Transforming Capitalism through Real Utopias: A Critical Engagement

2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 51-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Conor McCabe
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
The State ◽  
The Past ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
Class Power ◽  
Organisational Structures ◽  
Missing Element ◽  
The Welfare State

This article argues that Wright's work poorly understands the frameworks and organisational structures necessary to confront class power. Taking Wright's symbiotic strategies, it makes the point that if those strategies start to make gains, capital will react – and with force – but that Wright fails to build this into his argument. This leaves unaddressed the changes in class power in the past forty years and the implications of these for viable counter-capitalist strategies, avoiding any mention of trade unions or political parties. It states that the missing element in Wright's proposals is class power. Identifying financialisation as being at the heart of the changes in class power, it sees the state and state services as a crucial battleground as any democratic gains here are losses for finance capital. As the drive to dismantle the welfare state places more pressure on women, the article ends by focusing attention on the importance of women's struggles against cutbacks and privatisation of state provision.

scholarly journals State Policies Towards Precarious Work: Employment and Unemployment in Contemporary Portugal

2016 ◽  
Vol 61 (S24) ◽  
pp. 263-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raquel Varela
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
State Policies ◽  
The State ◽  
Precarious Work ◽  
Labour Relations ◽  
The Third ◽  
Short Overview ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Welfare State

AbstractIn the context of the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations, in this article, we relate the analysis of precarious work in Portugal to the state, in particular, as a direct participant functioning as both employer and mediator. In the second part, we present a short overview of the evolution of casualization in the context of employment and unemployment in contemporary Portugal (1974–2014). In the third section, we discuss state policies on labour relations, particularly in the context of the welfare state. Finally, we compare this present analysis with Swedish research done from the perspective of the state as a direct participant and mediator over the past four decades.

Retrenched, Reconfigured and Broken: The British Welfare State after a Decade of Austerity

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-96
Author(s):  
Kevin Farnsworth
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Public Expenditure ◽  
The State ◽  
Social Policies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Crisis Events ◽  
Financial Base ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Welfare State

This article is an attempt to take stock and critically reflect on the UK’s decade of austerity and social policy hostility over the past decade. It distinguishes between economic and political austerity and digs deeper into the data on expenditure in order to examine the impact of austerity on British public expenditure and politics. It argues that the decade of austerity was a hostile one for British social policy which not only undermined the financial base of key parts of the welfare state, it reshaped it and redefined its priorities, setting in train a series of subsequent events that would further change, not just British social policies, but British economics, polity and politics. And, as subsequent crises – notably Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic – testify, crisis events tend to be linked, and each one shapes and influences the ability of the state to respond to the next.

Speaking Notes With the Bishop of London on how and why the Church might be losing its nerve and its role in the modern society

1982 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 351-361 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ghiţa Ionescu
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
The State ◽  
Industrial Society ◽  
Political Organizations ◽  
Private Lives ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Welfare State

THE FUTURE OF MODERN DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY APPEARS TO depend on the amount of political participation, i.e. on how much its individuals will have to participate in political interests and activities. To be sure, the way industrial society functions requires an increasing involvement of the individual in public activities. But is there a danger that the private lives and aspirations of all individuals will be increasingly absorbed by the ‘public cause’? And that the Church, the intellectuals, the artists, the trade unions, and last but not least, the media might become transmission-belts of the ideological-political organizations?The welfare state gives in principle a due primacy to man's free choice of how to fulfil himself, for himself and not by the state and for the state. But within the welfare state, which could continue this balancing act, which is this balancing act, it is the individuals themselves who seem now to be more and more attracted, for stark economic reasons, but also because of ideological fallacies by the ‘external goods’ rather than by the ontological and interiorized raison d'être. Are we witnessing the transformation of the real man into the citizen, or comrade, of man into fan?

In Need

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordanna Bailkin
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
The State ◽  
Ethnic Identities ◽  
Refugee Camps ◽  
Downward Mobility ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Welfare State

This chapter asks how refugee camps transformed people as well as spaces, altering the identities of the individuals and communities who lived in and near them. It considers how camps forged and fractured economic, religious, and ethnic identities, constructing different kinds of unity and disunity. Camps had unpredictable effects on how refugees and Britons thought of themselves, and how they saw their relationship to upward and downward mobility. As the impoverished Briton emerged more clearly in the imagination of the welfare state, the refugee was his constant companion and critic. The state struggled to determine whether refugees required the same care as the poor, or if they warranted their own structures of aid.

scholarly journals Εθνικές προτεραιότητες και ευρωπαϊκές προκλήσεις στη μεταρρύθμιση του συστήματος κοινωνικής προστασίας και απασχόλησης στην Ελλάδα, 1980-2004

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Θεόδωρος Σακελλαρόπουλος ◽  
Χαράλαμπος Οικονόμου
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Protection ◽  
Social Deficits ◽  
Employment Policies ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Welfare State

The reforms of social protection and employment policies that took place in Greece over the past three decades were dictated mainly by domestic priorities and needs. Contrary to international tendencies, social protection reforms in Greece obeyed mainly to the need for expansion of the welfare state in new areas, in order to fill the structural and historical social deficits. Policies and initiatives of European inspiration were succesfull only in so far as they pointed towards a direction of further strengthening of the welfare state

scholarly journals Social innovation as a policy response to restructure the welfare state

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 269-276
Author(s):  
Doğa Başar Sariipek ◽  
Gökçe Cerev ◽  
Bora Yenihan
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Protection ◽  
Social Innovation ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
The State ◽  
Welfare Provision ◽  
Civil Society Organisations ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Social Risks ◽  
The Welfare State

The focus of this paper is the interaction between social innovation and restructuring welfare state. Modern welfare states have been reconfiguring their welfare mixes through social innovation. This includes a productive integration of formal and informal actors with support and leading role of the state. This collaboration becomes significantly important since it means the integration of not only the actors, but also their capabilities and resources in today’s world where new social risks and new social challenges have emerged and no actor can overcome these by its own. Therefore, social innovation is a useful tool in the new role sharing within the welfare mix in order to reach higher levels of satisfaction and success in welfare provision. The main point here is that this is not a zero-sum competition; gaining more power of the actors other than the state – the market, civil society organisations and the family – does not necessarily mean that the state lost its leading role and power. This is rather a new type of cooperation among actors and their capabilities as well as their resources in welfare provision. In this sense, social innovation may contribute well to the debates over the financial crisis of the welfare state since it may lead to the more wisely use of existing resources of welfare actors. Thanks to social innovative programs, not only the NGOs, but also market forces as well as citizens are more active to access welfare provisions and social protection in the broadest sense. Thus, social innovative strategies are definitely a solid step taken towards “enabling” or “active” welfare state.

Models of the Welfare State

2021 ◽  
pp. 786-802
Author(s):  
Philip Manow
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Short Discussion ◽  
The West ◽  
Welfare Capitalism ◽  
European Model ◽  
The Past ◽  
State Research ◽  
The Welfare State

IN 1990, Gøsta Esping-Andersen published The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, a work which has turned out to be the single most important and decisive contribution to welfare state research in the past thirty to forty years. In essence, Esping-Andersen argued that we can observe systematic variation in the character of the developed welfare states of the West, which he grouped into three distinct welfare state models: a Scandinavian social democratic model, a conservative continental European model, and a liberal Anglo-Saxon model. This chapter provides a short description of Esping-Andersen’s three regimes; introduces a fourth, Southern European model, which will then be described in somewhat more detail; and outlines a historical and genealogical account of the development of all four models. Finally, the chapter briefly expands on the comparative perspective with a short discussion on whether the regime concept or the understanding of distinct welfare models can also be applied to other regions, such as Latin America and Asia.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-33
Author(s):  
Benjamin Kohlmann
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Institutional Change ◽  
British Literature ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Administrative Procedures ◽  
The Welfare State

The Introduction begins to outline a literary prehistory of the welfare state in Britain around 1900 by turning to a period that forces us to look beyond the connotations associated with the terms reform and revolution today. The chapter presents the book’s two intertwined goals, one reconstructive and literary-historical, the other conceptual and theoretical. First, British Literature and the Life of Institutions reconstructs the emergence of a reformist literary mode around 1900 by exploring how literary texts responded and adapted to the elongated rhythms of institutional change that characterized the emergence of new state structures in this period. But the book also, secondly, aims to make visible a reformist idiom which pervades literary, philosophical, political, and social writing of the period, and which insists that we need to think about the state as an idea, as a speculative figure, rather than as a set of administrative procedures and bureaucratic processes.

Welfare and the State

2000 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 105-120
Author(s):  
Melanie Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Moral Worth ◽  
The State ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Welfare State

Once upon a time, there was a consensus in this country that the welfare state was the jewel in the crown of the post-war settlement. It was a national badge of moral worth. It was held to embody certain virtues that people told themselves were the hallmark of a civilised society: altruism, equity, dignity, fellowship. It defined Britain as a co-operative exercise which bound us together into a cohesive society. Or so we told ourselves.

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