> You don't really give off much of an air seriousness with this stuff. Do you
> want to let the welfare state die, or are you just being provocative? Should
> attempts to kill off the welfare state be opposed, or does it not make
> enough of a difference to care? You seem to want to take a let-it-die
> position without actually taking responsibility for that position. Is this
> what passes for radical chic these days?
Yeesh, touchy much? I know your questions weren't serious, that they were all just prelude to your putative bon mot "radical chic," but I'll pretend they were and see if I can address your liberal hand-wringing.
Politics that today has as its goal saving the welfare state is conservative, not just because the high taxes and agreed-upon high productivity that helped underwrite it created capital's most peaceful and profitable era, but because it was made possible by a huge amount of unpaid domestic labor and intense exploitation outside the factory and outside the "core." Saving the welfare state means returning to the social arrangements that made that possible, which is just what feminism and black liberation, among other movements, fought against.
That doesn't mean that elements like social security shouldn't be defended. They should be, as long as it's done carefully. And this is exactly where the lack of an organized left in the U.S., contra the moaning around here, is a potential strength: there's no official party or union that capital can use to mediate its conflicts and ensure that its goals get met and workers' needs get subsumed. In other words, the lack of an organized and organizing entity in the U.S. means that something like real antagonism is possible, one that can refuse capital's predations while not being bound by the institutional requirements of parties and unions. Part of the reason France has a vibrant political culture and is able to prevent things like the CPE laws and pension reform is that they have weak unions and weak left parties, so the state has no one to negotiate with and the opposition has no institutions it has to maintain. Something similar happened with Bush's promise to privatize social security: it was DOA because there was so much noninstitutionalized opposition to it. Which is why I think it's amazing that people here are ready to pronounce in advance the death of these things--not to mention a slide into fascism--because there is no organized left when there hasn't been an organized left for at least 30 years.