188
IRVING
HOWE
ment in order to recognize that his recent utopian writings may have
a more practical effect than the routinism and blundering of the
practical men- and precisely because his writings are, in the current
sense of things, less "practical."
• A belief that the welfare state is characteristic of all forms of
advanced industrial society; that it offers bread and television, pal–
liatives and opiates, to disarm all potential opposition; and that
it
thereby perpetuates, more subtly but more insidiously than in the
past, class domination.
Such views have recently become popular in
academic circles which in part are profiting from those struggles of
yesterday that made possible the advantages of today. Despite their
seeming intransigence, these views strike me as essentially conserva–
tive-they lead to passivity, not action-and inhumane-they ignore,
or minimize, the improvements in the immediate life-conditions of
millions of human beings. Ignore or minimize, above all, the fact
that the welfare state has meant that large numbers of working-class
people are no longer ill-fed, ill-clothed and insecure, certainly not to
the extent they once were. That automobile workers in Detroit can
today earn a modest, if insufficient, income; that through union
intervention they have some,
if
not enough, control over their work
conditions; that they can expect pensions which are inadequate yet
far better than anything they could have expected twenty years
ago-all this is
good:
politically, socially, in the simplest human
terms. To dismiss or minimize this enormous achievement on the
lordly grounds that such workers remain "alienated" and show little
awareness of their plight, is to allow ideology to destroy human
sympathy.
Concerning these matters I want to quote some cogent remarks
from the English writer Alisdair MacIntyre:
It was only gradually that people in Britain became conscious
of themselves as living in a society where a right to minimal
standards of welfare was presupposed. ... Even a modem af–
fluent working class, even a working class with a socialist tradi–
tion . .. has
to
learn that the welfare state is
essentially a realm
of conflict
in which the real benefits of welfare are always in
danger of being undermined by defense spending, by the en–
croachments of private interests, or simply by inflation, and
thus a realm in which it needs a good deal of running even to
keep standing in the same place. So a working-class political
