things like that (I'm not saying the person thought that, I don't think they did) but surely that is where the argument could end up?
I think you're right, it was a gain for the working class, but it wasn't a permanent shift in a socialist direction, it was also part of a global project of re-establishing American-led capitalism in the long term. That's why we have the apparent contradiction whereby the NHS and welfare state, the crowning achievements of post-war British social democracy, being paid for (in part) by the Marshall Plan. It was part of a project to re-establish globalisation, part of which involved rebuilding the shattered economies of western europe (and Japan) as a potential export market for US goods, and as a means of providing enough real concessions to prevent widespread growth of Communism as an alternative to US control. This is just as Harold Wilson was fond of saying, when he was fending off accusations of being a Communist "The best defence against Communism abroad is a strong social democracy at home" which is a standard Labourist line. I recommend Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin's
The Making of Global Capitalism, it's really clearly written and goes into great detail on this stuff, but this quote stands out. This might be what the other person was getting at:
The US-led postwar order is usually presented in terms of the victory of the interventionist, or welfare, economy over the market economy, which allowed states to cushion their populations from external disruptions in the context of the movement towards greater openness in the international economy. But what the notion of this so-called "embedded liberalism" obscures is that the social welfare model were structured to be embedded in capialist social relations. They facilitated not the "decommodication" of society, but rather its increasing commodification through full employment in the labor market and through the consumer demand that the welfare state made possible. The social reforms of the welfare state were extremely important in terms of employment and income security, education and social mobility, and they strengthened the working classes in many respects; but at the same time these reforms were limited by the way they were linked to the spreading and deepening of markets amid the relaunching of global capitalism
Education,mutuals, friendly societies, trade unions of course. I think someone once described it as something like 'workers took their affairs in their own hands and what is more important kept them in their own hands'.
I wonder how different both our benefits system and welfare state would be if the working class ran it.
The thing is both the friendly societies and the nationalisation worked in the same way - within capitalist property relations as a means of providing some decent standard of living within capitalism. Funeral societies were to mitigate against capitalism, just as social security is to mitigate capitalism. That goes for the unions too. That isn't to say there's something inherently wrong with those things, or that socialist movements couldn't emerge through those kinds of institutions, but it shouldn't be the limits of our imaginations. There's a tendency as well of Blue Labour style people who really invoke that sort of funeral society, mutualist heritage as a cover to justify cutting the welfare state and privatisation and so on - Jon Cruddas for example is up to his neck in this shit.
Another thing to remember is the policy of nationalisation post 45 was born of genuine pressure from below, based on the inadaquecy of DIY welfare that had existed in a scattered, ad hoc way previously. The realisation that in the direct aftermath of world war 2 you couldn't organise a high standard of universal welfare on a strictly participatory basis, likewise the "commanding heights" of the economy couldn't feasibly be run by any other institution other than the state, which meant that working-class led welfare systems existing outside that framework weren't considered. The NHS was born out of the same movements as the friendly societies anyway, and seen as an logical extention of them with state backing. Also, because the dominant socialist political organisation in Britain is Labour, and thus forever wedded to exclusively parliamentary forms of action, it's always meant that what opportunities there are/were for welfare organised democratically by working class people outside of the state were generally ignored in favour of a liberal state-led approach.
Welfare is not explicitly socialist, there's been welfare systems pre-capitalism, going back centuries. The notion that the state has literally no obligation to the subjects welfare isn't the default setting pre welfare state- infact it was the rise of classical economics as a crude dogma that enforced that, there were earlier paternalistic traditions, based on christian duty (and perhaps a realisation that giving small sums of money to the poor from time to time was cheaper than paying for a standing army to constantly engaged in putting down peasant revolts etc) that existed going right back into medievil society that you could consider welfare of a kind. Even in feudalism there were tithes and stuff, things embedded in feudal social relations.
Along with that, as has already been mentioned, In British it was Liberal figures like Lloyd George and Churchill that were behind setting up the early British welfare state in the aftermath the huge 1906 general election victory for the liberals - an election which showed a huge swing to the left even though we had a deeply undemocratic system that favoured the wealthy. It's also worth pointing out that perhaps the first truly modern welfare state in Europe was introduced by Bismark. And there it as quite consciously done to undermine the rising support for the social democrats in late 19th century Germany, to compliment the draconian the anti-socialist legislation he passed.
There's more I could write there I'm being a lazy with some of the details but it's quite late so forgive me.
