Welfare Under Capitalism
In 11 wide-ranging chapters covering history, social policy and the economy, David Matthews grounds his thesis in the following. Anti-capitalist reforms protect the working class from the market, help the ruling class and prefigure a socialist society. In The Class Struggle and Welfare: Social Policy Under Capitalism (Monthly Review Press, 2025), the author focuses on Britain to view how working people in a modern society can improve laboring and living conditions from the class exploiting and oppressing them using the state apparatus, a process that also benefits capital.
Matthews’ analysis is dialectical, the study of change. Victories can and do turn into defeats. Quantitative change can and does create qualitative changes. Working-class reforms to improve people’s lives via welfare provisions can and do spur counter reforms.
Working-class reforms that Marx wrote of during England’s industrial rise 150 years ago used an emerging capitalist state that had facilitated the commoners’ loss of land to a wealthy minority. Forced off the land that sustained them, commoners flocked to urban areas and entered the waged labor force. Through agitation and organization, workers shortened the hours of the working day.
Fast forward from an expansion of the welfare state to include the postwar enactment of a national health service in Britain. That progress paved the way for an attack on the NHS from private capitalist interests. Such social dialectics are baked into the for-profit system and its structure of boom and bust.
When the inevitable economic downturns and imperial declines take hold, ruling class interests pursue a tried and true “solution” of political-social deflection, demonization and distraction. Matthews focuses in chapters covering education, healthcare, housing and social security, on the role of capitalist ideology to weaken bonds of community and solidarity.
Matthews writes: “Although the state has the fundamental purpose of protecting and supporting surplus value creation, and the conditions of exploitation upon which this is predicated, it is also a class struggle state, reflecting the balance of class forces. History exemplifies that during the class struggle, the state has acted in the interests of labor as well as capital.”
There’s a reason that in America, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the most popular president ever, elected three times. He oversaw a big expansion of the welfare state during the depths of the Great Depression with New Deal programs, such as Social Security and unemployment insurance.
Matthews wraps up with an alternative vision of a welfare state for the working class. It transcends welfare policies of bureaucratic centralization in favor of human-centered social cohesion. Mutual aid is a central piece of this future society.
From mayor-elects Zohran Mamdani in NYC to Katie Wilson in Seattle, the popularity of socialist policies to help people obtain better welfare policies for say affordable groceries and shelter (council housing in Britain) is clear. Improving the material interests of the working class is a politically viable strategy. That strategic approach builds on past class struggles for higher minimum wages and reduced college debt in the U.S., to name two.
Matthews’ book is an important contribution to the Marxist critique of class struggle as a central feature of social policy. History matters, and capitalist scribes have no monopoly on writing it. The Class Struggle and Welfare: Social Policy Under Capitalism is proof of that.
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