Towards a reparative welfare state

ABSTRACT

The writings of TH Marshall, Esping Anderson and other welfare state scholars have been concerned with class-based inequalities bought about through capitalism. Yet the focus on exploitation of labour overlooks racialised and gendered inequalities bought about through historic and contemporary processes of expropriation also inherent in capitalism. In this paper, I argue that addressing processes of expropriation are fundamental to the political economy of the welfare state and propose a reparative way of thinking to transform the welfare state. Drawing on insights from the transformative reparation literature, I outline three modes of transformation – unsettling accumulation by dispossession, disrupting dehumanising subjectivities and supporting pluriversal possibilities as processes to transform the structures that uphold expropriation and the welfare state.

KEYWORDS:

• Reparations
• welfare state
• expropriation
• colonisation
• gender
• slavery

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For example, Charles Mills shows how the social contract, whilst espousing promises of equality for all, is actually based on a relationship of domination, subjugation and violence of non-citizens. Mills writes, ‘the value that is perhaps most intimately associated with the social contract tradition – equality – was not at all meant to be extended to half the human race. Likewise, as various theorists of race and imperialism have pointed out, once one examines the representations (‘savages’, ‘barbarians’) and the experiences of people of colour in the modern period – expropriated and exterminated Native Americans and Australians, enslaved and later Jim-Crowed blacks, colonized non-Europeans – it becomes clear that both in theory and in practice, only white men were equal … . How, then, can it make sense to conceptualize society as if, in the modern period, equality becomes the generally accepted norm, when in fact such a small section of the population were actually seen as equal?’ (Mills 2007, pp. 98–99).

2 Thomas (2011) explores such links between contemporary economic inequality in Jamaica and slavery such as ‘how the common practice of providing slaves with provision grounds might have laid the ground work for the patterns of authority that developed in the political share during the nationalist period, or about how arguments about the effects of slavery on family formation might have provided the scaffolding for culturist notions of poverty and violence (7).

3 Hickel et al. (2021) have recently quantified unequal exchange between the global South and North since 1960, showing that the ‘wealthy nations [US, Australia, European including the UK, Japan, Korea and Hong Kong] of the global North continue to rely on extraction to finance economic growth and sustain high levels of consumption’ (1). They find that through using exchange-rate differentials ‘the global North appropriated from the South commodities worth $2.2 trillion in Northern prices – enough to end extreme poverty 15 times over. Over the whole period, drain from the South totalled $62 trillion (constant 2011 dollars), or $152 trillion when accounting for lost growth’ (1). Between 1960 and 2017; the US gained over $18,000 billion, the UK $3354 billion and Australia over $1349 billion.

4 Including expropriation within the political economy of the welfare state is important to rectify. Keynes was influenced by the Malthusian concern of overpopulation and was the director the British Eugenic Society between 1937 and 1944. Whilst Keynes was guarded about any public declarations of his eugenic thinking, researchers have carefully traced notes and speeches by Keynes to show he was interested in how public policy could encourage desirable human traits and population quality (not just a concern with Malthusian quantity). For example, Magness and Harrigan (2020) cites a speech by Keynes to the Neo- Malthusian League, an organisation prominent in the eugenicist movement, where he outlined his view that state policy could be used to pursue eugenic goals. In reference to birth-control, he said, ‘Man has won the right to use the powerful weapon of the preventive check. But we shall do well to recognize that the weapon is not only a powerful one but a dangerous one. We are now faced with a greater problem, which will take centuries to solve. We have now to learn to use the weapon wisely and rightly. I believe that for the future the problem of population will emerge in the much greater problem of heredity and Eugenics. Mankind has taken into his own hands & out of the hands of nature the task and the duty of moulding his body and his soul to a pattern’. (JMK PS/3/109 cited in Magness and Harrigan 2020, p. 221). Keynes’ concern with using birth-control to control class and race-infused ‘hereditary’ reflects his ongoing concern not just with the quantity of global populations but the ‘quality’.

5 See Klein (2021). This move was controversial on three fronts. First, the move to development support was a break in the radical potential of payments made to smaller units, such as individuals or local communities, as these smaller units often have no control over development funds, which are administered by the nation state or multilateral organisations. Also, such aid would remain controlled by and within structures set up by the former colonisers. Second, paying for development does not necessarily provide recognition of the crimes of former colonisers. Instead, former colonisers can provide development support under the banner of humanitarianism and never admit their role in historical and racial violence. Third, the move towards development support for only post-independence states was a major break with pan-Africanism that interlinked reparations for slavery and for colonisation. By only focusing on the development of poor nations, development aid severed collective claims for redress made by both the diaspora of slavery and post-independence nations.

6 A Right to A Remedy for Victims of Violations of International Human Rights Law is linked to numerous international instruments, including: article 8 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 2 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, article 6 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, article 14 of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, and article 39 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and of international humanitarian law as found in article 3 of the Hague Convention respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land of 18 October 1907 (Convention IV), article 91 of the Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I) of 8 June 1977, and articles 68 and 75 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court,

7 See Kirkup and Evans 2009, Kang 2009 for an analysis of the ways in which the West has undermined the strength of economic rights in the United Nations Covenant for Social and Economic Rights.

8 A full apology is also demanded alongside repatriation to Africa for those that want it, debt cancellation, funds for development, resources to tackle ill health and illiteracy.

9 But as Craemer (2021) notes, paying reparations isn’t foreign for global North governments[9]. The French paid reparations to former slave owners in Haiti for loss of property during the Haitian uprising, and as a condition of accepting Haitian independence in 1804, whilst charging the new Haitian government the cost of these reparations. Accordingly, ‘the payments ran for a total of 122 years from 1825 to 1947, with the money going to more than 7,900 former slave owners and their descendants in France. By the time the payments ended, none of the originally enslaved or enslavers were still alive’. The British government also paid reparations totalling £20 million (equivalent to some £300 billion in 2018) to slave owners when it abolished slavery in 1833. Reparations were also paid to slave owners during the Civil War under the ‘Act for the Release of certain Persons held to Service or Labor within the District of Columbia’ signed by the then President, Abraham Lincoln (http://www.reparationresearch.org/there-was-a-time-reparations-were-actually-paid-out-just-not-to-formerly-enslaved-people/).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elise Klein

Elise Klein is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Crawford School, Australian National University. Her research focuses on development policy with a specific interest in work, redistribution, decoloniality and care.