Patrick:
Yes, this is exactly what it is all about--it is the political payoff
of the welfare state, if it is done correctly. Esping-Andersen has been
rightly criticized in the United States by people like Ann Shola Orloff
(have you seen her June, 1993 American Sociological Review article?) for
making male workers rather female workers/caretakers the default unit of
his analysis. And Esping-Andersen has tried to incorporate such criticism
in his new book Social Foundations of PostIndustrial Economies (Oxford,
1999). But his larger point about class alliances remains sound. By further
entrenching means-testing in the U.S. welfare state, the economic
transformation of the last twenty-five years has helped to split the middle
strata from the poor in classic Esping-Andersen fashion. From Sweden at
one of the spectrum to the United States at the other, such alliances propelled
the welfare state to the peak of its power in the early 1970s. The challenge
now is to recreate that cross-class alliance under different economic circumstances.
Universalism in social policy should be one crucial ingredient in
that effort.
Joel Blau
That's what it's all about, right? Class consciousness,
the demand that basic needs must be human rights, alliance-formation
and intelligent advocacy politics... which in turn takes us as far
as
capitalism is willing to concede such transfers (from the standpoint
of reproducing labour power and state legitimation), and
into the realm of challenging capitalism itself...
Patrick Bond wrote:
> From:
Joel Blau [EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Then, you are trying to find a way to do targeting within universalism,
and we
> agree. I thought for a long time that something like what you are
doing is the
> way out of the dilemma I described, so I'd be interested in seeing
what you
> come up with.
>From a long distance away (in a place where virtually everything in
the way of welfare and social goodies the state provides is
stratified, means-tested and subject to stigma), we've got a good
group of activists and intellectuals pushing hard on the twin themes
of decommodification and destratification. One of the main fights now
is access to a free lifeline water supply of 50 litres potable water
per person per day (I use that much the first 15 minutes after
waking, on the loo and in the shower--so after that the block tariff
should start rising fast... but given residual apartheid-era power
relations it doesn't yet).
> > This is the classic problem of universalism vs. targeting efficiency,
but
> > I'm
> > not sure I come down on the same side you do. On the universalistic
side,
> > money for the poor requires, as a kind of informal political blackmail,
> > money
> > for the rich (or at least the more affluent). Targeting focuses
the
> > benefits,
> > but risks the stigma of welfare and has all the other problems
that you and
> > Nathan have been debating. Under ideal circumstances, I would prefer
> > universalistic benefits that are taxed differentially, because
I think they
> > encourage the formation of more durable political coalitions.
This is the point made again and again by Gosta Esping-Andersen in
studies of The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, as well as Vicente
Navarro in a 1999 Jn'l of Int'l Health Services defense of the
welfare state as a class project.
That's what it's all about, right? Class consciousness,
the demand that basic needs must be human rights, alliance-formation
and intelligent advocacy politics... which in turn takes us as far
as
capitalism is willing to concede such transfers (from the standpoint
of reproducing labour power and state legitimation), and
into the realm of challenging capitalism itself...
Patrick Bond
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * phone: 2711-614-8088
home: 51 Somerset Road, Kensington 2094 South Africa
work: University of the Witwatersrand
Graduate School of Public and Development Management
PO Box 601, Wits 2050, South Africa
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
phone: 2711-488-5917 * fax: 2711-484-2729
