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IRVING HOWE
inhibited use of private property. At the hub of its mechanics,
it
is
different from socialism. Though some prices and wages
are detenmned politically, on the whole they are still determined
by the market, and that is true even of the public enterprises;
the regime of property prevails throughout, with the dead
weight of past investments burdening the calculation of profit
and the decisions on future investments, with at least a theoreti–
cal obligation to balance all budgets, and with remunera–
tion still tightly ruled by a man's contribution to the value
of the product. Public projects still need to
be
justified in
terms of national policy rather than human needs, and ex–
penditure for defense and similar competitive purposes still
exceeds the welfare expenditure.
What this excellent description does not claim to provide is any
sense of the way in which the welfare state tends to be open-ended
at both sides, the way-within limits that need not
be
rigidly fixed
in advance-the welfare state is an algebraic container that can be
filled with the arithmetic of varying socio-political contents. Nor does
it provide a sense of the welfare state as the outcome, not necessarily
a "final" one, of prolonged social struggle to modulate and humanize
capitalist society.
It
would be hard, perhaps impossible, to say to
what extent the welfare state is the result of a deliberate intent to
stabilize capitalist society from above, so that it will avoid break–
down and revolutionary crises; to what extent it is the outcome of
relatively autonomous economic processes; and to what extent it is the
partially realized triumph in the struggle of masses of men to satisfy
their desires.
As
against those intellectuals who feel the major need
for the immediate future to be a benevolent social engineering and
those who see the welfare state as a device for maintaining, through
diversions and concessions, the traditional forms of economic power,
I would stress the idea that welfarism represents, both in achieve–
ments and potential, a conquest that has been
wrested
by the labor,
socialist and liberal movements.
For radical intellectuals the welfare state presents a set of new
difficulties. The bulk of the intellectuals, to be sure, have adapted
only too easily to its comforts and inducements; a society with an
enormously expanded need for administrators, teachers and cultural
agents can offer position and prestige to intellectuals. But for those
of us who wish to preserve a stance of criticism while avoiding the
