ABSTRACT
At the heart of all these crises stood the welfare state, celebrated as an extraordinary political organisation, but increasingly viewed as an accomplishment which had reached its utter limits (Flora 1985, 1986-87), a view shared by the OECD (1981, 1985). Marxist analyses in particular theorised that the redistributive logic of the welfare state contradicted the generic logic of capitalism, governed as this system is by the functional needs of profitability and accumulation, and that this contradiction posed a threat to legitimacy and would necessarily lead to the transformation of the welfare state (e.g. O’Connor 1973; Ginsburg 1979; Gough 1979; Offe 1984; but see Skocpol 1980). The prospects for the welfare state were argued to be gloomy and its core structures were likely to be transformed radically as they were dysfunctional to the accumulation needs of capital.
