ABSTRACT

The conditions of international political stability and profitable economic growth, upon which all West European and North American welfare states have been seriously eroded. Welfare state systems generate more policy failures, political conflict and social resistance than they are capable of resolving; the crisis management strategies of the welfare state themselves become subject to new forms of crisis tendency. The likelihood of permanent fiscal deficits also grows because there is a contradiction between the ever-expanding costs associated with the welfare state's 'socialization' of production and the continuing private control over investment and the appropriation of its profits. Welfare state planning systematically produces unforeseen difficulties, 'bottlenecks', policy reversals and challenges to its effectiveness and legitimacy. Under welfare capitalist conditions, mass loyalty to the existing system of administrative and political power tends to disintegrate to a serious extent. Welfare state penetrates all spheres of civil society, social resistance to its misformulated, inequitable and often repressive policies can and must also be everywhere.