Welfare states fall into crisis when capital valorization and citizen autonomy conflict

Evidence

To avoid crises of social integration, governments, as Claus Offe has shown, are trying to satisfy two conflicting demands: on the one hand, they must ensure sufficiently favourable conditions for the valorization of capital in order to generate tax revenues; on the other hand, from the point of view of political and social justice, governments must satisfy the interest of the population as a whole in securing the legal and material preconditions of the private and public autonomy of every citizen – otherwise they will be stripped of their democratic legitimacy. However, capitalist democracies will only be able to steer a course of crisis avoidance between these two imperatives if they possess sufficient governance capacity. In other words, the scope of the interventionist policies must match the extent of the economic cycles relevant for securing national prosperity. Evidently, the Western democracies satisfied this condition sufficiently only for a limited period – namely, only until the worldwide deregulation of markets and the globalization of financial markets, which since then have controlled the financial policies of the states. — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 26

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the classic 1962 Structural Transformation thesis, which this essay revisits; the Offe reference also parallels the reader’s Adorno counterpoint project. — connects to: Meritocratic racelessness discourse accompanied the neoliberal retreat from the welfare state — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1739
• SEED: The governance-capacity constraint — intervention must match the relevant economic cycle — offers an angle on why deregulation broke the postwar welfare-state bargain.

Related

• Meritocratic racelessness discourse accompanied the neoliberal retreat from the welfare state (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Meritocratic racelessness discourse accompanied the neoliberal retreat from the welfare state #expands (0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1739