ABSTRACT
An ‘innovation’ phase – like the one of labours are living through at present – tends to reduce security by its demands for ‘entrepreneurial’ attitudes and skills from all and, in particular, from those who lose out under universalised competition. In the politics too ‘social exclusion’ rather than e.g. ‘poverty’ is invoked in order to make highly selective welfare policies, in contrast to measures aimed at (material) equality, acceptable. The terminology of ‘social exclusion’ was made politically fashionable by British ‘New Labour’, following earlier Francophone understanding of the problem areas of society as the ‘marginalisation’. In the form that has historically developed the one extreme of the welfare state is the ‘labour official’ realized in the communist states: universal employment by the state, therefore universal social security participation – in so far as it is granted by the state.
