A.R. Desai on the State

Among the themes A.R. Desai worked on, the modern capitalist state held a special place, and he approached it, as he approached most questions, from an explicitly Marxist standpoint. His essay "The Myth of the Welfare State" set out to test the concept of the welfare state against its own stated claims. Surveying the sociological literature, Desai identified three features that were held to define a welfare state. First, it is a positive, interventionist state, not the minimal, law-and-order-only state of classical liberal "laissez-faire" theory -- it actively designs and implements social policy to improve conditions in society. Second, it is a democratic state: liberal writers treated multi-party electoral democracy as a defining condition, which is also why they excluded socialist and communist states from the category altogether. Third, it runs a mixed economy, in which private capitalist enterprise and public ownership co-exist -- typically with the state concentrating on basic goods and infrastructure while private industry supplies consumer goods.

Desai then converted these features into five concrete test criteria against which a self-described welfare state's actual performance could be judged: does it free citizens from poverty, discrimination and insecurity; does it redistribute income from rich to poor and check the concentration of wealth; does it subordinate the private profit motive to the community's real needs; does it deliver stable growth free of boom-and-bust cycles; and does it achieve full employment? Applying these tests to the states most commonly described as welfare states -- Britain, the United States, and much of Europe -- Desai found their claims to be greatly overstated. Even the most developed of these countries, he argued, failed to guarantee minimum economic and social security to all citizens, did little to reduce (and sometimes worsened) economic inequality, could not escape market fluctuations, and continued to show excess capacity alongside high unemployment. On this evidence Desai concluded that the "welfare state," far from being a solved problem of capitalism, was largely a myth. …