Socializing the Welfare State

...The prospects for social responsibility and long-term planning are no doubt better in state-run industry, but it has proven possible to impose responsibility and to generate plans, where there is a will to do so, without nationalization...

...A growing proportion of men and women are involved instead in providing, delivering, organizing, and distributing human services...

...Extended families, friendly societies, churches, and fraternal organizations have lost their primacy in welfare provision, and no new groups have appeared to balance the triumphant civil service...

...136-137...

...Indeed, it would probably be a feature of any welfare state that was also a welfare society that the line between these two would begin to blur...

...Its heroes are not almsgivers dropping coins in a hat, but men and women extending a helping hand to one another...

...So we need to think of ways to draw volunteers into the range of activities financed and superintended by the state...

...Consider an easy example from the distribution of medical care...

...And as with any given good, so with any given industry, nationalization is commonly incomplete, no bar to small-scale (sometimes not even to large-scale) entrepreneurial activity on the side—in education or health, say, or in chemicals or steel...

...Neither of these projects has a necessary form or preordained endpoint...

...In both cases, of course, it claims universality, but its officials speak first of all for those who are not present at the point of production or at the point of reception...

...British steel and American steel, for example, have undergone a similar decline for similar reasons...

...The relations of production have not been transformed...

...It is already blurred with regard to economic resources, since philanthropic organizations, in the United States at least, effectively spend tax money...

...But they can't require, without abolishing the local committees, that the money be spent equally well...

...Nor is the experience of workers in state-run factories all that different, and, since nationalization was supposedly undertaken on behalf of the workers, that is the greatest disappointment...

...The poor (so we are told) have no time or, once their work is done, no energy...

...the producers themselves must take over...

...The development and expansion of such projects has gone much further in some countries than in others, but it would be a mistake to arrange countries along a single continuum, as if nationalization had some necessary form or logical endpoint...

...One of the consequences of distributive nationalization in Western Europe has been a reduction of the extent and scope of voluntary activity...

...My argument in this article is essentially contained in that comparison...

...It appears, 296 • DISSENT however, that if mutual assistance doesn't come into play at the minimal level, with regard to basic services, it won't come into play at all...

...Similarly, the poor could be recruited today for the work of mutual help, drawn into a range of distributive activities, so that they would begin to acquire some knowledge of the social economy of welfare to supplement the knowledge they already have of their private economies—both straitened, though in different ways...

...British welfarism, it has been said, grew out of the ashes of the blitz...

...They seek the enhancement of their own lives as professional helpers, and so have an interest in the helplessness of all the rest of us...

...Distribution and not production will, I think, be the first field of human activity to be socialized...

...Help and be helped: the first would not be exploitative nor the second degrading...

...Certain key social goods have been taken out of private control or out of exclusive private control and are now provided by law to all (or to some subset of) citizens and residents...

...But both groups could conceivably be reconstituted on a broader basis...

...But the transformation is only partial, for it is also true that old patterns of dependency have been reconstituted as new patterns of civil clientage...

...4 And apprenticeship and seasoning, Moynihan seems to think, come only through professional training and political office...

...The recipients of welfare stand in a necessary relationship to the state, a relationship mediated by the state bureaucracy...

...In a fully developed welfare society, many more citizens would be ready to help, would actually be involved in helping...

...The socialization process has two aspects...

...But this was a socialization focused almost exclusively on decision making...

...State bureaucrats, acting in the name of efficiency and universality, will seek (as they should) to remedy the inequalities, providing equal financial support, for example, to every school district...

...And what will the recipients, suddenly empowered, ask for but more of what they are already getting...

...The two nationalizations are formally parallel...

...The welfare state was imagined as a systematic form of mutual assistance, replacing the unsystematic (and unreliable) forms that had existed before...

...they have no monopoly on helping...

...The value may, of course, help to account for the backwardness...

...The clearest example is the collapse of the old working-class "friendly societies" that provided their members with the earliest form of social security...

...4 Ibid., pp...

...Education is nationalized in that it is guaranteed by the state and its delivery regulated, at least in some ultimate sense, by federal authorities...

...It would be better, surely, to have a non-gender-specific reserve...

...The preferred successor to private philanthropy is collective help—which is the work not only of bureaucrats spending taxpayers' money but also of citizens "spending" their own time and energy...

...It is sometimes said of them, however, that they have a prior aim, namely, the control of the society whose members they help...

...This is to say again that socialization balances rather than replaces nationalization...

...The first, much discussed in the 1960s, involves expanding participation in decision making...

...I have focused first on the delivery of welfare, the everyday work of distribution, in part because of the failures of "maximum feasible participation" in the welfare programs of the 1960s...

...The War on Poverty was indeed an effort, the most recent effort, to socialize the welfare state...

...The National Endowment for the Humanities is a typical, if minor, agency of the welfare state, distributing funds that are only supplementary to other distributions, some philanthropic in character, some market based...

...Another reason for the focus, of course, is the very lack of success in bringing on socialism by taking over industry...

...Or, consider the proposal that we require a period of national service from all citizens and then direct some significant proportion of the SUMMER • 1988 • 297 conscripted time and energy into "helping" activities—working in hospitals, caring for the aged, and so on...

...This has a characteristic content, which I will come to in a moment...

...Hence the need, and the recurrent efforts, to socialize state action itself...

...Curiously, though socialists in office have been far more successful when they nationalized distribution than when they nationalized production, theory has never caught up with political reality...

...On the other hand, there are a variety of decisions that might plausibly be made by local councils of citizens or groups of volunteers who know something about the distribution of benefits because they are involved in it, and who are at the same time actual or potential recipients...

...However partial the arrangements are, insofar as they are state arrangements, they will be organized and controlled along what we might think of as Weberian lines, in accordance with some "rational/legal" ideal...

...Nor would national service succeed in the absence of some degree of philanthropic feeling, any more than military conscription could succeed (in a democratic society) if citizens were not, to some degree, patriots . 2 National service would draw in the young, but there is another group, with more time if less energy, who might play an even greater role in the delivery of services: the growing number of elderly and retired citizens...

...They are both anticipated and seconded by private or nonprofit associations of many different kinds...

...It may even be the case that lack of managerial adventurousness is one of the reasons in both cases: why should corporate managers and state managers, recruited from the same social groups, subject to virtually identical incentives and constraints, behave differently...

...The possibilities for entrepreneurial initiative are no doubt greater in the private sector, but even there they exist on the margins, not at the center, not in heavy industry, not in the great corporate complex...

...But it is wrong to describe the agencies of socialized distribution as if they "belonged" to the poor ("their institutions," as Kennedy said...

...It represents instead the voluntary mobilization of (some of) the citizens...

...when it deals with the distributive sector, the state must represent producers (taxpayers...

...Production, like distribution, can be made into a national project, managed by public officials, with investment capital provided, if necessary, out of tax money...

...These groups have simply been superseded by the state, which provides for its members, that is, for everyone, a more secure security...

...We might think of voluntary mobilization as the spontaneous or nonpolitical form of socialization: it enables (some of) the citizens to control and shape the delivery of welfare services...

...And, of course, they control and shape it differently in accordance with their different views, and would do so even if the expenditure of tax money and bureaucratic effort were absolutely uniform across the nation...

...There is, of course, an alternative model, drawn more strictly on the productive analogy: a kind of welfare trade unionism, where recipients would be organized against distributors...

...Production is still primary in principle, and the argument over the merits of nationalization is still focused on productive activity...

...Only when that number is increased will it be possible to give recipients and distributors together a greater say in welfare management...

...The result would be a welfare state unbalanced by what we might think of as a welfare society...

...The growing strength of the women's movement and the growing number of women in the work force: both these factors help to explain the decline in volunteering...

...In the past, the private sector sold old-age insurance and pensions to men and women who could afford the premiums...

...Difference and inequality are intensified by the partial character of distributive nationalization...

...Otherwise it is only state power, not the power of ordinary people, that is enhanced...

...The tension generated over racial integration in the public schools—a policy imposed by federal judges and resisted by local committees—is a tension between nationalization and socialization...

...Other forms of mutual aid have only been curtailed as activists realized that the work they once did is more efficiently, if not always more humanely, done by state officials...

...And "different" here necessarily means unequal: some committees will function better than others, taxing their members more heavily, spending their money more wisely, choosing to provide these services rather than those...

...Recipients are not involved in an activity over which they can claim some rights of control...

...The aim is to make it possible for more people to volunteer and also to generate some greater consistency over time in voluntary service...

...The substance of the debate is readily described: it is the claims of efficiency and universality that are most often represented by national (state/bureaucratic) authority...

...2 It has been suggested to me that jury duty may be a better analogy here than military conscription—since the service required might be intermittent rather than continuous, extending for weeks rather than years...

...It has no analogy in the field of production, where there already exists a mass of producers, and where socialization requires only that we find ways of introducing members of the mass into the business of management— members who already know something about what is being managed...

...The state as we know it has its origins in the nationalization of police protection and military security, both of which the feudal regime distributed privately...

...The problem was that there were no significant cadres of welfare recipients ready for the hard work of managing and directing...

...Described in this way, the nationalization of distribution invites comparison with the nationalization of production...

...But the political distance is too great: what is true in principle is insignificant in practice...

...The welfare state is first of all a state...

...form...

...The division makes a lot of sense, and yet a local hospital committee, serving a particular community, elected by the members of that community, might nonetheless seek to obtain the very latest medical technology for its own "people" —setting an example of welfare autarky likely enough to be imitated...

...And it is socialized in that it is organized and run on a day-to-day basis by local and elected school committees...

...It isn't easy, however, to say exactly what this would involve...

...But whatever the extent and degree of nationalization, its characteristic features regularly reappear: centralized control, bureaucracy, uniform regulation...

...perhaps the government must be represented on the board...

...quoted in Neil Gilbert, Capitalism and the Welfare State: Dilemmas of Social Benevolence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 169...

...So the nationalization of distribution desocializes welfare—conceivably for good reasons...

...This critique of nationalized production is relevant also to the case of nationalized distribution...

...We might 294 • DISSENT think about it in terms of "power to the distributors," on analogy with the old socialist slogan "power to the producers...

...Is it odd or is it usual (a feature, perhaps, of left-wing thought...

...Planning and implementing: but most of the arguments, and all of the failed experiments, had to do with planning...

...Private distributors have been replaced (and, no doubt, improved upon) by state officials, but what might be called the welfare relationship has not disappeared...

...It certainly discourages volunteers, and a number of the more advanced welfare states have in fact reported a significant drop in voluntary contributions of time, energy, and money...

...The problem is to get the balance right...

...The problems of the welfare state, I want to 292 • DISSENT suggest, have been anticipated, have already been the subject of critical reflection, in the socialist debate over "nationalization," even though productive rather than distributive activities were at issue, and still are at issue, in that debate...

...Many of these people are publicly employed, civil servants of the welfare state: school teachers, social workers, caretakers, and administrators of many different sorts...

...Part of the sense of helplessness and futility comes from the feeling of powerlessness to affect the operations of [the existing welfare agencies...

...Nevertheless, we can say that the support of the humanities is now a national project...

...The Distributive Society The productive sector now absorbs a declining proportion of the work force—and will continue to do so unless (more likely, even if) we find new ways of dividing and sharing work...

...The disappointment, of course, is not the same...

...These are the agents of nationalized distribution, and their number is steadily growing...

...All this is likely to make voluntary activity seem superfluous, if not positively wrongheaded...

...Just as it is possible to take over the distribution of this social good but not that one, so it is possible to take over this industry and leave that one untouched—steel but not chemicals, chemicals but not steel...

...This will certainly make for new inequalities, since some agencies and organizations will be bolder or more energetic than others...

...The case is different in distribution, where the first requirement of a welfare society is to increase the number of people, recipients and potential recipients, who are also distributors...

...the state's distribution of social goods actually delivers the goods—to far more people than private distributors ever reached, and with far greater steadiness and consistency...

...The disappointment has another (related...

...It is not inefficiency that has made nationalized production disappointing...

...But the distributors are mostly state officials and professionals of different sorts, and they already exercise considerable power over their clients, the men and women who receive the benefits they distribute...

...In fact, of course, poor people have both time and energy, else there would never have been any political protest or union organizing, or friendly societies, or radical movements: all these are the work of volunteers, some of them, at least, recruited from the poor...

...Then what about "power to the recipients...

...Neither distributors nor recipients, as these two groups are currently constituted, seem plausible candidates for empowerment...

...Society's "civilians" need the state (and the bureaucracy) to defend them against their own divisiveness, to protect them when they are alone and helpless, to enforce universal standards of care and safety...

...That's why those who are present at the point have some claim to direct representation, to a "real voice" in decision making But they have no claim to a sole voice...

...We might think of them as SUMMER • 1988 • 299 professional "helpers...

...Defenders of the welfare state by contrast seek to institutionalize and perpetuate the helpfulness born out of collective crisis, the spirit of mutuality that arises among citizens confronting a flood or a storm or even an enemy attack...

...They would receive, presumably, only nominal sums, rather as left-wing activists are paid subsistence (or less) for work in the movement...

...that's why socialization is the necessary correlative of nationalization...

...I won't pursue this argument any further...

...The problem is to hold the two in some rough balance: central planning and workers' control, state regulation and entrepreneurial initiative, a welfare minimum and local self-help...

...Is the idea of a paid volunteer a contradiction in terms...

...The welfare state coexists with the welfare society, but the society today is relatively weak compared to the state...

...But the appeal of the recipients is to other citizens...

...But the poorest citizens, the unemployed and the helpless, are not significantly more independent, more responsible, more capable of shaping their own lives and joining in the common work of citizenship...

...But conscription would introduce large numbers of amateurs into the work of distributing welfare, radically shifting the proportion of citizen helpers to professional helpers, just as military conscription shifts the proportion of citizen soldiers to professional soldiers...

...The purpose of socialization is to provide new ways— a multitude of networks and institutions for mutual aid...

...And to some extent, the experience of welfare recipients has indeed been transformed: now they get what they get, not in the form of charity and noblesse oblige but in the form of legal entitlement, not as paupers but as citizens...

...What would a socialized welfare state look like...

...Nationalized production has been a great disappointment...

...sometimes that defense will have to be militant if the rights are to be enjoyed at all...

...If nationalized distribution makes for the welfare state, nationalized production makes, or was once thought to make, for the socialist state...

...Just as socialized factories don't belong only to the workers but also to the people who consume their products, so welfare agencies don't belong only to their consumers but also to the people who produce what is consumed...

...The position of employed workers, even relatively ill-paid workers, has been strengthened and stabilized...

...It does not require the disappearance or the replacement of the state—a utopian project and one unlikely in fact to strengthen civil society...

...These would just be interesting facts, reflecting customary behaviors slow to change, or a differential interest in nurturance, or (in the case of older volunteers) female longevity, or whatever...

...There is no such thing, obviously, as a conscripted volunteer (though individual conscripts might well choose the particular service they performed...

...90-91...

...So the War on Poverty turned, very often, into a different sort of war: between radicalized professionals and middle-class organizers (joined by some local militants), on the one hand, and established professionals and lower-middleclass politicians, on the other...

...State officials are likely to want to impose a division of labor, concentrating expensive equipment at a small number of centrally located hospitals whose services are readily available across a wide area, asking smaller hospitals to focus on preventive or routine care...

...Also on the policy commitments of their leaders: though these people are more often co-opted than elected, they are likely to reflect local opinion (subject, very often, to middle- or upper-class qualification...

...At the center, in the modern regulative state, nationalized production isn't significantly different from private production—and there, of course, lies the disappointment...

...A check in the mail, though that is very important, doesn't quite make the proper point...

...Assuming a rough equality in other respects (most important in opportunities for work), I don't see that it would matter much if a majority of the volunteers were women, any more than it would matter much if a majority of welfare professionals were women...

...He may be right, but it seems to me at least possible that participation in the delivery of services might constitute a kind of training for participation in the management and direction of services...

...On the contrary, they would say, the purpose of state action is only to guarantee a minimum, above which altruism would have free play...

...I'll try to explain the nature of that disappointment and then turn to the analogous but smaller disappointments of nationalized distribution...

...State officials can probably play only a modest role in developing such networks, but insofar as they emerge, they might well be recognized within the state system—even subsidized in some small measure...

...Helping others is a rewarding social activity, and the fact that some people make a career of it ought not to bar it to other peopleought not, certainly, to constitute an ideological bar...

...But the alternative is to make our peace with the disappointments of nationalization, gratefully to accept the benefits that bureaucrats bring and give up the hope of providing some of those benefits more directly, as part of the everyday activity of (some) citizens...

...q Notes Roger Hadley and Stephen Hatch, Social Welfare and the Failure of the State (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981), p. 111...

...When the worker calculates costs and benefits, nationalization hardly comes into the reckoning...

...Nor is there any reason why it should...

...They have also intended to professionalize these services, for the sake of consistency and uniformity, and to deliver them more impersonally, as entitlements rather than as gifts...

...I only want to point to the reference of my analogy...

...Not so long as the individual is contributing time and energy (and, one hopes, a growing skillfulness) that would command much higher pay on the market...

...We can see some of the problems involved in holding the balance if we consider for a moment the organization and politics of American education—the first distributive secfor to be both nationalized and socialized...

...It was certainly not the intention of advocates of the welfare state to undercut or diminish altruistic feeling...

...It doesn't...

...The involvement might be worked out, that is, either within a democratized system of state provision or through the less systematic activities of philanthropic organizations...

...The process is infinitely variable, for even if there is only a finite number of goods whose distribution might conceivably be nationalized, there is no limit to the ways in which nationalized distributions might be organized or to the range of people for whom the provision of this or that good might be guaranteed...

...The vitality of the institutions of the welfare state, Gunnar Myrdal insisted in the mid-1960s, depended on popular 298 • DISSENT participation in their management and direction...

...The distribution is paid for with public funds and organized by public officials...

...The tasks of management must be shared, or the managers must be controlled, by the men and women on the line...

...In the past, women have formed what we might think of as the reserve army of the welfare system...

...That last is not likely to be an entirely conscious or widely acknowledged aim, but it undoubtedly does explain some of what they do...

...Since most people will not be content with a world in which they are helpless (even if they are also, intermittently, helped), they will continue to find ways to help themselves and one another...

...That would open the way to a twofold program, which I shall explain and defend in the rest of this paper: first, power to the distributors only insofar as many more people, amateurs as well as professionals, join in the work of distribution...

...But every state preys on the society it protects...

...Socialists seek to institutionalize and perpetuate the ardor of revolutionary engagement, the solidarity of the strike meeting or the political demonstration...

...Both involve state takeovers of activities that were once entirely in private hands...

...and to many citizens these days the number seems insupportable...

...And, at the same time, it requires a state strong enough to superintend and subsidize the work of citizens and volunteers...

...But nationalization does produce, under contemporary conditions, a characteristic set of distributive arrangements: a central administration, a new cadre of civil servants, a more or less uniform code of rules and regulations...

...But if the measure is small, isn't this sort of thing properly called exploitation...

...Indeed, the problems of the two, and their performance in the face of those problems, have not been all that different...

...In any case, the first represents a strength, the second a weakness in American welfarism, and the two together suggest the ambiguity of nationalization...

...Because of this, socialized distribution is bound to be different in different places, reflecting the decisions of many different committees...

...the second involves expanding participation in the actual delivery of welfare services...

...It may be," writes Daniel Moynihan about these wars, "that the poor are never ready to assume power in an advanced society: the exercise of power in an effective manner is an ability acquired through apprenticeship and seasoning...

...Similarly the British national health service: without abolishing the private sector, the state organizes and largely controls the distribution of health care, guaranteeing some minimal standard of care to everyone...

...Social Security is an easy example...

...Behind it lay a conception taken over, perhaps unconsciously, from the literature on workers' control...

...Let me now complete the analogy: what we really had in mind was socialized distribution...

...Their heroes are not so much workers working as workers deciding (together) on how to work...

...Hence the standard left-wing critique of nationalized production goes like this: What we really had in mind was socialized production...

...Just as factory councils would be more, or less, successful, so school committees and hospital boards are in fact more, or less, successful...

...Most This essay is taken by permission of the publisher from Amy Gutmann, ed., Democracy and the Welfare State, © 1988, Princeton University Press...

...To work on the assembly line of a nationalized industry is no more exciting or SUMMER • 1988 • 293 desirable than to work on the assembly line of a privately run industry...

...And that is the disappointment: the purpose of nationalized distribution was to free us from all the superfluous and degrading forms of human dependency...

...This requires experiments in local democracy...

...The sorts of services they once "naturally" provided within the extended family now require alternative networks...

...I am inclined to think that the second is the more basic...

...300 • DISSENT...

...If the experience of production is to be changed, it is not enough for the nation or the state to take over the process...

...in Europe today, doctors and nurses...

...And then it might be more feasible to think about maximizing participation in decision making...

...Theorists of socialism have had little to say about distribution...

...One can imagine similar tensions in the field of production between, say, state planners and factory councils...

...It makes sense, for example, to create a local governing board for a local welfare project (as in the War on Poverty programs), but it makes no sense to think that the governing board can replace the local government...

...What they do, though, they don't do by themselves...

...Seasoned" officials alongside the unseasoned poor...

...What was necessary was "the involvement of the poor in planning and implementing programs: giving them a real voice in their institutions...

...For neither group was it really feasible to maximize participation, though the politicians could probably have turned out more of the "people" if they were pressed...

...Now we measure the advance of the welfare state—but we can hardly measure its success—by the growing number of dependents each working citizen must support...

...I want to note now its characteristic political form: the conflict arises between state officials, judicial or bureaucratic appointees, who are professionally committed to national goals, and elected representatives who are more parochially committed to their own constituents...

...we need, as two British leftists have recently argued, a "more participative and decentralized form of service provision" —opening up room for self-help and local initiative.' Spontaneous socialization needs to be seconded by state-sponsored socialization, that is, the democratic transformation of state agencies at the local level or the transfer of authority and resources to voluntary organizations...

...every welfare state has its own history and, I suppose, its own destiny...

...But the analogy fails, I think, because welfare dependency is not a "trade...

...The War on Poverty might have fared better had there existed greater numbers of poor people with some experience of giving as well as taking...

...Power to the Distributors Socializing distribution, like socializing production, requires us to find ways in which the strengths of civil society can be reflected in, and enhanced rather than overwhelmed by, the growing activism of the state...

...A lively and supportive welfare society framed, but not controlled, by a strong welfare state: that would represent, to return for the last time to my analogy, a fundamental transformation in the relations of distribution...

...The two must work together...

...The state is active—once again, for good reasons—and citizens are increasingly passive (or active only in demanding state action...

...we would not want them bargaining collectively with state bureaucrats over the size and delivery of their benefits...

...Robert Kennedy made the argument as clearly as anyone in those years when he said of welfare bureaucrats in relation to their clients what socialist writers have often said of managers in relation to workers: "They plan programs for the poor, not with them...

...and second, power to recipients and potential recipients, that is, ordinary citizens at or near the point of reception...

...This effect is hardly visible in the United States, where nationalization is less advanced than in Europe and where voluntary activity is more highly valued...

...There seems no reason why they should not be helped to help one another or organized to look after infants and preschool children...

...3 Quoted in Daniel P. Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty (New York: Free Press, 1969), pp...

...The claims of particularity are represented by social authority, that is by men and women SUMMER • 1988 • 295 closely connected to a particular place or regularly attentive to the interests and aspirations of a particular group...

...All sorts of voluntary organizations participate in the delivery of welfare goods and services, and it is obvious that these groups function differently in different communities, depending on the resources (time and energy as well as money) that they can command and on the skill of their leaders...

...Certain historical images lie behind this conception, images interestingly contrasted with those that lie behind the idea of socialism...

...But tensions of this latter sort, in this country, at least, are only imaginary, while in the field of distribution they are real and even urgent...

...Now the state takes over, collects the premiums in the form of a tax, and guarantees the pensions...

...More recent nationalizations have come at the expense of capitalist or market distributions—without, however, supplanting either capitalism or the market...

...When welfare is delivered socially rather than nationally, citizens receive different and unequal kinds or amounts of welfare...

...When it deals with the productive sector, the state must represent consumers...

...that the general issue is debated with reference chiefly to the imaginary case...

...nationalizations are only partial in character, state distribution co-existing with other forms of distributive activity—as public education, though it is guaranteed to all, co-exists with private...

...The real alternative to private management is self-management, autogestion, workers' control, some contemporary version of syndicalism —for the standard critique recapitulates much of what syndicalists, guild socialists, and other pluralist critics of the state were arguing many decades ago...

...Get the productive arrangements right, they thought, and distributive arrangements would fall readily into place...

...State-run industries are not (in the West) noticeably less efficient than privately run industries...

...But wouldn't that make a virtue out of dependency...

...Nationalization is not a new process...

...it also requires an effort to extend the reach of voluntary organizations...

...Why should women do without pay what men (and, increasingly, other women) get paid to do...

...but it would blur also with regard to personnel...

...But the experience of giving, outside of the family, in the wider world of hospital auxiliaries, parent-teacher associations, churchrun hostels and sanctuaries, and so on, is a characteristically middle-class experience...

...Thus Marx: "Any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the . . . mode of production itself...

...The greater the number of these citizens and volunteers, and the more work they do as part-time and amateur distributors of goods and services, the more likely it is that the professional helpers will really be helpful...

...Nationalized distribution was supposed to express a sense of the nation/state as a community committed to its citizens —or, better, as a community constituted by citizens committed to one another...

...Consider, for example, the proposal that volunteers be paid by the state...

...The effective chain of command, the everyday experience of hierarchy, is not much changed by the fact of periodic national elections...

...They have rights as citizens, of course, and they can organize interest or pressure groups to defend those rights...

...All the more reason to make sure that poor people experience something other than their own poverty...

...In principle, perhaps, a great difference, since workers are also voters and so can take part in choosing the boss of their boss...

...It isn't likely, however, that any society can pay for all the helpfulness its members require...

...Their aim is not the production of commodities but the enhancement of human life...

...What difference does it make if one's boss is a civil servant rather than a corporate official...

...A nationalized factory run by bureaucrats isn't the right setting at all...

...it is an argument that works by analogy...

...I don't think that this curtailment has anywhere been an intended consequence of nationalization, though advocates of the welfare state have certainly intended a degree of consistency and uniformity in the provision of basic services that voluntary organizations cannot approach...

...All this belongs to the social sector, even though it has never in any formal sense been socialized, that is, handed over to, or taken over by, the local citizenry...

...Power to the Recipients But what (again) would a welfare society look like...

...Juries too, as Tocqueville argued long ago, depend upon (and also strengthen) sentiments of civism...

...The question has arisen chiefly with regard to women, who over the years have made up by far the greater number of volunteers...