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J.5.15 What attitude do anarchists take to the welfare state?

The period of neo-liberalism since the 1980s has seen a rollback of the state within society by the right-wing in the name of “freedom,” “individual responsibility” and “efficiency.” The position of anarchists to this process is mixed. On the one hand, we are all in favour of reducing the size of the state and increasing individual responsibility and freedom but, on the other, we are well aware that this rollback is part of an attack on the working class and tends to increase the power of the capitalists over us as the state’s (direct) influence is reduced. Thus anarchists appear to be on the horns of a dilemma — or, at least, apparently.

So what attitude do anarchists take to the welfare state and attacks on it?

First we must note that this attack on “welfare” is somewhat selective. While using the rhetoric of “self-reliance” and “individualism,” the practitioners of these “tough love” programmes have made sure that the major corporations continue to get state hand-outs and aid while attacking social welfare. In other words, the current attack on the welfare state is an attempt to impose market discipline on the working class while increasing state protection for the ruling class. Therefore, most anarchists have no problem defending social welfare programmes as these can be considered as only fair considering the aid the capitalist class has always received from the state (both direct subsidies and protection and indirect support via laws that protect property and so on). And, for all their talk of increasing individual choice, the right-wing remain silent about the lack of choice and individual freedom during working hours within capitalism.

Secondly, most of the right-wing inspired attacks on the welfare state are inaccurate. For example, Noam Chomsky notes that the “correlation between welfare payments and family life is real, though it is the reverse of what is claimed [by the right]. As support for the poor has declined, unwed birth-rates, which had risen steadily from the 1940s through the mid-1970s, markedly increased. ‘Over the last three decades, the rate of poverty among children almost perfectly correlates with the birth-rates among teenage mothers a decade later,’ Mike Males points out: ‘That is, child poverty seems to lead to teenage childbearing, not the other way around.’” [“Rollback III”, Z Magazine, April, 1995] The same charge of inaccurate scare-mongering can be laid at the claims about the evil effects of welfare which the rich and large corporations wish to save others (but not themselves) from. Such altruism is truly heart warming. For those in the United States or familiar with it, the same can be said of the hysterical attacks on “socialised medicine” and health-care reform funded by insurance companies and parroted by right-wing ideologues and politicians.

Thirdly, anarchists are just as opposed to capitalism as they are the state. This means that privatising state functions is no more libertarian than nationalising them. In fact, less so as such a process reduces the limited public say state control implies in favour of more private tyranny and wage-labour. As such, attempts to erode the welfare state without other, pro-working class, social reforms violates the anti-capitalist part of anarchism. Similarly, the introduction of a state supported welfare system rather than a for-profit capitalist run system (as in America) would hardly be considered any more a violation of libertarian principles as the reverse happening. In terms of reducing human suffering, though, most anarchists would oppose the latter and be in favour of the former while aiming to create a third (self-managed) alternative.

Fourthly, we must note that while most anarchists are in favour of collective self-help and welfare, we are opposed to the state. Part of the alternatives anarchists try and create are self-managed and community welfare projects (see next section). Moreover, in the past, anarchists and syndicalists were at the forefront in opposing state welfare schemes. This was because they were introduced not by socialists but by liberals and other supporters of capitalism to undercut support for radical alternatives and to aid long term economic development by creating the educated and healthy population required to use advanced technology and fight wars. Thus we find that:

“Liberal social welfare legislation … were seen by many [British syndicalists] not as genuine welfare reforms, but as mechanisms of social control. Syndicalists took a leading part in resisting such legislation on the grounds that it would increase capitalist discipline over labour, thereby undermining working class independence and self-reliance.” [Bob Holton, British Syndicalism: 1900–1914, p. 137]

Anarchists view the welfare state much as some feminists do. While they note, to quote Carole Pateman, the “patriarchal structure of the welfare state” they are also aware that it has “also brought challenges to patriarchal power and helped provide a basis for women’s autonomous citizenship.” She goes on to note that “for women to look at the welfare state is merely to exchange dependence on individual men for dependence on the state. The power and capriciousness of husbands is replaced by the arbitrariness, bureaucracy and power of the state, the very state that has upheld patriarchal power.” This “will not in itself do anything to challenge patriarchal power relations.” [The Disorder of Women, p. 195 and p. 200]

Thus while the welfare state does give working people more options than having to take any job or put up with any conditions, this relative independence from the market and individual capitalists has came at the price of dependence on the state — the very institution that protects and supports capitalism in the first place. And has we have became painfully aware in recent years, it is the ruling class who has most influence in the state — and so, when it comes to deciding what state budgets to cut, social welfare ones are first in line. Given that such programmes are controlled by the state, not working class people, such an outcome is hardly surprising. Not only this, we also find that state control reproduces the same hierarchical structures that the capitalist firm creates.

Unsurprisingly, anarchists have no great love of such state welfare schemes and desire their replacement by self-managed alternatives. For example, taking municipal housing, Colin Ward writes:

“The municipal tenant is trapped in a syndrome of dependence and resentment, which is an accurate reflection of his housing situation. People care about what is theirs, what they can modify, alter, adapt to changing needs and improve themselves. They must have a direct responsibility for it … The tenant take-over of the municipal estate is one of those obviously sensible ideas which is dormant because our approach to municipal affairs is still stuck in the groves of nineteenth-century paternalism.” [Anarchy in Action, p. 73]

Looking at state supported education, Ward argues that the “universal education system turns out to be yet another way in which the poor subsidise the rich.” Which is the least of its problems, for “it is in the nature of public authorities to run coercive and hierarchical institutions whose ultimate function is to perpetuate social inequality and to brainwash the young into the acceptance of their particular slot in the organised system.” [Op. Cit., p. 83 and p. 81] The role of state education as a means of systematically indoctrinating the working class is reflected in William Lazonick words:

“The Education Act of 1870 … [gave the] state … the facilities … to make education compulsory for all children from the age of five to the age of ten. It had also erected a powerful system of ideological control over the next generation of workers … [It] was to function as a prime ideological mechanism in the attempt by the capitalist class through the medium of the state, to continually reproduce a labour force which would passively accept [the] subjection [of labour to the domination of capital]. At the same time it had set up a public institution which could potentially be used by the working class for just the contrary purpose.” [“The Subjection of Labour to Capital: The rise of the Capitalist System”, Radical Political Economy Vol. 2, p. 363]

Lazonick, as did Pateman, indicates the contradictory nature of welfare provisions within capitalism. On the one hand, they are introduced to help control the working class (and to improve long term economic development). On the other hand, these provisions can be used by working class people as weapons against capitalism and give themselves more options than “work or starve” (the fact that the attacks on welfare in the UK during the 1990s — called, ironically enough, welfare to work — involves losing benefits if you refuse a job is not a surprising development). Thus we find that welfare acts as a kind of floor under wages. In the US, the two have followed a common trajectory (rising together and falling together). And it is this, the potential benefits welfare can have for working people, that is the real cause for the current capitalist attacks upon it. As Noam Chomsky summarises:

“State authority is now under severe attack in the more democratic societies, but not because it conflicts with the libertarian vision. Rather the opposite: because it offers (weak) protection to some aspects of that vision. Governments have a fatal flaw: unlike the private tyrannies, the institutions of state power and authority offer to the public an opportunity to play some role, however limited, in managing their own affairs.” [Chomsky on Anarchism, p. 193]

Because of this contradictory nature of welfare, we find anarchists like Noam Chomsky arguing that (using an expression popularised by South American rural workers unions) “we should ‘expand the floor of the cage.’ We know we’re in a cage. We know we’re trapped. We’re going to expand the floor, meaning we will extend to the limits what the cage will allow. And we intend to destroy the cage. But not by attacking the cage when we’re vulnerable, so they’ll murder us … You have to protect the cage when it’s under attack from even worse predators from outside, like private power. And you have to expand the floor of the cage, recognising that it’s a cage. These are all preliminaries to dismantling it. Unless people are willing to tolerate that level of complexity, they’re going to be of no use to people who are suffering and who need help, or, for that matter, to themselves.” [Expanding the Floor of the Cage]

Thus, even though we know the welfare state is a cage and part of an instrument of class power, we have to defend it from a worse possibility — namely, the state as “pure” defender of capitalism with working people with few or no rights. At least the welfare state does have a contradictory nature, the tensions of which can be used to increase our options. And one of these options is its abolition from below!

For example, with regards to municipal housing, anarchists will be the first to agree that it is paternalistic, bureaucratic and hardly a wonderful living experience. However, in stark contrast with the right who desire to privatise such estates, anarchists think that “tenants control” is the best solution as it gives us the benefits of individual ownership along with community (and so without the negative points of property, such as social atomisation). The demand for “tenant control” must come from below, by the “collective resistance” of the tenants themselves, perhaps as a result of struggles against “continuous rent increases” leading to “the demand … for a change in the status of the tenant.” Such a “tenant take-over of the municipal estate is one of those sensible ideas which is dormant because our approach to municipal affairs is still stuck in the grooves of nineteenth century paternalism.” [Ward, Op. Cit., p. 73]

And it is here that we find the ultimate irony of the right-wing, “free market” attempts to abolish the welfare state — neo-liberalism wants to end welfare from above, by means of the state (which is the instigator of this individualistic “reform”). It does not seek the end of dependency by self-liberation, but the shifting of dependency from state to charity and the market. In contrast, anarchists desire to abolish welfare from below. This the libertarian attitude to those government policies which actually do help people. While anarchists would “hesitate to condemn those measures taken by governments which obviously benefited the people, unless we saw the immediate possibility of people carrying them out for themselves. This would not inhibit us from declaring at the same time that what initiatives governments take would be more successfully taken by the people themselves if they put their minds to the same problems … to build up a hospital service or a transport system, for instance, from local needs into a national organisation, by agreement and consent at all levels is surely more economical as well as efficient than one which is conceived at top level [by the state] … where Treasury, political and other pressures, not necessarily connected with what we would describe as needs, influence the shaping of policies.” So “as long as we have capitalism and government the job of anarchists is to fight both, and at the same time encourage people to take what steps they can to run their own lives.” [“Anarchists and Voting”, pp. 176–87, The Raven, No. 14, p. 179]

Ultimately, unlike the state socialist/liberal left, anarchists reject the idea that the cause of socialism, of a free society, can be helped by using the state. Like the right, the left see political action in terms of the state. All its favourite policies have been statist — state intervention in the economy, nationalisation, state welfare, state education and so on. Whatever the problem, the left see the solution as lying in the extension of the power of the state. They continually push people in relying on others to solve their problems for them. Moreover, such state-based “aid” does not get to the core of the problem. All it does is fight the symptoms of capitalism and statism without attacking their root causes — the system itself.

Invariably, this support for the state is a move away from working class people, from trusting and empowering them to sort out their own problems. Indeed, the left seem to forget that the state exists to defend the collective interests of the ruling class and so could hardly be considered a neutral body. And, worst of all, they have presented the right with the opportunity of stating that freedom from the state means the same thing as the freedom of the market (so ignoring the awkward fact that capitalism is based upon domination — wage labour — and needs many repressive measures in order to exist and survive). Anarchists are of the opinion that changing the boss for the state (or vice versa) is only a step sideways, not forward! After all, it is not working people who control how the welfare state is run, it is politicians, “experts”, bureaucrats and managers who do so (“Welfare is administered by a top-heavy governmental machine which ensures that when economies in public expenditure are imposed by its political masters, they are made in reducing the service to the public, not by reducing the cost of administration.” [Ward, Op. Cit. p. 10]). Little wonder we have seen elements of the welfare state used as a weapon in the class war against those in struggle (for example, in Britain during the miners strike in 1980s the Conservative Government made it illegal to claim benefits while on strike, so reducing the funds available to workers in struggle and helping bosses force strikers back to work faster).

Anarchists consider it far better to encourage those who suffer injustice to organise themselves and in that way they can change what they think is actually wrong, as opposed to what politicians and “experts” claim is wrong. If sometimes part of this struggle involves protecting aspects of the welfare state (“expanding the floor of the cage”) so be it — but we will never stop there and will use such struggles as a stepping stone in abolishing the welfare state from below by creating self-managed, working class, alternatives. As part of this process anarchists also seek to transform those aspects of the welfare state they may be trying to “protect”. They do not defend an institution which is paternalistic, bureaucratic and unresponsive. For example, if we are involved in trying to stop a local state-run hospital or school from closing, anarchists would try to raise the issue of self-management and local community control into the struggle in the hope of going beyond the status quo.

In this, we follow the suggestion made by Proudhon that rather than “fatten certain contractors,” libertarians should be aiming to create “a new kind of property” by “granting the privilege of running” public utilities, industries and services, “under fixed conditions, to responsible companies, not of capitalists, but of workmen.” Municipalities would take the initiative in setting up public works but actual control would rest with workers’ co-operatives for “it becomes necessary for the workers to form themselves into democratic societies, with equal conditions for all members, on pain of a relapse into feudalism.” [General Idea of the Revolution, p. 151 and p. 276–7] Thus, for example, rather than nationalise or privatise railways, they should be handed over workers’ co-operatives to run. The same with welfare services and such like: “the abolition of the State is the last term of a series, which consists of an incessant diminution, by political and administrative simplification the number of public functionaries and to put into the care of responsible workers societies the works and services confided to the state.” [Proudhon, Carnets, vol. 3, p. 293]

Not only does this mean that we can get accustomed to managing our own affairs collectively, it also means that we can ensure that whatever “safety-nets” we have do what we want and not what capital wants. In the end, what we create and run by ourselves will be more responsive to our needs, and the needs of the class struggle, than reformist aspects of the capitalist state. This much, we think, is obvious. And it is ironic to see elements of the “radical” and “revolutionary” left argue against this working class self-help (and so ignore the long tradition of such activity in working class movements) and instead select for the agent of their protection a state run by and for capitalists!

There are two traditions of welfare within society, one of “fraternal and autonomous associations springing from below, the other that of authoritarian institutions directed from above.” [Ward, Op. Cit., p. 123] While sometimes anarchists are forced to defend the latter against the greater evil of “free market” capitalism, we never forget the importance of creating and strengthening the former. As Chomsky suggests, libertarians have to “defend some state institutions from the attack against them [by private power], while trying at the same time to pry them open to meaningful public participation — and ultimately, to dismantle them in a much more free society, if the appropriate circumstances can be achieved.” [Chomsky on Anarchism, p. 194] A point we will discuss more in the next section when we highlight the historical examples of self-managed communal welfare and self-help organisations.

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