Lucia Vitale
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz
In its most basic definition, welfare is a form of state assistance which helps individuals meet their basic needs. Folbre defines the welfare state as “…a public sector providing education and a social safety net…” (Folbre 2009, xxx), where the social safety net is comprised of services such as health, old age security, and education (Folbre 2009, 325). In many ways the welfare state and how it has been defined since the writings of Marx has reflected not only the political and economic principles of the time, but also hegemonic ideas of the roles of women and migrants in a market society.
While welfare is not explicitly referenced in the writings of Marx, the reproduction of labor power is a related concept, and one that is later taken up by feminists and Marxist geographers in order to explore themes of welfare in contemporary times. Marx writes: “Given the individual, the production of labor-power consists in his reproduction of himself or his maintenance… the value of labor-power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of the laborer” (Marx 1867, 115). The value of labor power must be sufficient in the short run to satisfy a laborer’s natural wants, such as food, clothing, fuel, and housing. In the long run it must also “…include the means necessary for the laborer’s substitutes, i.e., his children…” (Marx 1867, 116). The capitalist, who is able to accumulate capital only when the laborer produces surplus value, is motivated to keep wages low so that they may cover the minimum required to reproduce the worker. Without this process of reproducing the laborer, there would be no laborer for the capitalist to accumulate surplus labor from. The reproduction of labor power requires wages from the employer to purchase goods on the market such as food. Unpaid female labor which is, for example, used to cook the food purchased from the market, is one way that labor power is reproduced. Alternatively, or in addition to, labor power may be assisted by the state through welfare programs used to acquire necessary goods such as housing and access to medical care.
In a discussion on Marx’s conception of capital as value in motion, Marxist geographer David Harvey writes how this motion begins with a capitalist going into the market to purchase labor power. The price of purchasing this labor power, Harvey writes, is determined by the costs of reproducing labor power at a given standard of living. Inherent in this calculation, then, are questions of who is responsible for the reproduction of labor (the two examples above were women and the state). Harvey writes,
In effect capital relies upon the workers and their families to take care of their own processes of reproduction (with perhaps some assistance from the state). Marx follows capital and likewise treats of social reproduction as a separate and autonomous sphere of activity providing in effect a free gift to capital in the persona of the laborer who returns to the workplace as fit and ready to work as possible (Harvey 2018, 14, italics added).
The capitalist, then, is reliant on unpaid labor from the family and, if present, support from the state in the form of welfare given as free gifts to his laborers.
Feminist scholar Nancy Folbre picks up on these themes of reproduction of labor, arguing that mens’ pursuit of self-interest is made possible only when women act in an altruistic manner, i.e. caring for children, the elderly, and performing housework necessary to reproduce the laborers in her household. In one passage she uses Adam Smith’s critique of state intervention into the economy, writing on how Smith was a known critic of his era’s “poor laws” and how they would hinder free trade and mobility of labor while simultaneously stifling male initiative (Folbre 2005, 65). Folbre traces this idea through time, and comments on how early welfare state policies have often been called the nanny state, a term which “…is often used to deprecate public policies that seem fussy, intrusive, and expensive, policies that would perhaps be unnecessary if individual women were more virtuous” (Folbre 2005, 268). State welfare, often deemed an inefficient intrusion onto a free market economic system, doesn’t provide support for traditionally market-based activities, but rather finances forms of care such as education and childcare, which are traditionally performed by women. Extending rights to women, then, allows them to exit their care roles, thereby facilitating state intervention through welfare and, as we will later see, a subsequent market co-optation of these public goods.
The New Deal era in the post-war “golden age” led by Americans was “…usually presented as the victory of the interventionist, or welfare, economy over the market economy” (Panitch and Gindin 2012, 9). It is this protective response to the marketization of society that Karl Polanyi calls the double movement (Polanyi 1944). During this time of interventionist welfare programs, Keynesian macroeconomic policies allowed, among other things, states to run deficits in order to invest in public works projects. This investment laid the groundwork for the modern welfare state, and its subsequent eradication (Hardt and Negri 2001, 242). As public monies were put to work establishing systems of Social Security, unemployment payments, and public health programs in the 1930s, the largest immigration surge in US history was underway. By the time Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal policies were in motion, immigrants, including white European immigrants and Mexican immigrants, made up 12% of the US population. Race and ethnicity, tied up with immigrant status, were used as exclusionary tools in protecting the welfare state from “undeserving recipients”. In an impressive comparative project which considers welfare access by European immigrants, Mexican immigrants, and Black Americans in the United States from the Progressive Era to the New Deal, Cybelle Fox (2012) considers the racial and ethnic exclusionary practices employed to keep state resources aimed at groups thought to possess the ability to “assimilate” into American culture. Just as welfare programs provoked anxieties surrounding the emancipation of women, so too did they provoke racial and ethnic anxieties of the “worthy” recipient.
As the Keynesian promise of full employment was fulfilled, workers gained bargaining rights and saw their social wage rise (both in terms of wage paid and in welfare received). The resulting squeeze on capitalist surplus spurred a decrease in the rate of profit and sparked a backlash in the 60s and 70s. As inflation soared through the 70s, Chair of the Federal Reserve Paul Volker hiked interest rates in an effort to break inflation. “Fundamentally, the Volker shock was not so much about finding the right monetary policy as shifting the balance of class forces in American society” (Panitch & Gindin 2012, 171). It was under this pretense that the Ronald Regan presidency was able to cut welfare, food stamps, Medicare, public pensions, and unemployment insurance.
These programs had been developed with public funding and, as such, had become a certain basket of public goods existing in the commons to which citizens were entitled. Hardt and Negri write, “The rise and fall of the welfare state in the twentieth century is one more cycle in this spiral of public and private appropriations” (Hardt & Negri 2001, 301). Since the structure of public assistance and their distribution systems were created through publicly-funded projects, their subsequent co-optation by the market represents privatization and expropriation for private gains. The commons are the basis for the concept of the public, and when they are privately appropriated by market regimes and neoliberalism “…the immanent relation between the public and the common is replaced by the transcendent power of private property” (Hardt & Negri 2001, 301).
Not only is the privatization of publicly-funded social programs existing in the commons a hallmark of neoliberalizing processes, so too is exposure to risk. In his book on the 2008 financial crash Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, Philip Mirowski (2013) considers the American neoliberal entrepreneurial spirit, writing that “…Anyone who participates in the welfare states is just a dull drone, lost in a vegetative state. They are debased because they expect the state to shield them from risk, when in fact, they should be reveling in the opportunity to remake themselves” (116). The contemporary neoliberal individual, then, is conditioned to reject welfare services on the basis that the “nanny state”, to borrow Folbre’s term, prevents the development of a self-sufficient, entrepreneurial market subject.
Also writing from the Great Recession, Eva Bertram uses the term “workfare” to describe the patchwork American welfare state and its requirement of (often private) employment in order to receive state benefits. This process, which she identifies as beginning in the 1960s and reaching its peak in the 1990s, occurred alongside deindustrialization and the resulting inability of low-wage jobs to provide income security and stability. She writes that “workfare policies were imposed in the context of sweeping economic changes that made low- wage work an increasingly unreliable path from poverty to economic security” (Bertram 2015, 6). The policies, another example of welfare state policy following the contours of political economic development, effectively kept lower classes from achieving social mobility.
Bibliography
Bertram, Eva. Workfare: Public Assistance Politics from the New Deal to the New Democrats. American Governance: Politics, Policy, and Public Law. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.
Folbre, Nancy. Greed, Lust & Gender: A History of Economic Ideas. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Fox, Cybelle. Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration, and the American Welfare State from the Progressive Era to the New Deal. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press, 2001.
Harvey, David. Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume One, The Process of Production Capital. 1867.
Mirowski, Philip. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. London: Verso 2013.
Panitch, Leo, and Sam Gindin. The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire. London; Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2012.
Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. New York: Octagon Books, 1944.