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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

beyond welfare « Previous | |Next »
September 14, 2006

Mitchell Sviridoff in a review of Lawrence Mead's Beyond Entitlement The Social Obligations of Citizenship in the New York Times (circa 1985) gives a useful account of the rightwing critique of the welfare state. He says:

The assault on the American welfare state by the intellectual right began 15 years ago with ''The Unheavenly City'' by Edward Banfield. Mr. Banfield argued with considerable cogency that the acute troubles of the urban poor would persist for decades; they were not caused principally by poverty and therefore would not yield to conventional antipoverty measures. Mr. Banfield's seminal idea has been enlarged and reinforced by a succession of articles in the [now defunct] quarterly The Public Interest and by the works of Thomas Sowell, James Q. Wilson, George Gilder and others, and most dramatically by Charles Murray's recent ''Losing Ground.'' Fitting neatly into the conservative political agenda, these views have had a growing impact on public policy

This highlights how the limitations of the left's understanding of neo-liberalism and its policy agenda of privatization and deregulation. This understanding is most commonly seen as primarily economic as it has come from a political economy perspective. The argument is that the nation state has not been subverted but drawn into interconnecting and overlapping global authority structures where it actively participates in the promotion of free market objectives Here in Australia, the pursuit of these objectives by the Federal Government can be seen to have occurred through the adoption of a neoliberal agenda which, amongst other things, has lead to the withdrawal of state subsidies, the demise of trade protectionism, the deregulation of industries and the rise of notions, and practices, of community self-help and active citizenship.

This critique of neoliberalism itself most often falls back on economic models of argumentation, diagnoses neoliberalism as an expansion of economy in politics and takes for granted the separation of state and market. This response is understandable, given Murray's proposal to dismantle the welfare state and let the marketplace, the family, the neighborhood and old-fashioned charity deal with the problem of the poor.

Don Arthur's Alliance against Daddy post over at Club Troppo highlights the politics of the neo-liberal mode of governance by introducing the category of paternalism This highlights the way government increasingly seeks to supervise the lives of poor citizens who are dependent on it.

What we have is emergence of new forms of governance, undertaken by a network of government, private and voluntary actors. This requires new ways of thinking about the state. The concept of governmentality can deepen this turn to the political, as it shows that both the conservative and classical liberal strands are political strategies. The transformation of the relations of economics and politics are investigated from the perspective of a transformation of social power relations. In short, instead of the power of the economy, the analytic of governmentality returns the focus to the "economy of power".

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 07:31 PM | | Comments (1)
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I would like to extend an invitation to you to join in on a collective blogging section of our upcoming winter issue of Reconstruction

Here is the original call:

Theories/Practices of Blogging

Our intent in this section of the issue will be to collect a wide range of bloggers and link up to their statements in regards to why they blog (something many of us are asked) and any statement they have on the theories/practices of blogging.

If you already have a post on this you can feel free to use it, or, if you are interested, you can submit a new one.

We will link to each statement from the issue at our site, with the intent of creating a hyperlinked list of statements on blogging that can serve as an introduction to blogging (or an expansion of knowledge for those already blogging).

If you are interested please contact me at mdbento @ gmail.com