Faust 1

Beyond the Third Way: Marcuse and the Dialectics of Welfare

Reese Faust

In the wake of the global recession resulting from the 2007-

2008 financial crisis, there has been a renewed scrutiny on the

relationship between the state, the market, and the sites where

the two overlap. The welfare state in particular has been

targeted due to its unique role as a state-funded apparatus that

mitigates the effects of the market upon its citizens. As such,

any post-recession politics that seeks to transform welfare must

take account of the welfare state as it exists and provide a

compelling alternative vision in order to enact any changes

toward that end. In this spirit, Philip Blond proposes that the

British welfare state be reformed based upon a radical

communitarianism that devolves power from the state.1 However, in

his zeal to provide an alternative to the current Left/Right

discourse, Blond fails to take account of larger systemic

problems within contemporary society and their relation to his

proposed solutions.

1 By “communitarian”, I mean a political outlook that sees the community rather than the individual or state as the locus of political agency, given the role that the local community has in forming persons.

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As such, I will argue that Herbert Marcuse’s dialectics

provide a more theoretically complete alternative to the welfare

state that Blond critiques. I will begin by detailing Blond’s

analysis of liberalism as a political and economic policy, the

premises for his policy prescriptions. I will go on to critique

Blond’s understanding of the role of market capitalism in

relation to the welfare state, arguing that he merely seeks to

reduce the flow of capital rather than shut it off completely.

Because accelerated neoliberal capital flow has determined the

shape of the modern welfare state, I will argue that Marcuse

provides a true alternative to the welfare discourse, as his

diagnosis of and prognosis for the welfare state is rooted in a

rejection of capitalism wholesale. More concretely, a Marcusean

language of welfare will speak in terms of socialism, the

antithesis of capitalism and as such the theoretical

counterweight to contemporary welfare discourse. Where Marcuse

differs from – and, I argue, surpasses – other socialist

critiques of welfare, however, is his linking of the liberatory

potential of technology with the aesthetic dimension, which

carries radical implications for welfare and the good society.

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As a preliminary matter, the respective trajectories of Blond

and Marcuse’s criticisms to the welfare problematic and its

resolution will be detailed. Blond’s analysis is framed by his

idiosyncratic brand of conservatism that rejects the neoliberal

free market2 and champions the value of the local community as

the guide for crafting state policy3. He is suspicious of state

action but finds no problem encouraging traditional civic

institutions – charity, church, or union – and their role in

shaping the individual.4 In short, his political analysis is

reactionary in that he responds to political questions by

reference to values distinct from (and preceding) those from

which the problematic arose – i.e., the liberal political

paradigm.5 Marcuse, on the other hand, applies dialectical

thinking, which is to say he “understands the critical tension

between “is” and “ought” first as an ontological condition,

pertaining to the structure of Being itself. However, the

recognition of this state of Being – its theory – intends from

2 Phillip Blond, Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix It (Faberand Faber Limited, 2010) p.191.3 ibid., p.173.4 ibid., p.3.5 ibid., pp.139-156.

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the beginning a concrete practice. Seen in the light of a truth

which appears in them falsified or denied, the given facts

themselves appear false and negative.”6 When the dialectic takes

historical form, “‘is’ and ‘ought’ confront each other in the

conflict between actual forces and capabilities in society”.7 In

this sense, while Marcuse does react to the given state-of-

affairs, he takes them as possessing the material conditions for

resolving the present political problematic by “intend[ing] a new

polis.”8

The opposition between the two brings the seemingly

contradictory nature of the modern welfare state into focus.

Historically, the British welfare state emerged from the

synthesis of two poles of political thought – capitalism and

socialism – into a single framework; that is, welfare is a

product of antithetical thought coming together.9 It is my

6 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society (Routledge, London and New York, 2002 [1964]) pp.137-138. 7 ibid., p.146.8 ibid., p.138.9 Gearey discusses the politics surrounding the implementation of the British welfare state as a mix of Atlee’s Conservative government attempting to changemarket capitalism and the influence of Fabian thought within the successive Labour government. As such, these actions were all reflections of a “’developing social democratic consensus’” rather than a socialist enterprise.Adam Gearey, Justice as Welfare (Continuum, London, 2012), p.38.

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contention that, because the welfare state has been transformed

so thoroughly by neoliberal capitalism, returning to a tamer

capitalism is both unrealistic and insufficient to address the

welfare problematic. A more radical vision – one that goes beyond

a mere dismissal of neoliberalism – is required. Contrasting the

reactionary, conservative capitalism within Blond and the

dialectical, radical socialism within Marcuse serves to highlight

the parameters of the issues surrounding the neoliberal welfare

state: the necessity of comprehensive critique; the ideological

effects of an economic model; the status of recipients as

citizen, subject, or individual; and the political role that

(state) technology plays in articulating these nodes of meaning.

While both argue for a more moral society, each has a radically

different conception of how such a society is structured in terms

of economy and its concomitant social relations. Their respective

societies are free in that each rejects (state or profit-driven)

corporatist control of the means of production, but they differ

in the ideological commitments of their critique of welfare,

which I argue determines the effectiveness of their critique.

Though using one critic of the welfare state to denounce another

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while simultaneously using the first to argue for welfare seems

paradoxical, my contention is that Marcuse’s critique can help

refine the purpose and goals of what welfare seeks to accomplish.

For his part, Blond sees “the economic collapse, the erosion

of society, and the legitimacy crisis of all our governing

institutions […] is the triumph of a perverted and endlessly

corrupting liberalism”.10 Liberalism has fragmented the social,

such that people have lost a shared sense of cultural ethos, the

source of communal values; reclaiming these values allows for the

possibility of social reform.11 Within the economic sphere, these

values can moralise the market as one of mutual exchange rather

than discrete, one-off interactions between individuals (as seen

in the liberal paradigm). The amorality or abject immorality

present within neoliberal capitalism is what needs to be opposed

– hence, the “moral market”.12 Since mutual exchange is built

upon trust, the economy will be reformed as one of mutualist

exchange within a truly free capitalist market. 13 A key part of

implementing this moral market is localizing the economy and re-10 Blond, supra n.2 above, p.139.11 ibid., p.168.12 ibid., p.185.13 ibid., p.197.

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capitalising the poor consistent with market exchange

principles.14 From this localization and (just) distribution to

the poor, Blond argues for a restoration of professional

responsibility to civil state actors and groups that will

decentralize the state’s hold on welfare delivery.15 In terms of

welfare, the state will surrender its role as administrator to

local communities and organizations to ensure local autonomy and

efficient use of services, thereby lowering maintenance costs for

the state. For Blond, the keys to reforming welfare are

mitigating the damaging effect of neoliberalism by rolling back

from supra-local markets and shifting the responsibility of

delivery to more local organizations. As such, the state is no

longer an authoritative administration centre with mechanized

denizens, but a collection of localities with civically engaged

citizens.

To that end, Blond accurately diagnoses problems with market

fundamentalism and the over-valorisation of the individual within

neoliberal capitalist society. However, he leaves much unanswered

in his conception of the civic welfare state. Essentially, Blond 14 ibid., p.237.15 ibid., p.239.

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wants to remake the social by creating space for both autonomy

and mutual dependence through devolving state powers with a

communitarian sensibility. Indeed, for Blond, broad socio-

political change is effected through local reform, creating

change from the bottom up and eventually affecting the supra-

local, i.e., the state. An initial question is how a renewed

sense of tradition and virtue could emerge when it is so easy to

reach for the Daily Mail after a long workday. This somewhat

flippant query raises a more pressing issue: Blond does not

engage fully with the practical ideological effects of neoliberal

capitalism. As such, he misses the reasons (other than liberal

individualism) why people cannot be engaged citizens or join

civic organizations within neoliberal society. Simply, how can

the modern working person find time to enter the political when

working triple shifts just to get by? Or the welfare recipient

whose time is dictated by the administrative load of his

caseworker? Blond’s radical communitarianism prioritizes the

local over the national, which does little to solve the crises of

the modern (supra-local) welfare state. To be sure, local

activism and change is necessary in order to reorient welfare

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toward meeting the specific needs of people on the ground, but

such activism is insufficient in itself – the neoliberal hegemony

and its presently existing administration also determine local

capabilities.

Because Blond does not fully engage with neoliberal

capitalism’s ideological effects, he cannot appreciate the

structural barriers that prevent even the most socially active

and embedded citizens from affecting the political. As a

conservative, Blond does not see inequality as an inherently bad

social arrangement – he openly advocates an educated upper class

as necessary for a functioning democracy. However, since Blond

rejects egalitarian political philosophy but remains committed to

(community-determined) individual autonomy and free-market

capitalist exchange, it is difficult to see how economic (and

thus, social) hierarchies will not emerge. Blond claims that an

economy of virtue will prevent the emergence of monopoly within

the moral market,16 but he does not elaborate on how to dismantle

presently existing ones. When Blond speaks of recapitalising the

poor, he does not address the problem of established economic

16 Blond, supra n.2 above, p.199.

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hierarchies or monopolies – instead, he advocates making more

capitalists.17 This implicit acceptance of hierarchy blinds him

to the immense power concentration already within the hands of

the capitalist class, such that they drive both national policy

and the desires and wants of the body politic, i.e., economic and

political (and thus, cultural) discourse. His criticisms of

liberal society without a critique of capitalist mechanisms of

social structuring and their effect on political discourse

effectively render his concept of the civic state a non-starter.

In this way, Blond’s (mis)understanding of how the local could

affect the supra-local stems from his failure to fully analyse

modern capitalist society. Blond attempts to move beyond a

welfare state by enabling local responsibility over welfare

delivery and a presumed resultant institutional responsibility.

For Blond, welfare is a localised endeavour in the mould of pre-

welfare charity organizations.18 However, historically, the

British welfare state rejected this model and was established as

a universalist system designed to provide for all citizens.19 The17 ibid., p.205.18 ibid., p.14.19 See, e.g., Asa Briggs, “The Welfare State in Historical Perspective,” The Welfare State Reader (Chris Pierson and Francis G. Castles, eds.)(Polity, London,

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hope was that a notion of national solidarity could prevail

without exclusion as a prerequisite for aid. While certainly a

product of the post-war reassertion of national character, the

British welfare state was also a site of compromise between the

needs of labour and the forces of capital.20 With the weakening

of labour since the 1970s and the capitulation of both the (New)

Labour and Conservative Parties to neoliberal capitalism since

the 1990s, capital’s hold on the welfare state has steadily

increased.21 This analysis does not assume that the balance

between labour and capital was ever equal or perfect at some

point, but it argues that an analysis of both forces is needed to

accurately confront the welfare problematic. Indeed, Blond frames

his return to pre-liberal notions of community within the

confines of the post-Third Way political landscape, which

constricts his analysis of welfare to a system that has been

overdetermined by capital and realigned to meet with neoliberal

aims. In this sense, Blond cannot see the value of a supra-local

welfare state precisely because he views it as another symptom of

2006 [1961]) p.16.20 Gearey, supra n.9 above.21 ibid., pp. 40-43.

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the neoliberal society rather than as a traditional safeguard

against capital. Blond’s shifting of the administrative locus

from the supra-local to the local is simply not enough to reform

welfare, as all he is doing is assisting further intrusion of the

lifeworld22 by the neoliberal market by removing the state.

In short, the failure of Blond’s proposal stems from his

inability to formulate a completion of the dialectical circuit.

That is, in somewhat crude Hegelian terminology, the thesis that

Blond is working against is the neoliberal welfare state. Blond’s

proposed antithesis, the civic welfare state, presents itself as

providing a new kind of capitalism that includes a free market

but does not require the hand of the state to administer.

However, in practice, Blond’s moral market differs little from

the neoliberal assertion that the state is an axiomatically less

efficient provider of services than the free market. As has been

seen within David Cameron’s government, the “civic state” can

serve as rhetoric to further extend neoliberal policies of

22 While the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) is a term generally associated with Jürgen Habermas, I will be using the term within its Marcusean context, which Kellnerdescribes as material conditions that “involve human and social needs, relations of productions and reproduction to satisfy them, class domination, and ideological systems,” Douglas Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984) p.50.

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cutting government funding, even to the non-state organizations

that are supposed to deliver aid in lieu of the state.23

Programmatically and practically speaking, there is a difference

between a civic engagement that renders state administration less

necessary and the political engagement that actually engenders

change in how society is structured, one the Blond elides with

his exaltation of (pre-liberal) tradition and virtue as the

driving force for both. In order to be a truly alternative

theory, Blond must proffer a programme that can both stave off

the challenge of market intrusion into the lifeworld and provide

a conception of society such that the threat can continue to be

mitigated through its very constitution.

In this sense, Blond’s nostalgic communitarian presents a

false alternative to the presently existing system. Rather, a

totally different theoretical articulation of society – both

political and economic – has to be formulated in order to create

a new theory of welfare based upon both autonomy and solidarity

without descending into either administrative morass or further

23 Nicholas Watt, “David Cameron reveals 'big society' vision – and denies it is just cost cutting”, The Guardian, 19 July 2010, <http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/jul/19/david-cameron-big-society-launch>.

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capitulation to capitalist exploitation. Such an articulation

must also meet the completion of the dialectical circuit in

offering a true alternative to the modern neoliberal welfare

state. To that end, I argue that Marcusean thought can provide

not only a critique of actually existing welfare in neoliberal

society, but a vision of welfare reform that ultimately seeks its

own abolition in pursuit of a more just society. While Blond and

Marcuse are similar in their treatment of and scepticism toward

the promises of liberal society and the claims of free-market

capitalism, the clear difference lies in Marcuse’s Marxist

disposition and willingness to examine the cultural effects of

capitalism upon society. To be sure, Blond’s prescription to

devolve power from the state to the local community is a breath

away from advocating worker ownership of the means of production,

i.e., socialism. While his analysis seems to beg for such a

position, he cannot meet it because of his self-imposed

analytical limits. Additionally, Marcuse’s commitment to

dialectical thinking differentiates his more (relatively)

orthodox Marxism from more recent socialist critiques of welfare

that either proclaim the exhaustion of liberatory potential

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within liberal democratic states or regard welfare as worsening

symptom of capitalism’s contradictions.24 Against these somewhat

defeatist readings, Marcusean thought offers a dialectical

reading of the welfare state built around his conception of

technology.

By way of introducing Marcuse’s analysis of the welfare

problematic, his view of capitalism in advanced industrial

societies must be examined.25 Marcuse describes such societies as

“one-dimensional” because “technological controls appear to be

the very embodiment of Reason for the benefit of all social

groups and interests – to such an extent that all contradiction

seems irrational and all counteraction impossible”.26 Marcuse’s

reading of advanced capitalist society emphasizes its

24 See, e.g., Jürgen Habermas, “The New Obscurity: The Crisis of the Welfare State and the Exhaustion of Utopian Energies,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 11(2):1-18 (1996) and Claus Offe, Contradictions of the Welfare State (MIT Press, 1984).25 A definite limitation of Marcuse’s thought is its relative age and therather specific political epoch within a particular country (the UnitedStates) whose society he was critiquing, my argument focuses not on thespecific contemporaneous of his analysis, but upon the way it is structured,delineated within his text. Additionally, while Marcuse’s analysis is based onobservations made over half a century ago, his conclusions remain relevant tomodern administration in at least some respects, see Richard C. Box, “Marcusewas Right: One-Dimensional Society in the Twenty-First Century”, AdministrativeTheory and Praxis, vol. 33, No.2 (June 2011), pp.169-91, and “ProgressiveUtopias: Marcuse, Rorty, and Wright”, Administrative Theory and Praxis, vol. 34, No.1(March 2012), pp.60-84.26 Marcuse, supra n.6 above, p.11.

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interminable cycle of production and consumption, which becomes

normalized to such a degree that it is impossible for people

within it to see any alternative. Indeed, for Marcuse, “advanced

industrial culture is more ideological than its predecessor,

inasmuch as today the ideology is in the process of production

itself […] this proposition reveals the political aspects of the

prevailing technological rationality.”27 For Marcuse, capitalism

in these industrial nations does not entail a society based on an

overbearing individual freedom, as Blond claims. Rather, the

appearance of individual freedom obscures the mechanisms within

capitalist hegemony that order the desires and drives of the

populace. 28 These drives are ordered under the Performance

Principle, which Marcuse defines as “the rule of functional

rationality discriminating against emotions, a dual morality, the

‘work ethic,’ which means for the vast majority of the population

condemnation to alienated and inhuman labor”.29 In short, the

Performance Principle pushes one-dimensional capitalist society

27 ibid., pp.13-14.28 ibid., p.4.29 Herbert Marcuse, “Marxism and Feminism”, Women's Studies, vol. 2 (Gordon and Breach Science Publishers Ltd., 1974) p.282.

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toward becoming an administrative state based upon an

instrumental reason blind to human needs.

Given the deep relationship between welfare and the management

of capital, Marcuse is highly critical of the welfare state

within one-dimensional society. For Marcuse, the welfare state is

“a state of unfreedom because its total administration is

systematic restriction of (a) ‘technically’ available free time;

(b) the quantity and quality of goods and services ‘technically’

available for vital individual needs; (c) the intelligence

(conscious and unconscious) capable of comprehending and

realizing the possibilities of self-determination.”30 Without

delving too deeply into Marcuse’s terminology, the important

takeaway is that while the welfare state can raise the standard

of living, it can only do so through technical administrative

means that persist the individual’s alienation from work and

30 Marcuse, supra n.6 above, p.52. An interesting passage from Marcuse on conservative attacks of welfare: “The critique of the Welfare State in terms of liberalism and conservatism (with or without the prefix "neo") rests, for its validity, on the existence of the very conditions which the Welfare State has surpassed – namely, a lower degree of social wealth and technology. The sinister aspects of this critique show forth in the fight against comprehensive social legislation and adequate government expenditures for services other than those of military defense. Denunciation of the oppressive capabilities of the Welfare State thus serves to protect the oppressive capabilities of the society prior to the Welfare State.” ibid., p.54.

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others. For the dialectical thinker, however, there remains a

kernel of liberation within this system. In analysing the

incipient American welfare state proposed by Lyndon Johnson’s

Great Society, Marcuse posits to two possible outcomes: that the

welfare infrastructure can either ameliorate or extend the status

quo, or envisage an essential transformation of the existing

society suggested by its technological capacities.31 For his

criticisms of the administered welfare subject under one-

dimensional society, this liberatory potential for seems

surprising. However, he also writes “the opposition of

organization to freedom is ideological: while it is true that

freedom cannot be organized, the material, technical (and perhaps

even the intellectual) preconditions of freedom require

organization. Not the growth of organization is to blame, but the

growth of bad, exploitative organization.”32 For Marcuse, then, a

liberatory technology of welfare is possible insofar that it

organises its preconditions as oriented towards human freedom.

31 Herbert Marcuse, “The Individual in the Great Society”, Towards a Critical Theory of Society: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Volume Two (Douglas Kellner, ed.)(Routledge, London and New York, 2001 [1966]), p.79.32 ibid., p.78.

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In order to better comprehend how one can think more fully a

liberatory technology of welfare, the question of technology must

be examined. For Marcuse, “technology, as a mode of production,

as the totality of instruments, devices and contrivances which

characterize the machine age is thus at the same time a mode of

organizing and perpetuating (or changing) social relationships, a

manifestation of prevalent thought and behavior patterns, an

instrument for control and domination.”33 Marcuse maintains that

technology has a dialectical relationship with society, as

opposed to a merely procedural one. As such, tailoring technology

toward achieving a particular end entails a constructing a

potentially radical political statement and purpose. “The more

technological rationality, freed from its exploitative features,

determines social production, the more will it become dependent

on political direction-on the collective effort to attain a

pacified existence, with the goals which the free individuals may

set for themselves.”34 A new vision of technology, based on a

different understanding of instrumental rationality, can thus

33 Herbert Marcuse, “Some Implications of Modern Technology,” Technology, War and Fascism: The Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Volume One (Douglas Kellner, ed.) (Routledge, London and New York, 1998 [1941]), p.41.34 Marcuse, supra n.6 above, p.240.

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bring about new relations in society, between both the self and

among others.

From where can this new vision arise? Marcuse looked to the

aesthetic dimension, as “the aesthetic universe is the Lebenswelt

on which the needs and faculties of freedom depend for their

liberation.”35 For Marcuse, the aesthetic, which pertains both to

the senses and to art, can serve as the basis for a new approach

to instrumental reason and thus technology, which possesses a

similar intersection of experience and ideal ends. However, I

wish to depart slightly from Marcuse to offer a broader

conception of how the aesthetic, the technological, and the

political suspend together in an interdependent relationship in

relation to institutions such as welfare. All three realms

project toward a notion of perfectibility or ideal situation that

require a particular material grounding in order to be formed.

Here, I propose that, as the ground for all three is at base

phenomenological, the way that a person experiences her world

ought to be taken as the basis for designing new political

technology to achieve the imagined ideal. In this sense, one’s

35 Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Beacon Press, Boston, 1969) p.31.

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actual experiences within the welfare state ought to determine

the dialectical blueprint for new welfare technology. This

outlook guards against nostalgic longing for past values that

might or might not have existed by taking account of the world as

it actually exists in order to construct the means toward a new

one. As such, welfare technology understood phenomenologically,

as the lifeworld of the welfare subject, can be put toward an

ideal political end entailing a respect for humans and their

needs – and that same germ is implicit and explicit within a

socialist notion of a welfare society.36

Wherefore from here? With the major theoretical contributions

of Marcuse laid out, a preliminary sketch of a Marcusean theory

of welfare can be given. Dialectically, the basis for such a

position must posited antithetically to the existing state of

affairs, i.e., the present neoliberal welfare state. The

presumptive starting ground can be neither a form of neoliberal

capitalism, nor a milder form of capitalism, for the dialectical

36 While this notion has been challenged by Habermas’ more instrumental approach to technology, Marcuse’s notion of linking the aesthetic and the political has the benefit of referring to how people experience their world within their society. See Andrew Feenberg, “Marcuse or Habermas: Two Critiquesof Technology”, Inquiry 39 (1996) pp.45-70.

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circuit would fail. As such, a socialist position on welfare is

needed, whereby capital is diminished and the power of labour is

increased.37 Further, the dialectical end must be taken to its

logical end, which means that a truly socialist welfare state

cannot be seen as a permanent solution. Rather, the socialist

welfare position entails the abolition of itself as the end goal,

such that the main energy of the new discourse will be levelled

against the mechanisms of capitalist expansion, i.e., in

Marcusean terms, the abolition of the Performance Principle. This

vision depends on a phenomenological understanding of the welfare

subject as the basis for constructing new political technologies

of welfare. This new instrumental rationality will be designed to

enhance the welfare subject’s well-being and autonomy by reducing

37 While not-labouring is the condition of labour under capitalism, the formulation of welfare as the site where capital and labour conflict nonetheless still holds. The social stigma inveighed against welfare recipients coupled with the ever-present threat of unemployment places even more power in the hands of capital, such that, paradoxically, greater exploitation of the worker can occur in the presence of greater social support. Recent studies in the United States reveal that even the employed must seek aid from welfare; see, e.g., Sylvia Allegretto, “Fast Food, Poverty Wages: The Public Cost of Low-Wage Jobs in the Fast-Food Industry,” UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, October 2013, <http://www.irle.berkeley.edu/cwed/allegretto/fast_food_poverty _wages.pdf>; and “Hidden Taxpayer Costs,” Good Jobs First, July 2013, <http://www.goodjobsfirst.org/corporate-subsidy-watch/hidden-taxpayer-costs>. Not-labouring under welfare capitalism entails greater exploitation of labourers. In this sense, reformulating welfare directly correlates with supporting the interests of labour as a whole.

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the amount of non-alienated labour necessary for work in society.

As such, the aesthetic at play within this language is that of

liberating not just the welfare subject, but society as a whole.

The role of the aesthetic as opening one-dimensional thought

yields interesting possibilities for who the agents of change for

this new technology of welfare might be. Indeed, Marcuse’s shift

of the working class as the historical agent to the student

movement opens up the possibility for the welfare poor to act as

such. Marcuse’s motivation was twofold: the breakdown of the

traditional Marxist class divisions, and the fact that the

student movement was emerging to voice similar critiques of the

then-contemporary social order. Within the age of cultural and

social capital, wherein creative endeavours and achievements are

the new products of one’s labour, the dispossessed

skilled/creative class have the potential to be the new agents of

historical change. Perhaps there remains room for the

aesthetically inclined (who Marcuse argues are the only ones

capable of an authentic life in an administered society38) to

38 “If the established society manages all normal communication, validating orinvalidating it in accordance with social requirements, then the values alien to these requirements may perhaps have no other medium of communication than the abnormal one of fiction. The aesthetic dimension still retains a freedom

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either reach out or integrate themselves with the welfare poor in

order to give each other a voice. Perhaps the new face of

solidarity is found within the collective bonds of those deemed

as “losers” by the Performance Principle, as seen with the Occupy

Movement. Still, the problem of class divides (real or imagined)

remains, as attitudes and cultural forces that have been shaped

by the continued ascendency of neoliberal capitalism. Whoever the

historical agents may be, however, is outside the scope of this

paper.

What I have sought to do is evaluate two different approaches

toward envisioning a new relationship of state, market, and

welfare. In short, I have argued that Blond’s conservative

critique of and prescription for welfare fails in his limited

scope of analysis. Because he sees capitalism as part of the

solution for reforming the welfare state, he does not see it as

the main driving force for its expansion and continued need. In

contrast, Marcuse presents a broader theory that encompasses the

mechanisms of capitalism and its effects on the social whole, and

thus provides a more convincing alternative to reforming the

of expression which enables the writer and artist to call men and things by their name—to name the otherwise unnameable.” Marcuse, supra n.6 above, p.251.

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current welfare state. However, for all their differences,

Marcuse and Blond share the same end: a more natural relationship

between humans without centralised, impersonal forces

overdetermining a person’s life. However, the difference between

the two remains their attitudes toward labour and capital in

relation to welfare. Ultimately, this paper’s simple suggestion

time when the balance between capitalism and socialism within

welfare thought has shifter toward the former, perhaps its is

time that focused on the latter in order to arrive at more

programmatically fruitful critique.