ABSTRACT
Disillusionment with the Welfare State in 1980s contrasts starkly with the hopes that were invested in its development in 1940s. One strand in this disillusionment is the suggestion that individuals, within the working class especially, have experienced Welfare State provision in health, education, housing, social security and personal social services as predominantly alien, bureaucratic and remote. The emergence of a distinctively Marxist approach to the study of social policy in Britain is of relatively recent origin and signalled by the early work of Saville. Schneider's approach to mental illness must, if it is to be Marxist, begin not with libido, as Freud's did, but with work. Like Schneider, Seve is concerned with the nature of human labour under capitalism and sees this labour as central to a Marxist theory of personality. The relation of an individual's experience of the world to the social relations of capitalist production and reproduction is effectively hidden from view.
